Hello, My Name Is:

Maybe my new official title should be:

Mid Level Manager,
Ministry of Unpopular Opinions and Inconvenient Truths

(the backstory is complicated. Some of you know some of it. It rhymes with build.)

GARLIC.

Why not add an entire head of rough chopped garlic to those onions?

ONIONS.

Obligatory shot of a whole bunch of onions, in a super fancy cutting board (a torn up pizza box.)

blood and gore

I don't recall if, in over 1,300 posts, I've ever posted a yucky picture of a body part. (I happily specialize in beautiful food and bicycles.) Well, why not? First time for everything, right?

Here is what I had done yesterday:

The technical name, like many things in medicine, makes it sound abstract (or at least not so yucky): ablation. The reality is that the doctor (in this case, my wonderful smalltown family practice doc) cuts out half (or sometimes all) of your toenail to fix a constantly ingrown toenail.

I first had this done on the other big toe when I was 19, and it took three months to get an appointment with a podiatrist at Kaiser, and hurt like hell. A week ago when I went in for a tetanus shot (gored my leg on rusty barb wire while hiking in the West Virginia woods) my doctor was like "yeah, sure, I can do that. Do you want a full ablation or just half?" The procedure yesterday didn't hurt at all.

So anyway, this is what it looks like when you get half of your big toenail cut out.

/EOF

Bleh: Hillbilly Elegy, by J.D. Vance

I recently read Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance. I wanted to stop about a quarter of the way through, because simply put, it's just not a good book. It's a good memoir: but as a purported sociological study, it's terrible.

A big part of what never sat right is that while J.D. Vance can certainly self-identify as a "hillbilly" if he wants, it consistently rings untrue.

He writes at length about Jackson, Kentucky, but throughout the book really only goes there for funerals. He grew up in Middletown, Ohio, and while Butler County and Warren County, Ohio, are most certainly the Rust Belt, they aren't Appalachia. Vance himself acknowledges this late in the book when he talks about going to "Appalachian Ohio" to visit a lovely state park.

Despite the conservative heart warming nature of his National Review-worthy bootstrap pulling rise from working class poverty, Vance started writing the book while a third year at Yale Law. He continued writing it while an associate at Sidley Austin, ranked #7 in the AmLaw 100.

J.D. Vance is a tool.

One among many things that made the bile rise in this supposedly dirt poor hillbilly memoir was that in his senior year of high school, he had been taking golf lessons from a "former golf pro" for a year.

I'm not a "hillbilly". I do live in southern West Virginia right now, but I didn't grow up here. I'm not an Appalachian, or a "hillbilly". Not by a longshot. But neither is J.D. Vance. Not by a longshot.

Butt typing

Well, really, pocket typing. Here is what happens when your phone stays on in your pocket:

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Giraffe

I'm not usually one for cute animal photos on the interwebz, but, c'mon: have you ever in your life seen such an adorable plate?

My favorite pack decoration

I waxed nostalgic about my old Camelbak and its replacement in this post.

Now, confidential for F, here is the decoration that makes me happy every time I see it.

It's got a little playa, a little hiking, and a lot of love.