I prefer a life lived in. Real perfection is necessarily imperfect: it’s polymorphous, in flux, crooked, and warm, cluttered and lopsided. You won’t find it in a catalogue. That contrived, mechanical sort of perfection is impossibly dull. Rather, you’ll find it in spiraling cells, in organisms multiplying, unfurling, evolving, wilting, copulating, decomposing, and dying. Seas and mall courts alike teem with it. Prime numbers self-contain it. It is things as they are. For me perfection is to live in the imperfect now, a now that is populated by mad curls, cast iron, cracked tea cups, whole milk, scars, asymmetry, dirty dishes, anxiety, crow’s feet, four letter words, chicken hearts, finger nail clippings, and, in this particular instance, a homely cake on an upended beer glass cake stand.   This roughly hewn cake was my very first cake, peanut butter layers with a ganache-like dark chocolate frosting and a sprinkling of fleur de sel. Nothing ground breaking here, just peanut butter and chocolate. It was a baby cake, 4″ across, and perfect in its imperfection. I’ve baked flourless chocolate cakes in bain-maries, angel food, and cupcakes before. But never a real cake, which is, as every southerner knows, a layer cake. This attempt was, as you can see, far from pristine. Some of the icing seeped into the center through what I assume was a crack in one of my layers and not some frosting worm hole in space-time, but as far as outlines and rough drafts go, this was a stalwart little cake. A small