Aug 29 2010 7:00 pm
salmon and the Phillies
It’s like losing four in a row to the fucking Astros. I’m the slumping slugger going 0 for 10 in the middle of an eight game home stand. The Stumper comes up and in the first three hours sticks and lands one on the fly. The knuckleballer bats a thousand because he only bats once in a blue moon. It’s the goddamn American League around here.
Raul Ibanez looks like a turtle without a shell. We can’t win one against shit but bring on the best in the west and we sweep ‘em. I guess steelhead season will be good to me.
I discovered Nelson’s Frontier Market the other day: Thundersticks, Maxima, Daiichi and Mustad, homebrewing supplies, clam juice, cereal, and by far the largest selection of craft beer in Ludington. They even stock one of my favorite double IPAs all the way from Pennsylvania: Stoudts DIPA. Sure it’s $16 a six pack, but you get what you pay for. Every DIPA should be so well balanced, so juicy and plump. Kind of like Alexis Texas drinking grapefruit juice in a grove of pine trees in the middle of a pretty intense logging operation. The backhoe operator stops his rig and stares.
I also discovered that Great Lakes whitefish is as meaty as sockeye and about half as expensive so you don’t feel so bad about eating it fried.
Aug 20 2010 2:52 pm
it's dumb in its bigness
It’s like that time John Lurie added me as a friend on Myspace because I had him listed as my hero. It felt that cool. But then again, who uses Myspace anymore? So now I guess John Lurie will have to add me as a friend on Facebook. Either way, the article about him in the latest New Yorker is pretty weird, but it also contains a refreshingly straightforward perspective on what makes good art good.
And Frank could have used that perspective last week when, after his small show at the Open Concept Gallery in Grand Rapids was poorly received by critics, he locked himself in his one bedroom apartment for a week living primarily on reds, vitamin C, and cocaine. Of course he was thrilled to even get the show in the first place, what with all the wet sex and profanity, but he’d shown at some other galleries around west Michigan and showing only goes so far. And of course he was thrilled that the critics came at all, but he’d had critics come before and any press is good press only goes so far.
When Lisa showed up on the eighth day and forced her way into his apartment she found a man reduced. He was sweating and pale and tired on the couch sitting with a pea green afghan over his knees in front of a pile of pizza boxes and cigarette butts. He stared at the floor. Lisa said, “Let’s go. It’s been a week and you are being a piece of shit. This is not attractive Frank. It’s not attractive on many levels.” Frank nodded and tilted down slowly to his side, barely moving his legs to curl into the fetal position.
Lisa, standing with hands on hips, sighed heavily and with a shuffling of purse and clanging of keys dumped all her gerunds and stomped across the room and opened the curtains and the light streamed in through the dust and Frank squinted and then closed his eyes. Lisa said, “What fucking right do you have to be so depressed? You made bad art. So fucking what. Deal with it. You’re a single man without a care in the world making a living as an artist. So you won’t win ArtPrize. You also don’t have cancer, your wife won’t get hit by a car, and you won’t die of dysentery in a remote, flood ravaged village in the Punjab. So buck up and let’s go out. If you get a shower and smile I may even suck your dick.”
Lisa was raised in Dallas or Houston, I’m not sure, whichever one has the natural gas wells downtown. She was raised on a cul de sac with a very nice yard and very nice edging and very nice mulching and only average hedge trimming. They took a two week vacation in Colorado every year where they would fly fish and ride bikes and stay in a condo on the side of a ski mountain and Lisa remembered thinking it was the weirdest thing when she was a kid to go to a ski mountain in the summer.
Her neighborhood in Texas was wide open and hot and there was every convenience nearby. Starbucks and Kohls and Applebees and Best Buy and Barnes and Noble and Home Depot. She would just hop in her daddy’s car and down the divided highway they’d go except one time when her daddy was really drunk. Then they barely made it out of their subdivision because he hit one of the neighbors with his car and that neighbor was very bloody and died in the street.
Aug 11 2010 11:31 am
the blue state theory
Michigan is probably the most weirdly shaped of all states, the direct contiguity of land masses being of first importance when adjudicating shape weirdness. It’s all fucking wonky. The Lower Peninsula itself is like you piled a bunch of dirt and rocks on a piece of paper in a foot of water then tried to lift it out with only one hand under the paper. And I’m sure Wisconsin is pretty pissed about the whole Upper Peninsula thing, or Canada maybe, and Ohio? While the Toledo War was relatively bloodless, the psychological scars run deep.
Why Michigan has such good fishing and beer is probably unrelated directly to its shape. The shape and the fishing certainly share some common cause, but why do some areas of the country have great craft beer and others don’t? What do California, Oregon, Washington, Colorado, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, for instance, all have in common? They all voted democrat in 2008 (and, except for Colorado, in 2000 and 2004 as well).
Do liberals just like better beer? Surely it’s more complicated than that: liberals are more creative, interesting, and willing to take risks than are conservatives. Just kidding. Sort of. I’m sure conservatives would respond with the arrogance, faux-sophisticate counter attack: liberals like to feel superior and “cultured” so they make and drink expensive, fancy beer. If only beer was more French, then they would have an argument. Wink. Wink.
Wink.
More traditional brewing states like Wisconsin, New York, Pennsylvania, and even Ohio and Indiana share some obvious social history in that they hosted large German immigrant communities in the 19th and early 20th centuries, but Indiana and Ohio have fallen off the pace over the past twenty years, Three Floyds and Hoppin’ Frog notwithstanding, though they are making giant strides recently. Is the blue state theory of craft beer enough to account for these trends? Probably. If nothing sticks to Teflon, how does Teflon stick to the pan?
Either way, it’s widely known that you don’t get rich playing Keno at the Sandbar. Say, Wade, what happened to your website dude?
Aug 1 2010 12:51 pm
necessity
The architecture of my conceptual facilities is baroque in the extreme. Like paisley. Like Persian vegetables and a sick Wikipedia. For everything that has an end must have had a beginning. Hard to believe, I know. But I find it patently obvious that everything that has a beginning does not necessarily have an end.
The topography and connections of my leanest concepts seem necessary. And through this necessity they are secured. They are warranted, standing up to the world or at least some deep psychological quirks, which are nonetheless in the world. What is it about necessity that is so compelling? Which concepts and connections themselves make necessity? And how are we to provide a necessary and secure foundation for them? What about necessity is so satisfying?
These structures of thought are not only compelling, they are also necessary themselves. Not in the logical sense, not in the coherence of concepts sense, but in a primeval, necessary to carry on one foot in front of the other without giving up to pure insanity kind of sense.
Are they as necessary as a clean weld? Are they as necessary as meat and potatoes, beer and friendship and hard work, big brown trout blowing up on a mouse at midnight, as masturbating only on the third Monday of every month, as getting a Fishbeer sticker on the back of the Ween tour bus?
Perhaps. But I tend to think not.
Jun 26 2010 10:09 pm
Gleason's rope
The bells clang aloud. I keep having dreams about being in my boat on the river at night. I’m lying on my back and have no control; I slowly spin in an eddy beneath moonlight filtered through trees whose leaves look oddly like mini-blinds. I feel around and realize the anchor is gone, so are the oars, in fact everything is gone and my boat is smaller than I remember it. I feel for the water and touch short-napped carpet and realize I’m in bed.
When I got back from a steelhead trip last fall I had similar dreams. I was lying on my stomach at the front of Kevin’s boat and he’s telling me to push us off a rock so I’m pushing and pushing. I pushed my bed a foot from the wall three nights in a row.
Several years ago when I returned from England I moved into a new house. I had a dream for a week in which I was trying to climb up a very narrow, rapids-choked ravine on the headwaters of the River Dart. I pulled my blinds off the wall several times.
I have a dream that one day all the female writers from The New Yorker’s 20 under 40 fiction issue want to go fishing in Michigan and fall madly in love with me.
I have a dream that my Gleason’s Rope grows by several thousand miles so I can tow myself to Alaska on the cheap. And by Gleason’s Rope I don’t mean penis.
I think these interactive dreams have something to do with new houses and mini-blinds. As for catching large fish, I’ve conducted many empirical studies and conclude with some not insignificant bravado that it’s all about motherfucking time on the motherfucking water. But I have to take a day off. I’m out of the good flies.
