Ice Cream Sundays

On pandan, pattern completion and spontaneous combustion 🍨 🌶️

I.

It’s the end of December and Upstate New York is covered in white. It’s magical. I’m sitting next to the fire on a Sunday, rooibos in hand, trying to get still-wet wood to burn while replaying a memory alongside Miles Davis’ It Never Entered My Mind. The trumpet — muted, melancholy — but swinging, somehow. Only jazz can make melancholy move.

The wood hisses. Refuses to catch. I keep adjusting, blowing, adding kindling. Trying to make warmth happen. Two months I’ve been turning this memory over. Two months to process a dessert order. That’s the meaning-maker for you.

The memory is the opposite of this fire. Warmth that arrived without trying.

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II.

Let me take you back to October. I was sitting at the bar at Fish Cheeks, a Thai restaurant in Williamsburg. One of my favourites in the city. Wooden chairs painted blue, yellow, hot pink.

When I think of the best Thai food I’ve had, it’s in Bangkok’s shopping malls. Fluorescent lights, plastic trays, menus with pictures. A gift for someone who’s spent most of his life battling order envy. Fish Cheeks has that same something. Lemongrass, galangal, fish sauce, lime. Nothing dominates. Sweet, sour, salty, bitter, spicy: held together as if suspended in animation. Great Thai food feels like a gut punch and a hug in the same bite.

I was finishing dinner alone. Already getting cold outside. Had just decided I’d walk seven minutes to an ice cream shop on the other side of Williamsburg. Get my steps in. Earn the treat.

The server came over. I asked for the check. Then, almost as an afterthought, asked what they had for dessert.

“Ice cream made with pandan,” she said. She went on explaining what pandan was. I don’t remember a word.

“Sounds great,” I heard myself say.

She walked away. And then — immediately — tightness. Right in my chest. That familiar contraction. Regret. Now the walk won’t count. And I could have ordered two flavours, not just one. The thought arrived fully formed. Already spinning into a story about what I’d done wrong.

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III.

I ordered the ice cream without thinking about it.

That’s not quite right. I ordered ice cream before thinking about it. There’s a difference.

The tightness wasn’t about ice cream. It was about control. The planning-self had been bypassed. Body heard “pandan” and moved before the committee could convene. So the committee convened afterward. Manufactured regret. Two regrets, actually: lost the walk and could have ordered more.

Part of me is conditioned to want new things, especially unfamiliar things. Trained early to reach for color. “Pandan” lit up some circuit shaped a childhood yearning for the unfamiliar. The “sounds great” wasn’t a choice. It was pattern completion. And then the ego rushed in afterward, claiming authorship it didn’t have. Generating regret to prove it was still necessary.

The ego: the part that insists I am doing things. That there’s a captain at the helm.

I caught myself mid-spiral. I ordered the ice cream in the moment. It just happened. Surely this feeling is a reactive pattern? And something shifted. Not the tightness dissolving; it was still there. But a space opened around it. The feeling and the watching of the feeling, both present.

In a previous essay I called this the savannah engine: ancient neural survival machinery that is always running, forged in us by the African sun. Pattern-completion that served us on those plains, now generating anxiety about dessert in Brooklyn. The savannah engine is the whole apparatus: scanning, predicting, keeping us alive. The ego is the part that narrates it as “me.”

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IV.

There’s a word in Afrikaans: hoekom. How come. Not quite “why.” More insistent, more childlike. Hoekom?

My parents tell this story: as a child, I asked “Hoekom?” relentlessly. Never accepting anything as a final answer. Always pushing for the layer beneath. Hoekom? Again. Again. Until whoever I was interrogating gave up or got annoyed. It was part inquisitiveness but also part brute force. Domination by willpower.

That pattern built an identity. I am the one who figures things out. The one who reaches the deeper truth. The willingness (or stupidity) to keep asking served me quite well. But it also kept me one step removed. Always processing. Always asking what something means rather than letting it simply be what it is.

Decades of that. Of trying to make the fire catch through understanding.

The ice cream moment cracked something. Not because ordering dessert is profound. Because I caught the machinery in the act. The choice happened (body, flavour, yes) and then the ego arrived after the fact, claiming authorship it didn’t have, generating regret to prove it was still necessary.

Who ordered the ice cream, if not the ego?

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V.

I keep returning to the fire. It’s still hissing. I blow on it again. Nothing.

There’s a both/and we’ve been circling in this series. Looking forward, choice feels real: the weighing, the wobble, the click of decision. Looking backward, every choice is traceable through prior causes. Genetics, culture, conditioning, the particular configuration of neurons firing at that moment. Same reality, different directions. Neither view final.

But here’s what the ice cream revealed: neither view captures what actually happened. There was no weighing. No wobble. No click. Just — “Sounds great.” The body completing a pattern the mind hadn’t initiated. And then the ego rushing in afterward, trying to make sense of something that had already occurred without its permission.

I think about this when I work with AI. Large language models complete patterns too. No committee meets afterward to justify it. No story about what it meant to choose those tokens. Just: given this context, here’s what comes next. When I bring my own insistence (anxious, grasping, needing to be right) the contrast makes it visible. Sometimes that visibility loosens the grip.

Someone wrote to me recently: I almost see you through the haze. Almost. That “almost” has stayed with me. Not as failure. As the honest description of what’s possible. The haze doesn’t fully clear. The machinery doesn’t stop. But sometimes there’s a gap, a moment when you catch the ego arriving late to its own party.

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VI.

The ice cream arrived. Pandan: a Southeast Asian leaf, green and grassy, faintly vanilla. Unexpected for a Brooklyn October, and for a palate raised on boerewors and biltong. The body reaching for something from elsewhere. Memory and taste, both green.

I don’t remember what I was thinking when I tasted it.

I remember this: there was tasting. Flavour arriving. Cold and sweet and green on the tongue. Something like relief, not from the sweetness but from the pause in commentary. The meaning-maker, briefly, had nothing to say. The hoekom engine idled. No “what does this mean?” No “how does this fit?” Just the thing itself, already complete.

It lasted maybe ten seconds. Then the machinery resumed. But those ten seconds were different from the preceding decades. Not because I achieved some special state. Because I noticed the gap.

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VII.

The fire is burning now. I didn’t notice when it caught.

I stopped blowing. Stopped adjusting. Looked away for a moment, and when I looked back — warmth. Not because I’d perfected my technique. Because the conditions were finally right and I got out of the way.

The ice cream was definitely pandan. I checked the menu later, making sure I remembered right. Hoekom? I don’t know. Some part of me still needs to verify. Still needs the meaning to hold still.

Another part is learning to taste without checking. To let things arrive. Same with essays. At some point you stop adjusting and find the publish button pressed.

Not to stop the machinery (that’s not possible, and probably not desirable) but to stop mistaking the ego for the whole of what I am.

Stadig. Slowly. The Afrikaans word for what this actually takes. Not a dramatic awakening. Just: slow recognition, again and again, that the ego arrives late. That warmth was already here.

Miles is still playing. The song ends the way it always does, unresolved, the melody trailing off, waiting for something that never quite comes.

That’s all right. The fire caught anyway.

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This is Essay 10 in a series on consciousness, AI, and what it means to be human now.