A Post About Writing Or Butter Or What?

Herb’s Blog, Herbdate 23841 – 1280

Dear Fans, Friends, Fiends, Foes, Followers, Flowers, and Family,

Here’s the haps:

(I originally posted this almost ten years ago, but I’ve modified it some. I still feel this way, though.)

Consistency. That is the key word that I need to focus on. I need to produce content here on my blog. And while I think I may have the ingredients all together in one place, just like any other recipe, they must be mixed in the right amounts at the right times. There are some recipes that require you to “fold in” an ingredient or ingredients. Chocolate chip cookies, for example (Which are, just so you know, an acceptable donation to this author. Unless they have nuts. Then you can keep them all to yourself.). You mix up the dry stuff, like the flour, the baking soda, and the salt, in one bowl. Then in another bowl, beat the sugar and brown sugar, and butter (Real butter, please. God created cows, man created margarine. Margarine is merely yellow vegetable oil, and putting it in your cookies is just icky.) and vanilla together, then mix in the eggs one at a time. Add the flour mixture, then, when everything is the right consistency, the last(best) thing you add are the chocolate chips. Do not add nuts. Never add nuts. Herb is nuts enough, maybe?

Sometimes writing is like chocolate chip cookies, really splendid when they come out hot and gooey from the oven and you kind of burn your tongue on them and cool your mouth with an ice-cold glass of milk. They are good when they have just slightly cooled, with a nice hot cup of coffee or another cold glass of milk or an ice-cold Coca-Cola. When they are cooled sufficiently, you can store them in a cookie jar if there are any left. And to keep them from getting hard, you put a slice of white bread in the jar along with them. This keeps the cookies soft and has no effect on the taste. As I tell the grandkids, “Yummy to da tummy!”

Sometimes writing is like Brussels sprouts. Stinky, icky, nasty little cabbages that I feel confident were created by the devil, but, nonetheless, are much improved with butter and salt.

I also don’t want to have a piece of toast without evenly spread butter. My family mocks me occasionally because I have to spread the butter evenly onto every inch, every corner, of the toast, but I don’t care, I know what’s good. If for some kind of unknown reason you don’t have bacon or bacon grease, you should fry my eggs, over easy, thanks, with butter. Fried eggs with buttered toast, bacon, a tall, cold glass of milk, a glass of juice, and a cup of strong, hot, black-as-the-devil’s-heart coffee. Ooooohhh…Yeah!

Also, popcorn without enough butter and salt is just styrofoam.

Now, something you can do to affect the consistency of a recipe is alter the butter content. Add more butter, take out some butter, you get different results. But one thing is certain: you have to have enough butter.

Herb, are you leading up to a point with all this, or are you just trying tobutter us up and milk this analogy for all you can?

Okay, okay. You guys are the cream of the crop. My point is that you can have or make so many good things with butter and it is a key ingredient in so many things, just the way consistency, in any endeavour, not just writing, is key. And you can write so many good things if you sit your butt, er, in the chair with consistency and just write.

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One final thought. Have you ever noticed how, the more you think about some things, the weirder they seem to become. I mean, who was the first person to see an egg come from a chicken’s butt and think, “I’ll bet that would be good to eat?”