storyfires

Lately I've been playing with dough. It's become a sort of compulsion. Maybe because I'm tired of driving all the way to some bakery every time I want a sourdough loaf--which, lately, is always. Maybe because I graduated with my MFA last August and I'm still figuring new rhythms which now include bread. Maybe because I sometimes feel like rebelling against technology, want to go back to old ways of doing things, from times when people made things by hand and they were fabulous, instead of buying assembly-line things that taste and behave as if assembled in a line. Or a line-up. Criminally bad. When assembly-line bread began appearing in France, the French did what you'd expect them to do--made bad bread illegal. Which is why their bread is fabulous and ours is criminal. But, you know, freedom--sort of a big deal in our part of the world. However, there are costs. Freedom means suffering will necessarily be part of the world, as Dostoyevsky always said. Freedom

Note: Originally published December 31, 2018, but Blogger freaked out with an attempt to make a small editorial change and made this post unreadably tiny, and then froze it that way.  This morning when I woke up and remembered how swiftly the old year was rolling towards the new, I responded first by putting off my gym workout, rolling over and going back to sleep (in case 2019 turns out to be as exhausting as 2018).  Once I’d finally forced my eyes open, I put off my workout again—as well as my yearly personal reflection and goal-setting session—by scrolling through my news feed and reading other people’s reflections on the turn of the year, including Dave Barry's sum-up of 2018’s news , in what might have been a humorous piece for the Washington Post if the reality of last year’s events hadn’t been so absurd…which was a depressing way to face the last day of the year and left me longing for something timeless. Like books. Good books. The best books. The kind that trans