My sister Anne spells it donuts and I use doughnuts. We both went out and ate some for this post, and we had a good time discussing Geoff Dyer’s essay “Otherwise Known as the Human Condition (with Particular Reference to Doughnut Plant Doughnuts” as the catalyst for this week’s conversion.

Click above to listen to our donut or doughnut themed podcast

Sometimes donuts are trash (sometimes I still eat them)

-Anne on her donut consumption

Torg got his doughnuts from Local Lion Doughnuts and Coffee in Boone, NC.

Local Lion Doughnuts and Coffee. 791 Blowing Rock Road. Boone, NC.
I appreciated this about the owners of Local Lion from their website: Josiah was born and brewed in Boone NC . He met Meredith as she was serving coffee on Appstate Campus and they settled into this beautiful mountain town. Together they founded Local Lion in Spring of 2012. Early mornings making scratchmade doughnuts and fresh roasting coffee are an excellent way to serve community. We love being an integral part of the high country.

Los Angeles Doughnuts from Anne:

https://randysdonuts.com/ Randy’s w/iconic donut sign is my favorite. Kind of far from my apt, the original location is somewhat close to work. Classic Glaze, sugar raised, vanilla iced cake, butter crumb raised. Opened in 1953 in Inglewood.
I will also go Trejo’s Donuts, close by. Bob’s donuts and Sidecar both The Grove
https://www.trejosdonuts.com/
https://sidecardoughnuts.com/
https://farmersmarketla.com/merchants/bobs-coffee-and-doughnuts
These are all good depending on the donut you pick
What about a shout out to Bolin’s Donuts in Logansport! The best donuts I’ve had and probably why I love a great donut.
Sucky donuts are trash. (Sometimes I still eat them)

Dyer’s piece opens with Effra Road as the metaphorical (and literal for the the writer) roads we all have to travel. Here are the opening lines of the piece:

For many years I lived in various flats either on or just off Brixton Water Lane. So I was always walking, cycling, or taking a bus down Effra Road. How many times did I walk down Effra Road? How many hours did I spend walking down Effra Road? If I was going to Brixton Rec to play squash, or to Franco’s for a pizza or a cappuccino (this was before I acquired the refinement of taste in cappuccinos that, in the years since then, has invariably been a source of torment and frustration rather than enhanced satisfaction), or to the aptly named Effra to meet friends for drinks, or just to take the tube to some other part of London, I always had to trudge or cycle down Effra Road. Wherever I was going, the journey began and ended on Effra Road. One of the reasons I moved away from Brixton was that I could not face trudging, cycling, or taking the bus down Effra Road again.

Torg’s potential Effra Roads:

Ditmars Blvd in Astoria, Queens, NYC.
It was a half mile walk from my apartment near Astoria Park and the East River from the N and W stop of NYC subway. Didn’t live there long enough to get that tired of it.
It did have Martha’s Country Bakery, which we have never forgotten. Click here. Cookies and cakes but I don’t remember doughnuts.
Would I usually rather have a cookie than a doughnut?
AND, Dewitt Barnett Road near Valle Crucis, NC. We’ve got this 10 minute very curvy drive almost every time we leave the house.

Anne’s potential Effra Roads:

La Brea and Melrose. I start on these streets all the time, maybe throw Santa Monica Blvd. in there.
Great donut place in Brownsburg IN. Hilligoss Bakery
Also Long’s Bakery in Indianapolis, kind of by Speedway

In Brownsburg, I would often go to a great gas station right by work. Get a Diet Mt Dew from fountain (not frequently available elsewhere) and a cinnamon type cake donut. Best donuts I ever had from a gas station. Casey’s gas station, a chain. I do not see them out here.
In Indiana, I used to go most Sundays and read the Sunday paper at Einstein Bagels I think around 82nd street on the west side where I would hope they would have a chocolate chip cookie cake that was round, I forget the name, but loved that sometimes they would run out just like in the story. I would get it warmed up.

The Nietzsche “enduring habits” section:

Nietzsche loved what he called “brief habits” but so hated “enduring habits” that he was grateful even to the bouts of sickness or misfortune that caused him to break free of the chains of enduring habit. (Though most intolerable of all, he went on, would be “a life entirely devoid of habits, a life that would demand perpetual improvisation. That would be my exile and my Siberia.”) Unlike Nietzsche, I succumb all too easily to enduring habits. Programmed by habit, I kept going to Patisserie Valerie until I met the woman who became my wife.

I am challenged about my enduring habits:

Morning coffee and yogurt with Megan, right to the desk to work, a feel of needing to be at the desk
To what degree, if any, do these need to be broken?

Reminds me of how I used to say instead of going on vacation there we should just move there for a while. That feels different now.

Anne’s LA Habits

Used to get a fountain drink most mornings from 7-eleven. Do not do that as much. Used to also get a bagel maybe once a week, also do not do now. Now I get to work, have a diet coke and a protein bar.
My morning routine for work is simple, wake up, shower, dry hair get ready/dressed, sit on couch for 10 minutes and browse internet, then leave around 6:55 am.
Weekend habit. Work out and hike on Sat and Sun, hoping always to be done by 10 am. Mostly Runyon, occasionally Griffith

Torg Golden Lines from the piece for brief discussion:

Psychologically, the location of a place is not fixed. It is determined not by where it is but by how we get to it.
Funny!: I went back to Delectica the following day and ordered another cappuccino and a doughnut. The doughnut I ordered that day was a ring doughnut, and it was an amazing doughnut. This was a major turning point in my New York life. As such, it will feature prominently in my forthcoming book Great Pastries of the World: A Personal View.
Not what happened to us at Bruno’s Pizza in Logansport: It was still there and we ordered cappuccinos and croissants, and the croissant, while it was just about tolerable, was nowhere near as good as I remembered and the coffee was pretty terrible (too milky and the foam was all bubbly, and although it seemed okay at first, by the halfway stage I decided it was totally revolting).
The last sentence. As we keep this up Anne, I am seeing that writers often like to go long in the last or second to last sentence: It did not seem like that at all now; now it became a symbol of the healing potential of the doughnut, of a world community of doughnut lovers living in peace and harmony, bound together by the vision and ambition of a Czech immigrant who went to New York, opened his Doughnut Plant, and then forged a doughnut empire, extending from New York to Tokyo while regrettably bypassing London, where we still have to make do with croissants that are like stale buns so that at times the whole of London seems like nothing else so much as an interminable extension of Effra Road.

What does he mean “the human condition” in the title?

...