Chowbacca!

Emily

2022-04-05T07:04:00.002-07:00

She had languished in the kitchen for a few days, settled, resigned.

Perhaps she was trying to make a point: don't neglect me. Or maybe, in my haste to assuage my guilt for having done so, I was too aggressive in my efforts to compensate for my absence.

I had taken her out a night or two before when it was warm. Warm weather made me think of Emily, and she liked warm days. But she was distant, unlively. I lavished her the only way I knew how: dining her extravagantly.

I fed her the rest of the dark rye. Then the new King Arthur I had shipped to my house (24lbs, all in 2lb packages, that I poured into my large blue-top Cambro one by one). I even gave her some granulated sugar.

I was ready to call in reinforcements in the person of Tasia Bernie, my personal "trainerpist," and one of my closest friends. Her sourdough starter was called Henrietta, and she had been expertly keeping Henrietta alive for quite a lot longer than I had been keeping Emily alive. I figured she'd know how I could save Emily; the thought of losing her again filled me with profound sadness.

It occurred to me that maybe in all of my forced attempts to coax her back, I had simply overwhelmed her. Flour had settled to the bottom of the tall plastic measuring cup I had placed her in, and a layer of cloudy, yellowed water lay on the top, with a thin skin growing on the surface of the water of what would surely blossom as mold if I allowed it to sit much longer.

I gave her a stir to distribute the colonies of microbes that made up her unique personality and poured most of her down the drain. What remained I diluted with additional water and a bit more flour. When I returned several hours later, I was relieved to see the top of her dotted with tiny bubbles.

Emily lives on!

I met Emily Salzfass in 1992 in what would have been my senior year in high school. Instead, I was repeating my junior year at an artsy boarding school I pleaded with my dad to let me attend, contrasting the stiff-lipped "Dead Poets Society" schools he wanted.

I immediately liked Emily, and I don't know of anyone who didn't also immediately like her. What sort of person would they be if such a person ever existed? Only the most jaded misanthrope wouldn't take to Emily's enthusiastic weirdness.

Of course, Emily wasn't always lightness and air. There was a seriousness lurking beneath the surface. She was so bright. Smarter than I have words to describe. I think she would want me to try.

I can sense her right now, seeing the serviceable gears in my mind slipping and eventually finding a purchase to move the axel to advance the hand one tick as the camera zooms in on the second hand. The minute hand advances, a tick. Everything falls into place at once: the sun through the window onto the table by the bed, the clock, the metal hammers on springs now hitting the tiny bells as a small thin hand comes out from under the covers to smack the snooze button as the clock falls off the edge. She pulls the covers over her head and utters, "dammit!"

I can see her chuckle warmly at the small, probably bad little play I just wrote.

I see her smile slightly, cock her head ever so slightly to the right, and put her hands in her pocket.

It is raining, and "Brother's in Arms" is playing. Leo McGarry says, "watch this."

Scene.

I can't blame my starter for being mad at me for neglecting her. But it wasn't exactly my fault, you see.

I traveled to Cleveland 10 days prior for neither business nor pleasure.

When last I saw my sister Jenny in person the previous summer (in Portland), she leveled an uncomfortable truth: "if Mom makes it through the next year, we will have to revisit her living situation." She will have run out of money to afford the posh retirement home and skilled nursing that has sustained her since we moved her out of the modest home that was too big for her. Where she lived alone.

She was unable to get up the stairs easily anymore, and after she cracked a vertebra, she moved into the living space adjacent to the kitchen and slept on a hospital bed. Jenny would say that I was soft-pedaling to say that she had always been a bit of a hoarder, but Jenny was pragmatic about these details and did not see much value in beating around the bush.

Jenny showed me a scale of severity for hoarders, as she is wont to quantify things with hard data, and as I read the descriptions of levels of hoarding, I had to come to grips with the reality that Mom was more than "a bit of a hoarder." We (mostly Jenny) took on clearing the house out. Mostly I fucked off and partied with my ne'er-do-well friends until Jenny had enough and dressed me down in front of my friend Lochen. He and I went to work clearing out boxes of junk into industrial-sized bins in the backyard.

Mom has a smaller collection of curated items that she brought with her but less area to clutter. These days, Mom was hoarding was an ever-growing list of chronic conditions: back problems, knee problems, thyroid problems, heart problems, and of course, morbid obesity.

This was all starting to come to a head. Two weeks before I flew to Cleveland, Jenny would write in her daily status update emails that "hard decisions" might need to be made soon. Powers of attorney, medical wishes, end-of-life plans, hospice care.

Jenny had dropped everything to fly to Cleveland, where she would have daily meetings with doctors and visit Mom in her hospital room. It is the end of February 2022, nearing the second anniversary of the pandemic lockdown. But she could only sustain that routine so long, and I agreed to relieve her so she could return to Seattle. If needed, we would go on a rotation until circumstances with Mom changed one way or the other.

Just before I flew to Cleveland, Jenny stayed at Dad's house. He was in Georgia with our step-mom visiting his sister Jane. The house had been professionally staged for sale, but you would hardly notice. The house looked like a movie set for a film about fastidious baby boomers. I could tell some chairs, and maybe a couch or two had been replaced with furniture brought in by the stagers. They were ever so slightly out of place and maybe a touch tackier.

I thought about renting a car, but my eyesight is getting worse, and I haven't driven in so long that I wasn't feeling too confident. I also knew I'd become a taxi service for my brother, ferrying him back and forth from his group home. Little things about cars that I don't deal with piled on: parking, anxiety over whether it would be broken into, and, worse than anything else, that there was a snowstorm forecasted.

It snowed in typical Cleveland weather fashion, the temperature fell to the teens, and three days later, the mercury was pushing up north of 75ºF.

University Hospitals had been limiting visitation to one person a day due to the Omicron surge, but when I arrived in town, the hospital had eased that restriction from one to two. I had wanted to coax my little brother into visiting her with me (we would have to spend time with Mom in serial, not together). He wasn't up to it, so I split my time briefly visiting with him at the group home, which comes with its own depressing baggage, and the hospital.

When I went to the hospital, it was by bus. The bus is a strange way to travel even during the lull in the pandemic, but most everyone is masked, and the air is cycled quickly. I had to walk about a mile (I missed the bus the first time, so I went up the road to do it, going in the wrong direction). The bus filled with high school kids. Buses run every half hour, which is comparatively infrequent to what I am accustomed to in San Francisco, and a few times, I simply walked down the hill to the hospital.

I was screened and had my temperature read and given a black and white printed photo-ID to wear outside my clothes good for a week. I wasn't screened again on my way in, but you would get a sticker with the corresponding numbered day each day. I kept the sticker from the 13th on my Lucky 13 hoodie. My ID was clipped to the draw-string.

I paid lip service to the sourdough craze of the early part of 2020 and had myself dabbled in bread in the past with mixed results. I had a few white whales that I sought, with vanishingly few wins, namely open crumb loaves of bread like ciabatta.

Ciabatta means "slipper"; the loaves are elongated and do not get much height. An open crumb structure, or bubble structure, means large holes in the bread made from expanding steam. A ciabatta loaf has a crunchy crust. Both crumb structure and crust texture result from a comparatively wetter dough. This makes the dough much harder to manage, more like a sticky unwieldy blob than a loaf, so most ciabatta loaves have excess bench flour on the crust's surface.

After years of trial and error, having only successfully accomplished this type of bread a handful of times, I have largely shelved the notion of pursuing the white whale of an open crumb structure – at least not until I get the basics nailed down.

Of course, a significant impediment to that goal is my stubborn refusal to measure anything that goes into bread dough. This vexes (or would vex, if I admitted it openly) many friends who do a much better job making bread than I do, likely due partly to their ability to read and follow recipes.

When I follow a recipe, I tend to start to approximate ingredients when I see fit, and after a few tries, I will go "off-book."

Before I left for Cleveland, I was experimenting with sourdough bagels. I start with a New York Times recipe as a jumping-off point, then launch into my (often unsuccessful) jazz improvisations.

For instance, I tried making a bagel with dry dill and diced shallots but added not enough of either to push the finished product's flavor far enough in the direction I wanted. I tried a sweet bagel to which I added too much pie spice and not enough sugar.

On my return, I tried to do an onion bagel, pre-cooking the onions to soften and cutting the pieces larger so they would be more noticeable. I under-kneaded and over-proofed my little bagels and tossed them into the oven when I got home at night rather than chucking the dough into the compost.

One time I found myself at sea with an uncooperative starter. Seeking Tasia's council, she asked me a question I couldn't answer: what is the ratio of flour to water.

Eventually, I settled on "getting correct" on taking care of my starter and naming her Emily.

This was not long before the ninth anniversary of Emily's death.

I did not put much effort into chasing down friends I had pledged to see in Cleveland. A lot of this was due to my familial obligations, and a lot of this was because my friends fell into two categories: those with day jobs or school and those with night jobs that were awake when I wasn't and asleep when I was.

I had a couple of meals with a couple of friends. I was disappointed that I never got a chance to see many more, and looming over my head was a dark cloud of urgency because you really never know. There's a last time for everything.

Mom was well enough to be moved back into her retirement home, and I spent time with her talking about TV and listening to her stories. She would talk, and her eyes appeared to be closed half the time, as if on the precipice of sleep. Then she would tire out, and I'd leave. I'd go wander around for a while, maybe, but usually just head back to Dad's, pop some Trazodone, and be in bed at or before dusk.

This was the least fun I had in Cleveland in a long time, but for reasons new to me. I imagined the next time I would have to fly home, and that being even less fun.

Mom was stable enough that I could take my scheduled flight home. I didn't sleep on the plane, even though I had not slept at all the night before my 6:30AM flight. Into town on the red-eye, out of town red-eyed. Instead of thinking too hard about what was going on in my life at that moment, after holding myself together while stupidly listening to the saddest music I could find on my Walkman, I eventually settled on distracting myself by monitoring the progress of the aircraft.

Somewhere west of the Mississippi, over Nebraska maybe, I connected to in-flight Wi-Fi and tracked the flight as it advanced slowly west on the flight map. I tuned into the live air traffic controller feeds when we were somewhere east of Provo, straining to hear updates about the flight's progress. I tried to determine what frequencies and call centers my flight was in, comparing the flight map with online maps of the regional air traffic control centers. Soon I could see familiar ridges on the eastern Sierras and knew we would be vectored in as we handed off from Salt Lake Center to NORCAL Approach. I watched as we came in over the Altamont Pass, I-5 stretching forever in either direction north or south of the flight path. Then the familiar crinkles of Livermore and the salt flats of the south bay between Fremont and San Jose. Moffet Field, the Dumbarton Bridge, the San Mateo Bridge, and finally wheels down on 28-R.

I had told work I would be online when I got home that Friday, but I think no one expected much out of me. Instead, I took a long nap and headed out into the San Francisco evening to get a proper burrito.

I took Emily out of the fridge. It seemed like a morgue to me.

"This place makes the best bacon for brunch in West Hollywood," she said.

"That's not very Kosher of you, is it, Emily?"

"Worth it," as she snatched up another rasher.

Across the street was a big Scientology building, painted blue, patrolled by armed security guards on mountain bikes.

I think I had a Denver omelet, or maybe eggs benedict, and Emily pushed food around her plate. She was skinnier than I remembered her from high school and more glamorous. I guess I hadn't noticed how pretty she was, but neither she nor I were exactly mavens of high fashion at the time. We spent a lot of time together in the school computer lab during evening study hours, having fabricated one pretense or another to get out of being required to stay in our rooms like most other boarding students.

She, me, Pierce, Ben, Alex, and Otto. A lot of the time, we'd just screw around. Emily was always writing. Otto and Alex were mean and "cool," and I hung around like a ridiculous yappy sidekick. I got caught up in dumb computer hijinx.

Los Angeles was the first time I saw her in person since getting kicked out of boarding school.

I was in the area doing a contract IT job. This time in my life was the start of what Tony Bourdain would call "the wilderness years." Really, though, it was the "wilderness decade," spanning 2010 to 2019. In retrospect, the aughts were a rough patch for me, but the decline accelerated in the teens after "the outage."

The job was pitched to me as 80% remote and 20% travel to Los Angeles. The actual job was in Thousand Oaks, about an hour north of Los Angeles in Ventura County, and it was more like 80% in Thousand Oaks and 20% remote. By the time I quit, the job had taken a good chunk of my soul and left me with nothing to show in exchange.

Emily and I had reconnected where everyone connected with their former classmates – on Facebook – a few years prior. We made several attempts to get together during my purgatory in Ventura County but only finally were able to meet up one time. It was 2011, now a full 19 years since the last time I saw her.

She seemed to be making up for that lost time by tossing me into the rapids, words like water rushing past. We talked about how she had a housecleaner who kept trying to get her to take one of those free personality tests, you know, the kind with the E-meter. And that vitamin stores were a front for Dianetics; they were everywhere in Los Angeles, selling pills to line Miscavige's pockets. We talked about the Writer's Guild strike of 2007 and 2008; she was in Los Angeles trying to carve out a living writing screen- and teleplays. She had a picket sign autographed by my high school classmate whom she met at Wesleyan, Carter. She loved Doctor Who, especially David Tennant. She had worked on Farscape and wrote a manga about the RDM Battlestar Galactica. She wrote elaborate fanfics on LiveJournal.

I walked her home, away from the Sunset Strip, and we talked about Elliott Smith. I had made a pilgrimage to the music store that bore the mural that graces the cover of Figure 8, the last full-length album he would release before he died. The sidewalks were abutted by dry lawns, mostly beige patches of dirt and rocks and stubborn tufts of brownish grass.

She invited me in to chat more, and I sat on the edge of her bed in her cluttered room. We smoked cigarettes and talked about friends in common. I immediately recognized the habitat of a disorganized, probably disquieted mind because it closely resembled the apartments I lived in and the rooms I slept in. The explosive ephemera of the overwhelmed.

I didn't see her again until she moved to Oakland to be closer to her sister and parents. She struggled with making ends meet and had severe bouts of depression and anxiety, and I hung out with her a few times: coffee, dinner, a board game night at a bar near Temescal, more coffee.

She had moved close to Lake Merrit in Oakland, her own place, and she had taken in an emotional support dog of sorts. He was not an actual service animal, and he was not potty trained, so Emily would warn me to avoid certain spots because he would often miss the pee pads she had laid out for him. The picket sign hung on her wall and a poster of David Tennant. She made me coffee, and we talked about nothing and everything for a while.

We tried to make plans to hang out, but she had her problems, and I mine, so I never saw her again.

On Facebook, she complained of pain in her chest. She would see a doctor soon, she wrote.

She died a little more than a week shy of her birthday in her sleep.

I don't really follow recipes for making bread. Maybe I should, but sometimes I just like to follow where it goes.

Dammit.

2021-09-18T00:08:00.002-07:00

Rails Across America - Part Five: Lake George Region

2021-08-31T06:19:00.004-07:00

The author is grilling at his cousin's rented house in Bolton Landing. One of his insufferably cute but misbehaved dogs is in the background.

Family

Edgar is a name we call Uncle Ted in jest, but we often refer to him as Uncle Stretch as he is a very tall man. Whenever I greet him, I give him 4 1/2. Ted lost half a finger in a construction accident decades ago. I have learned to downplay my association with the Bixbys. Uncle Stretch will often introduce me to folks around town with whom he thinks I should have a relationship. Uncle Ted knows that I, like his wife (my aunt), are seekers of hidden details, relationships, and history.

...

Aunt Jane is not only the town historian for Bolton Landing but has also taken it upon herself to chronicle our family history. Like his mother before him, my father eschews our ties to the Deep South. His mother was born to poor farmers in Alabama. Grandpa was from southern Georgia. My grandmother was married once before meeting my grandfather to a man everyone called Grady. Much of his history is clouded in mystery. It is said that he was a strikebreaker who broke ranks to become a labor activist. In retaliation, family lore claims that he was assassinated right in front of my grandmother – shot in the head through a window. Officially, he committed suicide.

Grandma had an older sister who died within a year of her birth. Her oldest brother stepped in front of a train, committing suicide. Family lore also has it that an aunt of my grandma was murdered while at a sanitarium. It is suggested that this person may have been institutionalized because she was a lesbian.

...

My grandpa's photo adorns my desk, holding my father as an infant. Grandpa was felled in 1967 by a massive stroke.

My grandpa was a legendary Southern gentleman and a principled man. I am sure I have shared this anecdote before, but I will summarize it briefly here.

One Friday night, Grandma had labored to produce a family meal. These gatherings were of particular importance to her, perhaps due to the many family tragedies that hung over my grandma. Just as they were about to start supper, the phone rang. As my aunt told it, Grandma glanced at Grandpa as if to say, "Do not dare answer that phone." Calls at that hour were rare. Grandpa assumed, rightly, that the call might be important.

It was.

Grandpa ran a trucking service, and many of his drivers were Black. One of his drivers had been arrested in southern Ohio on some trumped-up charge. Southern Ohio in the late 1950s was a dangerous place to be in jail if you were a Black man, as that was an area where the law was the Ku Klux Klan, and the Ku Klux Klan was the law. Family dinner would have to wait. Grandpa drove south a couple of hours to pay off the local constabulary. He bailed the driver out and returned hours later with the man just as the sun rose.

So the story goes.

Ancient History –

How a City Girl Made a Fool of Herself to the Townies

"You should jump into the lake" was the advice Uncle Stretch gave my roommate, CTR, after a night of drunken debauchery where she made an absolute fool of herself.

Bolton Landing is a small town.

My roommate was so mortified by the embarrassment of the whole ordeal that she, to this day, vows never to return to Bolton Landing.

We'll see about that.

I won't go into the details – that's her story – but I will summarize it this way: native San Franciscan arrives in a seemingly backwater Upstate New York town. It proceeds to vociferously make it known how much better it is to be from a "big city" (never mind that New York is a mere few hours down the road). Then we hit the local bars.

After allowing her to sleep it off and sleep in, my uncle, who has always been a tad mischievous, parades her down the main drag of Bolton Landing, where all the locals recognize her and kindly greet her.

I would like to think the lesson here is that one should never denigrate another's home, and even better, one should never underestimate the consequences.

(I am sure all the cutesy denigration I've done about Iowa or other places will haunt me later.)

CTR really stepped in it. And it was sweet, delicious schadenfreude to watch her suffer.

Bixby's Best

Cousin Sam has taken up the mantle of producing arguably some of the best maple syrup in the country. It is painstakingly harvested from over 1100 acres of maple trees planted by settlers in the region in the 1800s.

The process of producing maple syrup, at least the good stuff, involves tapping and collecting sap from the end of February through March. February in Bolton Landing is cold and harsh. 40 gallons of sap must be collected and boiled down to produce a single gallon of syrup.

This isn't work for the faint of heart nor amateurs: until recently, save a beat-up pickup truck, Sam employed the same techniques used in the 19th century for distilling syrup with a wood-burning oven in a tin sugar shack.

Precise timing, as with anything involving the cooking and distilling of sugar, can mean the difference between prized "B-grade" (or, as it is now known, "Amber") or burnt syrup.

It is a labor of love, and Sam's syrup does not come cheap.

His website, www.bixbysbest.com, has a nice section on the "Bixby's Best" story and some of the processes around producing it.

This is not how my cousin makes a living—he is a builder at heart, like his father. I hope he continues producing Adirondack gold, but I know that it may prove too much time and effort with diminishing returns.

That would be a real shame.

President Ulysses S. Grant's jar of cocaine water.

Ulysses S. Grant's final repose

Having spent some days recently organizing my vinyl record collection (and "painstakingly" cataloging them with an app called Discogs), I have learned a little about some albums' value and rarity.

I have learned that most of my collection if it has any value at all, that value is sentimental. Aside from this, one of the higher ticket items is a box set I recently bought that has shot up in value by a factor of three.

Anyway, I know very little about the value of albums and even less about the value of books. So when my aunt recommended a title to read for background on the final days of President Ulysses S. Grant, "The Captain Departs" by Thomas M. Pitkin (published 1973), it came as a bit of a shock to me that the hardcover edition of the book sells for nearly $800. Paperback versions must be specially ordered and can take up to a month to arrive – even in the Bezos-sphere. (I would be ordering it from either Mac's Backs Books in Coventry Village or from Green Apple Books here in San Francisco, and still might.)

The point of this segue is that I will be flying blind here concerning the details I can recall from a field trip my aunt, her college friend Sally, and I took to the town of Wilton, New York, just south of Glen's Falls, to visit Grant's Cottage.

The first thing you will notice driving up to Grant's Cottage on Mount McGregor is the giant institutional grey building rising up. That's the Mount McGregor Correctional Facility (now closed); the building wasn't always a prison. However, it started out as a sanitorium for persons suffering from the tuberculosis outbreak, spreading across the northeast in the early part of the 20th century.

A theory proposed in the latter half of the 19th century held that patients suffering from "consumption" (an antiquated term for the disease) benefited from being placed at altitudes significantly above sea level. The "Sanitorium on the Mountain" was one such site for high-altitude therapy. Still, it is not the first time the area was given to palliative care (as was often the case for tuberculosis sufferers).

The sanitarium was built in 1913. A vaccine was developed in France eight years later but was not widely distributed in the United States until the mid-1950s.

Grant's Cottage is where the former president resided for his final days. He died in 1885 of throat cancer.

Having a cocktail at Bolton Landing's "industry" bar, Lily's.

Lily's

There is a bar in the middle of Bolton Landing that is closed most of the year and opens up at 9PM at night during the "season."

The bar is called Lily's. It is run by a beast of a man named Bart, whom I am proud to call my friend. It is the closest Bolton Landing comes to what we would call an "industry bar."

Bolton Landing is not a big city, but it is where Big City types go to get wild. Because it is not a big city, though, Lily's is often out of supplies that would be easy to get in New York or Brooklyn: Jameson, plastic cups, bitters, ice, and PBR.

Bolton Beans is a diner built inside a faux 1950s streetcar. Locals fuel up on caffeine and eggs there.

The namesake furniture for the region.

Dill in the hoop house.

The Clan Bixby

As the story goes, William K. Bixby was a baggage handler and night watchman for the International & Great Northern Pacific Railroad in Texas. There, he caught the interest of H. M. Hoxie, who led to Bixby's eventual move to St. Louis, Mo., to rise in the ranks of the Union Pacific Company and later become a founder, president and board member for the American Car & Foundry Company. He retired at age 48.

Must be nice.

One of William K.'s six children, Harold M., became a banking magnate and major contributor to Charles Lindbergh's trans-Atlantic flight. Bixby suggested that Lindbergh name his aircraft "The Spirit of St. Louis."

As the story goes, Bixby suggested the name "Spirit of St. Louis" in honor of Paris's patron saint, Louis IX (Saint Louis).

What is not often mentioned is that "Saint Louis" is the name of the 1896 Elco Electric that docks in a boathouse owned by the Bixby family at their summer estate at Mohican Point.

It is the priciest ride I've been on, costing seven figures, that didn't involve metal detectors and safety placards.

Harold M. Bixby's business interests necessitated frequent visits to China, where he was fluent in the language, and the artwork pictured above was gifted to him by associates in China.

Bixby's money and influence dominate the western shores of Lake George, as do the clan's progeny.

"Six generations of freeloaders," as my father has quipped in describing the hordes of misbehaving trust-fund kids that descend upon Bolton Landing in the summer. I have learned to downplay that I am a third cousin to the horde.

I think about the contrast between my Uncle, Aunt, and cousins Sam and Ruben, who choose to remain in Bolton Landing year-round, and the ascot and open-toe sandal-wearing preppies who terrorize the townies from the Fourth of July to Labor Day. Jane and Stretch built their home from the burnt-out foundation of an ancestor's cabin in the woods; the only part of the original structure left was a brick chimney. The Caldwell boys build for a living, originally with their bare hands alongside their father.

The decision to pursue a less comfortable life despite the generational wealth strikes me as behavior worth modeling: instead of jet-setting, both my aunt and uncle were public school teachers. My aunt is a researcher and historian, a collector of stories. My uncle is the builder of things, with scars and a half-missing digit to show for it.

As I travel south on the Ethan Allen, a train route connecting Montreal to Grand Central Station, I think about this.

40 Is The New Portlandia: Spring 2015 PNW Junket Omnibus Edition

2021-03-27T11:50:00.004-07:00

March 2015.

I had no plan.

Well, I had a plan: bug out of town for the 40th anniversary of my mother birthing me ("...it was the last big blizzard of 1975, your father drove me through a snowstorm in the dead of night...").

Yes, thank you, mom and dad. Here's to all moms and dads.

40. The big four-oh.

The number weighed down on me.

I packed my "go bag" and fled for Oakland. I had a few drinks with friends, grabbed a burrito for the road (and a bottle of Jim Beam), and then hopped on the Coast Starlight, blasting along into the dead of night with its big diesel engine to points north.

Eugene, Oregon.

After scarfing down a French dip at the Jackalope Bar and Grille (conveniently across from the Eugene Amtrak Station), I check into the motel, the Campus Inn Eugene.

There's about a half-mile walk between the motel and what locals refer to as "The Barmuda Triangle" in "downtown" Eugene.

I made the slow walk every evening to The Horsehead, playing Ingress along the way, smashing and capturing portals, linking, and fielding.

About 3/4 of the way, there is a small courtyard where the local gutter punks and vagrants congregate – usually runaway teens, some aging into their 20s, often from disparate corners of the country coming into Eugene, usually by rail.

A young man stops to ask me if I worked for Union Pacific, so I look up from my Ingress scanner (ahem, iPhone), confused, and tell him no, I don't work for Union Pacific.

The man seems relieved and lifts his hat, revealing a nasty scar where, he alleges, railroad employees gave him what appears to be a pretty ruthless beating for hopping freight trains.

The man, maybe just barely 19, or maybe even 17, carries his body like a 40-year-old. He refers to himself as a hobo and proudly describes his preferred method of transit: illegally hopping freight trains.

Teens from around the country jump on freight trains just as they pull out of the depot, a risky proposition that often results in injury and worse; with those injuries and deaths, a great deal of liability to the freight operators.

The legend goes that hopping trains is "discouraged" by swift and brutal punishment meted out to would-be train hoppers. If true, it explains the man questioning my employment status with the rail operator.

"I'll trade you my hat for yours," says the man, presenting me with a dirt-crusted ball cap I avoid inspecting too closely.

"I'll pass," I tell the kid, offering him a few dollars to buy a tall boy of domestic lager. I make my way toward the center of the Barmuda Triangle, adjusting my Union Pacific cap as a light springtime drizzle breaks out momentarily. A brief gust of wind smacks cables and ropes into flagpoles and against the sides of buildings, shaking the leaves with a hiss.

"Who is General Shinseki?"

I spent the whole next day in the dark, nursing a mild-to-medium-strength hangover, working, and watching Jeopardy on the hotel television.

A work project would keep me tied up for a couple of days... which suited me just fine, not wanting to turn the remaining days until my 40th birthday into some sort of marcia-funebre to the death of my extended adolescence.

When the clock officially ticked past midnight on my birthday, I found myself sitting at a bar in an "adult entertainment establishment" with my platonic she-bro, Meenk, splitting a plate of pretty excellent fettuccine Alfredo made in the kitchen adjacent to the bar.

I ordered a round of rye whiskey for the occasion, toasted Meenk and her friend, a bouncer at the club, then raised a glass toward the main stage where a young gal was showing off an impressive array of upside-down twirls on the pole.

No disrespect was intended for the hard-working gals in strip clubs, but I was more interested in the pasta and gossiping with Meenk. Some of the best bar food I'd had in my life came out of the kitchens of these sorts of establishments.

'Why would you go to a strip club?' and 'Ew, you must be a pervert' are thoughts that have occurred to some of you reading this. As for the former... I don't know, it seemed like an interesting thing to do (it turns out it wasn't, other than the excellent fettuccine), as for the latter, you're damn right I am, and what's it to you?

Not that it matters, and certainly not in my own defense, I do not frequent those sorts of establishments – but when my former roommate, a cook and an ex-Marine, worked as a bouncer for a strip club around the corner from my day job, I went directly to the strip club from my office every day to meet him near the end his shift.

I would sit at the bar, have a drink, chat with the cocktail waitresses and dancers, listening to their stories.

My relationship with the women who worked there was different than the relationships those women had with the sales team at the office, all men, who would have two-hour liquid lunches at the club and would show up again promptly for happy hour. They called themselves "the five-oh-one club."

Some of the relationships that developed between the dancers and a few of our lead salesmen were strikingly complex—that is, not merely the exploited and exploiters (who exploits who, depending on your perspective) but a depressing yet almost endearing interplay of needy people seeking affection and validation.

Make no mistake, the strip club scene is rife with abuse and exploitation. Still, the most indignant and prudish among us tend to immediately shame those who make a living as sex workers (and it is, legal or otherwise, sex work). Sex work is an easy target for people to point at and feel superior about while totally ignoring the abuse and exploitation going on in all other aspects of modern life.

So if you find yourself in a strip club, at least be nice to your cocktail waitress, tip the bartender, and give some cash to the dancing women – even if you are politely declining the solicitation of a lap dance.

It's a tough job.

(As an update, an armed terrorist has just recently committed a racist and sexist hate crime that left eight dead in the Atlanta, Georgia, area. Six were Asian women working at massage parlors.

This attack follows an alarming trend of increasing violence not only against Asians but the ongoing violence against sex workers.

Or it's always been there, but people have overlooked it.)

Part of me just wanted to be back in the blackness of my hotel womb, and besides, I had a train to catch the next day to go to Portland for a few days.

That's as far as I had planned.

I had not booked a return trip to California.

For a moment, I wondered if I would ever go back.

Meenk and I closed our tab at the strip club ("...bartender's singing Clementine..."), and I returned to the hotel, where I would toss and turn until 6am when the hot tub reopened.

I donned my swim trunks, left the room, grabbed my coffee from the hotel registration office, and soaked in the spa for 10 or 15 minutes before getting everything ready for check-out.

The Patty Melt, my mother's favorite sandwich and one of mine, was sadly overcooked and lacking enough caramelized onions.

First hangover breakfast of 40 at the pancake house that was torn down and turned into condos. Even Eugene isn't safe.

Even the onion rings disappointed. Here, they are just a touch past overcooked, like the burger, which I suppose is better than limp. This is the usual mistake made when transferring onion rings straight from the big Sysco box in the walk-in freezer to the fryer.

A Manhattan and oysters on the eve of my birthday at Marché in Eugene's Market Square.

My friend Geni commented on a picture of this same sandwich next to an unholy pile of French fries, voicing concerns about the impact on my health, so this time, I ordered the famous Horsehead catfish sandwich with a side of collard greens (this includes a healthy fist-full of bacon pieces).

Charlie, who I met through a mutual friend at the Horsehead, has been making a life-size papier-mâché human bone by bone, tendon by tendon, and muscle by muscle.

Portland, Oregon.

A Czech motorbike and sidecar owned by a high school friend.

Apizza Scholls.

I've been to The French Laundry. I've been to Atelier Crenn. I've visited Gary Danko, Harris Steak House, Lola, and many more fancy-pants restaurants.

What I wanted for dinner on my birthday was pizza—not just any pizza, but the best pizza on the West Coast.

I wanted Apizza Scholls.

I have had 40 years to contemplate which foods I love and why... one of the foods I love more than anything else is bread, and another is cheese. Adding sauce and just a few scant toppings gives you food that is one of humankind's greatest achievements: pizza.

Like sex and beer, pizza is good even when it's not so good; when it's bad, well, at least it's pizza.

Breaking pizza down to its constituent components, again, we have bread, sauce, and cheese.

I could easily go on for paragraphs, pages, and volumes about the impact bread has had on modern Western society (including the noodle, and you encompass the entire globe practically).

Bread is hard and yet easy.

All you need is milled grains, water, salt, and the air you breathe – full of invisible-to-the-eye spores and microbes ready to consume the starches and sugars in any grain, fruit, or vegetable whose path they might cross.

For humans emerging from the last ice age in and around the fertile crescent near modern-day Iraq, cultivating grains was the hardest part. Milling the grains, mixing the flour with water, and discovering that the paste would ferment, bubble, and rise—that was the job of nature.

All dough was sourdough until just a few hundred years ago, when (in my opinion), to our great detriment, we discovered the exact microbe responsible for converting starch into two useful byproducts: carbon dioxide and alcohol. Fast-forward and you have a plethora of mass-produced commercial bread, some of which contain no yeast at all but instead a litany of unpronounceable ingredients. What is enriched flour? We stripped all the nutrients from the production process and added them back.

Better living through chemistry?

Well, it wasn't all bad – the discovery of Saccharomyces cerevisiae (from the Latinized Greek "saccharomyces" or "sugar mold" and the Latin "cerevisiae," "of beer") led to the industrialization of alcohol production, which on the one hand gave us abominations such as Coors Light but on the other hand, took the "roll of the dice – maybe this will get you drunk, maybe it will make you blind" impurities out of the millennia-long craft of brewing and distilling alcohol.

A surplus of cheap grain whose shelf life and salability could be extended by torturing those raw materials into canned American lager and white bread became a staple in households across America. We forgot how to make beer and bread, all in the name of progress.

(Checks the clock) How am I doing for time? A couple more minutes to talk about bread? Okay...

The metabolic output of yeast (carbon dioxide for lift, and alcohol for, well, alcohol) and a friendly neighborhood of acidophilic bacteria such as Lactobacillus produce a myriad of chemicals that interact with their surroundings.

One of the most interesting side-effects of this feeding frenzy of wee beasties is the formation of a much-maligned substance called "gluten".

Gluten, first and foremost, is a term describing a variety of non-water-soluble plant proteins... what's that? I'm out of time?

Shit. Okay, don't take my word for it; read more here.

So where was I? Sauce? Cheese?

I feel as though I've run out the clock talking about bread, a food near and dear to my heart and waistline.

So bread is an endlessly complicated topic, as is cheese, and let's not even get started about the tomato – a savory fruit once thought to be deadly poisonous and, according to some scholars, thought to be the forbidden fruit of Eden from the Book of Genesis.

Clearly, we now know that the tomato is not poisonous, and as for the degree to which it is an instrument of evil temptation, we've all had pizza for breakfast once or twice, no?

Cold, stale, and coagulated is not at all how the people behind Apizza Scholls intend folks to experience their finely crafted product. A cold slice of left-over Apizza Scholls pizza was, however, exactly what I had for breakfast the next day. Because I was now 40: I do what I want to.

I do want to mention that my good friends Lisa and Kay joined me for dinner, as did a high school friend of mine who I will not name.

I won't name him, but anyone willing to do a little research can probably deduce who he is.

He and I were scheduled to graduate from Shaker Heights High School in 1993, but neither of us did.

This fact is unremarkable. I was a fuck up, and so was he.

What is remarkable is that every year, for his birthday, he received a call from Julia Child, who worked closely with his mother and other notable food luminaries such as Jacques Pepin and Thomas Keller.

His mother co-wrote with none other than Michael Ruhlman, another Clevelander.

This hardly impressed my friend growing up – elaborate Thanksgiving or Christmas dinners cooked by Child, Pepin, and an army of eager James Beard wannabes.

"That food was too fussy, too fancy," he would tell me as my blood boiled internally.

Birthday phone calls from Julia Child? Thanksgiving dinner cooked by Jacques Pepin? You ingrate, you Philistine!

To his great credit, he has, in his old age (mere months younger than myself), come to appreciate the magnitude of all of this; more to the point, he appreciates the joy and simplicity of a perfectly made pizza.

It was my pleasure to share the experience of enjoying it with him... although I remain envious of Thanksgivings with Pepin, Child, and Keller.

Score!

Territorial Gen-X Pissings.

Kay and I went on what can fairly be described as a "hipster tour of the Alberta Arts District" in Portland's northeast quarter.

Kay and I are separated only by a couple of years – to the week – but she definitely considers her younger brother a "millennial."

As far as I am concerned, hipsters are all millennials and, therefore, were born in 1985 or later. I feel confident in drawing this delineation because the definitive characteristics of hipsterism can be reduced to the naive, younger sibling-like mimicry by a younger generation of things Generation X held as sacrosanct within the confines of affluent suburban culture.

What a Gen-X suburban teenager did to rebel, a millennial takes a step further and turns into an abject fashion. Punk becomes pop, pink hair becomes de classé, and all of a sudden, Americana, waxed mustaches, French cuffs, and pickles are all the rage.

In attempting to define herself or himself, the millennial resorts to outright plagiarism that doesn't stop at a few decades in the past but reaches all the way to the late 19th century for inspiration.

Generation X is certainly guilty of crimes of misappropriation – most of it cultural, a good example being the gas station work shirt I proudly paraded around in at my high school, complete with a stitched-on name tag that said "Tony."

Poor, as the famous song by Pulp went, was cool, and my suburb was especially fascinated with the "urban" aspects of poverty, at least the cultural ones, elevating hip-hop and rap music to the most popular forms of music for a generation before my own appropriated rock'n'roll from the poor, and jazz and the blues before that (and bluegrass, folk and country should anyone accuse me of focusing solely on those cultural artifacts we stole from African slaves and their descendants).

Hell, even Anton Dvorak swiped a melody from a black southern spiritual song for the slow movement of "From The New World." Before that, he'd been busy appropriating Czech folk music. Mozart and Beethoven gleefully stole from their peers, the latter taking an improvisation by a rival virtuoso, inverting the notes, and using the resulting melody as the theme for the finale of his third and arguably most influential symphony (at least in the eyes of music geeks, the rest of you can have the Chorale but I know that the Eroica is the most important piece of that era).

So I do not fault hipsters or millennials for theft, but I do often shake my fist in the air as if to say "get off my lawn" to their annoying affectations, mannerisms, etc.

Tasia.

Kay and I had stopped for Spanish Coffee, the sexier cousin of the Irish coffee that has become a Portland staple. It was midday. Our hipster tour of SE Portland was well underway, and walking down the street, I spotted what appeared to be a familiar shock of bleached blond hair with roots noticeable from about 20 yards away. The woman was pushing a stroller.

I think it might be a friend of mine, so I make the sometimes uncomfortably awkward gamble that the person I am looking at is not a complete stranger and yell out, "Tasia!"

Her head whips around. Thank Christ. I am not an idiot, after all.

She apparently has better vision than I, instantly recognizes me, and yells back, "Chris?"

I cross the street to chat, awkwardly acknowledging her toddler. This is a period in my life, as I write almost six years later when children terrified me because I rightly knew that they saw and spoke the truth.

I didn't like who I was at age 40, and I knew, deep down, that I was up to no good and had been for quite a while. I didn't like what I felt was captured in the gaze of a child. I was ashamed.

"What are you doing in Portland?"

I ran down the recap – I was 40, running away from the misery of yet another alcohol and drug-fueled Aries party in San Francisco. Instead, I had an alcohol and drug-fueled birthday in the Pacific Northwest, albeit much smaller.

I told Tasia about the fettuccini in the strip club, which amused her to no end, and that I was on LSD at the time.

That's what happens in Eugene: you step off the Coast Starlight, and within 36 hours, someone will give you psychedelics.

For that, I feel no shame, to be honest. Everyone should take acid at least once in their life.

I wrap up my Eugene recap with a quip about how Voodoo Donuts and Sizzle Pie are next to each other, and that must be by design.

"You should try Blue Star Donuts. They are waaay better than Voodoo."

Before that chance encounter, I had learned that trusting Tasia's advice on most subjects, especially those related to eating and drinking, pays enormous dividends.

"And if they have the blueberry, bourbon, and basil donut, you must try it."

She usually hit this one right in the bull's eye.

Origin Story

Tasia and I met online. Kinda.

I have a friend, Paige, who moved from Oakland to Portland around the time of the great diaspora of folks priced out of the Bay Area in the late aughts. Essentially, people like me were spilling over into the East Bay and driving up rent prices, so the folks who could uproot themselves moved outward and often north.

Paige also wanted to reinvent herself, which isn't relevant to this story.

This may have been back when Friendster, MySpace, or even Orkut was still a thing. Maybe, just maybe, it was in the early days of Facebook.

I am not sure exactly which proto-social-media platform we were using to keep in touch, but both Paige and I were super into a browser plug-in slash web portal called StumbleUpon. This would essentially send you to random web pages that matched your interests. If you found something you liked, you could give the page a thumbs up and share this with other users you were friends with.

(Sub-plot: I had an online "romance" with a woman in Canada I met on StumbleUpon. We got pretend married on Facebook – I guess this must have been in 2010? Some friends who were not in on the joke congratulated me earnestly; I hadn't talked to her in a while except on her birthday. She got married in real life and has a couple of kids. Sylvia is her name.)

Anyway, Paige and I would share links of weird shit we'd stumble upon on StumbleUpon, often tasteful and sometimes not as tasteful nudes.

One day, I came upon a photo of a young woman, naked as the day she was born, save for one leather high-heel boot on her left foot. Where was the other boot?

She gazed pensively at the camera, lips ever so slightly parted, her fingernails painted black, swirls of black text inked into her skin. A few paragraphs of Nabokov's "Lolita" could be made out on her left shoulder and upper arm.

Everything about the photo was blazing hot: a naked woman tattooed with literature with gothy eyeliner; it checked all my boxes.

I had to share this one with Paige, knowing that she would appreciate the photo.

Paige's reply? "That's my personal trainer, Tasia!"

It's been a brilliant friendship ever since.

You only live a day, but it's brilliant anyway.

There are more stories in my treasure chest for blogs later involving me yelling at people for playing Gotye on a bridge over the Willamette or pocketing oysters from secret bougie cocktail lounges, chicken chicharrones, pig's ears nachos, and more.

And, of course, Blue Star Donuts. We'll always have Blue Star Donuts.

"I love you, baby, but all I can think about is Dianetics; your butt cheeks is warm..."

Deliciously forbidden foie gras.

Cult of the Dead Cow forever.

The author, probably after ingesting a non-trivial amount of Jim Beam.

Redding. Another story, for another time.

Three or Four Lifetimes Later.

To the week, all of this was six years ago.

Six long years, the last one particularly long.

40 was the "new I don't know what," but the intervening—and let's face it, the previous six years—had been a roller-coaster of ups and downs.

I'm not sure what to say about turning 40 in a strip club (on LSD... did I leave that part out? I was on acid in a strip club in Oregon on my 40th birthday). Nadir? Apex?

Whatever that was, as the kids say, "Peak Dottore." Puns intended.

As I write this in March of 2021, more than a year since bars and restaurants shut down, a year away from friends and family, a year without any galavanting around on trains, and an endless March – today is March 381st!

Six years in 12 months.

I got my first vaccine shot last Sunday and my last shot of vodka on October 23rd, 2020. Not a drop since.

That will have to be a story for another time as well.

Stay healthy, stay safe. Wash your hands. We love you.

Food Blog or Not?

2020-05-01T02:38:00.002-07:00

Okay, apparently there's been some confusion. From the giddy-up, re: this blog, food has been a vehicle for a writing blog. Period. I'm sure that I made that clear early on. I hope that this, FINALLY, clears this up. Recipe Not Included.

Hey Everybody!

2020-04-25T12:33:00.001-07:00

I've been battling with the finicky Gods of sourdough starter, and the mischievous daemons of ruination have plagued my efforts to create the allusive Perfect Loaf.

My friend Lu3ke will complain that this is yet another "process story" (my words, not his) in which the author of a food blog rambles endlessly with color commentary, sometimes for entire screens full. "It was springtime, and the orange blossoms... blah de blah... you could smell cut grass in the air."

We get it, you're rich, and you live in the country.

I will admit to sometimes allowing such floral prose to wash over me as I languidly turn one glossy page of an issue of Saveur (rest in power) or Wine Spectator over – precise, tony fonts, color-corrected panoramas, lurid close-ups of sun-dripped chardonnay grapes and white people in Ralph Lauren summer casual.

But I am also sympathetic to Lu3ke's rage and understand the absurdity of the food porn industrial complex.

That said Chowbacca has not been a food blog, at least in my estimation, for some time.

If anything, it has always been an anti-food blog. Larry, the founder of this project, created the tagline "We have knives, don't call us foodies."

This is an expression of disdain more than a menace. However, I suppose it is a little threatening. That is the perspective I lacked when this project began over eight years ago. Wisdom and age have led our founder and fearless leader to adopt a less menacing tagline: "Play with your food." That seems much more germane to the spirit of this blog.

Instead of harping on the meta-subject of unnecessary wordage on food blogs ("just get to the damn recipe!") – which, again, this is not – I will return to the subject of sourdough starters.

Sourdough starter does not grow on trees* – except, of course, when it does, as in San Francisco during these strange days of self-imposed (if not frustratingly loosely enforced) isolation due to the novel Coronavirus.

"Communal Tins of Sourdough Starter Are Popping Up In Trees In San Francisco."

I have not encountered any, but I attempted and repeatedly failed to spontaneously foment my own.

My first attempt involved bananas, sugar, and water poured into an empty handle of Kirkland Vodka (don't judge; these are trying times – and any trip to Costco is fraught with perils, both real and existential). After several days of this failing to "catch," I pitched in a small amount of instant dry.

After a few more days and little sign of activity, I saved about a cup of liquid and poured the rest down the drain.

I fed that flour and sugar and added water, but the solution was still disappointingly lethargic.

After again cheating the starter with more instant dry, I could pull off a couple of decent loaves: a ham-fisted attempt at ciabatta using the no-knead method and focaccia with quick-pickled shallot.

Every few days, I would pour the fluid that settled on the top into a large bottle of Bragg's Cider Vinegar (the original cider vinegar had long since been supplanted by left-over beer and some organic fruit juices, which had nicely turned with the help of the SCOBY—a symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast).

I would re-water and feed this starter, but it remained frustratingly inert.

I made homemade pizza, which involved a bit of archeology locating and digging up my pizza stone and peeling it after almost a decade of disuse.

There was more cheating with a small amount of active dry, enough to make a passable dough with a barely lifted crumb, but not up to my expectations.

Next, I attempted a more traditional loaf, which I may have over-proofed, then became dense as a brick, with one or two inexplicably large air pockets in the otherwise impenetrable crumb.

In a fit of pique, I dumped 2/3rd of the besotted solution into a large Pyrex bowl. I resigned myself to making lemonade of the lemon that was my sourdough starter in the form of sourdough johnnycakes (pictured above).

I may now have to chuck the whole thing and start over.

However, I will have plenty of kvass-slash-shrub that will hopefully convert fully into vinegar in the coming weeks.

And now, just to risk summoning the ire of Lu3ke, a sort of recipe:

It's not really a recipe. I eyeballed every bit of it.

If you've ever made pancakes from scratch, or better still, sourdough pancakes, you will be familiar with the make-up and ratio of wet and dry ingredients, the desired consistency of the batter, and the appropriate resting time for the batter's wet phase to integrate with the dry.

Start with that set of ingredients, halve the baking soda, replace about 1/3rd of the flour with fine cornmeal, and have your basic johnnycake batter.

A true johnnycake is really just fried cornbread that would contain little to no all-purpose flour.

Perhaps a better descriptor for what I made that morning is a corny pancake.

I added two finely chopped green onions and a heaping fist full of shredded cheese and fried those suckers up in bacon fat.

--

* Yeast can and does grow on trees, particularly on fruit-bearing trees. The microbe we use to make bread and beer is attracted to sugar primarily and will thrive in any environment where that can be found. One method for starting a starter involves wrapping organic grapes in cheesecloth and submerging this in filtered water – this stuff from the tap may be a hostile environment for microbes, which is probably my mistake in the first damn place. When the bunch of grapes begin to bubble and float, then you are in business. I may try this next.

Rails Across America - Part Four: Lakeshore Limited to Albany

2020-03-01T00:51:00.002-08:00

Leaving Cleveland.

"A picture tells a thousand words," as the saying goes.

If I wrote a million words, I couldn't begin to capture everything in the above photo.

I am facing east. Dawn in Cleveland is breaking. The sun reflects off untold numbers of tiny ice crystals suspended high above me, relative to my position in the earth's thin atmosphere, relative to the sun and the moon.

An airplane is hurtling in a seemingly straight line high above me, leaving a trail of water vapor – the exhaust of kerosene burning up.

Some people see this and are confounded by its mystery. I am. Some people see something they can't quite come to terms with and makeup stories.

Chemtrails. What are they spraying? How can this be?

But turning on your oven or stove is no more mysterious than combustible gas turning into carbon dioxide and water vapor. That wave of humidity when you open a preheated oven is those two things escaping, rising up, passing your face.

Think of the hours, effort, sweat, and blood that went into developing the light bulb and the red-tinted plastic coating for the brake lights of the car pictured driving away. The automobile is a wonder in and of itself, yet it is a technology that is 150 years old—internal combustion—built of metal and plastic, fueled by the long-since putrefied remains of plants and animals that died hundreds of millions of years ago.

It is a wonderful thing that I, right here at this very moment, am typing on a plastic and metal keyboard, sending radio signals to my nearby computer on a glass and metal table suspended more than a dozen feet above the ground on a floor made of planks of wood, cut, milled, and assembled by the people who built the house I live in.

A very clever protein molecule indeed. A very clever molecule was formed and copied itself over and over and over and over a sextillion times over billions of years. A very clever molecule built a fortress around itself, protecting itself from the harsh primordial earth. First, it traps carbon and other gasses. When it was safe, it began to breathe in oxygen. It formed teams. Those teams built more and more complex organisms.

Think of scale. A billion years, three hundred and sixty-five billion sunrises and sunsets. The very first day that deoxyribonucleic acid came to be it copied itself perhaps dozens of times. Maybe more. Maybe millions of times. On the seventh day, billions. Billions of clever little molecules reproduce daily, eventually each hour, each second. That's the first year for this clever little molecule.

A sextillion or more mistakes were made. Some of the mistakes ended in failure. Those mistakes can replicate themselves and become ever more and more complex. Algae, fungi, plants, fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals, primates, and humans.

Eventually, that clever molecule wrote the Eroica. It painted the Sistine Chapel, built pyramids, fought to free slaves, fought for women's suffrage, waged war, and held "peace-ins." It came together, and often, it fell apart.

In the distance, we see the Rock and Roll Hall Of Fame, a museum that exists because a white disc jockey in Cleveland coined the term to describe the music of and for black Americans, music rooted in the aftermath of the shameful stain of slavery in this country.

I sit here today because of a clever molecule – an anthropomorphism for a chain of dumbly self-replicating proteins.

But what is given will also betray.

The same chain of proteins that gives me life, movies to watch, music to listen to, and a house in which I can live will also kill.

That is what cancer is: the betrayal of the very thing that makes us "us." Our genetic code went horribly awry.

The sun has risen more than one trillion, four hundred and sixty billion times on this earth's horizon, but for each of us, it will only come and go several thousand times or so at most. For B, the sun rose a little over fifteen thousand times.

I know this is a huge downer. I promise the next installment will be a little more fun. I'm still processing losing my oldest friend.

Here are some random photos from the train ride from Cleveland to Albany. There's not much to say here. I slept or drank on the train and ate shitty cafeteria food from the cafe car.

I wish I could say more about Erie or any other cities between Cleveland and Albany, but honestly, I know nothing about them.

Next up Bolton Landing.

Rails Across America - Part Three: The Lakeshore Limited to Cleveland (and Fuck Cancer)

2020-02-26T01:08:00.003-08:00

The 48 Eastbound Lakeshore Limited rolls out of Union Station in Chicago at 21:30 hours, assuming it's running on time.

Generally, it is.

Unlike the California Zephyr, there aren't major weather obstructions like avalanches on the tracks nor contention with commercial freight.

The "right of way" is a term I learned about watching an excellent independent film called The Station Agent, which starred Peter Dinklage, a little-known actor at the time.

When the film was released in 2003, I was not the train nerd I am today, but I credit the film with nudging me to take an interest in travel by rail.

Of course, I had traveled on Amtrak before.

That's a story I want to get to later, as it involves a rather extensive cast of characters and mise en scene.

My friend Scott warned me that the Zephyr frequently finds itself side-railed – sometimes for hours, according to Scott, in tunnels inside mountains – to allow commercial freight to pass.

However, if everything goes according to plan, the 48 Eastbound will roll into Cleveland at 5:38 a.m.

On June 6th, 2018, the sunrise was 5:54 in the morning.

Looking north, you can see First Energy Stadium, or as the locals call it, Browns Stadium. "Factory of Sadness" is also the unofficial moniker for the venue. In this place, one can reliably expect the local NFL franchise to lose any given Sunday, Monday, or Thursday during the football season.

Northeast is the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which I will steadfastly refuse to enter until they induct singer and songwriter Warren Zevon.

That's another story, cast of characters, and pages of mise en scene.

It's June 6th, 2018. I am in Cleveland. Father's Day is just over a week and a half away, but my dad does not even know I am in town—I want to surprise him.

I will check into my faithful standby hotel, the Downtown Cleveland Hilton Garden Inn. Sitting in the hot tub at the Garden Inn, you can view the parking lot and the inner-belt freeway exchange where Interstate 77 and Interstate 90 meet. Just south of that is a wasteland that stands as a stark reminder or memento mori of Cleveland's past industrial prowess as a steel town.

In the next 72 hours, I will receive news of death and near death.

This was the second to the last time I saw Mary Owen alive. She passed away last spring. I miss her and love her.

I saw Mary Owen alive one more time after this visit to Cleveland.

It was the Dinosaur Jr. show at The Grog Shop, and she was wheelchair-bound.

She died in the spring of 2019.

The Grog Shop holds about 450 people. Let's say for legal reasons that the attendance was exactly 450 and not a person more for Dinosaur Jr.

Mary's boyfriend helped her get close to the stage, where she remained for the rest of the show. Afterward, I saw her on the way out, kissed her on the forehead, and never saw her again.

I will never kiss Mary Owen's forehead ever again.

The crowd was thick. I knew J Mascis had invited Lou Barlow back into the lineup. Barlow even sang a couple of songs. I barely saw Barlow (the mastermind behind Sebadoh and Folk Implosion) for the entire time they played.

It was as if he wasn't really there.

Midway through my train ride from Emeryville to Grand Central, I had another penultimate encounter with the condemned.

"B's not doing well," said a friend of mine in California.

"If you want to see him again, you might want to book the next flight you can," a mutual friend texted.

B's little brother N insisted weeks earlier that I head out on the train trip I had planned at the end of May. Hopeful words were said about chemotherapy and other treatments. We would wait and see. Perhaps there would be a miracle.

"B is in the ICU," word had come from N, and I knew that I needed to book the next flight out.

My grandfather on my dad's side died before I was born. On my dad's side, my grandmother was the first grandparent to pass away. Pneumonia. Complications from a hip replacement had resulted in a weakened immune system.

Next, it was my grandmother on my mother's side. Cancer.

On my mother's side, my grandfather eventually remarried; his spouse was a widow from his church. Someone to keep you company, someone to talk to. Imagine my grandfather's loss after more than 50 years of marriage to my grandmother.

He was the last to die of cancer as well.

B had cancer, and no matter what spit shine we tried to put on it, it was terminal. B was diagnosed and not expected to see Independence Day.

No preparation in the world can prepare a person to see someone in the throes of a cancer-related illness.

B was an athlete, even if I didn't play any sport in particular. He was the most physically fit person I had ever known. Until his body betrayed him.

I landed in San Francisco, dropped my bags off at my apartment, and didn't say a word to my roommate about why I was there.

B's condition was what they call in the journalism community "on quarantine."

I went to San Francisco General Hospital and went to his room.

While in flight, B's condition had improved. When he was admitted to the ICU, he was put on 24-hour dialysis.

Just before I landed, the doctors could take him off dialysis. His body had recovered just enough to allow his kidneys to work independently.

B was immortalized in a manner of speaking by posing as a photo reference for my former roommate Marty Egeland, who at one time was the illustrator for DC Comics Aquaman.

Perhaps the photo doesn't exist anymore or is stuffed away in a box. It's B, sitting in a chair as if bound by ropes, in a pose that would grace the cover of an Aquaman issue.

No disrespect to Jason Momoa, but B was Aquaman first. At his peak, B had the physique of a Hollywood leading man.

In his hospital room, he was jaundiced and slight. His head, normally shaved, had a stubble of grey and white hair. His ankles were swollen with edema.

I could tell B was uneasy with his frail appearance, as if his body were under his control.

His brother N, his long-divorced parents, and I and a few friends gave him an uncomfortable audience.

Regardless, B still cracked jokes and seemed in good spirits.

A few months later, I spent some time with him at his home with his mother, grandmother, and N.

B was starting to look like his old self again. His skin color was back to normal. He'd gained weight, his head freshly shaved.

The jokes came faster, with a darker tinge, but we all had a laugh. But B tired easily, still, in between aggressive chemotherapy sessions. The tumors in his lungs and pancreas had retreated, leaving a few troubling tumors in his liver.

I had tried to see him a few times after, but his treatments were taking a toll, and he never had the energy for guests or excursions.

On June 14th, 2019, he passed peacefully surrounded by family.

B (left) was taken from us by cancer this last summer. Jesse (right) was taken from us ten years ago in September. Cancer. Fuck cancer.

When I go home to Cleveland, I often split my time between staying at my dad's and stepmom's house and staying in hotels. My dad's house is in the Historic Euclid Golf District of Cleveland Heights, just west of Coventry Road and north of North Park. The street he lives on is Colchester, a town in Essex, England.

Many streets in Cleveland Heights, University Heights, and Shaker Heights are named for towns or landlords from Britain and Scotland. Others are named after foliage (Maple Drive, Buckeye Road, Fernway, Cedar, etc.).

As a teenager, I often set off on foot to make the roughly three-mile trek from my home on Parkland Drive down South Park, crossing Shaker Boulevard, past the Shaker Heights Nature Center, and onto North Park. Mansions lined the north side of the street, and a man-made pond called the Lower Shaker Lake was on the south side. North Park eventually runs into Coventry Road, where I would turn north and continue marching. I would cross Fairmont Boulevard, then Cedar Road, which has a clear view facing west of the Terminal Tower in downtown Cleveland, and continue until I reach Euclid Heights Boulevard.

The intersection of Coventry Road and Euclid Heights Boulevard was the epicenter for misfit teenagers, cranky intellectuals, caffeine addicts, punks, skaters, and stoners. Here was Cleveland's very own version of Haight-Ashbury.

If you continue northbound on Coventry, you will reach Mayfield Road, where, if you take a left heading west, you will reach the southern entrance of Lake View Cemetery.

I try not to be superstitious, but if there is ever a magical place charged with a certain kind of energy, the area is known as Coventry Village and is certainly one such place.

Alex Alvarez, left, is a local artist, singer-songwriter, caregiver, and all-around good guy.

Instead of staying with my dad and stepmother, upon arrival by the Lakeshore Limited into Cleveland, I figured I'd give myself some respite, some "me time," at Cleveland's less-than-glamorous Hilton Garden Inn.

Hilton recently built a new, modern, state-of-the-art hotel close to the Lake Erie shore. It is complete with a 36th-floor lounge and outdoor patio offering views of downtown Cleveland, First Energy (Brown's) Stadium, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The hotel was designed by the famous modernist architect I. M. Pei. This Hilton is also much closer to the Amtrak Station.

I've also stayed there, and it's pretty nice as hotels go.

My affection will always be with the Garden Inn, even though the hotel abuts the spaghetti-like collision of Interstates 90 and 77. It is a tangle of raised concrete that would warm the homesick heart of folks from Los Angeles, where road pasta is elevated to a loved and hated art form.

Due south of I-77 is a stretch of land built on the swampland surrounding the Cuyahoga of mostly shuttered steel mills and refineries. Here is a stark reminder of Cleveland's glorious industrial past, a barely still animated memento mori belching sulfur into the air and lighting up the skyline at night with smokestacks burning off kerosene.

Caddy-corner northwest of the hotel is Progressive Field, known to most locals my age or older as "The Jake" after its original name "Jacob's Field."

The Erie Street Cemetery is north of the hotel, protected by red brick buildings.

I think I'm safe in my hotel womb.

I was sent to my room often as a child for punishment, and I wonder if that didn't inure me with a sense of comfort in solitude.

I know folks who would be punished by being made to fight their siblings. Those were the people I'd have to drag away from some imagined slight late night at various bars before they got into real trouble.

I lived with a guy who had gone to prison on a drug offense – pot – if you tried to wake him, he'd wake up swinging. When his mother visited our apartment, she would wake him by poking his feet with a broomstick. She knew he'd come out guns blazing.

My punishment was emotional isolation and abandonment.

I have fought with my siblings plenty of times, but not the way the person I know who was forced to fight theirs.

I'm not sure who is more of a danger to those around us between the three of us.

Sometimes I think it is me.

I sneak up and harm people without knowing I'm even doing it.

When the rage inside of me is released, it rages uncontrollably.

That's maybe why I like the solace of a hotel room as much as I do.

A friend told me, "Tony Bourdain is gone," as if to put a period on a sentence that required a semi-colon.

I want to talk about Bourdain a little more, the when and where I learned about his suicide, and the other things that were pressing on my mind that week.

On this day, chef and author Tony Bourdain took his life. So, what better way to memorialize the man and his legacy than eating some delicious charcuterie.

Goodyear Tire Company headquarters is in Akron, Ohio, 40 miles southeast of Progressive Field. My grandfather, a dirigibles expert in the US Navy in World War II, worked for Goodyear after the war. Like his generation, he retired, having never left the same company, a company man. If Cleveland were a steel town, then Akron would be a rubber town. In fact, Akron (industrially speaking) is the rubber capital of the world. Goodyear's affection for blimps, I suspect, might have something to do with my grandfather's enthusiasm and the enthusiasm of his peers for a vehicle that, even at the time of the Second World War, was a bit of an anachronism.

The Dan Rogan Memorial V.I.P.'s Only Bathroom, Grog Shop, Cleveland Heights, Ohio. Dan was taken from us several years ago. Cancer. Fuck cancer.

Breakfast on the plane, which Tony Bourdain notably hated, on my way to Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital's Intensive Care Unit.

Rails Across America - Part Two: Chicago

2019-10-06T09:15:00.003-07:00

The Glamorous hustle and bustle of underground Union Station...

Growing up in Cleveland, it feels like there's been a not-so-hidden undercurrent of sibling rivalry between the City of Broad Shoulders and the Mistake on the Lake. Clevelanders admire and resent their cooler, more successful brother city; both cities have storied pasts. Cleveland was built out of nothing on an actual swamp at the mouth of the Cuyahoga, literally meaning crooked river, and peaked with the Gilded Age when it was the seat of Standard Oil and the fortunes of magnates like John D. Rockefeller, John Severance, Andrew Carnegie and the like. Since then, it slowly declined until reaching a nadir framed by industrial fires on the burning, crooked river and blight throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Cleveland was the car bomb capital of America at one time as mobsters waged open warfare on its streets, brazenly assassinating one another, city officials, and the occasional civilian in broad daylight, in plain view of City Hall and the Federal District Court.

Chicago, of course, is a city well known to have been forged in fire. Unlike its sibling on the shores of Lake Erie, it would seem, Chicago walked naked out of the smoldering wreckage like the Mother of Dragons, ready to take on the world with its bizarre notions of what belongs on a hot dog and how deep is too deep a dish (locals refer to this as pizza, but any sane adult will realize that what they mean to say is "bread and cheese casserole").

Of course, the two cities will always have their mutual bond of being cities in America's beleaguered but beloved history with the mafia. Elliot Ness, a Cleveland native buried in Lakeview Cemetery just a few hundred yards from John D. Rockefeller's bones and perhaps a little bit phallic memorial, is famous for taking down Chicago mob boss Al Capone. Ness, in reality, did this with pen and ledger despite his depictions in popular culture as a Tommy-gun-wielding badass.

Capone was a crass yet popular anti-hero: a malfeasant and murderous thug. Yet he was taken down on account of his hubris for tax evasion. It makes one want to shut one's eyes real tight and wish for a hero like Ness, who might take down a more modern version of a populist villain with a penchant for flagrance in the face of the rule of law.

One hopes.

--

Invariably, places have soundtracks, sometimes multiple soundtracks, and associations I make inside my mind as if scoring the movie of my life.

For Chicago, that soundtrack has many possible candidates. After all, a couple from Colorado found a calling in Chicago, bringing music from the margins of electronica, psychedelia, and camp into the spotlight with the genre-bending oeuvre of Wax Trax Records.

Truly, it is an oeuvre for which I greatly admire. Dannie Flesher and Jim Nash nurtured acts like Ministry, Front Line Assembly, Nitzer Ebb, KMFDM, My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult, and many others, providing myself and millions of other misfits and outcasts with a ready-made soundtrack for our collective awkward teenage and young adult years.

Certainly, Uncle Al Jourgensen has bellowed into my ear through many traumatic episodes of stumbling through the painful process of figuring out who the hell I was and what the hell it meant to be me.

That said, the music of Brett and Rennie Sparks calls to me whenever I think about Chicago. Collectively known as "The Handsome Family," the Sparks' are an unlikely duo of a midwestern Jewess poet and a Texan crooner with operatic aspirations. The music they produce has been described variably as New-American Gothic, Y'allternative, Alt-Country, Americana, and Contemporary Folk. It is, of course, all these things and more. Rennie's lyrics are like the best anthologies of twisted little short stories (which, by the way, she also writes, and she had published at least one such collection, which, should you run across in a bookstore, you should immediately purchase). Within the body of work The Handsome Family has produced, you will hear tales of murder, rape, and kidnapping couched as a love song, giants with lethal foot ailments, Amelia Earhart's remembrances of a sort of Yankee high tea moments before dying enveloped in flames, a distraught boyfriend watching cops steal the television of his dead girlfriend, John the Baptist in the rain, overdoses, urban blight, crazy aunts writing poems to Jimmy Carter, Indians dragging burning wood, suicide, alcoholism, hunting snakes in foggy hollers and, well, you know, other fun subjects.

Whenever I begin to feel any pangs of resentment against my brethren and sistren of the Windy City, I think about how Brett and Rennie must have felt looking over Lake Michigan and how you can tell that they truly love Chicago as a living, breathing thing.

The couple now lives in New Mexico.

--

The rooftop patio of Tanta Restaurant in downtown Chicago.

Tanta Menu

Jex and his wife Alyssa

Like most mid to large-sized American cities between the end of the Civil War and the dawn of the post-World War II boom, Chicago had an extensive and functional streetcar system to ferry folks around. Sadly, Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler conspired to buy up these municipal railways and either scrapped the streetcars or sold them off – many original streetcars ended up in South America and Canada. This is, of course, just a tour bus made up to look like a streetcar, a sort of ironic "fuck you" courtesy of Detroit.

This is the last chance for any roughage before diving into the Deep Dish. Notice how much meat is on this salad. Welcome to Chicago!

How deep is your dish?

Comedian Ian Russo, of Los Angeles. "We noticed you taking pictures of your pizza. You must be a tourist, too!"

Six degrees...

The devil, Malört.

Malört face.

Proper pizza, quite tasty.

Anji.

Anji is one of the best people.

Just wanted to put that out there.

Smoked whitefish schmear.

Sushi time.

Harper and I sneaking a selfie.

Immediately following this, I either took a long nap or forced myself to play several hours of Ingress on foot. I probably chose the former.

Union Station outbound.

Rails Across America - Part One: The California Zephyr

2019-09-21T21:52:00.009-07:00

Dedicated with love to the memory of Doctor Robert Victor Irish*.

N did not text me frequently, which is fine. I've known him his entire life, and a relationship spanning four decades does not call for constant tending. We'd send each other birthday greetings, engage in lively chatter whenever one of the beleaguered sports franchises from Cleveland looked like they were making championship moves, and organize the occasional get-together.

N, whose collegiate aspirations were sports journalism, had been drawn into the food service industry like millions of other talented, whip-smart young men and women in this country. Like everything else N put his mind to, he excelled at it. Over the past few decades, N went from a server, head server, and front-of-the-house manager to general manager, landing prestige roles with chefs and restaurant investment groups.

Suffice it to say that N was a busy man.

So I found it weird when he texted me in May 2018, " Can I call you?"

Followed by a missed call.

I had been settling into my sabbatical and ignoring my phone—"Do Not Disturb" is a luxury forbidden to those in my line of work—and, unsurprisingly, it was one of the main reasons I felt I needed to take a break.

The last two weeks of my full-time employment had me taking hours-long conference calls starting at 2 and 3 AM to work on a project with my man on the ground in Frankfurt and the client. The Taipei team often looked to me to troubleshoot during their workday, starting around 6 PM and lasting eight hours. Cherkasy was offset by another five hours. The pressure was mounting for some team members and me to attend the office and keep regular hours.

An hour passed before I saw the text or the missed call from N. I called him back.

Voicemail.

A few minutes later, he called me with troubling news.

--

A few years ago, things had reached a critical juncture with my mother. Not content with the useless flailing I contributed to trying to convince my mom to move into some sort of managed care, my older sister swooped in and took charge of things.

The house, of course, would have to be sold. Along with the car. My mother, who could be diplomatically referred to as stubborn at times, put up roadblocks to the process. The shoddy, not-to-code addition that the previous owners of her house had haphazardly tacked onto the house proved to be one of the most vexing obstacles to selling the property.

Briefly, an addition to the house was built on improperly drained ground. For nearly 45 years, water would seep in, allowing mold to grow underneath the flooring and ultimately inside the walls of the exact room my mother, now no longer able to go up and down the stairs to her bedroom, had moved into.

The entire floor, subfloor, and foundation drainage had to be rebuilt from underneath an already-standing house, costing tens of thousands of dollars.

Of course, my sister would point out that the real challenge was all of mom's stuff. There is a scale for hoarding behavior, and my mother rated closer to the "piles of rotting newspapers and mummified rats" end of the scale than the "Monday morning after a frat party" end of the range (which I hope I am a bit closer to).

Just sorting, trashing, and moving what was deemed salvageable was a months-long process. I took up temporary residence for weeks at a time, one time for almost an entire month, while my older sister put her career entirely on hold and effectively stayed in Cleveland for 6 months. Through one of the roughest, coldest winters in recent memory.

Tensions were high. My sister neared exhaustion, crossed the line into acute fatigue, and pushed on. My other siblings helped as much as they could. Still, I was expected to do the heavy lifting, often falling short. Until one morning, I got an earful from my sister, who had long since reached her limit about hanging out with my friends and using my time in Cleveland as a carousing vacation.

So I took it on the chin, as I deserved, and pressed on.

Mom is a collector of many, many things, all of them presumably with some sentimental value attached. My sister cut through that with laser precision: no, that goes to Goodwill. No, that goes out on the tree lawn. No, that goes to the landfill.

Before that, Netflix shows about getting rid of things that no longer give you joy.

Regardless, my hoarding instinct bubbled up once in a while as a sentimental object was extracted from the pile, and I rescued quite a few gems from the chopping block, one of them being a book previously owned by my grandfather Thomas, my mother's father, entitled "The California Zephyr."

Where the copy of my grandfather's book today is anyone's guess. Maybe I lent it to someone. More likely, it's under a stack of other unread books I have grabbed over the years.

I had only flipped through the book when I grabbed it from my mom's house. Years ago, that planted the seed in my head that I would one day take the California Zephyr all the way from Emeryville, California, to Chicago's Union Station.

Just as my grandfather and grandmother had done, back in a better era for travel by rail.

--

"B has cancer," N eventually admitted after telling me how his older brother had fallen mysteriously ill late in March of 2018 and had to be rushed to the ER. B's terrier, Otto, who shares my nom de plume (Doktor Otto von Drinkensnorten), had passed away earlier that year, and N just figured B's lack of energy was run-of-the-mill depression. After all, Otto and B were nearly inseparable.

No one knew that cancer had metastasized in B's liver until it was almost too late, spreading to his pancreas and lungs.

"N, that's terrible. Next week, I am heading out to Chicago, Cleveland, and New York, but I can cancel if you need anything."

"No, no... go on your trip. Mom is coming in from Cleveland, and Dad will come from North Carolina next week. We're working on a treatment plan. I'll keep you up to date on the latest developments."

"Jesus... well. Okay, yes, let's keep in touch. If you think of anything I can do to help, let me know."

That call didn't come for another few weeks.

Many of you might be thinking – why not stay and help out your friend with cancer?

The answer was that other family matters were pulling me away, and now, I have even more on my mind.

On June 2, 2018, around 7:50 AM, I rolled out of Emeryville to points east.

--

Beautiful day for a train ride.

"The National."

Unfortunately, Wikipedia, the de facto blog source of truth, does not mention the travel magazine found onboard Amtrak. There is, in fact, no entry for it on Wikipedia.

(See for yourselves, and no disrespect to the band with the same name, which comes up first in search.)

Compare this to "Hemispheres," United Airlines' in-flight magazine, which has a Wikipedia entry.

Greyhound does not, to my knowledge, produce an onboard magazine.

If it did, it would hardly be unfair of me to suggest some parity between Greyhound offering a rider readable and any modern domestic airline: a bus with wings is still a bus.

My point is that travel by rail should hold some prestige and that Amtrak bothers to create a publication for its passengers' merits, at least mentioned on Wikipedia.

Perhaps after writing about my travels, I'll roll up my sleeves and correct this injustice.

Western foothills of the Sierras.

Truckee, California.

This is the entry point into the swath of land known as Gold Country, heading west, extending to San Francisco.

This is the last stop in California on the Zephyr's eastward journey: Emeryville, Richmond, Martinez, Davis, Sacramento, Roseville, Colfax, and then Truckee.

We talk at length about Colfax Station and Grass Valley in previous "Chowbacca!" blog posts. Check it out.

--

Given Amtrak's space constraints, seating in the dining car is communal for parties of one or two.

Compare this to the sad, solitary act of eating a meal while on an airplane: if you are lucky, you'll be in first class with a single person seated next to you. The flight attendant will first bring out a drink (I'll have a gin and tonic, please) while the rest of the plane is seated. Maybe you'll exchange brief pleasantries with your neighbor, perhaps not. Once at cruising altitude, more drinks. On flights with a meal, the attendant will bring a snack of warmed nuts (no peanuts) to each person in first class. Followed by a heated, lightly perfumed wet cloth. I always unfold it and bury my face in the towel as if I am about to have an elegant dinner in Japan. Some passengers will discard the cloth on the seat rest, but I carefully refold mine. Next comes the expensive TV dinner that passes for cuisine in flight (admittedly, the offerings have gotten slightly better since the industry nadir in the 1990s). During the golden age of passenger aviation in the 1960s, perhaps one would be presented with steak and lobster. Indeed, everyone in first class would be dressed to the nines, as would most of the passengers, even in coach.

The business model of offering some semblance of comfort or luxury to even those in the cheap seats has long since been deemed untenable by most carriers. I cannot fault passengers for having responded in kind by dressing down in sweatpants or other loose, comfortable clothing. Even pajamas in some cases. You'll see the occasional suit in first, and certainly a lot of business casual. I wear what I always wear: Dickies pants, boots or athletic shoes, a tee-shirt, and maybe a hoodie.

First-class, business class, "economy plus," or back of the bus, you and everyone else onboard will eat alone, facing forward. Should you be in the regrettable position of having to eat anything on a plane, whether you grabbed a BLT from a kiosk pre-flight or the first-class purser brought you a tray with braised beef ribs, spaetzle, a green salad, a roll, and a brownie. This has a chilling effect on the possibility of having mealtime chatter with your neighbor. That behavior seems to be frowned upon anyway.

For those of you who have read the book or seen the movie "Fight Club," the idea that people even make "single-serving friends" on airplanes should be a glaring warning that something is amiss with the film's protagonist (if that is also the correct term).

However, the communal seating of a meal on a train positively encourages small talk between strangers. This can be a blessing or a curse. Still, it seems more civilized.

According to The Washington Post, Amtrak is sunsetting the dining car as we know it. So get it while you can.

Sometimes it is better to grab a bottle of wine and a sandwich and retreat to your seat.

Rolling into Salt Lake City in the dead of night.

Much could be said about the strange folks that inhabit the great state of Utah, but only the most black-hearted, dead-inside cynic can deny the breathtaking beauty of the place.

The scenery from the gold country in eastern California through Nevada, Utah, and Colorado is really the big selling point for the whole California Zephyr experience. One could turn around in Omaha and head back and not have missed out on much.

Then again, you'd never reach the City of Big Shoulders.

Rolling into Union Station is the rider's reward for the drudgery of the entire state of Iowa.

Some of my terrific friends are from Iowa. They all have one thing in common: they left Iowa.

--

This is probably somewhere in Utah. The state is rich with geological and fossil history, telling the incredible story of the history of life on this planet and of evolution. Then it's a great irony that the state was built by adherents to a Utopian cult that fled Upstate New York when authorities caught on that its founder, Joseph Smith, was a philanderer and con man. Eat your heart out, L. Ron Hubbard, The Church of Mormon is how you do a long-con.

Omaha Burlington Station was renovated in 2004 after being shuttered for decades. The space was intended for mixed use. The 2008 recession stalled some planned development, but some were finally realized.

Welcome to Iowa.

Like much of this country, Iowa's natural beauty is found in undeveloped stretches of land.

Corn.

Obviously, it's a staged sleeping photo.

Big ups to Amtrak's always gracious porters. On long-hauls like the Zephyr, you get to know your porter, and your porter gets to know you. Although I did not have much luggage to speak of, I did make sure to slip this fine gentleman a $20 upon disembarking at Union Station despite being on an open-ended cross-country adventure.

Is Chicago? Is it not Chicago?

To be continued...

--

* Doctor Robert Victor Irish is a nom de guerre. B and N's names are obfuscated out of respect for their and their family's privacy.

London, United Kingdom: Meet Me At The Cemetery Gates

2019-05-13T03:55:00.002-07:00

Vandals, apparently unable to separate the arguably razor-sharp predictions Marx made in the 19th century from the ruinous dictatorships that bore his name in the 20th, damaged this memorial about a year after my visit. Way to "own the libs" while taking a page out of the Taliban playbook.

Day two in London was a big day, from start to finish. I took more than 17,000 steps, closed my iWatch fitness rings, and seemed to have traveled clear from one end of town to the other.

So, let's start there.

London is big.

New York City has five boroughs, and London has 32 (originally 54).

On that Saturday, I probably passed through a dozen boroughs. I crossed the Thames twice, on foot, over two different bridges.

First things first: the not-so-full English breakfast.

Ristorante E. Pellicci working the Saturday brunch crowd. Owner, center-left.

"I don't usually wait in queues," said Deth Veggie as we approached a small but growing queue outside E Pellicci. The owner, spotting Veggie, came over to greet us.

"You should have come on a weekday!" He said, eyeing the queue and packed, tiny restaurant. The two of us put our names on the list.

"I told you he'd remember me," said Veggie. Hard to forget a 6'5" giant American. Veggie's voice carries.

After playing the crowd and personally greeting each guest, the owner shortly returns to the lengthy queue outside with a hot plate of freshly fried chips doused in just the right amount of malt vinegar—the English way.

The restaurant is Italian, but I was there to experience Full English: a hearty meal consisting of black pudding, fried toast, fried egg, grilled tomatoes, sausage, bacon, and beans.

Their version left out the beans, and we had to substitute black pudding—which was the thing I was really interested in—for bacon. In England, bacon is more like country bacon, usually cured shoulder, like the Kentucky bacon I like to get at Wolfsen's Meats and Sausages back in Gustine.

"I think Douglas Adams has a quip somewhere in one of the Hitchhiker's books about Arthur Dent going into a crowded club where he later tells Ford Prefect that between the door and the bar, he thinks he may have had sex seven or eight times."

Veggie doesn't like queues (neither do I, really), and I don't like being jostled too much. However, becoming intimately friendly with the front of the house staff throughout our meal, who could not help but brush up against me several dozen times to fetch plates off the pass and bring them to hungry patrons in the cramped dining room, was a tolerable price to pay for the ambiance of the place, and it's a sense of genuine authenticity.

Although missing the country bacon and the beans, arguably not really the Full English.

A friend of mine lamented that the fried bread lacked butter. My understanding is that this bread is put in a deep frier and served quite crispy while soaked in oil. I pointed this out to her, and she doubled down that the fried bread should absolutely be buttered.

And one wonders why gout is so prevalent among Western Europeans. Butter or not, I knew I would have to walk this one off.

"Do you want to see Douglas Adams' gravesite?" asked Veggie.

"Shit yeah, I do!"

"Karl Marx is buried there too,"

"You're kidding? Sign me up."

Not quite the Full English, but certainly close enough for my poor gastrointestinal system.

Supposedly, Pellicci has been run by the same family for generations. The progenitor was a cabinet maker, hence the elaborate inlay work inside the restaurant.

In New York City, you can get counterfeit goods; in London, you can get counterfeit fast food.

Keats and Yeats are on your side, but you lose, 'cause weird lover Wilde is on mine...

I handed a Five British Sterling Silver pound note (£5) to the gate attendant, who Veggie aptly described as "Eastern European goth chic" (like the sultan, not the baby chicken).

He does not mean this scornfully, of course. However, a large influx of eastern European immigrants, particularly Polish, are viewed with disdain by an increasingly and troublingly growing subset of nativist Britons. Nativist threats to common decency range in severity from the laughable petition (a French word) to remove (a French word) all French words from the British passport (a French word) to Brexit to Neo-Nazis.

Veggie and I discussed the worrying rise of nationalism in Europe and the United States throughout my visit.

"Usually, as was the case with the Trump election, it's a case of the poor shooting themselves in the foot. In the case of Brexit, at least voters shot everyone, including the rich, in the foot as well," Veggie quipped.

Veggie is fond of broad pronouncements, and I don't blame him: He owns his worldview and is more than happy to defend it, even when he is wrong (for example, Veggie refuses to acknowledge that a Martini is a drink made with gin, not vodka, and he insists that the highest form of pizza is Chicago deep-dish, which, of course, is not pizza at all but a sort of bread lasagna, which is very delicious and very much not pizza).

Having traveled somewhat to parts of the United States that could be considered "Trump Country" (as much as I hate to give voice to the idea that some indelible chasm exists), I can see more nuanced descriptions for Brexit or Trump than "the poor shooting themselves in the foot." For one thing, the middle class is primarily culpable, at least in the US version of this current horror show. At the end of the day, one must look inward when one's worldview is so thoroughly rebuffed, and I think it's not unreasonable to lay some considerable blame at the feet of neo-liberal globalist progressive thinkers and pols and their failure to capture the imagination of the voters.

To be fair, Trump did lose the popular vote.

Also, one should not assume that Veggie and I are a pair of privileged dandies waxing philosophical about the finicky whims of the commoners. That's largely the case, but he and I have proper working-class pedigrees we will happily expound upon next to any unlucky bloke at the pub that catches our attention.

"The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" author Douglas Adams. People leave pens instead of flowers.

Appropriation

Classical Studies (capital C capital S) were still emphasized early in my social studies and history coursework during middle and high school (roughly grades 5 through 10). The classics, in Western parlance, study ancient civilizations (of the West) and their impact on history, literature, and culture (of the West). There were some glancing mentions of Mesopotamia, the Etruscans, Pagan Europe (which, I would learn after high school, should not be viewed in the monolithic or glancing manner of my school texts), and Ancient Egypt, but primarily focused on Greek and Roman societies and literature.

We collectively noticed as students the close correlation between the Greek gods and the Roman gods. Surely, we thought it was not an accident that there was Aphrodite and the Romans Venus, Ares and Mars, Zeus and Jupiter, Dionysus and Bacchus for the Greeks?

As the Greek Empire began to erode, slowly and surely, the Romans appropriated their lands, culture, gods, and government.

Mister Lizak, himself an admitted Philhellene, conveyed to us a rule of cultures that, on its face, seems to be fairly simplistic, but extrapolated into modern society has proven to be both rewarding and vexing: throughout history, it is often the conquered who have a significant and sometimes greater influence on the conquerer.

This is true of the Greeks, Romans, Spaniards, Moors, West Africa, the Caribbean, and Creole, et cetera.

They say at one point, the sun never set on the British Empire, but eventually, the bill came due, and the British Empire contracted faster than it expanded, always with lasting consequences and frequently lingering resentment.

Outside of India (and perhaps Sunnyvale, California), the best place in the world to get a good vindaloo is London.

"Hong Kong is up for grabs,

London is full of Arabs,

We could be in Palestine, overrun by the Chinese line

With the boys from the Mersey and the Thames and the Tyne."

In my wanderings of London, I saw many Hasidic prayer shawls, hijabs, North and West African garments, the cotton-linen garb of the Afghani, Pakistani, and other central Asian peoples, all shades of skin pigment, all colors of eyes, straight, curly, black, blonde, red, purple and green hair.

I also saw at least one skinhead, and judging from his bomber jacket and white-laced Dr. Martens, I was disinclined to invite him over for a nice plate of tikka masala. Or for any reason whatsoever.

As a long-time resident of San Francisco, this seems completely ordinary. In fact, the only thing that upset me was that the Indian food in London is measurably better and more varied than that which is available to those of us who live in the Bay Area despite our large Indian immigrant community.

Veggie looking appropriately dour past a post reminding Britons not to jump into the Thames, no matter how much Morrissey you've been listening to.

Ingress, then a bit of brunch...

The following day, Veggie, his wife, and I set forth for brunch. She bounded ahead to put our names on the list of a popular spot called "The Good Egg" while Veggie and I slowly made our way over since I wanted to make use of some of the portal keys I had amassed in the last 40 or so hours playing Ingress on the double-deckers.

In the game community, this is a "walking build," sometimes a solo endeavor and sometimes a team activity. Veggie sensibly refuses to play but does ask me questions about the game mechanics, privacy caveats, and culture of the game as we meander down the road past one point of interest after another (here's a mural, there's an old church, here's a placard celebrating some Victorian Lord or Lady's accomplishments, there's a pub older than the United States itself).

In the early days of Ingress, I explained how the game was invite-only and only for Android users (Niantic, the software developer, was one of the many companies in the Google Alphabet). Some game location data came from Google – certain businesses had early promotional deals with Niantic, so each ZipCar or AXA Bank or Circle K would become a game piece fixed in space called a portal – over which the two competing factions would vie for control. Other early portals may have come from map information featuring museums, post offices, public buildings, etc. The rest were all contributed by players themselves, and in the early days, older players (dubbed "founders" in the game) would insist this was mostly done in good faith.

However, as the game gathered more users and the mechanics were worked out by the players, the advantage for a player to have their own vanity portals appear on the "portal network" near where a player lived or worked became a motivating factor in many specious portal submissions, and the submission rate exceeded Niantic's ability to vet the portal-worthiness of each location. Therefore, soon after I started playing (and coincidentally after the general release of the game out of invite-only beta, as well as to the much larger audience of iOS device users), Niantic removed the ability of players to submit portals, and portals submitted during that year remained in limbo until Niantic figured out how to crowd-source processing the backlog using an anonymous voting system that was offered to senior level players to sort the wheat from the chaff as they say (more chaff than wheat, in this case).

After some time, the backlog was reduced to a manageable size. Slowly and carefully, Niantic began allowing new portal submissions to be reviewed in the same crowd-sourced manner.

That is how I was able to submit Douglas Adams's gravesite as a new portal (the submission was later declined, which means I will have to go back to London and resubmit it).

We arrived at The Good Egg, where a decent-sized queue had formed outside. Since the wife had preceded Veggie and me by a good 20 minutes, we only had to stand for about five minutes before a server fetched us and led us into the dining room.

A proper London dive. Rare and discouraged in pubs is the jukebox.

If Veggie and his wife were Brett and Rennie Sparks, this would be their bio photo.

Pinkies are out means extra fancy.

Sunday Roast

The tourist left to their own devices and the worst toast in London.

The rest of this speaks for itself...

Perhaps not the worst breakfast ever, but close.

At least the crappy breakfast spot had a sense of color.

The addition of "brown sauce", a condiment as familiar to the Brits as ketchup is to us Yanks (and with similar origins, I suspect), did not improve on this most disappointing British breakfasts.

Do not be deceived by the Eames-inspired decor and palette. This shop makes terrible food.

A bagel shop that makes no such thing.

Boombox nation.

Poppie's Fish & Chips

Old and new.

St. John Bread

Feeling supersonic, give me gin & tonic.

A "quesadilla," according to the VIP lounge at Gatwick.

Bentonville, Arkansas

2019-04-22T01:30:00.006-07:00

Dedicated with love to the memory of Mary Owen...
And to Zeus, who was the best boy.

I went to the home of Walmart corporate headquarters, Bentonville, Arkansas.

On a lark.

Zeus was a good boy (most of the time). RIP.

Northwest Arkansas riparian sedimentary terrain and deciduous vegetation.

Why am I in Arkansas?

I asked myself the same thing as the Embraer commuter jet touched down at Northwestern Arkansas Regional Airport, known by its call-sign XNA.

The answer to that question goes back to the middle 1990s and my guilt toward generally being a prick to everyone I encountered online on a nascent global internet, well before there was such a thing as the "worldwide web." Even the term "world wide web" is an anachronism these days, as is its abbreviation "www," frequently dropped altogether from addresses printed on business cards or writ large on billboards on the sides of buildings or next to the freeway.

Before the web, there were several entirely text-based venues to interact with the few thousand people on the internet. Instead of Facebook, folks hashed out their arguments in threaded debates on Usenet. Users had multiple avenues to chat in real-time, often requiring users to be logged into the same host: Usually a Unix box sitting in an office somewhere at a university – old-timers will remember tools like "wall," "talk," or "talk," and their many cousins.

The real fun was using internet relay chat, or "IRC." Kids these days would recognize distinct similarities between IRC and its modern-day incarnation, Slack.

Slack. Fucking IRC for the web, for smartphones. It never occurred to me to take IRC and make it an app... let's just say I'll never forgive myself. Slack is now valued at almost eleven figures.

Before Slack, before Google, before billion-dollar IPOs, back when Silicon Valley was just recently chopped down fruit orchards that had been repurposed for integrated circuit design and manufacturing at the height of the Cold War and not yet a comedy series on HBO, the internet was the realm of a few very geeky pioneers. The internet was a collaboration of the US military and academic community, whose original charter was the creation of a digital communications network that could withstand a nuclear war.

History will show that the greatest threat to that nascent global network wasn't the Soviets but bored teenagers.

I got onto the internet around 1992, when most of the infrastructure and governance were split between the National Science Foundation and the US Department of Defence Advanced Projects Research Administration (ARPA).

Making what could be an exceedingly long story short, I applied for and was granted my own domain name for free from the Defence Department's Network Information Center – the now-defunct "nic.ddn.mil."

For a 17-year-old, this was true power, and I was drunk with it. This was enough coverage to abuse faceless strangers on "IRC" (and to be mercilessly abused by others) to my underdeveloped teenage brain. That's how I encountered the radiant Amity, then a tender 15 years old, for the first time.

Of course, I had no idea that she was radiant, or even a she, at the time. How could I? All we were to each other, Amity, and an army of disaffected malcontent youths, were just words glowing on a CRT screen: fixed-width, green or amber on a black background.

Between the winter of 1992 and the spring of 1997, volumes of incandescent text scrolled past, spelling out the greatest soap opera never to be seen by more than several dozen teenagers and the FBI agents whose grim task was to catalog every mercurial spat into each of our respective permanent records.

When I finally met Amity in person in the early aughts, it became apparent that I was gravely mistaken if I ever suspected her of actually being a bored teenage boy pretending to be a hot girl. And one of the first things she told me was, "you were so mean to me!"

Despite all of that IRC nonsense, we became close friends. We often relied on one another for support and encouragement, even though we rarely saw one another in person.

I had let her down recently, and that's how she was able to guilt me, defenseless and under the influence, to fly across the country into enemy territory to redeem myself.

Rounding out an afternoon into an evening of pub-crawling through "downtown" Bentonville, we arrived at Tusk and Trotter for dinner.

The architecture of 110 Southeast A Street, where Tusk & Trotter American Brasserie is located, belies its original purpose: general office and warehousing for Sam Walton, red brick and utilitarian. Walton, you will find, touches nearly every brick and mortar property near Bentonville Town Square. The restaurant lays faux authenticity, chic in modern American casual dining, on in thick exaggerated strokes: Walton's warehouse door, fashioned to look like the giant sliding door of a barn, is repurposed here to partition the bar, kitchen, and dining room. The concrete floors have been washed with acid and coated with shellac, as have the tables, perhaps made of reclaimed wood. A mural illustrates the standard English primal cuts of pork. There are custom-made fixtures and hand-blown incandescent light bulbs, perhaps I did not look close enough. "Authentic! Artisan! Farm to Table!" screams the decor, set against exposed support columns and an unfinished 30' industrial ceiling. What was, and what could be, is the promise of Tusk & Trotter.

It is the promise of Bentonville, Arkansas, "a New American Town."

I was lured by the promise of pig's ears nachos, a decidedly Portland (Oregon) sounding appetizer in the middle of what was maybe only a decade ago the least Portland-like city in America: Sam Walton's own time capsule only recently broken open and dressed up out of necessity to attract a new kind of worker to this "company town".

I whiffed my chance to try the nachos, and I regret having done so, but I had been steadily noshing on Haute pub snacks since early afternoon and a few heavy local ales, which had a dampening effect on my appetite. I did the math in my head and figured I could eat half an entrée and take the rest back to my host's house for the weekend.

Unfortunately, this was a strikeout for me, swinging and missing with my entrée choice of local bison strip steak ("...everything here is farm to table..." assured our server).

I ordered the steak rare to mid-rare but came out closer to mid-well. The steak, my host's appetizer-as-entrée of bone marrow, pork belly, pig's cheeks, and the slab of BBQ ribs that her partner ordered were all salted within inches of their lives. To my palette, the ribs were also too dry, and I imagined that the shortcomings of the preparation suggested a story of multiple failures happening in series, leading to one catastrophic end result: too aggressive a dry rub when a brine would have been better, pre-cooked too far ahead of time and perhaps improperly stored after the initial cooking to exacerbate the dryness of the rib meat, too much salt added to the BBQ sauce in the early stages resulting in a concentrated salty mess, and finally the failure of each one of the cooks and the chef to taste it before putting the ribs on the pass.

The first "Five and Dime" was owned by Sam Walton in Bentonville, Arkansas.

The statue at the center of Bentonville Town Square commemorates Governor James Henderson Berry of Benton County, a former infantryman for the 16th Arkansas Infantry Regiment, which fought for the Confederate States of America during the Civil War. This statue depicts the governor as a soldier in full Confederate Regalia. Unsurprisingly, some controversy surrounds this memorial, and many would like to see the statue replaced.

The bar at the Pressroom in Bentonville.

Hushpuppies.

A roast porchetta sandwich. Unlike the food at Tusk & Trotter, the roast could have benefited from some more aggressive seasoning. The citrus and herbal notes one expects from this classic preparation of pork loin were missing. The cauliflower would have benefitted from a hit of lemon, Meyer lemon, or perhaps cider vinegar.

Drinks at Scotch and Soda in Bentonville.

This glass is too fancy for the John Powers "Gold" Irish Whisky.

Scotch and Soda

It is worth mentioning that if I got any kind of "gay" vibe in Bentonville, that vibe strongly emerged from the various service industry workers employed by these new restaurants and bars that were now dotting the landscape of the greater Bentonville and Rogers area.

Despite the claims to the contrary by various homophobic regimes (Iran, modern Russia, the former governor of Indiana), the queer community exists everywhere you look.

Hospitality and restaurant work has been a traditional refuge for "friends of mary" and Bentonville – a town that has strong ties to the Confederate South and to various stripes of extreme religious communities (for instance, the Church of Latter-Day Saints, of which Sam Walton was a member) – is no exception.

John Ritter, may he rest in peace, might have been encouraged by the societal changes that have taken place since "Sling Blade" was filmed. I was certainly encouraged to tour Bentonville and Rogers.

I witnessed servers and cooks who made no attempt to disguise the fact of who they were in a part of the country where doing so still requires an act of personal bravery.

Traitor flag

Corned beef, sliced into a steak, and grilled over braised cabbage and potatoes for St. Patrick's Day at Levi's Gastropub and Low Bar.

I was hoping they'd cover The Pogues, which Amity hates.

Each time I attempted to pay for dinner, I was outgunned. Either Amity or her partner would whip out their credit cards before I could shove mine into a server's hands, insisting that I not pay for anything.

I grew tired of this and decided that if I couldn't pay for dinner, I could simply go a step farther and make dinner.

Dinner

Beef shanks braised in wine with shallot, Dijon mustard, celery, carrots, and fresh dill.

A typical slow braise. First, you salt the meat, sear it to get a bit of the Maillard reaction going, and then set aside to arrange your aromatics in the pan: celery, carrots, and shallots. I rubbed a generous amount of Dijon mustard all over the meat, returned them to the pan, poured in my braising liquid, covered them, and put the whole works in the oven at about 275ºF for several hours.

Bone-in ribeye steak prepared using the cold-hot method.

Sometimes called a "reverse sear." Take the meat out of the fridge and salt both sides. Let the meat come to as close to room temperature as you can – this can take more than an hour, depending on the size and thickness of the steaks. Put the steaks in an oven that is set to a low temperature, for instance, 250ºF, just long enough to see the outside of the meat just starting to become grey and exude liquid (the liquid being the interstitial fluid and myoglobin from the muscle cells that have begun to lyse). This takes some practice. Overcook the meat at this point, and the game is over. The steak should be soft to the touch and warm but not hot. Remove the steak and set it aside, placing the pan (preferably big cast iron) on your stove to get as hot as possible. At this point, I like to give the steaks a nice rub down in oil or bacon fat, or any fat you like that has a high smoke point. Open all your windows and turn the stovetop fan all the way up. Whichever side was up when you had the steak in the oven will go down on the hot pan. That's your "presentation side." You're going to cook that side in hot fat until there is a nice, crispy, brown crust on the steak and the whole steak is roughly 60% done, then you flip, and you pull the steak off about 20% short of what your intended doneness is going to be. This takes practice. Remember: you can fix an undercooked steak, but you can't fix an overcooked steak. The meat will continue to cook for several minutes after taking off the heat – a phenomenon called "carry over cooking." Resting the steaks for several minutes will ensure that residual heat will be more evenly distributed, and the juices will have an opportunity to settle.

Steamed asparagus

Another technique sounds easier than it actually is and requires a modicum of finesse and attention. I will trim an average-sized bunch of asparagus that you might find at your local supermarket, removing the woody part of the stems, so they are a uniform length that can fit into a 9" or 10" sautée pan. The pan should go over medium-high heat. Add a tablespoon of butter, a pinch of salt, and a few tablespoons of water – probably just short of 1/4 cup – and put a lid on until you have a nice rapid simmer going. After three or four minutes, take the lid off, check for doneness and color, and boil off most water to form an emulsion of cooking liquid and butter. From when you put the pan on the stovetop to when you take it off, the whole process should be about 10 minutes. Your asparagus should be a nice bright green, with little resistance when pierced with a fork.

Boston Bibb lettuce salad with marinated carrots, radishes, and asparagus in a dill cream dressing

I used a vegetable peeler to cut thin carrot strips, then thinly sliced the radishes and asparagus by hand. I placed the vegetables in a bowl with a good pinch of salt, a dash of rice vinegar, and a few pinches of fresh chopped dill. This I set aside as I tore off the lettuce and dried it in a clean dishtowel. The salad dressing was prepared in a chilled mixing bowl: two tablespoons of cold whipping cream, salt, pepper, a brunoise of shallot, and finely chopped dill. I whipped with a small whisk until the cream was a frothy soft peak – just enough to hold its position loosely when the whisk was pulled out. I removed the marinating vegetables, discarding any excess liquid, and hand-tossed them in the dressing with the lettuce.

Sugar cookies dipped in chocolate ganache with vanilla bean ice cream.

This recipe uses a few cool tricks you can do with a microwave. Add a cup of bittersweet chocolate chips plus a tablespoon of maple syrup to a microwave-safe bowl and zap for 45 seconds on high. You should now be able to stir the chips together, but if there are unmelted bits, simply zap for another 20 seconds. Add a cap full of good vanilla extract and a quarter cup of heavy whipping cream. Blend with a spoon. Now you have milk chocolate ganache.

Dip anything you want into this, and then place it on a cookie sheet that has been lined with lightly oiled wax or parchment paper (or a silicone mat). Refrigerate until chocolate sets, usually at least an hour.

The radiant Amity is hunting Pokémon in an Indian restaurant in Bentonville.

Hot take: the Indian food in Bentonville, Arkansas, is really great.

Like, London is great. Milpitas is great. South Bay is great.

For my last dinner in Bentonville, before going back to my liberal, socialist bubble, I decided to treat my hosts to an Indian takeaway. This plan was hatched days before I first arrived, and my host gave me the lay of the land in this "company town."

In addition to Walmart's main corporate campus, the company recently built out The David Glass Building, a technology-only center just down the road to house a data center, various IT engineering departments, and probably some of walmart.com and all that comes with it. Walmart.com was previously entirely in San Bruno, California, just south of San Francisco.

India has been at the forefront of exporting technical expertise and labor for over 30 years, outpacing the Chinese, former Soviet Republics, and South America (oddly, Colombia is a big exporter of tech labor).

Where there is tech, there will be Indians. As far as I am concerned, paraphrasing Martha Stewart is a "good thing."

That is because where there are Indians, there is Indian food.

The Indian food in the Bay Area, where I live, is overwhelmingly northern in style. Colleagues of mine from southern India and Bangladesh have often lamented this fact to me. Both companies often put on an elaborate Diwali celebration during my years at Microsoft and Yahoo. Special dishes and desserts from southern India would often be featured.

Bawarchi Biryani is located on the outskirts of Bentonville's seemingly endless stretch of commercial property and malls. "In Ohio, we would have passed through six suburbs already going the same distance," I mentioned to my host as we drove 30 minutes away to pick up dinner.

The menu features a dizzying blend of Indo-Chinese fare, but I believe their hearts are in south India, judging from the variety of idli, vada, uthappam, and dosa. Idli is a savory rice cake, vada is a lentil donut, uthappam is a lentil flatbread, and dosa is a fermented crepe.

I ordered sambar idli, sour tomato stew, saag paneer, an uthappam, naan, fish stew, and a chicken appetizer to appease the pickiest eater among our group, my hosts' four-year-old son.

Whatever hijinks I got into last night were now expelling out of my pores. I dimly recall watching Hap & Leonard until about four in the morning, aided and abetted by a constant stream of VSS (vodka, soda, splash). Still, most of what we ordered was merely mildly spicy, based on Bawarchi Biryani's heat scale. Caveat emptor.

To my dismay and chagrin, I recently learned that an entire generation of my great-great-grand uncles and cousins were named after Confederate generals and war heroes after the end of the Civil War.

More alarming, I recently learned, as did an unsuspecting majority of fellow US citizens, that in some very real and very scary ways, the Civil War never really ended: it merely retreated, went to the ground, dug in its heels, and festered. In November of 2016, it finally boiled over like a boiling pot on the stove, dripping down the side of this melting pot and flaring up the fire from the burners below.

White men in the United States, especially in the post-Reconstruction South, in the heyday of the Jim Crow Era and the Ku Klux Klan, seemed to be particularly susceptible to suggestions that newly emancipated former slaves somehow posed a greater threat to their status and livelihood than the circling vultures of robber barons, gilded age oligarchs and political graft that would dominate the socio-political zeitgeist from President Grant all the way up to Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

When I posted an Instagram of me giving the Confederate Memorial in Bentonville an obscene finger gesture, it did not take long for some folks to take umbrage. Criticism ranged from lengthy explanations about how the Civil War was not about slavery but instead about Northern aggression against the Southern way of life to the unpleasant things certain Instagram users were willing to do to me should they catch me "in their hometown."

After a few hours (yes, hours) of this barrage, I decided it behooved me to archive the post rather than confront an onslaught of people who were on the continuum of being tragically misinformed to simply outright hostile. The experience was eye-opening but not entirely surprising, especially in an era where a sitting President of the United States cannot bring themself to openly condemn the scourge of white supremacy and white nationalist terrorism.

My aunt bought a home in Georgia, where my late grandfather grew up.

After the 2018 election, she wrote me that she would likely never spend another election cycle in Georgia – her ideological opponents in the town my grandfather grew up in were too vituperative.

She has always strived to stay connected to our family roots: traveling to Alabama, where her mother lived, traveling to my grandfather's ancestral origins in Scotland. She's an academic, and through her diligence, I learn about my origins – including the uncles and cousins named after war heroes of the losing side. One of my aunt's closest friends is a Civil War historian, and together we sojourned last summer to the cabin in which Ulysses S. Grant spent his last days in upstate New York.

There, after the tour, she repeated the story of my grandfather rushing away from dinner one Friday night, after my grandmother had labored to put this family meal on the table, to bail an employee of his, an African-American truck driver, out of jail in southern Ohio. My grandfather understood the peril this man, his employee and thereby his responsibility, was in at the hands of corrupt cops who were almost assuredly also high ranking members of the local Ku Klux Klan.

The inconvenience for a man like my grandfather to leave his home to help is a minor sacrifice but infinitely more honorable to me than the cowardice of our current president to stand by and equivocate about the evils of racial injustice in the United States that clearly continues.

Under the current administration, hatred, nationalism, and fear as a governing policy is not only unabated but encouraged.

We can, and should, do better.

Maybe it starts with Indian food in Bentonville.

Suicide is Not Painless.

2018-06-09T14:09:00.001-07:00

How soon is too soon to write a eulogy for someone?

I'm told that it is standard practice to write them before the person dies, in cases of notable persons.

In the last 36 hours it seems volumes have been written on the sudden and shocking suicide of chef and author Anthony Bourdain, who once described himself as the luckiest man alive. Within hours of the story breaking, multiple print venues had published lengthy eulogies online, and CNN, for whom Bourdain was the host of their only watchable content, would put together an hour long tribute that I regret not watching live last night when it first aired.

(Instead I watched the Cleveland Cavaliers melt-down in a game four loss to the Golden State Warriors at home at Quicken Loans Arena with my mother at her nursing home; I am grateful that my mother is still alive and that I could share the moment with her, even if the game didn't go the way I had hoped. It certainly did nothing to improve my mood, and Clevelanders are perpetually saying "there's always next year," but really, I don't think "next year" will come again in a long time.)

Of course, Anthony Bourdain was himself to my mind first and foremost a writer. A writer who was a dishwasher, a heroin addict, a cook, a chef, a bon vivant, a raconteur, a television host, celebrity, writer, husband, father, son but at his core of cores, writer.

Bourdain, as a writer, was as huge an influence on me as any, and I think this very blog would either not exist or certainly be very different if Bourdain's writings hadn't fallen into my lap. "With gusto" is as apropos a description I can muster for how I consumed everything he had ever published. I have read "Kitchen Confidential" over and over, and have found it to be at once a parable, a guide and a warning. The next time I read it, a memento mori.

I was thinking today there were three celebrity suicides that really hit me right in the gut, and those are Kurdt, Elliott and now Tony.

I want to talk a little about the three suicides that effected me the most in my personal life: A., F. and T.

I don't know what harm or good it does the world discussing the circumstances around the ends of their lives, and I'm sure a great many friends and family are relieved that they never received national media attention; that said, I'd like to just briefly talk about how they impacted my life in a positive way.

Although they are gone, they made an impact in the world they lived and I am better for having known them.

A. was a hunky jock, exactly the opposite sort of person you would expect to be hanging out with a dour computer and drama geek like myself. Teachers loved him, girls loved him, and his teammates snapped towels affectionately at him.

But don't let his smile and pretty face fool you, A. was whip smart and always moving in thousand different directions. A. always had some caper in mind.

Together we stole Ohio State ID laminates one year, featuring an at the time difficult to reproduce hologram of the state seal, and since his parents could afford a high quality color printer, we made a pretty penny selling fake IDs to our classmates. The next year we upgraded to selling modified Radio Shack 33-memory Tone Dialers to make free calls from pay phones. A. was my partner in crime and also the co-sysop of my on-again, off-again dial-up BBS that I ran off my father's business line. He ran one as well out of his house, and I was his co-sysop.

A. loved everyone, and was never a snob, judgmental or cliquish.

I will tell this one last detail, which I will never know if it is true or apocryphal, sadly involves A. during his rapid descent into mental illness after high school.

I had lost touch with him, but there were murmurs about A... A. had come into some significant amount of money, and was living an eclectic life; this of course is a WASP-y way to euphemize some scandal. The story went that he had gone gonzo, was living with a prostitute and had bought some sports car (which would later figure into his untimely demise, sadly).

All the tut-tutting and hushed whispers about this alleged relationship always troubled me, and I realized that if any of it were true that the A. I know would have nothing to do with anything sordid but that the A. I know was probably recklessly, unapologetically being kind to another lost and hurt human being.

That's how I like to see A.: generous to the very end, without an ounce of cynicism, friend to all.

I wish there were more people like him.

F. was also kind to me, and I suppose I spent too much time focusing on how mean people could be in high school to appreciate all of the people who were good to me; this is something I am beginning to only really fully realize and regret now 25 plus years later.

In high school, everyone thinks they have it worse than everyone else, and no one seems to have time to put themselves in other's shoes or consider their words and actions. This was certainly the case with me, at least.

F. was a girl who I thought had everything going for her: she was beautiful and well liked, kind and intelligent, and boy could she sing.

I got involved with the Student Group on Race Relations (SGORR) in high school because... because my older sister was in it, because it got me out of class twice a month, because all the hot girls were in SGORR, because the teacher I admired the most helped run the program and under all that teenage baggage of wanting to impress my older sister and chase girls and get out of class, ultimately it felt like it was the right thing to do: a rightful cause to pursue, important and just.

Of course, as I got to know F. I began to realize that there are other people, and that the people who appear to be the most together often are just putting on a brave face.

F. relayed a story about babysitting for a family in suburban Cleveland whose kids wanted to see her "tail", because their father had told them that Jews have tails. I don't know if this person was actively a frothing at the mouth anti-Semite or just an idiot feeding bullshit to his kids, but what was real was the humiliation and hurt that experience caused F.

F. was often an us-against-the-world ally of mine, and sometimes we'd skip class to sit in the auditorium where she'd share her fears and her Bailey's Irish Cream with me.

At the end of the day, F. wanted desperately to be loved, but like the song she found it in all the wrong places.

She was thoughtful, kind and brilliant and I love her to this day for it, wish I had told her so more often while I could.

T.'s passing wounded me in a very personal way because I had just been to see him only a few months before he passed, near Christmas time, leaving a wife and children behind. The call came in when I was doing my holiday meal shopping at the Safeway on 16th and Potrero, I was in the north-west corner of the store, by the bakery, frozen goods and liquor departments.

"T. is dead."

I was sick to my stomach. I talked to him almost every day online. I forced myself to look, his last typed words the gibberish of someone with a stomach full of pills.

T. was loyal wether you deserved it or not. When he was on, he was the most fun guy at the party. His smile was contagious, and conveyed mischief. T. had capers in spades, and was one of those people who you could see coming a mile away by the telegraphed confidence of his gait.

When he was on the upswing.

Like A. and F., T. was generous. Like them, troubled. And like them, suddenly, maddeningly gone.

I asked how early was too early to eulogize, and I say if you can eulogize, you can damn sure pick up the phone and send a text, or drop in with Chinese take-out and a bottle of wine. Life is short and death be not proud.

Context and Memory

2018-06-09T13:30:00.004-07:00

I'd spent the day wading through a state of shock. From time to time I'd checked in on the streams of surprise, sorrow, anger, advice, and disbelief on social. Like many of us, I was looking for some human connection in the void he'd left behind. I'm not one to get personal about celebrity deaths, and there have been so many in the last few years, but this one I'd felt. I'm still feeling it.

Is it because he'd left the things we all want behind? Success. Fame. Friends. Family. Independence. That was some of it, I suppose. Yet, as so many have pointed out, these things do not equal happiness. Still, to his public and those in his circle he'd surely seemed happy. It's often the case when these things occur.

Is it because he was the rare kind of guy who one embraced as a friend; became intimate with through his books, shows, appearances, and social media? I'd certainly felt it, as much as I feel a longing to sit down for one more beer or meal with friends far from me. Not everyone has that impact on so many. He did. He still does.

Yes. It's all of these things, of course. It's also something else. It's something deeper.

All of the repostings of suicide hotline numbers and calls to reach out to those in need help, of course, and they rub a bit of balm on our wounds, but they won't change the fact that people in need can't see past their illness. Like bulimia, anorexia, schizophrenia, or bipolar disorder, the person only sees what the illness wishes. It's how the illness survives. It blinds them. It binds them. It keeps them from help. I'd never understood depression before. I think I know it a little now.

Throughout the years of our long-distance friendship, I'd seen the kinks in the armor. I'd seen the insecurities. I've even noted some of them in this blog, but I'd just noted them as things that made the man who had so much more relatable, more human, not more vulnerable. I'd looked right past the very things that drive a person to take their own life. I'd done nothing to try and save him.

I'd let down a friend.

I'm not saying that I could have saved him. I'm saying that I wasn't even aware enough to try.

As I work through my loss and regret, I'll avoid the media ghouls with their gluttony for the morbid details. I don't need anything more than I know. My friend is gone. The only thing left for me, for us, to do is to be aware and hope that we've learned enough to save the next one. We can all do better. We should, for Tony.

It's Hot Cocoa Season!

2017-12-24T11:22:00.001-08:00

Tip: If you don't want to scald your milk (or, in my case, a 50/50 mix of heavy cream with Half and Half), a candy/deep fry/jelly thermometer will help you to keep an eye on things. I actually let mine go a little over my ideal while getting the pic below but I like to pull it from the flame at 120 degrees Fahrenheit (50-ish C).

I hope you're all having a great Holiday Season and are enjoying some cocoa and silly cookies. Cheers.

Let's Face It. It's the Heat AND the Humidity.

2017-09-02T09:34:00.001-07:00

California's been unusually warm and muggy this week. The heat's one thing. I'm ready for the Santa Ana Winds when they come. This humidity, though. Ugh. I'd thought I'd left it in Ohio.

Since we rarely need our air conditioned, I don't own one of those wonderful window machines. Fans are only so much help. Time for the ice pack air conditioner to come to the rescue. I just take a large metal mixing bowl, add the ice packs that I keep in the freezer for the camping coolers and power outages, (Be Prepared), then put a fan behind it and aim it at the bed. It's like magic, I tell you. If you're not prepared, substitute ice cubes for the ice packs. Simple.

Oh, and I keep the freezer stocked with some old friends, too.

Hot Pot Helpers

2017-08-31T16:21:00.000-07:00

If you are a cooker of noodles, these handy items come recommended by a friend of Chowbacca! They're bamboo, and they are five pairs for $7.49. They're not cheap, they're affordable. Check them out, and if you like what you see, buy some through the link above.

Bring On The Whimsy (with reservations)

2017-08-27T13:52:00.000-07:00

Thanks to a reader's FarceBarf post I was introduced to this thoughtful and hilarious piece by the thoughtful and hilarious David Mitchell of That Mitchell and Webb Thingy and Peekaboobs. It reminded me of a steak house that existed for about a year within a short walk of my home that cooked its steaks on bits of volcanic rock. No, it wasn't a Flintstones-themed steak house, no, I never darkened its doors, and yes, they were yabba-dabba-doing it wrong. The cooking of steaks is not broken unless you're ordering it well done or are slathering it in ketchup. If you are doing these things, seek psychiatric help.

Like Mr. Mitchell, I would prefer my steak on a plate rather than a shovel. That said, some of my most beloved restaurants have served portions of my meal to me on slate, logs, and seashells and I have delighted at the presentation, preparation, and flavors. However, if your food is not to the level of Atelier Crenn or Aubergine, you can stick it on a plate, thanks. Round, oval, rectangular or square, a plate is where your food belongs until it is worthy of whimsy. Actually, maybe just stick to rounded plates until you've worked up to angles.

A grilled cheese sandwich served on a hubcap is just a grilled cheese, folks.

Now, there is a place for whimsy when the food isn't genius-quality. If you're The Sardine Factory and you'd like to serve a portion of my meal in an ice sculpture of a swan I'd be (and have been) delighted. If you've prepared chicken under a brick and want to make a show of pulling a brick off of my entree at the table, I'll applaud your theatrics. Sashimi served on a little boat? Fantastic, and while I stick to the sushi at Benihana, I still enjoy the showmanship of teppanyaki. That said, slates, logs, and shells should be reserved for the truly wonderful meals. Sticking something ordinary on a slate is like having your insurance policy delivered by limo.

Also, I'm not talking about atmosphere. Do, please do, put as much thought into your space as you are able. It's part of the experience. Just don't expect it to save your kitchen. The food's the thing.

As the brilliant Mr. Mitchell pointed out, it's a tough, competitive restaurant world out there and any edge is worth the effort, but I say that if the food is worth returning for, they will return and no amount of flair will dress up a boring meal. Note the death throes of Applebee's and its ilk. There are too many good dining choices out there these days. Wipe the lipstick off of the pig and get back to cooking it.

Chicken Roasted in Seasoned Coconut Milk

2017-08-26T14:49:00.001-07:00

Easy as a lemon squeezy (hm, maybe I'll add lemon or, better, lime next time). Brine the chicken parts for about a half hour. Mix thyme, garlic (powdered or minced), and a pinch of salt to the coconut milk and marinate for 3 hours or overnight. Transfer chicken and coconut milk to a baking dish and bake at 400 degrees Fahrenheit for 20 minutes or until the internal temperature of the chicken hits 165 degrees.

The result is creamy, dreamy, and juicy.

You could cover it in the coconut milk on the plate. I didn't, but you could. The idea took me back to a lot of chicken cooked in Campbell's Cream of Mushroom soup from my childhood. So, I didn't. You could also spice it up. My wee wonder doesn't care for spice, so I went mild but you be you.

Need a baking dish? I always recommend Emile Henry. It's solid, reliable and beautiful. Oh, and the one below is now on sale for 56% off.

Greek Yogurt and White Vinegar Mashed Potatoes

2017-08-25T22:16:00.000-07:00

So, I had the potatoes boiled, the butter in the bowl, and was ready to rice when I realized *EGADS!!!* that I was out of milk, cream, half-and-half, and dehydrated milk or buttermilk just didn't feel right at the time (although I'll try those at some point). Why not Greek yogurt? Why not, indeed?

It worked out great. A little splash of white vinegar made the spuds even better.

Greek Yogurt and White Vinegar Mashed Potatoes (serves two):

1 Large Russett, (or the equivalent in smaller potatoes)
Peeled, cut into chunks and boiled until fork tender
1 Tablespoon Unsalted Butter
3 Tablespoons Greek Yogurt
1 Pinch of Salt
1/4 Teaspoon Paprika
1/4 Teaspoon Garlic Powder
1/4 Teaspoon Ground Black Pepper
1/2 Tablespoon White Vinegar

Rice the potato into a medium sized mixing bowl with the butter, yogurt, and spices. Mash to mix and add the vinegar while mixing. Try them with dill, parsley, chives, or green onions. Kombucha vinegar would also be nice.

They're so good! Make some!

Click above for a great "over-the-bowl" ricer that's easy to use and clean. Also, it makes great spaetzle, I'm told.

Blueberry Compote

2017-08-20T16:09:00.001-07:00

As we have all experienced, leaving frozen fruit in the freezer too long eventually draws all of the moisture out, leaving the fruit dry and unappetizing and the bag filled with ice crystals. I know it's tempting to toss it, but I prefer to turn it into delicious compote.

What you need:

1/2 cup water

1/2 cup sugar (syrup works too)

2 cups frozen blueberries (plus the ice crystals surrounding them)

1 1/2 teaspoons lemon juice (I didn't have any lemons on hand, so I left this out and didn't miss it)

Bring everything except the lemon juice to a boil in a heavy saucepan and then simmer 3-5 minutes until the berries begin to burst and the liquid is reduced to a syrupy state. Stir in the lemon juice if using. Enjoy with waffles, ice cream, or both.

Something for Our Parent Readers

2017-08-20T15:35:00.000-07:00

What a great idea. I wish I'd had one of these when the Wee Wonder was more ... um, wee. Maybe I'll get one anyway for my golden years. No, seriously.

Squash Blossoms Are Back!

2017-08-16T22:29:00.001-07:00

I received some zucchini blossoms this evening via Wee Wonder's trip to the farmers' market with her dear and generous grandmother. Since there hasn't been time for a garden (or the farmers' market, frankly) this year, and I didn't have a wealth of my own squash blossoms to play with, it was a most welcome gift.

Much can be done with squash blossoms. I could have stuffed them with bacon and mushrooms and then baked them. Unfortunately, I was out of (GASP) bacon and (ARGH) mushrooms. I could have filled them with ricotta and herbs and then deep fried them, but I was out of high-heat oil. I could have stuffed them, raw, full of goat cheese with blueberries, but, alas, I'd been making salads with that cheese all week, and it was gone.

I wasn't feeling like having a sandwich for dinner.

So, I just went for something simple. Along with some hydroponic butter lettuce and thinly-sliced apples, I served up the torn blossoms dressed with mirin, a bit of salt, and aged rice vinegar. Light and delicious.

I have some left over. Time for a trip to the store.

Bubbles in the Bathtub

2017-08-07T21:39:00.003-07:00

In my younger days, I used Dr. Bronner's exclusively. In fact, I believe that most of my fellow scruffy hipster neighbors in Cleveland Heights' Coventry Village bathed in the stuff. Beware the peppermint variety on thy sensitive areas, pilgrims.

Then, I moved to SF, something made my skin go crazy, and I had to switch to pricey "skin calming" body wash. Lately, though, I've thought that a nice lavender Dr. Bronner's might be worth a try. If my skin rejects it, I can always use the remainder for washing dishes or laundry. I will not, however, be brushing my teeth with the stuff, thanks.

You can read 15 reasons to love Dr. Bronner's here.

I Got Your Cake Pans Right Here

2017-07-17T23:30:00.001-07:00

These cake pans aren't cheap. They're affordable. 4.5 of 5 stars from 325 customer review? Done. Free shipping? Wow. Chowbacca! Approved? Done. Get some, bakers.