I’m entirely sincere. This recipe is both the easiest and the tastiest sauce it’s possible to make in half an hour with three ingredients. Most of the time is waiting. If you set a timer, you can’t screw it up (as long as you respond to timers.) And the only equipment you need is a saucepan, a knife, and a timer.
As far as authenticity, I learned this from someone who was posting their Italian grandmother’s recipes. It’s authentic, and it works.
NONNA’S NON-INVOLVEMENT PASTA SAUCE
INGREDIENTS:
1 large can tomato puree (1 lb/450g)
1 stick/ 4 oz butter (reduce by half if you are reducing fat, but it is not optional, butter is necessary for this dish to work)
1/2 a white onion, whole i.e. skinned but not sliced
salt and sugar to taste
METHOD:
Put the first three ingredients in a saucepan with a lid. Do not cook the onion, just stick it in the cold tomato puree. Likewise the butter, just shove the cold butter into the cold tomato puree.
Bring it all to a simmer then cook for 20-40 minute, stirring occasionally.
That’s literally it. Take out the softened onion then add salt and sugar to taste. Add 1 tsp baking soda if you are sensitive to acidic foods. Serve with any pasta, sprinkled with herbs & cheese as you like.
If you want a canned pasta experience (sometimes you want spaghetti hoops on toast and/or Chef Boyardee and I’m not here to judge you) take a couple scoops of sauce and thin with water and use as the cooking water for your pasta, then add more sauce to the cooked pasta until it tastes good. If you need those little gristly bits of meat in there, that’s on you, sort yourself out.
Well, it’s official. I don’t care about this blog anymore. I’ve had it for three years and that seems to be my upper limit for investing in projects that don’t have external motivation or a tangible return. I never really posted for attention, mainly for my own interest. I’ve gained no more than a handful of subscribers, and I don’t feel like doing the work to get more.
So I guess this is the end.
I don’t know if I ever had a goal with blogging. Just the desire to try. To see what happened. To help me build a routine around writing, but in the last three years I’ve learned that as much as routines help me navigate my daily life, they completely derail my creativity. Being obliged to write is the surest way of rendering me incapable of writing.
And, like…I’m bored of it. I don’t even read blogs with any regularity. I’d rather read a book. And blogs about writing tend to focus on beginner stuff that I’ve heard before, tried before, and either have already integrated into my habits or have discarded because it didn’t work.
Blogging is one of the latter. A habit I want to discard because it’s not bringing me joy. It’s not selling any books, either. And to be perfectly honest, that matters to me almost as much as the joy.
Nothing derails my plans more effectively than making them. For example: I set up my personal brand as author, blogger, and general nuisance and then essentially stopped blogging.
I have a lot going on, and this site was only ever meant to be an exercise in working out my thoughts coherently enough that other people would be able to read them, thereby clarifying these thoughts for me. I don’t know if that happened. As well as several dozen poems, I’ve posted a lot of rambling rants, a lot of mediocre ‘content’ as we’re meant to call everything that arises from the slightest creative human endeavor.
Is this post content? Is it shareable? Do I care?
Most of my parasocial needs are being met on Threads right now. It’s not a perfect platform thanks to Meta, who are either fascists or idiots or both given the way they disable trans and POC accounts via algorithm but won’t take down hate accounts despite hundreds of real users’ reports. They don’t fucking care, but I’m content to work chaos on the margins. I don’t have the energy to get on BlueSky or Mastodon or anything else. I’ll wait for a new exodus, when the process of enshittification has gone too far to tolerate.
Poetry is concealed truth. Poems are true, but they are best when that truth sidles into your understanding without you needing to directly perceive it. When they leave feelings and questions that linger in your mind and in whatever it is we call a soul. Writing poetry has helped me say things about myself that I don’t know how to say, which is why I rarely give context for my poetry. A good poem tells its own story, but sometimes we must defy convention.
After laughing way too hard at too many autism memes, I did a self-assessment.
Well shit….
This hit so much harder than finding out I have ADHD (and before you call me out for self-diagnosis, know that this is a questionnaire that clinicians use.) I haven’t felt grief like this in decades, as if someone died. That someone is the old me.
I am shaking as I write this. My understanding of myself has been radically altered. That’s why all my books are full of desperate, rootless young men dying to be seen, be accepted, be useful. Human behavior has always been opaque to me. I spend inordinate amounts of time thinking about what people think of me. If I can be of service to them, they’ll want to keep me around.
As a consequence I am superb at masking. At shielding myself behind a radical aesthetic that is itself a hyper-fixation, giving the world a curated version of myself. My aesthetic is a form of service, for one of my aims is to be the most interesting thing someone sees that day. But I’m not fully out to everyone close to me, so I am always consciously performing. Why not come out? Because honesty is terrifying.
I need to know that I can be wholly myself with the people I trust. To know this, I have to trust that when I show up as myself they will accept me as I am. To find safety I have to plunge into the abyss. Again.
But I’m tired. Tired of not saying these things, tired of faking it. Sometimes no matter how hard you fake it, you never will make it. But maybe you’re trying to make the wrong thing. Maybe you can just be yourself.
I’ve been with my spouse for almost three decades and I’m still convinced he’s going to decide one day that I’m too damn much for him and leave me. Like, calm down. But expressing this to him seems physically impossible. When I’m emotional, I can’t speak. I can write (I say as I’m crying into my keyboard) which sort of makes sense because speech and writing are controlled by different parts of the brain. Autism impacts the speech centre. If I want to say difficult things to my husband, I have to write them down and read them off a script.
So be it. If that’s what it takes. There’s no shame in it. We make life more difficult than it needs to be. If you think life is unkind, start being kinder to yourself. If you keep falling short of your target, move the target closer. If you don’t know what to do, try writing a poem.
Try. You are stardust. You have galaxies of time embedded in your every cell, meteorites in your veins. Become what you are. You are infinite.
Modern authorship is a make-your-own-rules kind of game. Self-published, mainstream, hybrid, neither (ask me about subscriptions to The All-Hearts Cabaret) and it’s up to you, the author, to decide how you want to play it.
Me, I’m doing my freaking best under the weight of my neurodivergent, gender-baffled self-awareness. I want to be/do/know/have/eat/encompass everything that exists, and this is a real problem when it comes time to make decisions.
And yet…
On Tuesday I visited one of the very nice nurse practitioners at my doctor’s clinic. No knock to the NP, y’all are keeping Western Medicine functioning, but this poor child doesn’t know me from a hole in the ground. So she went ahead and prescribed me medication that I (and many of you) expect will make me want to unalive myself.
Baby…I don’t do speed.
I just don’t. That class of drugs is Bad For Me. And when the popular literature tells me that no one knows *why* this particular drug works,? No. Just no. I’m not that messed up, TBH. I *like* my neurodivergence for the most part. It’s fun to have this many ideas. Maybe I could do better at keeping appointments and finding my keys, but the last time I tried this class of meds was a nightmare. I made a vast number of bad choices, while totally ignoring the work I needed to do, and ended up sobbing under my desk more days than not.
So…fuck you.
Fuck this.
Please, please don’t take my experiences as advice. You do you, as we say, and decide for yourself. Me? I’m going to just learn how to be this shambolic, well-intended, heartfelt and whole and every now and then problematic neurospicy genderqueer who gives no f’s for ordinary people’s comfort because I’m having too much fun.
What am I doing with these line poems? They say so little, tell so much, but I believe there’s a balance between poetry that is born of long thought, and that which tears through us, that grasps a mere tenth of our feeling yet makes it manifest in a form that others can see.
I want to work harder. I want to burn. I want to push and push and push until I reach a lie, then push beyond. I want you to break when you read them. I want you to be reborn.
It’s funny that this came up as a prompt the other day. I’ve been thinking a lot about how to accomplish my goals both professionally and personally, and as much as we all laud the concept of balance I’m starting to think it’s a joke.
When I think about balancing, I picture someone on a tightrope. Arms extended, eyes locked on the horizon, physically committed to a ludicrous, massively dangerous task for other people’s entertainment.
I did just write a novel about a tightrope walker, so yes it’s a strong echo in my mind but that also means I know what the metaphor means. And I don’t know if it should be a goal.
For one thing, it’s fucking impossible. You can do well, giving yourself more or less equally to all your wants and responsibilities. And maybe that’s a neurotypical thing, to be able to plot your life carefully then follow it through, but that’s not in my wheelhouse, to employ boardroom language. I can’t actualize that paradigm.
I’m losing interest in the idea of balance. It’s really difficult to relax while balancing. Balance is a state of tension, of holding in place. It requires hyperawareness of the body and the ability to ignore everything around you. If you find a place of stillness, you cannot move from it or you will collapse. That sounds–that is–exhausting.
That sounds like capitalism: find one thing and do it till you die, never quitting or questioning, while faithfully replicating your DNA to provide capital with more human resources and supporting the rentier system of the 1% that holds the rest of us hostage by giving them back in the form of household spending and debt all the money they loaned you as wages.
The ideal work/life balance is No Work, All Life. I don’t mean, let’s all be unemployed.* I mean, why is work not life? Why are jobs so shit? Why have we bought into this massive system of pitting our economic needs against our human rights? Who the fuck wants to be an actuary? I would expect a single digit percent of actuaries chose that career because of some deep inner calling. For everyone else it was because they weren’t pretty or clever or rich enough to get to do what they want with their lives, and so they put on a suit and sit in traffic and eat a packed lunch and try not to jump out the office window. If that’s your life why even be alive? So you can give your children the very same future?
TL:DR Modernity is delusional. Baked into the core of our culture is the idea that *this world as it is right now* is the best we can do. That Starbucks and Exxon Mobil are natural and inevitable, that the only improvement possible is making the whole world like America. Delusion, delusion, delusion.
Fuck the work/life balance. It’s a joke, it’s a yoke, it’s a rationalization for letting capital skim the cream of labor’s efforts. For our collective good we need to seek a way of life where our work is worth living for.
An ideal work life balance? The least work possible at a job that won’t cost me my life.
*We can talk about health care and education as necessary jobs as long as you want to discuss why we underpay and understaff both these professions.
I’ve always thought of myself as unable to resist temptation. As being too desperate for dopamine to not eat the cookie, not buy the gift. I always eat the cookie. But I don’t always buy the gift.
And I realized my problem isn’t with reward systems, it’s with gamifying food.
Consumer capitalism has a terrible relationship with food. It’s used as lure, camouflage, dumping ground, flag to wave, and whip to beat ourselves with. It’s a popular brand of mayonnaise declaring over a 90s grunge pastiche soundtrack that it “will not tone it down.” It’s a food that has never once in its existence contained fat declaring in block letters on the label that it’s “fat-free.” It’s thinking almond milk is virtuous without considering the operations of the almond farming industry (not pretty, if you ask a bee in California.)
Dieticians and specialists in early childhood will both tell you that using food to reward or punish children makes food a battleground and plants in them the seeds of lifelong eating disorders. So why would I do that to myself? If I eat a cookie, it’s not because I have “allowed” myself a “reward” of a “bad” food that I would ordinarily resist. It’s because I wanted a cookie, and I happened to have some. I might treat myself to a more expensive meal for a special occasion, but I don’t like tying food to performance benchmarks. I’m not a seal, bopping a ball with my nose to get a fish. I’m a person with an oven and a working knowledge of baked goods, and sometimes having a cookie is the only thing that makes me want to do my job. Let snacks be snacks, I say.
Gifts, though…I resisted building a Lego set for almost a week until I’d hit a word count goal. The unopened box sat on my desk for days, taunting me a little, but more inviting me to reach my goal.
I now have this nice reminder on my desk that I can get what I want if I stick to it. That cookie, or cake, or 700 calorie whipped cream and coffee thing? Long gone.
But don’t let me stop or shame you. Everyone is wired differently. I don’t want to attach moral significance to snacks. Excuse me, I’m going to go eat a cookie.
I stock up on dopamine* in the mornings by dancing, sometimes singing to my favorite songs. These range from So Whatcha Want by The Beastie Boys to the opening of the 2013 Tony Awards as sung by Neil Patrick Harris (thanks, internet, for all your flaws, for bringing me this ode to excess.)
Being a stage performer, particularly in musical theatre where you might have to be singing, dancing, and acting all at the same time, is tremendously hard work. It is physically demanding, often debilitating. Lots of musicians bring the same energy to the concert stage, not just in rock but across the board (it’s Britney, bitch.)
It’s not just the dopamine I’m chasing but the calorie burn. So I’m not ashamed to say I had to bail out about two minutes into the Talking Heads’ performance of the song Life During Wartime in the seminal concert film Stop Making Sense.
IDK what David Byrne was eating those days (looks like nothing) but he never stops moving and neither do the rest of the band. If you don’t regularly exercise, you’d never keep up, because they are beasts. MF, they are playing their instruments while running in place and has Gen Z seen this shit yet? This is a TikTok challenge waiting to happen, amirite?
So I thought, what a great candidate for a stupid goal. To be able to do David Byrne’s bit in Life During Wartime.
Get delusional, isn’t that what the kids say? This is a theme for me right now, after a post I made about impossible goals to a lively group of professional writers blew up, getting a few hundred comments from writers at every stage of their career. Why not carry this energy into everything I do?
I need delusional goals. Ordinary ones don’t seem to motivate me. So why not try something ridiculous? Absurd and not wholly useful except that it spurs me to be more active. A chance to score a symbolic victory over my human tendencies—taking the easy way out, hoarding calories in case of famine, anxiety about my appearance and social rank.
We have so little time on earth, and there’s so much that we might do that we’ll never have the time to even read about in someone else’s words. We’re dying the minute we’re born and I think if more people understood that we might as individuals and as a civilization use our time better.
I’m old enough to feel this in my bones. They say youth is wasted on the young because it’s only the accumulation of years that make you understand time at the cellular level. There is no solution to death. I don’t know that I’d choose eternal life even if it was offered. All we have is today, this hour, this second, this heartbeat, this blink of the cosmic eye, our every breath one more pearl strung on a thread that grows shorter and shorter.
Do it now. The thing you always wanted. Do it now because there is only now. Only this moment, this breath. This.
thefixer.home.blog 