The Best Fluffy Pancakes recipe you will fall in love with. Full of tips and tricks to help you make the best pancakes.
There is something deeply satisfying about drinking good bourbon in a bad apartment.
Not because contrast makes luxury more meaningful. I don’t think the bourbon
improves because the plumbing is lousy. I’ve just always liked carefully made things in
places that aren’t particularly careful about themselves.
My bathtub is cast iron beneath too many coats of landlord-white paint. The faucet
drips with dependable rhythm, the tile has settled into its own geography of cracks, and
the grout surrendered years ago. If the apartment were listed today, someone would
call it “full of character.” They would mean that nothing quite works as originally
intended.
I wouldn’t trade it.
Every few weeks, usually long after the city has decided to quiet down, I run the water
hotter than any sensible person should, pour three fingers of bourbon into a heavy rocks
glass, cut the cap from a cigar with more ceremony than necessity, and settle into the
tub until only my shoulders and knees remain above the foam.
The room changes almost immediately.
Steam is very forgiving. The overhead light stops being quite so ugly. The chipped
paint recedes. Even the faucet becomes tolerable. After a while its drip sounds less
like something I ought to fix and more like something keeping time. The bourbon slows
down too, or I do.
There are cigar lounges with perfect ventilation, leather chairs polished by decades of
conversation, and bartenders who can tell you exactly which bourbon belongs beside
which wrapper. I enjoy those places, they exist for a reason. But somebody designed
them to make you feel like you’re having an experience. My bathroom couldn’t care
less and there is something I like about that.
I have a bad habit of saving good things. I suspect most of us do. There’s a bottle
waiting for company, a shirt waiting for someplace worth wearing it, a cigar tucked away
for an occasion important enough to justify setting it on fire. The trouble is that most
Tuesdays don’t announce themselves as occasions. You come home. You make dinner
or don’t. You answer one email you shouldn’t have opened and suddenly you’re
answering four. You notice the dishes. Maybe you watch something you won’t
remember three days later. Then you go to bed and Tuesday disappears. Occasionally I
think a Tuesday deserves better.
So I fill the tub.
I don’t know that I’d call this self-care. The phrase feels too organized for what I’m
doing. I’m drinking whiskey and smoking indoors while sitting in plumbing my landlord
should probably have replaced years ago. But I do think there is something romantic
about making an unnecessary effort when nobody is around to appreciate it.
Use the good glass. Light the candle. Put on a record instead of letting an algorithm
decide what the room sounds like. Buy yourself flowers if you want flowers. None of
this changes your circumstances very much. That’s partly the point.
A cigar is particularly good company for this because it refuses to participate in
efficiency. You can certainly smoke one quickly, but you’ll ruin it. It gets hot. The flavors
flatten out. The whole thing begins to taste vaguely punitive. So you wait. The smoke
changes as it travels. The wrapper warms beneath your fingers. Somewhere along the
way you stop checking how much is left.
Bourbon works on me in much the same way. People describe whiskey through tasting
notes; vanilla, leather, oak, dried fruit and those are all perfectly reasonable
observations. But what I’ve come to appreciate most isn’t any particular flavor.
It’s what happens to an hour. Somewhere during that hour, the bathroom stops being a
room designed for utility.
I’ve spent years making artwork about ordinary domestic spaces because they fascinate
me in ways museums sometimes cannot. Museums announce their importance.
Apartments almost never do. We walk through the rooms containing most of our lives
without giving them much consideration, even as they quietly keep a record of us.
The paint around a light switch polished away by thousands of swipes. The slight
depression in a hardwood floor where someone always stood to wash the dishes. The
radiator that announces every winter before it produces any heat. The stubborn drip of
a bathroom faucet that, after enough years, stops sounding like a repair waiting to
happen and starts sounding like a familiar neighbor clearing his throat.
None of these things belong in a museum. That’s probably why I notice them.
An apartment accumulates evidence. Who lived there, what they touched, what they
couldn’t afford to replace, what a landlord patched instead of repaired. Eventually, even
neglect becomes a kind of architecture. Perhaps that’s why I enjoy the bathtub so
much.
My phone stays somewhere beyond the steam. Emails can wait until morning. The city
continues its endless conversation beyond the window, but from inside the water it
sounds less like traffic and more like distant weather.
I’ve smoked remarkable cigars overlooking remarkable skylines. I’ve stood outside
gallery openings balancing bourbon in one hand while discussing art with people
determined to appear effortless. I’ve had very expensive drinks in rooms where
somebody spent a great deal of money making sure I noticed the room.
Those evenings were enjoyable enough. I remember almost none of them.
I remember this bathroom. The chipped paint. The aging tile. The old plumbing. The
smell of warm steam mixing with cedar and tobacco. My drink balanced precariously.
Maybe that’s enough.
There is always another version of your life available for comparison. A larger
apartment. Better plumbing. A better view. More money. More recognition. Some
future version of yourself who finally owns the right furniture and remembers to have the
good bourbon on an appropriately significant evening.
I don’t trust that person anymore. They keep moving the date.
Tonight, already happened.
When the water finally cools and the cigar reaches its final inch, the apartment is exactly
as I left it. The faucet still drips. The paint is still chipped. Tomorrow is still waiting on
the other side of the bathroom door. Nothing has been repaired. Nothing has been
solved. And yet, with a glass of bourbon and a cigar, somehow everything feels back in
proportion.
