Information Services

The computer goes down.

Makes call. Hey, the computer went down.

Time passes. Ring.

“Is it plugged in?

“No, really. Make sure it’s plugged in.

“Please just check the plug. I know you can see your screen.

“The plug. Check it, please.

“Hmm…OK, so it isn’t that. We’ll call you back.”

Time, she passes. Couples fall in love. Baby birds leave the nest. The cold hand of authority strangles legitimate dissent.

Ring.

“OK, tell us if you see lights flickering on the back of your computer tower.

“So there are lights. Really?

“Really?

“Hmmmm….Ok, that’s weird. We’re escalating this.”

Time shows up, takes a shot of cheap white tequila and a handful of Xanax. Deep below the earth monstrous creatures burrow tunnels through the living rock for their own obscure purpose. A dude in a Green Bay Packers sweatshirt gets thrown out of a bar in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. The Hostess company creates filling for Ho-Hos.

“Hello!,” says person unexpectedly behind me. “Let’s look at the plug.”

See, says the person, what I’m doing is plugging this (holds up cord) into the wall. See that? And now–watch what I do, here–I’m plugging this other end into the computer. See? Now, I have my laptop here, and look!

Looks at screen full of code.

“Now give it a try.”

Tries. Fails.

“Hmmmmm…..well, so it isn’t that.”

Time. Pyramids. Ziggurats. Movements of the tribes. The shadow of clouds on the green earth. Stone melts grain by grain. George Burns plays Free Bird on a mandolin in an exotic, excruciating, time signature.

More people arrive, from differing factions. They circle each other warily. They push buttons. They argue. First person gathers up laptop, leaves in a huff, curses upon us all. Those who remain sigh knowingly.

“We’re going to have to take your machine.”

Goodbye, Machine.

Stupid Writer’s Block

I’ve never been very good at making myself write. It honestly scares me. The thought of starting a piece, even a small one, even a blog entry, fills me with tingly dread and urine.

So rather than write I’ll do nearly anything else, like sweep the floor or wash the dishes or stare hard at my fingertips and wish they were swordpoints or get a job with the City where I swivel in my chair and listen to the tiny burbling noises my brain makes as it dies. The floor, at least, eventually gets clean.

In school I had to, they made me. The life of the mind required, at least occasionally, that I knuckle down and grind out some practice news story or some ersatz editorial in which I would hopefully prove my ability to bloviate in acceptably quotidian fashion.

Later, at Go-Go and the Rocky, writing was the whole job, or a big enough part of it, that jumping in and hacking away at the keyboard just seemed like making the doughnuts, grabbing the shovel. It’s easier that way, when someone resolves the “art vs. craft” conflict for you and expects 20 inches of copy by 3 p.m.

But now there’s no whip hand. There’s no impulse from above, no immediate threat to my person in the form of lost employment or starvation. I’m left to find motivation within, from this supposed internal creative maelstrom that Serious Writers wrangle daily. The message, as I get it, is that I should care enough about my craft (my art?) to do it no matter what, no matter where.

There’s a (possibly apocryphal) story about Cormac McCarthy and how he lived without running water or heat at the start of his career because he just cared so fucking much about making great art. That’s impressive and discouraging as hell. I hear about truly diligent professionals that keep to set schedules, dutifully engaging with the Unknowable from 9-5 with enough energy after for a signing and dinner out with their agent. I can’t jot down a haiku without first spending 45 minutes wondering who will care about reading it.

See, my family has this crazy story. It’s got everything you’d want in a novel about 20th century America and Americans: circus fat ladies, attempted murder, suicide, war, electroshock therapy, redemption, chimpanzees in Japan. It’s a huge messy dreamboat of a subject, and it’s mine–I own it, or at least share ownership of it.

But I can’t tell it. I can’t even start. Fuck, I just wasted most of an hour deciding whether or not to write a haiku.

Germany

A few months ago, my Stepdad Rich asked me and The Wife if we’d be willing to travel to Germany on his behalf, to escort his grandchildren back to the states for their American summer vacation. We thought, hey, not like we’ve got anything else planned.

So, this is what happened:

Flight on Lufthansa to Frankfurt, direct from Denver. Flight attendants speak German. WHAT THE HELL, MAN. Listen to White Light/White Heat on the way, until the Xanax dropped me partway through “Sister Ray.” Try that and see if you don’t dream that Lou Reed and Goldie Hawn are trying to fit you for a Beatle wig.

Connect in Frankfurt to Munich, encounter bespectacled young German next to U-Bahn ticket terminal who wants us to pay him to ride along on his group ticket. We stare, suspicious. He explains the process–no, really, it’s a legitimate ticket, they’ll charge you each 10 Euro, you only pay me 5, it’s a win-win!–and we still stare, suspicious. Puzzled, he shows us his German passport, proving without a doubt that he is actually German and thus empowered with legitimate knowledge of German rail prices. We continue to stare, suspicious. “But no, it’s a win-win!” Stare, suspicious. “Oh, you’re Americans, I understand.” Alright, now we can do business.

Train takes a while and on the trip German guy tells us about the best cities in the world. All without us even asking. Turns out that our eventual destination Erlangen isn’t among them; in fact, to hear him tell it, place doesn’t even have any cows to tip, much less a good Saturday barn dance. But New Delhi! Now, that’s a city. Also Buenos Aires. And somewhere else, maybe Pittsburgh. We check the railmap for a connector to New Delhi or Argentina or Pennslyvania but come up with bupkis.

Hotel in Munich is fancy. The girl at the front desk speaks better English than I do. It is also right across the street from a strip club called “Madam Bar” that features a helpful window display stocked with 8 x 10 cheesecake photos and a single high-heeled shoe, all nestled in that decorative fluff they sell by the ton (tonne?) at Michael’s. I try to promote cross-cultural understanding but am rebuffed by my closed-minded American counterpart. HMPH.

Munich itself: stunningly walkable and clean. Wide Italianate avenues (thanks to Mad King Ludwig’s deficit spending!) a million people walking a million little dogs and not a spare turd to be found. So many gelato shops that businesses have little “no ice cream” logos on their front doors. We kinda look like everyone. Wonder why that is. They sell schniztel sandwiches. Guess what I love? Yes, Ryne Sandberg. And mom. And the free exchange of ideas. Also, schnitzel sandwiches.*

What I don’t love:

That…thing is the Butcher’s Platter, courtesy of a local establishment that didn’t seem especially offal on the surface. Bloodwurst, pig’s trotter in aspic, pig’s trotter in aspic with blood, some sort of extra smushy liverwurst item. And ham. We buy it because the menu says “ham.” But then, it was the English version of the menu, and they probably leave stuff off just to fuck with us. I think I hear Tuetonic giggles from the kitchen.

Best fountain ever.

In Nuremberg, we climb cobbled streets and drink authentic red ale in the shadow of Albrecht Durer’s house. I also break the brain of the kid tending bar at our hotel by ordering a Maker’s Mark on the rocks. He finally figures it out–I have to say “it’s just ice” like three times, even though he spoke English–but while so doing cruelly neglects his drunken teenage girlfriend, the only other person in the room, who is reduced to yelling TEQUILA TEQUILA TEQUILA! between gigglesnorts. Woo Girls are Woo Girls the world over.

Erlangen, despite what our smirky scofflaw of a train companion thinks, is purely wonderful. Bikes everywhere, beer gardens, the kids from the university studying in the park. Our hosts Julia and Dieter could not be more kind, and Julia’s daughters–our ostensible reason for being in Germany to begin with–are a couple of bright, entertaining young ladies. We drink late with a family friend in a local bar run by an old Spaniard, where I am mercilessly quizzed about Dirk Nowitzy by a couple of young German scientists. We defy multiple last call orders. We see a really excellent Jerry Lee Lewis cover band (!) play a neighborhood beer festival where thousands of happily buzzed locals walk around drinking from glass mugs–imagine a similar scene stateside ending any way other than with mass arrests. We eat doner kebab.

(I’m flummoxed by the absence of doner kebab in Denver. It’s kinda like an gyro, but not, and cheap. This is my future, my scheme, my ticket to the good livin’ over on Easy Street. Look for Alex’s House of Doner Kebab sometime in early 2037.)

And everywhere, always, beer. People having it for breakfast, for afters, to celebrate weddings, waiting for the bus, to dull the inevitable agony of simple consciousness, because it is all so tasty.

Ahh.

The return trip to America is best not mentioned here, or anywhere else, ever again, save to say that our teen travel companions maintain their good humor and composure far, far better than the two adults supposedly shepherding them to America. Oh, and if you’re ever offered a free night’s stay and meals in a Frankfurt hotel courtesy of Lufthansa, sleep in the terminal and scrounge crackers from the garbage instead.

*Here’s the thing. We do touristy stuff on vacation. This is because we are tourists, touring. We’re gonna visit museums, see sights. We’re gonna climb to the top of St. Peter’s and take pictures. We’re gonna buy dirndls and go to the Hofbrauhaus (admittedly almost too much, even for me). We’re gonna purchase magnets, we’re gonna ask for the English menu. The scarf-wrapped poseurs pining for a Lost Generation of their own–without accompanying Somme, of course–may say things like oh, I’m not a tourist, I’m a traveler or I choose to experience a place the way that locals do or Dad, your Mastercard didn’t go through tonight but you can wire me the cash, but here’s the deal: the locals don’t really like you. They like that you give them your cigarettes and buy them drinks. In some cases they are hoping to sleep with you, or maybe steal a kidney. And while Anthony Bourdain might sneer at our style, I say fuck him, because for every tree-grub he scarfs down, every pithy take of the destruction of “authenticity” by the polluting cross-current of 1st and 3d World, he drinks three infused foam caviar martinis off the backs off three high-priced Latvian escorts. I’ll keep my schnitzel sandwich.

Stop That This Instant

You. Quit that. Right away.

It’s a sandwich. Not a sammie. Not a sammich. Do not use those words, ever, because they are not words.* They are infantilized nonsense sounds favored by people who sing along loudly at Jimmy Buffett concerts.

Speaking of: Jimmy Buffett. Stop what you are doing and do something else. Your cheeseburger is full of sawdust and sand fleas. Your concerts are charnal houses for the alive-in-name-only. You are going bald, you have looked at 40 and a real pirate would cut your nose off and burn your house down.

Hipster neighbor. Your pants. Stop them from cutting off the circulation to your waist. Your beard is mighty, your tattoos cutting-edge, your friends identical. It is 98 degrees outside. You can put on shorts. Make them tight if you like. Your fixie bike feels badly for what it is doing to your grundle in this weather.

Internet snarktard. You are playing a character. That character is a dickhead. You would not use that sentence in public. You would not act this way in a grocery store. You would not tell that lady that thing because that lady would beat you. Beat you down.

Television show with the fat guy who has a gorgeous wife. This needs to end. The fat guy masturbates gloomily to a Victoria’s Secret catalogue in his empty efficiency. The gorgeous wife lives with a hedge fund manager and owns 56 pairs of yoga pants. Replace your laugh track with the sound of orphan children weeping.

Website telling me about the college degree I should have gotten. Website. Your servers are built from the bones of innocents. Your code is written in tears.

Reruns of Sex and the City. OH GOD JUST END IT NOW PLEASE I BEG YOU JIMMY CHOO SHOES MR. BIG IT BURNNSSSSS.

Coastal elite. Disingenous politician. Person with American flag screen-printed on tee shirt. Gwyneth Paltrow. Guy who blows through stop sign and meek-waves. Purveyor of jargon. Editor-in-Chief of local newspaper. Individual who eats corn cobs and motor oil and poops next to my back fence.

Just stop it. Stop it now.

*Westword got me started on this. Thanks, Westword.

Photo from jonathanpaulmusic.com

Catching Up: Bittersweet, Ribs, Rolling Rock

As this is ostensibly a blog about eating and drinking and gallivanting and the like, figure I best get back to brass tacks. So, with only a tiny little bit of further ado, some photos of the culinary badassery that my mom, stepdad Rich and I experienced at Bittersweet last Friday…

I ordered the duck. It was, I say with not a trace of hyperbole, the single best thing anyone anywhere has ever eaten, ever, with the exception of foods made by The Wife. Gorgeous, buttery, the kind of thing that Diamond Jim Brady probably had shipped in by the ounce from Turkey in the days before refrigeration and suffrage.

The scallops, my mom’s order. Her own mother–a tiny, daffy woman whose outsize appetites and gigantic personal history nevertheless loom over my family’s recent past like a colossus–made a point of ordering scallops in every single restaurant she ever visited, menus be damned. I like to think of ma’s choice as a sort of homage.

My stepdad Rich chose the wild boar. If my own hadn’t been so stellar, the clutchings of food envy might have been too much for me to bear. I’m a sucker for those perfect little potato croquettes. (I should mention, as well, that our server was beyond awesome.)

So. That was Friday. The Wife returned from her business trip Saturday evening, and Sunday I welcomed her back to the bosom of home by smoking a rack of baby backs treated with my buddy Jason’s signature rub and some other techniques I cobbled together with the help of my friends over at The Internet. (Hey guys!)

Here’s what I came up with:

After letting the rack sit in its spice rub for 24 hours, I proceeded to whip it gently with a camel’s hair shaving brush, douse it in Hellman’s Mayonnaise and recite, in my best Paul Lynde impression, every single section of Ezra Pound’s Cantos. When it began the inevitable back-sassin’–you all know what I mean, I’m sure–I ate 14 packets of red hot pepper flakes and made sure to carefully monitor its socio-economic worldview through the end of the cooking period. I also drank about 14 cans of Rolling Rock.*

Following that:

*Try it yourself at home!

On Fandom

Yesterday, Westword ran a blog item titled “The top 5 non-bro, non-dude places to watch sports in Denver.”

The author, Patrick Langlois, threw out a few names (Bull & Bush, British Bulldog, Big Game among them–evidently, the DudeBros stay away from joints that start with B), each bearing a brief descriptor with a bit of sass at the close, such as “(T)he place feels like a true pub without trying too hard, and it’s somewhat off the beaten path, so as not to attract cologne-soaked dudes who reek of effort” and “(I)t has plenty of comfy furniture, quirky vintage decor and a diverse mix of patrons, most of whom sport ink rather than backwards baseball caps.*”

I attend plenty of sporting events, at great cost to my wallet, liver function and general tolerance. Fans can be assholes, especially at the venue and especially after drinking 26 cans of Bud Ice. And this is a tiny little throwaway listicle, as much about pumping up some (admittedly really excellent) bars as beating on a bewhiskered trope. Still, I’m fascinated.

Why is it, exactly, that some fans–and Langlois definitely is one, as he attests in the first paragraph–feel the need to partition the notion of Fandom?

Consider this sentence: “(I)n fact, there are plenty of sports fans who appreciate the artistry of athleticism and the strategy of its execution, and who enjoy watching it take place with a good craft beer in hand and a plate (not a basket) of thoughtfully prepared food to go with it.” Leave aside the too-too snottiness of the Mile High Nouveau Hip and consider his meaning, which is: they paint their faces, swim a sea of warm Natural Light and mack curly fries smothered in ranch dressing; I carefully sip Ten Fidy and sample bone marrow crostini served on a PLATE. They yell, I nod appreciatively. I am cool. They are not.

I understand the reticence with which some–many in my own non-sports-havin’-female-dominated family–view organized sport. It’s mechanical, warlike, simplistic, prone to stoke our basest impulses. And that’s just college football. Langlois’ DudeBro isn’t imaginary, either: anyone who has set foot in LoDo’s or any of the Tavern chain of schlocksteraunts knows the type immediately.

But let’s be honest with ourselves. I don’t know a single fan of any sport who hasn’t, at some point or another, embodied the worst qualities of the group as a whole.

We can forego our college dress and attitudes, we can order Left Hand Milk Stout instead of Coors, we can think that “Lebron’s Decision was a smart business move”** and yet, at some point, we’ll be at our seats in Invesco or Arrowhead or Coors or wherever, shouting at the top of our lungs and flexing like the world’s most moronic DOOD when player A beats player B for a __. At some point, we’ll talk trash. At some point, we’ll drink way, way too much and trip into a gutter, say something we will later regret to a parking attendant and spend a night in the hoosegow. Like the tides.

The attempt to form a circle of elites in such context is laughable. You may eat off a plate instead of from a basket and imagine yourself superior to the hooting hoi polloi, but eventually you will chant DEEEE-FENSE. You can wear skinny jeans and a scarf and still end up punching a security guard.

*I’ve seen his byline for a while, so he has to know that the sight of a DudeBro with full sleeves *and* a backward hat is about as common in Denver as Starlings and bum poop.

**This bit got me: he seems to be saying, look, not all fans are solely steered by emotion, some us truly understand. Which is such a boilerplate Colin Cowherd-y thought–most fans are simps with brains dyed in team colors who don’t know how The Real World Works–that I’m tempted to simply shrug it off, but no. Fuck no. This drives me nutty.

The average fan understands their position in the relationship perfectly well: loyal consumer of a product made by individuals who only reciprocate that loyalty when convenient. Yet still they buy team gear, spend money on airplane tickets to see humiliating losses in other cities, experience wild mood swings based on the actions of 20 year-olds…and regret not a piece of it.

So yeah, when followers of the Cleveland Cavaliers watch a coddled Golden Boy like Lebron James preen on national television–and why, exactly, was that necessary? Could he not have just signed a damn contract like everyone else? The hagiographies were already being written, all he actually did was give the authors pause–you’re going to get some unreasonable civic anger, and maybe not everyone will immediately think, well, that kid just made a smart business decision! Good for him!

That’s just humanity. And fandom is nothing if not human–greasily, drunkenly human, but still.

Certified Nurseryman

The only reason I graduated high school on time–backstory there later, maybe, possibly–was because my wonderful guidance counselor, a woman of near-saintly patience and benevolence, steered me toward a work study course in Horticulture at the local community college.

Every weekday afternoon of my senior year, or at least the ones I showed up at school (backstory maybe, possibly), I hopped on the TransFort to Front Range Community College for a few hours of plant identification, pest management tactics and greenhouse building. I learned the difference between Acer and Quercus, between Hymenoptera and Lepidoptera, between smacking my thumb with a hammer while alone at home and doing so in front of my instructor Mr. Feisler, who thought I was about the most rotten and useless seed in the whole Burpee catalogue.

Feisler was a muscular, salt-and-peppery fella partial to suspiciously tight polo shirts, casual racism (he told us of his first job in Denver, a terrible affair that required him to labor at night in a factory alongside “a bunch of colored guys”) and Bristlecone Pines. Yes, Bristlecone Pines. He called them “God’s noblest creations” or something like that–can’t believe I can’t recall the exact language, because he said it like 8 times per class–and even raised a grip of them in his home nursery. Given that Bristlecones (Pinus Aristata, to you) don’t do well outside of specific high-altitude environments, Feisler’s efforts were akin to breeding Bottlenose Dolphins to attack swimmers in the wave pool at Water World. He was a complicated man in the way that uncomplicated men bound to peculiar obsessions are: Kirk Feisler would not have hesitated to beat you to death with his bare hands, roll your corpse into an old carpet, throw said carpet in the Poudre and then lie to the police about everything if he’d discovered you somehow dishonoring one of his pines.

Yet despite our shared distaste for each other, the man did manage to help get me a job at a local nursery. I’m pretty sure he had to as part of the program, but still, I loved it: hauling bags of peat moss, unloading pallets of gallon-sized flowering bushes from Monrovia, driving the golf cart around the back 40, doing donuts around the piles of mulch, flipping the golf cart over, rolling it back upright in a panic before a boss saw, sneaking off to smoke pot in the parking lot with the other kids, speeding off on the golf cart again…

But I’d see the Certified Nurserymen, with their easy confidence, personalized shirts and knowledge of integrated natural control systems, and be struck by the thought that those were exactly the kind of professionals I would never be. It wasn’t that I didn’t have a vision of my future, it was just that the vision involved doing the exact same things I always had, except maybe in an apartment of my own, surrounded by girls with low expectations.

While that job ended the way they all did back then, in a muck of irresponsibility and recrimination, I finally realized that I’d had it backward–because these years later I do have a place of my own. I have a job with responsibilities. The girl (singular) I surrounded myself with actually has really, really high expectations, dammit, which means I’m wearing pants right now. But there’s a not-small piece of me that wishes I was spending my days tooling around the back lot at a nursery, whooping wild amidst the sheep-and-peat.