a deluge of posts

Found a sometimes whimsical, usually weird, oftentimes clever website today called Magicmolly. If you don't like art (Yaniv) you probably won't like this website. Brian Leiter posted a link to it, to an "ad" for a food company whose foods are all named with Nietzsche puns. I wish there was an "about" section there. Very mysterious all around. A quick story that I like very much. Weird but good. This is good too.

Also, here is something I wrote while I was supposed to be thinking about Saul Kripke:

I want to be persecuted
for something so right
that I can, with a clear conscience,
tell everyone how stupid they are.

I want to say “Jesus lies!”
and make the pedophiles mad.

I want to say “Gay people love too!”
and make the unloved mad.

I want to say "Everyone knows reference is fixed by description!"
and make Kripke mad.

I want them to protest out front
in the street all night
and I’ll stand at the door, with a bullhorn in hand,
and tell them to fuck off.

MIP2K7

Remember last time? It's been two years since a full strength MIP[insert year] competition has taken place, largely because last year two of the core members were stuck in Denver because of those blizzards.

In an effort to increase the objectivity of judging Ian proposed a Craigslist ad. You should go and look at it and if you know anybody in NYC who might be interested, forward it to them.

inundational, infatuational (take #2)

Bloomington has done been dra
Ain’t got no rain since August fav
The lake is down below the piles
Impendin’ storm?
Another la

The foliage is drought shock brilliant this year with hot mustard-yellow maple leaves flapping hard in the breeze as if they seek to attract the attention of passersby. Lipstick-red oak leaves struggle to stay attached. The ones that fail skitter down the sidewalk in awkward arches, pushed by the dry wind painfully scraping the rough concrete with their brittle points and corners making that sound they make.

Sometimes it wakes me up. In the middle of the night. I think it’s funny that such a quiet sound will wake me up. But it does and I realize I’ve been grinding my teeth and clenching my jaw again. A muscle just above my left ear sizzles and pops and I can’t get my teeth to align quite right. I sit up and place my face on the wall on the molding just in front of the window and with my left hand carefully pull back two or three metal blinds and they make a sharp tinkling sound and I feel the warm Indian summer outside on my face through the glass. I rest there for a minute watching two bright, pointy, reflexed leaves slowly make their jerky way through the puddle of yellow light cast on the white concrete sidewalk by the street lamp in front of my neighbor's red jeep and it’s all really quite beautiful. It sounds like someone is slowly fastening and unfastening a small strip of Velcro next door. I can barely place it but there it is.

I release the blinds and they pop back into place and I lie down into my bed and throw the covers off and pull them back on and place a pillow between my knees and finally fall asleep again.

The city told us to conserve water in late October. The Showalter fountain has been turned off and dirt swirls in the big bowl in the wind around stranded statues of fish. Every car is dusty and the grass crunches audibly underfoot and you can’t really walk on the grass without shoes because it’s just too sharp. Monroe reservoir is low and the eighty five degree late October days have delayed the fall turnover causing fish kills along the whole length of the lake. Fifteen pound hybrid bass float blazing-white belly up under the hazy autumn sun, swelling with the gases of rotten entrails until they’re picked apart by birds feeding in their fetid tissue.

Wells are drying up in Brown County to the east and it’s hard to find bottled water in the grocery stores. People are nervous and so am I.

Jet black clouds rolled and folded ominously over the landscape from the west. They seemed miles high and dangerous. The bulging black line stretched from north to south as far as the eye could see. Reports of tornadoes in eastern Illinois were on the news, but talk of imminent relief was too. The dog whined and whimpered as crackling, startling, tornadic thunder rolled through the town shaking the house violently. The gusting winds tore down the last lipstick-red oak leaves and strewed them about the streets and yards no longer slowly raking concrete. Tornado sirens wailed.

Then the rain came down in buckets.

The leaves were swept from lawns and roads and regained their elasticity and their youth in the soaking deluge. They flexed and flopped and spread their wings and danced in the gutters hand in hand until they found themselves pressed up tightly against each other in pliable arms of red and gold and were carried quickly in the runoff towards sewer grates where they were stuck and their embrace prolonged.

We found a patch of tall, succulent green grass next to the river so we laid down on our backs with shoulders touching for a while talking. The pleasant smell of broken chlorophyll surrounded us and she rolled over on her side and propped herself up on her elbow holding her head on her hand and caressed my chest slowly under my shirt and it felt very good. We kissed in the soft afternoon sunlight that sifted down through tinted window panes of robust, dark green mid-summer leaves and the land felt overwhelmingly fertile and healthy.

She stood up slowly and adjusted her shirt and tucked some loose hair behind her ear and whispered something delicately and bent over to kiss me on my forehead and turned and walked into the tall grass up the hill away from the river. I rolled over onto my stomach to ask her where she was going but all I could see was the tops of the long leaves of grass swaying softly in the breeze.

The rain abated as quickly as it had begun and the dry, crackled earth swallowed up all that was given to it by the sky. The relentless sun reappeared, the wells still empty.

The leaves began to separate and curl up in the tense, hot, dry morning after heat. They were awkward and found relief only in coming apart. The wind picked them up and passed them down the street, distributing them widely throughout lawns and parks and sidewalks where they slowly raked the concrete and woke me up again.

congratulations Ben and Britt

NYC on the fly

The latest issue of This is Fly "dropped" recently, as they say, and I was happy to discover there were no hack-job beer pieces (see the end of that post). But more importantly, I was happy to discover part 2 of "Coney Island Zombies." Check it out. Because it's all fancy pants Flash there's no way to link to the specific page so you'll just have to navigate on over to page 95. It's quite good. Here's an excerpt:

"I walk up beside the two anglers to inspect and admire the catch. The choppers flop about with mouths full of tin, their yellow, fierce eyes screaming in thick Howard Beach accents, 'I'll kill all youz!' True fighters. Boxers and brawlers, just the way I like 'em."

Also, while I'm in a linking mood, a story about how freakin' small the roads are in England has been making the rounds. I saw it in the NY Times and then on NPR. When I was there even the big country roads were pretty fucking harrowing.

a faux beginner's guide

We always started at seven but on the first day Chris told me to show up at eight. I knocked on the door for several minutes before it opened. His small frame swayed and stumbled shirtless holding up loose, unbuttoned faded blue jeans with one hand while his giant, round, ruined glasses threatened to drop from his bulbous, swollen red nose. He was leaning back and slightly to the side where his right hand was held upon his goose neck of an arm, single finger extended lazily, others drooping loosely, his eyes traveled in two long, torturous circles, passing over my face slowly without seeing, ultimately settling on my left shoe. His body was contorted in such a way as to appear almost comical had it not been so apparent that he was in pain. He spattered something incomprehensible at me while wagging his finger vaguely behind the house then disappeared into a haze of cigarette smoke and children’s voices. I closed the door and proceeded behind the house where I saw a young man on hands and knees amongst rows of yews and aspens pretending to weed while smoking a cigarette. He was Kyle and this was the second to last time I would ever see him.

Mike secured this summer employment for me at Kalgan’s Gardening in West Chester. Mike had worked for Chris Kalgan on and off for many years so I had some idea what was in store. Chris was an alcoholic. This much I knew. But he somehow managed to run a very successful landscaping company, caring for many historic homes in Chester County. Stone and plaster homes with walls twenty inches thick, built in the 1720s, commanding thirty acre lawns dotted with forty old-growth white oak and beech trees, perched above mill races and vast arrays of outbuildings and well houses.

I liked landscaping. It was real work. The smell of fresh cut grass and two cycle exhaust is a potent aphrodisiac to the would-be philosopher. Shins plastered with grass clippings most days, arms caked with mulch dust, a ruddy complexion and hard calloused hands appealed to me when I knew I would quit in August.

Kyle and I pretended to weed the nursery and smoked cigarettes. Around noon we heard Chris yell hoarsely from the house, “Yoooooooo! We’re goin’ on a road trip! Ge up ‘ere! You’re drivin’!” And so it begins, I thought to myself. Mike had recounted many stories of his time at Kalgan’s that simply involved driving Chris around for hours, taking him to the Alley Bar in the morning and job sites during the day. Chris had earned many DUIs and lost his license to operate a motor vehicle some time ago.

“Where’re we goin’ Chris?”

“Don’t woooorry ‘bout it. You ga a full tank? We’re gonna need a full tank.”

“Um, no, I don’t have a full tank. We’re taking my car? We should take one of the trucks I think.”

Tilted always to the right, yelling strongly now, spitting with each hard consonant, holding each long vowel for several seconds in a low groan of unhinged timbres , “I wanna take yer car duuuude…I’ll buy fuckin’ gas so shut up and let’s goooooo!”

Chris sat up front with his ubiquitous, tall, milky white plastic cup half full of a red liquid I later learned was usually cheap vodka and a splash of fruit punch. He was now wearing his jeans, a dark blue, wrinkled, short sleeve collared shirt fastened by two buttons, dirty, untied white sneakers and a faded green ball cap with an absurdly long bill, his round, photo-chromatic glasses began to darken in the sunlight.

He told me to pull into Wawa. He leaned back hard in his seat trying to straighten out his legs so he could gain access to the pockets in his jeans. He finally managed to retrieve a significant wad of cash spilling twenties and hundreds on the floor and into the cup holders. He had several thousand dollars. He peeled off a twenty and I filled the tank.

“Which way?”

“Ge on to-o-ta south. We’re goin’ ta Delaware.”

We got on 202 and before Painter’s Crossing Chris was crying. Like trying to catch his breath with a series of short, deep, staccato inhalations that ended with three or four out gassings through loosely closed lips that caused them to flap and make soft smacking sounds. I had been pressing him for the details of our so-called road trip since we left Wawa and he was not terribly forthcoming. He was falling in and out of consciousness and becoming less and less coherent .

“Jus’ keeeeeep driiiiving! Aaaaaaaahm gonna fuck ‘em up! Fuck ‘em uuuuuup!” He was screaming hoarsely through a mouthful of drunken slime working it into a hot mess of froth that broke with each exhalation and splattered on my dash board. When I tried yelling at him he began crying in earnest.

Between sobs, “I’ll fuckeeeen kiiill hiiiim…I’ll fuckeeeen kill that soooon of a bitch…I have a gun and I’ll fuckeeeen uuuse it!” He was rocking back and forth with his knees gathered up awkwardly in his arms sobbing quietly, glycerin drool escaping his lips, drizzling over my parking brake handle like so much Karo syrup.

I immediately yelled at him: “Do you have a fucking gun Chris? Chris? Do. You have. A fucking. Gun?” But it was all to no avail. He was completely gone now, motionless except for the glycerin spittle. I looked back at Kyle.

“He doesn’t have a gun dude. Don’t worry about it.”

I wasn’t as confident as Kyle but I figured I’d persevere until I could extricate myself in a more graceful manner than by kicking Chris out of the moving car on the highway, though the thought did cross my mind. Chris was in and out of consciousness. Sometimes his large, yellow, rubberized Motorola cell phone would startle him awake but he could never figure out how to answer it. He became frustrated and threw the phone at the dashboard and it bounced into the lower right corner of the windshield causing several cracks to spider web out into the glass at all angles. I yelled at him some more and he continued to sob. I told him he was paying for that and we’d never take my car on a “road trip” again.

He somehow managed to get us where he apparently wanted to go. Somewhere south of Newark. A large subdivision with hundreds of two story, two bath, two car garage, cookie cutter houses stacked up next to each other on an endless arc of lane and cul-de-sac. About in the middle of this suburban American normalcy Chris demanded that I pull over. He opened his door and literally fell half way out of the car into a nicely manicured lawn, resting on his face and shoulder, right arm pinned between his body and the car seat, feet and knees propped still in the car. His shirt had come open and was tangled around his body exposing a large swath of lily white flank steak bespeckled with small brown freckles and shiny, metallic, purple stretch marks.

He lay there. Motionless. In a stranger’s quiet quarter acre yard. In the middle of Monday. In the middle of May.

Kyle and I yelled at him some more, but ultimately had to scoop him up ourselves and place him back in the car. He managed to tell us that this is where we were meeting “him” and that we had to stay in this neighborhood. “Who are we meeting Chris? Do you have a gun?” I should have left him then and there, but for some reason I didn’t. We drove to the entrance by the neighborhood marquee where he fell out of the car again, laying spread eagle on his back on the bare gray asphalt in the sun. Lily white flank steak blinding the passing traffic.

Only a few minutes had gone by when a green Dodge Ram 1500 rolled slowly into the neighborhood, past our disturbing little showcase and turned around in the first driveway. The truck parked behind my car and a heavily bearded Ernest Hemingway in dark aviator sunglasses got out. He walked over to Chris and tried to pick him up. My heart was racing. I didn’t say a thing. Hemingway said: “We’ve got to get him up. They’ll call the fuckin’ cops. Chris, you’re a fuckin’ mess dude. What the fuck! You can’t lay in the road like this in the middle of the goddamn day in the middle of this goddamn neighborhood!” He hoisted Chris into the truck cab and drove away without another word.

“Shit Kyle. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

So we left him. Driving north on 95 through Wilmington I was relieved but still unnerved. I called Mike and told him the story. He laughed. “Chris doesn’t have a gun man. He hates guns. You can’t leave him down there like that. You should go back and get him.”

“But where the fuck is he? And who the fuck is Hemingway?”

Just then Chris’ rubber phone rang from under the seat. It was Chris himself sounding slightly more coherent. “Wheeeere the fuuuuuck are you! Come pick me uuuuup!”

So we turned around. And went back to the neighborhood. And there was the green truck. And there was Chris. He walked under his own power more or less in a straight line to my car clutching an open, dewy can of Busch in one hand and two more dangling from the six pack rings in the other. He opened the back door and got in. He yelled at us a bit. He was remarkably coherent now and seemingly at ease. He was constantly fishing tiny white pills from a plastic sandwich bag in his pocket, working them quickly with nimble fingers between his narrow lips, swallowing them with Busch.

Chris told me to show up the next day at seven; I was going out with the crew to cut grass. I arrived early on Tuesday and Chris was in the driveway talking to Nazario in his distinctly pained and grumbly, though now slightly less unhinged, timbre. He was completely sober and wearing a plastic yellow hospital bracelet. He had overdosed on oxycontin the night before and had his stomach pumped in the emergency room. Sobered him right up. Then he died in the autumn time.

autumntime west chester photographic extravaganza featuring Bella

autumntime hair cut

louisville

Rapid travel down
through auburn corridors,
piercing Dixie over the river
on iron girder bridges
dissected black in squares and diamonds
against the gray night sky,
stretching out like spindly insects,
connecting north to south.

Broad boulevards
of tall tan and yellow brick buildings
collect themselves in a rush
and push uphill to the East
where they shrivel into streets
and bearded men and bespectacled women
in thick black frames
drink ‘round tables in neighborhood bars until
four in the morning on weekdays.

A soft warm breeze blows down the side street
between a bright red brick building
and our colorful muraled tavern wall
along which we sit
at round tables,
under blue umbrellas,
watching the tepid wind push
ten thousand crunchy yellow leaves
down the street a while.

Morning comes, yet another time,
still too warm for November.

We take the snaking parkway lanes
through auburn corridors again.

indianabeer all up in here

Went to Chicago's Barrel Aged Beer Fest two weeks ago tomorrow with Yaniv and Phil. Stayed with the beautiful Tracy Snowberger and generally had a very fun time. I wrote about it for Indianabeer.com and experimented with a new layout which my brother of Nimblelight fame helped me put together. Doesn't go very well with the rest of Indianabeer.com, but I think it looks pretty damn good if I do say so myself. Click the picture to be whisked away to that magical place called beer.



Don't forget about the busting wipers below.

wipers don't rise. they bust.

Well, I think I've finally become a true Midwestern fly fisher. I've gone after wiper four out of the last five days. Although it's hard not to. Lake Monroe has a very healthy population of these fish and you can catch them on the fly in the shallows off the dam. Fifteen minutes from my house. Fly fishing on a big lake is a strange thing for me. You feel terribly impotent, standing there, waving the silly little fly rod around in front of this 10,000 acre impoundment. But it's pretty cool. Kind of what salt water fly fishing is like I imagine. Kind of.

Wiper are a hybrid species bred exclusively for sport fishing (and food?) mainly in the Southeast and Midwest. They're a cross between the salt water striped bass and the freshwater white bass (hence the cute name). They are extremely aggressive and fight like a bull on cocaine. They are probably the most fightenist fish I ever done caught. I fish for them with my fast 8wt rod mainly because it helps to be able to cast 70 feet into the wind, but even the little ones put a bend in that big rod.

I've been meaning to go out after these fish and even made one half hearted attempt back in September when all I caught was this crappie on a dry fly in the spillway. Oddly enough. They were rising, what was I supposed to do?



But on Saturday, Zack of JL Water's Fly Fishing Department fame took me out to the dam and I caught three little ones (~12") in a row in about 30 minutes (unfortunately my camera batteries were dead so I didn't get any pics). Then we went up across from Fourwinds where I caught another little one.

I was pretty much hooked after that. Went back out on Sunday by myself. Nothing. Monday by myself. Nothing. (last night was Upland night). Tonight by myself: caught a few, and even a decent sized one. But they get much, much bigger. 30" long, 20lbs fat. How great would that be on a fly rod?

It apparently helps when the wind is blowing in towards the dam pretty strongly because it pushes the bait fish into the shallows and the wipers come in to feed. Every once in a while you'll see a flurry of shad skippin' across the surface of the lake fleeing for their life until WHOMPSHHH! A big old wiper comes up and busts on their aces. So you look for the fish busting and cast at 'em. But tonight it was so windy the baitfish weren't very obvious and I didn't see a single bust. But no matter. The wiper were in 3-4 feet of water and I must have stumbled onto a school of them because I caught five in a row on maybe ten casts. Just one after another. It was pretty awesome. Caught them all on Clousers. #4 orange over white was all I used on Saturday. Tonight I caught them on all white #4 and black over white unique hair with blue flash #8 (the others were all bucktail with silver flash).

Check out how much the leaves changed in just four days (maybe it's just the light). Click all for bigger.










Littlest buddy.



Bigger buddy. Click to enlarge.




And fattiest McGee. Click for bigger.

london calling?

(finally got around to putting this bit up from my trip to England this summer)

Is that a music reference? I have no idea. But I do know that Cesare "Galileo is my dad" Pastorino was born and raised in Italy. Genoa to be precise. So close to France that he has an inordinate fondness for cheese. I said: "Isn't Italy a third world country? Lots of dust, not so many trees, right? The womenfolk are constantly heckled by sweaty, annoying thirty five year old men clad in red neck bandannas that still live with their mothers? I've really got Italy's number, don't I Cesare?" You know, idle chit chat between friends. Any time someone opens their London home to me for three days when I'm abroad I introduce myself immediately by insulting their native lands.

Tamara, Cesare's live-in girlfriend (scandalous!), stood there not quite sure what to make of me. I was bearded. Large. Smelled faintly of the tumbling, tannic waters of Dartmoor and sweat. I smelled not so faintly of sweat. We had met once before, briefly, at a department party. And here I was insulting the man she loved not more than five minutes after I set foot in their nest, crashing the harmony party like so much lawn mower. "New Mexico [editor's note: Tamara's native lands] is nothing but a dressed up Mexico. More sand and dust than Italy. That's saying something. It's a filthy place."

Tamara didn't like that one bit and struck me fast across the face with the back of her right hand. With impeccably good timing Tamara took advantage of my leeward motion and drove her right knee quick to my crotch. I crumpled to the ground in a heap. A low moan escaped my lips, I curled into a ball and rocked slowly back and forth, holding the vomit in.

"Alright then, let's go the park. Throw the frisbee around."

"Ok. But let's get some beers first. We'll lay on the blanket and sip and sup the afternoon away."



Beautiful day. Blackheath Standard is quiet. We purchase several bottles of English strong ale and proceed to Greenwich Park, ten minutes walking away to the north. Blackheath is so quiet because everyone is at the park. The sun shines brightly through a clear blue sky and lukewarm breezes waft the smell of grass and trees on the air. I lick my wounds. We consume several bottles of Young's Special London Ale which is much finer fresh, untransported across the Atlantic. Truly a great ale. Perhaps the best beer I had the entire trip.

The bleak bulging grass land stretches out before us endlessly. We skirt the edge arriving at the brewpub perched on a high corner where the street swoops down and around the patio like swirling stone bathwater carrying pedestrians into the bowels of Blackheath.

Zerodegrees Micro-Brewery is a small chain of brewpubs with locations in Bristol, Reading and Blackheath. Pretty fancy pants modern decor. Lots of glass and gleaming stainless steel. Slick logos and well placed beams of light shine from mysterious origins. They make a Pilsner, a Dark Lager, an American Pale Ale, and a Wheat. Not exactly your traditional English establishment. The Pilsner and Dark Lager were quite good. As clean as freshly polished glass and gleaming steel. I was interested to see American styles exported to the UK. All Cascade hops in the Zerodegrees Pale Ale. It was above average, but nothing special. Didn't try the wheat.

Two pots of mussels: one Thai style, one cajun style. They were excellent. Two pizzas (that Cesare endorses). Two orders of fries. Several beers. Fat, fat, fat. We walk it off down into Blackheath, led by the smell of fried food like Atlantic Salmon back to their natal rivers. We arrive at an assortment of fried foods so glorious and artery clogging that I gasp and exclaim, "Good god man! Is this a common type of shop?" Apparently it is. But we were quite full already and passed up the fried foods in order to indulge in Magnum handheld ice cream bars. I got the brand new Ecuador Dark. Tasty.

We crossed the heath like Ethelred the Unready. Wasted by a day in the park, mussels, ice cream, fighting Viking invaders, ours is a hard life.

The next day we took the train to Southwark near the old Thrale's Anchor Brewery, one of the most famous breweries from London's porter heydays. We went to The Market Porter pub, one of the better real ale venues in the city. Eleven real ales on at any time and one real cider. They typically go through 50 different casks a week. The bartender was very cool and gave me samples of lots of different beers. The ceiling was covered in pump clips from the beers that have passed through the pub. They fill the ceiling in less than a year.





The Sussex Best Bitter (4% abv) was quite bitter actually, grapefruit rinds, well put together. Royal Oak showed big, rich malts. Bolton's Port O'Call Porter was mellow and chocolaty. Beowulf Beorma from Staffordshire (3.9% abv) was light and extremely drinkable.

From here we took the tube north to an obscure residential neighborhood whose name escapes me now and I didn't write it down. We had dinner outside at a pub with pints of Wychwood from the cask (of course). Then we walked a couple blocks into an even more obscure section of the neighborhood to the Wenlock Arms, perhaps London's most traditional of cask ale outlets. It was a dirty bar. Well lived in. Old red carpet. Everything dusty. We were by far the youngest folks there.







I had a half pint of Crouchvale Brewer's Gold (4.0% abv), Champion Beer of Britain in 2005 and 2006. Very light color. Hint of apricots. Good. Old Bear in the Red (4.5%) was crap. Artificial red coloring made it look like a red light but didn't taste bad. Earl Soham Gannet Mild (3.3%) was quite good with a touch of chocolate malt character and herbal tea like hops. A great, traditional mild. Glad I got to try it. Unfortunately they had just run out of a Dark Star ale, one of the more famous traditional British beers amongst beer geeks here in the states.

The pub was a hot box with no breeze. A very hot day in London.

England really isn't a great place to go beer sampling. I know that sounds crazy, but we're spoiled in America. In England, everything is a bitter. Milds and porters are extremely rare and really not all that different from bitter. Dann Paquette has a pretty good piece in this month's Beer Advocate magazine pretty much lamenting the homogeneity of British beer. Sure, it's great for traditional English real ale. But after not too long they all taste the same. In England, beer is for drinking, not for "tasting." And I actually think that's a good thing. But if you're a standard American beer geek looking for a wide experience in a foreign land, Belgium's probably a better place to be.

We walked fairly far south from there (maybe took the tube too?) to Chiswell Street and the old Whitbread brewery, another of London's famous porter breweries from the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It was cool to see it as we talk about it in my beer class. Unfortunately it's being converted into luxury apartments.





We took the tube back down to Southwark and the train to Greenwich (I think) and hung out there by the observatory. We sat around in the park and got some drinks at a Philadelphia Phillies themed hot dog restaurant. I shit you not. I told the guy I was from Philadelphia and he asked me if I knew a lawyer he knew in Jersey. I didn't.