It occurred to me today that life is just so damn complicated, we might be incapable of understanding much of any of it.

I have a chocolate chip cookie recipe. It’s mine, and no, you can’t have it. It started from some generic cookie recipe off of the internet, about a decade ago. I remember, at the time, being jealous of some of the old ladies from my church whose chocolate chip cookies were so enjoyable. And, of course, I asked these ladies, one by one, what the secret of their wonderful cookies was. I asked Carol and Lucille and Nancy.

They wouldn’t tell me.

And so, I set out to discover the secrets on my own. The first time I made the recipe that I printed off of the internet, I didn’t like it. Not because what I made on that day, so many years ago, was bad. No, I didn’t like it because it wasn’t like the cookies that those little old ladies were making.

I remember standing in front of that first batch of cookies and hearing those little old ladies laughing at me inside my head. “Those aren’t like our at all!” “I wonder what they’ll taste like?” “They won’t be delicious like ours!”

And so began a years-long process of tweaking it to make it my own.

In fact, to look at the recipe now, it’s hard to read the original printed text underneath all of the additions and corrections that I’ve made to the original sheet of printer paper. I tweaked just about every part of that recipe, and I documented those tweaks on the recipe itself. More often than not, my tweaks were bad ideas and so I would end up tweaking something else. In fact, I would often make small batches, specifically because I wanted to tweak something and I had no idea how it would turn out –> a batch of two dozen failed cookies wasn’t as bad as a batch of five dozen.

I tweaked the ratio of baking soda to corn starch. I tweaked the amount of chocolate chips. I tweaked the baking temperatures and the baking times and how long to leave them on the parchment paper before transferring them to the cooling rack. I tweaked blend times and vanilla amounts. In the end, I am sure that I seemed obsessed, to my wife, for a period of about five or six years.

Then, the tweaking got to be less and less drastic. At that point, slight changes, that made the recipe even better, were the norm. And finally, after years and years of experimentation and trial and error, I would say that the recipe has been pretty good now, for at least a year or two.

You want to know the funny part?

Sometimes, when I make the cookies these days, after having tweaked just about every single facet of that recipe, they still turn out bad.

And that’s when I throw my hands up in the air and I think to myself, “What the $&*%@????”

And when they go bad, I try to figure out what went wrong, and that’s when I stand, staring at a fairly complicated equation, right in the face, and I wonder.

Has my baking soda gone bad? What’s the relative humidity today inside the house? Is the oven starting to go bad? It is ten years old. Where did I buy that last bag of flour from? Am I using Aldi’s flour when I should have used Harding’s flour?

And I can literally stand there for several minutes wondering what happened.

And, mind you, this is a cookie recipe. It’s not that complicated, relatively speaking. Sure, when you get down into the nitty-gritty of the details of the thing, it seems pretty complex. But, how complex is this recipe compared with, oh I don’t know, epidemiology?

Because, here we are in the middle of this pandemic (you didn’t see this coming, did you? Me, turning the conversation in this direction? Huh?)…

I mean, I literally don’t know what to believe anymore. Masks, or no masks? The CDC or the WHO? What’s the current list of symptoms? It used to be four, and now it’s nine, and next week it might be twelve? If I had it, can I get it again? What’s the difference between a test for the virus and a test for the antibodies?

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!

If I have no idea what went wrong when my cookies don’t turn out right, how am I supposed to know what the right thing to do is, for my health and the health of my family? And, before you offer me your opinion of what I ought to do, make a copy of your medical credentials available for my review, thank you very much. At least I have learned to stop getting my medical advice (or moral advice or economic advice) from politicians and/or social media.

And, I’m no dope. I am a pretty well-educated, pretty ‘quick on the uptake’ kind of guy.

In the end, maybe it’s just too complicated to know.

I guess I’ll just eat the cookies when they turn out bad and be thankful for those batches that were perfect.

And…

I’ll trust that the next batch will be just fine.