Work? Nah.

 

I don't really like my primary job. It forces me to do things I really should never be doing, and doing them on behalf of people that mostly should never have existed in the first place.

To be fair though, I've only ever held one job I enjoyed enough to justify staying even if something more lucrative or stable came along- and then the plague killed it.

Plus, it's not like I've ever worked for an operation or company where I wasn't qualified to run the whole thing- and I've worked for some Very Big Companies in varying capacities. Hand off a c-suite to yours truly and long lasting success is almost inevitable with how easy it would be, so long as the underlying purpose is valid. Not that there are many valid businesses out in the world these days. All but a precious few are designed specifically to fabricate a need rather than fill one, and then sell a service that undoes the harm the company itself provided. It's recursive, wasteful, and full of fakery.

The "I know a guy" world

 

This is something I know better than most. Not only is it how I grew up, it's how what passes for my career and my life remain some degree of stable.

My family is poor, and so am I. No getting around that. Most of us barely scrape by, some not even, and we're deep into lots of blue-collar miscellany. Construction. Landscaping. Architecture. Transport. Education. Moving. Thing is, we talk to each other, and to our coworkers. Most of us have high-level skills and specialties in different areas, but we also have our blind spots. When one of us runs into a problem we can't solve, we probably know a guy that might be able to help.

If my mom has a car problem, we call a friend who's a gearhead. If the car guy thinks he can help, he might come over and fix it- save us a few hundred bucks for a tow and an auto shop. If he can't fix it, he might know the best local mechanic that can. Or maybe he'll know where we can get a loaner ride on the cheap till the car's fixed. 

This is where the I Know a Guy economy becomes more cyclical and asymmetrical. We owe him a favor now. Repaying that favor is a question of fairness and facility. It usually isn't extreme, but it tends to be something unrelated. The Car Guy might not take any money from us because he knows we're broke. But he might take us up on it if he gets asked to stay for dinner. Or he might need something else down the road. Maybe he'll ask us for a ride to the airport at the end of the month because his wife won't be home from work yet that day and can't take him. It's still useful, it's still time and effort, and there's an opportunity to chat and catch up a little.

One of the strong but fading bastions of that in the wider world is the restaurant industry.

You line up a good restaurant's staff, and what do you see? Cooks, chefs, servers, bartenders, managers, porters, cleaners... but there's a whole lot more besides. Most of them might also be welders, contractors, farmers, mechanics, landscapers, teachers, translators, plumbers, electricians, paralegals, or any number of a hundred other things... because at some point they've had to be. They often can't afford to live like real people on what their vocation provides, so instead they find other ways to try and make it work. Together.

Favors done, favors repaid, favors remembered. An effective barter system, built slowly and deliberately on a foundation of trust and expertise. Those are valuable currency in times of uncertainty, and those times are certainly here. Have been for a while.

What that methodology doesn't work with, though, is most of modern corporate culture, especially the 'hustle' mindset. You really can't build relationships like these if you're too busy trying to monetize every last thing in the short term, as so many pretty much have to. There's not enough time to build that bank of trust and reciprocity, to truly develop into what might become a community.

Worse still, the majority of those who make these I Know A Guy economies work are... aging out. Most of them are in my parents' generation. They're getting too old to help like they used to, or they're starting to forget a thing or two... any way you slice it, the communities they built together have grown frail with the passing of years. It'd be nice to have a new generation, and it's there... more or less. But the contemptible contemporary corporatocracy we're all stuck in pays us too poorly and works us too long and too cruelly.

No physical security, no financial security, no communal reassurance.

There's not a lot of hope left in the world these days.

Quite the busy while.

 

Lot of worries. 

Lot of troubles.

Lot of questions.

Mostly, I have answers.

But the big one remains.

When they begin to forget me, what then?

I'm used to being invisible. Damn good at it, even when I don't try to be.

But that talent, so carefully cultivated, turns upon itself when others' memories start to go.

Recipe Dev: Tom Collins Twists

 

I'm not usually a big shortbread person most of the time. When I want a cookie, I usually just want a cookie- not a cookie alongside other things. Be it coffee, tea, cocoa, fruit, or something else entirely, most of the shortbreads I know are designed to be eaten accompanied.

So my research went wider, trying to make one that was just fine on its own.

I don't thiiiink this counts as a shortbread any more, but it's really nice!

It's an eggless shortbread-adjacent cookie that's soft enough to verge on being a batter. It's extremely easy to work with, too. I actually pipe these, and if you're nervous about working with a piping bag, this cookie is a fantastic place to start. Using a wide star tip creates plenty of plausible deniability for how it looks, and the glaze will hide anything more egregious. They're not fancy, but they look fancy, especially with the icing.

Tom Collins Twists (makes 30-36)

Equipment:

Mixer (I use a hand mixer for these but with enough vigor it's easily doable by hand)
1x Large Bowl
2x Medium Bowl
Silicone Spatula, Large
Piping Bag / Piping Tips
Whisk
Scale
Measuring Spoons
Fine Strainer (In case of dry ingredient clumping)
Sheet Tray (Ideally two)
Parchment Paper
Oven (Preheat to 350F / 180C / Gas Mark 4)

Ingredients: (All at room temperature- extremely important to ensure a smooth, workable dough)

8oz / 225g Unsalted Butter
8oz / 225g Cream Cheese**
1 1/2 cups / 180g Powdered Sugar
1Tbsp Vanilla
Zest of 1 lime and 1 lemon (about 1 Tbsp in total)
3 Tbsp Lime Juice

2 3/4 cups / 400g APF
1/2 cup / 75g Cornstarch
1 tsp salt

Powdered Sugar
Gin

Process:

Preheat the oven, line the sheet tray(s) with parchment, and prepare the piping bag/tip.

Going down the list, combine all the ingredients up to but not including the lime juice in the Large Bowl.
Using the mixer, beat till smooth and well combined, 1-2 minutes.
Add the lime juice and mix for 5 seconds or so, then set aside.

Using the Scale, weigh out the APF, Cornstarch, and Salt in the Medium Bowl.
Add the contents to the Large Bowl, and mix on low till just combined, then finish mixing by hand with the Silicone Spatula to ensure minimal gluten development.

Load the Piping Bag with 15-20% of the dough, and pipe in squiggles, making vaguely rectangular shapes about 1.5" x 3". With a standard large star tip this will be five back-and-forth sweeps.

Approximately 15-18 will fit on a standard baking sheet in a 3x5 or 3x6 configuration

Bake for approximately 15 minutes, then remove from the oven and allow to cool for another 15 on the tray.

While cooling, prepare the glaze by whisking together ~1 cup powdered sugar with 2-3 Tbsp of gin, adjusting till you have a thick but pourable result. Add a squeeze or two of lime juice too if you like.

Gently drizzle the glaze over the cooled cookies. Allow to set for at least an hour afterward just in case.

-----------

So, the tricks in the recipe are as follows

-It uses APF as its primary structure, but it's somewhat heavily cut with cornstarch to make it resemble cake flour, so a bit more delicate. 

-There's no granulated sugar, only confectioner's sugar (which also has some cornstarch in it).

-The dough includes cream cheese**

-The glaze is made with alcohol, ensuring faster evaporation and drying with less danger of rendering the cookie soggy.

Even when you really don't care about making them look good they're still not bad! See?

**I picked this notion up from Daniela Galarza's Apple Tassies recipe several years back. Can't lay my hands on the recipe right now -it was two laptops and two desktop towers ago- but if I remember correctly, the ratio for that one was something like 2 parts butter to 3 parts cream cheese to 4 parts APF. You get the binding, the dairy, the fat, and the tang. For something like this where the primary flavor is citrus, it works wonders to round the flavor out.

In what world are the untrained, unskilled, and unfinished this absurdly self-important?

 

"SF restaurant to temporarily close after influencer says she left crying"

Is this place's management out of its mind?! Is everyone online just on the lookout for a dogpile?

Well, at this point the latter seems like a given. But that's what happens when you give voices to those incapable of deserving them. 'The Internet', everyone.

For someone to have "alleged that the owner treated her disrespectfully, saying her TikTok following of 15,000 was inadequate to represent the restaurant" after presumably being taken seriously enough to be in the running for a potential collaboration tells me that this... make-believe member of online media... sold a flagrantly false bill of goods to the restaurant re: utility and value, then got rightly called out on it.

The absolute absurdity to pay any attention to the voice of an underdeveloped, overvoiced "~iNflUeNCer~" has me genuinely staggered. But what's worse still is the fallout.

The resultant temper tantrum from this has resulted in an avalanche of utterly irrational and false negative reviews, and a massive overreaction from the restaurant's management. The chef's gone. The restaurant's closed, albeit "temporarily". A former restaurant is buried in negative press too!

When someone's life is seen by vast numbers before they're qualified for that privilege, problems are inevitable. People with actual value suffer.

This mess probably just killed two restaurants and dozens of livelihoods because a counterfeit collaborator couldn't stand to be told the truth- that their contributions weren't worth the trouble. 

Way to go, you thin-skinned, petty peasant.

 

I realized that I've basically become Uncle Iroh.

One who tries very hard to be good. 

One who did right by his family, even when they betray the principles they taught. 

One who serves as a mentor, a guide, and a surrogate parent to any number of others.

One who is still, despite the passage of time, an absolute demon in a fight.

One who (perhaps offscreen) absolutely Fucks.

Almost all of that is fine.

What bothers me, though, is the paradigm shift to Mentor/Guide.

I don't want to do that. Certainly shouldn't have to. But circumstance and betrayal have left it my only recourse. 

To do everything exactly right and suffer anyway. So many opportunities I was first promised, then owed, and always denied.

Now... all I have left is to do what I can for others, to help them prepare as much for similar fates as to avoid them.

Considering additional income sources

 

One friend says things like OnlyFans. He's silly. I'm... okay, he does have a point. I'm probably very appealing to no small number of people. But I'm also an experience that doesn't really translate well to picture and video. Much better to appreciate up close- and those who so know me would likely agree.

But then there are things like Patreon. I have a vast amount of knowledge and experience. I'm a world-class expert in no small number of largely disparate fields. Like my blurb on the side says- if you have a question, and I have an answer, you can trust it. People might well pay for that. Even just for reliable access to that.

I'm also a storyteller. My life experience has given my perspective and analytical utility a depth that is vanishingly rare. Those experiences could, if properly revisited, be of enormous entertainment and development value to any number of knowledge seekers.

On the other hand, there are already tons of people out there (substantially inferior in quality, but more visible and more aggressively productive) who are desperately flooding the visible world, on and offline alike, with their own better-off-hidden miscellany.

Do I go for it anyway?

...Do I have anything to lose?