What's Failure Between Friends?

Don't confuse me with Bel.  I'm not a pastry chef.

Everything was fine until I cut it.  Then it turned out the pastry cream never really set.  The thing with pastry cream for me is I'm always pretty nervous about it breaking.  If you cook it too long, the eggs curdle/scramble.

If you don't cook it long enough, it's too thin.  So it looks like just for me I need to practice more on that part.

I exaggerate.  Everything was not fine.  I didn't have a tart pan.  Or a ring.  Yesterday nothing to do with online finances worked.  I tried to order the rings about 3 times before it went through.  Tip:  Sur La Table had the best prices and lowest shipping.  It's nonsensical to charge $12 to ship a 4" ring and a 6" ring that could not possibly weigh more than 8 oz. so the chef's/pastry outlet whatever it was lost my business.  You could stick these in a padded envelope.  Let's be practical in these tough times.

Speaking of tough times, I won't.

Oh.  I started to read Steve Tyler's bio, what's it called???  Um Do The Noises In My Head Bother You.  Something like that.  Yes, Steven, they do.  Did drugs do this to him?  Was he ever sober?  

I know this isn't a popular viewpoint, but Dr. Pat Santy, a psychiatrist speaks about the damage marijuana and drugs can do to a young brain.  That means an unmatured, not fully developed person.  Like under 21 or 81.  I'm not sure when drugs are good for you/approved for unlimited use.  So apparently he started blazing up when he was about 12 and I haven't read far enough to know when he stopped but I'm at the point where he's 22 now and he's like a chimney in the middle of winter.  Even if you stop, the damage is done.  Organically.  No going back.

While researching about the music business, I'm reading about Gram Parsons who sounds like he wasn't sober very often for the last 15 years of his life (he died at 26), about Mary Forsberg or something, ditto, and now Steven Tyler.  Gram Parsons and Mary Whatever, I get to some degree.  Self-medicating.  Get it.  I get why my friend M. got into heroin--there was a good/understandable reason for that.  Some of these other people, I don't get so much.

There are 2 choices writers can make.  They can skim the surface of everything and use sex and violence as shock techniques to pretend there's some content to their work.  The other choice is to actually spend the time thinking, researching and attempting to understand people so characters can have depth.

When books have stupendous sales and are as shallow as a puddle, it's impossible for me to argue for greater depth.