In January, I was at an antique fair in Alameda, California that often deals in the too-expensive. I was there with a date who I had just begun seeing and had thought would portend a good beginning to the new year and instead disappeared within a few weeks. So it goes. (As it ended up, the idea that this would be a good year disappeared too as we’ve all seen play out pretty quickly.)
At a table in the back of the normally expensive antique fair (the dealers here know what they’re selling, it’s no flea market), I spotted an old skillet. It was crusty with layers of bad seasoning. I hadn’t heard of the brand — Axford — and called my dad, the expert in these sorts of things. He asked me to check the price. I asked the old man — who wouldn’t have looked out of place hocking Dead bootlegs — and he told me an unexpected price given the surroundings. $10. I took him up on it.
You see, my dad is a man of an unusual hobby. Where some people go to comic book conventions or car shows or other places where hobbyists gather, my dad gallivants across the nation, my mom in tow, to cast iron cookware conventions. He’s not just in search of any brand, but the Griswold brand.
My siblings and I have found out other cast iron facts through osmosis. How to spot a late model Lodge. When the Erie became Griswold. The differences between Wagner Ware and Griswold, two close competitors whose fates later became intertwined.
We learned all these things and accumulated little hand me downs along the way too. Recently a package came in the mail. My dad sent me a skillet in the mail, weeks after my birthday, asking me to identify it myself, which I did correctly after a bit of investigation. (An unmarked Wagner Ware #9 chef’s skillet, which he told me was a way for the brand to be sold generically in department stores who might’ve had “exclusive” deals with other name-brand vendors.)
I picked up the Axford skillet (which he told me was a Lodge sub-brand) that day thinking I’d send it home with him eventually, but instead I eventually became obsessed myself with finding the original raw skillet underneath it all. At home, my dad has an electrolysis tank to put old cast iron in to shock rust and grime off. At home, I’d have to deal with oven cleaner, trash bags, N-95 ventilator masks and protective gloves.
Several applications of elbow grease and oven cleaner later, the raw skillet underneath the Axford griller was there, chipped away under the grime. “Virgin” cast iron (I suppose this one is a born-again virgin) is actually a bit silvery in color. The dark color we associate with the pans comes from repeated cooking. Still, there were little flecks that never quite came out I became obsessed with. Eventually, short of drastic measures, I’d have to consider it good enough. He even helped me out a bit on a February visit, where we also found a vintage Lodge pan for $10 at a neighborhood flea market in Berkeley (his Facebook group buddies were very jealous, as in collector circles it goes for $60. The Axford griller goes for about $50 once stripped and seasoned.)
Here’s the before and after of the skillet, though as you can see, the seasoning isn’t quite fully stripped quite yet, and I haven’t quite gotten to the re-seasoning. Bit by bit. Depression and projects and I are a slow mixture.
Through my dad, I’ve come to look under every cast iron piece I see at flea markets and thrift stores and antique shops, to make the calls to him describing the brand and the size and the markings and the condition, to see if it’s something he’d want in his collection (only if it’s Griswold) or if he’d want to fix up and sell (only if the price is right).
But what we didn’t know is where the obsession came from. Except my sister asked.
For years, my siblings and I had suspected a great mythology. Perhaps it was a grand tradition. I have never known my father’s father, and he died when my siblings were quite young. Maybe he was a Griswold man going far back, and he passed that on to my father. Or perhaps my father’s grandfather handed him a skillet one day and gave him a lesson in American craftsmanship. Maybe his grandmother made the best biscuits in a Griswold skillet and those childhood memories stayed with him and he began to associate the brand with those memories.
Readers, it was none of those things.
I love my father dearly. But he is a pathologically weird man, in the most midwestern of ways, if “cast iron skillet conventions” isn’t an indication. The grand mystery of how my father came to appreciate cast iron skillets goes as such:
My mother’s aunt, not even a favorite aunt (not that there was anything wrong with her, there were just a lot of aunts on that side), died, and there was an estate auction of her belongings. Inside a box of cookware my dad purchased for $10 was a cast iron skillet made by the Griswold cast iron company out of Erie, Pennsylvania. My dad used it and just really liked the way it cooked, and therefore decided that he needed to learn everything he could about the company and also obsessively devote himself to finding more of their cookware. And now, he scours the country for rare pieces, currently mostly searching for dutch ovens as he has the skillets mostly covered. All because, in the immortal words of the philosopher M. Bouvier-Simpson …
Forrest Gump, but today
The movie Forrest Gump was both an aberration and an abomination and in some ways I hope its cultural imprint is gone forever, and in other ways it’s bad and it should feel bad and we should keep its cultural memory alive so it can know what it did. It is essentially OK Boomer: The Movie, surveying the tumultuous years of the 50s, 60s, and 70s with an aww shucks good ol’ boy who stays sweet in the face of cultural upheaval around him. And there’s some nostalgia and some knuckle beating about liberalism and that’s about all it amounts to before a feather flies off into the wind.
Anyway, I would hope it couldn’t get made today, but if it got made today, the following events would need to happen so that it could become rocket past Cats into our cultural poisoning of “nothing is good so let’s bathe ourselves in the bad.”
He teaches a young MC Hammer how to dance based on having ringworm as a child.
Through a series of labyrinthine circumstances he is granted entry into Harvard and cofounds Facebook with his college roommate, Mark Zuckerberg. He also says, “You mean like a book full of faces?”
He inspires the shit emoji
Goes on a tour of duty in Iraq, naturally, and comes back to the MoveOn protests.
Inspires Barack Obama to run for president.
Something something Occupy Wall Street but he’s just homeless and living in Central Park, really.
Cofounder of Sweetgreen
Killed Bin Laden
Accidental cabinet undersecretary
Science of the week
We’re all thinking of Covid-19. All of us. I hardly noticed if there was anything else going on. Our galaxy actually being nearly 2 million light years across? That’s kind of cool. Our president is a failure.
The piece of science writing that’s stuck with me most this week has been Ed Yong’s timeline of what comes after this moment. This is a moment in time we don’t come back from. There are people we love who are gone after this virus. There are people we love who mentally suffer agoraphobia after this. But perhaps there’s some resiliency and some hope at the end. We just have to be strong and make it through it together as best we can.
Mental Health
At sundown, things are always tougher than the rest of the day. It’s harder to judge the night from the rest of the day. I’m judging this on Saturday morning, looking back on the week. I feel like I was better than last week, but not great — we’re all cooped up. We’re all stressed. In the Atlantic article linked below, there’s the worry of post-coronavirus agoraphobia, which I definitely feel.
In the weeks leading up to “shelter in place” I was supposed to begin exploring the possibility of transcranial magnetic stimulation. This is when, essentially, an electro-magnet is swept over the right area of your brain, giving it a little jolt every day over a period of 30 days. At the end of it, for many people, there’s an elevation of mood if not a recession of depression symptoms. I’d been somewhat “tranquilized” in the lead-up to it, given more anti-manic drugs to make sure things were as calm as possible in the lead-up to the possible treatment. (Anti-depressants for bipolar disorder are hard to come by as it is.) The consequence, though, is that there is no serotonin coming through the gates. I feel at best a little flat.
I’m fine, overall. Better than last week. No major improvements. Nothing is really going to move until the Covid-19 Curtain lifts. After I was the only one to show up at virtual group therapy last week, it was “postponed” until next week this.
What I have contended a lot with are feelings of loneliness. I feel strange feelings of slight jealousy for those enclosed with someone — even roommates, but especially partners. Maybe it’s the concept of someone having a partner in your life, something that’s seemed evasive since I found myself single after more than a half decade in 2018 and I’ve never known how to do this anyway. At the same time, I’ve found there’s a basic futility in “the apps” or whatever. As if there’s even less worth in the effort than before, not that there was much happening from what effort I was putting in. There’s not an app specifically for balding bipolar nerds with John Goodman-like physiques.
It’s been good, as usual, to FaceTime with friends, to have Netflix Party chats with friends, Twitter DMs, chats, the gamut of human contact. Face-to-face human contact will be good to have again.
Medications are exactly the same as last week as I haven’t spoken to my psychiatrist. Lamotrigine 300 mg, topamax 150 mg, 1000 mg metformin, 1 mg klonopin, some benadryl for sleep.
Links
COVID-19 Myths, Debunked (The Nib) - See, it’s in comic form, so you can let the pictures do some of the talking. I’ve probably bored you with reading by this point.
How to Stream the Animal Kingdom From Your Sofa (Atlas Obscura) - Go to the zoo, virtually. More things to just look at.
Coronavirus pandemic produces the inevitable for Chicago: Malort hand sanitizer (Chicago Tribune) - Frankly, given the choice of drinking hand sanitizer or drinking malort again, I’d actually think on the choice longer than I’m comfortable with.
Debunking Fake Videos & WHO'S behind 5-min crafts? | How To Cook That Ann Reardon (YouTube) - You know those too-good-to-be-true easy baking videos? They’re too good to be true. Oh, and made by disinformation-rich authoritarian-happy propagandists. (via Iron Spike)
Against Productivity in a Pandemic (The New Republic) - It’s ok to just … sit back a little.
Jams
I put so little effort into my socializing outside of small groups or any real effort into dating that I don’t really consider my sexual orientation essentially apathetically bisexual with a little more trust in women but god damn Daily Show writer and arch-Twitter prankster Jaboukie Young-White put together a hell of a Spotify playlist with Gay Yearnings and it’s a real rollercoaster.
If you’re impatient with 79 song Spotify playlists this week and just want me to send one song your way this week I am going to make you listen to “Andromeda” by Weyes Blood, which is not on that playlist, which sounds like you’re in a mysterious lounge at an unknown hour struck by the saddest song you’ve ever heard at your loneliest hour.