THREEDOM! (#11) M L Clark's Monthly Miscellanies
Preamble
Well, friends, we’re still here, aren’t we?
You know, there’s something to be said about having one’s world upended a little ahead of everyone else’s. In the last few years, I’ve had to learn hard lessons about the social contract I grew up in, as I struggled to find a place for myself in a very different one. That struggle hasn’t ended, but I’ve learned a great deal about the nature of the fear that bound me to my first social contract, and I’ve shed quite a bit of it. That’s an important well of experience, which I hope I can put to good use in time.
It’s not just the West, though. Many urban-industrial economies are strongly driven by the idea that one should trust in and abide by one’s institutions above all else. It’ll all work out if you do! We promise! At the same time, our media is filled with representations of how dangerous it is to break faith with those institutions. Cop shows. Court shows. Military and government ops shows. Prison shows. All fixated on the idea that transgression has dire consequences. Don’t you want to succeed in this system? Then why aren’t you trying to play the game perfectly?
Of course, we also know that plenty of people cut corners, engage in criminal activity, and show blatant disrespect to authority, all with impunity. And our media glorifies them, too. We’re encouraged to covet people at the top of the financial pyramid, irrespective of how little actual hard work and personal discipline they demonstrated to get there. Politicians! Bankers! Lawyers! Billionaires! Ours is a rigged system of starkly stratified class outcomes, and we know it.
It’s all a game, and a very cruel and arbitrary game at that.
And yet… the fear of stepping out from that system!
I grappled with that fear for years here in Colombia, while trying to use my Western methods to make a home for myself. While trying to earn a home here, the same as I’d tried (and failed) to earn a home in Canada.
This year, though, Russia’s war in Ukraine hit me in a very complex emotional place, as I’ve written about before. Granted, the war reached all of us as a complete implosion of Western “civil” society, every veneer of institutional control upended by mass displacement pressures that exacerbated the profoundly racist and xenophobic fault-lines of all our arbitrary laws and governance, and also shattered the illusion of neoliberalism being at all useful for the cause of greater peace.
But the start of the war also left me wondering why in blazes I’d been so scared of falling out of step with traditional frameworks, when people fall out of them all the time, through no control of their own. How was my fear serving any greater good?
SCOTUS’s recent decisions have had a similar impact. Those decisions are so profoundly unsubstantiated by any rigorous and consistent reading of the U.S. Constitution, context, and precedent as to make clear that the rule of law means nothing to at least one full side of the U.S. political spectrum. It’s all a game, too.
And it always has been! But rare has the game been so overt in recent history, which leaves us with some serious questions: How on Earth can we build a better social contract out of this institutional rubble? From whence will systems of truly globalized care for one another arise? How do we walk away from unjust systems when their impact can be felt most everywhere on this finite raft of a pale blue dot?
So many questions to be answered in the coming weeks and months and years.
But for now? For today?
Well, we’re still here, aren’t we?
And one way or another, that’s just going to have to be enough.
Much love to all of you, as we try to muddle through.
M
Table of Contents
Three political tirades (not going to sugar-coat it; I’m mad)
SCOTUS and the absolute waste of our precious lives (PT1)
The pain of being right (PT2)
The struggle to do something more (PT3)
Three recipes, and their challenges
Butter pecan tarts (R1)
The perfect salted peanut butter cookie (R2)
Butter pecan cake (R3)
Three miscellaneous items
A quotation (M1)
A photo (M2)
A song (M3)
Three articles of note
“Planning for the long haul: four months on, the Ukrainian refugee crisis is only just beginning” (A1)
“Democracy entails conflict” (A2)
“The Happiness Data That Wrecks a Freudian Theory” (A3)
Three personal updates
On the fasting life (U1)
On the writing life (U2)
On the humanist life (U3)
M1. A quotation
“Unless one lives and loves in the trenches, it is difficult to remember that the war against dehumanization is ceaseless.”
―Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, 2012
PT1. SCOTUS and the absolute waste of our precious lives
What an awful month this has been for folks in the West, watching a huge slate of SCOTUS decisions completely upend any kind of integrity for the judicial branch of the U.S. government, and seeing other laws go into effect that are already causing immediate harm to civilian populations.
It’s painful to follow reports out of U.S. teaching districts advising staff to scrape anything queer-positive from their classrooms, including details of the teachers’ families, to protect themselves from attack under Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill.
Likewise, it’s been heartbreaking to hear of pregnant folk already compelled to carry their nonviable and dying fetuses until the parent is in active danger, forced to be at the point of sepsis and preeclampsia before intervention can proceed.
And of pregnant children, as young as ten years old, already losing abortion appointments. To be clear: when a child is pregnant, their reproductive organs are frequently damaged for life and require removal after the birth to stop internal hemorrhaging. It’s a cruel and unusual punishment with lifelong health consequences, on top of the rape that got them pregnant in the first place.
Then there’s all the open discussion among some U.S. state legislators about pregnancy-testing female-presenting people at airports or when crossing state lines. In other words… literally suggesting that feminized people should be considered automatically suspect if they travel. You can’t get away with this level of brazenly public dehumanization in most fiction (barring the obvious and oft-quoted example).
And that’s not even including the fact that people with other illnesses, like lupus and cancer, are already seeing their functional medications cancelled because they’re also classified as abortifacients. Thankfully, some alternatives exist, but it’s going to take months to see how well they serve patients’ needs. This is just ludicrously cruel.
Also, you can bet your bottom dollar I’ve saved up some ire specifically for Clarence Thomas’s concurring opinion on the Dobbs verdict, in which he explicitly targeted cases protecting contraception, same-sex intimacy, and marriage equality as potential sites of future SCOTUS revision.
And the recent anti-EPA decision gutting the ability to enforce regulations against pollution? Somehow this ruling feels like the cherry on top, because heightened pollution increases miscarriages and stillbirths, and thus affirms that there is no actual care for reducing abortion rates here. (I mean, we knew that before; the correct policies for reducing abortion are already used to excellent effect elsewhere. This has only ever been about controlling women to boost the white population. But still.)
It’s all no different from what I covered in a recent series on India’s rising Hindu fascism: The banner of Christianity put to work by extremists serving fascistic aims. Punishment, restriction, and general terror used to concentrate racialized power. Key U.S. lobbies and right wing societies have worked for decades to achieve these ends, scaremongering around “cancel culture” and “CRT” and “replacement theory”, along with trans and gay panic and “groomers”, and… now they’ve done it. They’ve won.
And it’s all just getting started.
What an absolute waste of our time alive.
What an absolute waste of our one and precious lives, to have to fight these scummy battles against dehumanization all over again. To see all the progress made in our lifetimes so thoroughly undermined in the U.S. that its effects will be seen in other countries, just as MAGA-styled populism spread like a virus around the 2016 election cycle, emboldening similar leaders to rise up all the world over.
Where is the hope in any of this? Good question. I know folks are trying their best to muster the votes needed this fall to give the Democrats the two seats they need to bypass their “DINOs” (Democrats in name only) and actually pass meaningful legislation. Legal experts haven’t been anywhere near as optimistic, though. Many who were actively involved in cases during this Supreme Court session suggest that it will take decades of concerted progressive efforts to heal the damage caused by decades of build-up to this hateful point. And so the work presses on.
Painfully, and full of grief that we have to reinvent the wheel again.
A1. “Planning for the long haul: four months on, the Ukrainian refugee crisis is only just beginning”
After four months of Russia’s war in Ukraine, we’ve now seen the West’s bitter and brutal acclimation to the fact of Eastern European conflict assert itself in a haunting level of everyday malaise. Much of this “war fatigue” can be explained by the reporting itself, the gamification of Russian and Ukrainian “wins” in a situation where everyone loses. We don’t really want calculated bets. We want answers. We want resolution. We want concrete pathways to meaningful action.
And that’s not always forthcoming. Some estimates even suggest the grim prospect of a years-long war. Other experts intimate that Russia is improving its long-game strategy and Ukraine is being offered a slow death not just by Russian battery but also by the piecemeal participation of Western forces: just enough weapons to struggle to the bitter end, and die. Whole villages, meanwhile, have been wiped off the map, crimes against humanity abound, and initial UN refugee estimates have fallen staggeringly short of the reality.
So what can we turn to, to catch hold of this terrible situation and not let it leave our sight? Well, articles like Kate Connolly’s “Planning for the long haul: four months on, the Ukrainian refugee crisis is only just beginning” might just be the ticket.
The title really does say it all, but what I most appreciated about this piece is how it targets so many concrete sites of action and growing need. It illustrates all the places where temporary shelter across Europe are not just filled to capacity but also very much in need of a concerted effort to shift into long-term housing and resettlement options. And the article highlights where pressure points within Ukraine, especially around ongoing commuter traffic in and out of the country, could easily see another spike in evacuation needs soon, too.
We cannot fix the war as a totality. But these data points are actionable, especially where short-term housing and resources are starting to fall short, and where longer term solutions need to be developed and enacted. The piece also highlights a few organizations doing this work across a whole network of European countries, which might need our financial support and signal-boosting to achieve their ends.
So stay informed—where you can, however you can—and keep the conversation lively around the pragmatic reality that Ukrainians are in need of homes, not just temporary accommodations. And donate, of course, but also advocate for refugee rights, more inclusive housing models, and more robust social welfare nets wherever you can.
We are not out of opportunities to commit to a deeper shared humanity.
No matter how many wars and sites of civic warfare might banging at the door.
U1. On fasting life
In my last newsletter, I mentioned that I was starting a rather extreme regimen to try to fix my symptoms of long COVID: namely, the everyday fatigue and short-burst energy windows, the brain fog, and the disconcerting exhaustion after workouts, such that I couldn’t make fitness gains. I’d looked at two bodies of still-nascent research, one for long COVID and one for autophagy, the bodily process of recycling old and damaged cells, before deciding on a 10-day water fast that I extended into 17 days.
My results were excellent, but my plan is to write them up in an OnlySky article offering a note of caution when presenting personal success stories in situations where the case-study population is n=1. We need to be more responsible if we’re going to advance better scientific literacy—and I think that, having gone through the euphoria of having had this regimen work for me, I’m in a perfect position to write with empathy about the underlying excitement that easily leads us into scientific error.
I will say, however, that I haven’t returned “typical” eating just yet. I’m alternate-day fasting, 42-hours a time three times a week, with eating windows of six hours between them. Partly, this is because I’m trying to make sure my body doesn’t rebound into another extreme state after going 17 days without food. But also, I’m continuing to explore the benefits of autophagy in shorter bursts (around 24 hours into a fast is maybe when autophagy starts, but it’s not a thoroughly documented science, so I’m guessing 8-12 hours of autophagy each 42-hour stint). And I’m enjoying the energy!
My food intake is also the healthiest it’s been in a while. Keto (veg, protein, and dairy) leaves me with so many wonderful options, and I’ve been building up a pretty nice repertoire of tasty recipes. Hearty soups! Nice stews! Fun skillets! On my 17-day water fast, I also broke my coffee habit, which I’ve had since I started my master’s program over a decade ago. I’m now a full-time tea-drinking cranky pants, and love it.
You’ll note, of course, that this month’s Threedom! has three recipes for sweets. I did not sample any of them. I bake purely out of joy, and to share tasty Canadian treats with the locals. (I have a neighbourhood girl coming over tomorrow, even, so that I can teach her how to make chocolate chip cookies!) I might have sweets in the future, but for now it’s not a big deal, and I don’t have any cravings while baking. I’m reminded, rather, of the team of Indian desis who cooked for a famous Indian-Canadian chef in Vancouver, and made even his omnivore recipes perfectly despite being vegetarian themselves, and never sampling said dishes. It’s absolutely possible to enjoy cooking for others on its own merits—and I am.
Now, one might well ask: What’s the point of all this abstention while the world burns? Why not just embrace what fleeting pleasures exist while we still can? Well, yes, there’s definitely a flavour here of wanting more control over what I can control, but I also just like how my body feels these days. More energized. More capable. I work out every day now, alternating between runs and rumba, stretching and strength training, and none of it depletes me. I feel strong in a way that I haven’t for a while.
And of course, I don’t know how everything will play out in the long run. (Who does?)
But it’s nice to know that positive change is possible. Even if only for the briefest while, and even just within the confines of my own skin.
R1. Butter pecan tarts
I was thrilled to have finally found pecans after over four years in Colombia. They are exceedingly rare here, and I look forward to making a pecan pie later this year for Thanksgiving or Christmas now that I know the one place in town that has them.
In fact, pecans are so rare that most folks here have not only never tasted one, but don’t even know what they are (a fact I’ll get back to in R3). Using Canada Day as an excuse, then, I decided to introduce a bit of my culture to my neighbours, with a treat that I cannot believe I used to take for granted for all those years up north.
But BOY HOWDY, are recipe mods necessary and tricky in Colombia. So although I thought I’d found a decent recipe for my first-ever attempt at making a butter pecan tart, I still had to accept variance and missteps as part of the follow-through.
For instance, I failed to account for altitude when trying to bake them as suggested, and that led to some impressively explode-y tarts in one batch. (Still good! Just messy!)
I also didn’t like the way that first recipe was structured: It had waste built in by design, and its proportions just didn’t work for its promised 12-tart yield. Not great. What kind of recipe calls for doubling the dough and then just storing half for another day and baking adventure?
And for that matter, what maniac decides to add, in the notes at the bottom of the recipe, that chocolate chips are an acceptable substitute for pecans in a butter tart?! If you don’t have pecans or raisins, just go for the classic butter tart! The flavour is beautiful enough on its own. Eesh. Some people!
But a few cooking issues were definitely contextual, too. Pie crust is a delicate art, and for smaller pastries it’s good to use a mix of butter and something firmer, either lard or shortening, to fortify the structure. Neither is available here, though, because people don’t bake! And that meant another hitch in my tart-y journey: this pastry, made with all butter, puffed up bigger and flakier than it would have otherwise. (This, too, probably contributed to the explosions: the interior of the crust was puffing inward, and driving the filling up to the brim faster.)
So, it’s interesting. I know enough to be a decent baker, but that doesn’t always mean I can put my knowledge into practice with the tools at hand. Sometimes one simply needs to take chances, get messy, and accept that even mistakes can be delicious.
(And these were, thankfully, for their recipients—so I’m counting that as another win!)
M L Clark’s FIRST EVER Butter Pecan Tarts!
Ingredients
For the crust:
2 cups (250 g) all-purpose flour, plus more for rolling out the pastry
1/2 tsp baking powder
pinch of salt
A bit over 2/3 cups (160 g) butter OR 1/3 cups (114 g) butter, 1/3 cups (114 g) shortening*
1 egg
1 tsp white vinegar
1 cup cold water
[*You always need a bit more butter when using it to replace shortening or lard]
For the filling:
3/4 cups (165 g) packed brown sugar (no substitutes for this recipe)
1/3 cup (75 g) unsalted butter
1 tbsp heavy or whipping cream
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 large egg
1/2 cup pecans, chopped small (mid-sized pieces can add to the explosion problem when baking)
Instructions:
Mix flour, baking powder, and salt.
Blend in butter (and here, it’s okay to cheat and use butter closer to room temp, because you’re going to be chilling the dough ASAP; never do this with a regular pie, though!) until the texture starts to resemble oatmeal.
In a measuring cup, mix the egg and vinegar, then add cold water until it reaches the 1-cup mark.
Add the fluid to the dough in small amounts, mixing until the dough looks shaggy, then holds together in a smooth clump. You will NOT use all the fluid.
Roll out the dough in two even balls, wrap, and refrigerate for an hour.
On a floured surface, roll the dough out nice and thin, 1/8th of an inch tops. (I was a bit more lax here, which probably added to my all-butter dough puffing out in the tin. A butter-shortening mix is more forgiving.)
Use a nice wide-brimmed mug or cookie cutter to make your 4-inch-wide circles, each to be tucked neatly into a pre-greased muffin tin. Don’t leave air pockets, and try to flatten them up to the brim.
Pop the prepped tin (or tins, if doing both batches at once) into the fridge.
In a pan on medium heat, melt the butter and brown sugar, stirring often.
Remove from heat and add vanilla and cream.
WAIT UNTIL COOL (around five minutes) before mixing in the egg. If it’s not cool? You’re going to cook that egg and ruin the texture!
Sprinkle your chopped pecans into the bottoms of each tart cup.
Spoon in enough fluid to fill the cups halfway. HALFWAY. NO MORE. They will rise, and they will spill over, if you’re not careful.
Bake around 13 to 15 minutes at 375 degrees, on the lowest rack in your oven. You want the interior to be bubbling and the rim to have a nice golden edge. If they explode a bit? Spill over the edges? Eh. You tried your best.
Let your tarts cool completely in the pan. Be warned: They will take time to set, and if you move them to a surface with even a slight incline, they will set at that incline. Let them be! Clean up. Watch some TV. Remove them gently once completely set (either with the flipping method, onto a rack, or by carefully getting a knife in on all sides and easing them out). Enjoy!
So, lots of lessons from my first attempt! And yes, they went over swimmingly with their recipients, faults and all—but now I’m also far better prepared for future tart adventures at a high altitude, and with limited ingredients.
And I can’t wait to try that full-on pecan pie this fall!
A2. “Democracy entails conflict”
There’s a huge difference between the state of affairs the U.S. currently finds itself in, with respect to the rise in far-right extremism, and a simple “difference of opinion” that one should always expect in a freethinking society. But where is that line drawn? That’s part of the question posed by Rochelle DuFord in her Aeon article, “Democracy entails conflict”, which also touches on how to stop debate from becoming destructive.
DuFord accepts the inevitability of strife, which I quite appreciate, and also highlights the very sensible reasoning for it. As she notes, “Substantive conflict is necessary because of the inescapable pluralism of human beings, but also because of a history of the structure and influence of systems of power designed for structural domination.” This puts so eloquently to words a concept I’ve been fumbling with at length online: the fact that even when we’re trying to struggle our way out of a toxic system with our activism, the historical shape of that current system still encourages us to prioritize similar fights for hierarchical dominance within our activism.
(The solution? Stop centering our struggle on the current system, via reactive activism for piecemeal internal change, and focus on building proactive replacements instead. Turn from the hierarchies wherever we can!)
I also enjoyed DuFord’s depiction of the crux of our current problem, the logical misstep that underpins so much of our approach to conflict. As she writes of a common outlook on democratic debate,
The agonistic view of the world, though, also relies on the notion that we live in an irreducibly pluralist world—we simply will continue to disagree with each other concerning things that are of central importance. Yet this risks making it appear as though we should agitate as much conflict as possible. If conflict is both inevitable and beneficial, then even more conflict must be even more beneficial. Often, it is this view of conflict that is depicted as incompatible with democratic politics and ways of life, for instance by Talisse above. Whatever else democracy requires, it is fundamentally, at least a little bit, about coming to agreement. Democracy seems to be about organising ourselves when we disagree fundamentally about values, tactics, policies and what a good life may be. This means that, while conflict is fundamentally an impetus for democratic processes, these processes are also about ending it. But, alongside these agreements, we must be willing to hold disagreements, consider dissensus, and allow for conflict.
I’ve been quite emphatic on a few forums, and on multiple occasions, that what we need to do is quit stigmatizing conflict as inherently a sign of cultural collapse or self-destruction. So often, we’re utterly ill-prepared to be told that something we’ve said might not be accurate or the whole truth—precisely because we’ve given the act of disagreement such a negative spin, as if being contested on a specific point is the same as being “cancelled” as a person.
Enough with allowing fear to dictate our relationship with dissent.
Embrace dissent—just, in expressly constructive forms. Dissent can be as simple as presenting multiple point of views and learning to hold them as concurrent realities and perspectives of the world. Dissent can be “yes, and”-ing one person’s experience by introducing a host of others that flesh out a broader social context. And dissent can be one speaker directly suggesting that contradictory evidence exists outside the reality presented by another speaker. Not that complicated!
And so, it’s not just the elimination of conflict that’s a problem for our democracies. It’s also our willingness to go along with the idea that conflict is an attack.
Real attacks, as we’ve seen recently, come from individuals or small groups in power deciding the end to a debate for us all.
Conversely? Coalitions for change come from leaning how to grow from pluralistic worldviews into a vision of a world that better accommodates us all.
Are we ready for the latter, now that we’ve seen firsthand what the former brings?
PT2. The pain of being right
I still remember the night of the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election very well. Around sixty Canadians in Kitchener (plus one U.S. citizen visiting from Michigan) had gathered in an old renovated theatre to watch what we had thought would be an historic event: the election of the first female president of the United States.
As the numbers started to turn the other way, though, the room fell into a terrible hush. We truly couldn’t believe it. Many of us, of course, had been startled in preceding weeks and months by the number of white male friends and colleagues who’d started saying all kinds of wildly misogynistic things about Hillary Clinton (as if there wasn’t a wealth of non-misogynistic things to say in critique of her politics?), and hinting at credulous belief in the snake oil that the “businessman” was selling.
But surely that was just talk, right? Canadians couldn’t really believe in that huckster’s BS, could they? And the U.S., for all its problems, couldn’t really be that openly racist, right? As to elect an inexperienced candidate of a wildly volatile nature who’d openly said all kinds of atrocious, dog-whistling things about most every demographic on the election trail? To snap back that hard from having Obama as president for two terms?
Okay, okay, I’m being facetiously rhetorical. Apologies. We knew that the U.S. and Canada could be that racist. We knew that white people’s support for Obama dropped hard and fast after he criticized the police in 2009 for arresting Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. even after the officer had learned that he was indeed the owner of the home a white female neighbour had reported as being broken into. And we’ve known for decades how much white North America is brimming with subgroups that resent sharing the stage, and just don’t want to deal with “diversity” issues anymore.
Another key part of that night stands out for me. Our lone U.S. citizen in the crowd was trans. And they were sobbing with fear. Rightfully so. We all knew the damage that this Republican presidency would yield. How this president would stack the courts at every level with people the GOP would pick for ideology over competency. The impact that this would have on ethnic-minority rights, migrant protections, hate-crime statistics, and protections for women and queer people in general.
We knew. We knew. We knew.
One part of why I left Canada was how sickened I was by the emboldened rise of overt racism, xenophobia, and sexism under traditionalist pretenses up North as well. The year I left, 2018, Ontario elected its own, mini-version of the U.S. president—because we’re not so different from our southern neighbours. Because, as one country swings further right, so too does the other. Plenty of things in my Canadian life had become unbearable by then, but the surge in right-wing rhetoric taken from a GOP playbook definitely had me casting about for a country with discourse that wasn’t caught in this stultifying quagmire. A place that was actually trying to enact change.
(I say this, mind you, with all love for those who stayed, and those who continue to fight on the ground. I was extremely fortunate to have been able to save up to leave.)
It’s taken six years for the other shoe to drop in full in the U.S., but there were ever so many steps along the way, so many points when activists and leftist leadership were tearing their hair out trying to get people to pay attention to all the pieces lining up for this utter collapse of government integrity. All the wretched court confirmations. All the legislation passed and dismantled. All the scaremongering rhetoric normalized and all the mainstream trend-cycles dictated by far-right lobbies and media.
I’m not the only one who feels like I’m letting out a breath I’ve been holding for years. Through all the cruelties of the trans panic. Through all the insulting dismissals of our concerns as histrionic Chicken-Little-ism. We’ve been sick with dread over the rise of right-wing extremism for years, and vindication isn’t sweet. It’s exhausting. I’m exhausted—and I’m not even living in one of those worst-affected states.
My heart aches for everyone who cannot leave those states, and for everyone else who learned in this past decade how little many in their lives truly see the defense of their rights as valuable. And my heart is especially weary for the people who were never holding their breath at all—because their own fights against state oppression and indifference go back even further. Because these institutions of Western power have never been on their side at all.
In other words: I’m mad as hell (if you couldn’t already guess).
But it’s also absurd to say “And I’m not going to take it anymore.”
Because that’s the whole problem: we’ve been reaching supposed “breaking point” after “breaking point” for years now.
When will we find an outlet for our anger and grief that manifests as real change?
M2. A photo
There is a lot of being angry in this month’s newsletter.
I bring you, as a palate cleanser, one of my local trash bandits.
Most nights these days, a mare and her colt idle in my park, snoozing near the metro’s underpass and finding tasty treats like banana peels to nibble on from the trash, when they aren’t grazing from the surrounding greens. Sometimes the stallion shows up in the morning, and the three amble back to their owner’s land, not far from the park. Living closer to the mountains in this sprawling urban zone, I routinely encounter these delightfully slipstream moments, and am reminded in the midst of them of the artificiality of so many of our borders and attempts at structured living.
What could we also be, as a culture and as a species, if we led more with curiosity, and a spirit of exploration? Could we reshape the terrain of our lives into something gentler, more compassionate, and less likely to cause so many so much routine harm?
U2. On writing life
June was a terrific month for writing, even as the world continued to yield so many regional sorrows. I attribute my successes in large part to the added energy and mental clarity I gained while fasting (See U1). I finished and sent out new three stories (selling one!), along with my long-overdue third novel manuscript.
That novel was delayed for a couple of reasons, though. The other had to do with letting go of my hopes and dreams for my first two novels—at least for now. My agent has a significant backlog (and is dealing with her own grief over the state of the U.S., which cannot be understated in its impact on ever so many of my friends and colleagues in the writing world), so she hasn’t been able to report back with her thoughts on my first (grim, alt-history Soviet) novel, and I suspect that she’ll be focussing on this lighter third MS instead.
This third novel is, of course, the first book in a four-part sci-fi mystery series centered on Pax Murillo, an AI rendered for an alien theme park from one of humanity’s last great action-thriller franchises. Like everything I write, it has strong deeper themes (neoliberal critique!), but it’s also a lot… well, let’s just say “looser” than my last two, standalone humanist pieces. And that had a huge impact on workflow. Yes, yes, my energy levels were a huge problem in editing—but so too was my own ego, in letting my disappointment with Dostoevsky In Space not finding a publisher (yet) keep me from moving forward.
A lighter SF mystery series does have a better chance of selling. It’s less intimidating! Easier to market! And even though I was feeling a bit down about what it would mean for my overall “brand” to emerge as a published author with this series instead of one of my first two humanist standalones… at some point I had to get the heck over myself.
M L! If this book and series sells, that will still be a) an amazing accomplishment, something very few people ever get to do, and b) a huge step toward your bigger goals! So knock it off, ya silly old cranky pants!
AND I DID.
I’m now wholeheartedly committed to doing whatever it takes to make that series a success, and to build from those successes to create enough market confidence to see those other books warmly received in time, too. (Book Two is up next!)
Meanwhile? The other writing work continues apace. I have a huge backlog of OnlySky articles to write, and a book-length translation from the Spanish to finish, to continue to grow my translator cred single-handedly as well.
Nothing has worked out the way I had hoped.
Very little has paid out meaningfully yet.
But that’s just the grind for you. And while so much of the world is in a state of sorrow (if not outright distress), I am left with routine reminders that it is a gift to be able to do creative work at all. Onward and upward, then—with ego better in check.
R2. The perfect salted peanut butter cookie
I usually go with the simplest peanut butter cookie recipe there is: the classic 1 egg, 1 cup peanut butter, 1 cup “sugar” (1/2 cup stevia) ratio with a quick criss-cross of fork tongs overtop before baking for around 10 minutes at 350 degrees. Why mess with success? But I had a lot of brown-sugar stevia kicking around, so I did a quick check to see if the (usually higher moisture) brown sugar variant required modification.
And that’s when I stumbled on a provocative claim. The mighty peanut butter cookie might… actually be better if it isn’t cross-hatched with a fork? In this recipe, modified from Ovenly’s most excellent version: Yes!
Simple stuff, really, but perfection when done right.
Salted Peanut Butter Cookies (M L Clark’s slight variation on Ovenly)
Ingredients
1 3/4 cups packed light brown sugar (or half that, as brown-sugar stevia)
2 large eggs, room temp
A dash of vanilla
1 3/4 cups creamy/smooth peanut butter
Coarse-grained sea salt
Instructions
Mix the sugar with the eggs until blended smooth, then beat in the vanilla.
Blend in the peanut butter completely.
The original recipe suggested it should have the consistency of Play-Doh, which is, ah, unlikely. Pop into the fridge for 15 minutes for firmness, especially when using brown-sugar stevia as a substitute.
Use a spoon to shape 1-inch balls for a total yield of 24 cookies. (Original suggested 12 at 2-inches. Nah. These were plenty big as is.) Give them space on the lined pan (I use parchment paper).
Sprinkle the tops with sea salt and bake for… well, here’s where altitude gets messy. Mine only needed 12-14 minutes, turning the pan once midway. Apparently it can take up to 22 minutes if you’re doing the 2-inch cookies, but peanut butter cookies are notorious for cooking faster underneath, so watch the first batch carefully for the edges going past golden. Lighter is better! You just want the wet gloss on top to firm up, and maybe to see a cracked surface.
Let them stand for 5 to 10 minutes in the tray before removing them to a plate to completely cool. Enjoy!
Couldn’t be simpler. And these cookies were a real hit with their local audience. That’s win enough for me! New favourite peanut-butter cookie recipe in the bag.
What more could a body want, in the way of fleeting joy?
A3. “The Happiness Data That Wrecks a Freudian Theory”
This last article for the month made me laugh, if bitterly. In “The Happiness Data That Wrecks a Freudian Theory”, author Ben Cohen of The Wall Street Journal shared the results of a five-decade study involving some 2,000 people that completely repudiates the cute truism that “well, fine, okay, so some people are more successful than others—but that doesn’t make them happier!”
It’s a nice thought, isn’t it? Right up there with Aesop’s fable, “The Fox and the Grapes”, wherein the fox, after failing to reach the grapes, consoles himself by saying that the grapes were probably sour anyway.
NOT SO, LITTLE FOX. The grapes were awesome!
The problem for human reasoning, as this study write-up notes, is that our brains are very good at confusing exceptions for the rule. So when a rich and successful person is openly unhappy? Vocal about their struggle on the higher rungs of society and life? We quickly latch onto this anecdote without a full sense of its statistical relevance.
Meanwhile, in a first study of the lives and careers of 1,826 people (the results of which were withheld for years for want of second-study confirmation), researchers found that the exceptionally successful participants were by far “healthier and happier than the unsuccessful”. Shock! Gasp! And in the second study, a three-decade-long project following elite doctoral candidates through their careers?
In almost every way the psychologists could think to measure—their physical and mental health, the quality of their relationships, their overall satisfaction with life—there was no connection between their success and unhappiness.
On one level, we knew this already. But I think the myth has provided many of us with cushioning against the hardness of our world. We want to believe that there are binding threads to our humanity, even when some people are so fully empowered in life that they exist at a complete remove from the everyday woes of fellow humanity.
More difficult to accept is the simple fact that, in our societies, professional “success” doesn’t come with an automatic counterbalance of negative side-effects. Indeed, it seems strongly correlated with a lot of terrific life outcomes in general.
But if we do accept that fact, then we can build better policy around it. What are the specific elements of “success” that allow for this outcome: job security? financial security? access to better healthcare and peer support? a deeper sense of purpose, belonging, and social value?
And if we can identify these factors, can we then build social systems that maximize the number of people who enjoy these plainly life-improving outcomes?
Obviously, I think it’s possible.
But also… the news these days makes clear that we’re a long way off from having the political capacity necessary to pursue such ends.
Which is where the added misery of being “unsuccessful” kicks in, doesn’t it?
We could be doing so many extraordinary things—if only we weren’t stuck with the dehumanizing dreck we are in so many worldly domains instead.
PT3. The struggle to do something more
One of the worst parts of living through such a sharp downturn in human rights (in the U.S., most recently, but of course also elsewhere in the world) is that it never comes to you in just one, quick burst. Instead, it rushes at us in waves of horrific news stories and local anecdotes, one burst after another, at the most unexpected times and in the most unpredictable ways.
It’s not a singular grief, then, but an attempt to grieve cleanly within a torrent of smaller wounds in the background of our everyday lives. And that can make a real mess of us, and diminish our every attempt to be our best selves.
We can be going through a normal day, for instance, having more or less accepted the grim, awful news about our changed status quo, when a single report about another exceptionally gruesome consequence of the fallout lands suddenly on social media or the front page of The Guardian.
For me, one such moment came when the UN announced that it was going to ask Russia to stop bombing children’s schools and hospitals in Ukraine. Something about the need for such an ask—the absurdity of needing to ask!—just broke me even though we were by then many news cycles into reports of racism and sexual war crimes.
Likewise, anecdotal reports from writer friends in the U.S., of emboldened hate crimes and policy proposals in the wake of the Dobbs decision and the enactment of “Don’t Say Gay”, had me throwing up my hands and fuming all over again.
Grief and anger and horror don’t go away when we try to calm ourselves enough to keep moving forward—to try to focus long and hard enough on other tasks to manage something more than simply wallowing in all the awfulness in the world. They all abide in us, and they’re all this close to the surface, ready to snap at the next update.
And there’s no trick to living with this fragility.
One simply has to live with it, all the same.
And give oneself the kindness of accepting that some days will be easier than others.
Some days, we will indeed be capable of that more. We will achieve things. Make progress. Find small, precious joys that allow us to lean into the good in life as well.
And on other days? …We’ll get by. Even knowing what we do about how cruel the world is, and about how many people around us tacitly endorse that cruelty, too.
We’ll get by, and we’ll get through.
What else is there to do?
U3. On the humanist life
It’s really difficult to think like a humanist while angry. Lately, I’ve found myself leaping to anger at whole categories of human being more often than I’d like.
I’ve been cycling through all the callous comments, behaviours, and experiences I’ve had with masculinized people, and feeling angry at how much time in my life was wasted catering to trying to appease and accommodate people who definitely saw me as just a little bit lesser for being a feminized human being.
I’ve also been angry with the existence of Christianity—or more specifically, with Biblical Christianity, because it’s the Biblical Christ that gives so many of these awful far-right U.S. Christo-fascists license to be their terrible, oppressive, tribalist selves. I have to keep reminding myself that the Christ most of my Christian friends know, worship, and use as the basis of their brilliant, wonderful, progressive praxis is different, a curated slice of the Bible that supports love, equality, and humanist action.
And I have had no patience for the folks treating this whole legal nightmare as mere political infotainment, fodder for their armchair commentary, by eagerly talking about how interesting this turn of events is going to make the fall elections in the U.S. (Oh, how I wish Hunter S. Thompson were around to write an incisive takedown of their ilk, and all the rest of the gamified, sports-media circus around these judicial affairs!)
But anger isn’t as useful as it feels.
And neither are blanket dismissals of whole groups of human beings.
So! What else am I doing, to heal my humanist sensibility amid this rage?
For one, I have articles lined up for OnlySky that will allow me to lean into constructive response, and to re-center wonder in my life. This upcoming week, for instance, I’ll have a piece exploring how to leap into activism without doing harm to existing, long-term activists, followed by a history of cosmological know-how preceding the July 12 release of the James Webb telescope’s first full batch of photos.
And on Counter.Social (still my favourite social media platform by a wide margin)? I’m starting a political action book club! Quite a few of us are interested in gathering twice-monthly for an on-site videocall to discuss nonfiction books that will provide us with a shared vocabulary around our most pressing sociopolitical issues. (My first suggestion is Barbara F. Walter’s How Civil Wars Start, and How to Stop Them, but I’m going to put a few options to a vote soon!) So, that’s proactive, right?
My anger isn’t going to go away, though. My frustration with specific demographics will rise and fall because I am still human. (Rats.)
But the move from being human to being humanist is always work worth doing.
Even when the world is hurting.
Especially when the world is hurting.
And on days when all that hurting just feels unbearable?
Well, that’s when I take my humanist praxis into safer terrain… like baking!
Because, well—Am I still furious, sometimes, while making a cake?
Oh, 100%.
But at the end of my fury, there is also a cake.
And that’s a mite bit better than the alternative, is it not?
R3. Butter pecan cake
My last baking adventure of June was also my favourite. Because tarts and pies are fairly uncommon here, I decided to introduce the pecan flavour to some other locals through a more familiar vehicle: a cake! But cakes are also somewhat odd here, inasmuch as the ones you get in the store tend not to have much in the way of icing (usually a smear between layers, but nothing on the tops and sides). So I made some adjustments to an extremely decadent butter pecan three-layer cake recipe, turning it into a two-layer cake with much less icing but still a whole lot of flavour.
And you should’ve seen the eyes widen on every face I gave a piece to. Some had never heard of a pecan before, let alone tasted one, but the smell and mouthfeel spoke for themselves. I was so happy to share this cake with so many very giddy local friends. I will definitely keep this recipe in mind for the future, too.
M L Clark’s Butter Pecan Cake
Ingredients:
Cake
1 cup cake flour*
1/2 tsp baking soda
3/4 tsp baking powder
7/8 cups (196 g) of salted butter
1 cup pecan halves (NOT chopped yet, key for toasting without burning)
1/3 cup brown sugar
1/3 cup white sugar (if using stevia, don’t bother halving it)
2 large eggs, room temp
2 tsps vanilla
1/2 cup (115 g) sour cream
[*If you’re making a small, three-layer cake, you want cake flour for lift, so if you don’t have any, blend 2 tbsp corn starch into regular flour for a similar effect. I didn’t care about having a flatter two-layer cake, so regular flour was fine for me.]
Frosting
1 cup (227 g) cream cheese
Butter left over from cake mix prep (1/2 cup, around 114 g)
2 tsp vanilla
3 to 4 cups powdered sugar (I low-balled for my local community’s palate, but more sugar makes the frosting firmer without refrigeration, so you do you!)
Instructions:
Heat butter in a saucepan over medium heat until the milk solids separate, and watch for that foamy surface to turn a golden brown, with a rich nutty flavour rising, before removing the butter from the heat and taking all bits from the pan, mixing thoroughly before separating into two portions: 1/2 a cup for the frosting, the rest for the cake. Keep in the fridge for now, bringing them back to room temperature before use.
In the same pan, toast your pecans for around 10 minutes on low- to mid-heat, careful not to burn them and waiting for that rich, nutty smell to surge. (Toasting them in the remnants of the butter adds to the flavour.) Chop them into small pieces after they’ve been toasted.
In a large bowl, mix the flour, baking soda, and baking powder, then fold in the chopped pecans and set aside.
In another bowl, mix the wets: the cake-portion of your butter with the brown and white sugars first, followed by the eggs and vanilla, with the sour cream coming last.
You do NOT want to mix the wets and the dries until you’re ready to bake, so make sure that 350 degree oven is heated and your tins are prepped before you combine the final batter. For me? Prepping tins for soft cakes always involves a circle of parchment affixed firmly to the bottom of a well-greased tin. (Trust me. You’ll thank me when it’s time to remove the sticky treat after baking.)
Fold the wets into the dries with as little mixing as you can manage while still blending everything together. (You don’t want to activate the flour too much before baking, or you’ll get a heavier texture on the final cake.)
Pour the batter evenly into the tins, and pop them into the oven to bake for around 20 minutes, until a toothpick comes out clean. Let them cool for 15 minutes inside their molds, then carefully flip them out (the parchment circle will help!) to finish resting. I do NOT recommend taking off the parchment circle until you’ve found the serving dish you want for the bottom layer. Sticky cakes live up to their name, and can be tricky to move once they’ve settled!
Assemble the frosting! Beat the remaining 1/2 cup of brown butter smooth, then add the cream cheese and vanilla. Add the powdered sugar last, one cup at a time, integrating it fully before adding more. Less sugar makes for a softer frosting and a cake that needs to be in the fridge before serving. More sugar makes a firmer frosting that can stand on its own a lot longer.
Add the frosting between the cooled cake layers as you stack them. If you’re going for a richly frosted cake, lay down a crumb layer (thin coat) all over and let the cake chill in the fridge a bit, before adding any further density to your outer frosting. (Or, if you’re just doing a thin veneer as I did, frost quickly and pop it into the fridge until ready to serve.)
This was such a fun cake to make, and a joy to smell and savour long before I got to see the smiles the main ingredient put on local faces. Hope you enjoy your pecans, too!
M3. A song
Is there any better recent song for these times than Florence + The Machine’s “King”? The video embodies both the fear that a lot of far-right extremists have about uppity femininity not knowing and serving in its place—the sheer witchy-ness of female ambitions for more!—and also, the genuine deep ache for a better freedom and more personal agency that lies as the kernel of truth behind such oppressors’ fears.
We live in sorrowful and hateful times.
And yet, we have lived in them before.
So, we will do what people have done in all such sorrowful and hateful times.
We will navigate this pain as best we can.
What other choice is there?
There is none.
And so, until August—
Be safe, my friends. As safe as you can.
And be well. Be kind. Seek justice where you can.