Issue 2, containing: A Useful Recipe, Historical Ephemera, A Clarification, Strange Gifts, Commonplaces, &c.

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SOME EDITORIAL NOTES

We have made it to issue 2! What further wonders are in store?

Accomplishing More Than One Thing seems minor, but it’s one I’m happy with. Semblances of order, schedules, and accomplishments are useful ways of ticking the clock, and don’t come with much by way of downsides.

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A USEFUL RECIPE

When I was a young and spritely Girl Scout I once had the dubious honor of preparing several pounds worth of trailmix for some event that required same. The basic instructions I was given was: a salted nut (protein, and salt to encourage drinking hydration), a dried fruit, and chocolate.

What I’ve found in the intervening years is that having a quick source of brainless food is useful to have around, particularly if I need to eat something before I can think well enough to actually cook the “real” meal. As such, I personally buy large amounts of the following:

• salted or honey roasted peanuts
• dried cherries (or dried cranberries with cherry infusion)
• Ghirardelli chocolate chips (because Ghirardelli uses pure vanilla, and not the caster sacs of beavers)

I mix all of the above in a large bowl, in proportions that look vaguely trailmix-y (primarily nuts, followed by fruit, then chocolate a distant third), and then portion them out into snack bags. I then hide the snack bags, so that they do not entice me with their siren call, and encourage me toward poor decisions.

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HISTORICAL EPHEMERA

There are very few things I regret not purchasing (I save my regrets for grander things), but one of them is the following cabinet photo, which I saw on eBay, saved to consider later, and then foolishly did not bid:

When they say a picture tells a story, I can’t help but think of this one, which appears to be a very happy little polycule having fun for the camera. The gentlemen are holding hands and touching feet while discussing something, and the ladies look on with mischief, tipping glasses of water onto the unwitting gentlemen. It’s a happy photo, regardless of the particulars, and subtly queer, and I hope, wherever it ended up, it’s treasured.

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A CLARIFICATION

At one point in my life, artificial vanilla was thought to be a migraine trigger for me. As such, I found out a great deal about artificial vanilla, the many unfortunate places it can appear, and the sometimes outlandish lengths companies would go to not tell me if their vanilla was artificial or not.

I discovered that apparently the caster sacs of beavers — or rather, the “yellowish exudate”, which gets excreted by the caster sacs near beaver anuses, for the purposes of scent-marking — tastes just like vanilla, as I imagine the beavers themselves no doubt taste just like chicken.

While not all artificial vanilla is beavers, since learning this fact I am inclined to assume it unless otherwise informed.

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STRANGE GIFTS

The best gift I ever received was a large box full of office supplies. Pens, paperclips, assortments of Post-It notes, Sharpies of various sizes and colors, folders, organizers, sticky flags — and all inside a box that, itself, was intended for hanging folders.

I received this box for my birthday in 2006, less than a week before I received news that I’d been offered my very first office job. If I look to my left now, I see the remnants of that gift still with me, bundled together in a storage box labeled “Spare Office Supplies”, dragged out now to furnish my at-home work space.

There is something deeply soothing to me about office supplies. They have a potentiality to them, not unlike blank notebooks, tiny jewelry boxes, and hidden drawers. The world is suddenly open to possibility, and the tools are finally there to attempt a mapping of the mind. They are always useful, they last for years, and, in some cases, can touch lives beyond our own.

The second best gift I ever received was a long, green ledger book I found in my dead grandfather’s home office when I was a teenager. It was blank, with a cloth cover, and it was legal-letter length but not as wide as a letter-sized piece of paper. The cover was green, and the pages inside were a lighter green, with green ruling. It smelled like my grandparents’ house, dust and damp wood and the faded scent of tobacco that had finally devolved into a pleasant perfume. I found it, and I asked my grandmother about it, and she gave it to me to use as I saw fit. I remember tucking tea bags into it to make it smell like magic, and I carefully calligraphed a large number of herbal remedies and other hedgwitchery things onto its pages.

I don’t know where that ledger is now, and I haven’t seen its like since — though even if I found something similar, I don’t think it would have the joy of the original. It was an office supply that my grandfather had bought and stored for some unknown future, kept with him as he worked, a potentiality that he never used — but that I was able to tap into, connecting my strange purposes to his mundane ones, generations folding into themselves.

I buy blank books now, and scatter them around my home — not for myself, but for my older daughter. She doesn’t want her own, but seems to take delight in finding mine, and leaving art splashed across their pages. I don’t know if she feels the call of futures in them like I did with my grandfather’s ledger, or with the pens and pins I was gifted later. But there’s something there. So I leave out the books, and the bin with “Spare Office Supplies” stays out for her to rummage in, and I wonder how far along each of these tiny unknowns will gather, waiting for their moments.

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COMMONPLACES

From Kurt Vonnegut’s A Man Without a Country:

The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.

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From Emery Allen’s Holy Things In This World:

If you love somebody
they turn into a god.

but you can’t control
what kind of god they turn into.

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ANNOUNCEMENTS

I have no particular announcements at this time, except to say that I am, at this point, still essentially navel-gazing with this zine. I suspect that in future I’ll give thanks to those who join (if any), and it would be nice to post some letters to the magazine as well — though an entirely separate Letters section would be fantastic.

Actually, to that end– if you would like to write a letter to be produced/answered in the magazine, please email me at minor.hours.magazine@gmail.com with the subject line: 

Letter to the Magazine: [subject of letter as you would like to see it printed]

If you wish the letter to be anonymous or under a nom de plume, please state so in the body of the email; similarly, if you’d rather not be printed at all, please also state so in the body of the email. It will otherwise be assumed that mail sent to that address is intended for print. 

-Until next week, be safe.