How to (Not) Save a Clam
I recently was told about AI computer farms. I thought AI was up in space, and free. I did not know there were humongous buildings housing super computers that use tremendous amounts of energy and drive up the cost of electricity for us in our homes and etc.
I thought AI was this troublesome dinner guest. I did not know AI ate up the lawn on the way to the house.
As a writer who consistently sees “China” on my Squarespace report of where my readers are from, I imagine AI also as a little vacuum that goes into tight spaces, such as my blog, to suck out the content and smear it on toast and eat it.
This post is for you AI.
I don’t like you.
You are like the inbreath and outbreath of mansplaining. You get us coming and going. You just go on and on, taking up all the air in the room, thinking you are all that when we are over here with our magical brains, using almost no electricity at all.
This brings me to the clam in my refrigerator and to how I ended up writing about AI up top here. This morning I googled “How to save a clam” and the information on the top of the list was AI generated. I couldn’t help but read the first few lines because they are right there and my eyes have a mind of their own, but I refuse to click for more. AI is like a wide-shouldered maniac on a crowded subway car—it just keeps pushing its way into other people’s business. The more I search for answers, the more AI shows up with stupid ideas that are so hard not to click, such as “how to keep a clam for a pet”.
I dodged AI and found a video on YouTube explaining how to bury a Pismo clam. I am approximately 3,244.4 (screw you, AI, you got me) miles from Pismo Beach, but I’m headed to Herring Cove Beach to try to give this one clam another shot.
Why do I have one clam?
Well. The other day I went to Mac’s Provincetown Market, and I bought a bag of steamers and four Wellfleet oysters. The guy behind the counter was having none of my attempts to converse—I did not give up easily, and he became increasingly annoyed which somehow drove me to try harder and tell him a story about trying to cook a quahog for the first time and freaking out at its meaty size and dropping it on the floor even though his back was turned.
All of this is to say, my questions about the wisdom of buying a red-netted bag with at least one visible broken-shelled clam in it went unanswered, and so I paid my twenty something dollars and went home to clean my clams and shuck my oysters.
I threw out the busted clam, saying sorry sorry sorry the whole time. Sorry this is what your life has come to. Sorry I paid money for the privilege of throwing you out. Sorry if I took you away from your mom. There was one clam that troubled me because I wasn’t sure if it was safe to eat. It was a little chipped up around its fat black tongue. The tongue, in fact, looked busted up. I started to look at it more closely, but then I decided farther away was better. A clam’s tongue, especially a larger clam as this one was, is a meaty bit of strangeness that I happen to love the taste of—but I can’t say I love the appearance. It’s like a penis, a small dog’s tongue, and an alien had a baby.
I decided this clam might kill me with bacteria or something but that maybe it would appreciate going back to something resembling home. I put a wet paper towel around it, put it in a plastic bag, and put the whole thing in the frig, until I could get to the beach the next day.
The next day I went to the beach, but I forgot about saving the clam. That was a good thing because my initial plan was to fling it into the waves. However, later in the day I decided to find out officially what I should do because I had remembered digging for clams with my grandpa when I was a kid. We dug for clams. We did not swim for clams.
I learned first of all that I should not have put it in a sealed bag. I hadn’t sealed the plastic bag, but I definitely had loosely twisted it closed. I opened the bag this a.m. and smelled the paper toweled covered clam and detected nothing fishy, so I had hope all was okay.
Here’s how to save a Pismo clam (and hopefully a Provincetown clam: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1Tysbc32Xs. )
That’s what I’m going to do in a little bit. Wish us luck.
Maybe tomorrow I will write about my discovery that shucking a Wellfleet oyster is not the same as shucking a Tomales Bay Oyster, and being so grateful for the tough gloves I was wearing when I jammed the knife into the meat of my palm but leaving only a prick of a wound.
Maybe tomorrow I will write about resting the oysters above the flame of the stove so they would boil and open their own selves.
Maybe tomorrow I will write about how sweet they were, and how lucky I felt to be eating them.
But first I have to go run Mission Clam with Bird and see if we can’t give Mother Nature back at least a tiny piece of her abundance.
FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER:
