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!