The Seventeenth Best Email We Wrote This Past Weekend

May 07, 2019

The Fifteenth Best Email We Wrote This Past Weekend: HMM WEEKLY PREMIUM for May 7, 2019

Good morning! Here is the latest edition of the SUBSCRIBERS ONLY Hmm Weekly Premium Newsletter, distributed exclusively to you, our paying members, supporters, and patrons. Thank you very, very much for your interest and support! If you're feeling even more generous of spirit, please share this message with your uninitiated or laggard friends, so that they too can take the opportunity to join us, and please spread the word about HMM DAILY DOT COM any way you see fit. We also haz Youtube. We're working on it, but if you find yourself on that web site and you could see your way clear to hitting the SUBSCRIBE button, we would appreciate you even more, if it's possible. We will, though.

LAST WEEK ON HMM DAILY

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DRINK FULL, AND DESCEND

"Imagine Twitter with this red button," the wise Paul Ford wrote yesterday morning, with a picture of the trending "Starbucks Cup" topic accompanied by a little red oblong saying "MUTE" in white letters. I imagined it, and I got off Twitter.

Over the weekend I had made and drunk two glasses of Jack Dorsey's asceticism beverage, or a version of it. Almost none of the ideas that emerge from the hollow space behind the public face of Twitter are anything but ridiculous, and the New York Times writeup last week of Dorsey's behavioral and dietary habits was appropriately pitiless. One of our preeminent dispensers of electronically mediated brain poison chooses to lock himself inside a Faraday enclosure regularly, to get a reprieve from what he believes to be the ambient dangers of the electromagnetic radiation given off by the omnipresent devices that deliver the brain poison on which his fortune has been built. As ever, you wouldn't be this mean if you'd just set out to make all these things up.

Among the evasions of contemporary life and mortifications of the flesh to which he subjects himself, though, Dorsey reportedly likes to drink a glass of water with salt and lemon juice in it. He does this in lieu of eating, because he has an evident eating disorder, but one doesn't need to not eat other things to go ahead and drink a beverage, unless the beverage is one of those vile food-replacement shakes. That's a whole other disorder.

And so Vice did a stunt piece where someone made and drank Dorsey's "salt juice" because it sounded so gross, but it didn't really sound gross at all. The person who drank it suggested, in passing, that it could be done with seltzer, which seemed exactly right, as the difference between a sort of fake-medicinal performance of self-discipline and a well constructed beverage. So on Saturday, I decided to try it.

Besides still water, the Dorsey version also used pink Himalayan salt, because the kind of people who want to construct monasticism out of high-end consumer culture believe it's important to ingest trace quantities of heavy metals, and also presumably I expect they believe on some level that the presence of the Dalai Lama has homeopathically seeped into the ground. I put a half teaspoon of Morton's iodized into a glass (by "glass," in our apartment, I mean "leftover honey jar") along with the juice squeezed out of half a lemon, by hand. I wasn't going to dignify Jack Dorsey's pretensions by going to the trouble of using the lemon juicer and a bowl, although then I ended up fishing the seeds out of the glass with a fork, so I probably should have.

I poured in a can of seltzer, or half a can of seltzer till the sturdy, soapy-looking foam subsided, and then the rest of the seltzer. I sometimes make a beverage of like one-third orange juice and the rest seltzer, so I've learned to anticipate the way citrus and seltzer foam up together. I took a sip or maybe just a slug of it; it was obviously and instantly good, fizzy and sharp and refreshing. It was a low-tech step toward the salty lemonade in a Vietnamese restaurant, minus the soft salt-pickled lemon or lime, or a salted-plum soda. If you have no interest in self-denial at all, and it's cocktail hour, try letting the dried salted plums soak in a layer of vodka for a while, then fill the glass with seltzer. Or just soak them in seltzer, they're delicious.

I drained the whole thing. The end tasted a little like the dregs of Alka-Seltzer, when you really need the Alka-Seltzer. I ate my meals like a normal person the rest of the day, and drank three more cans of plain seltzer, to keep my salt balance straight. The next day, I made and drank another.

And I had no desire to look at Twitter. I saw a couple of things and might have tweeted a little, but the gnawing every-minute compulsion to dig my phone out of my pocket and drag down to refresh was missing—or it was there, but ineffective, like a pulley still spinning after the drive belt has slipped off. The idea of trying to get that little hit of cortisol, of poking at the bad feelings, felt totally alien; scrolling back to see what I'd missed seemed definitively undesirable.

There were confounding variables, naturally. It was sunny and bright. We had things to do. We tried playing a five-minute meditation clip to get the kids wound down. Who knows what had really pitched the Faraday tent around my mind? It certainly wasn't due to any increase in my personal virtue.

Then Monday came—I woke up before the alarm could go off—and when I put my eyes on the screen, there was another beverage, the Game of Thrones coffee cup, and I didn't care. Or, rather, I cared a specific and precise amount. It was a funny thing, that the big-budget dragon show had left a coffee cup in a shot, and there was nothing more to add. My feed was filling up with people re-stimulating the stimulus, because Twitter has to be open-ended, even when the open end goes nowhere. I went away and read other things. Later on, there would be jokes about the new royal baby's British-American name, a Twitter prompt if ever there was one. Some of the jokes were good ones! I couldn't come up with one of my own.

*** NINETEEN FOLKTALES: A SERIES

Illustration by Jim Cooke

15. The Kettledrums

There was once an elderly man who worked as a gardener, but who loved music above all else. One day after a rainstorm he was walking through the forest, whistling and humming to himself, when he heard weeping. Following the sound, he found a forest sprite in distress, standing beside a sapling that had been split down the middle by the wind.

"Do not mourn," the man said. "This tree may still live." As the tearful sprite looked on, he took out a length of twine from his satchel, pulled the green wood tightly back together, and expertly lashed it in place. Then he sealed the wound with beeswax and left the little tree standing whole and upright again.

The forest sprite examined the repair with gratitude. "You have done a great kindness," it said, "and I would repay you. Name your wish."
The man pondered the question. "Making music is all I really desire," he said.

"Then you shall have whatever you need to make music," the sprite said. "Farewell." And it vanished into the trees.

The man made his way home, back to his small cottage, so busy puzzling over the encounter that he forgot even to hum. Soon enough, though, as he prepared his dinner, he began again to sing to himself. He pitched his voice low, and imagined what the high notes would be—and no sooner had he thought it than he found a fiddle in his left hand and a bow in his right, ready to play the sounds he had imagined.

The tone of the fiddle was ringing yet mellow, and he lost himself in playing it and singing. Then he began to wish for a fuller sound to support him. Suddenly there was the round back of a huge bass viol pressing against his belly as he stood. Laying aside the little fiddle, he began to saw away at the thrumming bass, filling the cottage with its deep, resonant purr.

By sundown of the next day, he had added two different sizes of harp, a lute, a flute, and an oboe. Whatever instrument appeared, he found himself ready to play as if he had practiced it for years.

Still, though, something was lacking. "A drum," he thought. "A kettledrum." And before him stood a huge shining copper kettledrum. He struck it and a low bass C rattled the dishes in the kitchen. It needed only—and there was a slightly smaller drum tuned to E. Then A, then D, till the little cottage was filled with bright copper from wall to wall. The man played the kettledrums for hours and hours, deep into the night, until he was so tired he could hardly stand.

At that point, he noticed that the drums had filled the corner where he was accustomed to unroll his sleeping pallet, and that they blocked the door of the house. So the man crawled out the window, and stretched out to sleep on the straw of his low roof. And the roof was where he slept from then on, except on rainy nights, when he simply curled up in the little space between the drums and slept there, with the day's music still ringing in his ears.

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RECIPES

We present here for your continued amusement, delectation, and possible puzzlement four recipes for sandwiches, hand-picked from The Up-To-Date Sandwich Book: 400 Ways to Make a Sandwich, published in 1909 and now in the public domain. We ran out of sardine recipes. OR DID WE.

ROAST BEEF AND JAM SANDWICH
Between thin slices of lightly buttered white bread, place thin slices of cold roast beef; on top of this spread plum jam.

ROAST BEEF SANDWICH NO. 2
Between thin slices of buttered bread place thin slices of cold roast beef; spread this thinly with horseradish.

CHERRY SALAD SANDWICH
Remove stones from two cups of cherries, add one-half of English walnuts and two stalks of celery that have been chopped fine; add enough mayonnaise to moisten; place between thin slices of lightly buttered white bread. Garnish with a cherry.

PICNIC SANDWICH
A pound of raw beef through the meat chopper; a teacupful of bread crumbs, pepper and salt to taste; mix with a well-beaten egg, and form into a roll.

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