Caramelizing onions

And a semblance of sweetness at the end of the world.

*Melania voice* Hello?

Hope you’ve been well. If you’re receiving this e-mail, it means you were previously subscribed to the TinyLetter I started in 2015 and stopped writing in 2020 (R.I.P.). It was honestly such a buggy platform that I migrated to Substack several months ago and didn’t tell anybody. I’m only just getting to the very basic housekeeping of this newsletter, including finally choosing a name (borrowed from my favorite Sleater-Kinney song).

Moving forward, I am hoping to write at least once a month about whatever fascinates me at the moment, hopefully accompanied each time with a playlist. Stick around if you’d like and e-mail me back if something tickles your fancy. Love you all.

So here goes:

How often have I sprinted from the thing happening to me to perceive it from afar, building critical distance to excuse myself from feeling something fully? That has felt impossible in the last several months, in a time where there is no distance to run to, no future self beyond grief to meet atop the hill. There is only life in this cloistered intimacy with ourselves, simmering, simmering in grief.

Lately, I’ve been spending a lot more time in the kitchen. A year ago, I was too busy to ever imagine myself taking three to four hours to cook one dish to feed one person. My new favorite thing to make is caramelized onions, partly because this radical transformation of form and flavor is so simple¹ and yet so slow. Also because watching the heat sweat out the onions’ water content² and break the disaccharides down to smaller sugar molecules tickles the brain in the exact way a grade school science experiment does.

So for a couple of hours, I stand over a pot of onions watching them shrink and brown and sweeten. I play music; I pour myself some Chardonnay; I take pictures to remind myself what the onions looked like five minutes ago, to remind myself not nothing is happening.

For how straightforward it is to caramelize onions, there is this richness and complexity to the end product—crisp fresh onions turning sticky and syrupy, their sharpness surrendering to a burnt sweetness.

Cooking is perhaps how I pray now, turning and stirring a thing so I can place myself however briefly within grace. I think about the last year, about the selves I will never meet, about the self I am transforming into³. And when it’s done, I eat my meal, wash the dishes and make my way back into my life.

I’ve been nursing a pet theory that music in 2021 is moving into lusher, warmer sonic worlds—guitars that glitter like sunlight, synths that envelop you, bass that cradles your body towards joy, lyrics that ache for intimacy. In a way, these songs imagine a sensual world for us to move towards, a place of unbridled desire beyond this forced asceticism. Embedded below is ‘21 Lush, a working playlist exploring this thesis. I will likely be adding, subtracting and rearranging songs here over time.

The opening track “Hard Drive” caught me off guard when I first heard it—Cassandra Jenkins stringing together these encounters with strangers over sumptuous saxophone lines. The final one is a woman named Perry telling her, “Oh, dear, I can see you've had a rough few months, but this year, it's gonna be a good one. I'll count to three and tap your shoulder. We're gonna put your heart back together.”

That’s it from me for now. Hope you are dreaming of some indeterminable sweetness waiting for us.

Be sweet to me, baby,
Apa

1. You only really need onions, butter (or oil) and salt to make the perfect caramelized onions.

2. Onions are about 89% water. Humans are about 60% water. If you think about it, mummies are just caramelized people.

3. Not nothing is happening.