White Bread - it was nice while it lasted
In main part due to how sick I was last week, I have been eating a bunch of white bread, something I've not done in years (decade+). Actually today, while writing this, I finished the loaf. It's easy to digest and simple for the body, so it's been a bit of a safe food as I work out what the heck is wrong with me. I have a CT scan this week, what a weird experience that will be.
The thing is white bread is a very, very odd food. It's both incredibly substance-less and really, really filling. It's unbelievably soft, eating it feels like taking a bite of air, yet it really adds up. This is most noticeable for me when it's toasted. It's just texture: crunch with no body, less there than cornflakes or bran. It's a bizarre miracle food while also being obviously junk.
For years I've avoided white bread. Even though I am one of those people who really likes bread, I had it in my mind white bread was bad for me. 'BREAD MAKES YOU FAT?!?!'. But, really, I'm a bread guy. A two naan and no rice kind of guy. Always a slab of crusty bread please, always something dark and dense. Sandwiches are heaven. Toasties are a treat. I like thin soft pitas with falafel, I like impossibly chewy Italian loaves. Foccacia is great, rolls are fine too. Irish soda bread, which is almost like a bread flavoured cake, is amazing to me. Sourdough isn't my speed, but enough butter makes anything lovely. A birthday treat for me is a fancy butter and a lot of bread. Butter, by the way, is one of the things I most taste a difference in quality in. Not enough to splash out all the time but, my god, a gourmet butter is like $10 but tastes about 40x better than Western Star. The one bread I didn't touch was white bread. It was just too carby, too sugary (though actually this turned out NOT to be the case for what I bought), just a pointless picky toddler of a food.
But this week I'm reminded of flat lemonade and plain toast as a kid to help ease my tummy and, for all it's sins, nothing works at a BBQ as well as shitty white bread. Thanks old friend, it was nice while it lasted.
Apart from white bread, I've been pleasantly surprised with some news about my writing this week. I've been working to find more ways to be paid to write. Given what I write - stuff about art - it's a bit of a niche and there's not exactly a line of folks kicking down the door due to overwhelming demand. But, I've started doing the thing we all hate: putting my services out there for folks to see and saying 'hey! hire me! I can do it! for money!' and I've gotten a few more small gigs. It's early days, and I don't foresee this being something where there's immediate appetite, but still, little wins are wins all the same. A friend recently encouraged me to potentially think about getting into grant writing, and that felt like a really good suggestion. I think I might try that - helping others by writing their grant applications for them. It's all a bit more money in the bank and a bit less reliance on the day job, which at the moment just feels like a 2nd or 3rd class life. If anyone you know needs help with artist statements, exhibition text, reviews, essays, or grant applications I'd love it if you pass along my name. More than happy to write about non-photographic stuff. I just love writing.
But I digress. Despite my reliance on a few slices of white bread, if it's all the same, I hope this is actually my one and only loaf (and I can go back to what I usually eat), I miss seeds and grains running through something really, really dense and brown.
Till next week.