The Danny/Gwyneth Project

Oh, god. Tonight’s the night. The first time I kill something. Excluding insects. And anything I may have accidentally, unknowingly hit with my car. I’ve fished, but the meager couple of things (if you can even call them fish) in my life I’ve ever caught, I’ve always thrown back.

But tonight I get up close and personal with my dinner. I don’t think I have the balls to stab a lobster — multiple lobsters, in fact! — in the face and slice them lengthwise like that bloodthirsty Gwyneth demands, so I’m going the gutless route (albeit even more painful for the animals, I’m sure): boiling crabs alive.

So, in a few hours, we shall be venturing down to a seafood store, picking out our victims, returning home, and tossing them in some boiling water. Pray for us.

And I’m pretty sure I only have glass lids for all my pots. I really don’t want to have to watch this go down.

Stay tuned.

My apathy has become staggering. Used to be, even on my off-days I would at least flip through Gwyneth’s cookbook once a day, doing mental math problems (“If a man is driving 30 MPH to a grocery store 50 miles away, and the cost of ground duck breast is $10.99/lb., how many times will he consider quitting his stupid project?”) and attempting to plan the meals for the next week. Today I realized I can’t even remember the last time I picked up Gwyneth’s book.

Maybe it’s not apathy; maybe I’m just distracted. Portland is at its most beautiful this time of year, and the temptation to be outside of the house all day is too great to resist.  I’ve also been doing some actual, non-Gwyneth, fiction writing, in the hopes that I can pull out of my ass the perfect short story to impress the admissions departments of at least one of the big MFA programs in the country. And, of course, I just had the best weekend I’ve had in a long, long time, and it was all entirely unexpected, and now I’ve come down from it with my head spinning and feeling very disoriented about everything. (Here’s the best advice I can give from what I learned this weekend: Don’t go to the Elephant Garlic Festival. Or, if you must go, bring a bottle of wine covertly wrapped in a T-shirt.)

But I know I have a duty (a very, VERY important duty) to continue on this Sisyphean journey, and I know I stumbled a bit on this journey by not cooking yesterday like I had planned, but I ended up spending most of the day traipsing around (and practically beneath!) Mount St. Helens, which necessitates a simple pizza party for dinner when one returns to Portland. I do have a Gwyneth meal planned soon, and it should be a big one. I have to cook for someone in the near future that I would very much like to impress, so I’m thinking it will be time to take a stab (oh, god, and I unfortunately mean that so literally) at lobster. Fuck, I really don’t know if I can kill a living thing.