A carnival of technology

Mr. Shea’s my daddy, but I couldn’t pass up that title.

I should first note that I find reading travelogues to be, in general, very boring. I doubt that this will be an exception. It’s also kind of long.

On Saturday, my 25th birthday, I decided to pack my bags and visit my nation’s capital. I’ve been to DC once before as part of a high school band thing, but I refuse to recognize the reality of any events from that time period, so this was my first time. There’s a lot of stuff to see there, so I thought I’d play the tourist for a few days and enjoy the fruits of my tax dollars as they’re spent on historical preservation and other neat stuff. I didn’t participate in any governmental processes or get a chance to tell W that I didn’t vote for him, but I thought it was a pretty cool trip.

I decided to take the train. Amtrak costs about the same as flying, but the trains are much roomier than planes, and they don’t give you any shit about what you bring. You could pack a case of coke and a set of Ginsu knives if you can get it to fit in the overhead rack. It has its own unique flaws, of course, but Amtrak seems to me like a better choice for anyone not in a hurry. The train from Atlanta arrived six hours late.

I decided to walk to the Amtrak station, in part because I was too lazy to figure out the Saturday schedule for the buses that travel up and down Peachtree, and on the way I was finally able to figure out the deal with that sculpture of the naked guys at Buford Highway. I’ve driven by that spot for seven years, and I never knew it was anything but a bunch of naked guys holding up a big sphere overlooking the highway. Apparently it’s the World Athletes Monument and has something to do with Prince Chuck. This information doesn’t clear anything up, but at least now it has a name. I suspect it’s some kind of leftover from the Olympics. I took some pictures.

Amtrak runs a route between New Orleans and New York, the Crescent, and the tracks in the southern section are owned by Norfolk Southern. Freight trains take priority over passenger trains, so waiting for freight to pass is the main source of delays. On Saturday a freight train broke down on the tracks, turning an 8pm departure time into 2am. A lot of people started to get mighty pissed as the hours marched on and the stated arrival time kept creeping forward, but I couldn’t help but find the whole situation hilarious. Maybe I’m just a bad person. I didn’t have anything better to do, so I just hung around Atlantic Station for a while and read a book in the train station once I exhausted my opportunities outside. The Amtrak station seems strangely designed to me. I know that Atlanta started as a rail hub, but I don’t know how long passenger rail or this particular station have been around. It looks old. Seating is a series of big wooden benches, lights are big round bulbs on top of poles, the walls are rough marble, and the ceiling is high and curved. It looks like a tiny parody of the way Grand Central Station is portrayed in old movies.

The armrests on the train all had little square rectangles welded onto the ends where ashtrays had obviously once been. I would think that Amtrak could get more business if they had kept smoking cars and advertised themselves as the smokers’ way to travel, but I guess that would be politically unpopular. Too bad for them. The seats were ok, roomy but not super comfortable. I could sit in them and sleep in them, but I envied the people in the sleeper cars. It was especially nice to be able to recline the seat without worrying about crushing the person behind me.

I arrived in DC around 2 pm and met up with Chris Schrimsher for second lunch. We originally planned to eat at a Texas-style barbecue place in Chinatown, but they’re closed Sundays, so we ate at some burger joint instead. He gave me some tips with regards to restaurants and museums, and I left to check in to my hotel. All of the hotels in DC that I could find online are hella expensive, so I ended up instead at an Econolodge just across the southern Maryland border that’s near a Metro station and has two-digit nightly rates. I had been advised to stick to more touristy areas, but I didn’t really care. I’ve seen poor people before. Getting off the green line near its terminus put me in the middle of a busy road with a view of a highway, a decaying strip mall and a restaurant that advertised fried fish and chitlin’s. It felt almost like home. The hotel is kind of a dump, and the bulletproof glass in the lobby probably isn’t a good sign, but the rooms are spacious, and my only real complaint was that they didn’t provide those little bottles of shampoo. A visit to CVS solved that problem.

I didn’t do much on the first night except drink. While in Chinatown with Chris I noticed a bar with fancy-looking ads for beer, so I stopped in there. The bartender didn’t ask me for ID, which made me feel kind of old. I don’t know if I’m finally starting to show my age, if he just didn’t care, or if he just figured that underage kids don’t generally come in and order a Belgian triple IPA. The guy who sold me a Harp at the Smithsonian festival on Wednesday asked for my “fake ID,” so I suspect it’s one of the latter two. Chinatown didn’t strike me as particularly Chinese. There were some chain stores with Mandarin under their names, but in all it seemed like it was only a few blocks and not very dense. Maybe I was missing something, but, from what I could see, I can get a more authentic Chinese experience on parts of Buford Highway. The bar I was mostly white guys in suits, but they had some nice beers, a couple dozen on tap and a hundred or so in bottles, sort of like a more reasonable realization of the Taco Mac idea that also wasn’t a chain. I had two beers: a Houblon Chouffe triple IPA and a Dogfish Head Indian brown. The Houblon, a Belgian, was a lot different from any other Belgian I’ve had. Whereas most Belgians use very little hops, if any, favoring a sweet, yeasty taste with some spicy overtones, this beer, though it had some of those overtones beneath the bitterness, had the living hell hopped out of it, making it something that tasted more like a dry IPA. It was pretty neat. The Dogfish was ok. It was basically like any other brown ale but with more hops. I was tempted to try some of the Dogfish beers on tap that I can’t legally buy in Georgia, the 120 minute IPA (21% ABV) or the Raison d’Extra (20% ABV), but the bartender said that these were basically high gravity novelties and suggested other things. The Houblon was served in a tulip glass, which is the first time I’ve actually seen one of those used in a bar. The head was fascinating. It refused to die, and it created concentric rings on the glass as the beer was drunk, leaving a malty glass tiger behind when it was finished.

I didn’t plan a single thing on this trip, and one of the more harrowing results of that was that I didn’t know how to feed my addiction in the morning. There are street vendors everywhere in downtown DC, but by the time I woke up and got moving, they had no coffee. After shambling through the streets and past endless government buildings, searching the walls and heartless skies for a fix, I ended up having some Starbucks. It was awful. I found a better place on Tuesday in the basement of the International Trade Center. I had to show my ID to enter, which seemed odd. They didn’t record it, and a Georgia driver’s license is a lot different from a building pass. Maybe they wanted to check that I’m a legal resident? Why would an International Trade Center care where I’m from? I’m going to be very upset if they wrote down my address when I wasn’t looking and i start getting international trade junk mail.

My first museum stop was the National Museum of the American Indian where, outside its doors, crews had set up to film Fat March. I guess that’s some kind of reality show? I don’t care. The museum wasn’t quite what I had expected. I anticipated a display of history, a retelling of the trials and injustices faced by this land’s native peoples as they were overrun by pale-skinned invaders, displaced, fought for a place in this new government or at least a chance to live their lives unmolested by it, but it was more about the trials they face retaining their culture in modern life, and that’s cool, too. The museum cafeteria served a variety of “native” dishes, the origins of which spanned the continent from beans and tacos to salmon and buffalo. I’ve had tacos, so I ended up eating at what I think was the Northwest section which, besides some grilled fish that didn’t catch my fancy, was serving a hominy and new potato salad and another cold dish made with eel and watercress. The potatoes were a bit too crunchy for my taste, but the meal was nice overall. I thought it was funny that they marked the eel as “vegetarian.”

My next stop found me at the National Postal Museum, located in the basement of a huge post office outside of Union Station. I’m not sure what this says about me, but I found this perhaps the most fascinating museum on the entire trip. It explored the various means of transporting the mail, the difficulties and solutions in rural free delivery routes, and some of the things faced by postal inspectors where the text on the walls assured me that, of the 200 billion pieces of mail processed every year, only a handful are bombs, so here’s what happens with the ones that are. I didn’t spend a lot of time in the philatelist’s wing, but I was there long enough to get the sense that it’s an incredibly tedious hobby. I think I’ll stick with unpopular comic books.

I really like the DC Metro. One thing they do that I wish MARTA would do is provide signs that give the line, number of cars, destination and timing of the next three trains to arrive on a particular track. Some of the trains didn’t look the greatest, but none of them smelled like urine. The only time a prerecorded voice was used was for the doors opening or closing, and that lady sounds a lot more mean than the MARTA voice lady.

My next museum was the National Museum of Natural History, at which I remembered how much I dislike tourists, even while being one. I don’t mind people traveling, but I don’t like obnoxiously loud children or people who don’t know how to act in crowds. Do they not have crowds where these people are from? Sure, it’s a new and alien place, but that’s not an excuse to stand around slack-jawed and cow-eyed while blocking everyone’s way. Most people were courteous, but a handful were just dumb, and some jabbering kid made me give up about halfway through the Natural History museum. I did see a pretty neat exhibit on the Sikh people, and I saw the Hope Diamond, which was smaller than I expected. I thought it would be the size of a softball. I don’t know where I got that idea. Maybe Duck Tales? I don’t know. It sure was a big pretty rock; I’ll give it that.

My last museum of the day was the west half of the National Gallery of Art, which, though still government run, is separate from the Smithsonian pantheon. The west is the half where they keep the older stuff, but I didn’t know there were two halves when I went in. I just saw “Art” and maybe “National” on a sign somewhere and barged eagerly into the quiet, air conditioned, free space. It was kind of boring. Saying this may make me some kind of postmodern liberal pretentious hippie jerk, but I like modern art. The older stuff just doesn’t resonate with me. I think I lack the background to appreciate or care about it, whereas the point of much of contemporary art is to to destroy that base and create entirely new experiences. Maybe I’m just a soulless Philistine. I spent a little bit wandering through the endless portraits and handful of Manets, got bored, and, since I still had some daylight left, headed over to the monuments and memorials.

I did not go up inside the Washington Monument. There’s some kind of ticket procedure involved, and they sell out pretty early, and I’ve been inside tall things before. Thanks to Google Earth, I can even imagine being inside a tall thing in DC without leaving home. The monument is very tall. Internet says that there’s an inscription in Welsh halfway up for some weird reason, which seems terrible. What an awful language. Anyway, the monument is very tall and kind of phallic and caused me to remember the hell out of Washington. I’m sure he was a great guy.

My next stop was the WWII memorial. This one’s only a couple years old or so, and I think it’s really well done. It’s not super depressing like the walls of casualties for Korea and Vietnam, but it still effectively conveys the message that hey guys we oughtta knock off this whole war thing while creating a beautiful, cool (yay fountains) space between the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial.

My last memorial stop for the day was Lincoln. I don’t have much to say about this. It’s a powerful place. It didn’t occur to me that I could slide down the railings until I saw the signs forbidding it.

For supper I decided to try that barbecue place Chris and I failed to eat at on Sunday. It’s Capital Q, located on H Street near 7th, and they weren’t half bad. They were out of pork when I got there, but the beef was pretty good. They do Texas-style barbecue, which to me means that the sauce goes too heavy on tomato, but it didn’t taste like ketchup like some I’ve had. Most importantly, they had sweet tea. DC is strange with regards to sweet tea in that they’re far enough south that no one looks at you funny if you ask for it but too far north for anyone to actually have it. I was on my third day with no tea at this point, and I was afraid that by the end of the trip I might end up looking for a Chick-fil-a and begging for asylum. Capital Q makes some nice tea. I wish their sauce was less tomatoey and more vinegary, but nobody’s perfect. They serve their meat platters over rice, which was the only sign of China I saw there excepting the employees.

On the second night at the hotel, no longer exhausted from the train ride, I was able to better examine my surroundings, and one of the things I found especially odd was the series of commercials accompanying an episode of Law & Order on TNT. There were a lot of commercials for hotels. I didn’t notice any of the sloppy cuts that usually occur when a cable company injects its own local ads into the stream provided by the station, so I assume these were chosen by TNT. My freshman English professor taught me to watch for the message in commercials, and this set confused me. Were these ads provided specifically for people in hotels, or does TNT think that anyone watching their channel around midnight is desperate for travel, suffering from the nausea of existence, in need of the novelty and freedom of a trip to somewhere else? There was also a commercial for ilovealpacas.com. If I were asked before then what an alpaca is, I probably would have guessed some kind of bird. They actually look more like llamas. Investing in an alpaca farm is good enough of an idea for it to be advertised on late night television. I think I’ll stick with booze and tobacco for my money.

I spent much of Tuesday in the other half of the National Gallery of Art where they keep the abstract, modern stuff. I loved it, though nothing stood out in my memory except that one artist who used straight lines and primary colors on a tilted canvas, some other guy who depicted the stations of the cross in sparse vertical lines, and one Pollock painting they had in the basement.

That afternoon I took a MARC train to Baltimore to visit Kate and Molly. After deciding that watching Live Free or Die Hard at midnight would be an excellent idea, we rented the first one at some pretentious video store (they had the first and third movies, but not the second, which I thought was funny. I also couldn’t find any Santo movies, which makes me wonder if they’re the right kind of pretentious, and I discovered that Duck You Sucker, the movie I bought a new DVD player for, has now seen a region 1 release.) and we then went to see number four in some theater near a mall. Things exploded and it was pretty good. There were a couple spots where it was pretty obvious that dialog was looped for a PG-13 rating (I think they should have gone with R since they shot it for R, but PG-13 means more money. I hope there’ll be an uncut DVD version), and some of the segments seemed a bit too Hackersesque, but in all I enjoyed it.

I started my final day with a visit to the Hirshhorn gallery, which is where the tour guide whose group I snuck behind in the National Gallery of Art suggested for the more unusual pieces. She described her museum’s collection as more “conservative.” There were certainly some interesting things there, and a lot of them tried to impart not just a visual experience. There was one piece, entitled “Levitz,” that was a series of metal chairs painted white accompanied by a sign informing the viewer that the artist encourages you to have a seat. My legs were pretty tired from days of walking and more recent hours of hiking up and down the streets of Washington and these new white-walled stairs and hallways, so I accepted the invitation. It was unsettling. The chairs were comfortable, but I had trouble getting past the fact that I was sitting on something that someone had labeled as art. I was inside the white tape square, a part of the work. Would someone challenge me? Would the guard kick me out? There was a nice view of the capitol. No one else sat down that I saw.

I thought some of the works with light were also impressive. One that stuck out was “Milk Run,” a series of colored gels and lights inside a very dim room that was pretty trippy. There was also some first rate crap, like one room with a projected loop and music that felt like a shitty rave, and the Takeshi Murata exhibit was like a bad Eyedrum performance coupled with a video that appeared to be a guy thrashing around in a gorilla suit with some stupid color filters and some severe MPEG compression. It sucked.

I enjoyed my time in DC. I didn’t try to see everything, and a lot of what I did see was pretty neat. There’s a lot of history, art and culture packed into a fairly small area. I thought it was pretty neat. The train back was only delayed by half an hour.

I took some photographs of Washington if you’re in to in that kind of thing.

Writing about beer (or wine) is a difficult task. Besides the concentration necessary to pin down just what you’re tasting, there’s a vocabulary involved to try to describe fermented wheats and grapes in terms of other foods, and that can get pretty confusing. That’s probably why I never bother to write anything down.

I bought three bottles of the Trader Joe’s 2006 Unibroue ale when it came out last autumn. I drank one then, did not write it down, and put the other two in my closet (I can’t do cool, but I can at least do dark) to maintain while the yeast does its thing. I chilled one of the bottles for a couple hours or so and am now drinking a glass from my Chimay goblet. I don’t really have the hang of the beer-tasting vocabulary, but here are some attempts at obversations of my now nearly year old beer:

• Smells hella flowery. But not that sharp kind of flowery you’d find while
  frolicing through Sound of Music meadows, but more a dark,
  wandering-through-the-forest sneaky kind of flowery, like honeysuckle and
  those little yellow things that grow on dead trees.
• Tastes sweet. Almost syrupy. Again makes me think of dark,
  smooth-tasting things. Let’s say apples and blueberries.
• Tastes boozy. This stuff was 9% ABV when bottled. I guess it’s probably
  more than that now. It still goes down easy as cherry wine, but there’s a
  little part of me that thinks as I process the taste, “huh, I guess that was
  alcohol.”

So, in conclusion, it tastes like sweet things, but not sharply so. There’s also that big yeast taste that Belgian-style ales have. The head is silky smooth and hanging on to the last. This is a mighty fine beer. I wonder how it’ll taste next year.

Dear Cristina,

You can stop recommending A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius to me now. I’ve read it. I didn’t really enjoy it.

Your pal,
David

When I think of memoirs, I think of records of World War II, of men climbing out of trenches, out of forests in a foreign land, separated from their platoon for days, weeks, caught in an alien land, lost in a foreign war, men who finally find friendly faces, maybe not so friendly but at least wearing a friendly flag on their sleeves, who demand a meal from a cook, a stranger, at gunpoint, because they’ve been caught in the trenches or forests or whatever it is they have in Germany for days and weeks and just want a goddamn ham sandwich. This wasn’t that kind of memoir.

Dave Eggers is the founder of McSweeney’s, which I am familiar with, though I have never read any of his work. He wrote a memoir about suffering—his and others—and losing your parents and having to raise a young brother is a hell of a trump card, but who hasn’t suffered? It’s a rare person that hasn’t seen a friend die, known someone to attempt suicide or try it themself, seen and felt pain in everything around them. The world kind of blows, and there’s nothing wrong with writing about that, but A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, like Mr. Eggers states in a short foreword offered as a guide to the reader, is kind of uneven. The characters breaking the fourth wall to become expository mouthpieces became exhausting fairly quickly. The Real World interview was unbearable, and I wish that was one of the sections I had been suggested to skip so that I could at least be forewarned. The book was interesting in parts, but overall it was just some jerk spinning tales about how much his life sucks (or at least sucked) and hoping to find some meaning in it. I don’t think I like memoirs.

One thing I did find especially interesting about this book is its ability to inspire. Maybe I found something resonating in the disjoint, rambling prose, or maybe I’m just upset that this chump—who cares if he lives in New York and wears hipster jersey shirts and went to art school—is famous and I’m not. I feel all funny inside. Maybe I’ll finally take all these scattered notes, dream logs—hideous things, my terrible chicken-scratch handwriting distorted and broken by the fog of sleep, illegible scrawlings about cheerleaders selling nachos and shopping for French mystery novels with my mother—and bizarre memoranda to myself about Kosher wine and Highway 41, and make something of it. Dave Egger’s book, behind its self-aware and solipsistic façade, seems to want to get people riled-up, get them to feel something, but I refuse to give him credit. I’ve been feeling this burning for a long time now, and this book only reminded me that I’m wasting too much of my life with other people’s crap. There was some interesting stuff in the latter parts of the book, but I think I should have taken his advice and stopped after the third or fourth chapter. That would have made a solid novella, and I would have liked it had I not paid a novel’s price.

I will be traveling next week. It will be a romantic journey, and there will be museums and monuments and everything will be grand. I will bring a blank notebook, more pages for my illegible scrawls, and a stack of novels not recommended by anyone or anything other than my own desires. It will be my birthday. I plan to open up a bottle of the Trader Joe’s brand Unibroue beer I bought last year—I don’t really like Trader Joe’s; they’re a store full of cut-rate store-brand crap, but they convince us that it’s great because they wear Hawaiian shirts and paint childish art on the walls, things that someone would scratch out in crayon on a Denny’s placemat—and I will drink it before noon, enjoying both my delicious aged ale and rebellion against society’s mores while I earn the last insurance discount I will ever see unless I get married, my speeding tickets now old enough to be forgotten, and I will then hop on a bus and go somewhere else, somewhere full of myth and wonder, somewhere away that has monuments and museums and things to write about illegibly in tiny pocket notebooks with tiny ink pens. I will style my hair in the fuck-it-all fashion I’ve paid staggering amounts for twice now using that waxy paste that wishes I would care more about starving children in Africa, and maybe I’ll meet someone on the way there and we’ll talk about books I bought on no one’s recommendation and have a grand old time.

I need a break.

I broke another light today. Boring, I know, but I thought the circumstances were funny.

The state of Georgia requires, sensibly, that I use a white light visible from 300 feet in front of my bike or something like that when I ride at night. Summer doesn’t have me riding home in the dark much anymore, but who knows when I might do something different or stupid. I’ve gone through a handful of lights, which I believe I’ve chronicled here. My problem has always been the mount: I’ll hit a bump and the light will go flying off my handlebars and never work again. The last one I had was pretty nice in this regard: the mount seemed to hold the light much better (I was never afraid to leave it on when I rode the bus), and the light itself was pretty tough. I dropped it on the pavement a few times with no troubles other than a few scratches.

My last light was a Blackburn Quadsomething. It had four LEDs, the aforementioned sweet mount (with swivelling action and kung-fu grip), a waterproof seal and a nice battery life. That part about the sweet mount? The mount actually kind of sucks. It has a more solid grip than things I’ve used before once the light is actually in there, but it’s hard to get it in there good, and it’s hard to tell whether it is in there good until I hit a bump and it goes flying. I took the light off this weekend to clean the bike, and I did not put it back on good. It came flying off on Mansell this morning while I was trying to dodge cars passing me to turn right and looking for enough of a gap to cut across traffic and turn left, and I think it survived the impact. Then the Hummer behind me ran over it. There’s no obvious damage, other than a scuffed and now slightly cracked case, but it won’t turn on anymore.

I decided to spend the extra couple of bucks this time and bought a Cateye EL-5something. It’s supposed to be pretty nice. And when it’s all the way in the handlebar mount, it clicks.

Wow, it’s been three weeks since I last made a bicycle post. Let’s do one of those.

(I would first like to apologize for the title. Using song lyrics or any phrase that happens to pop into my head from three degrees away from the topic is a bad habit of mine, I know it’s confusing, and I apologize. I’m trying to evoke a sense of the sound of gunfire.)

I’ve had some people suggest to me that I get tubeless tires. My boss has long been extolling their virtues, though not very successfully (the sole argument is usually that tubeless tires don’t need tubes), and more recently someone at work, who, though car inspections pay his bills, has a good deal of experience with bicycles, suggested them to me with some more attractive points. Traditional bicycle tires are, granted, kind of weird; they take a hollow circle of rubber, the sort of opened toroid with which any tire might begin, and then stuff some more rubber inside of it, a huge butyl doughnut, all hole and not at all delicious, making the tire itself not a container for pressurized air but rather a kind of shield, separating the more delicate pneumatic cushion from the world’s harsh terrains. You don’t see that sort of thing much in other types of tires. Is this an obsolete holdover from days past?

I guess tubes have the greater history of the two tire types, but they do have some advantages. Tubeless tires have less rolling resistance, are usually more resistant to puncture and can operate at lower pressures, but, for one, they’re more expensive. The main concern for me, though, is that you can’t easily fix a flat tubeless tire. If I get a flat on the road, I can just pull out the old tube, slap in a new one and, after five or six hours of inflating everything with that goofy little hand pump, I’m back on the road. I’m not even sure how one would fix a busted tubeless tire in an emergency. I assume it would involve some kind of patches. All I know is that I don’t want to mess with that junk while sitting on a curb. Once the tire is damaged, that’s pretty much it. These hard-soled shoes weren’t made for walkin’, but they’ll have to do.

My ignorance about bicycles is astounding. Despite bicycles being one of the seven simple machines, acts of maintenance are strange and difficult processes involving specialized tools and, in the case of fancy road bikes, tight tolerances. A year ago I didn’t even know how to change a tire. In an effort to reduce my dependence on bike shop service, I’ve been trying to acquire as much knowledge as I can—through books, the Internet and that one class I took at REI—but knowledge is not experience. Changing tubes is one of those actions that has a simple process but a lot of opportunity to screw up. One of the things I remember from that REI class was the three ways to blow out a tire. Each one means that you messed up, but two of them mean that you messed up real bad. Let’s review:

1) The first is the thing that’s not like the others; the damage to the tire is done beforehand, and there’s no earth-shattering kaboom, but the final product is the same: a rapid loss of pressure and a damaged tire. If there’s a hole in the tire where part of the tube can peek out, it’s eventually going to get punctured or just give up on its own, and you end up with a sound like letting the air out of a balloon and a sudden difficulty in pedaling. These aren’t actually too bad—you can usually patch the hole with a dollar bill—but it’s something to watch for.

2) This is the funny one. Pumping tires is hard, so some people get the idea to use the free air at QT. Bicycle tires have higher pressure than car tires, but much lower volume, so that couple of minutes you spend filling a flat on your Toyota becomes a few seconds and POW! At least there’s a pay phone nearby. Don’t fill your bike tires at a gas station.

3) This is the annoying one. When replacing a tube, it’s easy to stuff it into the tire such that, rather than being the perfect, pliant doughnut of its design, it becomes pinched against something: the rim, the tire or maybe a scrunched up piece of itself. It’s hard to catch these, and the tube won’t necessarily fail right away. Maybe it’ll take five minutes, maybe it’ll take a week, but eventually the pressure in all the wrong places will take its toll and BANG! there’s a new hole in the tire.

I have committed sin #3 exactly twice.

I’ve already written about my first time. That was my first attempt at changing a tube, and inexperience was my downfall. Since then I have learned a new careful technique, and I have had no trouble except with the usual hazards of the road. An extra minute or two of examination as everything falls into place back on the rims can save a lot of trouble later on, and I’ve learned the movements well enough that I can quickly replace a tube without fear of blowouts. Except today.

Earlier in the week I picked up a tiny puncture of the weaselly sort that doesn’t release a steady stream but can drain fifty pounds of pressure over the course of a day or so. After refilling the tire a few times and denying that I had a problem, I finally got out a bucket last night and found those tiny, intermittent bubbles. I think it was glass again, or maybe some grit came in through the old glass hole. Whatevs, I patched it up and put the tube back in. I got cocky. I gave the TV more attention than the tire, and this afternoon I was greeted with that sound I won’t soon forget. While my first blowout just put a hole in the sidewall that probably could have been fitted with some kind of patch, this time the sidewall actually tore away from the bead, leaving a strip of bare steel and a flap of rubber that refused to stay inside the rim. Crap. How am I going to get home? Walking sucks, but I can’t use this thing. Can I? Could I have been better prepared for my own mistakes? I’m not about to carry a spare tire with me everywhere. This blows.

I probably could have gotten another couple of miles out of the tire by switching it to the front. I don’t believe I’ve ever had a flat front tire, probably because it doesn’t carry much weight, but I think my brain subconsciously vetoed this idea. It would have been a lot of pumping. Instead I tried riding on the bad tire where it was, using much less pressure than I should to keep the bulge from looking too bad and sticking to coasting on the sidewalks instead of riding in the road. I didn’t make it very far. I made it home on foot and on bus after the tube deflated again, and I have at home everything I need to replace the tire, but I don’t feel great about having to learn a lesson twice.

Ok, so I watched Notre Musique. I want to punch Godard in the face just for the horrible color filters he applied to the entire Purgatoire (it’s probably worth noting that Enfer was 10 minutes of pointlessly manipulated (color, focus, saturation) stock footage of war. I almost turned the thing off after about five minutes, and I wish I had.) segment, the main act of the movie. I get it, everyone’s numb with the assorted conflicts and pain of life, now can I have some red back sil vous plaît? The dude speaking Arabic in a French accent was a bit much. And the stilted exposition (exposing the theme, not the absent plot) where people recited ideas in whatever language caught their fancy with no regard to timing or other people speaking was a bit over the top. I expected a sad-clown-flipping-pancakes mess, but this felt like I was at a freaking Eyedrum poetry reading. I actually shouted at the television several times, something I rarely do, usually in response to a particularly obvious demonstration of the shot/countershot form explained earlier in (I think) Croatian (still with a French accent). This movie blows. No wonder everyone hates the French.

Creative Loafing, a local (not actually local) weekly rag and the best source for hooker ads (sidenote: I saw an ad for absinthe in the last issue I picked up. Absinthe is kind of funny in that it’s legal to possess or manufacture in the US, but you can’t sell it. I decided to visit the link for the hell of it, and they’re trying to market the stuff like it’s the new pot. It’s not legal to ship alcohol to Georgia, a fact not mentioned by the site which in itself gives it an air of head shop indirection, and the site charges like a hundred damn dollars for a bottle. I had absinthe once, and it’s really not all that special. It made me feel drunker than I probably should have given the quantity, but there were no visions of fairies or anything like that. I do kind of want one of those fancy slotted spoons, though.), held a beer festival this weekend. They kicked all the bums out of Woodruff park, set up a bunch of tents and a stage and tried to have a nice little shindig. I visited with the goal of trying a bunch of new beers, but I feel like I was in the minority in that I wasn’t there just to get drunk. It wasn’t very exciting as a party, but there were a bunch of different beers available.

I forgot my little notebook, so I had to depend on memory and text messages to myself in order to get a more permanent idea of what I was drinking. Despite my goals, I did feel pretty buzzed after the first hour or two of drinking sample-sized beers, so my memorization efforts didn’t last very long. Regardless, I did try some new things. The first thing I had, a Thomas Creek red ale, was horrible. It tasted like it had gone bad. Maybe the heat had some part in this, but I have no interest in trying their products again. The Terrapin imperial pilsner wasn’t that great, either, but it wasn’t terrible, and I’m a bit more forgiving to that brewery since I already know I love their rye ale and the Wake-and-Bake imperial stout. The Thomas Creek junk might have also still been in my cup at that point, since there was only a single plastic cup issued to each attendee, and I didn’t find the free water booth (Flo, I think, from the feet of the Smoky Mountains or some crap like that) until around the third beer. The Flying Dog beer I had was also kind of dull. I can’t remember which variety it was. I kind of suspect that they’re trying to make a name for themselves based on their fancy graphics over good beer, so I’m not terribly interested in revisiting them, either.

The first good beer I had was Dogfish Head’s Raison d’Etre. I had the Dogfish Head 90 Minute IPA at a bar one time, and I was very impressed by it. Though I find the idea of imperial ales interesting (probably that fascination with history again), adding more hops and alcohol so a beer can survive a trip across the ocean, I don’t generally like IPA’s. I do like imperial stouts, and I still remember the first time I bought a Samuel Smith imperial stout, shocked when I poured it into a snifter I bought for the occasion only to find that the dark color of the bottle wasn’t from the glass, but IPA’s just taste weird to me. It’s not the bitterness; they just taste too thick, like I’m drinking some kind of beer syrup. The Dogfish Head IPA, on the other hand, seemed perfectly balanced, like I had found the Blue Mountain of imperial pale ales. The Raison d’Etre, on the other hand, is made in a more Belgian style, and it’s pretty alright. It’s no Chimay or anything, but it was tasty. I might try to find it and drink it in a more appropriate glass someday.

I did have an IPA by Highland, a brewery in Asheville, which was ok. I keep thinking that my fear of IPA’s is unfounded, and though this one was decent, it didn’t do much to change my mind. After that I had a Dragon Stout, which is apparently made in Jamaica. I like stouts in general, and this was a pretty good one. It had a very strong cherry taste. I’ll have to try it away from the plastic cup to get a better idea of the smell.

I was really surprised by the variety of beers represented. I realize that Atlanta beers can’t run a festival, since that only gives you two bottling breweries plus Terrapin if you’re feeling generous, but it still seemed odd to see things like Guinness and Coopers there. I tried a lot of different new beers, avoiding the ones I was already familiar with, but nothing really stood out as something special. There were some non-beer things at the north end of the park. A Trader Vic’s stand sold me a Mai Tai for a dollar, which was pretty nice, some Louisiana-themed restaurant gave me three surprisingly spicy crawfish, and there was some stand I visited on my way out that gave me three different red wines, the driest of which I kind of liked. I wish I could remember the name. It was French, and it started with a “B.” The two bands I saw were unremarkable.

Since I figure that drinking and driving is probably a bad idea, I at least cut down the time I spent in a car by parking at Medical Center and smartaing my way in with a bus route in mind should I actually end up in an undriveable state. I felt I was sober enough to drive home, and when I arrived back at Medical Center I encountered a woman struggling with some luggage. I figure I ought to do a good deed every now and then if I’m going to be wearing a Boy Scout belt every day, so I offered to help carry some stuff. It turned out that she had no idea where she was. She was certain that she parked at Medical Center a couple weeks back when she began her trip, but the path she remembered taking only made sense if she parked in the St. Joseph’s deck or at Dunwoody, and, besides, Medical Center isn’t a long-term lot. After talking to a MARTA employee for a little while she decided to try searching the St. Joseph’s lot and insisted that I stop carrying her suitcase. I felt kind of bad for just leaving her like that. I hope she found her car.

You know how sometimes it rains when the sun is out? Folk sure do have some funny sayings to attach to it.

When Kat passed through here a couple of days ago on the way to the ‘rents’ place, we somehow got onto the topic of sunshowers. She mentioned that a Bulgarian friend described it as the bears getting married. I remember one time during a sunshower, I was sitting in a car next to the baseball fields by the Aquadome, probably before or after one of Kat’s softball games. Some lady ran by through the rain with her children in tow and shouted, “The devil’s beatin’ his wife with a fryin’ pan!” That phrase struck with me, and I can’t help but remember that woman’s crazy yell and that imagery of demonic spousal abuse every time a few drops of rain fall while the sun is shining.

Kat sent me a wiki link today about sunshowers, and one of its references was a post to linguist list compiling some sunshower phrases across a variety of languages and cultures. The most common themes are animals getting married, animals giving birth and some sort of ruckus going on in hell. Baby Yaga gets involved at one point. Of course, the cheery Russians have to go off on their own tangent: “Rain with sunlight deplores a drowned corpse, or death of a man of virtue.” Rock on!

The sun isn’t supposed to be out when it rains. That’s just not the way things usually work. We know why and how it happens, of course, but that doesn’t take away any of the mystery or awe in this upheaval of the norm. Regardless of the angle between the cloud and the sun, sunshowers are signifiers of something gone wrong, just as the beauty of a rainbow shows us that Noah finally found land, or that there might be a pot of gold if you’re lucky, or that things are about to get totally fabulous. Science can, and should, do what it wants to describe and understand these phenomena, but it can’t take away the wonder and our need for poetry to cope with such an event. I think it’s great and amazing that every culture has its own myth and symbols for this occasional and strangely specific event. I do feel kind of sorry for the devil’s wife, though.

So my shaving stuff arrived last week. In addition to the old-fashioned safety razor I bought a while back, I now have a brush, a stand to hold the brush while it drys, a mug, a cake of bay rum scented soap and some new blades made by Feather, a Japanese company, which are supposed to be sharp as ninja’s sword. The blades are a little more expensive, about 60¢ apiece, but they are pretty damn sharp, and the one I’ve been using for the past week doesn’t seem to have yet lost any of its edge. Granted, I don’t have a very thick beard, but those Gillette pieces of crap ended up in the trash after about five shaves, so I’m quite pleased. I can’t yet say how they compare to Merkur’s blades since I’m still trying to figure out what in the hell I’m doing. As for the change from Barbasol to a cake of soap, man, it feels good. It really is the best of both worlds. I’m being alls kinda old-school, so there aren’t more macho methods of removing hair from my face short of a straight razor or a Crocodile Dundee knoife, and it leaves my skin all soft and smooth without drying it out or leaving a weird oily residue. And then I wrangle some cattle and fight a bear with my silky chin.

The biggest problem with the safety razor and brush is that very little I know about shaving applies anymore. I found some videos made by some guy on Youtube about shaving, and I did have the good sense to watch them before getting out the brush. I kind of wish I’d had his advice before I tried the new razor. Even after I started using this dude’s technique, it took me a couple of days before I could shave my neck without getting a little razor burn. I think I’m getting the hang of holding the razor at the right angle and shaving in a pattern that’s efficient and not too harsh, and the wet lather feels a lot better than the canned cream. I end up with a much thinner lather than the guy in the videos, but I think that’s just because I’m using a soap while he’s using a cream. The soap works well enough, and the bay rum scent sure is nice, but I might have to try a cream in order to compare. As for the brush, I’m not totally sure what to think yet. There are a lot of different grades of brushes, divided by material among those made with synthetic fibers, boar hair and badger hair. There are different grades of badger hair—pure, best, and super or silvertip or something like that—and I got one from the bottom of of the badgers (badger badger badger badger), a Vulfix Pure something or another. Internet says that Vulfix is on the Isle of Man, but the logo on the brush says it’s made in England. Is the Isle of Man a country or not? The best I can tell from lazy research is that they’re associated with the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, but they do their own thing. I guess that means that, politically, they’re more like Australia than Wales. Maybe. Their flag is weird. Anyhow, the synthetics were tempting for a second, since they aren’t made of animals, but you know what? Screw the badgers. I want a good shave, and nature has made some fibers a lot nicer than nylon or whatever goes into those things. I have a hard time judging the up-front cost of an item against its expected lifespan, especially when I don’t know if I’ll like it or not, so I decided not to spend a hundred freaking dollars on a brush and got one of the cheap ones. It works about as one would expect, but it’s just a tiny bit prickly.

I haven’t yet made up my mind on aftershave. Video dude says I should toss my alcohol-based Old Spice (shut up, I like Old Spice), but slapping a nice astringent on my face after those two or three passes with a sharp metal blade doesn’t seem to me like such a bad idea. Besides, I like the smell.

Since I don’t think this entry is long enough yet, I’m going to talk about movies now. I’ve been perusing the the foreign section of Blockbuster lately trying to increase my level of annoying pretentiousness, and I’ve had three recent rentals from there: a Japanese film, a Swedish film and a French film. The Japanese movie was Seven Samurai (????). I own a copy of another of Kurosawa’s films, Yojimbo, and from that I’ve decided that I really like samurai movies. I learned about Yojimbo because it’s the movie that A Fistful of Dollars totally ripped off, and, having watched them both, I agree with the court’s assessment that Leone was totally infringing all up ons. They’re the same movie, but, more importantly, they might as well be the same genre. Samurai movies are just spaghetti westerns in disguise. Or maybe the other way around. It doesn’t matter. Samurai movies and Western movies are the same thing, and I like me some Westerns, therefore I must like me some samurai movies. Seven Samurai was a one of Kurosawa’s big epic samurai movies, but my searches for it in stores have only turned up $40 Criterion copies. I don’t really want to pay $40 for a movie, so I rented it, and it was pretty badass. One thing I found interesting was that the trailer included on the DVD tells you the ending right up front. Four of the samurai die and they totally save the town but they’re still all moody and brooding at the end (warning: spoilers). There’s a place for suspense and surprise, but it doesn’t apply to all movies. I think that the fascination with keeping the essential details of a film secret is often damaging to the appreciation of a story. Rather than needing to watch something twice, you could just read or watch a synopsis and get the same effect the first time through. I wonder if that demand for suspense is a cultural thing? Not all movies are about the end. This one is about the middle.

The Swedish film is The Seventh Seal (imdb says “Det sjunde inseglet”, but the title screen was in English, so I don’t know what the deal is), a rumination on death and nothingness by Ingmar Bergman. Firstly, watching a movie in Swedish was kind of weird. The foreign-people-language movies I own are in French, Spanish and Japanese, and I don’t have any trouble watching those with subtitles. With French and Spanish I can understand just a little bit of what’s being spoken, but it’s enough that I can keep myself synchronized between the voices and the text. With Japanese I don’t understand a damn thing outside of “hai,” so the words and text are disconnected. I read the text and the speech becomes a sort of background that adds to the ambiance but has nothing to do with comprehending what’s being said. Swedish, on the other hand, is a Germanic language, similar in background to Old English, so it has a small intersection with English but none of the Romance bits I would find familiar, making it just barely recognizable enough that I can tell when a spoken word or two matches the subtitles and start to question whether the text is lying. It was difficult to keep up.

The plot of the movie was familiar since I’ve seen it parodied so many times: some knight or something plays chess for his life with Death, whose character embodies everything I know about Swedish film. Seriously, Death is hardcore. The image on the cover is the reason I picked the movie.

Anyhow, there are a lot of symbols and whatnot, but the message is pretty straightforward: God, if he exists, is punishing you, and the only thing that death can bring is nothing. It’s very nihilistic. I’m afraid I didn’t pay enough attention to my lessons on Kierkegaard to comment sensibly on the knights of faith and knights of infinite resignation as they appear in this film, but it still didn’t seem very difficult. Maybe Gravity’s Rainbow has spoiled overwrought art for me. Knight dude believed in nothing but wanted to find faith as an escape from the coldness of reality, squire dude believed in nothing and was comfortable with it, and actor dude had faith, which was his salvation though it also was a source of fear and ignorance and caused those around him to doubt his sanity. Was actor dude right? I guess that’s one of the ponderables the movie provides. I think it was saying no. I did not see any flat-packed furniture anywhere.

The French movie is Notre Musique, by Jean-Luc Godard. I’ve never seen any of M. Godard’s movies, but his is a name I indelibly associate with pretentious art flicks. I want to see if his reputation is true. Notre Musique is one of his newer movies, and I haven’t yet watched it. I wanted to get Masculin Féminin, but I couldn’t find it. I hope this new thing is as much representative of the nouvelle vague.

I’ve been continuing my examination of the ways of cocktails, though I’ve been doing it out of order after that experience with the Campari. Besides, I don’t have most of the assorted perishable garnishes, and I don’t even have the right knives for making a lemon twist, and for some of these drinks the garnish is the most exciting part. I’ve decided that I’m ok with vermouth in martinis, and I don’t see the point of making them with vodka. I still haven’t tried any of the “After-dinner” class of drinks, mostly because those seem to require a whole new class of ingredients, and I’m running out of counter space.

One recurring ingredient that has given me some amount of confusion is “gomme syrup.” This has been the first difficulty I’ve found in trying to follow the stumbling, crooked path of my forefathers. The idea of mixing a drink with both sweeteners and bitters has been around for a couple hundred years, and most of the recipes on the IBA page are probably at least a hundred years old. Fashion has changed, and though most of the older drinks are familiar to bartenders—you don’t see many people ordering a Manhattan anymore, but you could probably get one if you asked nicely and not even have to explain what goes into it—some alterations have been made even to these old recipes to bring them more in line with what people actually drink these days. The Manhattan you may order, for instance, probably wouldn’t be made with rye, because who drinks rye anymore? Bars might not have that stuff just lying around.

As for gomme syrup, it’s a sugar syrup containing gum arabic as an emulsifier to keep the sugar from recrystallizing. Anything that may have once contained gomme syrup is probably going to use simple syrup, instead. I found some guy’s blag that explained gomme syrup as well as his attempt to make some. While simple syrup, being a super-saturated solution, tends to get some solid bits in it, gomme syrup is supposed to be smooth as candy, as well as a little thicker, giving drinks a silky texture and helping them go down that much easier. The problem is that no one makes it anymore as far as I can tell, so the only option is to get your hands on some gum arabic and make your own. Food-grade gum arabic isn’t particularly easy to find, either, but the aforementioned article suggests health food stores, and if I fail at that there’s some on the Internet. I think I have a new quest.

I’m not sure how well things will go at health food stores. I don’t like those places to begin with (they smell like hippie), and I guess the US has implemented some new trade sanctions against Sudan, the world’s largest gum arabic supplier, on account of that Darfur thing, and that might be the sort of cause that hippie shops rally behind. Maybe I’ll just go ahead and order some online.