Living in a walkup, Uncle takes the typewriter to the park on a nice day to write his correspondence. It seems that his peace has been disturbed this day by a young man on a mowing machine.
Any cable sports producers looking for a career-making show should consider inviting the Greek king of the gods on for an afternoon to strike down sportswriters every time they employ a beat-up cliche.
Hardware store anarchists are more likely to use cookbooks than the bean-cooking type. Got it. Let’s all make a stew and pray for peace.
Follow along with the blue button for more dispatches from the Fun Uncle.
Editing for this letter from The Fun Uncle brought to you by:
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The Fun Uncle writes: "fear tastes like dish soap" and other wisdom
Snorkeling in streams, rivers, and other freshwater bodies is a respectable hobby, requiring minimal swimming for those willing to go face down into a puddle for minutes, hours, or weeks. Until bypassers call 9-1-1 about dead bodies lounging with the fishes.
For the stable home-dweller with a kitchen, a sink, maybe even a cabinet and somewhere to hang the dish towels, the no. 1 defense against the curse of “stinking sponges handled before eating sandwiches,” besides total abstinence from dish-doing, is a big pair of gloves laying there reminding you to wear protection before you shove that bologna in your mouth.
For those of us who have the time, the patience, the money, and the skill to properly “treat” a room for recording, there are infinite tutorials on the subject. Turning the spare bedroom into a very large closet seems more like the Fun Uncle approach.
Also very Fun Uncle: acknowledging one’s crazy for purposes of avoiding insanity.
That boys in the streets do not follow the rules of organized sport - dribble only with hands! only with feet! - is one of the great frustrations for Boring Uncles.
This episode of The Fun Uncle brought to you by Pigpen’s harmonica solo on “Operator” and the midnight “sandwich done!” bells at the Sheetz:
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the Fun Uncle writes us: "Always return borrowed blankets," other life advice
Like the guy sitting on his horse in the middle of the buffalo stampede.
“Trust the Process” was to be the name of this reinvigorated newsletter, before we searched the Substack URLs and found out the name was already taken. What we’re learning, over long sometimes agonizing time, is that fully fledged concepts do not emerge unscathed from the freedom of the imaginative mind. You gotta make them with work and toil, like chipping away rock to find the face hidden inside.
Imagine the uncle, in dirty t-shirt or sweatstained suit, singing ‘ACCEPT YOURSELF’ over a banjo band playing a funk beat. That’s how he sounds in his own mind, that’s how he sounds to me.
Alright, here’s one of yr uncle’s patented stories. Could be true, could be false, sure isn’t very clear. But we reproduce it in full for your consideration, should you choose to partake.
(cont. on pg. 2)
Now we know what Uncle’s listening to in his dining room hunched over the typewriter.
Thanks for writing Uncle. We hope to hear from you again.
How to Make Songs,
with yr Uncle Paul Simon
“Once I pick a key and start to play, I sing any words that come into my head without trying to make any sense out of them. I tend to sing easy words with a concentration on "oos" and "ah" sounds, which are musically pleasing to me. I also like words beginning with "g's" and "L's" and words that have "t's" and "k's" in them. Sometimes during this stream of consciousness singing, a phrase will develop that has a naturalness and a menaing, in which case I keep it and start to build a song around it.
from "The Songs of Paul Simon," 1976
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So you got an Instant Pot (TM!). Congratulations! Here’s a recipe to get you started!
No, seriously, here’s the recipe first:
NAVY BEANS AND BROWN RICE IN THE INSTANT POT. ONE POT. NO MESS. LOW COST. NO CATCH.
One cup Navy/Great Northern Beans (dry)
One cup Brown Rice (dry)
Two cups water
A dash or two of any cooking oil you like to keep it greasy.
Assorted spices to your whitebread taste (I used adobo, chili powder, turmeric, cumin, and probably some hot sauce, but we are Progressive White People here who have burned off most of their tastebuds with assorted heady habits. Salt and pepper is fine.)
Close Instant Pot. Set the seal to SEALED. Or you will hurt yourself. With a kitchen appliance. Which is very embarrassing.
Place Instant Pot in a shopping bag, beach bag, or any other assorted carryall bag into which it will fit.
Enter your local Starbucks, McDonald’s, or any other restaurant with modern electric wiring.
Find a seat with an outlet.
Plug in your Instant Pot.
Set time to 20 minutes, High Pressure.
Instant Pot will begin automatically.
Lay a t-shirt or some other cloth you don’t care about over the Instant Pot so when it starts steaming it will not be noticed by any vigilant staff member. (vigilant staff are rare, and to be avoided.)
Wait for your Instant Pot to beep.
Exit your cooking station with Instant Pot bag in hand.
STORING AND SERVING NAVY BEANS AND BROWN RICE FROM YOUR INSTANT POT
Once the Instant Pot has cooled, you’ll want to pack the rice and beans into the tightest containers you can find. Storage with lots of air seems to turn the rice faster, and if you’re making your rice and beans at the local Chain Restaurant, you probably don’t have some fancy refrigerator. So pack it tight into some reused ziploc bags, repurposed hot and sour soup takeout containers, or that rubbermaid container that used to house your kids’ crayola crayon collection.
Using the proportions in this recipe will make four very large meals for one full-sized person who is eating one main meal per day. So take that into account when cooking. You can adjust ratios as you find necessary.
We served this meal with burrito-sized flour tortillas that were aged for several months in a Pennsylvania refrigerator, then traveled south 2,000 miles, so they’re very crumbly and easy to fold. Throw some beans and rice in the middle of your tortilla, turn on the butane one-burner stove, and fold that quesadilla. You’re ready to eat like a person who gets to eat!
Now that you’re fed, surely you’d like to read some unhinged ramblings? Sure.
My friend Moneyballs always told me in my 20s that my catchphrase should be ‘NOBODY TOLD ME!’
Doing art is something people do for fun? for pleasure? to change the world? NOBODY TOLD ME.
Blondie was a whole band? Not just one lady? Who sang “Heart of Glass” over and over on WMGK? They could rock? What’s CBGB’s? NOBODY TOLD ME.
The Reagan Revolution was actually a well-orchestrated political coup by a small group of powerful people very uninterested in freedom? NOBODY TOLD ME.
And so we find ourselves at another NOBODY TOLD ME point, because when mi novia says “we’re going to THIS PLACE” which will remain nameless in this blog so THEY don’t hunt me down and make me PAY RENT (gasp!), I had no idea it was some islands. That people could drive to and hang out, like some sorts of wussy birds escaping the harsh cold reality of winters in the Grand Beige North.
Because while one following my itinerant lifestyle might think it all fancy free, there is also a strong strain of peasant in my mentality. I get to a place and think “I will stay here, this is fine, I can till this land if someone teaches me to farm” and then some combination of real estate speculation, late capitalism-induced neuroses, and general fears like “I don’t want you dying of exposure on my land in a tent” drive me away somewhere else. Also, there are two novels to finish and so many frickin’ songs to record and until you got that shiny published stuff no one’s really sure you’re working. Even after you get it, lots of people don’t think it’s working. that’s fine. They’re right. The whole world would fall apart if people didn’t work!
Oh wait, it already is! SIICK BURRNN for those of you who think work is necessary in an overpopulated dying planet! But don’t burn yourself by “venting” the steam vent on your Instant Pot too soon. Give it at least 5 minutes to cool down, and really, you can leave it sealed for hours. It’ll be hotter and your rice and beans will have a better chance of coming out soft if you happened to undercook them because you blew a fuse at the StarFu%#S.
That’s all for now! Happy Instant Pot (TM) Cooking!
“Did anyone order Wendy’s?” the call from the service counter under the signs: “100% clean promise and “Our Protein, “Our Produce.” Nothing artificial, no colors from artificial sources.
There’s sixty people working at the Panera, according to the shop chatter. Heard through the open service window. The girls talking about working at taco hell for a second job. They don’t open till 11 and close at 8. Five people on staff there, and they’re still only doing drive through.
Taking advantage of the universal ‘keep your cup free drink program’ available at all restaurants with self-service beverages. Mixing up the hibiscus fresca with the unsweetened black. All the better to upload some junk to the internet on corporate wi-fi while listening to the stretchy pant mommas cackle.
Someday maybe we’ll try asking for refills on cups we never bought. A good gauge of the level of ‘give a fuck’ of our restaurant employees. Maybe I have a new economic index to propose to the Dow Jones.
“On a scale of call the police to assist in the crime, what would your reaction be to me lighting this mortar inside of the restaurant?”
Following up on the article going round a couple days ago about Unfollow Everything. The handy-dandy nuke-your-newsfeed-disappear app. And its creator getting blocked on Facebook. And I’m like duh, I get lost on that shit all the time. When I could be more profitably losing my time to looking at guitars I can’t afford on Reverb. or going to search for a musician on Instagram and getting pushed all these 19-year-olds in teensy-weensy string bikinis automatically shaking it, no clicks required. Look once, and they never let you go.
So it’s nothing personal, really, a few friends and a couple of pages I do like seeing. Some amusement, some intelligence, some amount of the news from someone who I know knows their ish. But there’s little control, other that unfollowing all, to all of this blather FB is pushing. And it’s always felt kind of strange knowing things about people they don’t tell me. And really, i don’t need to know anything. like this writer who stopped reading his letters and just wrote responses immediately, this article someone shared on facebook told me about that …
And I’ve got myself to commodify. I don’t have time to be in the crowd, watching. I gotta be on that virtual stage, streaming! Posting! averaging three viewers an hour so amazon will let me have the privilege of people paying money to support my art, all live, hooked up using the internet wires that cost some money up front, and then hoping for some help. only half the cash to amazon! What a deal!
And of course, in typical "is it a glitch or an intentional bug?" way, FaceBook teases me with a native "unfollow all." And then forces one to scroll ALL THE WAY THROUGH ALL PAGES, loading as it goes. And then freezes on a random collection near the end after 20 minutes of my life have gone by meaninglessly, like so many minutes before lost on the "News" Feed. I wish I were stronger and could go straight to the functions I need to use, looking for gigs and messaging people about buying guitars. But the damn thing is so effective. It has nothing to do with free will - well, a little, but you know your consumer psychology more than the person who's looking for a break from their brain wants to keep moving on being a Real Person in the Real World with their day.
And so I write something to the very unmanned FB help line along these lines: “Manipulating people to do what they don't want to do is evil. Make it easier to opt out of your experiments.
Short of it, give me an Unfollow All button that works. Like, tomorrow.
Peace and love
Brokaw”
And now three weeks later after downloading the data - which isn’t all that hard, just a bit time consuming - so I don’t have to go through writing down all the random wineries and coffee shops I’ve “liked” in the past year whenever I get around to harassing them with my digital package of musical stylings, let’s try the old google extension. Following its scroll all the way down one more time to the first group formed back in those early college days. And we unfollow the top people, of course. Those with the usefulness. And a freeze up before unfollowing a elementary school chum’s sprint car racing page. Maybe we’ll try again tomorrow.
If I get on the internet. There are other things to do, so I’m told. Like chop some wood. It’s getting cold out.