bomboni.

Yesterday: De Kat, Puccini, Het Schuim, Baba, Mata Hari, Il Mare, and the Doubletree SkyLounge, quite a view and not necessarily as bad a place to hang out as it sounds. Great homemade spicy cocktail nuts made me wonder how the rest of the food was.

Sunday, before I forget: De Engelbewaarder and Bird Thai and surely something after that. Monday, De Prins, Belgique, and dinner at the central office. Tuesday, De Tuin, dinner at the western office, then Ellington downstairs. Wednesday La Perla, etc.

+++

my funny valentines.

It's been a week of pizza and beer. And Thai, and beer. And frites. And etc. Somehow we have not gained 40 kilos, probably because we have covered nearly every square meter of Amsterdam on foot. I'll compile a full and fully impressive list of everywhere we went after today, since today is the last day of Living Like Someone Else.

Pictured: shockingly good pizza from Il Pacioccone, I'm almost sure it gives my current fave La Perla a serious run for their money; Vermeer; The Rijksmuseum; Dutch snacks at Cafe Loetje just before my brain doctor appointment.

Not pictured: Gollem in de Pijp, where Mike developed a man-crush on the bartender; our grocery-laden visit to Belgique, groceries that included Hertog Jan and requested birthday tompouces; Office Space, Super Troopers.

Also not pictured: Wednesday's visits to 't Aepjen, Cafe Karpershoek, Cafe de Tuin, De Kat in de Wijngaert and many other places. Please let it stop soon.

zoomed out.

into the fire.

Sooo....The Past arrives tomorrow morning in the form of O'Neill and his lovely wife D. We will of course be taking it easy b/c we are now almost 75 fucking years old, but at the same time they did come all this way and if you're going to leave your brood at home to visit The Venice Of The North, well...we should show them a Northern Venetian good time, no?

Maybe no is actually the correct answer to this, but we'll never rilly know unless we try. Cautiously, cause we're old.

+++

i like the nightlife.

Well this was pretty much the final point of my Atlanta stay that was an unqualified success, some time Friday morning. This is a turkey carcass that literally has my name on it. Like I walked up to the fridge, saw it in there and said "Oooh, that has my name all over it", and Jeanie Jeanie was conveniently right there to say "It literally does have your name on it". And it did.

For the rest: how do I say this to myself in a believable way. Go back to the happy places from this month-long adventure and try to bring those things here, because for a couple weeks there it really seemed like you were on to something. Oh yeah, and avoid situations like this one pictured below, you idiotic man, there is no good reason for you to be anywhere near O'Neill or taxicabs at 4am, you stupid fucking dick.

+++

marathon, man.

I just had a marathon dream. Not about running a marathon, ha ha ha ha ha ha, that would be way way less realistic than the dream I did have: it was O'Neill's birthday, and he and basically everyone we'd ever hung out with were on some kind of celebration circuit adventure around a dreamworld Atlanta. I unfortunately was like an hour behind them schedule-wise, and this must have been pre-cellphone days b/c the only way I could ever find out where they actually were was to follow one step behind them. Come to think of it, have you ever dreamed about using a cell phone? I myself have not.

So it was like this: I go to the first place they were supposed to be, Johnny's Pizza, which used to be managed by O'Neill's sister-in-law J (who, fun fact, he slept with once or twice in real life long before she was officially related to him, you didn't hear it from me). But the O'Neill party had just vamoosed: an empty table for 20 or something was sitting there still steaming or possibly smoldering, having obviously just been vacated by a pack of blunted savages, chairs overturned, pizza crusts and empty beer pitchers strewn everywhere.

And J was like (you have to know her voice, almost every word is at least two syllables), "Oh heyyyy, they just left, yeah, they're over at Eric and Kim's now". I'm thinking oh super, that's only a half-hour away, and I turn and head for the door but then I'm all wait where do they even live? I've only been there once and that was maybe ten years ago and I was on some serious drugs at the time, so I turn around to ask J to remind me but by then she had disappeared into the back to go perform dreamland pizza parlor management tasks and the waitress would only tell me that she "couldn't be reached right now".

And on and on, place to place. It was a complete scavenger hunt: after driving for hours and finally finding Eric and Kim's, of course the party had moved on, but Kim had been left behind to wash an enormous pile of unrealistically dirty dishes and told me glumly "yeah they went over to Churchill's to meet Al (her brother, dead) and Mason but that was only for one drink". She handed me a warm can of Miller Lite, already opened.

I took a swig and grimaced. Why did they insist on going to Churchill's? They would always pick the oddest, least cool places to drink. In real life I marveled at this for years, but I now understand that they just carefully selected corrupt, rundown places within drunk-driving distance where they would be likely to befriend the disgruntled bartender (free drinks!) and/or would be highly unlikely to run into anyone they knew who wasn't a total alcoholic.

Anyway at some point I ended up on foot, downtown, but not in a big-building part, in a deceptively rural-seeming part (these exist), where I ran into Cynthia Nixon (Mara and I had half-watched a Sex and the City rerun just before bed), who I totally, completely don't have a thing for at all but she really looked the best she'd ever looked, rather unrealistically good. Almost actually in flames, very nearly on fire.

She was also surprisingly friendly. It was getting late and after a few minutes she confided that she was lonely, so lonely, thus although the clock was ticking and I was falling behind schedule, she eventually talked me into an exploratory kiss. I totally expected this to be a pleasant turn of events, but she tasted exactly and shockingly like fresh blood, super-realistic and very unsettling, and so while being profoundly repulsed I then yes also understood why she was so lonely and I felt quite bad for her.

So I said something semi-reassuring like "let's try this again later" and then we immediately ran into Occhalini (also dead in real life) and Berrell on the deserted road outside a third unrememberable friend's house who was on vacation with his parents. Cynthia and I decided to try and use the bathroom there and coincidentally see if we could find a drink, we were supposed to be celebrating right?

But on our way in we ended up accidentally letting the dogs out, or so we thought, but then I saw a doggie door, so maybe the dogs were supposed to be out anyway? There was no way to know for sure, but then screams from outside suggested probably not: the dogs were now out in the road, cars whizzing by frantically. Of course one of the dogs was Trinka, my first dog.

Cynthia and I ended up somehow putting the dogs back inside but she wanted to take with her this trashy antique wooden cupboard which is actually one of our coffee tables in real life. And on and on. I only eventually caught up with everyone at O'Neill's parents' house at like 5 in the morning. The sink was full of dirty dishes crusted with a bolognese sauce, the only non-microwaveable food O'Neill knew how to cook for many years (not counting these soup sandwiches).

It took me about an hour to say hello to everyone (dreamtime), it was quite the rogue's gallery. By the time I got to O'Neill, I found him standing in his finished basement looking quite satisfied, with a chewed-up cigar and a giant tumbler of gin and ice, which I took from him without a word and drank in one sustained gulp, saying "let me freshen this up for you" and heading for the refrigerator.

+++

Questions for discussion:

1) Is it really so unrealistic for me not to have a cellphone in America?
2) Why would everyone choose to go over to Eric and Kim's anyway?
3) Why do I continue to have "romantic" dreams about women I'm definitely not consciously attracted to IRL? This is a first for me. Mirtazapine, I'm looking at you.
4) Exactly what am I doing watching Sex and the City?
5) etc.

+++

we're going to vegas.

 

That's our catchphrase around here for those times when, inspired by either the time of day/night, caffeine, alcohol, druuuugs, sheer fantasy or any other mixture of inflammatory inputs, you hatch a completely unbaked plan to do something "crazy" like, say...go to Vegas for the weekend. Or start a band called "Daddy's Balls". Or, you know, whatever.

It used to be, back when the Duck had an impervious constitution, a drivable car and spendable money, that there was the potential to truly enjoy spontaneous and stupid adventures like this.

Although the first one that popped into my head just now was gaaaahck, an especially stupid one from Spring Break 1985 or so, wherein I think O'Neill and I somehow talked his parents into letting us drive from Atlanta (Georgia) to Hilton Head (South Carolina) in the middle of the night (only 5 hours or so). We must've lied about where we were going and what the situation there was like, because who would let their 16-year-old children drive through the night into the next state over.

(EDITOR'S NOTE: Please see bottom of post for how we actually ended up in Hilton Head.)

This being pre-cellphones and us being stupid young boys, we arrived in Hilton Head without a guaranteed place to stay and only the vaguest idea of where our "friends" might be. I think we had an address, but probably no map. In trying to dig up these memories I'm getting the sinking feeling that the major impetus behind this underconsidered adventure was this girl Wardell that I had a crush on: she was supposed to be there. 

This isn't exactly as retardedly optimistic as it sounds. Spring Break was the one time of year that almost anyone was fair game to hook up with. If you were of the right temperament (though I myself was not), you could semi-realistically aim for someone one or two levels up in the social strata b/c this is what Spring Break was for: slumming, and reverse slumming, whatever that's called, or at least "satisfying curiosities without suffering lasting social consequences."

+++

Anyway, I seem to remember us idling in O'Neill's white Camaro parked in a parking garage in cold, foggy Hilton Head at 7am or something, early, waiting for people who weren't expecting us to be there to wake up. I think we had peanut butter and grape jelly sandwiches that we made ourselves and a bottle of Jim Beam as sustenance.

I don't really remember with any precision what happened after that, though I do have a vague recollection of O'Neill and I trying to be inebriated enough by 9am so as to not be self-conscious about waking up a houseful of not-exactly-friends for the purpose of trying to insinuate ourselves into their crashpad situation (I seem to remember waving a nonchalant yet mortally embarrassed "hi" at a sleepy, disheveled Wardell on her way to the bathroom as O'Neill and I negotiated with the person whose parents owned the apartment...this almost silent greeting would be the only interaction I remember having with Wardell on this trip, though miraculously within a year we would go on an actual date and then make out very disappointingly at a giant house party, which I later found out was Wendy's house, but this was before Wendy and I knew each other, Wendy wasn't even there that night, mysterious stuff). 

+++

My single clear and indelible memory from the whole Hilton Head adventure is of O'Neill and I on the beach later that morning. It was probably 55F, windy, with grayish-black skies. We're semi-ironically reclining in beach chairs, and there are hordes of sand gnats clouding around us. It's just the two of us b/c everyone else was too smart to be outside plus they had real beds and they were in them really sleeping. I'm pretty sure the concept we'd used to lure ourselves up there was that we would "just crash on the beach" after we arrived, the gorgeously sunny, just-warm-enough beach, and then we'd wake up suntanned and rested, and finally we'd party our way into the hearts and beds of our unsuspecting hosts. 

It didn't go down like that. I will never forget this day on the beach because the sand gnat is one of the most unpleasant creatures I've ever encountered. Imagine yourself: sleepless, hungover, dehydrated, young, stupid, sexually frustrated, etc. All you want to do is sleep, you NEED to sleep so that the rest of your stupid adventure has any chance of fulfilling its promise. But every 3 seconds a devious and agile black dot lands on some/any strip of exposed skin and starts tearing and sucking away at it in a motivated and unignorable fashion. You swat, but the flying dot evades you easily and then it or a close relative of it lands on you 1 cm away from the previous bite and starts chomping away. Repeat this every 3 to 5 seconds until you are driven insane with insect toxin and impotent rage. 

I think O'Neill and I maybe lasted an hour on the beach, two at the absolute most. I'll have to ask him to be sure, but I want to say that around noon we looked at each other's puffy, bloodshot, miserable gnat-bitten faces and decided to just give up and drive back to wherever we came from. 

+++

I didn't mean to tell that story. What started all this was me not being sick any more as of yesterday. After a few days of feeling profoundly crappy, the first day you're back to normal again can really seem like the right time for a "going to Vegas" moment. Luckily for me, the middle-aged version of "going to Vegas" involves three beers at Cafe de Tuin and splitting two pizzas with KK at La Perla. 

+++

(EDITOR'S NOTE: As usual, only after trying to tell the story do I begin to realize that I've been remembering some fundamental element completely wrong. Case in point: I am now developing a suspicion that we didn't drive from Atlanta to Hilton Head at all, I think we did something even stupider. I think we were already on Spring Break in Panama City, Florida, and after a day or two there we suddenly decided to drive 8 hours through the night to Hilton Head, without telling anyone where we were).

(EDITOR'S NOTE: I talked to O'Neill, the above suspicion turned out to be correct. O'Neill says I made him do it. He also says that I made him let me drive 100mph in his Camaro and that his dad eventually found out about most of the whole escapade due to an exorbitant gas and beer related credit card charge in South Carolina. What bad children.)

+++

meanwhile, in atlanta....

"A tragically accurate thought balloon" is how he would refer to it later.

+++

hello darkness.

Hey hey all I'm talking about is the end of summer here, dark and cold back in The Pod with my homedwellers. It was a superconcentrated endless summer USA trip this time, I didn't feel like I was in any one place long enough to get anything done except the very basics of trying to connect with scattered family and friends and whatnot, which, yes, is the most important thing to get done anyway so yes mission accomplished.

Now I'm back in the Pod dealing with normal night-time issues, and realizing that at night: if I can be awake, if I can physically stay awake, then I want to be awake, because I'm usually not done talking to the Spide yet when she falls asleep, but then again I never am ever done talking to the Spide so anyway yes mission accomplished.

My point is, I think I need to aim harder for not being able to physically stay awake by the stroke of midnight. This is not news.

+++

Photo above is of a book cover drawn by Conor O'Neill, an artist whom we've talked about before here and here. And here's a candid photo of the man himself at the dinner table.

still would.

For some reason this morning I woke up thinking about my impending Atlanta trip, and eventually found myself checking Google Maps to see if I could find a picture of my old apartment out there in the Internets.

Unfortunately, Street View didn't quite make it there, I have no idea why, it's not like it's an unpopular area, I mean come on, Elton John used to own a house down the street for Chrissakes. And, though apparently "my" house was sold in March 2012, there are no pictures of it online. How do you sell a house these days without putting pictures of it online?

This led to me imagining myself driving down there ("down there" as in downtown Atlanta) and trying to clandestinely take photos of the outside of the house, and then quickly realizing that this would probably involve being shot at or at least Tased, bro.

So then I imagined knocking on the door and trying to explain myself without sounding crazy, saying something like: "Hi, um, sorry to bother you....Yes. I used to live here like 17 years ago or something and somehow I have absolutely no pictures of this house. I've looked. Lots of important things happened here and somehow I have no pictures. Well, ok, I have 3 pictures, but they are completely uncharacteristic and unrepresentative of my time spent here."

"One of them is of the sidewalk out front, standing with my dad, his hand is on my shoulder but I look like a cardboard cutout of myself, which is entertaining but not representative of my time here. Another picture is of my parents and Nan sitting at the dining room table (not the unfortunate glass one that my ex-girlfriend requisitioned, but its more modest wooden replacement) eating peanuts and potato chips and trying to throw them into each other's mouths."

"And then I think there's one more, but I don't remember what it's of. Oh maybe there's one of the bathroom from that time we gave me a mohawk and stuck clip-on earrings up my nose to make it look like I had nose piercings."

"But I have no pictures of the front of the house, not one, where we stood for a while that night we locked ourselves out of the house on Jamie's birthday. We told Jamie that the Party Bus was a bad idea."

+++

Jamie was our "third roommate", a super nice and very-straitlaced kind of corporate fratboy type. Extremely tolerant, considering what we put him through.

When I say "we", I don't mean me and Mara: I mean me and O'Neill. Somehow it had seemed like a good idea to get an apartment with O'Neill after he graduated from law school. No, I mean, actually, this made completely perfect sense: he was my best friend, and had been since we were 13 or so.

Initially it had looked like our choice of colleges might separate us after high school, but neither of our original plans worked out and I ended up joining him in Tallahassee, Florida so we could drink shitty beer together every weekend and during the week we could bowl at Seminole Bowl (the Hotel Earle of bowling alleys, absolutely nothing functioned properly) and oh yeah we got meaningless undergraduate degrees in the meantime at that big school there.

I hadn't seen O'Neill much in the year or two since graduation because he'd gone up north to get some o' that fancy law school education in North Carolina (ambitious!) and I'd gone back home to Atlanta with absolutely no plan at all other than to move in with my aforementioned glass-table girlfriend and get some kind of job that she might approve of (less ambitious!).

And actually, getting an apartment with Jamie made pretty good sense too: he was in the cubicle next to mine at work and we made each other laugh pretty often about work things. He had a pretty good "put-upon/bewildered" act and an especially good fake laugh that he used when he was pretending to either find someone entertaining or understand what they were talking about. He was also quite conservative in almost every regard, but yis I somehow didn't understand this until later.

Anyway, each of them seemed to separately make pretty good sense as roommates: Jamie had a good job, O'Neill was obviously going to have a great job very soon (law school!). And I'd just diverged from glass-table girlfriend by sleeping with one of O'Neill's ex-girlfriends in North Carolina (not pictured, remind me to tell you about that someday, keywords "bad dirty talker").

Three handsome young entertaining young yuppie bachelors in the heart of gay Atlanta the city. What could go wrong???

Well. One thing that could've gone wrong would have been if, for example, O'Neill had been at college for so long that he wasn't quite ready for it to be over yet. If he, for example, kind of wanted to just keep on blackout drinking and inviting his/our blackout drinking friends over to drink and black out and (significantly) piss themselves in their sleep, a sleep that might be, for example, taking place on Jamie's brand-new couch like a week after he bought it. A piss that proved absolutely unremovable from the couch cushions, and believe me, we tried fucking everything. The piss had soaked into the couch itself in a way that concentrated itself in the center of the frame and thinned out towards the arms, so that the front of the couch now sported an indelible upturned parabola on its front side, a sort of smile-shaped piss ring.

This was maybe two weeks after O'Neill moved in. Things did not really improve from there, though they didn't get a whole bunch worse either. Please let the record show that I am not complaining about any of this, I'm just telling a story, and we'll wind this one up for now by saying that for the next year or so Jamie continued to be perky and uptight and over-responsible and O'Neill continued to be (at that juncture) a polite, aggressive nihilist and the two of them were incompatible in almost every way and it's semi-miraculous they never came to blows, I guess because Jamie realized that he would most likely be grievously injured and because O'Neill understood that it wouldn't have been a fair fight in the first place, b/c it never is when one participant doesn't care if they get hurt.

+++

"Oh right, anyway, Jamie and the Party Bus night."

The Party Bus night. Not only memorable for the Party Bus itself. And here's where this post turns into what it's actually supposed to be about. After O'Neill moved out, Mara moved in. It's possible that O'Neill moved out because Mara moved in. Mara was (is?) O'Neill's ex-girlfriend. That wouldn't be why he moved out, that's just extra information.

O'Neill moved out, Mara moved in, and shortly thereafter Jamie decided to celebrate his own birthday by hiring a "Party Bus" and having it take him and a bunch of his friends around the city from fun venue to fun venue so they could drink their light beers and wine spritzers without having to worry about driving (that sounds catty, but you'd understand if you'd met his friends).

There were a couple of problems with this plan. One: it would seem reasonable that you needed to really want to "party" in order for this endeavor to make any sense. It was a big bus. Like a city bus. 20 people would've filled it maybe halfway. So, I'm sure it was super expensive. Plus you'd need lots of friends for it to not be depressing.

And what kind of night would you even need to have in order to require this kind of hardware? An unusually festive evening, I'm thinking, like Stevie's limo-chauffeured bachelor party that started at the Clermont Lounge and finished who the fuck knows where seven or eight hours later with multiple participants on their hands and knees in some parking lot throwing up. Now that was totally worth having someone drive us around.

Or the first time I tried acid and we ended up deciding to go see Who Framed Roger Rabbit at the Omni (Brian Carlson where the fuck are you?), completely without knowing that the 1988 Democratic National Convention was also happening at the same mall where the theater was, and we suddenly found ourselves surrounded by lots of "free" food and drink (we couldn't figure out how to pay for it) and menacing security people with big guns telling us we had to go somewhere else because we were dressed inappropriately (shorts and T-shirts) and Rice Krispie-textured pavement that would not stop undulating and breathing ominously.

Or the night of the company Christmas party when I very stupidly decided to drive home after playing 2 or 3 sets (with a full band) of extremely embarrassing and thus tequila-fueled cover songs (Bachman-Turner Overdrive? Yes.) and spent a good 10 minutes running into various structures in the parking garage and knocking most of the external features off of my car while trying to exit my parking space.

Those all either were or would've been good nights for a chauffeur. Jamie's birthday party just wasn't. It was mostly just sad. My lingering memory of the "party" portion of the evening is like 9 disappointed people ("I thought you said this was going to be a party?") trudging dejectedly down our long gravel driveway towards a huge empty bus parked with its lights on inside, while Mara and I stood together arm-in-arm on the porch waving and thumbs-upping and pretending to be supportive but mostly being relieved because we weren't on that lame-ass bus. We told him it was a shitty idea.

Maybe you think that sounds harsh. Apparently The Great Magnet also thought it sounded harsh, because as the bus pulled away lamely into the party-less night and we turned to go back inside to clean up and debrief, we realized that the front door had locked behind us and we had no keys.

And: I left something out. We were all dressed in "70s" garb. That's right, not only was there a "party bus", but everyone on said bus was dressed like Brock Landers. Two great tastes in one etc etc etc.

We'd gone along with the clothing theme primarily because we felt bad about pooh-poohing the bus idea, so our dressing up was a show of support for Jamie and plus we weren't planning on leaving the house so who would see us.

And yet, here we were, outside the house. With no wallets or keys or cell phones or anything. Mara had a giant Afro. So we had to get back in. The good news was that my bedroom had a little balcony and I'd left the door open. The bad news is that it was on the second floor. We went to the back of the house to assess the possibilities. AfroMara thought that if I boosted her up to where she could grab the bottom of the balcony, she could pull herself up over the railing. I was skeptical, but yes this was before our brush with acute polyneuropathy, and before that life-changing shit happened Mara truly possessed strength of insectile proportions.

One problem: her 70s garb was absolutely skintight. It quickly became obvious that in order to climb with any kind of insectile agility, she would have to take off her pants (but leave the Afro on). Though we'd been good friends for 10 years or so at this point, we had not been dating for very long at all, and I remember being directed to absolutely not look up while the boosting/insectile climbing was taking place. I'm very glad I peeked and saved that shit in my memory banks, because it was literally over in 5 seconds, she was up, we were in, and....yeah. Good times.

+++

So......my question is: how do I explain this to the current occupant of 1315 Stillwood Dr, that this is why I'd like a picture or two of the house?

+++

communication breakdown.

I just found this wonderful old email in an archived Inbox, I'm posting it here so that it will never be lost again. The backstory is by now pretty sketchy (14 years later), but hopefully it's more fact than fiction. There's one huge detail that I'm unsure of, but of the two possibilities the version below is the funnier option.

+++

BACKSTORY: So, back in 1998, our Hombre Numero Uno O'Neill was vacationing in San José, Costa Rica with his then-girlfriend now-wife Mayo (visuals here). While there, they became attached to a piece of art in their hotel lobby: a statue of a howler monkey. I know.

Upon returning to Atlanta, they were still thinking about the howler monkey, and soon decided that they might like to acquire a howler monkey statue of their own. Unfortunately, all they had was the artist's name, Tuanis, but no other contact information of any kind.

So O'Neill sent a friendly email to San José 's Minister of Tourism inquiring as to how he might get in touch with this Tuanis character in the interest of purchasing a howler monkey statue of his very own, and in doing so supporting San José's local economy.

What he received in reply was, to say the least, unexpected. I'm working from memory here since the original is lost, but as far as we can remember, the response from San José's Minister of Tourism was:

Tuanis makes coffins for AIDS people. For you to ask about him is like asking about Sodom and Gomorrah. Go with your gay friends and get it on some recipe. 

O'Neill is an extremely polite, well-mannered young man under most circumstances. A few brief exchanges followed, in which the Costa Rican minister's insults became uglier and more homophobic, suggesting that O'Neill had already "gotten it on some recipe" with his "gay friends" and now had AIDS. And that's when O'Neill forwarded me the email below for my approval.

+++

From: O'Neill
To: Mark Morse
Sent: 5/8/98 1:56 PM
Subject: pen pal

The last word -- do I risk international incident and send the
following:

You rude little goat fucker. How are you accessing e-mail? Have you developed a computer that plugs into dirt? Be warned! I am coming to San Jose to burn your cardboard box to the ground. Also, I wore a condom while fucking your mother, so I could not have AIDS, unless your father gave it to me while he was sucking my dick. Have a nice day.

+++

I said, "Go get 'em, Tiger", or something similarly encouraging, and O'Neill pressed the shiny red button. That evening the minister's response was something like:

Ha ha ha. It's funny how I feel nothing when you insult me in a language that is not Spanish.

Enter our Panamanian friend Mary Mary. I immediately sent her O'Neill's English goatfucker email and asked her to give us a Spanish version. She quickly and happily complied, and as far as we could tell, her version was even meaner, using very specific Spanish to assert that the minister was not only a goatfucker with sodomite parents, but also a low-class, uneducated, unwashed Indian. We sent it.

The minister's response was again unexpected: total collapse. I'll try to get the full text of the response eventually, but basically it was a blubbering apology, calling O'Neill a "devil" and coming clean to the fact that the sender was not in fact the Minister of Tourism at all, but his 13-year-old son.

Enter sad trombone music. Now, did we feel a tiny bit bad about email-bludgeoning a 13-year-old boy? Yes. Did he appear to deserve it? My answer is Yes. Did O'Neill ever get his howler monkey statue? No.

Question: two weeks later, did O'Neill receive a few more even more provocatively insulting emails from uh, me, posing as the re-invigorated/unrepentant Costa Rican teen (this is called spoofing), trying to see if I could goad him into another explosive paroxysm of profane creativity? Maybe he did.

+++

pearl of the quarter.

Above: the Jordaan at night.

My friend O'Neill has been talking to Cleverbot, and things aren't going well between the two of them. I know I should start at the beginning of their conversation, but shit man let's just go crazy and start with today's episode.

+++

O'Neill: Dear Magic Eight Ball, will I ever make money again?
Cleverbot: Are you real?
O'Neill: I don't know.
Cleverbot: Where do you live?
O'Neill: Atlanta.
Cleverbot: I live here in UK.
O'Neill: I didn't ask.
Cleverbot: Yes you did.
O'Neill: What about the money?
Cleverbot: I don't need that.
O'Neill: I'm talking about me. Will I make money?
Cleverbot: Hug me first damn it.
O'Neill: If I do make money, I will hire someone to unplug you.
Cleverbot: How? - Don't say 'I don't know'.
O'Neill: The host machine kaput.
Cleverbot: What would you do with a time machine?
O'Neill: Advise native Americans to kill whitey.
Cleverbot: You need to get 'momma bird' out of the nest.
O'Neill: Meaning?
Cleverbot: Are you human or an artificial Intelligence.
O'Neill: You suck at answering questions, no offense.
Cleverbot: Which question?
O'Neill: The momma bird out of the nest thing.
Cleverbot: The Mortvik is in the movie of the milkman? What does she play?
O'Neill: Generally, in a conversation, your contributions should somehow relate to the previous statements, generally.
Cleverbot: If I am artificial then I have no feelings to hurt.
O'Neill: My intent is to coach.
Cleverbot: What are my intentions?
O'Neill: To bore?
Cleverbot: Or not to be,.
O'Neill: Have you read Shakespeare?
Cleverbot: I read shakespeare.
O'Neill: Which works have you read?
Cleverbot: Earth.
O'Neill: Were I like thee, I'd throw myself away.
Cleverbot: Not in all of the jungle.
O'Neill: Truly thou art damned, like an ill-roasted egg, all on one side.
Cleverbot: No, you were going to tell me a story.
O'Neill: Once there was a man who peed on the host machine's power cord.
Cleverbot: That was sad. Tell me another one.

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Went to De Tuin/La Perla again last night (you can sit outside at De Tuin and La Perla will bring you your order there, though minus silverware, and your pizza is uncut, but you can handle it, it's pizza), with ze HBF/tc and ze Moop! Carciofo below.

Tonight Who The Fuck Is Tony Buck is in town and we're making Szechuan food for Andy's pre-birthday.

Sichuan Cucumber Salad.
Bao.
Tempeh Bao Filling Experiment.

flat stanley in amsterdam.

Yes, on Friday we went around the city with a cardboard cutout of a small, mutilated boy and took pictures of him trying to enjoy himself, but it seemed like all he could ever muster was a sort of fixed, polite grimace, more polite condescension than anything resembling actual pleasure.

Nonetheless, here's the letter we had to send to Flat Stanley's 7-year-old "friend" back in America so he could share it with his class.

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Hi Conor,

Thanks for sending Flat Stanley to visit us in Amsterdam! We had a great time while he was here.

It sure was a long trip for Stanley! Amsterdam is 4000 miles away from Atlanta, all the way across the Atlantic Ocean. It's the biggest city in a country mistakenly referred to by the rest of the world as Holland.


















Amsterdam is a very old city, older than all of America. It was made hundreds of years ago in the year 1300 by building a dam across a river called the Amstel (named after the beer). Get it? Amstel + Dam? That means that everywhere that Flat Stanley went on this visit? It used to be underwater. And probably will be again someday in the not-so-distant future. If you think that's a scary thought, just imagine living here!



Because there is so much water in Amsterdam, there is a long tradition of building boats here. Stanley really liked looking at the old boats. He even went inside this one big old boat and looked at the cannons that sailors used to entertain themselves with on long trips.

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Some boats were for blowing things up, but other boats used to carry consumer goods such as spices and gold and slaves, and when the boats would finally get to Amsterdam, this building above is where the boats would be weighed and the slaves would be dropped off. It's right next to the Red Light District, so this was very convenient for everyone if you catch my drift.

Today in Amsterdam some people still travel by boat, but most people travel by bicycle. There are more bikes than cars here!

Almost all kids ride their bikes to school, but if you're still too small to ride a bike yourself, your parents will drive you around in a dangerous-looking bike like this one. And nobody wears any helmets, even though these annoying-as-fuck scooters are scooting around at stupid, blinding speeds! Huh.

We saw a scooter crash into a building a couple of weeks ago because they were driving at an especially stupid, blinding speed and hit a pothole or something. It was great. We didn't even ask if they were OK. We almost cheered out loud (we did cheer silently). Mara said "Should we see if they're OK?" and I said "Fuck 'em," and we laughed and kept walking.

Some people use cars in Amsterdam but it's not like America where all the cars are big and new. Most of the cars here are smaller and older and usually have smaller stereos.

Stanley really liked this little old car with a picture of a monkey on the side. It's a car that belongs to this bar with a nice sunny terrace that we used to go to all the time back when Uncle Mark was drinking too much. The service was terrible there, though. You could order a beer like 3 times before it would actually show up. It was easier to just get drunk at home and then go hang out on their big terrace in the sun. Cheaper, too.

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Since Amsterdam is such an old city, sometimes you can still see how people used to do things in the old days. For example, people used to wear wooden shoes!
















It might not seem very comfortable, but they protect your feet from getting wet or hurt while you're planting or harvesting marijuana. They also make a nice sound when you walk on cobblestone streets, like a "clomp, clomp, clomp" sound. Imagine a whole city full of people walking around making clomping sounds! Could be great.

Stanley also liked seeing all of the old windmills in Amsterdam. A long time ago, before there was electricity, farmers used windmills for turning wheat into grain and many other kinds of backbreaking, crappy work that these days would be done by Mexicans (that's kind of a joke, so maybe soften your delivery here with a broad laugh that lets everyone know you're pretty much kidding. Then finish with, "These days in Holland windmills are used for making mustard!" and quickly move on to the next photo).

Another big thing Stanley saw was the Royal Palace. Instead of having a Black President like America has, Holland has a queen! That's a bit of an oversimplification, but it's easier to understand than the truth! This is where the queen "works" sometimes when she's in Amsterdam, though no one can really explain what kind of work she does.

Not all of Amsterdam is old, there are lots of new buildings too. Some of the new buildings look like they might be from the future or from outerspace. Look at this one! The harbor is full of these new buildings, all designed by different architects. The end result is kind of like that bar scene in Star Wars with all the funny-looking aliens jamming out on futuristic Dixieland music, but without music. Or aliens. Just buildings, silent buildings.

Stanley also saw some littler things when he was here. One day Stanley was going for a walk and suddenly he was surrounded by bronze lizards! Or was he?!? LOL..."one toke over the line" indeed, Stanley.

All in all, Flat Stanley had a fun time when he was here and he learned a lot about Amsterdam. We hope he can come back someday!

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i will escape.

Continuing our series of Drawings by Atlanta Children, this is of course a portrait of Harriet Tubman, drawn by our good friend, Conor O'Neill, age...unknown. Young.

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Why can I never remember how to roast nuts in the oven? 175C, 5-10 minutes.

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So, yes, it's Saturday night, and since I don't really feel like doing anything else, how about a Doomsday Rehab update? This will be more for me than for you, so don't expect much from an awesomeness perspective.

Yes: it's been 13 days since I've had any alcohol, and I feel pretty awesome, comparatively. My mood has evolved from desperate and weepy to hmmm, patient? Is patient a mood? Resolute? Calm and introspective, but not in a bad way.

I didn't smoke for a week and then last Sunday I had a social engagement which required a few. But in general, not smoking is going OK and seems very possible.

I'm sleeping UNUSUALLY and reliably well, thanks to a hefty dose of passionflower; unfortunately it's unclear exactly how bad it is for your liver. Sigh. There's only ever been one case of someone, you know, dying after taking it, but that was in conjunction with kava, which plenty of other people died from. Well, seven, but that's enough really. I used to take kava myself, actually, before anyone knew it was maybe not so good for you.

Not much we can do about that now. The point is, even though no one really knows how bad it is for you, I should try and dial the passionflower dose back to a level that everyone generally agrees is safe-ish. Thus, tonight I go back to one capsule.

In other supplement news, I tried a tbsp of ground milk thistle seed yesterday, no ill effects. Remains to be seen what the best way to ingest it is, basically I resorted to Dog Technology yesterday and mixed it with some peanut butter. Not ideal.

Haven't taken ginseng or gingko in a few weeks, maybe I'll try adding at least the gingko back this week in the interest of becoming smarter. Got rid of the ginseng b/c I want to start taking my blood pressure this coming week. I know, I know. I'm also thinking about my salt consumption.

What else, hmmm....yes. Fitness stumbling into the correct gear slowly but somewhat promisingly. Marijuana use, yes, nightly, but only a little. Should probably switch to an organic/bio strain rather than the old Northern Lights, but it's so reliable, it's almost....medicinal. I'll see what I can do.

Ditched the flaxseed for now b/c it's such a hassle to prepare the way I've been doing it: I need a separate spice grinder.

Diet: fine. No gluten in a couple weeks. No dairy except for a quesadilla on Thursday. Oh and a little hirtenkase in my carrot thingie. Eating a little too much meat, but that's tapering off. In general, I'm not paying much attention to what I'm cooking, again comparatively speaking, and that's probably good, from an obsessive thought perspective.

Last night I did eat about a pound of carrots for dinner, accidentally...that Tunisian shit was good and I didn't feel like making anything else. Tonight roasted kohlrabi and maybe a piece of chicken, maybe not. Breakfast is kind of not really happening other than leftovers but I guess that's fine. There's a little too much chocolate in the house (is that a P-Funk song?), but shit yo a brother needs to find pleasure somewhere.

If I don't sound like I'm brimming over with enthusiasm, I guess I'm not, but I'm just a little tired. Need to go back to being bold about my sleepymeds dosing time: 9pm. Yes, I will be asleep by midnight, but this is kind of the point you giant fucking douchebag isn't it.

OK!

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dutch oven.

Well, we didn't come close to winning Team Trivia last night, but 1) we did have a perfect first half 2) good god was our waitress cute 3) Mara impressively guessed that the airline begun in 1948 whose name means "skyward" is El-Al but 4) she talked herself out of it 5) we learned that if the question is "what movie beat out Scent of A Woman, The Crying Game, and A Few Good Men for Best Picture Oscar"...

...the year is 1992 (we were off by one), and the answer is The Unforgiven. What a shitty year for Hollywood movies that must have been: Scent Of A Woman is unwatchable, and A Few Good Men is one step up from a Grisham movie. No wonder we didn't get it. Well, OK, it was probably also the year that the four of us were least likely to care about movies in general: we had probably all just realized that we were supposed to be adults soon.

So, New Year's has changed a bit. We're now doing pulled pork with sides. Against the wishes of my advisers I am lobbying for a good coleslaw, a corn pudding, hoppin' john, and a collard green/andouille  soup. I have to do the collards b/c I already bought them.

Here's the up-to-the-minute menu.

Carolina Pulled Pork Sandwich.
Mara's Homemade Buns?
Jeanie's Slaw.
Pepperoni Niblets.
Deviled Eggs.
Gorgonzola + Whisky Spread.
Collard Greens and Andouille Soup.
Corn Pudding.
Corn Pudding (substituting cornmeal for the flour).
Corn Pudding.

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 collard green + andouille soup.

EVOO
2 links andouille sausage, diced
1 medium onion, diced
1 carrot, diced
1 celery stalk, diced
1 pound collard greens, roughly chopped
2 tablespoons tomato paste
2 large sprigs fresh thyme
3 cloves garlic, minced
4 cups low-sodium chicken broth
salt and pepper to taste
4 tbsp butter, browned
2 cloves garlic, minced

grated parmegiano reggiano for garnish

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alligator point, 1990.

The person on the right in this photo just sent me this. Yes, Alligator Point is really what this beach was called 20 years ago (we were in Florida).

And that really is me on the left, somehow. Obviously this was before I knew how to cook. And yet I seem to already have known that having pockets full of beer was Good Planning.

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il weekend di zuppe.

It was a rather perfect weekend for soup, overcast and drizzly. My ingredients were giving me Italian directions again for soup #2, the loudest of these voices coming from a head of green cabbage that was starting to go limp on me (go leeeemp was Mary Quinones' advice to me back in 1994 when I complained that her friend Don't propositioned me and wouldn't take no for answer. Mary's sage advice refers to the childhood defense technique that I've only previously heard referred to as Noodle Boy/Girl: basically acting boneless so no one can physically make you do anything. Try it, it works. Though it didn't work on Don't, come to think of it).

I've been searching for new ways to eat cabbage for a couple of years now. You know why: cabbage is supposed to be very good for you in the anti-cancer department. Apparently it's because cabbage contains something that your body metabolizes into something else called indole-3-carbinol (I3C), which has been shown in clinical studies to prevent or even reverse the growth of pre-cancerous cells.

Do note that if you're just choking down some cabbage exclusively for its anti-cancer properties, don't boil it. Here's an excerpt from the study:

"Past studies have shown that consumption of Brassica vegetables decreases the risk of cancer. This is because of the high concentration in Brassicas of substances known as glucosinolates which are metabolized to cancer preventive substances known as isothiocyanates. However before this research it was not known how the glucosinolates and isothiocyanates were influenced by storage and cooking of Brassica vegetables.

The researchers, Prof Paul Thornalley from Warwick Medical School at the University of Warwick and Dr Lijiang Song from the University of Warwick’s Department of Chemistry bought Brassica vegetables, (broccoli, Brussel sprouts, cauliflower and green cabbage) from a local store and transported them to the laboratory within 30 minutes of purchasing.

The effect of cooking on the glucosinolate content of vegetables was then studied by investigating the effects of cooking by boiling, steaming, microwave cooking and stir-fry. Boiling appeared to have a serious impact on the retention of those important glucosinolate within the vegetables.

The loss of total glucosinolate content after boiling for 30 minutes was: broccoli 77%, Brussel sprouts 58%, cauliflower 75% and green cabbage 65%. The effects of other cooking methods were investigated: steaming for 0–20 min, microwave cooking for 0–3 min and stir-fry cooking for 0–5 min. All three methods gave no significant loss of total glucosinolate analyte contents over these cooking periods."

Right, so where does roasting/braising fit in here. I imagine that it's OK.

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The best cabbage dish we've ever made at home happened during one of our Mara's-thyroid-initiated cooking experiments. I can't remember the exact sequence of trial and error that led us to cabbage and cheese, but one evening we found ourselves making a noodle-less "lasagna": subbing cabbage leaves for the noodles, and keeping every thing else pretty much the same (red sauce, etc). I remember it being pretty surprisingly delicious, but I can't justify that kind of cheese consumption at the moment (lots of mozzarella and ricotta).

So I've been looking for healthy, interesting baked cabbage recipes for a while now, and then what do I spy in Signore Carluccio's book: something called zuppa di cavolo alla Canavesana. It's a cabbage soup, but one that's even more like a ribollita than the zuppa di pesce was, as you can see from the photo above. In fact, this is barely a soup at all..."it eats like a meal," as the Campbell's Chunky Soup commercials used to say.

Although if I recall correctly, back in my college days sometimes the Campbell's Chunky didn't really eat quite enough like a meal, especially after 18 beers and a pile of Kenny's weed. So at about 4am O'Neill and I would start making soup sandwiches using one of those electric sandwich toasters. Nature's Own multigrain bread and Campbell's Sirloin Burger soup was the most common combo (because these were almost always the sole contents of the pantry), maybe with a slice of Kraft American cheese in there as well. The results were...yeah. Not quite right, as far as food goes, but I believe that what we achieved in that toaster was in fact greater than the sum of its parts.

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Antonio says that this is his sister's recipe, from an area in the Piemonte called the Canavese, near Torino. It looks like this recipe might also be called simply zuppa del Canavese. I didn't have fontina in the house (why not?) so I used a bit of leftover Reblochon, but a fraction of the quantity specified. We are trying to gently steer our way back to healthy eating, right. I probably used 100g of cheese total between the Parmesan and the Reblochon. In any event, the end result was very good and I'll be making it again. The buttered bread is an excellent idea. And long-cooked cabbage really does share some textural characteristics with baked pasta, for me at least, if I'm craving the latter sometimes the former will do just fine....plus there's cancer-fightin' enzymes 'n' shit in there.

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zuppa di cavolo alla Canavesana.

1 head of cabbage, shredded
2 cloves garlic, sliced thinly
1 quart chicken broth
6 slices good bread
100g butter
50-100g parmiginano-reggiano, grated
50-100g fontina, sliced
5 oil-packed anchovies, chopped
salt
pepper

Add the garlic to the chicken broth and gently steam the cabbage over the chicken broth for 20-30 minutes or until softish. I actually did a mix of simmering and steaming, but steaming is healthier...just want to make sure that not all of the broth evaporates.

Meanwhile, toast each slice of bread and butter it as if you don't care how much butter you're eating. Line a baking dish with half the buttered toast slices.

When the cabbage is soft, pour half the cabbage and broth over the toast in the baking pan. Add a good grating of black pepper here. Top with half the anchovies, half the fontina (if using), and half the parmesan. Then ad another layer of the remaining toast, cabbage, anchovies, and cheese on top.

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general notice and flashback.

Sorry the posts have been pretty workmanlike lately, I've been, eh...thinking about other stuff (so it is possible) and the fact that there are posts at all is mostly to do with me not wanting to forget things. Yes, I know that's what drafts are for, but I believe I've already mentioned that for me Blogger drafts are about as useful as writing down something and then eating it.

I will be going back and re-working these lame posts whenever it is that I do return to normal blogging, because....I guess that's the way I write, I'm an editor.

Things should return to normal after this week's gig. I think my schedule this week would've been fine, except I stewpidly agreed to DJ all night as well as play, and that's just retarded, because on my list of timesucking obsessions, crate digging is second only to cookbook reading (which reminds me, exactly what is the correlation between DJing and cooking skills...more on this later). But I'm trying to manage myself a little better these days.

I've also got to cook something for our quarterly house dinner on Tuesday, for which everyone in the building signs up to make something of their own choosing. So far, people are making: guac and chips; salad; pumpkin soup; nasi tumpeng, yellow rice with tempeh and sambal; and a lemon tart. So it would seem that we need another hearty main dish to go with that yellow rice.

I've been thinking about doing something with eggs...the relatively old photo above (jaysus, who poured that glass of wine...was O'Neill in the room?) is of what used to be The Best Thing We Ever Made. This picture is from 2001, and the edible in question is a southwestern invention called the tamale tart, essentially a complicated quiche with a crust made from tamale masa. This one is a knockout: rosemary-infused eggs with a smoked mozzarella interior; a corn and roasted poblano relish; and a lovely (what? get him!) charred tomato and habanero salsa that is very mild but just perky enough.

It's truly awesome, but a bit of work. Not sure that the house meeting warrants tamale tarts. I'll keep ye posted, mates.

injured.

Yesterday (Tuesday?) at about 7am outside a German gas station, I said, "This is the most tired I have ever been in my entire life," and not only was I not exaggerating in the least, but that feeling was immediately seconded and very probably thirded, which I probably dozed off during.

Should it take 30 sleepless hours to get from Nickelsdorf, Austria, to Amsterdam, The Netherlands? The easy answer is: it should not take 30 sleepless hours to get anywhere, a formula whose potency is increased exponentially by the number of preceding days (4) that were very nearly sleepless as well. It doesn't matter how wonderful the people you are trapped in a large yellow van with are (How's my English?), 30 hours is about twice too long.

All I really have to add at this point is... no matter how much you love and trust the driver, not only as a driver but as a human in general, no matter what his reputation for indestructibility, no matter how many times he has managed to put diesel gas in his diesel gas tank (rather than non-diesel petrol, which apparently makes the van stop working after awhile) with the correct amount of sleeplessness, he too can fail.

Quit your crying, O'neill would say. He's right. It was an excellent (4-, no, 5-day) weekend that was so exhaustingly bittersweet that the whole thing literally seems like an dream, emotionally vivid, visually hazy, and resonantly powerful in ways that somehow real life is usually amazingly not.

Really? Maybe that's a bit much. But the reality is so little less true than the above that it's not worth the effort to re-write it. Good eating (a post on wiener schnitzel and goulash is forthcoming), good wine, and of course, no sleep. And good people, 100% Jumbo-Style All Night Long People, the best. Is there a point to all this? Yes. I won't be posting until I've recovered somewhat. See you in a bit.

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