The End of Romance and an Orgy of Cheese

Stuck in traffic on a 50 minute cab ride from Charles de Gaulle airport to Gare Montparnasse, I was suddenly aware of how I used to attach romance to almost everything. As the French cabbie weaved his way through the streets swearing to himself about the gridlock, there was the Eiffel tower sticking its little brown dickhead up through the pink light and the Champs-élysées strung out in all its perfection. There were the French lovers at the crosswalk gazing into each other's eyes in a quiet personal trance against the backdrop of sidewalk cafes. I could almost hear accordion music bouncing off the big stone wall in my head.  Memories and ideas started bubbling up as a familiar ode in colored light. It was all still there where I’d left it but it was different somehow. The romance of writers, poets, painters, markets, and stone bridges that once flashed as big ideas presented themselves more like scruffy french hookers under dim street lights on the Rue St. Denis. I was older maybe and a little well worn. Besides, I had to couler un bronze. In my longing for the salle de bain, the bane of Henry Miller and the grandiose yearnings of youth were gone. 

Luckily, I know myself a little better these days. I know that wherever I go, for the first two days I want to move there. I could be anywhere. It doesn't matter where it is. I want to pack it all in and set up shop. My head can romanticize the city dump. It can romanticize almost anything-and not in a good way. In my youth, it was wino homeless poets, hitchhiking to work, big adventure, lovers, freedom, food, sex, spirituality, victory gardens, and money- basicaly anywhere but here. I hung myself out to dry constantly chasing an illusion in my head. I almost died on several occasions. I call it my magnifying magazine mind. It's the blessing and the curse of the artist who subconsciously collects the energy and imaging of the outside world and spits it back out as art. This fantasyland can create great art but also a constant state of delusion. Most of the spiritual giants and great artists I revered weren't mamby pamby idealist dreamers anyway. They were tough, hard working people grounded in the reality of the moment, more than likely with spade in hand. This is what a well worn life teaches you on the back end. These realizations sneak in through the back door of you serendipitously, whether you like it or not, if you just take the time to sit still for half a minute.  And then you wake up to find yourself strung out in a different dimension. Reality shifts on you before you even know what's happening. Then one day you find yourself driving through the streets of Paris-but in a different way altogether.

My first realization of this change came when I was stuck in Singapore a few years back. I'd hung myself out to dry on an ill fated attempt at India. ( I won't go into the gory details). I walked the hot humid streets for three days in a bit of a panic, past random modern buddhist temples , Marina Bay Sands, food stalls with families sucking chili crab, strip malls, commerce and buzzing traffic . I had the realization that most people in passing were not that different from people anywhere else half a world away. They were just trying to make ends meet, make it to the hardware store so they could fix the crapper or to the mechanic so they didn't have to take an uber to work. As I walked those streets my grandiose ideal system ground to a sweaty halt. It did me more good than two weeks in that ashram in India for sure. I realized that in all my subtle romantic notions, travels and befuddlments that there was a part of me that was missing my own fucking life.

I met my friend in Paris and we had a coffee in the station amongst the traveling hoards. She looked tired and wrung out. We rode the train out west through the French countryside yacking incessantly like old friends do. She had built a life in France that was falling apart and I came to help her out a bit. I spent three weeks busting my ass, weeding gardens, mowing lawns, trimming hedges and feeding chickens and alpacas. I worked at a little run down chateau mowing the lawn and painting ceilings to give her some relief from the predicament she’d found herself in. (very romantic) It didn't really make a dent in her overwhelming life load. What It provided, in the end, was a little space and perspective for the both of us. I wasn't interested in seeing the sites. I was interested in something a little deeper. As a result, I was able to taste the effervescence of French country life in a different way.

One day I stood up from a pile of alpaca shit I was shoveling and realized I could be almost anywhere. It actually reminded me of Ohio. A place I was eager to escape at all cost as a young man. The only way you would have known I was in France would have been to open up the Fridge and take a whiff, have some cheese and crackers, rabbit terrine, or take a run down to the Super U grocery store and walk the isles to bathe in the glory of the food and oogle at the prices of the Châteauneuf du Pape. Even then, all those little old French ladies picking through the produce weren’t on their way to somewhere else. They were just living their own lives. Or then again maybe not…maybe in the back of their little Breton buttered heads they were bored with all this and were dreaming of tromping off to Disneyland for a ménage à trois with Mickey and Mini…What do I know?  Humans and their longings are the most fascinating thing. 

All this is a sign to me that my spiritual path has worked--as it led to a great disappointment. Continued spiritual practice magically separates you from your head and plops your right into the reality of your predicament. Wherever you go -there you are. It's really the most profoundly interesting form of travel one could imagine and at the same time routine. You can't find this kind of shit in the shiney pages of Conde Nast Traveler. Still I can catch myself going there- to the great idea- to a glossy scenario wrapped in a bigger shinier rainbow life that has nothing to do with reality.  These days, I try to play the tape forward to the point where the honeymoon in my head is actually over. I go to that moment about three weeks in, when I'm rifling through reading materials looking for something in English in someone else's house, or to that hotel room on a moonlit Italian Piazza and I say to myself, “What?  Spaghetti for dinner again? Jesus fucking Christ! Why can’t I get one of those burritos with black beans, guacamole and chilis--yeah that would do me right.”  At that point I know I’ve done it again. I screwed the pooch on the gifts laid before me and it's time to go home. Where is home you might ask?--It's the joy of right here, right now. 

All that being said, once the dream is done one can taste the world in a different way. You can read books or poetry you once read and something deeper magically appears. Sensuality takes on a different hue on the other side of a romantic vacation. Take for example French Cheese. In between our back breaking work on the farm, in passing, we bathed in an orgy of cheese for a week. We devoured mass quantities of Comte’, French Bleu, local Emmental, chevre, and a soft cheese coated in ash called Morbier that comes from the method of preserving the milk curds by covering it with a layer of ash. The cheese coated with the ash neutralizes the acidity during ripening. The ash used is totally edible. I can only imagine the iron age dumbass who fatefully dropped that chunk of cheese in the fire the first time. I'm sure he reached down to pluck the cheese from the ashes mumbling something like “5 second rule” only to discover that in a week or so, the cheese was actually better. We ate a slice of a nutty mountain cheese spiked with black truffle in the market that you would sell your first born for. It was like an orgasmic symphony in your mouth. But at 50 euros a kilo we had to settle for the memory of just one slice. ( I've already started to romanticize it) There was also a chunk of what must have been a spring Tomme we bought that tasted on the back end like a bit of the barnyard. It left you with the feeling that a few wet sheep were dancing on the back of your tongue. Fall Tomme would have tasted totally different. There was the Brie, a Camembert from right up the road in Normandy and sheeps cheese from the pyrenees all consumed randomly everyday in passing with lunch or as a pre-dinner spelunk through the local cheese cave. It was simply mana to a working man's soul.

We all know the French have nary a rock and roll bone in their DNA. I've only met one. An aging ex-french paratrooper named Jacquenod who had parachuted into Algeiers in the 50’s turned music booking agent. He loved John Lee Hooker and wore snakeskin boots. He’d show up for a late breakfast every morning with two young women on his arm, order a coffee and a red wine at ten AM, roll his eyes, and announce to us like Pepe’ Le Pew that the young lasses were killing him. But what the French lack in rock and roll passion they make up for in other meticulous perfections.  Cheese would be one of them.

In three weeks I worked myself to exhaustion. On the long journey home there wasn't much to ooh and aah about but the stress of travel, train transfers, covid testing, long layovers, and traffic. Like any good love affair it ended all jizzed out staring at the ceiling. I think great food is probably the greatest art form. The end result is shit. Which turns back into life again. Like true love you can’t possess it or attach to it. You are it. You can’t hang it on the wall. It's only a whistle stop of momentary sweetness in a great circle of life. A nice beautiful boffing that holds the orgasm of impermanence flopping like a fish in its mouth. It's here and then gone. Life tastes better ground with reality--- like a great big biscuit slathered in Breton butter spiked with a grain of salt going down-- past the honeymoon in my head--- laying itself like a fresh egg right here, right now --in the orgy at the end of romance.

Bon Appétit mon ami----Fin