Porter Cake, the Alpha and the Omega

Coffined thoughts around me, in mummycases, embalmed in spice of words.  Thoth, god of libraries, a birdgod, moonycrowned.  And I heard the voice of that Egyptian highpriest.  In painted chambers loaded with tilebooks.
They are still.  Once quick in the brains of men.  Still: but an itch of death is in them, to tell me in my ear a maudlin tale, urge me to wreak their will.
-James Joyce, Ulysses

Welcome to San Francisco.

Once, I worked for an environmental protection agency in a national park in San Francisco. A bracing exercise in futility. I removed several tons of invasive ivy and non native grasses from coastal bluffs, then brought in groups of salespeople earning their companies a tax break through some voluntary sweat to plant native species with names like Armeria maritima and Ceanothus thyrsiflorus. The idea was to reestablish biodiversity thus promoting stable, self-sustaining ecosystems that would provide habitat for endangered species such as mission blue butterflies. Yet overhead flew a million little birds shitting down the seeds of a thousand exotic garden plants.


Futile with just the right dash of absurdity. For instance, I was paid to rappel over a serpentine cliff, ax in hand, to hack away Pampas Grass, a terribly invasive plant sure to grow back next year, even after I burnt the fuck out of the roots with a flame thrower. There I was, suspended in mid air, locked in mortal combat with some grass, which my boss assured me represented a concentration of earthly evil, while 100 feet below on the city’s gay nude beach, dudes got naked and... frolicked.

Baker beach is actually quite pretty.

Once we had a little volunteer group of old guys wanting to get some experience before landscaping their yards. My boss, sensing opportunity, happily walked them through planting technique while extolling the virtues of native species. She recommended SF natives for terraced areas, listed others that did well in the shade of native bushes, rhapsodized over her favorite native species. Native, native, native, native, she veritably sang to ever more visibly uncomfortable first generation Chinese immigrants. At the end of the day she asked one of the men what native species he would plant in his yard.

“This is nice,” he said pointing to a big bunch of Pampass grass. “I think I’ll plant a couple of these.”

In her heart, my boss really believed she could reintroduce native species to the whole San Francisco metropolitan area, hell, maybe to the greater Bay Area, if only she worked hard enough. She envisioned a chaparral covered post apocalyptic San Francisco.  She could not wait.

One of our favorite conversation topics was apocalyptic scenarios. Nuclear apocalypse, zombie apocalypse, nature strikes back, alien apocalypse, anarchic gang warfare unto extinction, plague, and after, a peaceful landscape of green draped steel towers slowly rusting into the dunes. Probably, I had to refrain from saying, draped with Cape ivy, Ehrharta, and Pampas Grass. After all, who is going to keep these fragile natives alive when we're gone with all the tough invasive seeds hanging out in the soil, waiting to bloom?

Tokyo Genso dreams similarly.

What is it with the generation of 20 to 30 somethings and the apocalypse? It’s a safe topic at any party. Everybody has got a survival plan they’d love to detail for you. Your average waitress can hold forth on the variety of gas mask best suited for bio-warfare. The bearded man in skinny jeans wants to tell you about the contents of his go bag, which includes an ash wood baseball bat, the best weapon against zombies, in his opinion. And there have been a variety of related fad hobbies. Learn to raise and butcher your own pig. Feed yourself entirely from a garden you can grow in buckets on your fire escape. Get wilderness survival certified.

I feel a great unease about apocalypse scenarios. They are just too unlikely. Firstly, you will probably die right off.  The tsunami will crush you. Plague will wipe out 98% of the population, including you. You will have your innards ripped from your living torso and will become a zombie. As for me, if I survived all that, then, no one will be manufacturing -4.25 Pure Visions by Bausch and Lomb after the apocalypse. May as well slit my throat with my survival knife.

That looks like it stings.

Yet I too love to envision the apocalypse. My favorite apocalypse story, lines up neatly with Stam1na's Viimeinen Atlantis. A concept album that comes with a comic book, it describes the inundation of the world, and the peace after the extinction of mankind. Initially a lone survivor scrambles to enact the familiar heroic plot - find other survivors, lead them to safe haven, reestablish social order. As he fails to weave the story, his plans unraveling to a chaos of tangles, he learns to find beauty and finally solace in the arbitrariness and indifference of the natural world.

The schemes of Viimeinen Atlantis's lone survivor follow the thread of a common tale, the story of the ascendent outcast. We are a generation raised in the pop cult of the omega, the lone wolf, the anti-hero, the strong, independent rebel who lives outside the system. If we fashion ourselves in this image, the apocalypse is our paradise and our proofing.

This vision of the omega is largely a pop culture myth. Look to nature for real examples of omegas. They just can’t get along socially. Missing the program. Real lone wolves die young, hungry, parasite ridden, alone. And they don’t get laid.

I have a friend who has become interested in the idea of the omega and has worked out several story arcs whereby the omega creates a new society. But what if that is just what you want to escape? The suffocating push of people. Their flat, incomprehensible, uncomprehending faces.

After Ragnarök, the world emerges fresh and clean from the ocean, and in the gently waving grass lays the golden tafl board yet, waiting for the young gods to make their next move. Odin, master of Geri and Freki has been eaten by Fenrir, Thor poisoned unto death by Jörmungandr, Surtr bested Freyr. The old give way to the young, outsiders, marginalized, and underlings.*

Sometimes Bast likes to get in on the Apep beating
action.  She's a cat, after all.

Yet for the Egyptians, each day the world serpent stirred. Each day Apep was beaten back and rallied to triumph in night. Each day the end times were enacted. Yet longer cycles spoke of a deep sense of stability. A new Pharoah incarnated Ra, the apparent face of god; as the old Pharoah died, he became aligned with Atum, the hidden face of god. Never did ma’at, that is truth, justice, rightness, good order, an inherent aspect of the Pharoah, leave the world. The word of a god lived perpetually among the people.**

So here we have two imaginative models, powerful in their own time and place. One speaks of the triumph of the reintegration of the omega rising to take the place of the alpha through an act of survival. The other of the perpetuity, even in the face of end times, of the alpha class. Though entombed in writing, these stories live in our imaginations still. The Egyptians and the Norsemen both knew how to consult the dead for information about the future. Perhaps Thoth is the god of libraries, his charges dead but dreaming.

One theory of civilization’s evolution is that humans settled down to farm grain so that they could have enough to make beer. Yes, beer was there at the beginning, and if the predilection for home brewing of the young para-omegas is any indication, beer will be there at the end.

8,000 years of uniting alpha and omega!***

So, let’s make a porter cake!

Grease and flour a nine by nine bake pan.  Set your oven to 300 degrees Fahrenheit.

In a saucepan melt together:
12 tbsp margarine or shortening
¾ cups of brown sugar
1 cup of porter
the juice of 1 orange
the zest of an orange
¾ cup of dried fruit
simmer for 15 minutes then let cool for 10
Then stir in 1 tsp of baking soda



Mix together:
2 ½ cups ap flour
½ cup of coarsely chopped nuts
1 tsp cinnamon

Pour wet ingredients into dry then mix in
½ cup of soy or oat yogurt

Pour into pan, bake for 1 hour, check, bake up to 30 min longer.

The goal here is a dense, heavy moist cake. It keeps forever, so when the world ends, you can pack five of these and have dessert for the first couple of months of life in the wasteland. I used Browar Witnica S.A. Black Boss Porter from Poland, which added a slight aniseed flavor as well as deep, malty tones. Another good choice might be Rouge River’s Hazelnut Brown Ale.












*The Poetic Edda. Oxford World Classics, 1996.


**Eliade, Mircea. A History of Religious Ideas. The University of Chicago Press; Chicago, 1978.


***Ninkasi, born from Enki's mouth to heal his pain through Ninhursag's intervention, shall be what satisfies the heart (and makes the liver happy). The first known recipe for beer was formulated as a hymn to Ninkasi. Her origin story is pretty kinky for a goddess of beer, though!

Frosted Pumpkin Cookies

Sing, goddess, the wrath of Eilif son of Jack, that

brought countless ills upon the Pumpkins. Many a brave gourd did
it send hurrying down to Hades, and many a squash did it yield a
prey to cakes and cookies, for so were the counsels of Jove

My favorite time of year draws nigh. Autumn, the sharp air wraps scents in a swaddling of crisp cleanliness. Even trash and dog shit smells refreshing. In autumn, return is the greatest pleasure. One can’t come home unless one goes out. I have a proclivity for nocturnal rambles, and it reaches it’s height in November. I like to just walk around and smell shit, sometimes literally.

Not a whole lot actually smells bad, if you try laying prejudices aside and just sniffing. Rotting meat and old cheese, maybe. The smell of trash can be damn interesting.

Everybody knows that when you smell something, you are inhaling little particles of it. Mouth breath all you want, you still fill yourself with trash and poops and that industrial strength carpet shampoo your neighbor is using to clean the upholstery in his car. You are what you eat, and what you breath in. This could be pretty gross, but keep in mind that you eat 4 to 8 spiders in your sleep a year*. Your muscles: made of thousands of wriggling spiders! Itchy.

Murha makes Finnish sound just like this.

Being alive is pretty cool, but also pretty gross and occasionally just plain degrading. Sometimes that’s fun. For the other times, there’s brutal death metal. Filthy, churning, slamming, brutal death with riffs as gigantic and venomous as Shelob. Like an audible bee suit, all neuroses become laughable when faced with it. Never fails to put me in a good mood.

Murha is an excelent example, if a little on the easy listening side (one occasionally discerns a straightforward melody and the singer is intelligible, if you understand Finnish). As a side effect, the songs are catchy as fuck, and you can sing along! What Murha lacks in ESL charm, they make up with the dire/cute sound of Finnish, like an audible Gloomy Bear. Don’t worry about lyrics, just enjoy the sound. Like most death metal bands, you don’t really want to know what they’re saying anyhow. (Hint: it’s about murder.)

Murder solves all kinds of problems, even our current problem of being made of shit and spiders! You can’t unsniff all those delightfully disgusting smells, but you can tweak the spider to baked goods ratio of your meat by eating plenty of cookies. So...

Let’s murder some pumpkins!

Pumpkins are delicious and healthy. Plus they are lower in fat than a human and won’t get blood on your carpet. This time of year they are cheap and abundant. Buy three, put them on your headboard, tell them your troubles, make them little dresses, paint faces or nice pictures on them. They make cute decorations and patient friends. When you’ve had enough of hanging out with mute vegetables, hack them to pieces and eat them.

Olive Oil Pumpkin Cookies with Lemon Cream Cheese Frosting

A delicate cookie much like a small cake. Fresh pumpkin and nice olive oil make all the difference in this recipe.

Option 1, start from scratch:

Preheat your oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit. Set a rack in the middle and one at the top.

You will want a Chinese vegetable knife for this. A cleaver is a close second. Halve those cute little fuckers and scoop their innards out conserving the seeds. Just slide your fingers in there and pull. Gross!

Put the halves cavernous side down in a 9 by 13 baking dish, pour in half an inch of water, cover with tinfoil, and put it on the middle rack in the oven. Depending on the size of your pumpkin, they’ll take about an hour to bake. When a fork slides easily into the skin, they’re ready.

While the pumpkin is roasting, simmer the seeds in salt water for 10 minutes, drain, pat dry with a towel, and toss in about a teaspoon of olive oil. Spread them out in a single layer on a baking sheet. Actually spreading them to a single layer is the key to even roasting. Put them on the top rack and watch closely. Depending on your oven, the weather, and possibly gnomes, they will brown in 10 to 20 minutes. Rotate the sheet for even browning if necessary. When they are a nice golden brown color, remove from oven, and begin shucking. Alternatively, give these seeds to industrious rodents desperate to put on fat reserves for winter, and go buy some pre-shucked pumpkin seeds, because this shit is a pain in the ass.

Back to the pumpkin. Use a fork and your indifference to pain to turn the halves out onto your work surface. Scoop the pumpkin meat out into a receptacle. Each average sized sugar pumpkin yields about five cups of cooked flesh. You’ll want a cup and a half for your cookies. The rest keeps nicely in a container in the refrigerator, or you can spread it flat on a baking sheet, reuse your tinfoil to cover it, and freeze in cup portion cakes. Once frozen, pry the disks up and store in the freezer in a plastic bag. Way better than canned whenever you fancy a pumpkin dish and about as easy.

Option 2, get a can of pumpkin puree and go ahead with the cookies:

Preheat your oven to 350 fahrenheit. Grease your cookie sheet.

In a bowl mix together:

2 ½ cups flour

1 tsp baking soda

1 tsp cinnamon

½ tsp salt

Beat together:

1 ½ cups pumpkin puree

1 cup brown sugar

⅓ cup olive oil

¼ cup apple cider vinegar

With a few swift strokes, mix your wet ingredients into the dry.

Drop by the tablespoon full onto your greased cookie sheet and place in the oven for about 15 minutes.

Frosting!:

Beat together:

¾ cup of vegan cream cheese.

3 cups of powdered sugar

juice of ½ a small lemon

½ tsp of vanilla extract

Adjust the lemon juice or sugar to reach desired consistency, which is that of a thick glaze.

When the cookies are fully cooled, drip frosting by the spoonful on top and let it spread itself. Sprinkle pumpkin seeds to taste on top.

*According to the Burke Museum of the University of Washington, this is a total myth. I’ll believe them; they have the skeleton of a terror bird in their lobby, after all.  How sweet is that?  Just too good a rhetorical device to pass up.