thecounterintuitivekitchen

Well, we have a Cuisinart ™ fine shredding/slicing disc, some old knives, a Garden Weasel ™ Claw Pro, and a circular saw band saw table saw.

A fine shredding disc, you may think, is for cheese, but actually it is something I like to brush against while rooting through a drawer so I can lop off a deep wedge of skin from the outer corner of my thumb knuckle on my dominant hand. It is a way to feel alive! That location comes into contact with everything – the button on your coat pocket, the wall you get too close to, the ice scoop, each and every key in the vicinity, the edge of your debit card, the point of a tack, the dangly part of your earring, the bird feeder, the corner of the toothpaste tube, your dog’s mouth. And thus, there are thousands of opportunities every day to experience the thrill of sticking a fork in an electric socket, except that socket is the open wound on your thumb knuckle and the fork is literally everything except fleece blankets. The other benefit of a thumb knuckle wound is that no bandage will stay on it for long, so your wound will ooze a clear goo like your thumb is crying, and thus you can express a micro version of Weltschmerz but not from your eyes. If you are doomscrolling, you can just look at your thumb, the only thing keeping us ahead (and just barely) of the dolphin and the octopus, and find agreement. The grasses too might express sorrow because of what we doing, and what is being done to and around us.

With Some Old Knives, you can rustle around in a drawer and have nothing bad happen to the skin of your hands. I had three extremely dull knives that I could have used to play percussion on my arteries and not a drop of blood would fall. I don’t feel that you can throw knives away.  I also didn’t want to make them someone else’s problem. I brought them to the blade sharpener at the farmer’s market, and he managed to make them sharp in part by shortening them, and though I went to the farmer’s market with all the knives bouncing around in a cloth bag, I clanked away from the farmer’s market feeling very dangerous, and this was empowering. Though dull blades are more dangerous for real work, something I think about in color ever since I read Percival Everett’s James. And rummaging and carting around dull knives just reinforces feelings one may have that one is ineffectual. But no more!

The drawback is that now I have more opportunities to fuck up my hands while cooking, because I see the old knives and think, “dull old knife.” And then I use them, my new cuisine swords, and I slice off bits of my fingers. I had to compost a lot of salad because I was sure I’d lost the top half of my pointer finger’s nail in it. So in addition to the open wound on my knuckle, I had the endless sizzle reel that is a chopped-off fingernail. Every time you wash your hands, more blood and stinging. I also cut a wad of skin off the thumb of my non-dominant hand. If you listen to the middle (~ minute 1:48) of Look-Ka Py Py, that is what my cooking sounds like, but less dancy.

On the upside, this tossed salad went straight into the compost, paving the way for use of the Garden Weasel. Do you have a Garden Weasel Claw Pro? Not an animal. I got it specifically for turning compost, and I love it. I love it! It’s a bright red T with a claw at the end. If the claws extended, they would make kind of a double-double helix. They remind me of the 1980s craze of competitive fingernail-growing for the Guinness Book of World Records, where various people with footlong+ fingernails that twisted around were revealed when someone pulled a cloth napkin off them.  It was like, “ta da! Look how gross this is!” But the Claw Pro is beautiful.

I use the Garden Weasel to turn the compost. There are arguments about turning compost but… those are for other people. To avoid rodents of unusual size, I use enclosed rotating compost barrels, and the Garden Weasel’s long handle means I do not have to get too close to the compost, unlike my former neighbor, a master gardener who at one point came over and thrust his entire arm into our standing bin compost (which at one point did house rats), going through layers of fireplace soot, old vegetables, leaves, etc. and naming each thing as he went. I screamed. He was a great giver of monologues and socially a little trying, and did not notice my scream, or anything other than the pH of the compost, which he seemed to divine through the skin of his forearm. Anyway. The Garden Weasel speeds the revision of waste into nutrients and it is great! Yes, it is better than a shovel. Who am I answering? An imaginary lover of composting who is also contrarian. While I am opposed to and agonized by democratic erosion and am no fan of coastal erosion, sometimes erosion and decay is delightful. I know from trying to talk about it that people are grossed out by composting, but knowing that ends and peels and old leaves, mistakes, uneaten things and the remnants of fires, piled together and allowed to stew, become crumbly new soil that helps with water retention, methane-release control, and ballooning landfills, and makes your garden grow, is wonderful. Olga Tokarczuck, in House of Day, House of Night, gets halfway to my point:

“For some reason people have developed a liking for only one sort of transformation. They are fond of increase and development, but not decrease and disintegration. They prefer ripening to decay. They like things to be younger and younger, more and more juicy, fresh and unripe; they like things that are not yet fully molded, still a bit angular, driven by a powerful spring of potential, what might sill happen, always the moment before, never after.”

But! The compost, once spread, yields all of the young, juicy things. It’s the after that goes back to the moment before, and I love it! I love it! I have been told that as a Capricorn rising with the moon or ascendant to the most annoying or whatnot that I do not gush enough and am standoffish, but take that! Take this! I love my Garden Weasel Claw Pro and my compost.

I do not love my choices re: bed frames. A while ago, I thought it made sense to buy a bed frame online. I was wrong about this. If I never see another flat pack item of furniture, that will be fucking great. This bed frame was meant to support a mattress that is 84 x 84 inches, or 49 square feet. And whoever conceived it decided that it would have a single center rail and a leeetle tiny upright in the center of the center rail that you install with an Allen wrench, which means it’s a piece of shit. As expected, that upright conked out and became an angled liability, rather than… an upright, with a terrible cracking sound. After pointing this out to the person in my household who has an entire woodworking shop set up, and after taking the bed apart so he could access and fix it, and then after he just stacked some books under it instead, and then after those books of course slid out because THEY ARE NOT BUILDING MATERIALS, and then of course the book that was the top book was Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson in paperback, and the cover ripped in half, I went in half-cocked. Half-cocked like that falling upright. 

Numero uno, I hauled the 49 square feet of mattress off the bed but it had nowhere good to go so I was basically standing on an endlessly crashing wave of bed. Numero dos, that was irritating and I had a pocket full of Allen wrenches jangling and that was also annoying. Numero tres, I took the bed rails apart and got to revisit my original distaste for the bunch of slats, connected by Shaker tape. Numero quatro, I verified that when my kid jumped on the bed and it made a cracking sound, that the center rail that the flimsy upright was barely attached to had cracked. So I bolted a long two-by-four to the center rail, and decided to make box of two-by-fours to distribute the weight and also so I could huck the flimsy upright into the yard with great vigor and cursing. Numero cinco, this required some cutting of two-by-fours. 

First, I watched a video of how to use a circular saw. Then I realized that wasn’t the type of saw I was about to use, with little knowledge of how to use it and also, apparently, no knowledge of the tool’s name. So then I hopped onto Youtube and watched videos of people using band saws. Interestingly, there in the cold garage, I had no band saw. At this point, the owner of the saw came home and offered to help, an offer that I refused by saying something about how we were not going to use paperbacks this time so get out the way! But then had to ask if the thing I was standing in front of was a table saw or what, and the answer was yes. Did I end up in the hospital? No! Did I wreck anything? I did not. I measured and re-measured, walked away, squeezed water of resentment out of my eyeballs (not tears), returned, measured again, and finally cut the wood pieces and then put them all together and fixed the bed and hauled the mattress back onto it and thought about rereading Housekeeping.