"Awesome!" A Blog.

2011-12-16T11:55:00.000-08:00

Roast Beef Kazenzakis, Observed, December 2011.

As Told by C. Onstad.

The rain spat and drizzled without conviction as Roast Beef sat at his workstation. The sky was twenty percent gray and the window was open wide, letting the chilly evening air blow over his mouse hand. He liked it this way.

He checked a few math websites to make sure he still had his game about him, then felt the first stirrings of hunger. Molly wouldn’t be home until later; he considered a solo trip to get won ton soup. Maybe a cigarette if no one was watching. He fished around in the back of his desk drawer and found the old pack of Nat Shermans, which yielded a solitary cigarette of extremely high quality. He himself never spent nine dollars on luxury cigarettes; these had been left outside after a party at Ray’s. The second-to-last one had been smoked alone in the narrow space between the pool house and the neighbor’s fence; he’d immediately gone inside to wash his hands, brush his teeth, and gargle afterwards. Instead of drying with a wash cloth, he had used paper towels which he threw away in Ray’s trash can, along with his toothbrush. Molly had been staying overnight at a girlfriend’s house, watching Steel Magnolias and getting chatty on Campari, but no precaution was too great.

He walked with his contraband for a while before lighting it with a pack of matches he had found on the mantle, and was pleased that it only took one strike; she would never notice the match missing. He tucked the lid of the matchbook into the ring which held his keys so that he wouldn’t forget to replace it on returning home, and considered getting some handi-wipes from the corner store to clean the smoke off his hands. They had wipes at the bodega for customers who bought the heat lamp fried chicken and jo-jo potatoes; perhaps a snack of these things would help erase the odor which would dwell deep within him.

As he turned the corner to enter a dark, wooded section of the park, he saw a familiar silhouette in the tall grass which grew between the pines. It was Ray, and he was swishing a golf club around in the rough, looking for something. He glanced up and smiled when he saw his friend.

“Yo Beef!” Ray exclaimed, taking a nip from a hip flask he’d secured inside his puffy winter jacket. He was wearing a Tam o’ Shanter in garish road work safety colors.

Beef steeled himself and resolved not to toss his cigarette aside; he allowed himself this one small pleasure.

“Oh uh hey Ray what you got goin’ on down there.”

Ray pointed at Beef’s cigarette. “That’s a secret,” he said in a knowing confidence, free of judgment. It was a strong understanding between men.

“Thanks dogg, I got night feet pretty bad and needed a mile.”

“You seen a bonchity-bonch Titleist anywhere up ins? I straight-up shanked this damn new hybrid sand wedge and the thing got a wild hare up its ass. I never even saw it.”

“Well uh I’ll help you poke around for a bit. How come you hittin’ balls in the park anyway though, Seven Pines gettin' like aerated or such?”

“Urban golf, dude! It’s hella great practice for the short game, all with crazy lies and slopes. You ever putt down a slide? Bank one off a plywood fire engine? Teach a child to sing? Thrills, man! I’m makin’ the game feel ALIVE again!”

“Ain’t police down on you makin’ a ruckus all with clubs and balls flyin’ everywhere?”

“Police? Nah, dogg! Plus, there ain’t signs against golf. Just alcohol.” Ray took another swift nip and slid the flask back into his jacket pocket.

“Well uh I mean ain’t it just common sense that hard little balls that could go in any direction real fast might not be too welcome in a public area…I mean they got like kids and way litigious moms and stuff in parks.”

“Well, all the better they ain’t someplace else, then,” Ray said distractedly, picking at his teeth with a wooden tee. He had found his ball behind a large garbage bag that looked to be filled with filthy towels, discount popcorn bags, orange peels, and sticky emptied cans of Monster energy drink. “Heads up!”

A choppy three-quarter swing sent the cold little orb off through some trees, and Roast Beef carefully tracked its arc, noting the approximate amount of energy the vector contained and roughly calculating how far it was likely to travel on its path of woodland surface ricochets. He pulled on his cigarette and told himself he had one more good puff left, then surveyed the area for cedar branches or pine needles with which to camouflage the scent on his hands. Ray made off into the underbrush, and he followed close behind.

Their journey led them to the banks of the creek, where they were plussed to find old Cornelius angling in a slowly purling pool of thick brown water. Beef stamped out his cigarette before the old man could see him.

“Yo, Connie!” Ray beamed. “You see my damn Titleist chompin’ round in this rough?” He hacked and spat.

Cornelius eyed them with a barely perceptible measure of displeasure. Roast Beef sensed immediately that Ray’s ball had disturbed the water, sending any already-skittish aquatic life darting beneath distant logs and shadowy outcroppings. “Sssh,” he hissed at Ray. “You gonna scare the fish even more than the ball with all that yellin’.”

“My Titleist go in the water, Connie?” Ray asked, incredulous. “For real?”

Cornelius gave Ray a brief dose of eye contact which was not unlike solid public steel in its overall effect—in its effect on Roast Beef, the party of the third part, at any rate. Ray poked around in the reeds for a creel, hoping to compliment the old man on a productive evening of sport. Beef stiffened as muddy eddies languished out into the larger waters, now alerting even the most remedially sensate of fish to the dangers which came from shore.

Cornelius gnashed his teeth with a brief, compact efficiency and set his pole down on the shore next to where he sat. Within moments he had produced a small thermos of orange pekoe and a ham biscuit wrapped in waxed paper. As Ray rustled and kicked about in the underbrush, he continued to spread his modest repast out in silence. Though none of this production’s uncomfortable silence was for Roast Beef’s benefit, it was perhaps felt by him the most. He nervously smelled his hand to see how badly the tobacco had perfumed him. It was strong, but he didn’t dare stick it in the creek, as he thought he remembered that smell travels even more quickly through water, and he didn’t want to taint it for the fish. Tobacco is a very polarizing substance in nature, and generally indicates an imperfect environment, he reasoned.

“Strawberry, Strawberry, the dopeman’s ho,” Ray sang to himself as he fished for his ball. Beef silently told Ray not to run this song down around Cornelius, as it would no doubt offend his aged ears and sensibilities and make an already bad situation worse, but could not make himself verbalize the admonition. He merely stood and felt his blood pressure rise within him. Ray took another nip from his flask and then had a noisy coughing fit as the volatile, pocket-warmed liquor dissolved the mucus in his throat.

When his spasm had subsided, he offered the flask to Cornelius. Beef watched nervously; there were many signs posted against the consumption of alcohol, and if Cornelius’s fishing license were revoked there would be hell to pay. It was one of his last pleasures, along with agreeable temperatures and recording payments in his ledger.

“Yo, hit this, Connie,” Ray insisted. “You gonna get bored if you don’t, dogg.”

Cornelius stood his ground for a moment, and then, with an affable elevation of the shoulders, shrugged off his mantle of displeasure and accepted the offering.

“Es tut sie kein gutes in der Flasche,” he said. “It does you no good in the bottle.” He sipped genteelly from the brushed pewter, held the liquor on his tongue to evaluate its quality, and then swallowed without air. It was the practiced device of one who is used to accepting dubious snorts from strange vessels.

“Thank you, Raymond,” he said, passing back the flask. “I believe you will find that your gutty has come to rest beneath the taller of the two manzanitas just ‘round the bend.”

“Dang, Connie!” Ray chuckled. “You let me do all that splashin’ around in the water for nothin’?”

The warmth spreading across the inside of Cornelius’s chest extinguished a choice acerbic retort, and he merely mentioned that he had been looking for an excuse to break out his evening rations.

Ray clambered off over the uneven terrain in search of his quarry. Cornelius offered Roast Beef a hand-rolled from an old engraved case in his breast pocket.

“You will enjoy the flavor of a fresher tobacco on your evening stroll,” he said. “And if you wish to keep from scenting your hands, I find that gloves are a happy accoutrement.” Beef noticed that the old man was wearing black leather driving gloves. He accepted the cigarette, an anise-flavored hard candy, and a dab of vetiver oil which Cornelius instructed him to rub on the offending area.

A loud thud sounded from behind the trees. “Fuck me, man!” Ray yelled to no one, amid the sound of crackling twigs and the rustle of nylon clothing.

“Some are to be endured as we sally forth, arm in arm, unto the familiar embrace of death,” Cornelius said serenely as he surveyed the waters.

Roast Beef nodded, thanked him for the sundry goods and services, and made off for home. Perhaps he would take a shower and find some won ton soup, he thought. The chill was now bracing, and something hot would do him good.

Hiatus, Explained Tenderly and with a Great Gentleness.

2011-03-20T22:16:00.000-07:00

[Editor's note: this is an emergency relocation of the original Fanflow release, as I did not realize those servers would be down for maintenance for the next day or so.]

Hello, friends and readers.

As you have likely noticed if you have any interest in Achewood, output has been next to nil for the last several months, and was slowing down before that. Here, let me explain. Have a seat wherever you like.

You see, whenever I sat down to write over the last year or so, I had a growing, nagging feeling that, after nine years, 1,700 strips, 1,000 character blog entries spanning twelve characters, thirty books, 700 subscriber pieces, the New Yorker pieces, tours, hundreds of interviews, terabytes of vitriolic hate mail (incoming), running a merchandise mini-empire, and just generally feeling under the gun to dance for the public, I was getting a little burned out.

Whenever I cracked my knuckles and attempted to start a fresh strip with an idea that had popped into my head that day, I’d get halfway through it and realize I’d already done that particular gag, say, six years ago. Frustrating. Had I run through everything that my finite brain knew to talk about? Couldn’t be...I’d boasted in earlier times that a good writer could write his way out of anything. What a cocksure young man I was. Maybe it’s time to recharge.

Another nagging idea which slowly grew from a whorl in the tub to a Pacific gyre was that, as I wrote piece after piece, it seemed like I was just imitating myself, if that makes any sense. I had always prided myself on not being formulaic (say, Monday jokes and lasagna jokes), so this presented a grave problem. I have always wanted Achewood to be something that didn’t exist before, including earlier versions of itself.

Like a sparrow birthing a clenched human fist, Achewood must be reborn in strange ways over time to achieve this ideal. This may mean the occasional hiatus, or span of dark strips that do not make you laugh. This may mean a week of heavily-Photoshopped scans of pencil sharpeners, or simply stenciling a “bobby” on my garage door in a cheap imitation of Banksy.

I know it’s irritating that I can keep no regular schedule; that’s what RSS is for. Also, whatever I put up on Achewood.com is free to the world, and I won’t entertain a bunch of entitled whining. Here’s a great essay by the wonderful Neil Gaiman on that subject. This essay is a gift to writers and artists everywhere.

I take inspiration for Achewood’s future from the great P.G. Wodehouse, who wrote with furious zip and consistent institutional tone literally until the day he died—aged 93, in an armchair, pipe in hand—next to a fresh manuscript. He wrote Jeeves and Wooster for longer than I’ve been alive, so that gives me some hope that I can drop back into the feeling of Roast Beef and Ray’s dynamic, or the sordid stories of the rest of the cast. I do love them; though I am a different man now than the kid I was when I invented them, perhaps they can “grow in the telling.”

I can enumerate a few more of the concerns I’ve had. If you’d like to skip to the end, though, and look at the picture I commissioned of the OH SHIT kitten finally falling from the branch, please hit the “End” key on your extended keyboard. But please, clear any children from the room first.

One thing that’s always made me a bit sad is how Internet presentation seems to devalue content. So much art, writing, and news is suddenly available to us that each piece seems nearly a throwaway, lost in the gullet of our now-insatiable appetite for information. Here in the future, everyone is famous for 15kb. Fifteen reTweets. Fifteen LOLs. Should I work fifteen hours on something that will take fifteen seconds to read? The answer is yes, of course, because I love what I do, but after nearly a decade one wonders if one couldn’t do more for people with that time. Create greater and lengthier entertainment. I’d like to focus more on prose; despite the heavy foot I seem to have planted in the comics world, perhaps I can balance both by shifting the weight a bit. Some might count themselves kings of infinite space when bounded in the nutshell of six panels, but personally I’m finding it a bit cramped.

I’m also trying to gently withdraw from life as a semi-public figure, impossible as that sounds given my medium. I just don’t feel suited to it. It’s very bad for your head (well, my head, anyway) to be intensely praised and intensely hated by a decade’s worth of strangers. I loved meeting the thousands of kind readers on my tours, but the stress of the constant travel, constant demand, and unstanchable 24-hour communications have me longing for a wingback chair, a quiet inbox, and perhaps a calming agent in some cut crystal. That said, you can follow me on Twitter!

In sum, I think Achewood will be back sooner than later. As will other projects, and the sun, and my solo album with Greg Lake (he’s on vocals and guitar). I’ve needed time to reflect on what all this is, but it’s been a good long time, hasn’t it? I still love the work when I look back over it, and don’t want to take it off the ventilator. Cross your fingers, do that RSS thing, and I hope to see you again before too long.

Thank you,
Chris Onstad

PS: Subscriber content will continue to be updated. To try and keep my brain active I’ve been writing chapbooks, nearly 400 pages’ worth. I think that if you like the Achewood mentality and approach to things, you’ll enjoy these. They’re available here, and the first one is free to all. A new one will be posted in a few days’ time. There will also be my Achewood experiments, writings, and attempts at progress. If you’ve never been in the Fanflow, for $2.99 you get access to about three years’ worth of content you’ve never seen before. [As luck would have it, the Fanflow servers are down during the next day or so for maintenance—please check back!]

A Good Employee Is Available In This Land

2009-01-16T21:02:00.000-08:00

Dear Friends of the Library,

As a Non-Recognized Nice California Company (NRNCC), we try to do what we can for the people who help us do what we do. When our Warehouse Guy's new job offer fell through recently, I told him I'd help get him in his search for a new gig.

His résumé follows. What it doesn't tell you is that he is a sterling individual, conscientious and proactive, a loyal fan of good work and hard comedy, and highly adaptable. Often was the night when it was him nagging me to get one more order filled. Also often was the night when he called me aside, in all seriousness, to watch a new Tim And Eric internet video, or something about "Bub Rubb." He can also hold forth extensively on the subject of baseball, though we did not use that part of him.

The résumé of a one Chris Crane, for your evaluation.

All he asks in return for his excellence is a position.

Talk to him, people. If your business needs a happy, bright, versatile chap who scored 1580 on his SAT and can meet any situation with a winning spirit and attention to detail, he is that man. I am happy to provide reference.

Thanks for your time,
Chris Onstad

Achewood State of the Union, 1/2009

2009-01-11T23:08:00.000-08:00

Dear Friends of the Library,

They say that the devil you don't know is worse than the devil you do. In that same spirit, I posit that the Achewood State of the Union update which you can read is better than the one which you can't.

If you've been following Achewood in any capacity for the last year, you've noticed changes afoot. Most particularly, I'm sure you've noticed that the strip itself, always the flagship of the enterprise, has run less frequently.

I want to apologize for that. After seven full and happy years, though, production of the strip has had to find space for itself among other projects. Book development, animation development, and most recently, the rapid relocation of my little family to another state. That's the big killer. We lived in Silicon Valley until today. Until three weeks ago, we thought we were going to live here forever. It's a complicated story involving eminent domain, the stewardship of the American financial continuum, and a poisonous dog named Nasturtium. I'll tell you about it sometime.

There's no way for me to do good work while taking care of my family and all of our interests during this move. You would see scabrous comics—literally injurious to the eyes—anxiously uploaded from a laptop in a stall at the Mount Shasta Bathe-n-Shat. You would see strips about crying. You would see shakily-drawn strips about cantaloupes with wedges missing, in a half-hearted attempt to ape that whole Shel Silverstein thing. It would be wrong.

I expect this official strip hiatus will last about two weeks. I hate not being able to produce it for your entertainment, but I would hate more to rush the work and injure the archives for the sake of quantity. Thank you for your patience and dedication, and please find a home for us in your RSS feed aggregator.

Sincerely,
Chris Onstad

PS: All orders are being fulfilled, and there will still be Fanflow premium content during this time. Ain't nobody gonna get burned on this deal.

North American Achewood Tour Dates and Times.

2008-09-23T22:21:00.000-07:00

Last updated 11/12/2008 10:50AM PDT

Los Angeles just announced! See below.

Gentle Reader and Friend of the Library,

Here are the dates on which you and I will meet, chat, and conduct friendship, as I come through your approximate area. I hope that the events, once over, will carry on long into the night, at a place that is not too far and has room for all. Except for when I have to be dragged off to a plane, my pen trailing a line down the carpet aisle and out the door.

In cases where your city does not yet have a venue/time listed, Dark Horse (my publisher) and I are working out the details with the shop and will update this information as soon as things are official.

- - -

PORTLAND, OR
Portland events poster!

Thursday, Oct 9
Floating World Comics, 6-8PM. Signing. BYOB.
20 NW 5th Ave #101

Friday, Oct 10
Skeleton Key Tattoo, 9PM-close. Free tats (limited spaces), kind of a loose general hang-out thing. I will sign anything you bring, but not with a tattoo gun. 1729 SE Hawthorne Blvd.

SEATTLE, WA
Saturday, Oct 11
Comics Dungeon, Inc. 2PM-4PM
250 NE 45th Street

ANN ARBOR, MI
Monday, Nov 3
Ann Arbor District Library, 343 S 5th Ave, Ann Arbor, MI, 7-8:30 (Q&A, brief signing), then afterparty/full-fledged signing at Vault of Midnight Comics, 219 S. Main St, Ann Arbor.

TORONTO, CANADA
Tuesday, Nov 4
The Beguiling. Signing. 7PM-close.
601 Markham Street

CHICAGO, IL
Wednesday, Nov 5
Comix Revolution, Evanston. Signing. 4-7PM.
606 Davis St.

Thursday, Nov 6
Quimby's. 5-7PM. Signing.
1854 W. North Ave

BROOKLYN, NY
Friday, Nov 7
Rocketship. Signing. 7PM-close.
208 Smith St.

BOSTON, MA
Saturday, Nov 8
Million Year Picnic, Harvard Square, 2-4PM.
Afterparty with Freezepop, location TBA.

AUSTIN, TX
Saturday, December 6
Austin Books, 7-10PM - 5002 North Lamar Boulevard.

LOS ANGELES, CA
Friday, December 12th
Meltdown, 7pm to 10pm.
7522 Sunset Blvd @ N. Sierra Bonita

Our events throughout the northwest, midwest, and northeast have been blowouts, so bring your good-time game and get ready to stump me with Achewood trivia. I look forward to seeing you.

Gush-Love Hemisphere, and other B-Sides

2008-09-16T16:48:00.001-07:00

I "blogged," (I'm going to stop putting that word in quotes someday, but not today) and you responded. Here is the tentative roster of cities we're pretty sure to hit in October — I can't name specific shops yet, but these are pretty nearly locks:

Los Angeles, CA
Portland, OR
Seattle, WA
Austin, TX
Chicago, IL
Ann Arbor, MI
Boston, MA
Brooklyn, NY
Toronto, ON

These will generally be in bookstores or prominent comics shops with lots of space and a history of having beer and wine during signings, to make the lines bearable. Dark Horse will be hammering out the details from here, but I do appreciate all the white guys with glasses who have been writing in with suggestions. In some cases we're scheduling a secondary event, which will be a more low-key meet-and-greet type thing, and less of a signing, although I'll be happy to sign "whatever" (ladies?).

Stay tuned as we firm up locations and dates. Thanks to all the shops who are offering to sponsor travel and/or hotels -- that definitely helps make things happen.

Achewood World Tour, Pt. 1

2008-09-14T18:32:00.000-07:00

The pens sit on the shop's counter in the low morning light, drained of ink. A partially consumed rotisserie chicken stinks in its plastic supermarket carry-out dome, having been forgotten under the bar the night before. Thirty miles away, the official Achewood car sits in the official Achewood driveway, holding much less merchandise than it did when it last departed, and the official Achewood cartoonist is wondering how to politely suggest that his warehouse guy unpack and inventory all of it. The body is idle, but the mind races.

Last night marked the first public signing of the first proper Achewood book, and it was an event which wicked free vodka into its attendees at a medically significant pace. The Isotope, San Francisco's premier comics shop, kept the stuff flowing for a crowd of hundreds of young white men with glasses, and your humble narrator stood planted in place from 8:30PM until 1:30AM, greeting and signing his little body off. Despite the long line, the "vibe" was energetic and upbeat, and we'll have to do it again real soon, because it was like a wedding: everybody gets a second, but nobody gets a minute.

What do I remember of the event?

* There is a crazy guy named Don who lives in San Francisco. He wears a fez and black-tinted 1920s driving goggles, the circular kind with little leather panels on the side (such as Trent Reznor might wear if he were flying a biplane past a leather storm cloud covered in zippers). He has long hair and a handlebar mustache, but he does not seem dangerous...unless you are, say, a comic book that does not want to be read, because comic book, he's gonna read you.

* I also met this guy at one point. (I'm the white guy with glasses; he's the white guy with glasses to my right.)

* The only chest I got to sign was that of a white guy with glasses. Bevy of beautiful women in attendance, where were you on this one? F-minus, beautiful women. Get out of here.

I wasn't sure what to expect at the First Ever Achewood Book Signing and Party-Off, as I've been relatively inaccessible for most of my writing career (piano lessons). It was a treat, and as soon as we returned home I contacted my publisher with urgent plans to set up signings in the following major metropolitan areas:

Portland, OR
Los Angeles, CA
New York, NY
Boston, MA
Austin, TX

If you're local to any of those and would like to suggest a comic shop as a venue, or would like to suggest another city which could hold a signing, by all means contact me (Canada—what's up, girl?). I greatly enjoyed a night with you all, and would like to punctuate autumn with several more of the same.

/C
aka MC chris@achewood.com

For your consideration.

2008-04-21T23:00:00.000-07:00

Two quick items of note this week!

The first photograph comes from Matt, who claims to have upgraded from the Ford Taurus pictured here:

And the second lovely little tidbit comes from newlyweds Ty and Bev, who had a one-of-a-kind pair of cake toppers constructed:

Let's wish them all a lot of luck, especially Matt, as he recovers from Taurus ownership, and as ever, send in any and all photographs that you deem germane and amusing.

Hello and There Have You Been!

2008-03-25T09:22:00.000-07:00

It struck me that I haven't been making much of an appearance in the old "public figurena" lately, and that it was high time we checked in with one another. I know that you know that I'm not much for this kind of thing, so I'll keep this brief and to the point. I will also ramble, and go on at length, and take many breaks to view Internet pornography about maids.

1. "Hey, did you quit or something?"
I've been posting the four weekly Achewood strips in the morning lately, and this has caused some confusion. It upsets routines. It drives people in Australia up the wall, because their "morning" is actually something like sixteen hours later, and their coffee has long since gotten cold, and they've drummed their fingers to the bone. It's hard to please a twenty-four hour world, people. So, why the different posting schedule? Well, I've been doing the strips at night, often very late at night. Sometimes I finish them so late that my synapses are actually sitting in a pile next to my mousepad, and I don't have the use of them. I've found that I like to look over the strip when I wake up, gently burnish it here and there, and then send it on its way. Why don't I work a day in advance, you ask? Well, that's kind of like asking me why I'm a boy. God put what he did where he did, and now I'm prone to thinking of Chuck Norris every few days. I make no apologies. I doubt Chuck would either.

2. The Child.
A little while back I got all high on my abilities and had a child. I posted updates about her life, and then I stopped doing that when she got to be about two and a half. She's three now, and I can't say that she's let up much. We went to Disneyland recently, and late one night when I was on a bipedal errand I fetched some cereal milk and bottled water from a liquor store a block past our hotel. Plumbing around for a personal nadir, I ducked into a Del Taco for a cheeseburger and a side of fries. The food was disgusting. The patty was a disc of paste like you might peel off a roll of waxed paper. The fries were crinkle-cut relics from a joyless factory thousands of miles distant, their crenulated surface informed by food styling trends set in the early '80s. I was glad she was not there to witness as her father stuffed three dollars worth of expedient gunk into an sticky, overflowing trash bin and wandered back out into the night.

3. The Great Outdoor Fight book
This is a big one. We've had it in the works for a while...roughly since before YouTube and Facebook emerged to remind us all that we should have learned how to write computer programs. Dark Horse will release this hardcover in the fall, and it will be on Amazon as a pre-order starting sometime in mid-April. What I recommend is getting a case for your trunk, so that you can make friends wherever you go, and also keep a stack in the front hall for departing guests. It might also be prudent to keep a few dozen in a large bowl in your office or waiting room.

4. The 2nd Achewood Cookbook
It's an open secret that Achewood sells a cookbook, and in the five years since its release I've been testing, learning, tasting, and documenting my further experiments in the kitchen. It's just a gigantic mess of a Microsoft Word file at the moment, but I hope to have it dressed up and pretty by summer. Whereas the first book is full of basics (who else will tell you how to really cook rice and hot dogs?), this one is more advanced, more sophisticated, and assumes that the reader has a cutting board.

That's about it for now...I need to go draw gorillas with somebody.

New Adventures In Text

2008-03-04T00:01:00.000-08:00

Like many quasi-computer people my age, I passed whole years at a stretch plumbing the depths of HHGG (remember the silly little gifts that came with it? What were they?), Planetfall, Leather Goddesses of Phobos, A Mind Forever Voyaging, Zork...the list actually doesn't go on much from there, but indelible marks indeed did those games leave. A couple stale-smelling guys in a dorm room at MIT could combine five or six interesting sentences with a diagram of seventeen rooms and you, the user, would create entire mental worlds in the white-on-black 80-column universe. So spare was the imagery and explanation (it had to be: these came on 128kb floppies, remember) that by the time you wrapped up a successful trip through any one of them, you'd imagined more copy than the combined works of John Irving, only no one would be referring to you as, "a fairly important novelist from New Hampshire" (unless you were, of course, J.D. Salinger, in which case why were you dicking around playing Zork?).

Several years back, a very talented fellow coded a Java-based environment, complete with GUI, in which I could develop a retro-style Achewood text adventure. He was a good man, with the best intentions, and he was magnificent with computers. Unfortunately, I could never install the thing properly, make sense of the user interface, or run it anywhere without a bunch of gray pop-ups saying things about Java and failure. Wherever you are, C., forgive my ineptitude. I hope you were able to use the code in some other way, perhaps to mind your eggs and milk.

It is in that spirit that I put the following query forth to my readership: does anyone know of a good, easy-to-use environment in which to develop interactive text adventures? I stopped programming computers well before the Internet replaced the Vuarnet, and we've been on uncomfortable footing ever since, so it would need to be something which ideally did not expose one to a command line. I mean, of course, in the making of the product — not in the use of it. Funny how that goes.

Please email me with any suggestions. Thank you for any and all, and if I do not reply it is nothing to do with you, but rather because I am a lousy fellow.

(Edit: as of nine hours later, I have about sixty replies, most of which are recommending something called the "Inform-7" interactive fiction platform. Thank you everyone! And here I was, thinking Inform-7 was some sort of Swedish boy band.)

Just what have I been doing with my sick old myself!

2008-02-27T22:42:00.000-08:00

Well, that was just about the biggest non-holiday Achewood comic production break I've taken since I don't know when. Sorry for being sick and tir—no, I'm not sorry. Even guys like me get sick and can't string two words together sometimes, particularly ones that I have faith will be even slightly amusing in the morning. That said, I will try to arrange my sick time for weekends (you know, going to the airport Friday morning and shaking lots of hands in the International terminal, licking Taco Bell employees, etc) but cannot make any promises (some men just refuse to be licked, often for religious reasons).

I would be remiss if I didn't take time to thank all of you who wrote in with "get well" messages, people who at least thought, "poor bugger, he's ill, it seems," or at the very least did not go online to "haxX0rz" me and Photoshop ASCII runes all over my picture.

In other news...if you're like me, you know the power of watching Gordon Ramsay yell at people. He is truly fantastic at it. He is the Jimmy Page of becoming angry. I'm almost afraid to make fun of him here, as I have a tiny fantasy of running into him at the San Francisco Airport executive lounge. He is one of the very few people I would touch on a weekday there, as the thousands of YouTube videos of Hell's Kitchen, Kitchen Nightmares, etc. (and there is quite a lot of etc.) show him to be a man who just might yell at himself in the bathroom mirror if he didn't "wash up" after using his much-referenced "widger" to "do up a proper boys' piss." So, in a nutshell, if you are a member of the SFO executive lounge, I would very much like to visit with you while keeping an eye out for Gordon Ramsay. Some wish they could have seen Gehrig hit his first home run, some wish they could have seen an intact Led Zep play at Wembley, but I'd love to see Gordon Ramsay give a proper dressing-down to the next Taco Bell food court employee who gives me meningo-form coccxylampreys, or whatever it was I contracted recently.

Coming up in the next weeks: updates on the status of the Great Outdoor Fight hardcover I'm doing with Dark Horse, Achewood Cookbook II, the "how to make a living off web-comics" book I hope to distribute as a PDF soon, and a really kickin' version of the 1969 GOF announcement poster. (I am trying to at least do one of these from each decade.)

Howdy, yet goodbye,
/C

Christmas 2007

2007-12-25T22:07:00.001-08:00

Good evening. Happy holidays. Are you all set, there by the fire, snug as a bug? I see you have put down your book, but have not finished your brandy. Is it because you are tired? Well, then I had best make this short.

I am writing to you from my new twenty-two inch monitor. (Is it unnecessary to mention that it is flat panel any more?) I've got Gordon Ramsay's "The F-Word" playing in a YouTube screen to the right of this text editor. I feel like I'm "blogging" at a rich friend's house. It may take a while for me to take the word "blog" out of quotes, since it's such a stultifying neologism (or is it a portmanteau?). I definitely don't want to hear from anyone who has an opinion on the things in that last sentence. I have a hard enough time just wondering when I am going to take all the ugly junk off my front porch, let alone read all kinds of stuff regarding people's thoughts about ideas.

Christmas was good to me in other ways, as well. I got a case of mixed wines from my father's travels, the latest food industry books, a lot of flavoring agents, and a small device which measured rum in the 1930s. Why did they measure rum in the 1930s? I always thought it was kind of a crazy time, a time when businessmen in double-breasted suits would drain off immoderate amounts of rum and agree to finance the sort of Broadway musical where the chorus girls kick their legs up in the air and the female lead warbles like her throat was being pinned beneath a boot at the bottom of a salmon ladder.

Hmm...what else did I get...oh, who cares. A lot of beef dinners and sausage breakfasts. The end of the holidays has left me feeling as though a dexterous raptor with seven feet of Saran Wrap could just roll me up and poach me like a plump boudin. I wish I didn't feel this way about myself.

Maybe 2008 will find me in an improved state. I did join a gym, and have been going with a pleasing regularity (there is this one chick — damn. You know the one? FOX Motorcycle tattoo across the back of her neck?). I've mainly been doing the machine near her.

Bedding and Breakfasting with the Bohemians

2007-11-08T21:04:00.000-08:00

The woman on the telephone returned from her revels in the ether long enough to affirm that yes, they did serve hot breakfast in the lobby of their beach town B&B, although it wasn’t, in spite of the place’s Germanic title, a proper German breakfast. To hear her tell it, their “all-American” breakfast was actually quite popular with the Europeans who were attracted to the place by its multilingual website.

So, hard-boiled eggs, cheeses, and great fanned trays of sliced leberkäse would not be mine, but at least I would be fed and offered coffee within twenty feet of my pillow the morning after the wedding we would be attending, which meant the residents of this hidden seaside community would be spared my chartreuse visage at least until checkout.

Feeling tentatively alive on the morning after my old friend’s nuptial bash, I slipped downstairs and surveyed the promised buffet. A cereal bowl of scrambled eggs, a picked-over Pyrex brownie pan with a few cubes of unctuous home fries, and a suspiciously full crock of sautéed hot dog slices (cool to the touch) seemed to apologize for themselves from a sideboard which also featured a disused toaster and a photograph of an Italian.

I lifted a red disposable Dixie cup off the stack by the coffee urn, and then jumped a little when I saw a name Sharpied on it. Upon closer inspection, all of the Dixie cups revealed the telltale droplets of having been run through a dishwasher.

My wife wasn’t having any of my leaving-the-room shenanigans, so I wandered out into the bright morning sun alone. A strong, handsome white pit bull sat in the middle of the quiet road and gave me a sleepy smile that seemed to suggest he’d been out late at a little doggie wedding of his own the night before. A block further was a café offering a Bellini for four dollars, so I strode in, placed my order, and appreciated the funky little town for being exactly what it was: the sort of place where a tired man can afford to buy a dog a drink on a Sunday morning.

Bacon No. 8 (Retrofill Comes Later)

2007-11-05T23:02:00.000-08:00

Bacon no. 8 is "North Country Cob Smoked Bacon," and it's a welcome throwback to my first and favorite shipment, Father's, in that it is a thick, smoky, down and dirty slice of meat. To touch it raw with your fingertip and then bring the digit slowly to your nose is to be wrestling in a dusty logging camp alongside a buried row of ember-lidded Dutch ovens. Grizzled lumberjacks clap and holler, and great gallon growlers of forest-temperature steam beer are hoisted and drained in a minute by groups of three, as you and your opponent plant your worn jack boots against each new body blow. North Country is every bit as American as Tom Sawyer lighting a corncob pipe off a tightly rolled Indian treaty, with a flavor depth you'll never find in the supermarket. To discover these smoky climes, unfortunately, requires aggressive consumer action. Again, please refer to the Grateful Palate if in search of exceptional bacon.

We'll talk more about what I've done with North Country in a later post. It's time to come clean with my most consistent bacon epiphany, if I can even call it that any more:

Bacon is at its best by itself, eaten like a long potato chip, while standing over whatever you used to drain it. It doesn't seem to take or want help from other ingredients.

Think about it: the product hits on almost all cylinders when simply rendered and left to rest a minute or less. Sweet, salty, smoky, rich, fatty, chewy, warm, multi-textural...a symphony to everything that our palates know to be right. What's going to do anything other than dilute that perfect experience? Is there any other foodstuff so well rounded? Put some seared foie gras on brioche next to a slice of properly smoked and seasoned bacon, and the liver will lose every time. We like chew, we like depth. We don't just want to eat meat butter. Anyone with an honest palate knows that we eat foie gras in front of people, but we want bacon when we are alone.

I've seen my dog growl and get nasty when we try to tickle her after we set down her bowl of manure pellets (or whatever it is we feed her) — but try pulling a piece of bacon out of my hand as I lift it to my mouth. I'd give my own mother a sharp elbow in the solar plexus, and I love her as much as any good son. This raises unpleasant questions about primacy and my character in general, but those among you who didn't feel a pang of sympathy just now, rise up and shuffle off. Bacon is as close as food gets to a narcotic, and, like marijuana, it's the sort of thing you really won't appreciate until you order special versions through the mail.

Bacon No. 5: Hempler's Peppered Bacon

2007-07-13T16:08:00.000-07:00

Hempler's Peppered Bacon arrived yesterday. It's thick-cut, looks like a pastrami, and is far lower in fat than its predecessors because it's mostly meat (they say the bellies are trimmed before curing — huzzah from one who's been eating pure pork fat for the last four months). Hempler's is wet-cured, maple- and hickory-smoked, and flavored with black pepper, mustard seed, paprika, and onion powder: this is by far the most gussied-up bacon I've received from the Grateful Palate's Bacon of the Month club. It comes to us from Washington state.

I was inspired to plant myself at my desk at 4pm on a Friday afternoon by a sandwich I just made with this bacon. Normally at 4pm on a Friday I'm in the back yard with the family and the dog and a beer, throwing tennis balls around, looking up at airplanes, and helping people point the hose into the kiddie-pool. Today, however, a confluence of events steered me into the kitchen for a mid-afternoon snack: the wife is away watching the new Harry Potter, the tot isn't moving from the Curious George marathon she's arranged for herself, my new "cereal for breakfast and lunch" diet has me seeking the support of door frames and banisters all the time, and we had a leftover "artisanal" sandwich roll so light and velvety to the touch that I could not bear to watch it go stale. "Why not make a sandwich and do a bacon update," I thought, as I cracked open a nice chilly beer. "We've got that three dollar heirloom tomato, after all."

In The Reach of a Chef, Michael Ruhlman contrasts the cooking of Thomas Keller (driven, tortured, laborious, masochistic yet sadistic, and highly technical) and Masa Takayama (zen-simple sushi, served only omakase style, most dishes prepared in seconds). The philosophy of my sandwich was in the latter camp. I've been overthinking bacon thus far in the experiment. It is inherently a good, finished product and it needs little adornment or technique to guide it into its state of perfection. Case in point:

1 The aforementioned "prince of rolls," something like a personal ciabatta, sliced and lightly toasted, slipper-softness is key
3 Slices thick bacon, cooked but not crisp
2 Thin slices heirloom tomato, never refrigerated, pulp gently massaged out
1-2 tbsp Mayonnaise to lightly coat inside of sandwich
1/2 tsp or so Cream-style horseradish to work into mayonnaise
salt and pepper to season dressed bread before filling

We didn't need to turn it into lardons for Coq au Vin. We didn't need to purée it and use it to caulk red mullet into papillote. We didn't need Grant Achatz to dangle it off a miniature fishing rod while strapping dorsal fins to our backs. This was a BLT. Some L would have been nice, but I was out. Did you notice the horseradish? You might know it as that searing, unbroken condiment that ruins many a plate of beef. This tiny amount, worked into mayonnaise, is gentle, warm, and just a bit spicy. Please, pick up a little jar of it. I think the cream-style preparation is even milder than the others you find on the shelf. Rediscover horseradish. I think it's going to have a big 2008. Here, touch my hand.

This is a sandwich bacon. It's not the thin sort that you wrap around things. It's big and meaty and rewarding to chew through. This will likely be a strong sandwich month here at the Bacon Blog. I won't disappoint you by doing a bunch of hackneyed California stuff with avocados and boneless skinless chicken breasts. I may finally work out a banh mi for my common-grocery honkeys, and how about a proper breakfast burrito? I grew up on those, and I have iron-fisted opinions about what should and should not be.

* The review of Bacon No. 4, Edwards Brown Sugar Bacon, will appear here shortly.

Tennis: Sport of Slick Princes.

2007-07-05T17:15:00.000-07:00

Maybe two months ago the warehouse guy found a couple of old cheap racquets in our back storage shed, and suggested we might take them out for a spin. Mrs. Onstad and I had bought them very early in our courtship, a few addresses ago, while trying to identify a second mutually enjoyable physical diversion. It never took between the two of us, but I did end up playing many memorable sets with the son of the fellow who chose the fonts for the first computer at Xerox PARC. Funny how life goes. More on that never.

I'd always hoped that the tennis experiment would turn into something, but was forced to lay down the "stick" when my fancy friend moved away. Liz was having none of the game, claiming an "annoyance in the knees." She was fine to rollerblade around, of course, and drag me into that Land of Lucifer, where I promptly wibble-wobbled through a schoolyard and hit my elbow so hard on the pavement that several types of priest had to be summoned. The racquets moved with us three times—nothing more than burdens for the last eight years. Like my rollerblades, but with less mouse poop rattling around in the foot cavity.

After eight years of hanging in the dark, I suspect their frames and string beds aren't in peak form. Often now, when I give a shot my all, it sort of "thubs" off over the net, giving up once it's crossed the tropic and begun its fall to the ground. I think the sweet spot has shrivelled to a point, the way the dot of white light collapses in the center of an ancient black and white television set when you've had enough snowy Leave It To Beaver and just want to crawl in bed and cry the cabin vacation away.

We think we may be good. Even with these petrified clubs in our hands, we have some pretty fantastic rallies. We thock-thock-thock those balls across the net with inches to spare, "baseline play"-style, as I think it is said. I often focus my personal anger into a serve or return, and feel furious joy as my opponent (friend) is destroyed (misses the ball) by my violence (a Dunlop #6). It is incredible to watch him fall to his knees (reach into his pocket) and burst into flames (ask me if I'm ready) before hurling a glowing brimstone spear (another Dunlop #6) at my center mass. Later, we will drink water that has been organically siphoned from a federally recognized aquifer a thousand miles beneath the earth's surface ($3.99).

Still, though, I have some questions about how to improve basic aspects of my game. Are any of my readers tennis pros? Tennis pros, these are my issues:

1. On "off" days, the arc of my forehand return tends to mimic the beautiful parabolic curve of the St. Louis Arch. How can I keep this from happening? I desperately want to hit the ball horizontally, with a little sprinkling of devilish topspin. Sometimes I can do this, but not reliably. Far too often, I treat my opponent to a mini-vacation in Missouri.

2. My racquet is probably fairly bad. It's called, like, the "Kenny Boy Fat Duo" or some such. Aggressive and sporty, but strange. It's 105 inches, "oversize," I suppose, and I think it cost me thirty dollars in 1999. The strings have never been changed. Am I waxing dandy about Coors in a room full of Trappist brewers, here? In other words, am I a tender-hands blowhard with a gentle tummy, accidentally let into the private airport lounge and bothering Michael Madsen about Oceans Eleven, which he wasn't in? To put it bluntly: should I be ashamed of even talking about this shit racquet while claiming to be getting serious about tennis?

3. What's the idea with a backhand? That's a weird one. I see better players do them in proper, clearly-trained form, and they look like twits.

4. My serve is incredible. I call it the Steamboat Willie, because I put so much spin on it that it curves through the air like some crazy little boat. It almost corkscrews. I don't need any help there, thanks. It basically Fosbury Flops over the net, and the warehouse guy is left standing there, screwing his face into the angriest mug that his muscles will make.

That's it for now. I momentarily forgot that I am supposed to be writing about golf and bacon, and I've got to get to those. Thanks for sticking through this tennis bit. Hopefully I'll become so good at it that I won't need to speak to anyone about it, ever.

/C

AFTERWORD, FOLLOWING A TRIP OUT TO THE CAR:
It seems the racquet is actually a "Kennex PowerZone." In my opinion, the name sounds weak and trite. Whoever came up with it lacked dignity and clarity of purpose. And the paint job is just a mess. Like a pixelated red zebra caught on bad film. I am certainly not proud of it, and welcome the opportunity to purchase a new one, perhaps with a plain-color rim and a smart logo in the middle.

(Okay, I didn't actually go out to the car. I think that's the name, though.)

Golf Memoir No. 6: Going Modern

2007-06-26T22:01:00.000-07:00

"Chris, I want you to take a left turn at History, and park the car at the intersection of Progress and Usability."

That is what the oblong, hermetically sealed, gift-wrapped cardboard box might have whispered to me as I cut apart the binding tape of its short end and pulled out its contents: a gently used set of stiff-shafted Taylor Made "Burner" irons, which my father had procured on eBay for a song. They were beautiful, glowing silver in the outdoor light of our cabin's back porch. They felt smart in the hand, and the sexy contours of the polished perimeter weighting had me mentally crushing balls down an impossibly green contrast-cut fairway someplace tropical.

If you have wandered through my earlier golf memoirs, you will recall that until now I have played with the 1975 Wilson Staffs that my father bought for himself when I was born. I have made it a point of pride to not cave in and use the myriad "crutch" club design technologies which have come along in the last three decades. Reasoning that I'd have a more disciplined swing if I could play well with simple irons that had a relatively small sweet spot, I laughed off new equipment with a quiet superciliousness. Like a man with diphtheria who raises his nose at the latest antitoxin mushed up from Anchorage.

From a certain coign of vantage, and well aware of my position on the matter, dear old dad told me what I'd be getting as a gift a month before my birthday. This was just after a session at the Danville driving range where I'd tried one of his new Taylor Made irons. Actually, I ended up trying several of them—all of them, in fact—and marveled that when I so much as chucked one of them at the ball like a javelin, I'd get a good 180 yards with decent spin. When I went so far as to take the club in my hands and employ waltz time, I was a man reinvented. The nine-iron went half the range, easy. The three-iron was bouncing off the back screen, something I thought only Greg Norman could do. (You may wonder why I do not instead reference John Daly, the king of the long ball. That is because instead of being on the range with me, he would be in the clubhouse, holding five lit cigarettes between his index and middle fingers and squeezing pasty Irish girls.)

After that dalliance with space-age casting, I was of two minds. In this crappy, modern world, I wanted to hold fast to something traditional — to my old clubs. Then again, when these old clubs were new, the purists played with hickory-shafted gleeks and niblicks, swatting pickled ortolans around sheep-shorn fairways with half a bottle of Old Fuckall sloshing about in their guts. Also, I reasoned, life is hard enough as-is. I have a two year-old. I try to make a living off a comic strip. Why in the GOD DAMNED HELL SHOULD I PICK A FIGHT WITH MY GOLF CLUBS ONCE A WEEK.

Goodness, what happened there. Excuse me, I'll get the mop and the disinfectant.

So, I got the clubs, and my folks even gave me a nice black bag to put them in. One of those new ones with the embarrassing backpack-style carrying harness. It was a lot of change to handle all at once, as you can imagine. What sort of dildo-craving genetic bust-out wears his golf bag in the style of a backpack? The thing even had a built-in retractable stand. After a bit of experimenting in the privacy of the cabin's spare bedroom, thankfully, I discovered that one of the loops serves reasonably well as a standard shoulder strap, so the rig was essentially serviceable.

Last week, before our shifts, the warehouse guy and I headed over to the range to plow through a few buckets. Upon manning the mat, I once again discovered that even the grossest swing yielded something straight, true, and needing binoculars. At certain points I was so ashamed of how easy the game had become, I actually looked up to give a good-natured shrug to whomever might be watching.

The teetering, tottering, wheeze-box firing line that snaked out before me was heads down, slapping their own low irons up against the far screen wall.

(Author's note: You may notice that Golf Memoir No. 5 has yet to appear. I'm working on that one separately, and expect to complete it at...a date.)

GIN OCEAN

2007-06-11T22:47:00.001-07:00

I went to a pretty expensive college, and sometimes people at pretty expensive colleges actually do something that doesn't make me want to gouge my eyes out with a tastevin. Please observe this case in point, a Kairos house homage to Achewood's May 17, 2007 strip:

Bless all ye holy on the Mayfield row.

A Return to Bacon, the Senses, and the Stove.

2007-06-01T22:51:00.000-07:00

In deference to the lingering illness that had me running wounded on three of my five sensory cylinders this May, I decided to make soup. Soup is a troublesome topic in my house, as my wife prefers a smooth purée and I like a spoonful with a variety of textures in it. I ask you, how can you eat something that's going to be precisely the same uniform liquid experience sixty sips in a row? The brain softens. The spine goes insensate. Dignity takes a dive and the dog wanders from the table. There is no joy for her here. Give me a spoonful of hot broth in which I can quickly determine a bean, a bit of ham, tiny flecks of carrot, and perhaps something small and green, and I am comforted. The dog returns and assumes her expectant tableside seat. A plane lands. Everyone is safe. Everyone is home. A setting sun refracts through a ruby glass of wine...then a restorative sup. A sweater beckons from a drawer, a book beckons from the floor by that bronze thing that adjusts the disconnected furnace.

Speaking of my wife, she is also not much for the high art and pastime of meat-eating, so her gift of the Bacon of the Month Club was an open invitation to make foods we wouldn't be sharing, which is normally taboo in our family of two (the tot doesn't count yet, as she thrives solely on a diet of Bunny Grahams and alphabet-shaped pasta). Kill two birds with one stone, then, I thought: make a chunky white bean soup and flavor it with some cubed Canadian-style bacon that has had the hell browned out of it. From the mythical three-day Toulousain cassoulet to the cheap chop with black-eyed peas of my youth...one hates to invoke the term "gestalt," so I won't, but if I did, would you walk out on this sentence?

I'm by no means an accomplished soup cook, but I've done my share of reading, so I set at it with a knife and a hot little cuprous-complected fellow we picked up at the wedding. One of the discoveries I took away from this go was just how many cans of beans thirty-two ounces of chicken stock can absorb if you take a stick-blender to the pot (hint: the upcoming Achewood Cookbook II will have this highly controversial and hotly debated information).

Other soup cookery discoveries:

1) You hear it all the time -- even occasionally in an empty room, which causes you to jump with a start -- but soup really is best a day or two after the initial preparation. The ingredients have heated and cooled and heated and cooled and essentially rotted a little longer -- "rotting" being a word that you won't find in many cookbook titles. The art of controlling the process of going bad is the secret of many of the table's greatest pleasures: aged beef and pheasant, cheese, wine (particularly the aptly named "noble rot" Botrytis), then vinegar...the list is as long as the time Europeans can find to laugh at our refrigerator culture.

2) You can use a Benriner or mandoline to quickly julienne the carrots for your mirepoix. From there it's just a quick pass with the knife until they're a fancy little brunoise. Why am I talking about this? Because I am praying that Christopher Kimball will show up at my doorstep with a Ford Ranger King-Cab limo and a passel of glycerine essays about what lath and plaster walls mean to him.

3) Kidney beans are kind of nasty. I'm not sure why they're around. I can't put my finger on their flavor but it's sort of like something that would be smeared on a building to keep coyotes from urinating on it.

4) If you own a building and coyotes are always urinating on it, consider smearing kidney beans around the foundation, instead of using them in soup.

Fondest Regards,
Chris

Bacon No. 3: Carlton Farms Canadian-Style Bacon

2007-05-18T00:12:00.000-07:00

Food and I have had a rough couple weeks. Late last month I attended a remarkably well-apportioned bachelor party for an old friend, and in the two nights after that I officiated at a few high-octane events for my beloved Stanford Chaparral. What was once a typical three-day bender — one which might have ended with a bit of waterskiing and a mid-morning trip to a steak restaurant in another state — put me on the rails so hard that my immune system was reduced to an unconvincing leukocyte in a dirty Superman costume. Disease after disease ravaged my body, exhausted my lungs, and diddled the dobro of my swan song. Wakefulness was agony, marked by periods of joyless work and difficult parenting.

Somewhere along the endless toilet paper ticker tape into which I blew my nose, or perhaps expectorated against some luckless street tree, rested the conjoined apparatus of my taste and smell organs. Food had no flavor, rotten items in the refrigerator had no odor. My own clothing, to which I am deeply sensitive, betrayed none of the telltale fragrances of overuse. To eat was to cough, and to think was to worry that I'd never enjoy food again. Sure, I'd wind up looking like Scott Weiland, but skinny people are never happy. They lack the blood chemistry which activates a convincing smile.

The UPS man dropped a fat little package of a new sort of bacon into the rattle of all that misery. This time it's Carlton Farms Canadian-Style Bacon, dry cured and alder/hickory smoked, from Oregon. My mind peered forth from the shroud of tubercular angst long enough to appreciate that unlike the all-fat belly and jowl bacons I'd been receiving, this sample was cured center-cut loin. An all-meat spacer in the opening salvo of pure lard.

Still on the recovery trail, ready for nothing and able of less, I sliced a few pieces off the uncut loin and pan-fried them with some bread and an egg. The Carlton Canadian-Style Bacon isn't the tough-love rubber you get on pizza; it's tender and evenly seasoned. This is the bacon I'd like to use in a carbonara -- something that's not just egregious fat in a recipe already filled with unctuous yolks and cheese. Fat sneaks into a happy diet from so many cracks and seams -- the bacon should be adding salt and smoke, not grease.

This is My Jowl, and it Freaks Me Out! (bacon 2 post 2)

2007-05-02T00:46:00.000-07:00

I'm not particularly scared of jowl bacon, actually. The first time I ever encountered face meat—veal cheeks, to be precise—in a restaurant, I was in the early throes of a passion for brave new foods, and ordered them without hesitation so as to seem gustatorily advanced in front of my future in-laws. Fortunately, they just turned out to be plump little brown things (the veal cheeks), not unlike shank or pot roast. This was a relief, because at the time I had been "pretending" my way through a lot of sashimi. (To this day, I still can't join ranks with those of you who think you are big scary bears.)

Application #1
Tired of charitably wrapping bacon around bland meats like chicken breasts and scallops, I thought I'd go for a real speedball with this latest test. I strode up to the longest butcher's counter in town, ordered a handful of lamb tenderloins, and grabbed some mint and jalapeños on the way out. This dish was going to have "game," I decided. (The game in question turned out to be Retchin' Retchin' Hippos, as opposed to an event where Michael Jordan springs off the half-court line, propels himself off the top of the backboard, and continues on into space.)

Having seasoned the lamb strips, I wrapped them in jowl bacon and let them sit at room temperature for a while, figuring the fleshes would become tacky and stick together better. Meanwhile, I hummed and chatted with myself as I chopped mint and jalapeño for the sauce. I'd do them in a pan, and when the fond had built and the grease had rendered, I'd deglaze with a little red wine. I'd throw the mint and jalapeños in, stir quickly, and pour it all over my tight little browned marvels.

High on the taste of an unsauced test bite of bacon-wrapped lamb, I turned off my brain and operated by instinct. I threw in the wine. It hissed and steamed in that pleasing way. I threw in the mint and chili. Finding my sauce volume lacking, I went for a bit of dairy to fill it out. My hands were guided to a tub of sour cream, from which I cast a good dollop and whisked.

The resulting sauce was thick and pink, the wine mixing with the dairy and creating something which, at a family reunion, could probably call over the photographer and clink glasses with Pepto-Bismol. Blinded by the juices of bacon and lamb, I spooned it over three servings of plated tenderloins: one for me, one for the warehouse guy, and one for my mother, who was over that day.

We sat on the old iron patio set and slid our special occasion brass-fitted Laguiole steak knives from their burnished case. Why not break the good stuff out whenever you can, I say — what good does it do you to die with nice things in the garage?

The freshly-sharpened edge of the knife fell through the meat with surgical efficiency (to this day I swear I saw Anthony Edwards run across the back of the yard, give me a quick double-thumbs up, and then plow headfirst into the apple tree). I pushed the morsel around in a good batch of pink sauce and lifted it to my lips.

- - -

MOM: Mmmm! Delicious, honey!

ME: Oh my god this sauce is terrible.

MOM: No! You did good! I'm so proud my boys like to cook.

ME: Agh it's all acid, and heat, and it looks like a pink Converse pinched one on my plate.

MOM: [giggles] Oh, I don't know. I like it.

ME: I'm sorry, mom. I'll do better next time.

MOM: [stiffens, sets fork down] You said that about Stanford.

WAREHOUSE GUY: [plate is mysteriously clean, dog is retching over by the shed] Good stuff!

- - -

Indescribably bad. Wine on jalapeño on sour cream was just the type of triple-acid funnycar you'd expect. Plus, it was quite spicy, and you couldn't taste the meats very well for all of that.

UPDATE
Just this last weekend my old friend Steve came in to town from Cleveland, where he regularly receives heartbreaking email about his oncology and hematology (cancer and blood disease) patients. (Actually, he just did that at my kitchen table for a while — I have no idea what his day-to-day is like. Table tennis in the lounge?) Needless to say, he takes his happy days where he can get them, and insisted on whipping me up his special wilted spinach salad with bacon and tangerines.

We all know the sort of cook who has a few staple recipes that he can pull off in his sleep. Steve is one of them. Bacon spinach salad, T-bone steak with Emeril's essence, a mean Austin-style breakfast spread...he's got it. If Steve were a restaurant, he'd be in business. If I were a restaurant, my dog would be retching on the front steps of City Hall while the cameras rolled. I was wondering what would happen with Burgers' Jowl Bacon. Steve happened to this bacon, and it was tasty.

I have a few slices left. I'm thinking of doing a banh mi: a Vietnamese baguette sandwich typically with some kind of cured or otherwise strong meat, cilantro, pickled daikon and carrot, thinly sliced hot pepper, and dressing. Banh mi are like girls: your first real experience with one will forever have you driving around low-rent strip malls looking for more.

Burgers' Jowl Bacon (bacon #2)

2007-04-13T23:07:00.000-07:00

A few days ago, the dog started barking and a corn-fed man in a brown uniform strode back down my sunny driveway, having just deposited a hearty parcel of pork on my doorstep. Is there any tableau so quintessentially American? I nearly stood at attention, hat held proudly over heart, humming the Pledge of Allegiance. (I quickly remembered that the Pledge of Allegiance is not the national anthem, and sat back down.)

That is correct: Bacon of the Month Club shipment No. 2 is here. This one is Burgers' Smokehouse "Sliced Country Pork Jowl." It comes to us from the curiously named California, Missouri.

Being face bacon, rather than belly bacon, I suppose it's akin to guanciale, the mythical product that Mario Batali has been espousing for so many years. What I notice is that it's nearly pure fat, with very little meat. This is no bad thing. It's a cooking tool like any other, and I can see it as a sort of "final jammies," wrapped around so many different grilled foods, basting them while protecting their tender flesh from direct heat. I think of using it like caul fat, like the fancy fellows do on Iron Chef. To hold things together. Will I finally buy a weird little frozen quail? Will I finally do a scallop wrapped in bacon? I think all of these horseshoes are at least leaners.

I've only had a small sampling of Burgers' -- my typical "control group slice," done plain in a pan. It was pure fat, without any streak of meat, though most of the rest of the package does have a pencil of pink in it. It's nothing like Father's bacon. Tasting it does not bring to mind scenes of a randy redneck taking advantage of Ned Beatty in the woods while a cross-eyed hillbilly plucks a banjo on a porch. This product has none of that dense hickory perfume, and is just itself, pure pork essence. It's a much more subtle flavor.

I'll keep you posted. As ever, thanks for the recipes and techniques that continue to flow in. I read them all, and mull over them, and on occasion have even had them recur to me as I stood in a line or waited at a traffic light.

The San Francisco Giants Season Opener.

2007-04-11T12:12:00.000-07:00

In the total body of work which comprises Achewood—a body of work which runs the gamut from topics as disparate as cutting-edge gay pornography and risotto burnout—you will notice a remarkable lack of baseball. In my youth, I played little league as earnestly as any mortally shy, four-eyed kid in jeans and non-regulation discount sneakers could, of course. My dad even coached a year or two, but it didn't amount to much (he listens to Sibelius in his Volvo and plays Frankenstein with heirloom rose grafts). At the end of my last year suffering under the mesh-backed, adjustable-strap crown of thorns, when the team awards were handed out, he had to give me an award just like everyone else, and I went home with a baseball in a spherical plastic case which read, "Most Versatile." Meaning, no matter which position they stuck me in, I'd be equally capable of moistening my dungarees if a ball came within twenty yards of my "responsibility zone." I eventually opted for Boy Scouts over baseball and my mother, whose arms grew taut and veined with the effort of hauling hundreds of yards of dungaree-ripe clotheslines to and fro each week, sighed with relief. Since that time, America's game and I have fallen irreparably out of touch.

Thus it was with no small amount of surprise that I found myself happily accepting a ticket to see the San Francisco Giants season opener last Tuesday. My old friend Jon, whom I have described elsewhere as a high-tech knee breaker and axe man who routinely travels the globe to put the screws to six-figure geeks, had a couple of sweet stubs that put us six rows back from third base, and I thought, "Hey, I'm a writer. I could use an excuse to wear pants this month. My wife would love it. She might even get out the camera."

I met Jon on the Caltrain that wends its way up the San Francisco peninsula from our southerly suburbs. The trip had been sold to me as an excuse to start drinking beer early in the day, a generative exercise with which I am professionally familiar. I wasn't terribly in the mood to sup on suds as I walked to the train at 11am this particular day, but I gamely picked up one of those mortar-size Heinekens at a corner liquor store and felt its cool weight against my hip as I waited for the train to toot and hiss up to the platform.

Jon wandered into my car and set down a Safeway bag full of Guinness and high-end potato chips (as I have mentioned elsewhere, Jon works hard, and takes his pleasure when and where he can get it). We cracked a couple of the cans and got to chatting about our kids. Here and there we broke off a couple of the Clotted Cream and Kielbasa Kettle Chips (real name forgotten) in our mouths and chewed like horses. I traded him my Heineken mortar for a humbler and more nutritious Guinness pint, and after a fashion we rolled into the San Francisco terminus, a mere block from AT&T Park. Having fortified myself earlier with a toaster waffle, I found the rate of Guinness absorption wholly pleasant.

Awash in a sea of fellow fans, we made our way to the park and had a quick Anchor Steam at the peripheral ACME Chophouse (how many ballpark slop-shops can say that their menu and food philosophy were designed by Traci Des Jardins?), before entering the gates and getting an Anchor Steam to wash down all that Anchor Steam. To dogpile the beer and keep it subdued, we ordered an unusual number of ethnic sausage sandwiches from the dizzying assortment of food concessions (correct me if I'm wrong, but I think I saw one small booth that was permanently serving a still-beating cobra heart to an animatronic Tony Bourdain). "Hey," I thought, "Maybe it's not me that's stayed the same. Maybe it's baseball that's changed." It was a happy moment. Perhaps I would have to have baseball over for halibut cheek ceviche and Żubrówka appletinis sometime.

We descended to field level and took our seats. My warehouse guy, who actually follows baseball with a religious fervor, described our address in the sixth row as "worth killing [me] over," so I was happy when we finally alighted and there was no C-4 duct taped to the underside of my seat. We settled in next to a couple of drunken, fat blowhards with chunky watches (Wikipedia: season ticket holders) who quickly engaged Jon in expert baseball camaraderie. I played it loose and fast on the other side of Jon and was largely ignored, despite my looseness and fastness.

The first few innings went smoothly, and I found myself watching the batters' stats on the Jumbotron. After noting a few curious trends (e.g., a perceived Gaussian distribution of batting averages in the batting order), I felt ready enough to dissect the sport with the drunkest and blowhardiest of the chunky watch brigade. Unfortunately, the subject never came up within earshot, so I busied myself with watching the Giants spray clouds of raunchy foul balls into the upper deck.

Before long, it was clear that I would get sunstroke, so I rolled down the sleeves of my fancy hiking shirt and pulled the bill of my old Boston Red Sox cap (purchased during the frenzy of the 2004 ALCS, at which time I happened to be in Boston) even lower on my brow. Jon wandered off to get a few more eight dollar beers, and the near-most blowhard pressed his opinions on me. After a bit of deft prying, I was able to get him to admit that he was very successful, and had sold a lot of things to a lot of people lately. Life had been worse for old him, he admitted in full candor. His friend afforded that the fellow's house was an excellent place for parties, and that there were always cool people there. I said that I agreed it must be so, and they seemed pleased. It was as good a time as any to head to the lavatory.

Using the men's room at a Major League baseball game is an institution and culture of its own, ancillary to the game itself, dependent but distinct. It is a milling, densely packed cattle call where fathers try to teach their too-young sons how to use regulation urinals. Teenagers gripe at the backs of the old, who can no longer muster significant PSI. Here and there a laugh spreads at an odd vector across lines of men who are half-paying attention to whatever micturation foible or embarrassing cell phone conversation is most obvious. Those who have just finished their business part the seas of uncomfortable men like a uranium Moses. If you find yourself next to a thorough hand-washer, you use the soap too. If not, your fingers dance briefly beneath the auto-activated spray and you are on your way back down the steps to your seat. To the blowhards.

Which brings me to why we left in the seventh inning. The Giants weren't up to much, and we'd had enough sausages, so it seemed unnecessary to run the risk of getting corralled into after-game beers at the blowhard party house. Jon and I instead ran a con about a sick kid or a wife with dysentery or something of the sort, shook a few quick hands, and trotted up the steps and out of the stadium. Feeling smart, we had a few beers, a couple Subway six-inchers, and caught the next train south. By six o'clock that evening I was standing in front of my hallway mirror and admiring my lobster-red sunburn dickie. A hot andouille curled against my pancreas and went to sleep. Anchor Steam trickled slowly from my ears. I was happy. Baseball was something different to me now, just like fishing and summer music festivals. As with those other sterling examples of boredom and agony, beer had drawn everything into focus. Thank you, Jon. Thank you, beer.

Moving on to Bacon No. 2

2007-04-04T20:37:00.000-07:00

Part One: Thanks, Players.

First of all, thank you to the hundreds of players who have sent in bacon-based recipes. I could never hope to answer you all in a high-quality, "bacon"- style way, so let it be known that I have read and enjoyed all of your letters and suggestions. Here are some "fun facts" that I have culled from your correspondence:

1) People from England who have travelled in the United States uniformly assume that all of us cook our bacon into bitter little dry, hard strips at every opportunity. They think that if we come to England, we will break into their houses while they are away and cook all their bacon until it snaps when you drop a pencil on it. They think we sneak away from our own college graduations to ruin bacon in a van parked behind the stadium. How wrong they are. How strong their own country's bacon propaganda machine must be.

2) On the whole, most of the recipes I received were for some sort of pasta carbonara. I have had good—nay, great—carbonara, and it is an adipose indulgence on a par with eggs Benedict, foie gras, and rillettes. I know what you are talking about, and I know you write with love. I will attempt a carbonara, but I don't yet know in which month. [note to self: at the end of this paragraph, include a joke about a tap-dancing kidney, and how he sings about his need for fresh water.]

3) Black-eyed peas. If there is one treat that takes me back to my childhood kitchen with high-grade ballistic precision, it is black-eyed peas. Pair them with a butter-topped pile of steaming white rice and the only thing missing from that youthful, sensory triumvirate is the time I saw my half-naked, senile old neighbor mowing his front lawn with a load in his shorts.

3.1) In (3), I originally intended to thank the fellow who wrote in with the Hoppin' John idea, but "the tale grew in the telling," as they say. That's where I was going with that black-eyed pea angle.

Part Two: Putting Father to Rest

You may as well know the truth. After last I wrote, I had already dispatched the remaining four slices of Father's hickory-smoked bacon into the great gullet that spells end-of-days. I hid that information from you, as a writer. I knew I was doing something wrong, or at least disingenuous, yet still I carried on; I felt as though the greater time I afforded myself to come to terms with Father's final application, the more adequately I could convince you of its ultimate appropriateness.

After last time's egg-and-lardon salad, as you know, I had four slices of this supremely smoky bacon left. It was getting close to three weeks, and despite my best efforts, Father's bacon wouldn't last forever out of the deep freeze. I had to act quickly, and I did. With an inbox full of roasted butternut squash risottos and bacon-wrapped quail in mustard pesto, I did the unthinkable one morning, when no one was home.

I cooked the slices until tender, spread seasoned mayonnaise on two toasted pieces of bread, and set the bacon on a book-matched bed of cool, crisp, tender romaine hearts. A flash of the blade down the middle and there I had it: a thick, smoky bacon sandwich without much in its way.

Father's had a lot of personality — it was a cigar in a room full of dippers, a Stetson in a sea of beanies. As I wound down my trials with this first shipment from the Bacon of the Month Club, I didn't feel bad to use it this way. I feel I was lucky to grasp the essence of this particular meat just in time: that it was strong enough to stand on its own. If a slice of steamed ham is Liberace, with his wardrobe of lettuces, onions, pickles, sauces, cheeses, and fridge-ripened tomatoes, Father's was every bit a dying man with a wooden guitar, alone in the back seat of a Cadillac, the one who didn't need to dress up to say goodbye.

- - -

Next Time: New Shipment! "Burgers' Smokehouse Sliced Country Pork Jowl." First impressions of pork face fat quality, tasting, and rumination. Includes centered photograph.

Join the Bacon of the Month Club! gratefulpalate.com

Success With Four Slices Left

2007-04-02T00:46:00.000-07:00

Time's running out for Father's Bacon, what with the next mystery shipment of pork hitting the vans today (I get an automated email letting me know that I had better be home or call in to the mothership if it's going to be otherwise). I've got four thick slices left after tonight's modest success, and I think maybe I'll even ask for a professional opinion as to what to do with them. There — any professional cooks out there? I've read and considered every recipe the readers have sent in, but these (with absolute respect to all contributors, and I hope to hear from more of you) peaked at wrapping a hot dog in bacon. Sure, on paper—technically—it's a remarkable achievement of charcuterie, but I feel like something as transcendent as smoked pork ought to do more than adorn an already-tasty hot dog. It ought to elevate something in need of its bountiful charity.

Foraging around my mental gallery of germane recipes this afternoon (price of admission: honor system; take one of the Chinese delivery menus I pretend are brochures), I considered the workhorse bistro salad of frisée with bacon and poached egg. Dress the lettuce, toss it with some lightly-rendered bacon and croutons, and drop a poached egg on top. How could you not like that? You would be a crazy fool with a nugget of cocaine under his eyelid if you tried to act like that would not be delicious.

A PHOTOGRAPH OF THE FINISHED DISH

On the left are two slices of Father's bacon in mid-render. On the right is a badly Photoshopped headshot of the final dish. I was so ashamed of my overexposed, washed out, hardcore-amateur picture that I put images of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il in each corner, in the hopes that they might wick away some of your ire and disappointment. Normally I like to make a big to-do of Achewood food photography, but I was rushed in this case. (I'm trying to get together a pithy statement about how temperature is the most important ingredient in any dish, bear with me.)

NOTES ON PREPARATION

Like a beaming grandmother who sprays perfume at an asthmatic infant whom she hopes to mold in her image, I put the bacon slices down to cook whole. After a fashion, something told me that a chef with a thermometer in his tricep pocket would have cut the bacon into its little lardons (French for "lil' lardy-bops") first. Something about edge texture and more attractive finish. I removed the meat from the pan and quickly dispatched the strips into 1/2-inch bits before returning them and finishing the render.

Meanwhile, I got an egg poaching. I tossed in some vinegar to help the egg bunch together and look lovely, but I used red wine vinegar (even though I was only making dinner for one person, I made a lot of hack mistakes like this). The top half of the egg wound up with some pink discoloration around it, so at the end of the thing I plated it upside down on the lettuce (and attempted that deft food photographer's slice, the one that frees a nice little rivulet of ooey-gooey yolk).

When the bacon was done, I turned it out onto some paper towels and poured the grease into a can of Coca-Cola Cherry Zero (I will make sure this subtle nuance is in the final recipe). The pan had two great fond-outlines from the original strips, and the crouton cubes I'd set to brown in there didn't scrape them up, so, once the croutons colored, I dumped them into the frisee and poured my dressing into the pan to release the chewy brown outlines. I'd never done a functional warm dressing before. It was exciting; I felt like a person with red pants on. I felt like a person with red pants who becomes something better than himself because of the pants he is taking a chance on. I'm sure you have all been there.

In all, I was glad to find myself returning to basic dishes. When you taste this bacon, you don't sit around talking about redolent wisps of deprecated hyacinth, or tumescent campylobacters (like with most bacons, I'd guess). After my first bungling tribulations with the first bacon of the Bacon of the Month Club, I've arrived at a plump little maxim: "it's bacon, not paid-by-the-word hackneyed Victorian food writing." Bacon is simple, like a man smoking a cigarette on a train platform in Budapest. He doesn't need you, and he doesn't care if anyone cares about you. He's perfect at what he does, which is make everything porous smell like him. If a wolf ate him, the wolf would be named after him. The wolf would stink forever, and no hunter would place much value on his pelt.

Next time: putting Father to rest.

I failed Father.

2007-03-24T20:43:00.000-07:00

This evening I managed to create a dish with Father's hickory-smoked bacon that became less than the sum of its parts. It was sort of embarrassing, and rather confounding, as I usually like this particular dish quite well when there isn't bacon involved. No, it was not iced tea.

If I have some chicken breasts around I like to use the technique Jacques Pépin adapted from an old frog leg recipe*: cube the meat to 1", dry it, dust it with seasoned Wondra (extra-fine flour), fry it in some butter and oil until golden, then hit the whole thing with a handful of finely chopped parsley and garlic (persillade), stir, and serve. Persillade has gestalt. Two humble ingredients, heated briefly and tossed with a little fat, make otherwise dull breast meat almost sparkle in the mouth. How could a little chopped, super-smoky bacon not improve it? I even threw in some dijon and white wine until a thick sauce formed - that sort of fancy shenanigan always seems to do the trick with restaurant rabbit. The result?

Hospital food. Well, not precisely (this differed somewhat from a sullenly-proffered mattress-size tray of enchiladas with whole black olives inside), but the bacon flavor didn't permeate the way I thought it would (probably because chicken, unlike the starches I wrote of last time, is dense, and needs time to take on flavor, and maybe all the acids retarded the permeation of the smoke). My hopes, built up as they were by the bacon's previously demonstrated power, were dashed, and that can deaden even passable flavors. As many a failed chef holding a lightly steamed, intact-but-for-one-tiny-bite chuck roast has often been heard to say,"I guess I should have gone with a braise."

No telling what the future holds from here. I'm like a lost boy in a rowboat, and he sees another lost boy, this one in a dinghy, and he thinks to himself, "you know, we're really not all that different."

- - - Scholar's Korner - - -

* Fast Food My Way, 2004 (p. 145)

Bacon No. 1: Going Low.

2007-03-23T23:59:00.000-07:00

In deference to the upcoming tax season, we've agreed to spend less money on groceries. We're eschewing wines that have particular flavors in favor of wines that cost less than parsley, and we've committed to working through the mortifyingly monochromatic pantry arsenal of pasta, canned beans, and frozen walnuts. The Bacon of the Month Club has been instrumental in giving purpose to the wallpaper paste that dispiritedly calls out to me from all corners of the kitchen.

Intellectually—that is to say, in my imagination, which is slightly to the side of the grumpy old sleeping man that is my intellect—I began this bacon club documentation project with the loftiest of aspirations. I fully expected to grow as a cook, to broaden my horizons through the use of brave new techniques and exotic ingredients. Here and there, in indulgent moments, I pictured myself striding purposefully into a market catering to an unfamiliar, fast-speaking, foreign nationality, and picking up a yummy block of, say, tamarind paste. Perhaps a pack of bidis to roll into the sleeve of my white undershirt, little leafy smokes which I might puff postprandially as my friends congratulated me on a stellar bacon-tamarind paste "maki-wrapped pan-future burrito."

Well, not this week. Here are the two things I've cooked with my fancy, expensive artisanal bacon so far:

1) Bacon and lettuce sandwich (not even any mayonnaise, because it smelled off and I didn't want to break my arm whipping up a new one)

2) Chopped bacon stirred into some microwave-style kids' macaroni and cheese*

So! Dry sandwiches and microwave pasta. You may think that sounds pretty pathetic, and while I support your correctness, I must point out that it only sounds that way. The real truth of the food in question is quite different.

The Bacon and Lettuce Sandwich
Some toasted sourdough, two wide leaves of romaine heart, and three slices of thick, hickory-smoked Father's bacon inside, rendered tender but not too crisp. Originally I had kicked myself for not putting a moist dressing on the sandwich, but that soon became an unnecessary self-flagellation of the past (I am part Catholic, and so is my half-assed sense of guilt). Father's bacon didn't really need the bread or lettuce, as it turned out, because the bacon itself essentially turns off everything but one's caveman brain, and you go into a pretty excellent trance until it's gone (at which point you become furious and want to fuck something). So: my lousy-sounding dry sandwich, which I ate in my robe at noon, with a Mickey's grenade that the warehouse guy had left around the night before? Sorry, French Laundry. Where was the hickory-smoked bacon that time I paid you all that money? (The Mickey's, true to form, tasted extremely bad. I doubt if Thomas Keller routinely looks to these for inspiration.)

The Bacon and the Microwave Kids' Macaroni
This dish also sounds as though it were coming to you live from a house with a beach ball-sized propane tank. It was worlds removed from Slim Jim dogs on Wonder slices, of course. Some chemical aspect of smoke is all-permeating, and after a few stirs the bacon had entirely infused the light, creamy sauce like a battle-coiffed matron dripping White Diamonds in a crowded elevator. Only, unlike in that scenario, I was more than happy to open my mouth, close my eyes, and let what happened, happen.

- Afterword -

Clearly, the thing that makes Father's bacon special is the way it aggressively radiates intense, even smokiness in all directions. Starches love to assume that sort of submission, and so does delicate seafood like shrimp and scallops. Maybe a smoky paella is in the works. I've been barbarically shaking paprika into things lately, perhaps that's where we're headed. I implore that you remain tuned to this channel.

*To my credit, the macaroni was a white cheddar organic fancy-pants variety, and not the stuff that's the color of a Simpson. But, yes, the microwave was my go-to guy here.

Bacon No. 1: First Taste

2007-03-19T11:01:00.000-07:00

As I sit down to describe this bacon to you, "Squeeze" is on the headphones, and I cannot adequately convey the serious qualities of this food to that happy pop stuff. Bless Squeeze for all they have done, CBEs for the lot of them, but Father's Country Hams' cinnamon-rubbed hickory-smoked dry-cured bacon seems to demand something a little less "Anthony Michael Hall combing his hair in front of a Vector W-2 poster," and a little more "[the abject silence of Southern patriarchal scorn]."

I searched the Internet for an audio clip of Hank Williams dying in the back seat of a chartered Cadillac, but the best I can seem to do is a ten minute YouTube video of Bono singing to Santa Claus, so here it goes. I don't have all night.

Father's bacon is smoked. You have had "smoked" meat before, but this is not that. Eating this meat is like eating camping. Merely touch its plastic wrap and your skin holds the smoke smell for hours. Put the cooked morsel in your mouth and you are in a cheap sleeping bag again — drunk, slightly confused, and thirsty. Is someone playing the guitar? Did that ranger score with Marlene? Damn. Too bad it wasn't me — what did I do wrong? Wow. I'm camping [falls asleep with mini-Maglite suspended in sewn-in tent baggie inches from head].

Here now, while Bono wishes Santa Claus a Merry Christmas for the eighth time, I think back to how the pork looked when I first cut the package open. The meat had the surface quality of a prosciutto, that particular sheen and dryness. It had the deep, rich red of raw duck breast. The balance of meat to fat was generous. I flipped the first test strip a few times in a low pan until it had rendered and gone slightly crispy. The cinnamon flavor was negligible in this application — it was all thick, pure hickory smoke on pork, and I felt like I'd never really had bacon before. The watery, wrinkly strips you get at the supermarket now just seem like pictures of bacon, and cheap pictures taken with a cell phone, at that. Father's bacon is a sturdy pair of Wellingtons to their photocopy of Capezio toe shoes. Father's bacon is produced in slow, stern, abject paternal silence, to their factory line where Squeeze plays over cheap loudspeakers at a federally-regulated volume and the immigrant packers have no idea why. Father's bacon is excellent.

Next time: Cooking with Father's.

(Oh, I ought to mention where you can go to find the Bacon of the Month Club: GratefulPalate.com. Tell them I sent you, if possible. Maybe they'll give me another free plastic snout.)

Bacon No. 1 is here. What now?

2007-03-16T22:53:00.000-07:00

As promised, UPS delivered the initial package of bacon on March 14th, two days ago. I'm nervous. Some suffer from completion anxiety; I suffer from outset anxiety. Earlier today, the warehouse guy chided me for not even cooking one piece of it yet. He may be right, I may be more hesitant than is warranted. Or, he may just have been angling for some. He didn't get any, but we did go to a hofbrau later, one which features a slowly rotating, slowly roasting turkey in a little peepshow-like booth on either side of the front door (no picture). He made a big show out of eating a lot, and I can't help but feel like some of the eating was directed at me.

This particular bacon comes to us from Kentucky, and is a dry-cured cinnamon-spiced gentleman of hickory extraction. Dry-curing apparently means it won't shrink during cooking (since no water is absorbed in the curing process, none has to be handed its hat on the green mile), so unlike most bacon, you (I) won't wind up with a linguini-size string of meat in the middle of two deeply scalloped and ballooning fat-edges. But that's just structural. The real thing to consider here is the cinnamon.

My copy of Culinary Artistry suggests the following flavor pairings with cinnamon: apples, berries, chicken, chocolate, coffee, lamb, oranges, pears, rice, tea, and zucchini, (to name a few). So...coq au vin, sausages with an apple-bacon sauerkraut...wait. One thing I despise in food writing is watching amateurs make up fanciful dishes the way eighth-grade girls write elaborate descriptions of makeout scenes with Cary Elwes. Fuckin' A, food writing. Do not be a girl on my bus when I was thirteen.

It is time for me to withdraw into the Fortress of Weeping Pipes (a corroded pipe under the kitchen sink recently resulted in me making a lousy repair) and consider my options. I bid you cinnamon dreams and carabiner kisses, whatever that might mean. (What did you picture in your head?)

The bacon will be here today - 3/14/2007

2007-03-14T00:01:00.000-07:00

I have just received automated word that my first delivery from the Bacon of the Month Club will arrive today, March 14th. Two years ago to the day, my daughter was born, so make of that what you will. Perhaps the cosmic implication is that this bacon blog is my new baby? And that it will grow into something wonderful and fascinating and I'll have to spend hours each day trying to convince the bacon blog not to climb into the sand-and-water play table because the bacon blog might fall out and crack its head open on the deck, thereby necessitating larding/stitches?

You will notice that I now embrace the term "blog" with both arms and a graceful, almost imperceptible brush of the cheek. I cannot do otherwise. It is like fighting a dying sea. Even a dying sea can crush you at the bottom of it, or float you for ages along disused trade currents. I will not go so gently into the goodnight that is "foodie," however. Everyone who uses that term, though there already were epicures, gastronomes, gourmets, and gourmands...well, shame on you. You sound like knee-dandling aunties, like a CEO named Charles who opts to go by the diminutive Chuckie. It's an idiotic term, and an embarrassment of the age. Like food is something we discovered in 1995. As though it were a novelty thing. There were already words, and good ones. Which are you? (These are pared down to their barest essence)

EPICURE/GOURMET: One who enjoys good food and drink.

GOURMAND: One who enjoys good food and drink in large quantities.

GASTRONOME: One who enjoys not just food, but its history and sociology.

Where does "foodie" fit in? I don't know. To me it rhymes with "poprophiliac."

The bacon will be here soon. At the outset, I have just amateurish ideas of how to use the stuff to its best ends. Carbonara. BLTs. Bacon-wrapped this-or-that skewers. Soup bases. Salad lardons. The old concepts you glean from a decade of reading cookbooks while never really getting your hands greasy.

On the other hand, I don't want to make a bacon foam in the shape of a hard-boiled egg, with a tourneed saffron-braised home fry "yolk" and agar-agar thickened mimosa sac "sunny-side up, slurped off the screen area of an iPod 'spoon,' to resemble consumption."

The delivery will be here in mere hours. Watch this space, as cheap billboard operators say when deadheading their overhead acreage.

BACONSPIEL 1

2007-03-11T19:18:00.000-07:00

I'm not going to lie to you, not today. No, sorry — not now, not on this blog. I don't care what you came here for, I'm not going to do it. Today is truth day down at the old Onstad thing-mentioning area, and I have a juicy tidbit to get off my chest. Well, it's not really one single tidbit. It's twelve tidbits, made up of several smaller, cured, often smoked, tidbits.

If you hadn't guessed by now, I'll just come out and say it: for Valentine's Day, my wife signed me up for the Bacon of the Month club. Every second week of the month, I am promised a thermodynamically stable little cooler full of American artisanal bacon, on the doorstep, to do with as I please.

For the sake of sport and discussion, and to pad this out in the absence of my maiden shipment, I will first point out that our earlier efforts at ordering fancy delivered food did not fare well.

ATTEMPT ONE: "THE BOX," A CRATE OF ORGANIC FOODS DELIVERED WEEKLY

Problem
Two young professionals who do not like to eat ten pounds of kale.

Solution
ME: [from porch] WHAT DO YOU DO I MEAN DO YOU MAKE A SLICKER OR A TARP OUT OF THIS STUFF
LIZ: DID "THE BOX" JUST SHOW UP?
ME: THERE IS ALL THIS KALE BUT THERE IS ALSO A WEIRD MELON, AND A BEETLE IS ON TOP OF THE MELON LIKE HE IS THE OWNER OF IT
LIZ: PUT IT IN THE YARD BY THE BRICK PILE
ME: THE MELON?
LIZ: ALL OF IT
ME: WE HAVE THAT HICK NEIGHBOR MAYBE HE CAN SHOOT IT
LIZ: SHOOT WHAT?
ME: MY RECURRING PAYMENT OF $36.50

ATTEMPT TWO: AN UNFORTUNATE DELIVERY

Problem
Too lazy to cook, and there is a little money in my pocket.

Solution
ME: Say, it's Saturday! Let's spare ourselves a few dishes and get some upscale take-out! That new Fist of Mandalay place says they deliver.
LIZ: I'd love some papaya salad and spring rolls.
ME: It's done. It's as good as done. For me I will get prawn dishes.

[two hours pass]

ME: [intensely serious] I...I hope you...I just hope you don't mind. [gingerly rises from couch]
LIZ: What?
ME: Just don't do anything like listen or care or try to help for a while, alright?
LIZ: Are you feeling okay?
ME: Shut UP!
LIZ: Babe?!
ME: [runs bathroom shower as noise baffle for half an hour]
- - - -

As this is bacon, and not pestilential crates of unpopular greens, or shrimp that have been ripening under the nervous eye of a cash-strapped restaurateur, I see no reason the whole thing shouldn't be great fun from beginning to end. We'll have people over more often. Our soups will have a deeper, more earthy flavor. Large Sunday breakfasts will become a thing of tradition. We'll go on a hike, or perhaps look at pictures of the sea.

Now—here is my actual announcement—since I've got this monthly bacon gig, I thought I'd make a little recurring blog feature out of it. From the plop of the package, to the evaluation, to the recipe research and ensuing guest response, I intend to document what can only be described as one man's monthly subscription to a cured pork delivery service. I hope you will follow it with great enthusiasm, and perhaps, when it comes out, go see the film.

My Trip to Google (with photos)

2007-02-13T17:07:00.000-08:00

I went down to Google for an important meeting today (I can't say what it was about, but it involved someone whose name rhymes with eBay Kwuckles). I was treated to a free lunch in the distributed cafeteria peer network during what was apparently a lousy-salad-demand traffic spike, was promised a free Google sporting vest, and generally had a curious time.

Since most people will never get to enjoy the sprawling Mountain View campus of this Internet behemoth, I documented the affair with top secret, clandestinely snapped photos.

Photograph No. 1: Before the meeting.

You can't enter a building at Google without plowing into a shelf laden with free water bottles, fresh apples, "Flee, Radical!" berry trail mix, and high-gluten "grubble muffins." After you recover from your spill and swat the last grubble muffin from your chest, a nearby stack of unused 38" Dell flat panel monitors, upset by the commotion, works itself loose and washes over you. Once you have extricated yourself from the cords and displays, you totter over to the receptionist, who discreetly zaps you in the eye with a retina scanner. (In the photo above, you see one of my many water bottles, adorned with the lapel sticker that shot out of the guest registration machine the instant I'd been "logged in.") While I waited for my host, I was invited to take as much as I wanted from the "hundred dollar bar" (a large stack of hundred-dollar bills on a disused SGI tower). I felt like it was some sort of test, and only took one. Soon, it was time for my meeting.

Photograph No. 2: After the meeting.

This is the enormous tent where the Google workers dance and play and hug each other in big Nerf chipmunk suits ("Money! Money! MMMMONEYYYY!"). No...actually, it's where I had to park: the nearby lot of the Shoreline Amphitheatre. The main Google campus only has twenty-three parking spots for its 4,500 employees (whoops) so they operate a pretty swift system of shuttles out of this lot. Google Fun Fact: they have two guys manning the twenty-three convenient spots, whose sole job seems to be to sit under umbrellas, look thoughtful for a moment, and then tell you there's more parking down the road. Google Sadden-U Fact: Google's fully-loaded Useless Parking Lot Attendant budget is, perhaps, three times the annual revenue of my company.

Photographs Nos. 3 and 4: They Have Their Own Yeti

The elusive Google Security Prius (license plate: DOINOU?). Both times I tried to photograph the Google Security Prius, events transpired against me. The first time, it ducked behind a tree, and the second time, my windshield wipers underperformed and I panicked a little. Later, while pulling out of the parking lot, I got the sense that it knew I had been taking pictures of it, and suddenly I found it pulled up alongside me. I quickly snapped a photo while driving past and trying to keep my eyes on the road. Upon returning home, I was stricken with fear when I saw that the driver of the Prius was Lost's Benjamin Linus. I'm too scared to post the image here.

Photographs Nos. 5 and 6: Pulling out — some cars parked in front of Google Headquarters.

Come on, Google. Don't have a car like this.

Another instance of bad car style at Google. I got a haircut, shaved, and bought new shoes to go down there, and then they throw this in my face. Alright. Look -- I'm a man. I'm a person. I know how ugly it is to see some crap like this. We all do. I consider this image the proverbial "don't let the door bump you on the ass on the way out" type of goodbye. Do I even want to work with these people?

Photographs Nos. 7 and 8: Stuff I Listened To on the Radio.

On the way home, XM Radio treated me to some old cuts I hadn't heard in a while. It made me feel better about the bad cars I had been subjected to on the way out, and the salad with the whole coriander seeds in it, and the guy on the parking shuttle who was so plump that when he sat down thirty-two pagers, cell phones, USB memory sticks, Blackberries, Wiis, Mag-Lites, and Spread'm-Slather'm mayonnaise knives popped off of his belt and clattered to the floor like so many dreams deferred.

In Closing
Thank you, Google, for the neat time and the roasted pork loin in Calvados cream sauce. The macaroni salad was also decent. I urge you to hold your apple-raisin bread puddings at a higher temperature, and also to inspect your salad team for the requisite qualifications and trade certificates. I shall watch your future career with considerable interest.

Happy New Year 2007.

2006-12-21T10:19:00.000-08:00

Dear Friend of the Library,

The tree flickers dimly in a disused corner, strung with a garland of peanuts. Large cardboard boxes hold overstock, and are pinned down by dead laser printers, bins of dusty shoes, and backpacks which still contain college lunch receipts. There is no room in the house for 2007, yet we chip away, set the shopping on the oven, and vow to order that second trash can. We put a laundry bin on top of another laundry bin. There is no space in our house for another year, but the world has spun once more, so we tie things to the dog and throw a treat into the yard. Goodbye, super-dense PG Wodehouse biography. Goodbye, bizarre accumulation of 32 silicone spatulas. Enjoy your new life among the eucalyptus leaves and river stones. "Sorry," in a way.

If you are reading this, it is perhaps my one chance to thank you directly for supporting Achewood this year, and I don't mean to waste it. If you're with me so hard that you actually read this "blog" (Internet for "prose that is wholly devalued by its medium"), then stick around. I've got lots of chestnuts up my sleeve.

This was a year of firsts. First time I ever got so mad that I flipped off the dog AND said "fuck you!" First time I ever got myself fired by a vendor. First time I ever said pure, wonderful swear words to a vendor. It was so wonderful to swear at that vendor. It was like heroin, except one of the two people was saying "YOU ARE DONE FUCKING ME." And no needles. Like that, I was fired. It was like finishing a race. Their product was so crappy.

But let's not dwell on the bad stuff. You'll never see it. UPS took it back. My little girl is almost two. Those who are parents know well enough how that feels. The scaffolding of language, the surprise when imagination shows up out of nowhere. Those who aren't parents can sit around in their smoky apartments and drink corporate beer; I won't act better than you. You can wear your pants and talk about cable television shows with your single friends. That's good, that's fine. You're hardcore, you spent $63 on vodka tonics last night. I have a kid, and I walk around in running shoes and jeans. My t-shirt often has the name of her pre-school on the front. Do I look soft? You bet. Am I soft? Charge past me the next time I'm trying to enter a crosswalk with my stroller. I WILL flip your Saab 9-3 like a turtle. You think I care if a car is upside down? Watch me buy a bagel, from your upside-down car. Watch me eat the bagel, and share some with my kid. A guy with a stroller wants nothing more than to flip cars with his bare hands. Bonus if there are people inside. Let's move on. I can also flip your Saab lengthwise if the timing is right.

Back to the holiday cheer — enough of me ruining cars out of anger. Happy holidays to all of you. If this holiday letter makes even one of you stop and wait for a person with a stroller, then it has been a success. If you do not stop for a person with a stroller, and all of a sudden your car is tipped over and the windows are being kicked out by an extremely plain running shoe...nice to meet you.

Best Wishes for 2007,
Chris Onstad
www.achewood.com

Note: Liz, the baby, and the warehouse manager explicitly decline any association with this instrument of good cheer.

Golf Memoir No. 4. The food.

2006-11-01T19:25:00.000-08:00

It's commonly known that some think of golf as an upper-crust sort of sport, a few stiff hours spent blabbing on the latest slabs of stock data or gurglings in the bowels of insurance floats. A fellow in between tee shots might try to unload a Rothko, or a horsey daughter who too closely resembles a best-forgotten patch in the lineage. In the coming months I'll champion the alternate angle — that golf is the great equalizer, the plane where the Boston Brahmins and the Venice beach bodybuilders, the dawdling decagenarian diners and the Dominican dishwashers, the Victorian constable-euthanists and the kittens who mewl as their burlap casket is beaten over and over with the side of a helmet — meet glove-to-glove and flip a tee for honors.

But not today. I came here to speak of the vagaries of golf course cuisine, and so it shall go. You will get your penny dreadfuls of 19th-century London flatfoots braining still-blind, squeaking litters of Siamese with their cast-iron "Bobby buckets" on some other day. Shame on you. It is gross what you want. It is sick what you feel is relevant.

Onwards, then! Golfers are largely pigs. They ready two fingers, index and middle, and poke two nostrils into their figurative Play-Doh snouts with every new round. They pucker their bushy, mustachioed pusses as the beverage-and-sandwich cart "girl" appears over the rise of a hillock five hundred yards off. They compare rock-hard fantasies in which the lass (a 58 year-old bar pixie named Meg—short for Margaret, not Megan), using a sharpened Coors Light, eviscerates their old, stone-ridden kidneys, and then produces fresh sets from the Igloo strapped to the rear of the light-service Daihatsu. They yell "high five!" to each other as they lay on their bellies near a yardage marker, two bloody incisions in their lower backs. As their skin grows tacky and their pupils less responsive in the white-hot afternoon rays, Meg pushes the new kidneys into place with the sharp end of a triangle-cut ham on white that's been plastic-wrapped so hard, it's water resistant to three hundred meters. "High...five...," the last to receive the transplant whispers into the fragrant, fresh-cut turf.

That is the long and short of golf course cuisine. You may ask after the fabled "private clubhouse's" filet mignon avec jabot du bacon, but this is largely a fiction created by retirement community literature. More likely than not you'll be choosing between a frankfurter that's been lolling around on metal rollers for the better part of Comet Halley's retreat from earth, and a hamburger patty that was tenderized on the narrow path between the 18th green and the cart shed.

I believe this actually serves to pre-affirm my future over-arching point that, when all the facts are in, golf is the great equalizer. I see, upon re-reading my introduction (this does happen), that I had planned on not making this point. This speaks to the strength of my message, I think. Though I had tried desperately not to make any point at all, it was inescapable, and now it is deposited lightly upon the surface of the busy sea of human discussion, soon to sink beneath a great wave of non-syllabic text messages weighing in on whether or not Britney Spears is fat.

My heritage changed.

2006-09-26T20:42:00.000-07:00

If you were to look at me, you would notice that I suffer from vitiligo, have a woman's nose, and wear a single white sequined glove in a shadowbox around my neck. Just kidding. If you were to look at me, which you can't, because I don't like that sort of thing, you'd probably quickly register the following qualities: White. Glasses. Hair. About as tall as the top of a fast-food restaurant soda dispenser. Bookish, if sedated. White.

Well, I'd have you fooled. I myself had been fooled, until Thursday, when my dad came around and mentioned that I'm 1/16th...Seneca. Not Seneca "Indian." Not "Native American." I'm 1/16th Seneca Nation, and the other 15/16ths of Chris Onstad had better GET THE HELL OFF MY LAND!

Only joking, of course. I know Native Americans aren't typically yelling things like that. I mean, I don't really know much about Native Americans. Until Thursday, Native Americans were the guys on the cross-country team who could finish the 3-mile varsity course, go home, have a good sweat and maybe a rain dance or two, then come back and half-heartedly cheer as I bumbled across the finish line ("yaaay for Chris"), my sock garters having long since fallen around my ankles. But now that I am a Native American of a legally-actionable level of extraction, I have a vastly different impression of...myself.

You see, an uncle of mine had recently been messing about at Ellis Island or someplace like that, popping down to trace the family heritage in between vast seas of split pea soup at Houlihan's, and he unearthed this data. I'm quickly inclined to believe it, too. The rest of my genealogy is pretty hot stuff: my great-uncle Niels Onstad was the wealthy Norwegian shipping magnate who married Olympic figure skater Sonja Henie in 1956, after all. How about a side dish of hard-ass American Indian, Chris? Yeah, that sounds good. Set it down next to the buttered lutefisk. I'll get to it.

(If you're wondering: no, I'm not wealthy, despite the "shipping magnate family" thing. Apparently my ancestors liked Linie more than they liked staying alive and keeping the business solvent. Note to self: breakfast potatoes should be in the form of hashbrowns, not aquavit.)

So, now that I have this fresh take on myself, I'm going over Seneca history and identifying personal traits that are in keeping with the Seneca character build. Here are some of the more prominent ones:

1) The Seneca diet was based on corn, beans and squash. I love corn and beans (well, beans, mostly), and I identify with my Seneca ancestors who had to choke down slimy, bitter squash until they moved out and got their own teepee with their buddy He Uses Socks For Napkins.

2) The Seneca culture is matriarchal. The men went on long hunting and fishing expeditions while the women kept it together at home. This explains why I don't care about anything and just want to leave my house to have fun most of the time, and why my wife was the one who unsubscribed me from VIBE when a friend jokingly signed me up.

3) The Seneca adopted many of the customs of their white neighbors. So have I: I drive a car instead of a horse or wolf-drawn litter, get most of my food from markets, and will usually finish out an episode of Seinfeld if I happen to come across it while channel-surfing.

4) The Seneca are stereotyped as getting mad when the government tries to keep them from selling tax-free cigarettes on the Internet. eBay shut me down in '01 and I've been enjoined ever since—I may be asked to speak at next year's summit of the Iroquois League, at which I will be selling cigarettes, out of my trunk, no cut for Uncle Sam.

5) Some Senecas spoke Mohawk. Can you imagine anything more raw than cutting a dude down to size in Mohawk? Until now, I've just thought of a "mohawk" as an ass-kicking haircut, but an ass-kicking haircut with its own language? I bet that language has 137 different words for "bruise," and a one-syllable word that means, "let's get some Jäger and make out with sluts until we puke." Onkwehonwehneha sata ti...you cunt.

I have much more to say on the topic, but it just struck me that I ought to get back in touch with Stanford and see if any retroactive scholarship money can be mailed my way. Can you imagine not playing the Native American card when filling out scholarship applications? That would be like folding with a royal flush, hitting on 21, or finding a hunk of gold on a hiking trail and saying "Huh! Neat!" before chucking it down the hillside.

Excuse me.

Golf Memoir No. 3: the short course.

2006-09-19T23:19:00.000-07:00

Three years ago, I was invited to golf with my friend John, who lives up in the soft hills of the San Andreas fault line, hills that geologists at cocktail parties like to call "Hell's zipper." The local Elks Lodge maintains a golf club of remarkably token effort up there, and it's one of those "3-par" courses, where each green can be driven with a high-iron tee shot (usually a 60º sand wedge, in most applications) and two-putted. I hadn't been out on the links in a while and hastily accepted the invitation. Not knowing it was a 3-par, I brought my full bag and spikes.

I woke up at my customary quarter-of-seven, put a mile or two on the old legs and, shortly thereafter, still bright and early, I rolled into John's driveway, happy to find him sitting on his front steps with a five-iron and a bottle of Sierra Nevada. I supposed he'd been out knocking pine cones across his lawn, and had comically filled an old beer bottle with his morning coffee. I have known John a great many years, and have always considered him a person who would put nearly anything into a used container.

The course was just a short walk from his abode, so I took my bag out of the trunk and slipped out my spikes.

"You won't need those," he said, pointing at my golf shoes.

"Yeah," I replied, knowingly. "That's a thing now, isn't it? Those courses that don't allow metal spikes?"

"Let's put these in there instead," he suggested, procuring a curiously cold case of Sierra Nevada from the trunk of his BMW and slipping bottles one-by-one into my shoe compartment. "Good call with the bag," he said. "Ready to go?"

He carried his five-iron, his hand in the middle of the shaft, and made off down the driveway. The outline of a single golf ball could be seen in his shorts pocket. His flip-flops flapped pleasantly as he moved.

Before you get the wrong idea about John, I should point out that he majored in something called "Mathematics and Computational Science" at Stanford, can solve equations that seem to have pictures of pasta in the middle, and holds down a job that routinely requires him to travel around the world putting the screws to hard-line Internet nerds. When he's not bitch-slapping some poor eyebrow-pierced Welsh network engineer with a Cisco manual, he tries to relax with a little golf. I'm only too happy to be a part of the healing.

"I have a story about the time I actually penetrated a Glaswegian SysAdmin with the SCE-4500 2U faceplate," I pretend he tells me, as we stroll down a beautifully lit, densely foliaged and canopied mountain lane. Deep gullies run down either side of the worn asphalt street, golden sunlight beams through the arcs and sprays of heavily established blackberry vines, and brown oak leaves crunch beneath our feet. I open a Sierra Nevada with my divot repair tool and do as the Romans.

After a pleasant, lightly beery walk among the timeless climbers and kudzu, we arrive at the tiny course pro shop, where it seems we have virtually no competition for a tee time. The cheery little old lady, who does not literally have a maraschino cherry stuck into her head with a tiny plastic cocktail sword, tells us that we can take scorecards and pencils if we want. We smile and decline, put a few dollars into some sort of container, and walk back out of the shop as she mentions to a glove display that she once rode on an aircraft carrier.

We get to the first tee and I immediately sense the miniaturized scale of the course. How could I have been so blind? I'm just John's mule for cold beer and the occasional putter! Thirty-yard fairways isn't golf, it's...waste of a morning...bad for the swing...John pulls out another round of Sierra Nevadas, we toast, and we're off. It's not hard to hit a green that you could essentially throw the ball to, and we perform magnificently. His sole club, his five-iron, is one of those brand new high-tech numbers with perimeter weighting, carbon-fiber honeycomb shaft, and peanut allergies, so his shots are given and precise, despite the fact that his swing resembles a man beheading a gopher with an adze. I do all right, managing to work a little more backspin into my lob shots in that sexy, magical way the pros do, where the ball lands, spins furiously in place for a moment, and then starts to roll back toward you, as though in search of revenge.

By the fifth or sixth hole we were doing all the usual stuff they edit out of PGA coverage: peeing while walking sideways down the fairway, aiming at houses, yelling at cats, and flicking coins at each other in mid-swing. Also: teeing off empty bottles of Sierra Nevada, making plans to go pistol shopping together, and promising to open a calzone restaurant together ("...and why the hell not!"). I can't remember if we played all nine holes, or if we just wandered back to his place at a convenient break in the fence. We may have played 23 holes and gone dancing with the old lady; we may actually be Elks now and several years behind on dues. It's hard for me to say. I do remember being at his place later and watching Fargo on his new television set, which was the size of a delivery van (it was delivered using a larger delivery van, and required one wall of his house to be temporarily knocked out, which is not a falsehood borne of the desire to entertain). It is strange but not entirely unpleasant to see Frances McDormand's head blown up so large that you could dance with it (you would hold onto the ears, I suppose).

I have a few other short course stories in me, but not today. That is all the golf I will describe at this sitting. On my "to write" list for the coming months: a treatise on golf course cuisine, golfing with the Hawaiians, golfing with the Germans, bearing the standard for Faldo and Azinger at Pebble Beach, and a youthful descent into crime and sexual madness, as set in motion by golf.

Golf memoir No. 2

2006-08-26T20:39:00.000-07:00

A friend had recently invited me to hit balls at a driving range equidistant between our two homes, so we settled on a place that sits along the San Francisco Bay coast, just a few miles south of that great city. This particular plot of earth is also directly beneath the flight path for SFO, so menacing jumbo jets in all their surreal glory look to be in very real danger of getting pelted by well-struck Callaways. Myself an avid and tireless planespotter, I thought the combination of golf and see-what-the-guy-in-the-window-seat-is-reading views would be worth the price of admission and then some. Also, there was a bar, which I thought could be fun afterwards.

We bought our buckets and approached the large, screened-in range (were it not for the tall screen walls, the high bay winds would no doubt carry off a significant portion of their range ball inventory, comically plonking them down onto the heads of sea lions, who would then feel disinclined to return them). It was one of those double-decker structures, where a second story houses another range of mats and tees. Finding the first story full-up, we climbed the stairs to the next. We located a few neighboring mats, and after some gentle joshing and good-spirited canavery, we selected our warm-up clubs and teed the first ball.

It becomes salient, at this point, to note that the edge of the astroturf mat went right up to the precipice of the second story, so that not twelve inches from my left foot was an unprotected drop of at least fifteen feet. I should also note that a golf swing involves the transfer of a lot of momentum in the direction of that very same left foot. Look at photos of golfers who have just completed their swings: the entire weight of their body rests on the outstep of their left sole. One misstep and I'd tumble off the platform to the ground below, no doubt taking a few 160MPH Maxfli's in the knees and teeth on the way down.

Think: had I taken any missteps in the past, on flat ranges? Dozens of instances sprang to mind, perhaps amplified by my rapidly maturing acrophobia. There was that time in high school, when I'd swung my driver so hard that I came to rest a good ten feet out into the range...the five-iron with the head so heavy it carried me off into the air after my ball...the time I fell over to my left simply because I saw a woman of average beauty. True or not, my mind was beginning to shake on the rails of reason.

Wincing a bit while stepping up to my ball with a fairway wood, I gamely waggled and settled into striking position. How was I going to do this without falling off the structure? One solution might be to swing incredibly slowly, perhaps like a mime in a strong wind, I reasoned. Or maybe a chuck-swing, a 1/4-arc bleck meant to look like you're practicing punching out of trees with a low iron. Okay, I thought. Hold it right there. Nobody punches out of trees with a 3-wood. And regardless of club choice, nobody at the San Mateo Swat & Swill practices odd-looking, unsexy utility shots in front of the other off-shift cell phone salesmen. These are the kind of specialty shots that Nick Faldo might practice once in his career, on the professionally landscaped, heavily-treed Bilbao estate of Seve Ballesteros. The guys at the Swat & Swill? They're trying to crush shots as hard as they can, because (a) they want to show off, and (b) they make a living lying to people who know that they're morons.

I'll just act like I'm deconstructing my swing, I think. I'll swing slowly enough that I can't fall off the structure. No one'll notice me. I wear glasses, for goodness' sake — most guys at cheap public driving ranges already write me off as invisible. I might as well be a successful woman with computer skills.

I draw the club back, twenty-five years' worth of muscle memory guiding my arms. I feel goofy, but I keep the timing in proportion. I cock my wrists at the top and begin the downswing. Don't want to fall, don't want to die. Just got to get the club head through the danger zone and not topple off the building. Swinging real slow, now. Real measured.

The sweet spot of the thirty-year old stiff-shafted persimmon club hits the ball and it flies away with the beautiful, calm clack of one croquet ball striking another. Pay attention to what I just said. This sound does not occur in nature, particularly on golf courses. Modern "woods" are engineered to give off a satisfying metallic TING!, the sort of thing you might hear when a cartoon railway worker drives a spike with his big silver hammer.

The sound was so unusual, in fact, that the fellow in front of me turned around, looked at my club, and then furled his nostrils as though I were standing there in overalls swinging a mattock. The ball landed a respectable 230 yards downfield, an achievement that seemed impossible given my "underwater clown" swing velocity. It was what you might call a breakthrough moment, sort of like when Benjamin Franklin bumped his head on a towel rack and invented the post office.

The next five dozen balls went much the same way, up and down the irons and woods, swinging so slowly that at any given moment you could have stuck your face into the path of my swing, blocked my clubhead with the surface of your open eye, and closed your eyelid around it so as to keep me from easily pulling the club back. A magnificent feeling reared its golden-coiffed head within me as ball after ball soared straight and true over the grass.

Once in a great while I will allow myself to think that I have achieved something remarkable (the last time being that late, late drug- and alcohol-fueled night in 1998 when I noticed the little arrow hidden in the FedEx logo). Upon the depletion of our buckets, my friend and I trotted back down the steps to the bar. In my giddiness, I peeled a twenty out of my wallet, handed it to him, and grinned a nearly inaudible "Hiiii!" He was on the case immediately, and before long we were mulling things over a couple of draft beers and a bowl of used popcorn. I pulled off my cap and smoothed my sweat-soaked hair. It seemed like I was onto something. Was it too late to join the tour? I'm pretty much tour-quality, I reasoned. I can hit the ball straight, I'm used to high levels of stress (thanks to my job of drawing unemployed cats whenever I feel like it), and on more than one occasion I've had gin while waiting for the morning paper to arrive.

A brief statement on the position that golf occupies in my life.

2006-08-09T22:55:00.000-07:00

If you're like me, you more or less grew up on a golf course. I don't mean a place with lush grass, zippy carts, and people named Brent, or Brad, or even Bob. My nines were mangy red-dirt places in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas, where you paid five dollars to the blind old lady at the counter in the "clubhouse" (a rickety wooden shack where one presumed that, after dark, they moved aside the ancient picnic table and began filming the mule-sex videos) for the all-day rights to go out and lose your ball down rattler holes. If the other players on the course even had names, they were likely Bodie, Bud, or the haunting, telltale "Junior," a moniker that, in those parts, implied an entire family's wholesale dismissal of written language. [Cut to "ma," washing clothing in a tub on a sagging porch, discussing the alphabet with the off-screen documentary journalist: "Ain't need no alphabet what ta tell Junior he's gon' die by skeeter bites he keeps stickin' his willie in that mule come twilight, that's when they come out, don'tcha ken."]

My main course, a place that went by the name of Sierra Pines, is now a series of fallow, untended apple orchards. In its heyday, which I'll casually define as the time when I played there — since I seem to have been the only guy who ever replaced his divots — there were a couple cranky gas carts that tourists used, a pretty horrid looking groundskeeper (read: cirrhosis on a rider-mower) and a wizened club "pro" who exhibited neither professionalism nor any real understanding of the game. To wit: the time he held the blind old lady hostage in a drunken rage, and the police shot him in the arms. Unerringly in-character for Sierra Pines, the pro went back to work alongside the blind lady a few months later, albeit in a diminished teaching capacity, as his arms now bore a striking resemblance to driftwood. In true foothills fashion, I actually took a lesson from him after he'd been shot to pieces (not money well spent, as I'll tell you soon).

Like most golfers, my extreme emotional problems lead me to swing too hard at the ball. In my case, this leads to a strong slice (when a struck ball shoots out, then curves off to the right). At one point, perhaps around age fifteen, I'd hit a wall in working on this problem, and my dad, sick of watching me not listen to anything he was saying, decided to buy me a lesson with the "pro" one day. It should have been telling that on the clubhouse price board, a half-hour lesson was the same price as a gin & tonic.

I stood waiting at the driving range, five-iron in hand, bucket of balls at my feet. "Destroyed Cochlea Mel," let's call him, came shuffling down the pine-needle strewn path. "ORZENBLATT? ORZENBLATT?" he called. Figuring he was looking for me, and not the pot-bellied six year old swapping at pine cones with a switch of cedar, I waved him over.

I was somewhat surprised that his "lesson" was actually less about the mechanics of a good swing, and more about how life will betray you, and steal the game you love from you, and featured several grotesque demonstrations (using my own clubs) of how he couldn't even "swing a god-damned nine-iron" [it was a five iron, as I have mentioned elsewhere] anymore. He was right: the sloppily repaired tendons and muscles in his arms afforded no range of motion befitting a traditional swing. It was kind of like watching...A GOLF SWING, BY DAVID LYNCH.

My father is an excellent golfer. He grew up playing the munis — the cheap municipal courses — in Oakland in the sixties. He's not fazed by a forty-five degree downhill lie to a green sixty yards away and he brought his one iron instead of his lob wedge. He probably practiced that combo fifty thousand times as a teenager, while avoiding going home to his four sisters. He'll get it within six feet of the pin, and one-putt. He put his all into teaching me to play, but for the most part I was a C student. Giving me golf instructions was probably a lot like shaking a Magic 8-Ball: "Can you please break your left wrist earlier in your downswing?" "REPLY UNCERTAIN, DAD. I MOSTLY TAKE AFTER MOM?"

The clubs I use now were the clubs he treated himself to the year I was born, 1975. (The year my daughter was born, I treated myself to a brewery tour and a banjo. Say what, Junior? More Testors? Yeah, it's premium, but you get what you pay for, brahhh.) They're ancient Wilson-Staffs with ancient engineering. There's no perimeter weighting, personally adjustable counterbalancing (what in the name of all that is holy is TaylorMade up to?!) or FancyShaft technology. I think the shafts are filled with Cutty Sark, and the heads of the woods are actual wood, made from wood, with, like, a knothole as a sweet spot, and a small tap at the rear of the hosel.

I will be the first to admit that I am annoying about not playing with modern clubs. You ever watch that America's Test Kitchen cooking show, with Christopher Kimball, where he wears a bow tie and acts like he is angry that no one cooks pancakes like Abraham Lincoln anymore? And he always spent the weekend helping a neighbor pull an old red tractor out of mud? That is how I am about my golf clubs. I struggled hard to learn how to get the ball down the fairway, and now here's this generation of two-lesson junior Chrysler salesmen with silver drivers the size of chowder-in-a-sourdough-bowl slapping three hundred yard tee shots without so much as taking off their beer helmets and bluetooth earpieces. These guys swing at the ball like they were trying to kill a mouse with a broom, and their Titleist flies straight and true. Pretty soon all we're going to have to do is pull up to the pro shop, punch a button that says "9 HOLES," insert fifty bucks, and the machine will spit out a card that reads, "YOU SHOT PAR! GOOD JOB. 25% OFF CHICKEN WINGS AND ALL BIG BERTHA MERCHANDISE!"

The Internet is crazy for cat schlong!

2006-08-01T00:10:00.000-07:00

Wow, what a crazy ride! Late Saturday, I posted this comic. I awoke on Sunday, took a look at it, and wasn't entirely sure that I liked the big rigid schlong in the last panel. I didn't think it was necessary. So, I changed it. I gave Pat a smooth, Ken doll pubis. He still had on assless chaps, sported a Freddie Mercury mustache, and was aggressively involved in the consumption of delicious meat products. "No one who hasn't seen the original will care," I reasoned.

My inbox immediately began to fill with angry reader mail. "Why did you censor out Pat's d%$#?" one fellow wrote. "Dude it was way better with the cack," wrote another, this time a young female, apparently from New England. All in all, I received hundreds of emails more or less insisting that I reinstate the version of the strip which you see today.

As a working artist, I'm perpetually torn between the desire to put forth what I think is my pure vision for Achewood, and the desire to satisfy the reader's craving for rock-hard cat cock. I don't like to compromise, but in cases like this, it seems to serve the greater good. To this day, I receive email thanking me for going back to the original. I have even toyed with the idea of offering a mousepad or coffee mug that features the phrase, "ROCK-HARD CAT COCK." Perhaps in blue, with underlining, to look like a hyperlink.

TRIVIA THAT I SHOULD THINK ABOUT: Did you know that Achewood has shown over three penises but never so much as a woman's naked breast?

Anyhow, that's my blog for today. I'm also in the market for a jogging stroller, but I don't know which brands are good. How about that for an ending point of overwhelming mediocrity.

Yeah, I bought the biggest one. It's nice.

2006-07-19T20:34:00.000-07:00

After coveting it for somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty-five years, I finally felt I'd earned it. I kept finding myself in situations where it would have been handy, where I would have looked smart for owning it. I kept finding myself on eBay, looking at it. Finally, on Friday, I pulled the trigger, and now I have it. What is it, you ask?

Oh, the Victorinox SwissChamp XLT. Yeah, it's got the most features of any Swiss Army knife they make. It's got a magnifying glass. It's got a pen. It's got a set of hex wrenches. Yeah, it's got a couple blades. But that doesn't even begin to cover it.

The thing is deeply, deeply satisfying to own. The tools snap in and out of place with a crisp, Swiss precision. It's the size of a cell phone, and weighs as much as a roll of quarters. If I come across a fish, I can scale it. If I'm lost in the woods and need to repair some nice leather brogues, it came with a booklet that shows me how.

It showed up at about 1:47pm today. I was in the middle of one of those phone calls I always seem to be in lately, where someone is explaining that my web server is down, and I'm saying "I know that, but it's in Seattle on a rack right behind you, can you do anything?" and they're saying, "the guy you need to talk to is in a staff meeting about customer satisfaction, he can take a look at it in forty-five minutes," and I'm saying, "I have just received a tool that has a hook disgorger that I'd like to shove into my monthly invoice and yank out a few zeroes."

The call eventually ended with me slamming the open handset directly against my forehead until it, too, crashed, at which point I opened the knife's shipping box on the way to the train station (I was meeting the wife and tot, who had been at some sort of toddler play group). I had barely gotten the thing unpacked when they disembarked, so I quickly shoved it back in my pocket and gave everyone a "big hug" and "did kisses" and subsequently "got bitch-slapped really hard on the eye" by someone I won't name but who is less than three feet tall and really needed a nap.

On the way back to the Onstad home, I quizzed my wife:

- + -

ME: Guess what I bought!

LIZ: Did your Paypal knife show up today?

ME: You saw the transaction?

LIZ: I run your business. Your business is made out of Paypal.

ME: Yes! It did! Want to see it? [reaches into pocket]

LIZ: [acting more like my mom than my wife, at this point] Sure, honey. Show me what you bought.

ME: [holds out knife] Ah-haaa!

LIZ: That thing's huge! You're going to lose it.

ME: I'm not going to lose it! This isn't yours! You don't get to complain about it!

LIZ: Can we get a move on? If you hadn't noticed, I'm covered in yogurt.

ME: [notices that clothes of tot and wife are covered in dried yogurt] Oh. I thought I smelled something. That stuff goes bad pretty quick when it's 100 degrees out, doesn't it.

LIZ: Quit fanning out all the blades to look like the photograph. You're going to trip and fall on that thing.

ME: What?

LIZ: Put that away until we get home.

ME: Oh, sorry. No.

- + -

So far, I've used it to file my nails, clean under them, shave a little hair off my forearm — and the pièce de résistance is the top of this soda can that I punctured with the chisel so that it looks like a weird happy face. Man, how I wish you could see it. It's like a weird cartoon fish from the 30s. It's really good. Oh, wait! I just did a bunch of things and now I have a picture of it, with the knife:

How My Birthday Went

2006-06-14T22:00:00.000-07:00

Many of you may not know how I spent my 31st birthday. In this brief summary, I aim to rectify this awkward lack of information. If you could, please help me get this information into the larger news channels, so that it can serve more people.

- - - - - - - June 14, 2006 - - - - - - -

7:00am
Wake up, anxious: why isn't the dog awake? Why isn't she bothering me? Did she actually die this time? [What I mean by "this time" unclear; after brief inspection dog seems to be asleep on pad next to bed and breathing normally]

7:01am
Oh dear God, why do you do it to a man, why do you not give him two bladders, one a day bladder of modest volume, and one a night bladder equal in size to a basketball, which is engaged only when the body is prostrate.

7:05am
The pain and anxiety are too much. I limp off to the can (have you ever voided so much liquid that the toilet actually flushed itself?), then manually open the dog's eyes to make sure they respond to light.

8:00am
Finally drift back into sleep as bladder, like a post-delivery uterus, finishes shrinking back down to regulation size.

8:20am
Time to get up! We have to go register for the IRS auction of things that were seized from our favorite restaurant. [Our favorite restaurant was run by an Italian man who wore so much cologne that his brain went crazy and he didn't pay any taxes for ten years.] We hope to get a well-seasoned pan, a few sets of shelves, a set of tongs and ladles, and heck, maybe even a real deep-fryer.

9:00am
Got plenty of cash from the ATM, for the auction. Although I don't notice it at the time, I leave my card in the machine.

10:00am
A local restaurateur bought all the restaurant equipment for a flat price and everybody else went home from the auction without anything.

11:30am
The morning's hopes dashed, we walk back into town for a proper taqueria lunch. After we sit down at a sidewalk table, some little kid on a skateboard comes really close to getting killed by a truck, and then I start to think about my own kid, and I can't enjoy my enchiladas.

12:50pm
My grandpa calls and tells me that he cut his thumb pretty bad and had to get stitches.

1:30pm
The mail's here! Maybe there will be a card or two. Hm. Water bill, something from a local political candidate...and something called "Complex" magazine. Complex is like a rap magazine with Eminem on the cover, and lots of puffy shoe ads, and some butts in tiny shorts...it's like something Ray would read. Who subscribed me to this? It came to my home address, which I don't publicize...is someone trying to tell me that they know where I live, and that they know I don't like rap? Am I being harassed? I can't tell. It's frustrating.

7:06pm
Ugh. Why did I eat this many french fries? Am I crazy, or just an idiot? I must have had fifty french fries. Fifty french fries could easily be arranged to spell WWWWHYYYYYYY

11:13pm
I think someone just shot a gun at my house. I need to move to a better neighborhood.

A story with a medium ending.

2006-05-02T23:21:00.000-07:00

We, the family of three, were tooling about in the car this weekend when the idea struck us to comparison shop for gourmet cookies (we have also rolled through a variety of trailer parks, gated communities, and done a multi-city sampling of McDonald's fries). As the tot was sleeping, I dropped Liz off at a few different upscale grocery stores and rolled around, waiting for the call that would tell me she had paid and was ready for pickup. I looked at many fine houses I could not afford, and saw rich men jogging with computers on their arms. What they were scowling about is anyone's guess. My car was clean and fairly new, and I had shaved.

I figure we gathered around three dozen pastries in all: fancily frosted sugar cookies, bags of chocolate-dipped tuiles, madeleines, petits-fours, that kind of thing. We put them all in a big grocery bag when we debarked, along with half of my driving sandwich (always have a sandwich while driving — it eases the mind and occupies the jaw), which I was saving for later.

On returning home, some friends called, asking if we could come down for dinner at their new place. There would be thick grilled steaks, Roquefort dressings, imported buffalo mozzarella and the season's first tomatoes. There would be cold south American beer with limes, and wines, and our children would play together on an idyllic expanse of grass the size of a 4-par while we laughed and toasted their every little squeak or toddle. It was hard to resist this invitation, so we did not. After all, our own house is small, noisy, and reeks of pickle brine.

Three pleasant hours later we were back at home, ready to start the Sunday night that is the Monday morning that is Achewood. We dropped our bags, checked our email, and put dinner out for the dog, a dachshund named Olive. In an uncharacteristic display of not inhaling the food and then licking the floor around the bowl three feet in every direction, she acted nervous and trotted in a few circles before click-clacking out of the room.

The righter-seeing of us, being the distaff, noticed that the grocery bag which held the cookies had been emptied and crushed in a far corner of the living room. The dog, who has been climbing on tables and stealing food ever since the baby learned to crawl and slap at her water dish, was the immediate suspect. I went to the corner of the back lawn and found empty wrappers for about three pounds' worth of expensive sweets, while Liz dialed the emergency pet hospital (why is it pets always pull their most dangerous stunts on holidays or weekends? Do they get this from "Jackass"?). I looked at the dog: upon closer inspection, she did resemble a cookie-pregnant moron. Wait now...instructions from the emergency vet operator...

Find a turkey baster and squirt one tablespoon of hydrogen peroxide down her throat to induce vomiting? Okay, will-do. Yes, it sounded wrong to me too, but I'm no emergency vet. One quick, sweaty, tire-screeching trip to the grocery store later, I had the 88-cent bottle of hydrogen peroxide and was force-feeding it to the dog. For good measure, I grabbed her around the ribcage and spun us both in circles about six times until I, full of steak, lime-dressed beer, and fatty cheese, nearly lost my own nutrition. The dog slunk off to the ivy patch and urped up enough white foam to fill a boot. I collected myself and considered changing into more comfortable clothing.

Watching for warning signs of shaking, "eye-movement," and general death, we passed the evening. After about an hour I was convinced that the dog was just a big greedy pig-dog who deserved her stomach-ache, and went about my business. Over the past few days she's lightened up a bit, committed a few intestinal felonies on the back lawn, and generally been really unpopular with me. I did pet her a bunch tonight, but my hidden agenda was to check and see if her stomach was swollen with doggie-diabetes (which she deserves). If the devil makes her go to hell for being so greedy and gluttonous, you will read about it here, and hopefully there will be pictures (red satin weiner-dog costume, satin horns, plaintive expression).

Into the Memory Box

2006-04-18T20:36:00.000-07:00

In celebration of the centennial of the San Francisco earthquake, my mom apparently spent the day clearing their garage of flammable materials. Chief among them were, of course, my old grade-school papers and "1982-83 2nd Grade Spelling Bee" trophy. I won't show you the trophy, because it is small and depressing, but here are a few choice samples from my early career in academic publishing, which are now in my garage.

Computer Programming in BASIC

Need help programming that computer to create a mad-lib? Then just consult my manual, which was largely written by looking at the manual that came with our Apple //c. I think this dates to 1986, and the motivation to publish it was that I had a shiny sticker I could put on the cover.

Thomas Alva Edison

"Thomas Alva Edison," my senior honors thesis at Stanford, was widely reviled by the department for my argument that most, if not all, of Edison's inventions had been copies of inventions by Francis Bacon.

Actually, I think I wrote this in the fourth grade. There's a juicy bit of reasoning in the detail below the cover:

I suppose one could argue that dependence on massive power grids that draw heavily on nonrenewable natural resources for their energy isn't technically "practical," but then one wouldn't be in the fourth grade, would one? Nope, it's "go with the flow" for this kid. I've got light bulbs, I've heard that candles cause fires, and oil lamps look pretty corny. Light bulbs for me, ten times out of ten, please.

I've got stacks of these things, including a series of illustrated, informational books about Alaska, Colorado, Norway, and the Early Explorers of California. In one, a teacher chides me for hyphenating a one-syllable word in order to make it wrap. If you're lucky, I'll have the patience to scan them before I think better of using my time this way.

I learned how to play the Lottery.

2006-04-08T21:29:00.000-07:00

So, like I said, I'm about thirty and up until last week I didn't know how to play the Lottery. I assumed it was easy, but there are about seven options when you go in to buy a ticket, and I didn't want to look like a rube. How is the novice gambler expected to choose between:

1) Scratchers
2) Super-Lotto
3) Mega Millions
4) Fantasy 5
5) Daily Derby (twice daily)
6) Mega Scratchers
7) Paul DeLillio's Fantasy Scratchers

What finally got me over the hump and into the liquor store? We were out on our morning walk, and I saw a Lotto sign in the window that said something like, "$43 million!" I thought, "that'd put a dent in the car payment. Let's give it a whirl." Mind made up, I bravely asked my wife how to play the Lottery. She gave me that one-eye-squint look she gives to me when I ask how to do basic life functions, and then said to give the man at the liquor store five dollars and ask for five Quick Picks (these are Super Lotto terms, I discovered).

Armed with this Lottery terminology, I walked into the liquor store. It was sort of dry-feeling, and smelled dusty, though there was no visible dust. Interesting place. I handed the five-dollar bill to the man behind the counter, and before I could speak he pressed a button on a proprietary-looking green machine and handed me a small orange "Super Lotto" sheet with a matrix of numbers on it, five rows tall. How did he know I wasn't there to buy $5 worth of Mega Scratchers? Or $5 worth of "Leg Show," for that matter? Do liquor stores still sell remaindered copies of Leg Show by the pound? I'm proud to say I no longer know.

That done, I held the winning ticket (what I called it, at the time) all the way home in my hand. "How easy it is to win the Lottery!" I mused.

Later that evening I checked the Lottery website and I had gotten none of the numbers. The winning set was something like 1, 2, 3, 4, 46. Ridiculous! Not even a machine would pick that kind of spread. Oh well, at least California public schools had gotten 36% of my investment (about 54% went to Abe Padrascus of Tarzana, CA, who said he planned on using my portion of the pool, as well as the rest of his $43 million, to "not get a Rolls Royce but maybe just a Lexus, that's good enough for [him]". What the hell does Abe Padrascus know about cars? Is he worried that the Rolls won't have a trailer hitch for his Ski-Doo? Jesus. Talk about a guy who pulls his testicles away from his body with both hands.)

That soured me pretty well on the whole Lottery experience. From now on, when I go into the liquor store, I'm going to try to find something else to spend my $5 on. Maybe they'll have a fancy ziggurat-shaped bottle of something called UNFAIR MESOPOTAMIAN GOD.

It has been ten years since college.

2006-02-18T23:50:00.000-08:00

I used to be a guy who did not have a baby, a wife, or even a blog. I don't know what I did with those days. I had a kite, I remember, and I helped this one group of French people find an address that was a couple houses down from mine...but what of the rest of the years? It has been an incredible amount of time since I was the guy outside the bar with the two chained-together mountain bikes whose friend had made off with some chick and therefore had to convince a Spanish-speaking bread truck driver into toting some fool with two "bicicletas! mine! honéstia!" three miles down El Camino at 3am. It has been pretty much exactly that same increment of time since my friend showed up at my doorstep the next morning, pretending that he had been looking for me for hours, and wished that I could have partaken in the big crazy sex thing he had done after he gave up.

It has been nearly ten years since I drove my car into a huge puddle of water while trying to get to a stupid temp job where I would sit and wonder for eight straight hours why my computer wasn't networked. The car stalled, and I had to roll up some fancy wool pants I inherited from my uncle so that they would not get wet. The cuff was all nipped away by my bike chain.

It has been almost ten years since I thought that spending an entire day's pay on a 100-CD Case Logic CD-holder was a fine investment. It has been five years since that Case Logic, sitting on the backseat of my wife's car, containing my Descendents cd AND my Mr. Mister cds (13 copies of Welcome To The Real World, which I got for a penny from Columbia House under a false name) , was stolen by a guy who thought he was only getting a snowboarding jacket.

I don't even snowboard. My wife won it on a radio call-in show, because she is good at trivia. It was draped over the Case Logic. She knows who the Hittites were. I had $234 worth of Mr. Mister stolen from me. I can't snowboard because one of my eyes is basically fake and I only keep it around to make me look friendly in Christmas photos.

Ten years, boy-whoo. The ten years between twenty and thirty. If you are twenty, do what I should have done: start Google. I swear, there was this one day at college where I was equidistant between the Communication department and the Computer Science department, and it was the day I had to choose my major, and this guy sitting outside of the Communication building was eating this great-looking sandwich. Like I said, man—decisions. Think about them.

I did, but not until this year.

— C.T.O.

PS: Maybe spell it G00gle, with two zeroes instead of o's.

Maybe I'll get back into web design.

2006-01-28T20:46:00.000-08:00

I'm thinking of getting back into web design. It's been a few years, and the kids probably know a few more tricks than I do, but I have one thing they don't: I could not possibly care less about web design.

That's right. You want your logo to spin in a circle and twist itself inside-out for twenty seconds before people can get to your splash page? How about this instead: bgcolor=#CCCCCC. That is "portable across platforms."

You think it would be great to have a Flash movie play in the center of your splash page, and "maybe have a guy do kind of a 'Matrix'-thing?" This is the sound of me stapling a picture of Keanu Reeves to my invoice. I made you a table where border=5.

Actually, I copied the code from somebody else.

You want the navigation buttons to change color when the mouse rolls over them? And maybe make a little "plink" sound? That's called Javascript. I have no idea how it works. I made your buttons out of blue underlined text. The "Contact" one is actually a "mailto" command. On the house, compadre.

Look, I didn't go to college for this. You couldn't, when I was in college. We would spend hours, hunched over our NeXT boxes, trying to figure out why BRs would behave as Ps in certain TDs. We learned nothing and were paid nothing. Excite was still called Architext. I know this because I used to get stoned with one of the founders. I said hi to him at the mall last week and he looked at me like I was crazy.

Hm, a "chat room." Yes, I think that everybody who comes to your model railroad website will want to sit around alone in your chat room. One thing I could also do, though, is design a link to "Yahoo Chat: Small Trains." For the link, I can create little right-arrows using two "greater-than" signs. Or maybe I will use the guillemot right ASCII character. That's a premium character, and rather volatile cross-platform, but breathtaking when executed correctly.

What? You want your website to automatically play a 2kb MIDI of "Oh My Darling Clementine" when it loads, and for the background to be a tiled animated GIF of an American flag? And for the header to be H1 size? Okay, I think I have that template. I may have to "back it up" off of an old hard drive. I charge $150/hr, and I don't have a phone number.

Computer crisis SOLVED!

2006-01-21T21:37:00.000-08:00

For the last little while, my computer has been shutting itself down for no reason, often in the middle of booting up. This had me a bit concerned, but I could usually manage to get the machine up and running after a few restarts, so I figured that was an acceptable level of service. I'd built the thing myself, after all. Then finally today the machine wouldn't beep and whir for more than a few seconds after I hit the "on" button. It'd just go "HRRRrrrrrr" and die. It's hard to pop a CD into the drive and back everything up when the computer is acting this way.

Thoroughly agitated, I sat and considered the thing from the business end of a Campari and soda. It seemed to me that the variable nature of the timing of the crashes meant it wasn't one of those nasty spy-ware programs that you get when you go to the bikini websites. No, this was further down in the guts of the thing. I unplugged 568 USB devices from the CPU, plopped it on the desk, and took a good, long look inside. Easy to do, since I never bother putting the sidewalls on my machines.

No microchips were dangling loose, so I wiggled the "RAM" card. Hard to wiggle. Definitely "seated" correctly. Hm. Maybe step back and try to get a vibe from the whole.

The insides were coated in a fine dust, sort of like a small computery moon, so I went to get one of those cans of compressed air that people are always using to blow hand-dander out of their keyboards. I gave the motherboard what-for and it spruced up nicely.

Then, between the blades of the fan that sits over the processor, I saw something amiss. It looked as though James Bond Rat had been tricked by his nemesis into falling on the thing, and the subsequent carnage had covered the processor's heat sink with a thick, felty layer of gray must. About enough to make a new Homburg, if I remember correctly.

"That's not right," I reasoned. "That thing should be a gleaming set of aluminum spikes."

"Also," I continued, "if it is covered in a thick, insulating layer of gray botrytis, the thermal dissipation task of the heat sink may be significantly hampered."

I thought back to a time in my life—a simpler time—when, in a hot room, a computer had repeatedly shut itself down. I knew what I had to do.

I steadied my grip on the compressed air and took aim at the heat sink. The next five seconds seemed to last an eternity.

Later that afternoon, after we had opened all the windows and doors, wiped our faces of dust, and sedated the dog, I plugged the computer back in and booted it up. It zipped through its little startup routine in record time. Adobe Illustrator, which had been taking upwards of six and a half hours to launch, popped open in seconds. I even ventured to burn a CD. Flawless.

I sit here now with that incredible feeling of having overcome a computer problem. It's invigorating, and empowering. Maybe I'll hook the digital video camera up and try to see if Microsoft has any native video editing software. Maybe I'll type up some of my favorite recipes. Maybe I'll use a WYSIWYG editor to make a web page, only to delete it because I don't need it.

Computers, you once had me scared. You had me angry. You knew you could hurt me. But now, I have a new thing. A message I can relate to the world. A message of cleaning you off. A message that there probably isn't spy-ware on your funny-acting machine. Spy-ware is probably just a fake idea created by software companies, to keep the canned air companies down. I can live in that world, now that I know the truth. I can find my way in this war zone that man has created.

My Cell Phone Died!

2006-01-01T21:59:00.000-08:00

Can you believe it. Can you JUST believe it. I pay like a hundred bucks for the thing not three years ago, and last Friday it just craps up and dies! Sure, I may have been the last guy on earth using a phone with a monochromatic screen and the inability to play "Perphect House Daddy — Tha Killa Protein Moleculezz" MP3 clips when my "badass Mom" is calling, but it worked fine and it had all my numbers stored in it. I had even used the little melody composer to compose a custom ring that sounded, to me, like a crazy bumblebee who thought he was an electron-hummingbird (a hummingbird that disappears from one spot and reappears in another without any perceptible passage of time). Now that is all lost!

I had left the unit in the car overnight, and when I went to fetch it the next morning I noticed the battery had died. A few seconds after plugging it into its charger, it blipped into life and the screen said, "SYSTEM FAILURE - CONTACT SERVICE PROVIDER." It also said "SOS" above one of the multipurpose menu keys, so I pressed "SOS," figuring it would send a distress-type call to my service provider, who would then happily explain that I needed to stick a paperclip into a particular nook or cranny in order to rejuvenate the thing.

ME: Oh, I guess I should press on the "SOS" button. That's what the phone seems to want.

ME: [presses on "SOS" button, waits, thinks, "Oh, I should do this later. I'm about to go on vacation." Hangs up on "SOS."]

ME: Honey, did we get the dog medicine? Are we ready to go?

WIFE: I need to write back to a couple people. Can you hang on a minute?

ME: [sensing chance to call "SOS" and straighten everything out] Oh, no problem! Great.

ME: [Calls "SOS" again]

SOS: This is 9-1-1. What is your emergency?

ME: Oh, my cell phone must be broken. It said to call "SOS" and had this button, but it connected me to you.

WIFE: You idiot! When cell phones crash, they're required to still be able to call 911. That's what SOS is.

ME: No, "SOS" is an international distress signal made famous by ships.

SOS: Thank you. [hangs up]

WIFE: Nice going.

ME: I did what the phone said. You want to yell at somebody, yell at my phone.

WIFE: I'm not going to yell at your phone.

ME: Well, I am. YOU SUCK, PHONE! YOU COST MONEY AND YOU MAKE ME SAD!

WIFE: [leaves]

ME: Oh well, I'll call my brother who used to sell cell phones. He'll tell me what to do.

ME: Oh wait, I can't. [Looks out window] Hey, there's a police car blocking our driveway! Those guys think they can park anywhere. What if he's still there when we try to go on vacation? I'll need to—

DOG: chris i am dying

Long story short, I swapped my phone's "SIM" card (?) into an even older, crappier unit that we had found in a vodka screwdriver the day after my 30th birthday party, so if you call me and all you can hear are gummy staticky sounds, that is what it's like to talk to a dead cocktail.

What I got for Christmas

2005-12-25T23:50:00.000-08:00

You won't believe this, but I was surrounded by a bit of a Christmas "jinx sphere" this year. Every time anyone tried to pick up or order a present for me, it would invariably show up wrong, broken, or mis-ordered. Here are some examples.

1. Weber Q Barbecue. My wife tried to order this compact, highly-portable gas grill for me. Unfortunately, she actually ordered the Weber Baby-Q, which is a much, much smaller and less powerful version of the same grill. Who do I blame for this mix-up? That's right: our Baby.

2. A bottle of wine. A friend, who is a great wine enthusiast, forgot my gift (a bottle of good wine) back at his house on Christmas Eve. He had also left his jacket, his inhaler, and his car keys (he had caught a ride with an extremely undiscerning motorist). He says I might get the wine later, "if he cares."

3. Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell. This frequent New Yorker contributor's book on the psychology of first impressions was high on my list. Unfortunately, some dude in the storeroom at Borders had bent it and drawn on the inside cover, and it had to be sent back to the distributor. My first impression of Borders: do not draw on the book, and break it over the edge of a stair, because then I do not get to have it, Borders.

On the upshot, I am extremely tired and will probably not toss and turn with terrible thoughts all night. I will fall directly to sleep and dream of a tiny, ineffectual barbecue with a single sardine hanging off either end, its eyes twitching and mouth gasping while its belly lightly steams.

Year-end wrap up

2005-12-19T00:23:00.000-08:00

I forgot that I had a wish list at Amazon! I don't think I've looked at this since last Christmas. I enjoy looking back over it and remembering the man that I used to be. I was a man without a baby, a man without a queen-size bed, and clearly a man without Steve Martin's "A Wild and Crazy Guy."

MY POLICY ON PEOPLE I DON'T KNOW GETTING THINGS FOR ME OFF MY AMAZON WISH LIST:
Thanks!

Other matters of year-end business:

We're happy to announce that Nice Pete's book should be ready in January of 2006. He left a "highly urgent" copy here for me to read, and it looks pretty much done, except some of the pages seem to have had hair stuck to them during photocopying. I'm not sure if he'll want to reprint those, but we've agreed to sell the book in our Achewood shop either way, since I don't want him making a cape out of my dog, or e-mailing me pictures of him dropping live caterpillars into a deep-fryer.

Thank you to Rod Mann, who owns the German auto repair shop that I used extensively this last year while getting a vintage car ready for selling. It looks like I bled enough cash there to make it onto his premium client list, which means that a 2lb box of See's Candies showed up today, with his business card tucked under the ribbon. You guessed it: sitting on my dinner table is Rod Mann's 2-pound Nut Sampler. Rod Mann's 2-pound Nut Sampler. Either American slang is completely lost on this guy, or it is completely understood by him.

That's about it for 2005! Thanks, year.

I have a new bed.

2005-12-12T21:04:00.000-08:00

It's true — I have a new bed. You may notice a bit more spring in my spiel today, or perhaps a sly smile playing about my predicates. We'd been sleeping on a mattress that was the chiropractic equivalent of taking a tumble down an interior wall of the Grand Canyon, and my arm had started to fall asleep so badly every night that I'd begun to have dreams where the flesh had turned mustard yellow and hung heavily at my side like a thirty-inch Cotechino. The situation was simply not tenable. Fortunately, we accumulated some money, and shortly thereafter we went to a mattress shop.

Have you ever bought a new mattress? It's a curious ritual where you walk into an enormous room, and a salesman looks at you while you lay on ten different mattresses which all feel more or less the same, and you say out loud "I have no idea what I hope to gain by any of this," and he says that the Sealy "Salome's Garden" has a seventy-five dollar rebate, and the next day two strong men show up at your house with a "Salome's Garden" and a mis-matched box spring. They haul away the old mattress, which is easily folded into a taco shape, and take it to a lab that uses liquid chromatography to analyze how gross your life is. I am anxiously awaiting the results; I fear that I am "very gross" because ever since the baby came I have not been exfoliating quite as much.

Moved back to California.

2005-11-29T01:00:00.000-08:00

Well, things didn't work out in Abilene. I guess I blame Chamorro Jim. The guy thinks that as soon as he's repaired a couple TV sets or dishwashers, he can knock off and just drink Coors for the rest of the day. Would that it were so. Some of us are trying to establish slightly grander foundations for our twilight years, thank you very much.

It's a good thing we never actually closed on the old house in San Carlos. We moved back in essentially overnight (actually, I moved back in, because Liz and the baby hadn't yet left) and I'm sitting at my desk now, writing this down. It's so nice not to have Chamorro Jim aggressively drinking Coors at me while I try to get work done.

At any rate, I've been getting the Christmas list bug lately, and I thought I'd jot down the things I'm interested in. It's always fun to write down lists. For example, here's a little list I'll throw out there before I even get on with the Christmas list:

1. Chlamydia
2. Gonorrhea
3. Syphilis

That is a list of STDs which are hard to spell. Why are they all so hard to spell?

Without further ado, here is my Christmas list:

1. That Weber Q small propane gas grill. I have the mesquite Weber and it's too wasteful for everday cooking. It's like turning on the Space Shuttle to broil a shrimp. This one I could keep right outside our bedroom door, on the deck, and flick on at a moment's notice. I might even set it up in the kitchen, depending on whether or not I am the only one home at the time.

2. 168 Finger Ave, Redwood City. This is an incredible 1930s structure on .6 acre, with a creek. It needs a fair amount of restoration, but I figure we could set up Sheik Yerbouti City (tents) and camp in the backyard until all the renovations were complete. A deal for 1.6m fell through in October, so if you're in the market to drop around 1.4m on a house for me, it's probably yours for the taking (and giving).

3. "The Winding Sheet," new historical detective fiction by H. Maude Cummings (I go through this stuff like crazy)

That's about it. I have to go to bed, because I am about to have a dream where my arm falls asleep so bad that Robert DeNiro yells at me for being a "shmuck."

Results of the "Tell Me Where To Move" contest!

2005-11-03T17:38:00.000-08:00

A little while back, I asked readers to mail me a postcard with the ZIP code of a US town, and I promised to immediately move to the town I selected out of a spinny wire "bingo ball"-type cage. Well, I did the drawing, and guess what?

Life is great here in Abilene, TX (79601)! I'm sitting on the front porch of my house, and it's kind of hot, so I don't have a shirt on and my laptop is making my lap warm, but that doesn't matter because my new neighbor Chamorro Jim just brought over a six pack of Coors! Chamorro Jim is a repairman, and he is one of 32 Guamanians or Chamorros who live here in town. He's 31.1, which pretty much puts him at the median age for us Abalonians. Anyhow, we have agreed to get a pizza later, at Domino's or Little Caesar. I think they're both on Walnut Street.

Well, that's all for now. Chamorro Jim is right, it's rude to type on a laptop when your neighbor is trying to drink Coors with you. I guess I'm just going to have to adapt my California ways, because I live in Abilene now.

Hardy Boys: The Wailing Siren Mystery

2005-10-24T23:45:00.000-07:00

Last Christmas I was given the complete first-edition hardcover Hardy Boys series, the same one I enjoyed as a child at our cabin during those long summers in Twain Harte. Until now it sat, beautifully aligned and untouched, on our living room bookshelf.

Tonight I finally had a quiet evening in which to crack open The Wailing Siren Mystery. As a lad of seven I'd never noticed how incompetent the other crimefighters like Smuff were written, nor how thickly the ethical lessons were spread via Frank and Joe. Good Christ, if some anonymous helicopter had dropped a wallet containing two thousand bucks into my speedboat at the onset of my mystery novel, the last thing I'd do is turn it in at the police station. I think the first thing I'd do is yell "Fuck, man! Fuck YEAH! Fuckin' A, Frank! Did you see this?! Two-fuckin'-thousand! Ha ha! Man, I am finally gonna...Iola...what the hell are you lookin' at me like that for? What? RETURN it? To who?! What?! The POLICE didn't lose this money, dude! Man, the pilot didn't drop this on accident! This is yeyo shit! Oh, Jesus. Stop it with your 'Dad this, Dad that.' Do me a favor, I think I just dropped a copy of Robert's Rules of Order off the side of the boat by the...yeah, right about...OH I JUST HIT YOU WITH THE THING WE STUN THE MARLIN WITH BYE FRANK"

And then it's all me, Iola Morton, chocolate fondue, bellybuttons, and two grand. Plus a new Hudson, which probably costs like $12.50, and a pound of weed, which doesn't exist yet, so I'm out zero on that action.

Have you ever been so tired that your head got really hot?

2005-10-18T23:32:00.000-07:00

Today's main thing is that I am so tired my head is hot. Or maybe my head's hot because it's about to rain. I need to finally just sit down and make an index of the different non-intuitive things that my body does in response to certain conditions. It would start out something like this:

1. Head too hot: extreme exhaustion (or, it will rain)

2. Left knee is sore: the laser printer is about to run out of toner

3. Right ear canal itches: haven't practiced "home-row" skills in a while and am in danger of reverting to "hunt and peck" technique

4. Beard but not head dandruff: impending anxiety about the decisions I have made in life (I don't have a beard, so this one is theoretical)

The body is a complex, miraculous thing that gives us reams of feedback we never pick up on or interpret. Sit still and close your eyes for a moment and see what the first thing you notice is. It may be that your pants are uncomfortable, or that your heart is dying, or that you are digesting pork. There! There it is. Your body's unmistakable feedback.

Our cargo-pockets are so laden with dozens of sizes of iPods, cell phones, hip-top "sidekicks," Blackberries, and Palms, that we are distracted from the subtle signals our bodies give us. Try what I do, and pass a magnifying glass over your forearm in a lukewarm shower once a week. I find this really helps me get centered.

What I Saw on Sunday.

2005-10-10T22:23:00.000-07:00

On the Sunday morning walk I saw something I hadn't seen in a while. No, it wasn't a friend vomiting into a box for three dollars—far from it, in fact. Someone had hired a skywriting plane to spell out WILL YOU MARRY ME? [plus a heart drawing] in the sky over our town. A tremendous and romantic gesture, to be sure, so I am of two minds about pointing out the following three shortcomings of its execution.

1. "MARRY" was spelled "MARY"

2. The total execution of the question took about fifteen minutes, and no doubt the lucky woman would have gotten the idea of the thing about three seconds after her boyfriend elbowed her and mentioned that now might be a particularly meaningful time to gaze skyward and read the slowly unfolding phrase which began, "WILL YOU M—." There's a lot of downtime while you're waiting for a little plane to arc back around and finish a complex letter. Maybe the pilot was the proposer himself, and called her once he'd started the message: "Okay, I've just written a 'Y,' do you see that? Ah, good. The completed phrase will read, 'WILL YARBROUGH PLEASE RETURN MY ROTOTILLER? - D.P.' It's for Dave Palmer over on Lorton. Whoops, I've just written an 'O,' do you see that? Listen, do me a favor and keep an eye on my skywriting for about ten minutes? I'm a bit rusty. Love you. Wait! Can you snap a few photos?"

3. It would have been so easy for the pilot to fly his little skywriting plane back across the equator of his heart drawing so as to create an arrow, but instead he made a beeline back to the airport. Perhaps he was low on gas. The last thing a newly engaged woman wants to see is the craft which has just skywritten her lover's proposal go chut-chut and take a strong header into solid earth at five hundred miles an hour. Particularly if he's the one at the helm, and she's accepted.

At any rate, it's better than my own marriage proposal, which was delivered on the memo line of a personal check.

People are telling me where to move.

2005-09-30T00:01:00.000-07:00

Well, many postcards have come in! Thank you for those. As it stands now, I am either moving to Boston or Austin. Or this one place in New York that is purportedly quite great. Additionally, I may move to my own house, as I took out a bit of insurance and sent myself a hundred postcards with my own ZIP code on them. (moving can be quite expensive)

On a weekend diversion we took a tour of local open houses and there is a fantastic parcel for sale just one mile from here, in Redwood City. It's a cozy old joint, with nooks and crannies, built in the 1930s. It's got all the bathrooms and bedrooms you could ever simultaneously make use of, but the real sparkler is the half-acre lot. I'd get out the old checkbook but the place is listed at $1.6M, and it needs about a hundred grand in upgrades before it qualifies as "inhabitable." Is this the price one must pay in order to have one's children ride bikes among the children of those who thought up the colors in the Google logo? Apparently.

I sure hope that the people who dreamed up red, yellow and blue are sleeping well tonight. And I hope that the guy who chose "serif" is sleepily enjoying the idea that I cannot afford to be his neighbor. Because I would sure as shit throw a hard, spoiled salami through his window as soon as I closed escrow. I hate computer people, and I will hit them with my inexpensive car, .

I'm thinking about moving.

2005-09-21T21:15:00.000-07:00

There comes a time in a man's life when he doesn't want to live on a noisy street with creepy neighbors who he has never seen in four years except for the time a drunk driver launched a car into his front yard. A time when a person doesn't want to live next to an idiot who leaves for work on his dirtbike at 3am. A time when just for once you'd like to be able to run next door to borrow a cup of sugar without having to fear that the sugar was masturbated near. It's starting to feel like that time, around this place.

The following is a list of qualities I think an ideal town would have. If your town has three or more of these qualities, please write the zip code of the town on an index card and mail it to: Chris Onstad, PO Box 7182, San Carlos, CA 94070. I will put the card into a spinny wire-type lottery cage, and then immediately move to the town I randomly select. (Card to be picked on November 1, 2005)

List:

1. A free school, K-12, founded by wealthy Internet luminaries who stress the importance of never playing rap music around one's father.

2. A wooden store with a small happy man who sells handmade cheeses and cured meats. He usually has a bottle of Sambuca open to enjoy with the meats, and when your wife isn't looking he winks and uses that fine Italian hand to suggest that you take one more nip while he shows her the latest pictures of his grandchildren.

3. A post office clerk who is constantly dropping the "F-bomb." Extra consideration if the clerk has a metal plate in his head from a gun accident. Extra-extra consideration if the clerk's nametag reads "Johnny Fuck."

4. An overzealous Truant Officer who is routinely outwitted by a small boy and his Bull Terrier (black ring drawn around its eye).

5. A town festival every Friday wherein fresh cold beer, hot baked potatoes with salt and butter, and grilled sausages are offered free-of-charge (paid for by the Police). A man performs amplified skiffle on a small platform while a dunk tank featuring local stray dogs raises money for the Police. (see John Rawls' "Consider An Economy Such As This," 1973, Harvard Press.)

6. If a person has a faded inkjet printout of a passage of Scripture taped up in the rear window of their car, the town agrees that sufficiently addled citizens, when found placing refrigerator items (e.g. lunchmeats, spoiled novelty mustards) over the Scripture, will not be subjected to punishment or even scrutiny.

7. "I Don't Want Your Soap." A free small vinyl sticker that applies to one's front door, at eye level, which indicates involvement in a community program that forbids high school-age kids from selling detergent products door-to-door as a means of raising funds for "college scholarship." Everyone knows that the kid just gets into a white pickup truck at the end of the block and lights up a Marlboro.

8. Old Folks-Based Racism! Or, actually, the absence of that sort of thing. The other day in our grocery store a salty old Sinatra-era bluehair said some really nasty stuff to some Polynesian kids who were playing around in their mom's shopping cart, and there was a big to-do involving the store manager taking away the lady's free sample of Meatless Meatballs and escorting her to the door. The whole thing just seemed unnecessary, if you ask me. The ideal town would not have Old Folks-Based Racism.

Whoops! "Facto."

2005-09-02T23:50:00.000-07:00

Apparently my friend is going to wear Achewood apparel on his Bravo TV show on the 9th, and not this evening (the 2nd). If you did watch the show this evening, you at least got a chance to see a candid shot of George Wendt sitting on a park bench holding what looked like a bottle of booze in one of those four-dollar grocery store "wine gift bags." You know the dude has more class than to swill from brown paper. He dropped $29 on a bottle of Rombauer Cabernet, and another $4 to keep the police off he azz.

This could very well be the early markings of a celebrity trend: publicly swilling top-shelf booze out of overpriced "wine gift bags" instead of paper bags. If, in the early hours of some coming weekday morning, you see news footage of Matthew McConaughey slugging Tanqueray Ten out of a shiny velvet-handled bag that says "Jazz!" and has pictures of champagne bottles popping their corks, you know that either (a) he reads this page, or (b) the complex permutations of celebrity pastimes have simply made it seem as such.

My friend is going to wear Achewood t-shirts on television.

2005-08-30T00:03:00.000-07:00

Hey, before you read the rest of this blog entry, could you please go to this AOL/Bravo voting page and click to vote on "Stephen's Life"? It's only one of two choices. Thanks. This will just take a second, and will pop up in a new window which you can quickly close and not get involved.

Long story short, my old chums Dave and Andrew competed on Situation: Comedy, a "reality show" about producing a television pilot. Through the magic of television, Dave and Andrew stand to win $50,000 if their show, "Stephen's Life," wins the audience vote. Because that's how great works of art and comedy are made, right? By unaccountable committees numbering in the millions? Anyhow, Dave and Andrew have pledged that if I ask the seventeen people and sixty-five hundred web-indexing spiders that follow my blog to click on Stephen's Life, they will buy me some egg rolls if I ever see them again.

I thank you for your time, and your click, and your willingness to, like the rest of the world, toss aside your integrity for a moment when it comes to helping friends win money on television.

We're friends now,
Chris Onstad

PS: Watch them wear Achewood apparel on Bravo, 6pm, Friday September 2nd, and then again on the 9th when the winner is announced. If you want to, that is. Personally, I have karate practice at my "dojo" on those evenings.

MISSING BALLOON - EXTREMELY SMALL REWARD

2005-08-28T21:36:00.000-07:00

Now, anyone who knows me will tell you that I'm not the sort to go out and buy a seven-dollar balloon shaped like a parrot, but when the happiness of my girl (the younger one) is at stake then reputation be damned, I will buy that balloon. You see, she enjoys batting at large interesting balloons while sitting in her office bouncy-chair, which means (a) she is pleasantly entertained, and (b) I can get at least five minutes' worth of work done.

The big transparent dolphin balloon finally withered away to sea-jerky, so today was the day to head out to Diddams party supply store and have the gothic girl who mans the helium tank fill up a new one. The baby likes balloons with lots of pointy ends, so the parrot fit the bill pretty well, we thought, and $7.58 later we were rolling along with our shiny new friend.

She was having a bit of trouble falling into her morning nap, so we tacked another mile or so onto our walk, all the while mindful of keeping the parrot out of low-hanging foliage and street signs and whatnot. Well, I think that gothic girl needs to up her intake of proteins and vitamin D, because the knot she had used to tie the balloon to the string and floor-weight was pretty damned weak. Somewhere around the intersection of San Carlos Avenue and that street by Longs Drugs the string went limp in my hands and I looked up to see that the bird had taken flight. With a sinking heart I bade the entourage to stop and get mad at me, which promptly occurred. Head hung in shame, I wound the string into a ball and tucked it in a pocket.

SO, the upshot of all of this is that if you find a large metallic parrot balloon, and it's still in decent shape, by all means drop me a line. Last I saw it was headed somewhere high over Highway 280, roughly in the direction of San Francisco, and just gathering steam. I understand there's an infestation of feral parrots somewhere near Coit Tower — perhaps it found its way there, to be worshiped like the godlike thing that it was.

The day's work is done.

2005-08-22T22:46:00.000-07:00

Time to lean back in the old upholstered computer chair and flip the top off an ice-cold pilsner. The comic strip has been uploaded, the books have been signed, the tot is snoozing away in her crib, and this week's installment of Tony Bourdain's new travelogue has been carefully watched. This evening Tony ate a three-foot horse cock and took a ride on a boat. The man's got style.

Tony Bourdain's various travel shows can be fairly characterized by the following standard conventions:

1) Tony will go to a third-world nation and drink their local moonshine out of used plastic soda bottles,

2) Tony will work in a lot of tough-guy references to war movies or Viet Nam,

3) Tony will eat something's cock or face.

Usually the cock or face is nicely braised and served in a delicious sauce, but I thought it worth mentioning. One rarely gets the opportunity to eat cocks and faces, so I suppose that as an adventurous gastronome he is holding a pretty lucky ticket. Today I had a corned beef sandwich and some ratatouille, and I would gladly have traded either of these meals for a bit of Tony's horse cock soup. I mean, honestly, you only live once, and if it was really quite tasty, you'd probably become fast friends with your local Santeria butcher-priest.

TOASTER OVEN : AMERICA SPEAKS

2005-08-08T01:10:00.000-07:00

I would like to thank the good readers of Achewood and, more specifically, of this blog (I doubt there is any need to draw a Venn diagram to separate the two families) for unanimously recommending the Black & Decker toaster oven mounting hood in response to my last post.

Now comes the hard part. So many people wrote in, with so many kind words and so much enthusiasm, that I feel bad saying this:

I already knew about the Black & Decker Toaster Oven Mounting Hood. Like many of you, I too have access to Google. I'm not saying this to be snotty, like some guy in a silver Mercedes CL600 pulling up at a stoplight, rolling down his window, and yelling to the guy begging for change on the median: "I HAVE ACCESS TO GOOGLE! WHAT HAVE YOU GOT? HAVE YOU...NOTHING?!"

I'm just saying, I should have pointed that out before my last post. What I can do to set things right is issue this proclamation:

The World, we need an alternative to the Black & Decker Toaster Oven Mounting Hood. It seems to be the only mounting hood on the market. The readers of Achewood have made this painfully clear. Plus, it is 0.5" too wide for the bottom of the cabinet where I was hoping to install it.

Thank you, The World, and thank you, kind reader. Thank you for being involved in my casual search for a toaster oven.

/C

I am having a huge problem getting the right kind of toaster oven.

2005-07-27T21:26:00.000-07:00

What I'm talking about is the kind of toaster oven that mounts beneath a cabinet and doesn't take up a bunch of counter space that frankly, just between you and me, I don't have. So far I've struck out at Home Depot (Foster City and San Carlos), Sears (Hillsdale), Williams-Sonoma (Hillsdale and Stanford), Macy's (Hillsdale and Stanford), Best Buy (San Carlos), the Internet (Groversville, NC), and a local restaurant supply store (actually, I haven't been there yet, I just thought of it while I was typing this list, but I fully expect to wander its aisles aimlessly for eight minutes while clerks avoid me).

Why do I want a toaster oven in the first place? Read on, dude. You came to the right place if that is the information you're after. Did you get here through Google?

You see, often times I want to cook a thing that is roughly eight ounces, so it's a waste to heat up my big old standard kitchen oven. I'll have a frozen salmon-puck-in-puff-pastry or something, and putting it in the oven is like parking a skateboard in the middle of an empty hangar. The thing's just sitting there in all this space wondering why in the hell the world is so lonesome, and I'm on the other side of the door wondering if there's any possible way to pipe Hank Williams tunes in for its final moments. I think it costs me like $48.92 to bake up a single serving of something in the big oven, and according to my imagination the same act would cost only $0.08 in a toaster oven. You can see why I want the smaller unit.

If anyone has any way of telling me how I can find a toaster oven which mounts beneath a cabinet, off the countertop, and can be obtained for less than, like, a hundred or so bucks, please use that way. I'll write your name on the thing's window in dry-erase pen for a while after I get it, if this goes down. The last thing my parmesan toasts will see before the great oblivion of my uvula will be your first name, backwards in translucent red, across some grimy glass, above a blackened horizon of crinkled tray-liner foil. Think about it.

XM Radio

2005-07-14T00:41:00.000-07:00

So we got this new car, and it's nice to have a new car, because if you've been driving older cars you're not used to that little eep-eep door-unlocker thing that Tom Cruise has probably taken a stand against since he traded his Wonka Chocolate in for The Seven Moods of Sea Monkeys or whatever logical emotional guideline brochure he's hawking now that everyone thinks his brain is made of "celebrity mousse." The new car has all these detachable and foldable/removable seats, and you can wipe it off, and there are all kinds of speakers, and this roof-window thing that lifts very slightly, and it can go on snow if you need it to. We may need it to go on snow during the winter, so this is a worthwhile feature. But the main feature of interest is "XM Radio."

The car comes with "XM Radio," which is a satellite radio service. They have probably fifty channels (I do not remember numbers larger than fifty unless they are a million, but it is unlikely that they are going to base the next "Rain Man" on me) and we set ten of them up immediately. It's great; you get to hear genuinely deep alternative album cuts (by Talk Talk, Boomtown Rats, Echo & The Bunnymen), genuine punk canon (Cro-Mags, DK, OpIvy, Germs, Misfits, MDC), and even obscure bluegrass or early country-western, depending on the channel. Yes, it's all commercial-free. The problem? It's like $13 a month.

I know, I know. Thirteen dollars is not a big splurge, especially when you consider how little it costs Sally Struthers to feed her Chambord habit these days ($257.90/24hrs). But once you get a household going you realize that you pay like $13 a month just to run naked-time mats through the dryer, and that's literally the tip of the iceberg.

I wanted to write more about this, but at the end of the day, I am not going to pay $13/month to listen to "Video Killed the Radio Star." Also, I need to stop typing on the computer and telling people about things I will not pay for. This isn't 1997, dammit.

Salad Dressing Man.

2005-06-17T18:58:00.000-07:00

We were at Mollie Stone's trying to think of what to cook for dinner when at the end of the aisle which led to the produce section I spotted a man handing out free samples of food. I froze. I cannot take a free sample of something without winding up purchasing one of whatever it is. It's a guilt thing: imagine taking a sample of something a person has cooked, eating it in front of them, and then leaving without buying one of what they are offering. It would be insulting. It would be like saying "Listen. What you made is bad. It is not good enough for me." This is why I avoid free sample tables at supermarkets—I just don't want to get involved in the whole psychological mess. Whenever I see one of these tables approaching I stop, look thoughtfully at my watch, and turn the cart around.

That's harder to do when one's wife is along and she doesn't know what you're up to. She insouciantly strolled up to the table despite the sudden and strong interest I had taken in my watch, and then had the gall to call me over to try the free sample. I studied the label of a Barolo ("Great with full-flavored meats such as lamb, venison, or beef") until the second entreaty came, at which point I gave in and wheeled over. The fellow, an older gentleman with a chef's outfit and thick Mediterranean accent, smiled as he offered us a sample of bread dipped in some kind of brown sauce. It was tasty; in fact, it reminded me of the dressing they use on the house salad at our favorite Italian joint. I began to rationalize the purchase. The man complimented our baby. I remembered that Liz had thrown all of our old salad dressings away last week. She reminded him of his own baby granddaughter, he said, just nine days old.

Since there was no one else around (which makes it virtually impossible to leave the table without buying something) we chatted and it turns out that he was actually the Julio featured on the bottle of "Julio's Delicious Sauce." He made the stuff himself and did the farmer's market circuit, drumming up customers. I was reminded of the early career and travels of Robert Mondavi. At this man's advanced age, to still be hitting the pavement...I sympathized with the fight of the self-made businessman. I do a bit of self-making, after all, three or four days a week. Well, let's put a bottle of the stuff in the cart and wish him luck. I mean, it has good flavor. Support the independents, and all of that.

The rest of the trip passed uneventfully (Liz got some pita bread and olives to round out a Greek plate we had most of at home, and I just made a sausage sandwich from some leftover birthday sausage). After we rang up, while Liz was otherwise occupied with the baby, I stole a look at the receipt. There it was: JULIO DELICIOUS SAUCE -- $7.99."

Well, I don't need to tell you, no matter what you might think of me, I was not raised to pay eight dollars for a bottle of salad dressing. Unfortunately, I was also not raised such that I could return a bottle of a hard-working man's salad dressing and make him look bad in the store where he was working. Who raised a fellow with these diametrically unworkable qualities? My parents. They're lovely. It's not easy raising a child.

So what did I do? I threw the receipt away before anyone could see it. As far as anyone's concerned, I paid a reasonable $3.59 for that bottle of Julio's Delicious Sauce. A bottle which I am promptly throwing away so that it doesn't become a family favorite or some disaster like that. If I don't, I'll be pouring that stuff over the salad at Thanksgiving dinner in 2065, just like I have been for the last sixty years, my thumb pressed firmly over Julio's face, hoping I voodoo-suffocate his ghost. My sixty year-old daughter will note that yet again, dad's thumb is bright white with purple accents and he's pouring very, very slowly.

Birthday party; new car

2005-06-15T23:55:00.000-07:00

The birthday party went well. Many types of people gathered in the yard with their dogs or kids or peers and consumed the food, consumed the keg beer, consumed the handle of Bushmills that Tony brought. At one point two dudes agreed that they were too drunk to play guitar together, and they put the two guitars they were holding safely back into their cases, which I think is barometric proof that your party has gotten to the perfect place. At the end of the party I looked among the spoils and saw that I had been given a bottle of fancy vodka, a cookbook, and a Home Depot gift certificate, among other things. There, now you know what kind of man I am.

It was time, after that, to get a new car, so we went and talked to a nice Italian boy who sold us a good car. I would say what kind and color it is, but there is a good chance at this point that since the car is so distinctive, I would be out in the driveway washing it off, and a person (you?) would wander up and ask me if I am the "guy that does Achewood." I know you might think I sound paranoid but most people who like comics also like to Google you pretty hard and see if they can find your high school track photos to cry over while they use NIN cds to mock-slit their wrists.

Big Birthday List

2005-05-31T09:32:00.000-07:00

Here is a list of things I would like to get done before all the people come over for the big birthday party. I like to have a big birthday party every year not because I think it is a big deal that I have gotten worse and less virile, but rather because my social nebula has far too few occasions on which to gather in one place and have a smoke.

1. Finish Brick Path. I started the brick path around the lawn using leftover bricks that the previous homeowner had kind of let "go to seed" and sink under the general debris. I still have about 12' to go before the path is done. I really don't like laying bricks, though, because it is such precise work and involves a lot of being on one's knees and laying on one's side with a rubber mallet, trying to get things level. Last time I worked with the bricks, in 2003, I was so bored with the activity that I made myself a rum and coke and ended up hitting my knuckle with the mallet. I played off the pain (people were watching) by joking that my drink was called the "bricklayer's helper" but to this day I know that I hit my hand because of alcohol.

2. Choose Menu. The key to having a ton of people over and getting them fed is to have 90% of your food ready to go the day before or morning of the party. What should I make? This is hard to say. I should make things which sit well at outside temperature, absorb booze and taste good. I also don't want to break the bank, so maybe we'll do a lot of polenta-based hors d'oeuvres, and grilled kebabs. Perhaps I can finally make a pot roast in that new dutch oven and maybe serve it up shredded like pulled pork next to some sliced rolls and coleslaw for dressing. Oh goodness gracious I am going to serve pot roast with coleslaw to people and I just want to dance around in a little circle with red mules on.

3. Did You Want Me to Get Beer? Yeah, fine, I can do that. I was going to brew a keg of the 2.9% for all-dayers, and bottle some of the 5.8% for the citizens who would be concerned about not getting shitfaced by 4pm under the June sun. In other news, if you half-die under the porch for eight weeks, you'll get to sample some of our plum wine. Provided I find you come August.

4. Jogging Buddy. Ever since 2005 I never go jogging. Maybe I need a "jogging buddy." This would ideally be a simple man with no weird ideas who was pretty dedicated to running approximately three miles each morning. If you are considering this position, remember that I don't have a lot to prove and mainly want to get out of the house. We don't have to talk a lot.

It is interesting to be twenty years apart from the last experience.

2005-05-11T01:14:00.000-07:00

The Experience: Stepping in dog poop to the degree that you have to take off the shoe and leave it somewhere for a while.

The Last Time This Happened: I was in an age before memory completely solidified, maybe five. I was being sat by some other kid's family and we went to the grocery store to look at Christmas trees. It was raining. On the way out, I stepped in a dog crotte the size of an eggplant. The thing practically shot up my pants leg and stole my wallet. The best the kid's mom could do was look back and laugh as I stood there panicking.

But Yet, Today: Yeah, I have a dog now. She takes her little Tootsie-Craps on the lawn, and we have this special rake/scooper thing to whisk them away. Only, today the rake caught on something and when it released it flung this little piece of crap between my legs and behind me. I stepped back to find the offensive knob and the heel of my running shoe planted squarely on the thing's soft, glistening carapace. I say "running shoe" to illustrate the extent to which it will be difficult to extricate the feces from the intricate tread.

How is it Different to Step in Crap Now vs. Then: No one was around to laugh at me this time, and unlike the five-year-old me, I have made some headway in the world and am not an unvalidated, snot-nosed wreck all the time.

What am I Going to Do Tomorrow: I am going to leave the soiled shoe on the back deck for the better part of 2005. I'm not the kind of guy who really ever uses shoes again once they've gone tete-a-crotte. I will throw the shoe away when we move to a different house.

Erotically Charged Shoe Purchase

2005-05-07T21:49:00.000-07:00

It's Mother's Day tomorrow and my wife is recently a mother. I had already caved and given her her main present during a particularly long and arduous baby-night (a tiny little camera) so today I struck out for more fish. During our morning walks she had been commenting on a contrast-stitched pair of black sandals in a shop window, so I went and picked them up. The staff and customers at the boutique shoe shop knew that I was ripe for a bit of hard-ladygabbing, and they set about me like the equivalent of horny union jackhammer men.

At the sales counter I stood and inspected the shoes which the attendant had brought from the back. Apparently something about my demeanor told them that I was not buying these womens' sandals for myself, and the wedding band further implied that I was to be treated as a quasi-sexualized medicine ball.

A matronly sexpot draped in purple was the first to act. Through a bit of deft conversation she ascertained that the shoes were not for my mother, but rather for my wife, and this led her to comment that she wished she could find a man like me (I am not actually a very good man, it should be noted). She then commented something to the tune of, "the good ones are all taken."

Feeling relieved from social accountability, I hazarded the old chestnut "either we're taken, or we're gay," to which the sexpot and the shopkeeper (another maritime-ready hull) awarded a chorus of what I will call "pleasant-enough erotisqueals."

These old birds were absolutely professional in allowing the little charge to dissipate throughout the shop, and I was able to leave with gift receipt in hand. Not yet sure whether I will tell Liz that the procurement of her Mother's Day present put me squarely in the company of MI(would-not)LFs.

I think I might buy a Honda Civic.

2005-04-29T01:58:00.000-07:00

I don't really need a new car right now, but Honda Civics are incredibly inexpensive. They're like $58 a month with a hundred dollars down. Something like that. Maybe I'll get it just to have it be the car I use for only one single purpose, like an eccentric rich person, and use the other cars for regular, varied purposes. That's it...it'll be the car that I use to go get french fries at fast food restaurants. Usually when I do my daily errands I'll embrace temptation and whip through a Jack in the Box or McDonald's drive-thru for a little thingy of crisp, delicious fries. These invariably cause the interior of the car to reek of fries for a day or two, particularly if it's been rainy and the windows have been up. A new Honda would be just the thing. Liz wouldn't get annoyed, and it's probably healthier for the baby if I use a separate car for buying french fries.

First words

2005-04-18T13:31:00.000-07:00

Most babies' first words are something sweet and nice, like "mama" or "dada." It makes sense. A baby spends most of its time with someone who refers to themselves as Mommy or Dad, and finally comes to mimic the expression. This weekend my parents came over and we looked at a few baby albums and then they dropped the bombshell on me: my first word.

It wasn't a rich epithet, or an effeminate "thimply fabulouth!"

It wasn't even "baba!" or "papa," both common contenders.

My first word, according to both my parents and attested to by an overlooked entry in my baby album, was "K-Mart." Apparently pronounced something like "kay-'Maht."

It may further amuse you—since my pants are currently down—to know that I worked at K-Mart for three years during high school. I suppose we aren't the complicated evolutionary matrices that Nova programs would make us out to be. As a tot I was endlessly wheeled around the bargain bins of Sebastian Kresge's low-caste vision, apparently forming a deep and lasting bond with the cheap white laminate tile floors I would one day pace, and the red vest I would one day assume.

Not only did the house I grew up in burn down, but my K-Mart has since become a Gottschalks. Maybe John Cusack needs a writing partner for Grosse Pointe Blank II. I have some ideas.

Sunflower seeds

2005-04-10T01:26:00.000-07:00

Recently I have been tucking a few sunflower seeds into my cheek while working. I cannot think of another snacking item that is so socially divisive as these seeds. They constantly require one to noisily spit small bits of wood from one's mouth, and contain so much sodium as to make one's face bloated and unseemly, so that in just a matter of days one bears resemblance to a George Washington who's gone a round in the ring with Tyson. Particularly if one wears a baldiwig and silk knickers, as I do.

No one enjoys my new habit of eating sunflower seeds.

Chicken Stock, Chicken Stock

2005-04-06T21:18:00.000-07:00

Man, why did I make ten quarts of chicken stock when the kitchen is already full of dirty dishes. And how did the kitchen get full of dirty dishes when all we've been eating lately is takeout food? Today for lunch was sandwiches from that new Bullpen deli, and dinner was Greekish food from Santorini, that decent joint on Laurel. Somehow all the surfaces in the kitchen are covered with recyclable bottles and cans, dirty mugs, and trash. How does this happen? Maybe it happens because when you are asleep a new baby can use her small fingers to reach just far enough into your sleeping ear to press the Reset button, much as we do to a Palm-sized device or Texas Instruments Speak-n-Spell with a paperclip.

A new baby unwittingly invents several hip-hop jerks, gestures and other nightclub moves which need only minimal refinement before sexual men and women can use them on the dance floor. Among them:

1. Do The Cry
Stand in the middle of the dance floor and just scream until you get so agitated that you hyperventilate. Here come the (police) ladies.

2. Every Body Get Startled!
Babies have a "startle" reflex which causes their arms and legs to shoot out when startled. Next time someone you like walks past, "Get Startled!" by immediately jumping up and making your arms and legs into a big capital X. If you simultaneously crap your pants, then so much more the baby are you.

3. Everybody East Side West Side Heyyy-ohhh Heyyy-ohhh
Babies do that thing with their hands like gangsters do, where they use their fingers to form letters signifying gangster signs or affiliations (Blood, Crip, etc). Next time you see a baby startle, closely watch the way they crinkle and contort their hands. You may be able to catch whether they are a Blood or a Crip.

REI Womb

2005-03-29T23:48:00.000-08:00

Well, our shoulder sling thing that I carry the baby in while I work isn't from REI, but it looks sporty/cargo-ish. If Geoff Probst had a baby and needed to take it to the Survivor set, he would carry it in one of these. "Survivors, please take care of my baby for 8-10 hours while I catch up on rest. You all have immunity and you win the Texas hamburger bar."

She is pretty happy to sleep in there, since out of all of the things in the world so far it's the one that most resembles the cramped quarters of a placenta bag (only it doesn't smell like a hot butcher shop).

Is there an "exploratorium" in your city? San Francisco has one. There are all these crazy scientific displays. It'd be cool if an exploratorium filled a bunch of inflatable river rafts with hot Beef-flavored Jell-O, then dumped them into a big pool of exactly the same density of hot loose Beef Jell-O, and then dumped your naked body into it. Also, instead of not having a strip of hot liver under your nose, you would have one. The exhibit could be called "I'm Baby!" and there could be photos. Please call me, Mayor Gavin Newsome or Exploratorium Staff, to discuss royalty structures.

Alright, here we go.

2005-03-23T02:10:00.000-08:00

Well, I guess people would think it was pretty weird if we had a baby and my first entry back I chose to blog about, say, television programs. Yes, the baby is here, and she is a happy little thing. She chopped our day into eighths instead of thirds, though, and that's taking its toll on most aspects of this scene. Last night I was so exhausted I just went to the back bedroom door and peed on the deck instead of walking down the hall to the bathroom (fortunately, it was raining). This is what exhaustion can do to you.

Thanks to everyone who wrote or mailed cards of well-wishes. I can't write back to everyone but I have read everything you sent and it is appreciated.

I would write more but there is a little pile of warmly-colored textiles squirming around on the couch next to me, and it hasn't eaten in over two hours.

Limoncello

2005-03-11T23:07:00.000-08:00

Our Limoncello recipe turned out pretty well, but it needed a lot of time. The way it works is you buy two handles of good vodka, a fifth of everclear, pour it over maybe eight ounces (dry weight) of big lemon zest peels (use a carrot peeler), and let it steep for a few months. Then mix in the same volume of simple syrup and let sit a few more months. When this batch finished in January it was pretty crude, but now that it's March the stuff is a lot smoother and you can drink it straight over ice.

The main interesting thing about making our own Limoncello is that when we were at BevMo buying all the liquor we ran into one of our local post office clerks, who was buying a case of non-alcoholic beer. He was wearing a denim baseball jacket with ecru leather sleeves.

There are apparently two paths in life down which one can go.

FedEx, why do you have to be that way with me.

2005-03-09T10:16:00.000-08:00

The doorbell rang at some ungodly hour this morning and the dog went barking mad, as is her way. I was on the cusp of deep-REM sleep and decided pretty quickly not to answer, though the person rang twice. I thought it might have been my wife, having forgotten her house key on the way to an early morning medical checkup, in which case I calculated that she'd eventually give up and come around back through the rear bedroom door. Soon I heard footsteps on the rear deck and startled as something heavy set down not five feet from my toes, but then nothing more. No wife entered the room, and the dog stood noisy vigil at the front window. The worst pain is that of a tired man who is not sure whether to be scared.

I rose to discover a package from FedEx at my rear-facing bedroom door. You don't just walk up to my rear bedroom door — you have to go through a couple gates and get pretty intimate with my personal space. This FedEx driver, as far as I was concerned, had very nearly taken off her boots, gotten under the covers, and asked me to sign for the package across the expanse of her tough-nippled but silken-skinned breast. It's as near as I've ever come to being violated by a courier, and I have to tell you, I considered that thought from several angles as I grudgingly made the morning coffee and defrosted the hashbrown patty.

I have discovered the worst flavor

2005-02-25T10:17:00.000-08:00

Okay, so imagine that you were up late the night before, and you had a cigarette with a friend, but you're not used to cigarettes, and then you went to bed kind of dehydrated. Then you slept in a little bit and woke up with dry morning mouth and kind of a stomach ache, so you chugged a shot of mint-flavor Mylanta.

That mixture creates the worst flavor. You might want to try seeing if you can arrange it sometime.

I bought a thing at 7-11

2005-02-20T15:19:00.000-08:00

Our dog has a game in which she constantly wants you to throw this mini-sized tennis ball for her. It drives me up the fucking wall. I've never been one to pick up the slimy tennis balls dogs foist on you, so today I bought a toy at 7-11 which should ameliorate our situation. It is called EYE SIGHT CHALLENGE and it is Made in China. Can you guess what it is? No, of course you can't. It's a little red slingshot. Ah, who doesn't look fondly back on those innocent days of youth, spending hours with one's young chums, trying to knock down tin cans to see who would win the eye sight challenge.

Even more curiously, the package is decorated with these waving checkered flags.

The perfect people

2005-02-07T02:03:00.000-08:00

I'm not sure if I've mentioned this before, but there are these people across the street who are completely perfect. This is what I have observed them doing:

1. Going to city hall meetings
2. Re-landscaping their front yard, including copper pipe stuff
3. Pulling up and re-pouring concrete which had been slightly damaged by a tree root
4. Installing new windows
5. Taking all the boards off of their house and putting them back on again.

If you were a funny-ho-ha person you might think I was joking about that last one. No, they took all the boards off their house and put them back on again. I'm not sure what that was all about, but I know that they are intensely religious, so perhaps it was their way of avoiding "the big O."

Maybe they know something I don't. I doubt it, though. I spent today leaving the boards on my house and watching an Animal Planet special about puppies. Also, my dog stole five ounces of gorgonzola off the coffee table and took a heinous shit in the yard.

Tonight a woman showed me a video.

2005-02-04T02:10:00.000-08:00

Tonight a woman showed me a video of a baby being born. As it turns out, when the baby comes out of the hippie mom who agreed to be filmed with her co-star, Ferdinand The Distended Rectum, it is a completely pale chalky white, like plaster. This was news to me. I thought it would be kind of light bluish/yellow, like a strangled person. Just goes to show you that even if you read all the books, you still might not know what sort of dead body your baby might resemble. Life is a miracle! Etc.

We made paella.

2005-02-01T13:56:00.000-08:00

Have you done this? It's pretty much the same as making risotto, except there's some more-involved meatwork. You sort of "jerk" the chicken in paprika and oregano for a couple hours before browning it, I think that's where it gets most of its distinctive flavor. That and the chorizo.

We included clams and prawns, but I would omit these if saving any of it for later because seafood leaves a lingering, unpleasant taste that the dog doesn't like. She sniffed a spoonful of the cold leftovers and looked up at me with those watery, plaintive eyes that she has. My dog looked at me with her eyes.

New Desk

2005-01-24T01:44:00.000-08:00

I have a new desk, in a new room. It is a fancy IKEA tall workstation with shelves above my head (when I am sitting) and it fits neatly into a corner of our front office. I think it is called THE GRÜMH unit or something very similar. The fancy nice printer is on my right, and on my left is a rolly-cabinet in which I store painting supplies, some sketches, and fan mail from 2002. Do you want to read a list of all the electronic gizmos I have on my desk? I never thought of myself as a gizmo person but here are all my gizmos:

1. Digital snapshot camera (2.0 megapixels)
2. Cellular telephone (Samsung)
3. Small but powerful digital video camera (mini "d-v" format?)

Huh. It seemed like a lot more gizmos when I was setting up the desk. I actually brought #3 in and set it down after I made the two-item list, just to flesh things out. I am not counting the scanner as a gizmo, because it is not a sexy little thing I can sport in public.

Oh, man. I completely forgot to mention that my monitor is a flat panel display, and my keyboard is wireless. Here's a haiku I wrote about the Gizmo Lifestyle:

Life is sweet
The gizmos are sweet
Who downloaded Crash Test Dummies
Onto my computer

whoops

2005-01-17T01:16:00.000-08:00

Sorry, that was an email meant for a friend. I do occasionally have a hard time telling which Microsoft-based text editor I'm using. WHOOPS sorry.

Subject : Re: Which Clash album did you want?

2005-01-17T01:08:00.000-08:00

To : Gideon Krauss-Finkelman <gid_the_yid@gmail.com>
Subject : Re: Which Clash album did you want?
----- Message Text -----

Gideon,

Yes, I did receive the discs in the post just the other day. Thank you. Tonight I put them all on my computer (? ? ) and started to play them. There were 546 songs! I was excited to get to hearing them, so I started the player, and the first song started. It is by my personally appreciated band, The Magnetic Fields. Up 'til now I only had his "Get Lost" album, plus a couple others, so I know what a crapshoot this guy is. However, about 1:16 into the first song of his you included, I can see he is on his A-game here. I don't know if there is a better compliment I could give to a friend who has sent music to another friend.

Sorry about Max and Crane. They can be like a dog sometimes.

- Mrs. Patterson, Your Teacher Who Died

On Sun, 16 Jan 2005, Gideon Krauss-Finkelman wrote:
>> Did you get the CDs I sent along? I am wondering about whether you got them.
>> I am in Tahoe. Crane and Max have spent forty-eight straight hours
>> throwing snowballs at a small fire hydrant sign.
>> G

"Jerk"

2005-01-16T21:44:00.000-08:00

I jerked some chicken tonight. When you're doing this, you sort of half-heartedly want to make "jerk-off"-based jokes, but obviously you know better because everyone's already thought of that and it's not funny at all. Still, though, it was my first time jerking anything and my mind was racing.

What happens when you go on a walk.

2005-01-06T01:45:00.000-08:00

I thought I'd get out and stretch my legs a bit today, so I dressed in fancy exercise-type sports pants and walked around the town. I walked for about forty uneventful minutes with a little local newspaper, reading stories and facts from the "knowitall" section. Did you know that West Virginia has the lowest crime rate of any US State? Maybe it's because what we consider crimes, West Virginians consider routine acts of procreation and natural selection. Did you know that there are only seven Starbucks in all of West Virginia? Not that California is any shining example of cultural evolution, but we have 1,551 Starbucks. I feel much more comfortable living in a state where douchebags are never more than five miles from a seven dollar cup of coffee. I feel that much less likely to get shot off the back of my free-thinking friend's chopper by a good old boy with a shotgun, even though the closest I ever get to riding on a chopper is sitting in my friend's '97 Camry, and the closest I ever get to free thinking is checking my PayPal account.

Oh, that's the thing I was trying to think of. Our little comics venture has shipped merchandise to 49 of 50 US states — who's missing from the US equation? West Virginia. I know there are colleges there, because both Don Knotts and Billy Crystal got their diplomas in WV. If you live in WV and order something from our shop, I will personally see to it that we throw in a little something extra. I'd like to shade your state in, on that little inkjet printout of US Sales Distribution which I have tacked above my pillow on the headboard.

After I was done fretting about West Virginia I wandered in to Best Buy, this normal electronics/appliance chain. I have been looking for a good flat panel monitor lately and there was a pretty good deal on one there so I ordered it. Then on the way home I noticed little airplane bottles of Absolut in the weeds/bushes at the side of the sidewalk every five-to-twenty feet. I counted about twelve Absolut bottles in all, then there was a little airplane-size Jack bottle, then I was at the corner gas station. It seemed like someone or some small group of people had bought approximately twelve little bottles of Absolut, and one little bottle of Jack, and drank them while heading down the street away from the gas station. I can only guess that this is what happened. Either that or some person bought a single airplane bottle of the booze every day and tossed it on the way home. I know that it wasn't me because I work at home and can buy Absolut in larger bottles.

Anyhow, I felt great after my walk. I had a little bit of energy and I also felt like I had unearthed a lousy mystery.

My Amazon Wish List

2005-01-02T01:59:00.000-08:00

I never thought it would be cool to make an Amazon Wish List because why should anyone buy anything for me, you know. Anyhow, I recently made one and some people actually bought me some stuff, which changed my opinion.

Okay, here is a list of things that have been stolen from me or things that I otherwise am interested to receive:

http://amazon.com/gp/registry/3FG5JVBBWZYDT

I work on this all the time now. You might want to bookmark it and check back regularly. (I hear about new albums, or remember old good ones, almost twice per day.)

Hm oh here is another thing I can blog about: today at IKEA I spent an incredible amount of money. I'm not going to say what I think an incredible amount of money is, but I will give you this hint: I rented a U-Haul van in which to carry all the stuff home. Okay, can you guess how much I spent? (This is so fun!) Okay, do you give up? I spent a lot less than I would have if that goddamned place had had even half of their shit in stock. You think your meatballs and open-faced shrimp Kröstjes will leaden my senses, but I know your deal, IKEA. Go through the showroom and get all excited, but then when you get down to the bins where all the pieces are stored, the only thing that's available are five hundred thousand Christmas napkins, a children's object that looks like a mesh accordion, and a white couch with a huge handprint on it.

T H A N K S

O K A Y

L A T E R

A comprehensive list of things which I received for Christmas.

2004-12-26T22:27:00.000-08:00

Herein is a gathering of data points which you may use to assemble a mental image of the things I am interested in, or which others think I am interested in, or which others found on sale, or which I had outright insisted that others buy for me.

THINGS WHICH I AM INTERESTED IN

1. A book about the laying of the first trans-Atlantic cable

2. The new Wodehouse biography (this book is a real zinger)

3. A large basket full of fancy Italian condiments and pasta etc.

4. A complete set of all Hardy Boys books, many of which are first editions. They have that great cabin-like smell.

5. A new sketchbook

6. A new easel, so that my lap no longer suffers the errant brush.

7. A little airplane-size bottle of Jägermeister.

THINGS WHICH PEOPLE THOUGHT I MIGHT BE INTERESTED IN

1. A "baby starter kit" which contains numerous oils, salves, powders, wipey-cloths, mild soaps, etc. The whole basket smells like a nice baby. There might be a baby under there somewhere, for all I know.

2. A magnetic stud finder, to help you (me) locate wall studs for the purpose of installing shelving etc. This was given to me because I recently installed a set of shelves which fell down and nearly killed the dog.

THINGS WHICH PEOPLE FOUND ON SALE AND GAVE TO ME

1. This enormous gray jacket two sizes too large

2. Seals & Crofts Greatest Hits

THINGS WHICH I INSISTED WERE BOUGHT FOR ME

1. Dozens of pairs of matching black socks. I throw all my old socks away during December of every year, and therefore my wife has to buy me new pairs for Christmas. They have to match so that we never need to sort them. Sorting socks is really beneath all but the Untouchable caste, I feel.

THINGS I DID NOT RECEIVE BECAUSE I DID NOT MAKE A CHRISTMAS LIST

1. Metallica, "And Justice For All." I am not some kind of heavy metal person, but anyone who appreciates music must admit that this is the genre's equivalent of Rubber Soul, One Step Beyond, Substance 1987, etc.

2. A tea mug which is larger than the usual type of tea mug, which is probably around 10 oz. I wanted something more like 20 oz., but did not discover this until early in the morning on December 24th, when I had tea for the first time in about seven years. Ten ounces of tea is really a pretty small amount of tea. Did you know that "green tea" is the flavor of tea you get in a Chinese restaurant?

3. All the Clash albums, which were stolen out of my car a few years back. I am still angry about this. The Clash would have wanted me to be angry, and to have taken action, but I did not take action. I am 1 for 2, The Clash.

Social Interaction

2004-12-09T16:49:00.000-08:00

I was at my printer's picking up the batch of Volume IV, and I was wearing my Red Sox hat. A pretty average attractive lady who was hanging around in the lobby said something positive about the Red Sox and I, having anticipated this eventuality, said something about how I'd been in Boston during the ALCS and how exciting that was. She mentioned how her fiancé was a big Sox fan. This bluntly took the conversation from chitchat into the realm of delicately marshaled social interaction. What did I care that she was affianced? It's a dickle how the recently engaged or pregnant or cuckolded etc cast these major life changes out onto strangers at the slightest provocation. Maybe tomorrow I'll be standing in line at the grocery store with my Red Sox hat on, and the checker will go "Oh, Red Sox! ...my wife shot herself last night."

Some observations on the day.

2004-12-03T18:21:00.000-08:00

Our waitress at lunch had very thick wrists and hands. She seemed nice.

I paid $7 for a glass of wine. We were celebrating a good week. It was Pinot Noir, and it was alright.

My meal, tortelloni with smoked chicken, spinach and mushroom jus, was quite tasty. I didn't eat mushrooms until I was about college age. I considered them little slimy nuisances that I fished out of Chinese soups, or off-tasting chunks that I picked out of diner salads. I didn't enjoy tomatoes, avocado, or seafood much until then either. Maybe during college I was exposed to some sort of chemical or radiation.

We got the dog a toy that looks like a buckyball, and we stuck other, smaller toys inside it so that she can be entertained as she tries to get them out.

This afternoon while I was thinking I remembered that we saw Chris Isaak perform last night. He seems like a good man.

Truffles

2004-11-18T18:37:00.000-08:00

Here's my dilemma, and it's not a bad one. Someone recently gave me a jar of three Italian black truffles, and I don't know what to do with them. I'd like to use them in a Thanksgiving dish, but mainly I'd like to use these mythical little dooks to their best ends. All in all a nice piece of fried bacon would give more palate pleasure, but truffles have that potato chip bouquet and delicate richness that just might take center stage in some new recipe. They seem like they'd be a natural with crab, lobster, eggs, and other prissy proteins. Short of avocado nori with truffled sesame aspic, what do you do with these little tumors? I don't want to dick around trying to get on Thomas Keller's short list, but I don't want to slice these into Top Ramen with Tabasco either.

Local Restaurant Makes Good

2004-11-17T03:24:00.000-08:00

The Left Bank, an SF Bay Area French joint with four or five doors, gets knocks for being a multiple-location heavy hitter. We stopped in that place with my folks this weekend and they had braised oxtails with olives, beef bourgignon, sand dabs, and all the roasted usuals. If you're out in the area and want to pay Sizzler prices for legitimate bistro plates, this is your reliable.

Pork trend.

2004-11-12T01:18:00.000-08:00

I mentioned that I ate pork yesterday, and then today I ate pork twice.

For breakfast, I had a grilled pork chop with a buttered flour tortilla as a side. It was nice; I ate it while I worked. Some coffee was the drink I chose.

For dinner, I got chili verde at my corner Mexican joint. If you have not had good chili verde, then you are not me.

I am not sure what sort of pork I might eat tomorrow. If this keeps up, I can imagine a roasted tenderloin or perhaps some bacon in a crunchy BLT.

Please picture me as a slavering hound-man with unctuous, never-still cheeks

Alton Brown has a "blog"!

2004-11-10T14:09:00.000-08:00

Alton Brown has a "blog"!

http://www.altonbrown.com/pages/rants.html

If you don't know Alton Brown, he's the self-styled modern day Harold McGee. If you don't know who Harold McGee is, then you aren't an apt scholar of food science, and someone should tie your arm to a tree.

What's new...I ate some pork and talked to a friend.

Tense week recap

2004-11-07T20:39:00.000-08:00

So, here were the things causing me stress last week:

1. Téodor seemed to be making an offensive salvo in the "risotto" war

2. I had to cancel my book deal because I wasn't happy with the outcome

3. The Presidential election was looking grim

4. The baby gender sonogram was coming up

5. Mr. Bear missing, not paying rent

6. Unhealthy-looking front lawn.

Here's where they stand this week:

1. No action on the risotto front. Tension rises.

2. Book deal formally canceled

3. The Presidential election was won by a person who'd rather see a soldier die than a zygote

4. The damn kid had its legs crossed

5. Mr. Bear still missing, still not paying rent

6. It looks like there used to be a tulip patch where we put our front lawn. Man does that look stupid.

Oh well, at least my kid's safe from George Bush for the next few months. Unless they figure out a way to put tiny Jack Chick tracts into the amniotic sac.

Tense week

2004-11-03T01:25:00.000-08:00

So, Téodor seems to have re-instigated the risotto wars, we had to cancel my new book deal, the Presidential election is a gridlock leaning the wrong way, Philippe is about to have his heart broken, the OBGYN tells us the new baby's gender on Thursday, Mr. Bear is incommunicado and behind a month on rent, and my front lawn is looking worse than ever. What's next? Oh yeah: massive Bay Area property taxes, refinishing the hardwood floor in the nursery, and Salvation Army volunteers jumping out from every corner, ringing bells at my face.

My advice to all high school students: flunk 'em while you got 'em, hang back as long as possible. Grades are a false honor. Plumbers make more money than lawyers.

Dammit

2004-10-25T13:02:00.000-07:00

On my nightstand this morning when I woke up: a frozen bowl of what looks like a mushroom risotto.

The whole thing is rock hard. I'm letting it thaw so I can stir around and see if he's hidden anything in the rice.

Boston, this one's for you

2004-10-19T17:50:00.000-07:00

A lot of people want to know what I ate while in Boston recently. Here is a short list.

Boston:

Pizzeria Regina - old brick oven pizza, thin crust, in the North End. We found it on accident by following our noses off the Freedom Trail, but you should find it on purpose. Beers on tap. Homemade meatballs and sausage. Every waitress is Carla.

Ristorante Toscano - Beacon Hill. Higher-end Tuscan joint. I had a wood-grilled pork chop you could eat with a spoon. Watch out for the unpriced wines by the glass. Tuscan bread does not seem to have salt in it.

King & I - Beacon Hill. This is where you go to get the watery Thai curries and rotten fish you've been craving.

Faneuil Hall/Quincy Market - the greatest mall food court in the world, with about fifty different stalls serving regional cuisines. There's a guy shucking oysters and clams, there is a sullen man behind a pizza, there is a Pho place. I think they even have Portuguese food. I had a lobster roll the size of a spray-paint can. It's an historical tourist/school field trip destination, but don't let that dissuade you.

Cambridge:

Greenhouse Coffee Shop in Harvard Square - This is like a Denny's, but it is a fine place for a meal. They have those round, thick waffle-cut deep-fried cottage fries. Come and watch as families eat next to greasy pre-law students. You get the sense that Kurt Vonnegut has been there.

Allston:

Spike's Junkyard Dogs - a magnificent hot dog restaurant. On the side you can get either fries or "nachos," which are round chips with melted mozzarella and Hormel bean chili. There is a sink inside the actual restaurant by the tables, so you can wash your hands. I had the original "junkyard dog" with tomato, pepperoncini, scallions, ketchup, mustard, onion, relish (I think). It was on a soft roll, and way better than the nachos, which had softened into an unapproachable mass.

Redneck's - a cafeteria of deep-fried and sauced foods for the drinking times. I had the "bbq" chicken tenders which reminded me of chinese food.

Sunset Cantina - they had Hoegaarden on tap, Mako shark skewers, sweet potato fries with raspberry dipping sauce, and a lot of other Tex-Mex specialities that you can only find in New England.