Hey Look, I Forgot To Add A Title — Again!

It’s been time to write a post for a while now.  Hell, it’s been past time for a while now.  But…

Yea, there’s that damned but again.  God, I hate that fuckin’ word.

What sentence, statement, wish, or thought ends well that has the word “but” figured prominently in it?

Ahem.  Anyway…

I still find the time to write nowadays.  In between meetings and research and accounting and planning — and all of the other things that crowd the top of your To Do list when you’re opening your own business — I still try to make time to write.  Unfortunately, there really isn’t anyplace near me where I’m comfortable enough to sit in the corner and lose myself in the words.

Well, not until the Depot opens.  Then…

Then, all bets are off.  And, shit, do I love that thought.

When worries about costs and fees fill my days…

When thoughts about lights and tables and chairs keep me up at night…

When stress about licenses and certificates and approvals wake me in a cold sweat…

I picture myself sitting in the corner and writing.  And I smile.

The joy this whole process has brought cannot be overstated, by the way.  Oh, not just my joy — and trust me, there ain’t really a limit on just how much freaking joy this brings me — but the simple, honest joy of others, too.

The joy of my friends in this new home of mine at the promise of a place built to bring something  different — something real — to a town with little on offer besides corporate schlock…

The joy of my dad’s friend at seeing his grandfather’s picture still hung on the wall of the vestibule…

My dad’s own joy at seeing the happiness grow in a son more known for cynicism and writing about the dark side of life…

The joy of that son at building a legacy — a legacy not just for a father, but for a grandfather and a great-grandfather…

Look, if I don’t stop now, I’m gonna go all writerly and start trying to cram a series of profound thoughts and emotions into a two-hundred flashfiction piece.  I think I’ll skip that, for the moment.

I’m going to skip ahead to the end of the story, actually.  I don’t know about other writers, but I write — and think! — in images.  Most of the time, when I write a piece, I have a final image I want to leave in the heads of my readers.  That finally image is always intended and designed to elicit certain specific emotions and thoughts.  

On this blog, I tend to replace that final written image with a musical thought.  I use a song in place of a mental picture to try and convey some of the thoughts and emotions that went into the creation of the post.  Honestly, the best way to really understand what I write here is to listen — and pay attention — to the music I post.

Oh, it doesn’t always work.  Sometimes my mind — and my writing — changes direction in ways my ear can’t keep up with.  But today…

Well, if today’s post ended up being a short bit about joy, rather than what I first set out to write, the song I initially thought to build around still holds some very real elements of truth.  Plus…well…it’s really fucking good.  It is, in fact, one of the two or three most evocative songs I can think of (and I can think of a lot of songs).  It also happens to be one of my favorites…and I don’t mean just from this specific band. For me, this song stands up there among other, far more well-known songs & bands.

{Musical Note — just turn the volume up.  No, really, turn it all the way up and let the music wash over you!  That is how I write, by the way, with music blaring in my ears and the world held at bay.  That is when I write the most — when I feel the most — when the music is felt as much as heard, and the world is nothing but a distant tug, easily ignored.}

Food, Beer and a Music Podium

So I started thinking about food.

No, not like that!

Err, okay…pretty much exactly like that, but I plead hunger and impatience for my lunch to come.

Well, it’s a bit more than that, actually.  I started thinking about food a few days ago, mainly because I was cooking…and because I love to cook.  I love the process of taking a pile of disparate ingredients and turning them into something greater than the sum of the parts.  It is actually one of the more satisfying things to me, to be honest.  Strangely — for a guy as given to impulse, randomness and flights of fancy as me — that process of turning chaos into order is pretty damned relaxing.

But just as much as the process do I enjoy what food means.  Look, when I get together with friends, we inevitably end up in the kitchen.  We inevitably end up sharing booze and food and good times.  Even at “work”, when I get together with others involved in the beer world, we inevitably end up back in the brewhouse, still sharing booze and food and good times.

So where am I going with this?  No, that’s not me projecting your response to the opening above, it is me legitimately asking myself that question…

When it comes to food, I love it.  No, really, there is nothing I won’t try.  I love it all. I’ve had some of the most refined, perfect food you can imagine, from Kyoto to New York to Nice.  I’ve also had street food.  In the back alleys of Mexico City; in the streets of Marrakech; in those neighborhoods in Naples you aren’t supposed to go…

And in every bite there has lived that one thing so impossible to define, but so crucial to life: culture.  The culture and life and heartbeat of those who gave birth to that food, both the individuals and their people as a whole.  The food that sticks with me — and the food I like most to eat — is, by the way, the street food.  The peasant food.  The food that make families brag about still using great-grandma’s recipe.

I once spent several hundred dollars on a formal 30-course kaiseki dinner in Kyoto.  I loved the meal, but if you pressed me, I could only really describe one or two dishes.  Do you know what I remember more from that trip?  The grilled chicken cartilage* I had at a tiny Shinjuku izikaya.

*Yes, it really is a thing.  I won’t explain in the interests of saving space and word-count, but buy me a beer sometime and ask about it.  I can go on for hours about some of the weird shit I’ve had in my life.  Just don’t ask about the sheep’s eyeball — I didn’t enjoy that one.

I thought about this as I was cooking dirty rice, by the way.  More peasant food.  Food that started as a way to extract all the flavor possible from leftovers and off-cuts and what was left after the rich had their pick.  It was James Michener who introduced me to this reality.  I don’t know if you have ever read any Michener, but one of the things he excelled at was connecting his readers to the cultures he was trying to explore.  One of the ways he did that was through their food; more importantly, through the historical nexus between food and culture.

In the US that nexus is one of class, yes, but also of race.  Steaks and roasts we all know.  They were — and still are, to an extent — the food of the wealthy.  Then you have the foods for the rest of us, for those at the bottom.  The fish stews and pies for the New England fishermen.  Gumbo and jumbalaya for the French Acadians (yup, that’s where “cajun” comes from) transplanted to far off Louisiana.  For the slaves and former slaves there were wild greens (collard, mustard, etc…), catfish and leftover/unwanted cuts of pork and beef…all those things that lie now at the very heart of American barbecue.  As a matter of fact, I just paid $25 for a meal that once was given to slaves because the master couldn’t be bothered to supply anything better.  Hell, lobster was once so despised that is was used only to feed prisoners…

That is how food both reflects and embodies culture.  That is how food defines who we are as a people…and, just as much, who we once were.  That is a key part of the magic of it all.

As a writer, I sometimes get chastised for using food and booze too much.  I use them, however, to reflect my characters.  To reflect who they are, and who they aren’t.  I use them, often, to create situations where the food — and the atmosphere around it — defines the cultures and backgrounds of the characters in ways that would otherwise take hundreds and hundreds of words.

I am, at heart, a peasant.  I would rather have real coq au vin in a tiny country village than the best dishes from the fine dining places in Paris.  I would rather, as a writer, use a hundred words of my characters’ thoughts and reactions about food and everything surrounding it as a mirror for the real world than five thousand words of exposition.

One of my disappointments with George RR Martin, by the way, wasn’t that he talked too much about food, it was that he didn’t use food enough to truly comment on the lives and circumstances of the different strata of the society he created in GOT…

{Musical Notes — this started as something very different.  It started as a desire to find a good, old school song to use.  That desire morphed into finding those anthems that are truly evocative of an era.  Then, me being me (and beer being beer), everything morphed again into finding those songs that we don’t even have to actually hear anymore; into those songs from which we need only an exposure of a second or two to remember, and to feel.  I had to limit things to the last fifty-ish years, if only to keep the number of songs manageable.  As a further note, these are all songs I love…and all songs that bring their own memories for me.

Gold Medal: perhaps the most instantly evocative of these songs, for far more than one generation.  Don’t cheat, don’t look ahead.  Just listen.  It won’t take more than one second if you are anything at all like me…

Silver Medal: a better song than the first, it does not have the instant cross-generational impact of the “winner”.  It is to me one of the best songs ever recorded…

Bronze Medal:  This song is my generation.  It should probably take the Silver, to be honest, but the second place song is just a better song by a better creator…

Honorable Mention: I couldn’t help myself, this song had to make the list.  It had to make the list because, not long ago, I was walking to my own locker room at a hockey tournament, only to hear a bunch of middle school players belting out this song in the next room.  That is cross-generational appeal…and a song you will instantly recognize…

Adopted Characters

I haven’t done much freelance writing lately.  Honestly, my focus has pretty much been 100% on getting the new brewery up and going.  That focus, by the way, is not gonna slow for at least a year. With everything I have to do, I do not expect to even open the doors until next fall, and even that will take an awful lot of blood, sweat and tears.

Some opportunities, however, still come up…

Even when I don’t seek them out, I have enough friends and contacts who know what I can do to feed me “snacks” from time to time. Look, when you’re known in certain circles for certain emotional things, the work kinda finds you.

I sometimes wish it didn’t.

A snack came my way recently…one I wish I had refused.  I certainly thought about doing so, but the money…

I was asked to rework an ending for a video game.  It was the “bad” ending, yes, but it still was a prominent part of the game…and one that needed attention.  The money wasn’t great, but it was better than what I get in my only-the-healthcare-matters “real” job, so of course I said yes…

All I needed to do was craft some character notes, and write a suicide note and eulogy.

Fuck.

I did it, of course.  I did it because I always do.  I don’t make promises that I don’t keep.  I wish sometimes that that was not the case, but I always deliver*…

*Not always on time, but I always deliver in the end.

So, I finished it…then I called out from work today and opened a new bottle of scotch.

I also cranked up the music.  A lot of music.  An amount — and volume — of music that I’m fairly certain had my neighbors calling the landlord.

Whatever.

I needed it, both the booze and the music.  They weren’t “my” characters, but I adopted them, and that means I built some feeling for them. They weren’t ”my” characters, but still I broke myself to turn out material that mattered…

Then I went and reminded myself of courage, and what it all really means.

Look, I like blues and rock and a certain amount of folk inspired music.  What I can’t stand is complete country.  I hate “hillbilly” music almost a much as I hate sell-out, commercial shit.  Which means I can’t stand 90% of what is called “country” today…

But, well, sometimes the meaning of the song transcends any categorization.  I’ve mentioned it before, but, well…this particular tune has a story that bears repeating:

I can think of no greater sign of courage, nor of love, than what Steve Earle did with the song below.  He took a song from his son, one that he never saw or heard until after his son’s suicide, and he recorded it.

Dear God, I can’t imagine the kind of strength that took.  When I need to remember courage and devotion and love…yeah, this song is all I really need.

More importantly, when I need to remember just how much art can heal and inspire, all I have to do is think about the story, and listen to this song:

Suspended in My Masquerade

So, I gave some of those young kids from the last post my blog address. Maybe that was a mistake…

The funny thing is that it wasn’t the important bit about cynical manipulation in the last post that drew them, it was my focus & fixation on music that I talked about in other posts. They didn’t care that the grizzled old bastard could make them do whatever the hell he wants…they only cared that he actually listens to music they might like!

A (big) part of me actually really likes that outlook.

Since I’m not in the mood to write a decent post right now, I’m going to oblige the kids. It’s a song…it’s a song I’ve talked about before. It is quite literally the musical version of why & how I write.

Yep, it’s an old song. It’s older than me, actually…but the version I am posting here is solidly from my own life. It is also the best version of this tune that I have yet heard…

By the way…if this doesn’t make you dream and fantasize, nothing will…