Ye 'Ember Months

While wearing white and eating gelato

Oct 05, 2025

Hi everyone, and happy fall 🍁🍂

We made it. Sliding into the final stretch of the year like we always seem to do. Whither doth the time flee? I ask you.

I’m thrilled you’re still here. My posts have been more seasonal than schedule lately, but maybe that’s part of the charm. Hoping…

And while it may technically be fall, I live in LA. So if it weren’t for Sprouts and Trader Joe’s punching me in the face with fall swag like cinnamon broomsticks and pumpkins with googly eyes, I’d take a gander and say we’re still in summer.

So alas, today’s brain sneeze is about folks still wearing summer whites and flip flops with a few thoughts sprinkled between.

Enjoy! 🫑🌶️

I’d like to pause here and take a small detour into greens. This revelation came to me last week after discovering The Department of Salad: Official Bulletin by Emily Nunn.

She writes that salads have “lived a lifetime as an afterthought (in restaurants), been given appalling short shrift by many of you (“Oh, I’ll just have a salad”), and been avoided at home for reasons we cannot begin to fathom.”

So… it’s not that I ever looked down on salads. I do love them. But they’ve only taken center stage for me in the spring and summer months.

I now realize the folly of my ways. Emily makes a compelling case for say, a warm salad, with great stories mixed in. It’s well worth exploring, should you be looking to expand your palate.

And with that, I’ll leave you with Sydney Smith. He was a philosophy writer, founder of the Edinburgh Review, lecturer at the Royal Institution and a man who loved salads so much he put them in verse.

Thanks for the lead, emily nunn. A true hero of the greens.

And lastly, this week I got incredible ice cream. Well… sorbet. No. Wait. Gelato. It was gelato. Craft gelato. How dare I.

I can’t keep it straight.

It was from a place called An’s Dry Cleaning, which, obviously is not a dry cleaner. I don’t knows who An is. Neither did the employee, who took us on what he called a “flavor tour”. But An, if you’re out there: your craft gelato knocked my goddamn socks off.

Also? It’s been years since I got something in a cone. Why?

Anyway, what I wanted to touch on here was this: have you ever noticed how serious people get about ordering their ice cream?

It really is something else. No one’s on their phones. No one’s side talking. No earbuds are in half-listening to a podcast. Everyone’s fully locked in. Game face on.

The man in front of us studied the case like he was trying to disarm a bomb. His pupils were dilated. He was sweating. Visibly in conflict. This was, without question, the most important decision he’d made in a long time.

You just don’t see that kind of concentration anymore, and I appreciate it.