I always say that I want to code up a recipe feature for my blog to make it easy to post the things I cook. I suspect this may never happen, as I never quite have the time. Or, to put it better, I never make that particular task a priority in my life.

So in lieu of that, I'm posting a photo/description of my supper tonight because it was awesome. I picked up a nice piece of sustainably harvested, wild Arctic char at the market today and the Internet told me to make a quick avocado relish to go with it. I pan-fried the fish in ghee after putting some cuts in the skin to help it crisp nicely (I can't tell if fish skin or chicken skin is better, but both are best when crispy and rubbed with salt and pepper). Then I roasted asparagus in olive oil with shallots, garlic, cherry tomatoes, Aleppo chili pepper, turmeric, salt, and pepper. I also roasted some Okinawan (purple) sweet potatoes in freshly rendered, grass-fed beef fat (I roasted some marrow bones on Friday, ate the marrow with a parsley-shallot salad, saved the rendered fat for cooking, and am now turning the bones slowly into beef broth: 36 hours on a slow simmer with an oxtail and some beef neck bones). To drink I squeezed some lemon juice into the bottom of a glass, muddled in some fresh raspberries, then filled the glass with water and let it chill/settle/become awesome in the fridge for a few hours.

As complicated as this all sounds, it was only an hour of work to pull together (not counting the time spent rendering the precious precious beef fat, but that and the stock will be used for many many other purposes). Also, nothing here was tricky. Probably the hardest part is avoiding overcooking the fish, but that is just a matter of practice. I'm still not great with fish, but tonight I nailed it! Delicious!!

Nom nom nom nom nom

I frequently peruse lists of books with names like, "The 100 Best Novels of the 20th Century" and then I use those lists to inform my own reading choices. It was with such a context that I picked up "Naked Lunch," not really knowing anything else about it.

It turns out to be one of the seminal novels of the Beat Generation. Both Allen Ginsberg (Howl) and Jack Kerouac (On The Road) collaborated with Burroughs to edit and piece together a mountain of notes and half-written stories produced by Burroughs over a decade during which he was mostly in the thrall of opiate addiction (morphine, heroin, codeine, demerol, and more). Apparently the novel is widely considered a landmark publication in American Literature. At publication it was also considered to be extremely controversial both for its subject matter (drug use, violence, homosexuality, paedophilia) and intentionally gratuitous use of obscene language. It was banned in a bunch of places, but the ban was later overturned on appeal based on the testimony of several prominent authors who argued the book has social value and thus is not subject to the laws on obscenity.

The 50th Anniversary Edition contains about one hundred pages of appendices including a rather illuminating article written by Burroughs about his drug experiences that was published in The British Journal of Addiction.

The actual book itself though...wow. It's a series of chapters that can be read in any order and are only vaguely related to each other. As far as I can tell the paragraphs and sentences of each chapter are only vaguely related to each other as well. Hell, even the words in a single sentence seem to be at odds with each other at times. For the most part I really had no idea what was happening. The only way I can describe it is like a much crazier version of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Also, I can certainly see why it riled up the censors back in the day.

I'm not sure that I'd recommend the book (although I suspect it improves on a second or third reading), but if you do read it I highly recommend seeking out the 50th Anniversary Edition. The appendices supply a ton of much-needed context. They also provide a stunning contrast in style to the novel itself. The book is hard to read and follow and then you stumble to the end (without warning) and into the appendices which are written with the intent to communicate information clearly and concisely. They are like a breath of fresh air. So I guess I recommend the book as a way to gain a better appreciation for clearly written narrative and dialogue.

My mom took note of my enjoyment of The Grapes of Wrath and for Christmas picked up this collection of Steinbeck's short novels for me. It includes "Torilla Flat," "The Moon Is Down," "The Red Pony," "Of Mice And Men," "Cannery Row" and "The Pearl."

None of the novels are big, but together they make for a rather large book. With some hesitation about the weight I brought it on my recent canoe trip. There was more rain than expected so I'm glad I brought a big book because it was just long enough to last the duration.

All of the novels were fantastic, but I particularly enjoyed "The Moon Is Down" for its biting and original satire of war and "Cannery Row" for its heartwarming and seemingly disconnected set of stories concerning the inhabitants of a fairly destitute neighbourhood in California. "The Pearl" was also great for its more myth-like structure.

Steinbeck is a fantastic author and I'm so glad my mom picked this collection up for me because I'm not sure I would have got to all of the novels on my own.

Although a short book, this one took me a while to finish as I was reading it while getting ready for my canoe trip and hosting Patrick and Toni and Kiera before Sue's wedding. I managed to finish it before leaving but it remains a bit muddled in my mind. Regardless, I definitely enjoyed the book as I've enjoyed all of Vonnegut's work. His blend of science fiction and social commentary is fantastic and I love how his stories always seem to just snap into place at the end. Like he plans them or something.

I'm back from my canoe trip on the Thelon River in the Northwest Territories. It was fantastic!! The weather was challenging at times and at other times the bugs were insane but overall the experience was truly amazing. The tundra is unlike anywhere I've been before and I saw lots of really cool plants and animals. My group and I paddled over 210 kilometres including many sets of rapids and a single big portage. All seven other people on the trip were fun and interesting and our guide Alex was brilliant.

I'll be starting a trip journal with lots of photos soon, but I probably won't be done before the end of August.

I made a final push this afternoon and finished off my trip journal for my family's recent trip to Europe. There are lots of photos and videos and stories if you're interested.

It was a fantastic trip!

I've been working steadily on my travel journal for our trip to France, but I also just finished another book so it's time to blog about it.

Like The Wheel of Time, the Dark Tower series from Stephen King is one of the defining reading experiences from my childhood. Stephen King is unfairly branded a "horror" author due to his early work, but this series is much closer to fantasy than to anything else. I loved it growing up and I also loved how he'd tie it back and forth to other books he wrote that weren't explicitly Dark Tower novels.

King finished the series in 2004, but he recently released "The Wind Through the Keyhole" which is a short novel set between the fourth and fifth books. I love the whole Dark Tower and gunslinger mythology he's built up so I knew I'd enjoy this addition as well. The book features nested story-tellling and gives further insight to Roland's past. Any fan of the series should definitely check it out.

On Sunday my mom, my brother and I returned from an epic two week family vacation in Europe spanning the Netherlands, Belgium, France and Iceland (with my brother joining us direct from an additional two week trip of his own in Australia). We had a great time and the trip is the reason I haven't blogged lately (first I was busy preparing, then I was on the trip).

Now that I'm back I'm going to start working on a trip journal complete with lots of photos and fun stories. I intend to finish before I leave for my next trip in July: canoeing in the Northwest Territories!

In the meantime, here is a photo of Mont Saint-Michel at sunset.

Mont Saint-Michel at sunset

After twenty-three years and the death of the original author the fantasy series "The Wheel of Time" is complete. The series is fourteen books long (plus one novella) and weighs in at 4,056,130 words. I started reading it in high school, in 1995, so I've been paying attention to it for eighteen years. More than half of my life. I've known the characters of the series longer than most of my friends.

When Robert Jordan died in 2007 it was a bit of a shock and I was sad that I'd never learn how the series finished. But he had copious notes and even parts of the final books already written so Brandon Sanderson was able to pick up where he left off and finish the last three books. I do not have any serious complaints about the new author. He remained true enough to the original style.

I won't go into any detail about the book as I don't want to spoil it for anyone who cares. I will just say that the entire books is a climax. Each book in the series has a pretty good "exciting" part towards the end, but this book is just non-stop excitement from start to finish. Don't start reading it if you can't afford a few hours to go inexplicably missing.

Objectively the series is pretty fluffy. It's not going to change the world. I don't think I'd recommend starting it if you are already an adult. But it's been such a large part of my past that even though it got a bit annoying around book nine or ten I never doubted that I would keep reading until the end. And now that it is done I feel a small but measurable amount older.

I've blogged a lot about physical health lately, particularly diet. But I've also been reading a couple of "lifestyle" blogs: Mr. Money Mustache and Raptitude which are more about financial and psychological health respectively. Both are excellent and I encourage everyone to read them.

Mr. Money Mustache is ostensibly about early retirement (for the average middle class working family), but it's a lot deeper than that. It really comes quite close to covering the same ground as Raptitude, but from the angle of personal finance. Early retirement is easy: spend significantly less than you earn. The author of the blog retired with his wife at age 30 in order to concentrate full time on raising their son. They did this by trimming expenses down to about $25,000/year and then saving money until the passive income generated by their investments covered that budget. The interesting stuff comes as he describes where they made cuts and how those cuts actually improved their quality of life. Our society is full of ridiculous ways to spend money and it's pretty easy to argue that most of those ways do not return an appropriate amount of happiness per dollar spent. At no time does Mr. Money Mustache or his family feel "deprived." In fact they feel more free and happy every single day.

Raptitude attacks the quest for personal fulfilment in a more direct way. The author talks a lot about mindfulness -- the attempt to really experience the present moment. It's so easy to spend a whole day worrying about the future or regretting and reliving the past. But the past and present don't really exist. The past is gone and all that remains is a collection of memories in faulty human brains. The future is at best a murky unknown. The present is really the only thing there is and it is our tendency in the western world to waste it. He is not saying that one should forget the past or avoid planning for the future but that those things should not overwhelm the experience of the present.

Both blogs regularly come back to the same theme. The western world is a friggin' wonderland. The things we have access to and the comforts and freedoms we enjoy are unparalleled in human history. And all of this amazing stuff is accessible for very little money. Never has food been cheaper as a percent of income. Access to information and communications is essentially unlimited via the Internet. We can travel anywhere on earth cheaper and faster than ever before. Medical science has extended life expectancies immensely. Go back just one hundred years, a blink of the eye in the history of humanity, and the world offered so much less at a much higher cost.

And yet we take it all for granted constantly. Our sense of perspective is massively broken and we suffer for that. We take on massive amounts of debt requiring us to spend the best years of our life working to service that debt, often in jobs we don't enjoy. Our health suffers when we fail to think about the food we eat when presented with the unlimited smorgasbord that is the modern industrial food complex. The mindless accumulation of possessions has replaced real experiences and human interaction in the pursuit of happiness.

I hope to one day be half as good at life as the authors of these two blogs. In the meantime though I'm starting small. Both authors regularly issue challenges to themselves and in the spirit of that I'm embarking on a small challenge myself. Everytime I think to myself that I "have to" or "need to" do something I intend to mentally change the phase so that I "get to" do that thing.

Instead of "having" to get up early to go to work, I "get" to get up early so that I can go engage my mind and interact with interesting people at my job that pays me money. I "get" to do my morning exercises and revel in the movements of my body. I "get" to pay my taxes which let me enjoy the benefits of a modern collective society. I "get" to collect and take out the smelly compost and use the super cool tri-sorter garbage shoot in my apartment building. I don't own a car, but every time I drive one and have to wait in traffic I'll remember that I'm also getting to pilot a magical wonder box with continental range and a lazy-boy for the captain's chair.

And I "get" to write this blog post and freely express the ideas in my head.

Almost all the chores and annoyances of day-to-day life can be rephrased as privileges. Because for the minor stuff, the alternative one hundred years ago was probably a lot worse. I suspect that the bigger, harder parts of life can benefit from this outlook too but for now I'm starting small.