Mar 9 2010 11:08 am
nope part II: three days of nope
What is that feeling at the core of my central nervous system, the one that feels warm and aches softly all over? Is it the flu? Spinal meningitis? Is it exhaustion? Is it wrong that I like it because it helps me sleep at 10:00pm?
When I saw the cove on Saturday still full of ice from shore to shining shore I lost my nerve. I didn’t call. There was some open water all the way out on the point. So we walked out there but I still didn’t call.
Waded a few miles in the local creek on Sunday and didn’t catch a thing. Caught a ride back. I told the driver about her and he laughed at me and said: “shit or get off the pot son, before you know it you’ll have used up all that charm of yours, ain’t no telling where you'll be then.”
Yesterday I hit a different section of the creek. Sixty degrees and goddamn sunshine, but couldn’t get bit. Walked the road back. I saw her on her fancy road bike riding at me. There was a big truck hauling massive blocks of limestone and growling its Jake brake barreling down the hill behind her. Both her and the truck passed me by at the same time and she looked scared. Her ass looked good in spandex, what with the efficient geometry of the bike forcing her to bend so far over. I wish she had high heels on. There is just something special about women riding road bikes in high heels. I yelled “fuck you” at the top of my lungs and she wobbled on the bike in the cloud of dust the truck made.
Then I went to the beach again and the ice had receded to the middle of the lake. I saw a dead yellow bass on shore. I stood in the cold water for an hour then went home to fall asleep at 10:00pm.
Mar 2 2010 6:55 pm
it ain't spring, but it's something
There has been a Blood Knot Magazine [sic] article making the blog rounds lately. It is about the types of customers one might encounter as a fly shop employee. It is funny, and parts of it ring true to this particular fly shop employee, but of course it is incomplete.
To wit- I happen to have two customers that were not accurately described in said piece. Following the format of the above mentioned article, they could be described thusly:
SOPHISTICATED ACADEMIC BADASS (Male 50s? and 60s?) They are academics, artists in fact, though one or both may dispute that moniker. They’ve been at the fishing game a while and know what’s what. They have a various and assorted collection of well-worn Patagonia and Orvis gear, probably more than fifty rods between them, yet they continue to support the shop generously . They are accomplished fly tiers, some might even say neurotic, who order lead eyes by the hundreds and entire dyed pheasant skins two or three at a clip, despite the fact that they could supply a fly shop’s entire tying inventory from their personal stash for some not insignificant number of years. We’ve fished together several times and they could both wade me into the ground. They are hard as nails. ANNUAL FISHING DAYS = 1000.
One of them gave me an articulated crayfish pattern two weeks ago which I tied on first today, my first smallmouth mission of the new year. I promptly hooked a nice 17” fish and then said fish promptly spit the hook.
The other gave me an articulated crayfish pattern two weeks ago, very similar to the first sans rabbit strip claws, and I tied it on sometime later today and caught a decent 12” fish, whose likeness can be found below.
Feb 26 2010 9:48 pm
new camera
Sold the boat. Bought a camera. Took 300 pictures on my walk to work today. Here are the decent ones.
Feb 22 2010 7:41 pm
four pieces of news
He is plagued with a strange sort of ritualized eating practice.
Toward the top of his driveway the edges of the asphalt crumble into the yard and he gathers 15 pieces of this material at a time and lines them up in three lines of five in the shape of a bird’s foot, one long line in the middle and two shorter lines at an angle to the sides. He starts with the angled lines and eats one piece of each, chewing delicately lest his teeth be damaged. He can usually finish all 15 pieces in an hour.
Everybody thought it was weird until he started patching driveways with his shit in the spring. Then it was all smiles and thank you kindly, chipping ice this winter sure took a toll on my driveway, thank god for you and your weird ritualized eating practice.
There are three more pieces.
One: I saw an ad in the Drake for Ranger IPA, a beer from New Belgium Brewing Company that hit my marketing/branding chord so perfectly I went out and bought two bottles of it the next day. Rarely am I so moved by advertising, at least I like to think that I am so rarely moved by advertising, but this ad, as I have already mentioned, struck my proverbial chord.
Like a lot of New Belgium's advertising, the layout is meant to look like some sort of mixed media collage, in this case a piece of satisfyingly worn and gold-grommeted green canvas appears to be a frame around a diorama (?) with a wooden back that has been painted blue so as to imitate the fine blue sky of summer, yet in a satisfyingly worn way, like the canvas. The whole thing sits on a satisfyingly worn wooden table. The set pieces all appear as if they were cut out of a magazine with scissors by hand and thus all bear an exaggerated but tastefully doctored white border space. They also appear to be at different planes within the diorama thus providing a crude yet, again, satisfyingly campy illusion of three dimensional depth. It’s all just so goddamn satisfying I can hardly stand it.
I could do without the douchebag in the green uniform though. I think a cartoon, vis a vis the crackly old Hop Wallop guy, would have been better, despite his farfetched back story as a wild west hops prospector.
The thing about the ad that really caught my eye, however, was the copy: “Three pounds per barrel of Simcoe, Chinook and Cascade hops make this 70 IBU brew...blah blah.” Simcoe. It jumped out at me right away. Back when I used to homebrew a lot, Simcoe hops were all the rage. They were fairly hard to get and they were really good. I made quite a few IPAs with them and was pleased with every one, the pine and citrus notes are glassy and sticky all at the same time. But more on that below. The thing is, I wonder if the brewery and the marketing team knew how sought-after Simcoe hops are? I’m sure they did.
The name of the beer is right on. ‘Ranger’ is a simple word, but one that sounds strong and interesting despite its simplicity. The economy of a single ‘g’ doing the phonic work of several letters, or perhaps it’s just a pronunciation convention, I have no idea, is also, well, satisfying. The label is simple and good. It’s an IPA. It is hoppy. ‘India Pale Ale’ is written on the label and there are sketches of hop cones there as well. It even makes the otherwise pretty annoying 12oz New Belgian bottles look cool. In fact, I like the rebranding of the entire line of what they are now calling their “Explore Beers.”
But one of the coolest things about this beer is that it is a firmly American beer made by one of the largest American owned breweries, that, until this beer (not sure when Mighty Arrow came out), hadn’t made a truly American beer.
As for the how the beer drinks? Thank god, it is as good as the branding, the marketing, the copy, and all the other crap, though as you can see, I think all that other crap matters as much as, if not more than, the beer itself in terms of how we experience the beer. A truly hoppy American IPA that is 6.5%. That is a good coupling, yet all too rare in today’s craft beer market. One of my other favorite beers? Three Floyd’s Alpha King. Another rare IPA that squeezes every bit of citrusy and piney goodness from American hops without making a stupidly huge beer (Three Floyd’s does their fair share of stupidly huge though, cf. Dreadnaught).
I swear to god it’s pineapple in the nose. Not like Bell’s Hopslam, but still, there is pineapple here, along with the obligatory citrus and pine. The bitterness is aggressive and lingers on the back of your tongue, but it isn’t offensive and doesn’t quite wear you down. The hops are glassy and strong and almost syrupy tasting, like how I imagine molten glass would taste if it wasn’t so hot, though the beer isn’t syrupy at all. It has a low to medium sweetness that doesn’t quite balance the hops but tries. There is a remnant of cotton candy in the finish. I like to think that what I like in this beer is the Simcoe. But I just like to think that. Doesn’t mean it’s true.
Two: my brother continues to blow my mind with his internet discoveries: fishbeer.ru
Three: these may well be the last pictures ever taken with my beloved digital camera. I have a new one coming that is very nice. Much nicer than this one.
