Monday, May 31, 2004
Hedonism by Degrees
Gustatory: it’s a great word. My earliest recalled true pleasures were concerned with eating and food: candy, challah, bbq renfaire ribs as long as my youthful arm… I’ve always naturally keyed in on the joys of eating, if not always the joys of cooking, which I usually find pretty joyful too anyway. But my point is that I like food.
Meeting Andy, and through him, Heidi, only fed this appetite. He and she and Kel and I have crested innumerable culinary tidal waves, veritable food tsunamis, always looking to make the next experience ever more delectible and gluttonous.
Andy has a professional relationship with a cook. Well, a chef. Well, the executive chef and both co-owners of a restaurant. Here’s what this restaurant is like: I went there for a party. The next morning I opened the sunday paper and the associated weekly magazine features a glowing review of another restaurant, a new one, very hip. The place I’d gone the night before is mentioned twice in the one-page article, and the chef is mentioned once independently by name. Basically, this place sets the standard in a town that sets the standard.
So, that party I mentioned: It was Andy’s birthday party and the tables were set up in a big U. I was slow to grab a chair so I wound up sitting away from most of my friends with the restaurant crowd: Paul and Bob and Maggie and Paul’s wife who’s cool but I don’t recall her name. The meal was stunning. And by this I mean, I was literally stunned, my senses numbed by opulence. Three appetizers were served (carpaccio, asparagus spears, and platters of six of the best salamis ever created, handmade by the chef), and then a truly profound pasta in red sauce. I’d been drinking champagne and then an outstanding red something or other (damn! It was a Silver Oak, six litre bottle, but was it a merlot?), had just poured myself a fresh glass of it as the main courses began to appear.
Maggie was seated next to me. A waiter brought her a Spaten. Beer, that is. My eyes bugged.It was so beautiful, looked so crisp and refreshing in a perspiring pint glass against the white tablecloth. Paul noticed. “Get a beer,” he suggested.
“A beer?,” I stuporously repeated back.
“Beer. It looks good, doesn’t it? This is a restaurant, you know. My restaurant. We serve beer here. Why don’t you order some?”
“But I just poured a whole glass of this lovely wine.”
“It’ll keep. You don’t want it now. Beer would hit the spot, though, right? I just ordered one for myself. Oh, here it is.” A waiter appeared at Paul’s shoulder with another gleaming pint. He took it, handed it to me. “Drink a beer,” he counseled. “It’s a party.”
I raised the glass to Andy and then took a deep draught of the finest glass of beer in the universe. My eyes bathed in the rich gold of the lager, and then strayed to the glowing crimson spot on the tablecloth where light from the chandelier shone through and was focused by the wine in my glass, the wine that was so delicious, the wine that awaited my pleasure.
There are degrees of hedonism, and I had just been graciously but firmly brought to the next one by an acknowledged master. Not every party can claim that distinction.
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Familial Bonding
Thank you all, again, for boosting my spirits when I was dragging my ass back there last friday. I’m dragging everything I’ve got now, but I have a much better excuse and I won’t need to ask for your assistance or your pity. This filthy planet has plenty of better places for those things, if you have any of them left. I think it’s fair to say, I was crabby before, but now I’m coming out of my shell again.
Friday wound up being the day the visiting inlaws - mom, dad and two sisters - did all the typical tourist things in town: sealions, fisherman’s wharf, coit tower, ghiradelli square, funky bar, the castro, the mission (that is, the actual mission itself), twin peaks, ocean beach, and a few other items I probably am overlooking… I spent the day in a five-hour committee meeting that was productive and satisfying, even if only on a professional level. I got home in time for some serious partying, though, and the party pretty much lasted through the weekend. The main activities on Friday night were watching Big Frank
fight his way through a jug of Carlos Rossi Red, and all of us struggling to breathe as:
I filled the entire house with thick burning peppery white smoke while preparing carnitas. The recipe calls for searing the meat, and lord help us, it seared us back.
We rented a big ol’ landboat on Saturday and piled in for a drive down the coast to see some lovely tidepools,
chuckle it up at a favorite winery,
and eat ourselves stupid at a restaurant that left us all gasping for room in our bellies in which to fit one more fried clam or
whole smelt. Once we got back it was time to play some games, including my favorite, Fluxx,
which I decisively lost, except that it was a lot of fun, which ultimately was winning, except, of course, that I actually lost.
Sunday was a quiet day of reading the newspaper, arguing over crosswords, strolling in the arboretum and around the neighborhood, and getting our asses kicked with an hour or so of power yoga at the Y - I am sitting here feeling parts of my hips rattling around that till recently were locked in place with a mortal rigor. Sure it’s good, but damn, from my forearms to the soles of my feet and everything in between that I can exercise in public, I’ve been expanded from the joints on out and it’s a very strange sensation indeed.
That night we ate the smoky carnitas (which, once again, had turned out perfectly), drank some excellent wine (Ravenswood Sonoma old vines zin, Lyeth tricentennary vines aussie grenache, and of course the Bonnie Doon barbera that’s so freaking excellent) and then finished off the jug of Rossi, all while playing poker for pennies till after midnight. That’s when Heather and Tara started voguing
and doing cheerleading poses
and things got a little weird. We got a few hours of sleep before the alarms went off at 5 for the first airport run this morning; the second run was at noon. I’ve spent the rest of the day trying to refocus my shattered energy, reconstruct my traumatized alimentary canal, and revel in the quietude of a house that’s been emptied of inlaws. My sister and her husband show up in a week for about five days, and my mother is in town the weekend after that. I expect a lot less wine to flow, but maybe that will work out for the best this time. There’s only so much a fellow can stand, even when it’s the very best.
Friday, May 28, 2004
The Power of Blog Compels You
(Caveat: You know, I hope, that this isn’t about you. I mean, except for the part where I say how cool you are.)
I find new sites all the time that are witter and more current, wiser and more touching and goddamned funnier than I could ever hope to be, other sites that kick my ass and hand it back to me in a hefty bag, with comments up in the 70s or 90s or higher on every post and a link list of geniuses and international bon vivants, a rarified world in which I could never really even imagine myself participating.... and I think, there are so many of them out there, so clever and savvy, tweaking things on their sites that I don’t even know exist and still putting more meaning and entertainment in a 50 word post than I can eke out of 500.... and I come back here to the ‘hut with its pages on pages of tired white text, its worn old voice and the smattering of comments I glean from those few among my occasional visitors who are charitable enough to cast a word or two in my direction.... sometimes I truly feel, when I see the first comment on a post I really liked coming on line hours - many hours - after it’s been published, that I’m just getting a “pity comment” from some gracious visitor empathetic enough to be chagrined at the total lack of feedback. I know, it’s neurotic, but that’s where I go sometimes these days.
Then I think of some blogging friends I thought I used to have, and whatever once stood for a relationship between us is just gone. My comments on their sites resound like hollow echoes and their comments on mine have evaporated entirely, their hits soaring as mine slowly dwindle. I can’t help but feel a bit jealous, resentful, covetous, petty as the tide surges forward, carrying further they who were once my peers but now outpace me; meantime, I drift slowly backwards into a murky unknown, where my talents are ordinary at best and my words shatter brittle in the night air, leaving no more impression than the shadow of glass. It leaves me wondering why I do it.
But then I remember: there was no choice, I never decided. I always wrote. I wrote all through school - bad poems and long unsent letters, illuminated doodles, fables, jokes; I developed a sense of rhythm that demanded satisfaction and a love of words that I needed to feed, and the pages filled notebooks and the notebooks filled boxes before I finally confronted the fact of my addiction to rearranging words and got myself this journal to stoke my jones.
This medium of blogging brings many diverting novelties to my writing experience, and it’s easy for me to confuse these with the real reason I write. But this site is not about the comments, the hits, the geeky tweaks or the purported social status inherent in my links list. If it turns out I’ve alienated every damn person I thought was my friend on line, I regretfully accept it but I will still go on. I’m not doing this for them. I’m not even doing it for me. I’m doing it because I can’t not do it. I just write. I just do. This site helps me hone that craft as best I can: compels me to produce my best work according to my own standards, to extirpate typos and to refine my prose. It’s nice to hear from people who visit here but I must finally embrace the fact that we are all bystanders at this trainwreck. It was going to go down anyway; the ‘hut just happens to have been fortuitously located so as to provide a convenient vantage point from which to view the carnage. That is, if you are of a mind to do so. But either way, the writing will just go on.
