Sans titre

Stay with me.

We do not know how the hell the Gay Pirate Plate was first acquired. This being a point of contention is actually pretty plot-relevant; the saga of the Gay Pirate Plate began with my grandmother and her sister, who, for some ungodly reason, both BADLY wanted the Gay Pirate Plate and believed it to be rightfully theirs.

I should back up, firstly, to establish: The Gay Pirate Plate is the cheapest, tackiest, ugliest plate in existence.

It is in no way a collector’s item. It is physically impossible for it to complement anyone’s decor, because the colors in it are garish. It’s just a ceramic plate with a gay pirate painted on it, and the painting is, this cannot be emphasized enough, extremely bad.

(How do we know the pirate is gay if he’s just posing on a plate? Listen. Fully 100% to stereotype, but he is. He is gay. There’s an energy. That pirate is a flaming homosexual. That pirate has sex with men and does it frequently. That pirate is fucking gay, all right, he just is.)

Anyway. The point is that this is an extremely cheap and ugly plate with a poorly-executed painting of pirate on it who is like a nine on the Kinsey scale.

My grandmother and her sister fought a blood feud over this plate for their entire lives. It would be on the wall in my grandma’s house, and then her sister would visit, and then it would be gone. She’d visit her sister and the plate would be on the wall and her sister would pretend it had always been there. She would steal it back, hang it up, and, when her sister visited, pretend it had always been there. This continued for DECADES.

When the sister died, the Gay Pirate Plate lived triumphantly in my grandmother’s house. And then my grandmother died. And my aunt, who had lived with her and been her carer throughout her life, rightfully inherited their house.

We visit my aunt after the funeral and stay with her for a week or two.

Me, my sister, and our dad. Her brother.

The three of us look at each other. We don’t say anything. We studiously avoid making eye contact with the Gay Pirate Plate mounted proud and ugly on the wall. We notice one another studiously avoiding looking at it. We notice one another noticing. We say nothing. We come to a silent consensus. We pack up to leave. We get in the van. Our aunt comes out to say goodbye. I loudly announce I need to use the restroom before we leave. She obviously stays outside to continue talking to my dad.

I take down the Gay Pirate Plate, stuff it under my oversized sweatshirt, go outside, and get in the van. She happily waves goodbye as we drive off.

Two days later my dad gets a phone call that opens with hysterical laughter and “You FUCKING ASSHOLE did you seriously STEAL THE PLATE–”

Anyway. The gay pirate plate lives in my dad’s house currently.

The plate must be clearly and openly displayed in a place of great prominence whenever it is in your possession. When it is not in your possession, the display piece must remain in place. This is where you would put your gay pirate plate, IF YOU HAD ONE.

No active steps may be taken to prevent the theft of the Gay Pirate Plate. That goes against the spirit of the game, as does attempting to hide it.

The plate MUST be stolen and cannot be gifted or removed with permission. Should you witness attempted theft of the Gay Pirate Plate you are required to intervene and return it to its place.

When I did wrestling, my grandpa showed up to most of my wrestling meets. Wrestling was fairly exciting, and it had a lot of action, so I understood why he did this. 

When I did cross country, my grandpa showed up to most of the races. That made less sense to me, as cross country is not very exciting to watch. It is like NASCAR if the cars had an absolute maximum top speed of 12 MPH and could throw up. But my dad pointed out that watching long distance running was sort of like watching people volunteer to torture themselves, and if you were the right kind of deranged you could get really into that. Which led me to believe that my grandpa maybe just liked watching people run until they puked. 

Then I did Academic Decathlon, which is standardized testing as a sport, and I cannot emphasize enough how boring it was to attend. We'd all go into big, monitored rooms and fill out scantrons and then go back and stress eat for an hour while the sheets got fed into an auto-grader. And my grandpa would show up to that. He'd sit in the hall outside the test room, and he'd wait for me to leave, and then he'd be very enthusiastic about however I said it went. If I said the test was hard, he'd go ah, so then imagine how hard it must have been hard for everyone else. That's good! And if I said it was easy, he'd go, ah, of course it was easy for you Babs. Of course it was. But for everyone else, surely, it was a challenge. 

“It’s funny,” I told Flewin. “We have an old Nintendo Game Boy floating around the house, and Tetris is the only game we own. My wife will sometimes dig it out to play on airplanes and long car rides. She’s weirdly good at it. She can get 500 or 600 lines, no problem.”

What Flewin said next I will never forget.

“Oh, my!”

The husband was writing an article on classic video game records, was surprised to find out that holding the Tetris record is a bit of a big deal, and mentions how good his wife is at it.

The guy he’s talking to mentions that the record is 327, way lower than his wifes usual scores of 500-600.

They travel to a tournament, and she goes to do her attempt. Just after she beats 327, and is climbing higher, a judge brings up to the husband that the specific version she’s playing actually has a different record of 545.

The protagonist has just won the world famous sword fighting competition in the big, rich capital and is talking to his mentor, and says something about being the best swordsman in the world. The mentor frowns and tells him that no, he isn't. He is the best swordsman out of the people that could afford to show up to this tournament. There could be a mercenary way out in the mountains, patrolling a snow encrusted fort's walls that could kick his ass and there was no way to know until he was already losing to the guy.

I have another cookie recipe from my grandparents on my other side; my grammy’s “chewy ooie gooey” chocolate chip cookies. I don’t try to make these at home as often; they aren’t the same if they aren’t in the kitchen she always made them with us in, and she’s sold that house now. maybe I’ll try again sometime.

I wonder how far that recipe goes back; I wonder if it matters.

the other day I read about bread. there’s evidence that humans were making leavened bread, baking, long before we invented agriculture, or writing, or “society” as humanity understands it now. I wonder if their grandmothers and mothers and great-grandmothers taught them how to do that, too, generations on generations. I wonder if baking is one of the most fundamental ways humans express love we have, built into us the same way as all the others.

I wonder how many other families have cookie recipes that lead to the kids getting immeasurably disappointed when they realize it’s not quite the same when you get it anywhere else, and use margarine and a lot of brown sugar and the collective wisdom of at least three generations. and I wonder how many feel lost when a house is sold.

great gigi's oatmeal raisin cookies - makes around 5 dozen cookies

1 cup margarine (make sure it’s margarine, so 80% fat, and not butter or vegetable oil spread with a lower fat content!)

1 cup brown sugar

1 cup sugar

2 eggs

1 tsp vanilla

1 1/2 cups flour

1 tsp salt

1 tsp baking soda (possibly more? they keep on turning out flat for me and this may be the culprit.)

3 cups quick cooking oats

1 cup raisins

1/2 cup crushed pecans

steps:

1. preheat the oven to 350.

2. mix margarine, sugars, egg, and vanilla with an electric mixer until smooth.

3. add flour, salt, baking soda, oatmeal and pecans, mix.

4. stir in the raisins (you don't use the mixer for this, though you can)

5. drop rounded tablespoons of dough onto cookie sheets (a little smaller than a ping-pong ball)

6. bake for 9-10 minutes. do not cook until brown - the middle will look raw and that's correct. instead, cook until the edges are just barely pale tan. if you cook until the edges are brown you've overcooked them. this is the hard part of the recipe for people so i've bolded it.

7. cool on the cookie sheet for a few minutes, then, once they've firmed up a bit more, transfer to a wire rack to finish cooling. they will finish cooking like this.

8. eat some cookies, then store the rest in ziplock bags and freeze them. these cookies are delicious frozen and last a good long while in the freezer so don't be afraid to freeze a lot of them!

I've been re-reading Camus to cope with this. "You continue making the gestures commanded by existence for many reasons, the first of which is habit.” Yes. I've gone on this walk up the hill many times since, because the body remembers the pattern even as the world rescinds its offerings. I climb the hill because I used to. I climb it because unanswered prayer is still prayer. Some part of me knows I shouldn't treat a wheel of cheese like it's the divine Logos withdrawn from the material plane, but I find meaning in continuing the ritual in full awareness of its futility. "The absurd man takes no refuge in the illusions of hope; but he is not resigned. He continues."

“Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his descent." Same. This is where my absurd condition crystallises. I trudge back down the hill, cheeseless, not deluded, not desperate, but conscious. Then I go up again.

"Nostalgia is stronger here than knowledge. Reason is an instrument of thought and not thought itself. Above all, a man’s thought is his nostalgia." Reason tells me they've had a baby. Nostalgia whispers that the cheese remains. It's not a belief, just the memory of hope in a world emptied of its promise.

“There is so much stubborn hope in a human heart.” I still hope they might start making cheese again in September.

In the meantime, I have tried to convert my summer guests—friends and relatives—to the belief that the rite is sacred because it outlasts meaning; they reacted with varying degrees of metaphysical commitment. When I said we should now walk to the cheese farm not in expectation of cheese, but in lucid confrontation with its absence, my aunt pointed out that there are other farms; a friend accused me of weaponising philosophy against reasonable decision-making again. I understand that you can't convince everyone. You can only climb your hill, and carry your truth. I tried to explain it better to other guests, to say that we do not resign ourselves, or naively hope; we walk past hope then choose to keep walking, not toward meaning but through its ruins. Cousin: "What if I actually want to buy cheese?" Then you are not ready. But you will be. Until then, I will climb for both of us.

Then my best friend brought me a cheese (the "same" cheese) that she'd bought from another farm on her way to my place. It was really nice of her, even though it violated the covenant of absence. We ate some of it, had a sunny picnic in the pasture, and I quietly observed her as she began to perceive the problem. She could taste it. This cheese was philosophically inert. It lived outside the myth, content just to be edible. It was here, it was good, and incapable of signifying.

She told me that her first reaction upon learning about my existential cheese pilgrimage was to think I needed a puzzle feeder, but now she was beginning to see my point—she said this in the weary tone of someone who realises that the bit has, regrettably, achieved structural coherence and now demands to be treated as a belief system. She said, "I'm starting to regret having brought that cheese." That's because you committed an act of metaphysical substitution. "That’s exactly what I thought you’d say." 😔 I just mean you tried to replace the sign with the thing itself. "I brought cheese to a picnic." And it's good cheese! With bad ontology. It's just pure referent. The human spirit craves a cheese that can gesture beyond itself; or else it can't feed anything but hunger.

She admitted that I had a point. Well, to be exact she said this sentence shouldn't exist, but she accepted that she now lived in a world where it is, somehow, true, and she was ready to contemplate its implications. Which meant going up the hill. To the cheeseless farm. "So—you don't want cheese anymore?" No, I want it. That's what makes it absurd.

“The absurd man catches sight of a transparent and limited universe in which nothing is possible but everything is given (except cheese) and beyond which all is collapse and nothingness. He can then decide to accept such a universe and draw from it his strength, his refusal to hope, and the unyielding evidence of a life without consolation.”

She walked up the hill with me, interested in the unyielding evidence of a life without consolation. She was trying to understand. We talked about how Camus said that the absurd man, when he contemplates his torment, silences all the idols. Friend: "The idol is the baby?" Right; that makes sense. And the parents are the priests. "That's ridiculous but coherent. The cheese is the lamb. Sacrificed to absorb disruption." Exactly. The cheese was the most innocent being in this scenario, the most marginal and voiceless. It had to die. Its makers chose procreation over fermentation (which some would argue produces more lasting cultures.) "So we're sure there won't be cheese at the end of our walk?" Quite certain. "And we're climbing anyway." I saw it—her thoughtful nod. A crack in her worldview where cheese must be the answer rather than the question. She had touched the rind of the absurd.

We reached the farm, but didn't knock at the door. We stood outside near the cheese cellar like Vladimir and Estragon. The cows looked at us peaceably. The wind smelled like fresh hay. The wildflowers buzzed faintly with truth.

"The absurd is born of this confrontation between human need and the unreasonable silence of the world."

Friend: "So we're... visiting the absence of cheese. Of meaning." Yes! "And we accept it?" We don’t just accept it. We follow the contours of meaninglessness until they resemble a path.