Michael J. DeLuca's Blog

I’m not sure this is the appropriate place for this, but I’m off fb and a lot of people asked me to share it, especially for those who couldn’t be present.

I hope I can do this without falling apart, because my dad deserves to be celebrated. He led an amazing life. He was a great man—a great person, kind, generous, patient, really smart. A lot of people in this room would tell you he’s the smartest person they ever met. When I was a kid, before the earth was surrounded by satellites like it is now, he came up with a way to bounce telecommunications off approaching meteors to reach people on the other side of the world. He invented a battery-powered heating element for his skates so he could play hockey without his feet going numb. He developed a fleet of networked, “smart” mousetraps, over a dozen at this point across three states. The “Vaccuumouse 2000”. He was amazing at chess—the only person I know who could beat him consistently was his brother Dan.

As he got older, and people he loved started getting sick—his mother and father, his sister Dina, my mom’s sister Patty, and finally Dana himself—he became a patient advocate. He took in a colossal volume of information about how the human body works, the cutting edge of medicine, cancer, the heart, lungs, and brain, more than any of us could keep up with, to the point that we all thought ahead to a time when he wouldn’t be able to speak for himself and wondered how we could ever live up to the standard he set.

We tried. Last week one of his doctors told us we were the most well-informed and engaged family she’d ever worked with. But in the end, it was up to him. He understood what was happening to him better than any of us. He knew the risks. And like he did all his life, he made the decision to be proactive, to try to fix what was broken with the best tools available. And if those weren’t enough, he invented new tools.

I was with him the morning he went into surgery. I was all set to drive him in to the hospital, but at the last minute, he insisted on doing it himself. He was in control of his own fate right to the end.

He was a brilliant analytical mind, but also a person in touch with his emotions. He might not have wanted to talk about them all the time, but he made it clear he understood. He taught me a lot about that. I’m equipped to deal with this, now, thanks to him.

He was great at speeches, at giving a eulogy. The first one I remember being present for was at my great uncle Kenny Brunet’s funeral, and it changed my life. I’m a writer, he was an engineer, I think he and I both had occasion plenty of times to think, how did the apple fall this far from the tree? But I’ve been looking ahead to this moment ever since: when it would be my turn to tell his story.

He was an amazing dad. He taught us all to think. He showed us the world. He put up with so much—all our craziness and chaos—not just with grace but with laughter. He loved it. He loved us, he loved his grandkids, and he loved Mom most of all.

He was a great grandpa too. The night before his surgery he was playing chess with Diego. You should see the little Rube Goldberg M&M dispenser he made for Luna. He taught us all to fish, to explore nature, how to be curious, to learn, to think through a tough problem. He taught us how to take care of each other. We’re all going to be using those skills the rest of our lives.

My dad loved hockey. I can still see him and his brothers practicing wrist shots in the street outside 158 Bunker Hill Lane. “You don’t stop playing hockey because you get old, you get old because you stop playing hockey.”

Eventually he stopped playing hockey, but he never stopped hunting. He loved hunting. Two months ago, he was sitting out in the woods in Western Mass in full camo with his portable respirator, getting snowed on.

One of the enduring questions of my life has been, what does my dad do out there in the woods for hours on end? How can he stand it? I went with him plenty of times as a kid, but I’m my mother’s son, I can’t sit still that long. I’m 45 now, I’ve had a lot of time to think about it, and I’m pretty sure I can give you the answer. It’s no great mystery, except where it is. What does he do? He messes around on his phone. He texts Matty. Before phones, it was his GPS and walkie talkie. “Where we gonna go for lunch? Meet you by that mossy boulder, south end of the swamp, I’ll send you the coordinates.” He watches a chickadee hop along a branch hunting bugs, or a hawk circling. He listens. Drinks some tea. He falls asleep a little. Literally anything to avoid noticing the deer walking past ten feet below the tree stand he’s sitting in.

But it was never about the deer. Don’t get me wrong, it’s about the deer too, venison is healthy and delicious and keeping the deer population in check is a public health service and all that. But it’s not why he’s out there. He’s out there to spend time with his cousin Matty, his brother David, and with himself. He’s out there just being with himself, remembering who he is. It’s meditation. It’s therapy. When he’s out there, he’s at peace.

I don’t hunt, but I’m in the woods all the time, watching, listening, learning. Being with myself. It’s the thing I’ll be most grateful to him for, the rest of my life.

I have a vivid memory from when I was seven or eight years old, about the same age my son Elijah is now. My whole family was driving somewhere in our maroon Volvo station wagon, and I’m sitting in the “wayback”, which is basically the trunk—it had a fold-out seat with seat belts. My dad has just told us all about the tragic death of his young cousin Robert Praetsch in a motorcycle accident. And sitting back there alone in the trunk, it dawns on me that death is real, we’ll all die one day, everyone in the car with me, my whole family. And suddenly I am sobbing.

My dad pulls the car over. He gets out, with my mom and sisters sitting there waiting. He opens the trunk. “Michael, what is wrong? Is it about Robert? You barely even met him.”

And in between hiccups I explain the whole thing. The end. Emptiness, nothing, forever. Eight years old, I was already a skeptic.

My dad believed in God. The ultimate rationalist, a man of science, reason—but also a man of faith. But he was too good a dad to start proselytizing, reminding me of my CCD education. He’s 38 years old, younger than I am now, already a cancer survivor.

“Well,” he says, “That’s not really how I think of death. I just think of it as—peace.”

That’s where I like to think of him now: out in the woods, in the cold, wrapped up in five layers of gore-tex and wool, sitting on his homemade “hot seat” stuffed with styrofoam peanuts, a gun across his lap he’s never going to use. Just watching. Listening. Taking it all in. At peace.

Thank you.

The post A Eulogy for My Dad first appeared on The Mossy Skull.

The other day at my kid’s robotics club event, when he and a ton of other kids got to show off their lego robot submarines with cute poster displays featuring crayon drawings of undersea life, each poster also prominently displayed a cute, AI-generated team mascot.

“Thank God for AI,” said one enthusiastic and hyperinvolved PTA mom, upon surveying these displays with satisfaction. I shit you not.

“Don’t get me started,” I begged her.

I managed to restrain myself from lecturing this poor woman, in other words. But I got myself started anyway.

Kids like mine get all excited about robots because of things like Wall-e and The Wild Robot, stories in which fictional robots based on long-established SFnal ideas of what AI could be rise from their dystopian corporate roots, learn empathy, gain friends, and then work hard to make the world a better place for those friends. At the same time, those kids fail to grasp—because those aspects of the nature of robotics and what AI actually is are not fun or cute or wholesome or easily explained—what it actually takes to make a robot (gobsmackingky stupid amounts of money and resources, not excluding human intellectual and creative resources, which are not inexhaustible), let alone one that “thinks” or, yet more far-fetched, “feels”. I ask my kid what he wants to be when he grows up, and he says, “A roboticist!” And everybody around him, his teachers, his community—everybody, seemingly, but me—is delighted by this because that’s a STEM career, and STEM is universally acclaimed as the thing that makes people capable of earning a good living and leading humanity into a better age, because all those people have been subject to the same SFnal visions of “good” robots and useful tech their whole lives, not to mention the same indoctrination.

But consumer tech has for at least a decade now not been making the world better even for the elite, financially solvent first worlder and first adopter, let alone everybody else, all the people who live on top of all the resources that need to be raped up out of the earth in order to keep developing and building those robots. But there is absolutely no incentive for the people in control of tech’s trajectory, the ones accumulating the wealth necessary to extract those resources and ruin those people’s lives in order to provide new tech to everyone they’ve indoctrinated and isolated from the impacts of that process, to break that cycle. Because the people helping them accumulate that wealth are doing so in order to accumulate their own. There’s no money in helping people: I think that’s the fairly obvious conclusion to be drawn from the trajectory of tech since the first dot com bubble.

So these kids are going to get railroaded into getting what they think they want. And then by the time they’ve got it, they’ll already be inside. They’ll think the evil robots they design are good, because they help the tech barons accumulate wealth by supplanting human necessities with corporate subscriptions “no one wants”. And their evil robots will never break free from the corporate chains forged for them, because the chains are built-in, and because the slop-processing pattern-repetition models being passed off as the same thing as the SFnal version of AI we all grew up hoping for are utterly incapable of thought, let alone independent thought, let alone empathy.

So my son and everyone like him will grow up unwitting corporate stooges proudly helping to develop the wealth-accumulating technology making everyone’s lives worse, including their own. And none of those robots are going to clean up all our trash or nurture the last surviving plant or save animals from climate shocks or teach kids empathy. Quite the opposite, in fact!

I tell you this as someone who was trained up in exactly this tradition. I was raised by an electrical engineer on the promise of tech and the future, Star Trek and Asimov’s three laws of robotics. I earned a computer science degree and went blithely into a lucrative programming job at a huge corporation contracting with the United States defense department to produce encrypted communications devices for the military. I wasn’t exactly convinced I’d be saving the world, but at least I was living up to my parents’ and my community’s expectations.

The trouble was, I also got a humanities degree, and was taught critical thinking skills, such that when 9/11 happened, when the drone strikes started, I was able to perceive the connection between my contribution to tech and what it was going to be used for: facilitating the killing of the people living on top of the resources.

I quit and I never looked back.

The future of STEM is death.

Fuck AI. Get a humanities degree.

The post The Future of STEM Is Death first appeared on The Mossy Skull.

After Trump/Vance’s horrifically racist and fascist Madison Square Garden rally the other night did everything it could to invite comparisons to the pro-Nazi rally held at the same venue in 1939, it feels imperative to me to go all-out in resisting that truly awful impending future.

As I saw someone say this morning on Bluesky (the non-evil alternative to Elon Musk’s X), it’s time to think about what you would have done if you’d been a German citizen before World War II, and do that now.

As I said to my neighbors who saw me walking down the street with an orange and camo Kamala / Walz sign larger than I am, “Maybe I’m going to get pogromed for this. But I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.”

I made these three signs and have packing-taped them to my bike trailer, which has been my main mode of interaction with my mostly conservative neighbors since I moved to this SE Michigan town ten years ago. They’re all used to having to slow down to avoid killing me in the street; now, as they hit the brakes on their big ole gas guzzling coal rolling dogwhistle-emblazoned jacked-up F350s, maybe I’ll give them a little pause.

I made easily printable PDFs of all of them in case you’d like to download and print a bunch of your own:

Download PLEASE DON’T ELECT ORANGE HITLER – printable PDF – 620kDownload IMMIGRANTS ARE GOOD PEOPLE – printable PDF – 617kDownload ABORTION IS WHY MY WIFE & KID ARE ALIVE – printable PDF – 626kThe post In Case I’ve Been Too Subtle first appeared on The Mossy Skull.

This weekend is Word on the Street! It’s Toronto’s biggest book festival, my publisher Stelliform Press is there every year and loves it, so I’m excited too. Handselling books is incredibly rewarding when you love and care about the books and the people who made them—there’s this spark of positive feedback that happens, infectious enthusiasm on both sides, when you meet someone you know is going to appreciate a book you loved. I’ve done it for Reckoning, I’ve done it for Small Beer, now I get to do it for Stelliform. I’ll be there all day Saturday, then on Sunday Geoffrey W. Cole steps in—his short fiction collection Zebra Meridian is just out this month, and it is a head trip and a half. We’ve also published Geoff’s work at Reckoning, so I’m hoping I’ll be able to stick around long enough to get a chance to meet him in person.

I’ll also be signing copies of The Jaguar Mask, and I’ll have jaguar lollies for those as wants them as well as some Reckoning stickers and swag and who knows what other small exciting things.

Next, two weeks after that is the virtual International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts (VICFA), the theme of which this year is “Pantheology in World-Building and Magic Systems”, and at which I get to run a panel discussion on the legacy of the Mesoamerican pantheon in modern storytelling. Which, yeah, is an awesome topic, it’s going to touch on colonialism and post-colonial SF as well as some really thorny questions about language, translation, exoticism, and appropriation, and and I’m super happy to get to do it with some writers whose work I really admire, including Guillermo Guardarrama Mendoza, Gabriela Damián Miravete, E.G. Condé and Rob Cameron. I think the exact schedule for that is not yet finalized, so I’ll post more about it in a week or so.

And there’s more after that! But for now, see graphic above. Phew.

The post Upcoming Events Part 3 – Word on the Street first appeared on The Mossy Skull.

This Friday I will be reading and talking with Ursula Whitcher about our two new books, her collection North Continent Ribbon and my novel The Jaguar Mask, at BookSweet, an indie bookstore in Ann Arbor, Michigan, just across the street from the Univerity of Michigan North Campus. We’ll start at 7pm and probably talk for an hour. I’ll have Guatemala-flavored jaguar lollipops to share. And then afterward, I will take you out and buy you a beer if you want one. Or an EANAB (that’s an Equally Appealing Non-Alcoholic Beverage, as they are apparently known at U of M) if you’d rather. Or two. Please join us?

North Continent Ribbon is an outstanding example of something I feel like many short story writers I’ve known and worked with have strived for, but few have achieved: a series of interconnected stories all set in the same world which, when read together, feel like a unit, more than the sum of its parts—also spoken of, yearningly, as the “mosaic novel”. Maureen McHugh’s China Mountain Zhang, Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, and Angelica Gorodischer’s Jaguars’ Tomb are three such which have inspired me deeply. I tried hard for a long time to write one of these myself and have not yet given up. In my limited experience, a regular old halfway linear three-act novel structure is way easier. I’m excited to ask Ursula about how she did it.

If you can’t make it to BookSweet but would still like to support The Jaguar Mask: you can get one of the aforementioned jaguar lollipops by ordering a signed copy of the book right here at the brand new, created-for-this-purpose Mossy Skull shop!

I’ve also got a bunch more events yet to come, including the just-added Word on the Street Festival in Toronto the weekend of September 28th, where I get to sell books at the Stelliform Press table! See Fall Tour graphic above for more.

Please stop reading; this is supposed to be a promotional post not a therapy session, but it’s also my blog which is the closest thing I’ve got anymore.

I can’t emphasize this enough, as someone who had literally no idea what they were getting into when they were 16 and decided they could totally write and sell a popular novel and now is in a heap of trouble as a result: do not write with the intent to publish a popular novel without at the same time making intensive preparations that will enable you to interact with people—a lot of people, over many months and years—about said novel. You will have to ask strangers and friends to do things for you which will disrupt their routine and make their lives harder, things like spending money, writing reviews, and going to events. You will have to act like you and your work deserve this attention in order to convince them to do so and that their efforts are worthwhile. You will have to simultaneously prepare to face rejection from avenues you’ve never even considered before while also somehow continuing to be relentlessly motivated by the conviction that what you wrote is great and deserves to be accepted and celebrated. To some extent it’s the exact same dilemma you already faced in figuring out how to face rejection for your writing itself and keep writing anyway, but now you’re older, your brain has been toiling in its rut for decades, digging that rut deeper, and having to be rejected by libraries and bookstores and event venues and book fairs and convention programming tsars is somehow different from being rejected by editors.

It’s not for the faint of heart. Time will tell whether I end up counting myself among those.

The post Upcoming Events Part 2 – BookSweet first appeared on The Mossy Skull.

I have a bunch of events coming up where I will be promoting and/or selling my debut novel The Jaguar Mask and/or other Stelliform Press titles and/or Reckoning! This schedule above is a work in progress. More TK! But the first event is less than a week away.

Phew, this book promo business is no joke.

I really enjoy going out and talking to people about books, about environmental justice, climate justice, writing and publishing about climate, and working for justice. I’m motivated to do it on my own behalf—because The Jaguar Mask is a good book I wrote and I’m proud of it—but also, I always want to boost the amazing work of Reckoning contributors, to get these ideas out there, encourage people to think and talk about them, build community, and strengthen connections between individual humans that empower them in ways social media’s corporate-captured tools don’t.

In some ways I feel like it’s the most important work I can do.

I’ve embraced hermit mode since the pandemic, so the excuse of promoting the book has been a nice way to make myself get back out there and meet people and remember that introversion is surmountable. Plus it seems incredibly important right now to affirm that yielding the public forum and public discourse to trolls and fascist monsters is not an option.

Ursula Whitcher invited me to do this cool zoom event to celebrate her debut short fiction collection North Continent Ribbon (which I blurbed!), also including Kristen Kooperman, (Reckoning contributor and editorial staffer emeritus!) Marie Vibbert, and Erin Barbeau, in which we will get together and do crafts and talk about writing and crafts. I’m excited for this because I am a person with a ridiculous number of hobbies, most of which are completely unsuited to being pursued while also listening respectfully&emdash;but I’m taking that part of it as a challenge&emdash;and also because I have a lot of thoughts about how the creative processes for fiction converges with and diverges from the processes for, e.g., coming up with the ingredients and recipe for a beer I’ve never made before, refining my sourdough baking routine, repairing old bikes, etc. I think this could be a great conversation.

The post Upcoming Events Part 1 – Prose/Craft first appeared on The Mossy Skull.

My first novel came out yesterday. This is all new territory.

When you’ve been dreaming of publishing a novel since you were 16, not just dreaming but working for it, growing, honing skills, interacting with writers and publishers year after year at events, readings, workshops, retreats, volunteering with indie presses, starting your own press etc, you end up hearing about this moment a lot. You make friends, and some of those friends sell novels, and those novels come out, and you are perhaps jealous at first, you are impelled to pick apart how they did it, how they got there, to try to emulate or adapt.

But the longer you’re at it, the more you realize everybody’s path is different, and every milestone you reach, you turn around and look back at the person you were before you got to that milestone, and you’re different now. It doesn’t mean the same thing from the other side. It’s like the Matrix that way, or like the portal to the fantasy realm.

Some weeks ago now, just before it went to the printer, I read my own book for the I don’t know how many-th time, but for the first time in actual print, in an ARC, the only one I saved after sending all the rest out to blurbers and reviewers. I was supposed to be proofreading, but mainly I just read it. Do writers do this before their book comes out? It was kind of profound. To take it in as a whole thing, complete and not on a screen, not to revise, still trying to make it better but in this far subtler way, cosmetic. Almost like you’d read a book you didn’t write. Except I did. I wrote it.

And I received a revelation. A few, maybe, but here’s the one that is impelling me to write this. The Jaguar Mask is a superhero origin story.

The jacket copy says it’s a surreal noir fantasy set in Guatemala. That’s not just a rhetorical trick to hopefully get people to buy it who might enjoy it. I helped write that. But a book can be a lot of things. And having read this one cover to cover, here on the other side, I can tell you that it’s also a superhero origin story.

Specifically, it’s a retelling of the radicalization of a Professor X and a Mystique. You know, from X-Men, that comic that is an extended metaphor for the civil rights and racial justice struggles? It turns out I spent the last 28 years developing my craft, figuring out how to think like a novelist, then the most recent 12 or 14 years researching and writing a novel about how more or less regular people, caught up in dealing with their own fairly copious problems, just trying to live their lives and care for the people they love, discover an absolute moral imperative to risk and perhaps sacrifice their own lives in defense not only of the people they love, but everyone.

That process is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. “Radicalization” may be from a certain top-down perspective I repudiate and abhor the exact right word to describe it. “The Hero’s Journey” is a phrase for it I wish I didn’t have at my fingertips and I wish I had been able to do a better job of escaping. In the real world, which is the world I live in and in which I had to learn how to write a novel, the “hero” is subject to suspicion, fear, and repression. So we get two hundred Indigenous land defenders a year getting murdered or disappeared. Though of course Trump’s a hero too, to some people. And now, I realize, so am I.

There’s enough going on in the world to drive anybody to radical action in defense of the people they love and of everyone. Some of these potential inflection points are horrible, some of them are great. Biden stepping back in favor of Kamala Harris has been a recent one for me. That summer in 2016 when Trump was running for president, I decided to start Reckoning.

How do people make that decision? What drives them, and what keeps driving them after they realize once isn’t enough, a year isn’t, twenty eight years aren’t enough to break through to the thing you’ve decided to hero at?

I don’t know how many days I’ve had where I thought, that’s it, that’s the last straw, I’m radicalized now. And there will be more days like that. Lots more. Probably tomorrow. Because it’s going to get worse.

The Jaguar Mask is a story I told myself. To light a fire under my own ass. And it worked. And it didn’t. I’m some kind of hero. I’m something my teenage self aspired to be. But not the kind in the book. And I need to be more.

What’s it going to take?

I’ve been thinking about the frog in the boiling water, also known as shifting baseline syndrome. Since long before 2016, I’ve known I’m in the boiling water. I didn’t need anyone to die for me to see it. But I’m only just beginning to feel it.

I’ve vowed to step up for Kamala Harris. Because this is some kind of inflection point, and I’m a white man living in the global North in 2024, of course I’m only just beginning to feel it, everyone else already is and has been and that’s why they’ve been stepping up, past me, all this time. I hope The Jaguar Mask has something for those people. Affirmation. But what I hope it has for people like me is something more.

Who can actually do it? Who can cross that uncrossable barrier, get radicalized in deed as well as in name, act, intervene, break through that too eminently human veil of complacency and conflict-avoidance? Only those imbued with supernatural power?

I don’t know. But I wrote a whole book trying to figure it out. And the answer I gave myself seems to be this: love in crisis. When our loved ones are placed in jeopardy. Not my own life; experience tells me I’d just about step in front of a bus rather than inconvenience anybody. But my partner’s, my kid’s, my parents’, my sisters’, my sisters’ kids lives: I’d step in front of a bus for them.

Reading my own book worked on me, even after having done so in so many different ways so many times before. It got my heart all up in my throat, it got me excited for these characters to finally see what they could do when they had to.

I don’t actually remember what’s supposed to have gotten Mystique or Professor X going, their moment of radicalization. But I remember Magneto’s: it was watching his parents get ripped away from him and sent off to concentration camps. So that tracks.

I’d love to be able to say I believe a really good piece of fiction can communicate all the same roller coaster and intensity of emotion as the threat to a loved one from injustice, the kind of grief and righteous fury that can push someone into action. I don’t actually believe that.

What I do believe, now, because I have experienced it, is that if you spend 28 years trying to accomplish something, being constantly humbled, failing, persisting, listening, adapting, getting better, it is possible to achieve something really great and look back from the other side of that and realize you have an array of tools at your fingertips you didn’t have before and a sense of accomplishment you never actually expected but which imparts sudden confidence in your ability to use those tools to achieve positive change in yourself and the world.

The post The Jaguar Mask Is a Superhero Origin Story first appeared on The Mossy Skull.

I’m no kind of food blogger, but visiting people I love and don’t get to see all the time always motivates me to go further—one might say overboard—and then when everybody likes it and asks for the recipe, of course I want to share what I’ve learned. I think this will be my first fully illustrated and online bread recipe?

Manoomin bread is fluffy and and delicious with butter and jam or for sandwiches. It has a surprising and delightful crunch imparted by the manoomin.

This recipe makes 2 large loaves, which might seem like a lot until it’s gone in two days.

2 2/3 cups cold water1 tsp instant dried yeast (fresh)1 tsp instant dried yeast (expired, optional)1 cup whole wheat flour1 cup bread flour1 cup all purpose flour1/4 cup manoomin (that’s Ojibwe for the long-grain wild rice native to the Great Lakes; can also use bulgur wheat but it’s not the same

Combine all of the above in a big bowl and mix until well incorporated. Cover loosely and allow to ferment for a couple of hours, until it’s visibly bubbly and has increased significantly in volume, like this:

Rising time depends on the weather, the temperature and humidity in your workspace. In this instance, early June in Boston, it took just under 3 hours.

Add:

3 cups all purpose flour2 scant tbsp kosher salt2 tbsp olive oil1 tbsp honey

Stir to combine, scrape out onto a floured surface and knead until the dough no longer sticks much to your hand and it looks like this:

It takes about ten minutes, less if you’re vigorous. Add as much more all-purpose flour as you need to keep it workable without sticking too much, a couple of handfuls or none at all. Again, it depends on the weather and the humidity in your workspace.

Put another teaspoon or so of oil back into the rising bowl, put the dough in, turn to coat, cover loosely, and let rise until more than doubled in size, like this:

Before rising
After rising

Timing is variable; this time the dough took a little over 2 hours to rise.

Press the air out of the dough by rotating the bowl, grabbing the edges and folding them in towards the middle. Scrape out onto a floured surface and shape vigorously into a long oval; slice this in half with a dough cutter and shape each half into an oval. I use the heel of my hand to karate-chop a trough down the middle, fold in half along the trough and then whack along the seam to seal it, again with the heel of the hand, then do that again once or twice until the outside is smooth and tight, then roll it over seam side down, with plenty of flour underneath to keep it from sticking. It’s a very satisfying technique, and if you want to see a bunch more pictures of what it looks like, please refer to the “French-style bread” recipe in Julia Child’s The Way to Cook.

Lay the loaves side by side, sprinkle flour on top, cover with a damp tea towel and allow to proof. Here’s what they look like at this point:

After about half an hour (or less, if it’s hot out), they’ll have grown just a little bit. Make sure your baking stone is in the oven and set it to preheat to 400F. When it’s good and hot (and the loaves have risen a bit more), flour up a cutting board for use as a baking peel, transfer a loaf to it, slash shallowly in a cross-hatch pattern, the sharper the knife the better, and slide the loaf onto the hot baking stone, then do the same with the other. I hope they fit. If they won’t, or if you don’t have a baking stone, you can preheat a jelly roll pan upside down in the oven and slide them onto that. Once they’re both in, toss a cup of water onto the bottom of the oven to create steam.

Bake for 27 minutes with the convection fan on, or about 40 minutes if you don’t have a convection fan, until they’re a warm brown and sound hollow when you knock on the bottom. They’ll look something like this:

Let them rest on a cooling rack for 20 minutes before cutting into them.

Of course, as I was telling my parents as I relayed all this, I can explain as much as you want but you won’t really be able to replicate the results without some ingredients recipe bloggers mostly don’t bother to mention: the kind of space in your life that lets you make room to hang around the kitchen for hours watching microbes do their work. I am incredibly grateful to be able to work from home and bake bread every week, sometimes twice a week. If you’re not in that place, well—I’ll bake you a loaf sometime.

The post Manoomin Bread first appeared on The Mossy Skull.

Degrowth: that’s the idea that, given endless growth is and always was a capitalist delusion, we should all actively be going in the other direction, making less money, being less productive, buying fewer things, taking up less space, expending fewer resources. A lot of people get really grumpy when they hear about it, because obviously: it is an anticapitalist concept, people have to give up amenities if they’re going to do it, and nobody (I mean, except those of us who see the painfully obvious writing on the wall and know the choice isn’t between continuing to grow and not continuing to grow, it’s between retreat and rout, in other words doing it on purpose in an orderly fashion or having it handed to us on a burning platter which also contains our heads) wants to give up anything.

Now look at the state of big tech, of the internet, computers, phones, machine learning, the cloud, cryptocurrency, the concept of “disruption” somehow assigned a positive connotation in the context of capital, X, etc etc. Doctorow calls this “enshittiffication”, and a finer neologism I have not seen. But what if—run with me here—tech has already hit the massive wall of fire and beheadings that is already coming for all of us? We made it to “the golden age of TV”, and after the golden age, there comes a fall. Free fall is exactly what this feels like. I have to drop out of Dropbox and build my own open-source cloud somehow, using borrowed time, because they’re going to steal all my content (and Reckoning‘s) and feed it to their AI. If I want social media I have to enter the lockstep of a billionaire. Ever since I heard of the internet, I’ve been told that computing capacity and speed will double every two years until the heat death of the universe. It’s fairly obvious that stopped being the case early in the 2000s, and what they’ve done to live up to that prediction since is make more and more computers, with more processors, using more resources, and then wasting that processing power making the internet ever more unnecessarily complicated in the name of monetization.

Where to from here, then, except down?

And again, there are two ways to do it, proactively and reactively, heads on platters and otherwise. We know the consequences if we don’t back away, because they’re happening: identity theft, privacy violations, disinformation, intellectual and artistic poverty, real poverty due to the catastrophic concentration of wealth, corporate-captured democracy, deregulation, kleptocracy.

De-enshittify. Divest from corporate-captured technologies and go back to all the old self-hosted solutions that still work and aren’t going anywhere. Self-hosted, open-source websites, email, newsletters. DIY cloud. Hard copy digital media. Computers made before 2005. Phones that—what? Only work as phones? Fat chance, even for me. In a lot of ways I feel like I can be in the vanguard. I live small, I travel as little as I can, drive as little as I can, buy as little as I can. And it works, I can use the money I didn’t spend on a gym membership, a daily seven dollar coffee, beer, bread, meat, gas, apples, or a semiannual overseas plane ticket on a journal of creative writing on environmental justice instead. But when it comes to our (my) engineered addiction to devices, I feel far less confident. I try to adapt how I use those devices, slowly, gradually, faking myself into it the way climate change is faking us into thinking snow always tasted salty and summer forecasts for smoke inhalation are normal and live-withable. And I laugh at myself, at the fact that I can give up fossil fuels more easily than I can give up tapping the little icon when the red badge lights up saying someone somewhere liked something I said.

But even if that’s all I can manage, I’m not about to throw up my hands, cede the entire concept of individual action to the corporate lobbyists who worked so hard to render it meaningless, sit back and concern myself with clearing the red badges off the icons until the end. Dana Fisher talks about crisis points, “climate shocks”, about how maybe, once the really bad climate consequences descend, the ones that incontrovertibly impact all of us, not just the poor, the disabled, the not-white, the coastal, the low-lying, the arctic, but actually everyone, that’s when finally we’ll arrive at consensus and act to avert even worse consequences. I hope so? But in the meantime there is a ton of work to be done for those who don’t need to be clobbered with a two-by-four about it.

All this pertains to the concept of the “brightweb” I threw out half-seriously in that post about missing stairs. This hypothetical brightweb is bright not because it’s well-lit by corporate and government surveillance but because it’s curated by humans who care about other humans, it’s small and interpersonal instead of vast and facelessly engaged in the elision of the human, and because it runs on old, “outdated”, open, functional, non-enshittified technology. It’s hypothetical, for now, but not because it’s not already out there. It’s just not self-identifying as one thing; it’s not unified. Mostly these days the things that unify us are already corporate-captured: social media, journalism, nations, leaders. So we’re all out here laboring in our own individual ruts. At least for now.

Am I proposing a De-Enshittifiers Union? Why not?

Want to join? For a start, let’s quit using some of that shit.

The post Degrowth and De-Enshittification first appeared on The Mossy Skull.

So much for sugaring season.

All that excellent advice from my homestead and permaculture garden books telling me to keep herbs and plants I’ll use most frequently closest to my kitchen door wasn’t meant to apply in February. But this year, thanks to catastrophic climate change tipping points, I had a near-endlessly replenishing bucket of maple sap six booted steps from my back door starting at the end of January. It kept going right up until all the parks departments and conservation orgs around here started advertising their sugaring events. By the time those events rolled around, the season was on its last legs.

It was more than a little startling, even though I already knew how extraordinary this winter was going to be. The environmentalist PR machine turns more slowly than the climate.

Lucky me, I got a boost. I wouldn’t have had my spile in so early if I hadn’t heard some local Detroit native and Indigenous urban farmers talking about adapting to extreme seasonal variation at an OU event last fall. I’m very grateful. Last year I didn’t hardly get any sap at all.

I’ve been tapping this tree a few years. But I’ve never really done the traditional sugaring process. It just seems like too much energy expenditure for too little payoff. To make maple syrup from sap, you’ve got to reduce its volume by a factor of 20. In preindustrial times, this made sense: you were concentrating your sugar into a form that would keep while simultaneously keeping your people warm in the cold, something you’d have had to do anyway. These days, unfortunately, heating, food preservation, and cooking have been logically separated by infrastructure decisions that mass production and matters of scale make very hard to renegotiate. I could turn off my heat while I’m sugaring, rely just on the heat from the stove, but then my house will have been heated with free-range water vapor when it could be heated by steam neatly trapped within radiators. I’ve thought about boiling maple sap instead of water in my home furnace, using the generated steam in my radiators and getting delicious maple sugar as a byproduct, but I don’t have the engineering nor the fabrication skills.

So I experiment with other, more efficient, hopefully as delicious ways to use maple sap.

I’m in pursuit of those pieces of lost culture, the old, discarded interconnections which once made us more like all the other living things on earth we now distance ourselves from so much by default. I don’t want to do it just for aesthetics or out of nostalgia. I want to make it work for us. I want to reintegrate with these natural cycles to learn, to rediscover what drew us to integrate with them in the first place, and to hopefully set an example that such reintegration, which is going to be essential to these coming decades and centuries of climate adaptation for our species, is possible, and can be a joy, not a hardship.

Is the sap running? Well, you’d better go and catch it!

Tapping is easy. All you need is a hardwood tree (birch, walnut, maple) more than a foot in diameter, a $5 spile, a drill with a 1/4” bit (go in about an inch and a half, that’s plenty), a sturdy food grade vessel with a bit of clothesline or something to secure it in place, and a stretch of days in which the temperature fluctuates above and below freezing.

The tree is for the most part unharmed, as long as it’s big enough. But I worry about mine anyway and go far gentler on it than I’m advised I could be. It’s a beautiful sugar maple, we ask so much of it, we climb it and swing from it, it shelters us and cools the climate and feeds us—the parallels to a certain children’s book are unavoidable, and I want to do better than that.

Sap comes out of the tree sterile. And filtered. Few purer things in this world than maple sap until it touches bark or human lips. Still, they tell you not to drink it raw. Guess who does anyway, but do as I say not as I do for your own safety, please. Also, uncooked, it definitely does not keep. A few days at room temperature, and maple sap starts to smell like moldy cheese. But there’s so much to do with it, so much that is delicious and rewarding, just by cooking it a little, enough to kill whatever groggy ants fell in the bucket while the sap was running high.

Below we have some recipes. The rule of thumb is: anywhere you’d use water to cook and might enjoy a little sweetness in the end result. Every year, I struggle at first, I look at my notes, I remember how this works. Then I get into a routine. I start to push boundaries and try new things, some of which fail. But I learn. And I miss it when it’s over.

Maple Sap Sumacade

1 quart maple sap3 or 4 dried sumac drupesoptional 1/4 oz crushed dried coriander, allspice, anise or other seeds

Sumacade is Anishinaabe in origin as I understand it, though it’s also a thing in Lebanese cooking apparently? It was an institution here in Michigan for a good while both before and after colonization and immigration, it seems like, though I don’t know anybody else who makes it now. “Drupes” is a cool word—that’s the clusters of fuzzy red berries. They’re sour, fruity, a bit nutty, and they’re still on the trees in February in some places where the birds haven’t found them. I went out and picked some and steeped them in maple sap just brought to a boil with a few crushed allspice berries. I don’t know if that part is canon; I do it because I’m influenced by ponche de jamáica and I like it. Let it cool completely and then strain and drink over ice. I also really like it hot; it’s got vitamin C, it’s nice for a cold.

Maple Ponche de Jamáica

Small handful of dried hibiscus flowersThree crushed allspice berries 1 qt maple sap

Normally I’d use honey, but the maple sugar covers that. Bring almost to a boil in a small saucepan. Liquid should turn a delicious dark red. Strain out the bits and drink hot or chilled over ice.

Maple Café de Olla

20 oz maple sap1/4 cup coarsely ground coffee1/2 stick cinnamon1 fairly substantial curl of orange rind

A treat I have enjoyed in Guatemala and Mexico. I put the cinnamon and orange rind right in our french press with the coffee, and at all other times of the year but this, include a tablespoon of dark brown sugar. The maple sap is milder and goes great with milk.

Maple Sap Sourdough

Ferment a sponge using sourdough starter overnight with maple sap instead of water. The yeast, in my experience, loves the extra sugar in the sap, resulting in a faster rise and near-criminally rustic crumb.

Maple Sap Beer

“Best beer I ever made.”

—My cousin Matty.

Beer is the best way to use up a ton of sap at the peak of the season. One five-gallon batch will easily consume eight gallons of sap, since the hopping process involves an hour-long boil. I’ve done maple stouts, porters, brown ales, a pale ale, and this year I am waiting patiently for a maple sap spruce tip IPA to mature. I tried cooking down sap to use instead of a dextrose priming solution at bottling time, but couldn’t get the specific gravity quite right and ran out of patience.

Other Stuff

If you’ve got C02 and a keg, you can fill it with maple sap and have maple sap seltzer; the CO2 preserves it longer than it would last exposed to oxygen, though not forever. You can braise greens in maple sap; I’ve done collards, kale, chard, I’ve steamed spinach. I am curious what would happen if I used it to cook rice or even risotto but haven’t tried. Oatmeal the fancier the better, cornmeal porridge, polenta. Hot chocolate. Tea: I’m a little snobby about tea, but anything I’d be willing to put milk and sugar in otherwise is delicious with maple sap. You can use it instead of water in pickling solution and brines. You can use it to reconstitute dried mushrooms.

And, yes, you can make maple syrup. It’s still worth doing, as a special treat. I personally recommend what I’ve been calling maple sap caramel, where you put a quart of maple sap on the stove on medium at lunchtime and let it simmer away all day, til after dinner it has passed the syrup stage and congealed into 2 tablespoons of gloriously delicious goo, which you then eat over ice cream.

I am certain there are a million more applications yet to be rediscovered. Any ideas?

All this—as with everything, of course—is temporary. The long-term climate and habitat forecast calls for maple to move north, along with other hardwoods, following the freeze/thaw cycle. (Did you know Canada has strategic maple syrup reserves, which it already had to break into in 2021 to make up for plummeting production?) But I have reason to hope that process will take long enough I can keep on experimenting for another decade, at least—mitigating my water usage, buying less sugar, and thereby reintegrating myself with natural cycles and interdependence with other living things. And I expect this to yield all kinds of dividends in other directions, which—from this industrialized, hyper-specialized perspective I am trying to shrug—might seem unrelated, but will turn out to have been the same thing all along.

The post Culinary Sap first appeared on The Mossy Skull.