Derik Badman's Journal

It's cleaning day so I just got back from leaving the house so I'm not here to bother the woman. I always feel so bourgeoise when I mention the cleaning, but we have good jobs and no kids, so giving someone else some (pretty good paying) work so we can have a little more free time seems like not so bad a thing. It is a little odd, since I work from home, I basically just leave the house when she shows up and take as long a lunch as I can. It's also a little odd, because my mom used clean houses for people when I was a kid. I remember occasionally going along with her when I was sick and too young to stay home by myself. I'd sit on strangers' couches and watch tv while she worked.

I'm experimenting with TVP (texture vegetable protein) for cooking this week. Made sloppy joes with them based on this recipe that turned out decent enough. The tvp seems as effective as buying the fake meat "crumble" that is considerably more expensive. Just got ingredients to try a mushroom tvp stroganoff too. The recipe asks for "vegan worcestershire" and lo and behold they had some at the food co-op. I don't know what really to do in general with worcesterhire as I've mostly avoided it because of the anchovies. I remember as a kid we would have some in the house and I guess the only brand available at the time was one where the glass bottle was wrapped in paper. That always made it seem special and a little odd.

Read Kevin Huizenga's The River at Night over the past two nights. Kind of a reread since it is a collection of the Ganges issues that I've read, and I don't think it has any added material (haven't confirmed that). It's been so many years over the course of that series that I've read the first ones numerous times (as each new issue came, I'd reread the previous), but I've not read the later (especially the last one) probably more than once. So reading the volume started out very familiar and then slowly became less and less so. By the end I felt and impatience and frutration with the book. The ending starts to become increasingly abstract and... confused. In a way it is completely on point, as the narrative is about the character Glenn being unable to get to sleep one night and the sense of impatience and frustration feels true. But in another way, it's not the best thing to feel as one reads. I'm not sure how purposeful it is. The end sections become fragmented, occasionally abstract, obscure, but in a way they do seem like a dream-like drift into sleep, which is perhaps what Huizenga was going for. So I think he was successfully, but also... by the end I just wanted the book to end. I'll have to reread it.