Binary Butter: A Theory of Sound and Satiation

I absolutely choose my gyms and exercise classes based on the music they play. It's all about the vibe. If you're going to have me jump on boxes, pull insane amounts of weight, or squat below parallel, I better have a good playlist pumping because I know myself—my internal motivation isn't strong enough. I need the external vibes, man. I need the energy of the room to be right so that when I look around and see all eight other working-age moms and dads at 7 AM, I'm motivated to finish this 15-minute circuit block.

The classes I go to usually last an hour, and because I'm between things right now, I tend to have more time to do all the stuff you're supposed to but never get to: foam roll and stretch. About 5 to 10 minutes after class ends, the energy instantly dies. The music cuts off. You don't hear med balls being slammed on the ground anymore. It's eerily different from just 10 minutes before, when there was so much energy in the room that suddenly dissipates into the abyss like it was never there. It only picks back up again during the lunch rush.

Vibe is a binary function—either on or off—and the primary indicator of whether the room is "on" or not is sound. Sound is a compression of air that transmits from the source, through the medium, and then into your ears. I remember that definition from high school physics. If sound is air compressed, then air uncompressed is silence. Sound is everything everywhere all at once, and then silence is nothing at all.

Life is like that. Sometimes it happens all at once, and sometimes nothing happens at all.

If my mind so quickly associates sound with that type of vibe at the gym, I should be able to create that energy as well, no?

November has just started and with December following it, these next seven weeks or so are all about the holiday vibes. As much as Thanksgiving is celebrated with pictures of turkey on the table and sides all around, I would say the energy of Thanksgiving is an actual process—a culmination of weeks of errors in cooking, braising, basting, and baking that climaxes on the third Thursday of the month. Thanksgiving, in fact, is not a workout HIIT playlist you can just turn on or off, but more of a gradual ground swell.

For this past Halloween, I didn't end up going out but instead opted to do a "dry run" of Friendsgiving at my friend's house. She insisted on hosting Thanksgiving, and me, having hosted multiple Friendsgivings prior, know that you don't want the first time making dinner for a 15-person party in the new kitchen to be the first time you figure out which baking pan will fit when you have to put three things in the oven simultaneously.

My friend did the stuffing and cookies, and I made two smaller roasted chickens, a side of roasted kabocha pumpkin (shout out to Orange) with a lemony yogurt with turmeric-cumin buttery nut crumble. It was my dry run of a Friendsgiving, to make sure that I could in fact still pull it off even without having done it in the past four years or so.

With enough butter and wine to sedate a small horse, it turned out to be a pretty successful night. I learned that your dude still got it, and that I was able to bring my version of the Thanksgiving-Friendsgiving-treat-yourself-to-another-slice-of-pie energy back.

To restart your traditions from one chapter of your life to your current chapter is no easy feat. It's not just about having turkey and gravy and mashed potatoes and some greens on the actual day, but it's about making it from scratch. I understand Donna Berzatto’s dilemma when preparing for the Seven Fishes episode of The Bear and why she went slightly off the rails at the end.

The conduit, though, between the Thanksgiving vibe of Thanksgivings past and Thanksgiving 2025 and beyond—as I discovered in my short hiatus from cooking Thanksgiving dinner—is butter.

Butter is the glue that holds it together. Butter is the thing that's consistent across the dishes. Turkey? Herb butter that's softened and then stuffed between the protein and the skin so it can keep the flesh moist during the roast. Pie? In the crust, in the caramel of the apple filling. That roasted acorn squash thing? In that cumin-turmeric compound drizzle on top. Chardonnay? It was a buttery Chardonnay.

Interestingly enough, for most of the year, my fridge is usually devoid of butter until November rolls around, then I can't stop buying enough of the stuff. It's like Chef Didier said in "Last Holiday": "The secret to life is … butter."

You and I know the secret to life. The secret to life is… butter. 

And the way that butter melts and sizzles and spreads itself across the pan—that's some cosmic energy right there. Sound might compress while it transmits from the source, but butter transmits deliciousness from the second it hits the pan, to when it turns a nutty brown, through the foaming and right before the fat solids almost burn.

Perhaps that's what butter is to me: the presence of it is the presence of Thanksgiving, and without it, well, it just isn't Thanksgiving without it. 

The aftermath is usually a comatose state of existence around the couch. As I was busy polishing off a wing bone, Willow, my friend's terrier doodle, looked at me longingly for a friggin' bone, and as much as I wanted to share, my friend said better not since the dog was still on her meds.

"I did it," I thought. "I successfully killed everyone with my Friendsgiving, and it's only just the dry run." Two guests from dinner were planning to go out to the bars after, and they were in such a comfortable, cozy state that they sank into the couch, barely able to muster the energy to go out. Who knew I had such power in my hands? It was the power to derail people's Friday night plans and sedate them, away from the lure of a Top 40 playlist pulsating with strangers in a lounge. In fact, if you think about it, the vibe I bring is the antithesis of a 7 AM workout or a 7 PM happy hour. It's a promise of a warm meal, and the only social obligation you need to fulfill is to put spoon to mouth at regular intervals until your plate is clean.

Just as the energy builds up during the Friendsgiving dry run cooking, it drops off just as suddenly—a binary function. The sound of butter sizzling is now replaced by murmurs of satiation, gratitude, and comments about how nice it was to stay in on a Friday night. I know where I'll be tomorrow morning, probably back at that gym at 7 AM, but for now let me just drift off to sleep in the silence before the morning alarm wakes me up again. Tomorrow is gym day, but today, let's rest.

What's your butter—that one thing that carries the energy from one part of your life to another? And how do you know when it's working? Maybe it's when your friends can't make it to the bars afterward.

Savoring this moment with you,

Kevin L