Fat Tire's Silver Linings

Infuriated at personal shortcomings, Kiddo chugged 22 ounces of Fat Tire and took out enough food three Kiddos to the movies to while away the two hours it would take for her 12 copies of a 91 page board presentation to be comb bound, from the stack of paper so fat it was in an old printer box, and wrapped in a plaid, linen scarf to keep it from wetting in the flash flood warning.

It had taken an hour for them to print, back in the office behind some heavy fake cherry doors--all of which only opened with a badge swipe. Traffic, even at 6:30pm, stood to make me cry at the wheel.

That's when life becomes crucial again. There are no adorable children faces to look at you with hope. There are no teenagers on the line, ready to drop themselves into your enlightened hands. There are no adults thanking you and praising your black president, who shines with the fire of 40 saints.

There is no where to hitch hike without being an underpaid hooker, and no where you can drink beer all day and not feel anything but joy at all the dirt in your heels.

I've been back from Moldova for a year an a half. I haven't talked to any of my Moldovan friends. I love them, and think of them more often than they would believe if I told them.

But I was alone. I was alone and in the world, and doing something more terrifying. The people I'm dependent upon now, are dependent on me. We are living the capitalist dream, together. We are gleaning money from the hands of investors to defend the greatest country currently on earth.  We are a smalll company burgeoning with ambition and desire to do good.

It's not how I wanted to do good, but I've drunk the kool aid of CEO: we are only here to pay mortgages and do good and interesting work.

Because, really, what else is there?

Parking Lot of Mis-Matched Time Cards

Preface

People in Maryland are, in my experience, wimps about weather and driving. Or, at least, they are lazy and eager for an excuse to stay home. Can we really blame them for taking a chance to stay home? No. Or course not. Hunter is in the midst of convincing me to play hooky one day this week himself. Hunter is one of the hardest workers I've ever witnessed. 

Can we blame them for thinking a bit of slush, or, heavens-to-betsy, 1/4 inch of snow is quite enough to keep us all at home for the sake of children's safety? 

um. Well. We can judge them harshly. 

Chapter 1. 

My parking lot at work is probably typical. Exactly 10 more spots than there are workers who can potentially park on a given day to work in out building. They fill up closest to the door first. By 7:15 am the rock star spots are gone. I can only imagine these are held in high regard by those who park there. 

If you troll in around 10 am, you're off in the spots cordoned off for piles of salt meant to save the Winter Wimps. 

Chapter 2. 

I park just beyond the crazy ambitious. I gauge myself to have above average ambition. I will probably end up just above average in money-raking and recognition. I drive in rain, shine, slush, ice, hurricane, crazy beautiful hula-hooping sun, flu, tension head ache, terrible hang-over. 

Chapter 3. 

I work for 11 hours. This is almost impressive. However, my hero, the CEO works for 12. No matter how many things I do, she does more. 

There are, of course, reasons for this. She has been doing this since she was my age, and she's the age of my mother. 

Chapter 4. 

When I finally leave, there is much left undone, and I think "Fuck damn, I'll just have to finish that tomorrow." I put my laptop into its big, padded case. Coil it's power cord up and shove it down the sleeve adjacent. "shit burn, there's that whole project for IT I promised." I pick up a black leather folio full of my drafts and drafts and drafts of my To Do lists. "Yep. All I need's some beer to help me do that!" 

Chapter 5. 

Zipped, tripped down the stairs (four flights), and out five sets of doors. The salt they put down is not even scattered. It's in weird, congealed piles of half-melted white. Sparks of magenta or blue make me remember just how artificial they are. Just before I look up and resent the empty spaces that represent people already at home, I wonder just what idiots dropped slop bowls of fake salt-substance on my ground. My heels grind in the white as the spread of cars come into focus. 

A few of the front-liners are still here (CEO's Subaru included). A fewer number are in the big dumping areas off in the deer-ridden distance. 

The majority are in that no-man's land of average. However, there aren't many. Not even average has much of bell-curve. 

Epilogue. 

I drink three bottles of beer, fold two loads of laundry and eat only one side of fish. I save the other side for Hunter, who doesn't come, and put it in a box to take to work at 6:30 am tomorrow.

M.C. Kiddo

Another faux pas, another day.

It turns out my super sleek system of uploading my old mix CDs onto  iTunes, and then mixing up my stash into sweet playlists and given as presents is one of many things. None of them cool.

To the ultra geeks (see Papagaard's old blog on Macs,or Hunter's articles in The Motley Fool) I am so late nineties. To the True Hipsters, I am a hipster. To the music studios, and very probably my federal government, I am a thief. To outcast friends (many of them either hipsters or True Hipsters) I am just not as good as them.

My mixes are pretty darn neato. While in my cubicle I think Optimistic thoughts, or I think some hard core gospel thoughts about there not being a god. I think them and have no ready way to express myself! I must express myself! It's a work day! I cannot blog! I cannot go and tell my love all the love that wells in my breast! The sturm! The drang! So while I admin away at the unruly world, I sort files and songs.

Files are alphabetical or chronological or by VIP. Songs are by Anais, Homicide, Oaf, Realism, and Sirena Mica. One is by the world as logic shapes it, and one is by how art organically grows it.

When I was in Moldova, I had two whole winters in which to sort my musical library. I could testify to every genre and spelling. I could verify every year of every album and write little blurbs about every band, their being -- Oh! glorious depression it was. I had the world's most organized iTunes library, and a very few other things to do.

With this idea of settling, can I have it all? Can I be productive, not depressed, and have an organized iTunes library?

Maybe if I ever get a TV. 

The Devil's Whiskers

I had a new drink last night. It didn't have bourbon in it, but it was delicious.

It starts, in Lady's head as a perfect Manhattan. Liking the sounds of it (vermouth nerd, all about the bourbon) and always wanting to try new things, and always looking for a way to stay in touch with my beloved Alcoholics, "yes" was the only answer possible.

Lady suggested it first, of course, she is the responsible mother of our merry band. Skinny Dancer starts with a glass, 1792, bitters and pops open a tiny can of grapfruit juice. I have enough faith in my friends that, sure, those ingredients could... could work.

Pho Poet catapults down the stairs to arrest misguided mixing.

Phew.

Nope. Not bourbon. Gin. Use gin.

While this is a bit dissapointing for my sweet life theme just a the moment, it does make more sense with the bitter citrus.

So, mix this:

1 part gin
1 part grapefruit juice
1/2 part dry vermouth
1/2 part sweet vermouth
1/2 part grand marnier
several dashes bitters to taste.

Serve shaken or stirred, neat or on the rocks. I had mine on rocks in a high ball glass with a little stirring straw to get through the ice. It was divine. Smoky with the sweet vermouth, bright with the citrus. Sweet orange and dry vermouth to hold it all together over a floral and tangy base.

It's a great drink to exemplify why I wish, often, that alcoholic drinks were not alcoholic. I could drink something flavored like this all the time, except that Bonbay Sapphire puts me $11 out and I weight 120 pounds... three of these things buts me pretty out of clean mind.

After learning about liquors themselves, I intend to find very good, dry drinks that will not dull my brain. 

The Start

I'm in early drafting phases of the bourbon guide I'm making for The Trip. The outline shifts and expands every time I have a new idea. I get a new idea with every paragraph I read online.

I'm in the manic research mode of a project, and it's fun as heck. It is New Year's Eve, and I just gave up going out partying with my awesome friends to stay in and READ about drinking. Mamagaard and Papagaard trained us to be critical thinkers about everything we pupae do, it makes you enjoy them more, is the argument for this. I must enjoy them so much they never actually get experienced.

Or, Kiddo is just a nerd. You be the judge.

So far the guide is like reading this here blog, if ever I could focus this here blog on some subject or other. The loose idea of travel is pretty stretched if you ask me. Life is a journey, surely, and each experience I've had does reflect the culture in which I find it... but... yea, you're all right, it's not necessarily related.

Knowing this, knowing a whole 100 pages really have to tie into the same three things over and over again means the writing actually happens far more fluidly. Thoughts appear, and are shunted into the sections that seem most appropriate. Then comes the justification. Why is this thought relevant? Why should it not be deleted before it is finished?

Mostly everything gets kept, (manic phase is maximalist phase) but I am proud to say that each scrap of paragraph does tie into the thesis: Teach Kiddo Bourbon, with the subtitle: What is Love?

It's a good time. 

Travel vs. Settle

One day maybe I'll get around to attacking the word "Settle" with all the vehemence and understanding my 19 little readers have come to expect from me. Until then, know this: I have settled.

With varying levels of deliberation I have an apartment, steady job, close family, prospects of love, and definite stakes driven into the dull Maryland ground.

Kiddo's new goal is to not go crazy mad with the pressure of staying still. Luckily, that looks no where close since each of the above-mentioned stakes are apparently made of some quantum flux material.

And, my first travel since stepping off the Peace Corps boat is in the planning stages. I have been planning it for 12 hours now, and am stoked. At long last, after a couple brushes with Possibility, Kiddo will tipple the bourbons of Louisville straight from the casks.

Stay tuned for details as my crazy motivation for motion keeps me pounding out some sweet entries.

Downside: I'll have to start logging into facebook again.

Le sigh.

Silly Poet, Drama is for Snooky

The last century and the Romantics of yesteryear have collectively stripped the necessity for plot and narrative in poetry. Poetry becomes “better” when it abstracts a single image or feeling. It is best if the poet discovers something about life  or themselves in this scrutiny, but it’s not necessary. It is enough to point out how swollen with emotion the writer is.

Which is cool, I love poetry like that. I love purely descriptive poetry. It’s like well written guide book tid bits into the human psyche/condition. It’s anthropology, sociology, psychology, and even history rolled into a bite size nugget. If it’s really good, if the poet is to become respectable for her ability to convey all this, the writing must not be simply descriptive and informative. It has to be moving, right? Drama.

Human drama is what keeps us engaged, and away from the edge of boredom that potentially allows us to forget our need to eat and procreate and rear our off spring, right? It's also what pays the network bills. Do you think Jersey Shore could sustain itself without Sweetheart and her thug boyfriend didn't break up once a season?

My own drama is the reason I write poetry in the first place. Break up? Can't go around flinging your weakness and idiocy in the real world! If there’s no rough emotion tangling up my ability to function on the mundane level, I have to express it in some contained way, like planned demolitions. If you put enough individual scraps of emotion together, over a sustained period of time, you cannot help but provide plot-line for whoever is reading it, right?

Yet, so many books of poetry are simply collections of poems that loosely correspond to each other, like the poets just squirt out 400 poems and shunt some about nature into a Nature folder, and some about love into a Love folder, but there is no development of attitude towards these things through the course of the book. The reader is forced to start with fresh slate every page and absorb whole new emotions each time. It's freaking tiring. 

This sort of collection is great for picking and choosing read time. One poem for this 5 minutes, one for a break later in the day.

The next step up of coherence are books like Mary Oliver’s … anything, they’re all beautiful and all the same.  Every single poem has a subsumed drama to the grace and awe Oliver has for members of nature. None of the foxes, herons, ponds, clouds ever interact with each other, but if you read 3 or 4 of her anthologies you will have a new eco-system living in your imagination and its drama will revolve on an almost Stephen Crane sort of careless equilibrium.

The last level, however, is the genuine page turner poetry collection Claudia Emerson’s “Late Wife,” and Edgar Lee Masters’ “Spoon River Anthology” are brilliant. They are a cut above every other book of poetry I’ve encountered. Every poem in each of them is a single scrutiny of humanity. Every poem also builds on the last, mentions characters or instances in the another. They reward the reader for paying attention. They build suspense, and a deeper connection with the characters. At the end of reading one (and you’ll want to read them cover to cover) you are as in touch with the speakers as you are with Katniss Everdeen, or Jay Gatsby.

Thank you, Sugar and Wikipedia for these treasures. They are the only two I’ve found. I’m eager to learn, so if you know of more, I will give you a dollar per anthology.