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I was hearing this in the style of a BRAWNDO commericial.

That was inspiring.

[PASTA PUTTANESCA]

Right, so today we're going to talk about pasta...of the evening.  That's right—PASTA PUTTANESCA!  It's fast!  It's cheap!  It's easy!  It's boozy!  It's comforting after a shitty goddamn day!  Let's all gather round and make some goddamn pasta puttanesca.

To begin with, find a mortar and pestle.  Or a cutting board and a meat tenderizer.  Also find some ingredients—garlic, cherry tomatoes, anchovies (YES GODDAMMIT!), olives, and capers.  Stick a heavy skillet on very low heat and give it a few serious glugs of olive oil.  Peel the garlic, drop it into your mortar, and start smashing.  Crush it real good, like it's responsible for all of the bad things that happen to you.  Then throw it in the olive oil and let it sit.  Cut the tomatoes in half and throw them in with the garlic.  Then smash the rest of the ingredients and add them to the party.  Turn up the heat until the liquid pooling in the bottom of the pan starts to simmer angrily, then toss in some FUCKIN' GHOST CHILIES!  Or some red pepper flakes.  Y'know.  That's okay too, I guess.  Leave it at a low simmer until the tomatoes are mostly broken down and the pan is basically saucy.  The anchovies will melt and magically make everything just...better.  But not fishy.  It's a mystery.  Deglaze the pan with a healthy pour of wine.  Let it simmer down again.
   
Drain the pasta that I'm sure has just finished cooking to be a little underdone.  I like spaghetti.  Find what you like.  Throw it in the sauce, tear up some fresh basil, and mix it all together.  Let the pasta finish cooking in the sauce.  Mix it up again, dump onto a plate, top with more fresh basil and grated cheese and serve with crusty garlic bread and the rest of the wine.
   
Note: My audience for this meal has suggested that even though she "doesn't like shrimp," shrimp would go well with this.  This will be an entry in the future because that can only end well for me.

  That sounds delicious.

It was pretty good, but I would recommend making sure that left-overs aren't a thing--I'm not a fan of reheated risotto.

This sounds EASY.

YES.  MAKE THIS WITH IRON AND FIRE AND RAGE!

[Risotto con Verdure dal Congelatore]

Author's Note: It seems that getting pictures on the forum is somewhat more complicated than I am presently prepared to deal with.

Risotto con Verdure dal Congelatore

To make this dish, you first must accept that somewhere along the line you became the kind of horrible person that spends all your money on books and cameras and wine and books and such, and has to scrounge for food because would you just look at the price of potatoes these days!?!

Risotto con Verdure dal Congelatore is a spiritual descendant of the "Whatever the Hell's in the Fridge" gumbo that we all fondly remember from when we first struck out on our own and realized that come the first of the month someone shows up to take all of your food money.  It differs, though, in that now you're the kind of person who has fourteen different kinds of vinegar and eight different types of rice in the pantry.

To begin, find the lid to the enormous Dutch oven sitting menacingly in the corner.  Or a cast-iron skillet.  Or the $3 Ikea skillet you bought as a high school for that one cooking project and inexplicably still have.  Basically, something with sides that you can stick over a burner without immediately setting your apartment on fire.  Got it?  Good.  Stick it on the range and crank up the heat underneath.

Open your freezer and start rooting around—we both know that there are large bags of frozen vegetables sitting in the back, taking up space, and desperately wishing to be in some way involved in the kitchen—it's their lucky day!   Grab your onions and tomato and spinach, or your kale and broccoli and carrots, or some other combination of vegetables that sounds like it can fend of scurvy until payday, and throw them in the pan with a generous pour of olive oil.  Scrumble it up with a wooden spoon, and let the vegetables thaw and begin to cook.

Once they vegetables have started to heat up, throw in a few handfuls of rice--Arborio if you're feeling particularly fancy--and a few heavy pours of whatever stock or broth happens to be laying around.  Or a bouillon cube and some water.  Maybe water and some balsamic vinegar.  Some sort of liquid that has any kind of flavor.  Dump some dried rosemary and thyme on top of whole affair, mix it again, and let it cook until the liquid is almost gone, then pour a little more in.  Continue this process until the rice is soft and edible.

Top with leftover chicken and black pepper.  Serve with the beer that's been in the back of your refrigerator for as long as you can remember.  Remember to buy food next payday.

I was reading what you said about Buddhism, about personal responsibility, and it it seemed primarily about avoiding doing the wrong thing.  Instead, I was wondering if there was "something" positive you got out of it other than being "significantly less of an asshole".  Its interesting how otherwise the whole venture seems subtractive, not that there's anything wrong with that.

I see.  I don't necessarily think about my experience those terms, as there exists a linguistically positive and negative way of expressing any idea so far as I am aware.  In this instance, I think that it's more my own linguistic proclivities which may be coloring what I said as "subtractive."

To use your example, it seems to me (and I acknowledge that this may be something that others don't do) that implicit in the statement "avoid doing the wrong thing" is a suggestion that one should try to do the right thing.  You can talk about "being less shitty" or "being better," and while there are certain subtexts to both, they're similar sentiments I think.

Absent authority, on personal recognizance, without mercy, is there a responsibility that concerns you beyond the circumspection of being fucked?

I'm not exactly sure what you're asking; could you clarify?

Fuck Them.  The rock polisher changes you into something that other people find appealing.  Let them dive head first into the machine if it's what they want to do.  Plot your escape; make good your escape.  Be wrong—vigorously, go to somewhere that makes you uncomfortable, find something important to do and do it like it's the last thing you'll do.

There's a Joseph Campbell quote on my wall. I look to it in times of doubt:
The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.[/size.]

I'm curious - your post is coming from the far side of Buddhism. You sound like a "post-buddhist", one who was trapped and escaped.

Looking back on it, what did you get out of it? Would you recommend that path to others?

Hello,

I like that quote.  I may have to have that tattooed...somewhere.

Regarding your questions, they're interesting and I'm not sure that either has a simple answer.   I was born into a very conservative (if, looking back on it, hypocritical) Southern Baptist denomination wherein you could do basically anything you wanted once you were submerged in water by a preacher--didn't even really have to feel bad about it.  God loves you because you took a bath with your clothes on.

Buddhism, then, and the self-accountability that came with it, was a revelation.  There was no "grace" or "forgiveness" or somesuch; no looking back.  You screwed up real bad, you pick yourself up and put that in the "DO NOT DO AGAIN" column.  Then you keep going.  I like that and I still appreciate that.  A world where everyone has to come to terms with all of the horrible shit they've done is, in my experience, a generally better world than one in which anything can be "cast as far away from God's mind as West is from East" (or something like that--it always seemed to me that "east" and "west" meet at basically every point on a spherical world).

I "came out the far side" of Buddhism due in part to an increasing realization that most (not all) teachers are more than happy to, in one way or another, relieve you of responsibility.  After all, when everyone just does what the teacher says, the community gets along harmoniously and the teachers get to do...well...everyone.  Now, I'm not about to judge what two consenting people do behind closed doors, or behind the Buddha statue, or wherever two consenting people decide to do things, but this is illustrative of the problems which have been with American Buddhism for half a century.  There are even instances where a teacher is "transmitted" (meaning her or his teacher declares her or his level of awakening to be the same as theirs, as their teachers did, and so on back to--allegedly--the Buddha) and then the transmitting teacher tries to "revoke" the transmission as a way of controlling the younger teacher.  The political aspect of it can be disgusting.

All this having been said, I think that it was a net positive experience, and I think that I'm significantly less of an asshole than I previously was.  I've met some truly great teachers and monks and hermits and laypeople, and I've met people who pay more for a robe symbolizing homelessness and poverty than they would for a new BMW (they get...quite fancy).  I've seen temples with only the abbot living there, and part of his day is fixing the leaks in the roof; I've seen temples where there is a "minimum donation" to take part in activities.  I think that I will always be a little bit Buddhist, in the same way that I'm still a little bit musician even though my hands have been mangled to the point that I can't actually play my primary instrument anymore. 

I learned to meditate, to not believe everything that I think, and to maintain a healthy distrustful of authority figures until such a time as they have satisfactorily proven that they are, in fact, not out to literally or metaphorically fuck everyone around them.

And that, my friends, is a valuable lesson.

Thing is, there are no cabbages.  Just billions of people who more or less all assume they are one of the few awake people in a world of sheep/robots/cabbages/whatever.

Fact:  Nobody is a cabbage all the time.
Fact:  Nobody is a fully-functioning human all the time.
Fact:  No special religious (or any other) training will change those facts for anyone.

I concede that point completely.

It's not in the mastery, it's in the doing that a person becomes a human.

I'd argue that the default position is "human".

Maybe so.  Language is clunky and imprecise sometimes; I don't know of a good way to write that sentence.  Perhaps "...that a cabbage becomes a person"?

Okay, so today alone, 175 children under the age of 3 died in Equatorial Africa, from either violence or plain old starvation.

They were or were not human beings and/or persons?

That's not what I'm saying at all, and I sincerely hope that isn't how you read that.  However, your point is well taken and perhaps I should have taken more care to clarify that the above rant is my particular view of the particular culture in which I find myself.  Everything has a context and I was careless when establishing mine.

It's not in the mastery, it's in the doing that a person becomes a human.

I'd argue that the default position is "human".

Maybe so.  Language is clunky and imprecise sometimes; I don't know of a good way to write that sentence.  Perhaps "...that a cabbage becomes a person"? 

The value of a rock is what it can do. The same can be said of a person.

I disagree.  The value of a person is, I would posit, found in what s/he does.  You don't have to cure cancer or invent a new musical genre or...I dunno...invent a pair of self-removing pants.  You just have to fucking do something.  And do it as hard as you can, then do it harder.

Love cooking, but you're piss-poor at it?  Do it anyway.  "Skill" is a fancy word for the huge pile of failures behind you.  Maybe you'll never be the best, but dammit you did something, and that's more than most of the people around you can say.

It's not in the mastery, it's in the doing that a person becomes a human.

I've been exploring the forums and I must say I'm a fan of your work.

Cheers.

Note: Modified in the face of a very good point.

I was a Buddhist for most of my life.  I was a Zen Buddhist for most of that time.  Zen Buddhism is a community practice, with half of the year being dedicated to Ango—literally translated as "dwelling in peace."  During Ango, you work hard on yourself, and work hard to fit into the group.  In the chanting, your voice is lost in a sea of other voices.  In working, your work is done selflessly and with no hope or idea of ever finishing.  A teacher once compared Ango to the process rocks go through in a polisher—they bump up against each other, wear down the sharp edges, and come out more beautiful than before.  In a way, I suppose that's true.  When you give up your will, things go swimmingly.  No need to think about your work assignment, food, clothing, or what you'll be doing for basically all of your time.

Life is a rock tumbler, and when you take the metaphor out of the carefully curated and maintained monastic environment, you can see its dark side.  It's not polishing—it's grinding down.  Wake up early, spend the day at work, go home and sit in front of a screen until it's time to go to bed and do the whole thing over again.  The Ango of everyday life grinds the fundamental nature and vitality out of a once-dignified, unapologetic, and real person.

What can you do?

Get the hell out.  Maybe you're stuck in a job or a city or a circumstance from which there is no immediate prospect of extrication.  Realizing it is the trick—once you understand what's going on, you get to make the choice of "in" or "out."  Choose "out."  Spend your eight hours a day at your job, because you're an adult and you don't shirk your obligations, but understand on a deep level that you're moving upstream against a lie that washes all of us straight to hell.  It has to take time, and it will be subtle, but every person that moves against the stream puts pressure on the damned thing.  The lie is that "success" lies in how others perceive you, or the size of your paycheck.  The lie is that success is something that you need to get from Them.

Fuck Them.  The rock polisher changes you into something that other people find appealing.  Let them dive head first into the machine if it's what they want to do.  Plot your escape; make good your escape.  Be wrong—vigorously, go to somewhere that makes you uncomfortable, find something important to do and do it like it's the last thing you'll do.

I escaped from the rock polisher, and I'm deeply okay with being lumpy and pointy and not nice to look at.  Ugly pointy rocks are the kind that people remember when they see the scars on their knees.  The pretty ones get tossed in a sack in a box in a drawer and are promptly forgotten.

What is enlightenment?

Hello C an' S, Pennyworth, LMNO, Roger, and Lucifer,

Thank you for the welcome.

2. This someone is almost certainly not completely (or even mostly) benevolent.

Promulgates false dichotomies.

1. Someone is pulling strings somewhere,

Assumes facts not in evidence.

Thank you for your consideration.

May your days be interesting,

M.I.

Buenas noches, mein Freunds,

I've always been bad at introductions.  Feel free to skip this one and do something else.

There are a few things which inform my outlook, and may become apparent at some point in time; primarily, fifteen years of my life has been spent in and out of Buddhist monasteries preparing for monastic ordination.  Then I found myself in Washington, D.C., and have realized that there's...just...so much crazy.  So much.  I've since revised my belief system to include some beliefs that seem likely.  Namely:

1. Someone is pulling strings somewhere, and often it results in itchiness.
2. This someone is almost certainly not completely (or even mostly) benevolent.
3. This someone is obviously playing practical jokes on us at the macro and micro level.
4. Any religion that prohibits wine and/or whisky is not a religion for me.

So...Discordianism. 

I'm looking forward to getting to know you all.

May you not be lulled into a false sense of security,

M.I.