And then, one day, it stopped.

I didn’t go to Amoeba yesterday because I had a convincing but utterly shameful thought: if I went to Amoeba, I’d just end up buying CDs, and why on earth would I want any more CDs?

Not long ago, CDs to me were synonymous with music. Before that, cassette tapes; before that, records. Not wanting a CD would have been not wanting music, which is a wicked, horrible, you might as well go crawl under a speeding bus thing to think. But that’s no longer the case – music itself no longer has a case (if it ever really did). Now my CDs sit unloved, largely ignored in disarray on my shelves, still out of order since I moved to a new house over two years ago. Sometimes I’ll go pull out a treasure and sentence the CD to death by ripping the tracks onto my computer. Music has dematerialized and that’s how I expect it now. I miss album art, liner notes, and I miss being able to proudly present a wall to anyone visiting my house that said “This is me, this is what I like”, but the music itself easily transcends those add-ons. Music was never meant to be contained in a physical form, so the transition to the dematerialized world was, in retrospect, very easy.

But books it’s not so simple. Words, like music, don’t necessarily need a physical form, but the act of reading is fundamentally different from listening. If you want to read with your eyes, the words need to be somewhere. To not want a book is not the same as not wanting words, it’s the same as not wanting reading.

I’ve had books I loved so much they look like old raggedy teddy bears. Books have been my companions around the world: they’ve wedged open windows, killed cockroaches, pressed filmy ferns, and acted as a note pad. And when they were done with those secondary tasks, books kept me entertained. Or if they’ve annoyed me or weighed me down, I’ve ditched them on bookshelves and cafe tables. Books are mementos of place, sometime incongruous ones, but powerful nonetheless: I can’t separate Flannery O’Connor short stories from Venice and Trento where I first read them, Cormac McCarthy from the London tube, Somerset Maugham from a park bench in Bern where an Italian man wanted to talk to me about George Bush and pesto.

For months now, a Kindle has sat in my shopping cart on Amazon unbought. Am I ready to enter the world of dematerialized books? Will I have the same connection to words on a Kindle? I can read words on a Kindle, and the story can be just as good or bad as would have been in the printed book, but the experience will change forever. All books will look the same, feel the same, and smell the same (if they smell at all). Just try pressing a filmy fern in a Kindle (in fact, please do, and send me a photo of the results), and I’d wager that killing a cockroach with a Kindle is a pretty risky undertaking.

I once sat on a panel discussion at a conference where, having forgotten the several compelling arguments I had come prepared to put forward in defense of books, I found myself arguing that books couldn’t die because we’d all miss the smell too much. I was only half serious, but man, when I cross over into the realm of the dematerialized book – and I know that I’m at the tipping point now – I surely will miss the smell.

Well I haven’t asked him, so I don’t really know. In fact I probably should ask him, he’d probably have a lot to say on the matter. But in lieu of actually going to the source, I’ve combed through hours of fascinating interviews featuring a broad array of hairstyles and pulled out a few gems from Mr. Bolton that speak to the traveler:

- If you’re not in the right place, there is no right place.

- I have friends who’ve tried to break into the UK, who went back with their tails between their legs. Fortunately I’ve had the opposite experience.

- It’s an important thing to remember where you came from.

- I don’t feel like you’re permitted to cruise and just say, “Okay, I’ll just do whatever I want and put aside the awareness of all the people who want to know what you’re going to do next.”

- I happen to love coming to Dallas…I’m sure I’m going to do something there.

- When I travel, I’m basically listening to AC [Adult Contemporary].

- It begins with a little quest and turns into this giant learning experience.

- It was a day at the beach. “Normandy,” I think they called the beach.

- I’m so overwhelmed with this passion to keep going.

- I think every day I digest a little bit more.

Andy Rooney died a few weeks ago, and at the time I was in the midst of a preoccupation with pluots. Several years earlier, Andy Rooney had done one of his rambling stories on fruit and I could clearly recall his moment of confusion with a pile of pluots. Here’s a fruit, here’s another fruit, and here’s one that’s hard to eat, and here’s one that’s red, and boy are stickers on fruit a nuisance, and so on with nary a point in sight until he finally came to a crate of stacked pluots.

“Now here’s something I never heard of: a California pluot. What in the world is a pluot?”

Being from California myself, I’m accustomed to the emphasis he put on the word, implying just how unsurprising that something strange and unnatural sounding like a pluot would emerge from the libidinous hot tub of suspicious ideas that is California.

And he’s right, the pluot did come from California, a plum-apricot hybrid developed by noted plant breeder Floyd Zaiger to capture the aromatics and texture of an apricot and the sweet juiciness of a plum, but without the bitter skin of the latter. A silly name perhaps, but the pluot came about from a very unsuspicious and traditional method of breeding crops that humans have used since we decided that farming was preferable to chasing saber-toothed tigers with clubs.

At the time of Andy Rooney’s broadcast, pluots were raising eyebrows around the country, not just Rooney’s famously bushy ones. Today, they’ve nearly pushed the plum out of supermarkets, because they ship more easily, have a longer shelf life, and they’re a happy marriage of sweet and tart that fruit lovers find hard to resist. And as a bonus you get to say “pluot” out loud every time you buy one.

So what does one do with a pluot? Well, eating it is a start. But if you want to really use a pluot to it’s full advantage, try baking with it. Here’s a spin on a classic frangipane tart, pairing the pluot with its stone fruit cousin the almond, that’s sure to please any pluot skeptic:

Andy’s Pluot-Almond Tart

This tart looks amazing and it tastes even better. If you don’t immediately want a second piece, then something important might be missing from your brain (you should really get that looked at). The frangipane filling isn’t too sweet and is just almondy enough, so it won’t overpower the fruit. This recipe works wonderfully with apricots, plums, and cherries as well.

For the crust:
1 cup flour
¼ tsp. salt
1 tbsp. sugar
½ cup unsalted butter, cold
½ tsp. almond extract
1-2 tbsp. ice water

Mix flour, salt, sugar. Cut cold butter into dry ingredients with a pastry blender until butter is size of small pebbles. Add almond extract and drizzle in ice water starting with 1 tbsp. Blend and form dough into a ball by hand – it should be crumbly and just barely hold together. Drizzle in more water if necessary (but dough should never get wet/sticky). It’s okay if some streaks of butter are still visible. Pat into a flat round and refrigerate in plastic wrap for an hour or more.

For the filling:
1 cup blanched slivered almonds (toasted if desired)
½ cup granulated sugar
1/8 tsp. salt
1 egg + 1 egg white
6 tbsp. unsalted butter, room temp
½ tsp. almond extract
½ tsp. vanilla extract

Add almonds, sugar, and salt to a food processor and process until finely powdered (about 1 min.). Add egg and egg white and both extracts and process until evenly mixed. Add butter and process until no lumps are visible and the paste is smooth. Refrigerate for up to 3 days.

Assembly:
3 pluots, halved and sliced into ¼ in.-thick half-moons

Preheat oven to 400°.

When dough is chilled, remove from fridge and roll between sheets of plastic wrap into a round large enough for a 9 in. tart pan plus 2 extra inches (the dough will be fairly brittle but holes and cracks can be patched with the excess). Lay into pan and press into the corners. Trim edges and puncture bottom with a fork every few inches. Bake crust blind for 10 min (won’t shrink much in this time), remove from oven and immediately add the almond filling with a spatula and arrange the pluot slices on top in two overlapping circles lightly sunk into the filling. Reduce oven to 350° and bake until the almond filling is puffed and browned throughout (40-45 minutes). Remove and cool.

Happy pluot eating!

And, Andy, I hate to break it to you, but a tomato is a fruit, and – wait for it – also a vegetable. Hopefully even now that’ll raise your eyebrows.

Around four years ago, I started blogging. I hated the word – such an ugly word, “blog” – but I loved the concept. I was moving to the UK and I wanted to keep my friends and family updated on my life without writing long repetitive letters, and I wanted to force myself to keep a journal and keep writing, even if most of the time I was scribbling informally about the lack of root beer in the UK or the absurdly high number of banana peels one encounters while walking the streets of London.

Very quickly, I found that blogging wasn’t just about reporting on the interesting things I did, it served as a much-needed kick in the pants – a constant helpful nag that yanked me off the sofa and forced me into the streets of London to find new and interesting experiences. Sometimes these were banana peels, other times it was rowboats on rooftops or celebrities skulking in the shrubbery.

That was ticking along nicely for quite some time, but then I moved back to the US (yay!), started blogging for my work (yay!), had a baby (yay!), and, well, the whole personal blogging thing got relegated to the back burner rather quickly (boo!). Occasionally I’d find a moment here and there to write, and even managed to accidentally defame a clown in the process (long story). But the drive had sped off in a puff of smoke, the focus had faded, and the spare time I used to find to write seemed like a pleasant but distant memory of simpler times, like happy recollections of recess in elementary school.

At some point in the past year I found myself with one dormant blog, another one that so ambitious and daunting it never got off the ground, one that I wasn’t entirely sure why I had it at all, and one that was about the goings on of my monthly breakfast club (that no one was reading). Nothing was getting anywhere, and I hit a wall of frustration I came to call “the blog jam” and occasionally prodded it with a stick to see if it would go away without putting much effort into it. Sadly that wasn’t the case.

But then came the Ukrainian hackers, who managed to slip some malicious code onto my sites getting all of my sites blacklisted by Google. It was the best thing that happened to my blogs in the past year, because it gave me the opportunity to press the big red button and nuke everything, wiping the slate clean. Cheers, hacker guys and your pet robots, that was just what I needed. You wanted my sites more than I did.

So now the blog jam has been blasted to bits, and this is what is emerging from the rubble – rough at the moment, but hopefully prettier and functional in the near term. My original blog, DSRB, is still resting peacefully on it’s creaky old Blogger platform – go visit it and say hello if you wish – but I’m officially calling it quits over there and starting up here with renewed energy. One blog to rule them all. Or something like that.

More soon – I promise.