I’m All Lost In, #81: New shoes; new poetry; and the best place to watch the NBA playoffs is a gay dive bar on Capitol Hill.
I’m All Lost In …
the 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week.
#81
Before I get to this week’s three preoccupations, I’ve got a recipe of the week
Two recipes, actually—one for mushroom paste and one for mushroom dip. The backstory is that I recently went to Yalla, the Lebanese food window over on the Drag Beyond the Drag and ordered the same mushroom gyro that I got back in January. Unfortunately, the former standout vegan menu item left me longing this time; the mushroom filling was flat and flavorless.
So, I decided to take mushroom matters into my own hands. I googled a few recipes, but I couldn’t decide which one to go with: a shallot-based one (identified as duxelles) and a heavy-on-the-parsley-and-walnuts one. Frying pan and mini-food processor going all at once, I whipped up both and slathered the meaty results on facing pieces of toasted jalapeño bread with romaine lettuce, dressed red cabbage, homemade bread crumbs, sliced tomato, and (secret ingredient) yellow mustard.
I didn’t snap a picture until I had an open-faced version for seconds (pictured below). It was delicious, but I’d recommend the traditional sandwich version.
Mushroom paste and mushroom dip combo sandwich, Monday, 4/28/25
1) New Shoes
I’ve always been hard on shoes. Holes. Soles coming unglued and falling off. This was particularly hard to admit with the two most recent pairs of shoes I’d been wrecking as I rotated between them all year. One was the slim pair of shiny black dress shoes I bought at Ross Dress for Less for Dad’s funeral back home in Maryland in March 2024, and the other was an old-fashioned tasseled pair of soft black slip-ons I pilfered from Erica’s grandad’s closet to wear at his funeral in Mississippi in September 2024. Despite my enchanted hope, the sentimental value was not enough to fortify these standard issue men’s shoes from decomposition.
Wearing my also-fairly-ratty gray New Balance track shoes, I walked downtown on Saturday as my Seattle shopping compass directed me to Nordstrom Rack at 5th and Pine. After working the crowded aisle of size 9-1/2s for an uncharacteristically patient half hour of perusing and trying on, I ended up going with the two pairs I had picked from the start: some stretchy navy blue mesh Cole Haan sneakers with a cushioned white sole and brown leather accents, and a shiny pair of classic black leather oxfords with brown and white trim.
Tuesday afternoon, 4/29/25
I was paranoid that the tight spots around the insteps (that I’d pretended not to notice) would actually become aggravated in the real world beyond the store mirror. But after a week of walking around town, the leather has softened, the mesh has eased, and with last year’s set of funeral shoes safely ensconced for sentimental keeping in my closet, it’s time for these solid, cozy, and even elegant new kicks.
2) Andrea Cohen’s The Sorrow Apartments
During my 2018 heyday—aka, my obsessive, initial excursion into poetry—I had several autodidactic strategies to make up for lost time and discover as many poets as I could. Among these strategies—which included reading all the classics I’d skipped in high school and college; finding more by poets who were showing up in literary magazines; and getting recommendations from my old bookworm friend, high school English teacher, Dallas—there was also this: spending tipsy Friday nights in the poetry aisle at Elliott Bay Books where I’d literally judge a book by its cover. This impulsive ploy actually led me to the great Louise Glück; her definitive 1962-2012 collection has a sci-fi picture of Saturn on the cover.
In a bit of a poetry reading drought these days, I returned to my Friday night game of chance this week. Based on the excellent Impressionist cover mockup of what looks like contemporary Brooklyn on a muggy summer night of flickering apartment building windows, I bought The Sorrow Apartments (excellent title, too) a collection of taut yet chatty verse by a poet I’d never heard of, Andrea Cohen. In a mysterious postscript to this wild Friday night shopping spree, Dallas claims to have sent a few of her poems my way earlier this year.
Written in clipped short lines of two or maybe three words, and often using slant rhymes (mantle/nail, bottle/still, boa/holds) to propel the reader along, Cohen drafts near-epic short stories about lost moments with former lovers or distilled snippets from long lost childhood summers.
These expansive minimalist dispatches from her melancholy memory banks had me deciding again and again that I’d just read the perfect poem; I dogeared about 15 of the 80 or so in the collection, including this one:
Mantle
I have——/on my mantle——/
a jam jar filled/with nails. Every-/
thing I love has/burned down,
but I still have/my mantle/
and my nail/aquarium. I/
still have/my fire.
3) The Madison Pub
The best place to watch the NBA playoffs is a gay dive bar.
I’d never been to the Madison Pub before, a neighborhood oasis of tap beers, busy pool tables, pinball machines (Guardians of the Galaxy, Star Wars, Ghostbusters), and a well-lit, mazey expanse of four-top seating.
Madison Pub, May 2015
Dappled with neon beer signs and big screen TVs hovering around this spacious dive, I’ve been settling in at the long bar to watch Denver’s Jamal Murray go for 40, the unimaginative Lakers forget there’s a key, the Timberwolves’ Anthony Edwards smirk and score at will, Houston and their coach idle in anger, and GSW have fun, while I nosh on Cheez-Its; they don’t have a kitchen. But not to worry. The warm staff lets you bring in food from nearby businesses like Dave’s Hot Chicken.
Quip-making cast of bartenders included, there’s lots of playful kinship at the bar (one fellow in town on tour with a Broadway musical put us on the guest list for a Saturday matinee at the Fifth Avenue Theater). The bar also has magically cold beer served in frosted mugs that, if you luck out, comes with a layer of slushed ice below the foam. And their comprehensive jukebox keeps the old rock (“Spill the Wine”) and new pop (The Weeknd) in steady rotation, along with a weird downtempo cover of Elton John’s “Rocket Man” that seems oddly popular.
I’m happy to report that this week’s Quote of the week—”This is like the Zapruder film”—came during an NBA watch session at Madison Pub. This pithy bon mot was uttered in response to the TNT announcers as they endlessly reviewed a technical foul sequence during GSW’s game 4 win on Tuesday night.
…
The other Quote of the Week comes from my favorite British-accented trio from The Tennis Podcast who were posting installments during the Madrid Open where, by the way, my parasocial goddess, Daffy Saby affirmed her 2025 status as World No. 1 and beat Coco Gauff in the final 6-3, 7-6 (7-3). The quote, however, was about cryptic World No. 2 Iga Swiatek, who I think of as J.D. Salinger’s catatonic Franny Glass. “Of course Iga Swiatek loved the blackout. Of course she did,” host Katherine Whitaker observed with delight after the tournament was temporarily suspended during the curious Spain/Portugal power outage and broody Swiatek savored the chill time.
Lastly this week, a follow-up on the Scrabble obsession I wrote about back in I’m All Lost In, #70: “Randiest,” the week’s most impressive Scrabble play, earned a 50-point bonus for using all seven letters and included “Triple Word Scores” on both the “R” and the “T,” and a “Double Letter Score” on the “I,’ for a grand total of 116 points.