Lake Inez

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i hope this valentine’s day
you all have somebody
who looks at you
the way timothee chalamet
looks at the horizon/the great unknown
in this painting i bought
on facebook marketplace
now - without rival - my favourite piece
in the dining room
and where i look to
whenever i’m feeling
lonely & lost

a new dish!
salmon gravlax cured in toasted hay, juniper, & dill
with creme fraiche, yuzu, preseved bergamot, pickled rutabaga, poached quince, & toasted rye loaf

this is a true story:
when we were opening lake inez i was dating a wacky brilliant newf who introduced me to the works of christopher & mary pratt.

i was entranced by the way their styles juxtaposed.
and then also, like, how was that expressed in their love? or in their home. i couldn’t imagine a living room aesthetic they agreed upon.

his paintings so sweet n serene and expansive.
so much quietude and a world full of tender possibilities.

her paintings so acute and harsh and borderline grotesque (in a hot way) and a way of turning minutiae into universality.

and him (presumably) being like ‘no, babe, the muse will reveal herself to us only after gazing at the horizon over the course of one million sunsets’

and her being like, ‘i don’t have time for horizon-gazing as i’m one of a million women who are catching, butchering, and then cooking this glistening salmon so we don’t starve while staring at the sunset’

and how like, the sun somehow melting into a single colour the way it does in his paintings will nourish a part of you.

and how her paintings of jars of preserves and freshly butchered fish and just-peeled citrus will nourish you in another way too.

and how - somewhere, in some living room in newfoundland - both are happening at once.

anyway…..
in 2016, when i was building the website for lake inez, i emailed christopher pratt (lol to be young) and asked permission to use one of his paintings for the landing page.

(as an aside: that painting has since sold for half a million dollars)

the gallery then showing the painting replied on his behalf.
christopher said i could use the painting in exchange for a free meal if he ever made it back to toronto.

mary passed away in ’18 and he in ’22 and to my knowledge never did make it back here to cash in on that meal.

i owe them a salmon dish.
and you owe someone an email.
it never hurts to try

.
a new dish!
house made andouille w/ scallop, shrimp, sassafras,
scallop-shaped puffed pastry

new orleans, NYE, ‘24
crawdads were the cheapest thing we could buy so we subsisted on them the best we could.
they’d come in gigantic paper bags dampened by residual steam.
you’d get a soup container’s worth of neon red hot sauce for dunking
they were delicious but a lot of work
thankfully we had nothing to do really.
a scared ritual:
pop off the head, slurp the juices, gnaw as much meat out of the claws & tail, spit the shells out, sip on a now-warm tall can of sh*tty beer.

seb was tired of me by then.
he was tired of crawfish, tired of being broke, tired of long days of driving, tired of the cds we had in the car, & tired of my stories.

he said being a storyteller meant living in the past & he wanted to make new stories & barrel into the future.

i kinda knew what he meant & i kinda agreed somewhere deep down but i wasn’t in a hurry to grow up & also i was afraid i didn’t have enough to offer & i was afraid of applying myself cause it might mean rejection or worse it might mean just like being boring.

it really hurt me when he said he didn’t think i contributed as much to our friendship as he did.
mainly cause i knew he was right but also cause i never thought of our friendship as a transaction.
but he 𝒘𝒂𝒔 right: he had cooler friends, deeper thoughts, better music, and broader prospects.
so he decided to fly out jan 1 & return to his Adult Life in portland.
i spent my last $150 check from my long-gone landscaping gig on scallops, skinny ci******es, & some very lousy co***ne.
i fired up our camp stove in the sh*tty hotel room and severely overcooked the scallops while he nuked a stick of butter in a styrofoam soup container.
we blew a huge line & talked about our fears, regrets, earliest memories, & the type of dad we’d want to be should that day ever come.

we didn’t leave the hotel room that night and when the sun rose all ambered over vast parking lot i said its dappled reflection on the asphalt looked more like a bayou than a motel 6.
he said he’s gonna remember it that way.
that’ll be the story he tells.
and he hopped in a cab and sped away