A Literary Feast

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Posts from the “Uncategorized” Category

Pumpkin King: Searching For the Perfect Fall Brew

Posted on October 22nd, 2012

My least favorite thing about the passing of yet another pizza oven summer is all the people who, regardless of how little they know you, will immediately volunteer how upset they are over the coming rains and trench coat weather. Apparently, the secret to happiness is a wardrobe of shorts, the incessant simultaneous hum and dripping of thousands of air conditioners, and the (imagined) benefits of spending the day roasting in Coney Island. It takes all of me not to say, if that’s your idea of a good life, why don’t you move to Florida? We have seasons here and we like it that way.   My favorite things? I’ll spare you the poetic praise of autumn chill, foliage and sweaters and get right…

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The Most Powerful Hour

Posted on October 22nd, 2012

I guess I can’t remember exactly how it all started. I’m pretty sure one of us suggested it as a joke, probably on some hot, bored Los Angeles day. (There were a lot of those, in our early twenties.) Someone joked about it and we laughed, but at some point we must have stopped laughing. Because someone eventually went out to buy the beer, and someone else collected the shot glasses from the kitchen.   There are four of us, at the core – me, my husband, and our best couple of friends – plus other members of one of our groups of friends from college (a group of people all somehow connected to our alma mater’s elite choral group, either directly or through…

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Terms of Enbeerment: Towards A Lexicon of Beery Sayings

Posted on October 22nd, 2012

Gentle reader: Herein find a selection of beer-wit happily recalled over the course of a long week end when the author’s wife was out of town. I present them here in an order which reflects the same discipline that guided my choice of beers to sample between the years 1978 and 1982. I make no claims as to their origins, just that I know I heard them someplace. Clear as beer piss: self-evident; abundantly clear, metaphorically referring to the near lack of color in urine produced after drinking more than a six pack. Beer Goggles: metaphorical; relating to changes in judgment concerning physical beauty and sexual attraction of potential human bed partners resulting from the ingestion of mass quantities of beer. As in: “Zounds,…

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‘Lite’ Protection

Posted on October 22nd, 2012

If you drink enough beer, things that didn’t seem appealing in the starkly sober light of day, things that didn’t interest you in the least, start to become the focus of your inebriated obsessions. Things like hot pockets, toothpaste brands, the names of your kindergarten teacher’s twin sons. Things like pollen build-up along the curbs in the parking lot. Things like Mace. When I was twenty one I lived in an ‘undesirable’ neighborhood. The kind of neighborhood where you could peek out your front window to see drug deals and old ladies smashing windshields to powder with a purse full of bricks. My roommate at the time was an oft-deployed infantryman who was extremely invested in the armed forces lifestyle. I would come home…

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Lovely Day for A Guinness

Posted on October 22nd, 2012

You never forget your first Guinness. How can you? Brown so deep it might be red, like looking into a bottomless pond where you worry about what’s swimming beneath your toes. A head of foam, thick and perfect as an ice cream float, that you puzzle over at first, wondering if you need to scoop it off with a spoon in order to reach the drink underneath. A true Guinness pint glass has the curve of a woman’s hips, and you hold it, cool and solid in your hands, and you think, “Now this, my friends, this is a real beer.” And you are afraid.   I drank my first Guinness in the most appropriate way possible: seated in a seedy pub on the…

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Da White Pint: A Ghost Story

Posted on October 22nd, 2012

Through a series of accidents, most of them intentional, I once found myself alone on a sparsely populated island a little ways north of the 60th parallel. I had survived for a month on other people’s muesli, withered green peppers, and an occasional bean-and-macaroni pie, but I was none the worse for it. The almost interminable daylight filled me with a bustling chemical energy that made food seem irrelevant. And drink—drink felt like a thing intended for another species. Giddy from the subarctic summer, my brain was drunk almost constantly on salt and latitude. For a month almost nothing stronger than well water touched my tongue. A dram of whisky once at a school regatta. A perplexing glass of sake at an equally perplexing…

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The Whole Wide World

Posted on September 17th, 2012

I am fifteen, when it starts, or fifteen and a half, and I have cut off most of my hair. We are in the same creative writing class, and I’ve started to write these poems, about an older boy that I don’t know, because it’s safe, and whatever adolescent longing I’ve accumulated from being the bookish, blush-prone, chubby nerdy girl who then developed a love of backpacking and wearing men’s boxer shorts as outside shorts doesn’t matter, in between the syllables. One of these poems, I can’t remember which, makes you write me a letter, and hand it to me, as we’re leaving class. The letter tells me that I have stunned you. You have a girlfriend. I ignore them, those two stray marks…

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Somewhere Between Blue And Orange

Posted on September 17th, 2012

He had been here before. This he had seen and he liked how the colors connected his theories. Stuffed up and under the bowseat of the puttering sixteen-foot Alumaweld was a limp black Hefty bag with an extension cord, two pairs of flannel boxer shorts, a yet unopened can of Cheez Whiz and four teriyaki beef sticks. His dad’s friend called the beef sticks dilators and he didn’t know why exactly but he supposed they were about going to the bathroom because that subject made up at least half of the jokes that he had heard his dad’s friend tell that trip. Atop the platform of the seat were two half-empty cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon, twenty two feet of braided nylon rope, and…

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First World Hunter Gatherer: A Soundtrack For The Solitary Shopper

Posted on September 17th, 2012

My favorite time to go is after 10PM but I’m usually sleeping then, and most of them aren’t open that late anyway, so I settle for before 10AM weekends or around 3PM on Fridays. You can go whenever you like but I recommend avoiding 10AM-2PM Saturdays and Sundays unless you are a masochist who enjoys watching amateurs fumble around in each aisle directly in front of the item you are entirely sure you would like to purchase.  Take an inventory of the pantry, and the fridge (but that should be just about scarce by now). Make a list keeping in mind the current store of goods. Don’t forget about the winter squash and abundance of tomatoes you just got from your farm share. What…

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Grandma’s Feather Bed

Posted on September 17th, 2012

Listening to my mom play guitar at our family’s cottage as our numerous guests sang along, I was only half enjoying myself. The other half was looking forward to a time when I could think back wistfully on my mom playing guitar at our family’s cottage as our guests sang along. I felt so removed from my daily existence that I even, for a time, narrated my life to myself, embellishing it with melodrama–“He turns the doorknob slo-o-owly”–as though it were a dime-store thriller, and I some hapless hero. I was ten years old. Every summer, the families of my mom’s Bible Study cohort, or her folk music ensemble, would visit our family’s cottage for a weekend. Each family was responsible for cooking one…

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