So I just had as good a weekend as you could have. Swung up to Burlington Vermont to meet my friend Tom Harrington’s wife, Bernice (lovely person), and also meet his munchkins, James and Mary (beyond adorable). Stopped at The Alchemist Brewery in Stowe to get some Heady Topper Double IPA, along with some Focal Banger and some other surprises.
Went to a distributor and got a four pack of Sip of Sunshine. Megan, my girlfriend, is quite happy about this. Vermont, as I’ve found out, is something of a Mecca for awesome beer. These are all brands that rate high on The Beer Advocate’s list of great beers. Actually, they rate beyond high. They score a perfect 100, which qualifies them as world class. Had you told me I would be drinking a world class beer two years ago, had you told me that I would be this road warrior who pays visits on his assorted friends in the Northeast, I would have shaken my head and said that you had the wrong guy. But no, I am now officially a free man, and I roam the highways, staying with good friends from my days at UMASS who actually tell me that they’re glad to see me. Bob Miller, Tom Harrington, Tom Aczel, Julian Parker Burns…these people are not just friends, they are amazing hosts. They give me a place to stay, and they often prepare breakfast for me. They show me where I can grab a bagel for breakfast if I am hankering for such things. Lately I try to come bearing a gift of some sort. For Tom Aczel, I came bearing the gift of some of my potent potable loot from Vermont. For Tom Harrington, I came bearing my four string electric tenor guitar, the better to play “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” for his munchkins, along with the Wiggles’s “Teddy Bear Waltz.” The munchkins smiled. They made these adorable movements with their arms to indicate that they were shining stars, as their parents had taught them. Tom (Harrington) pretended to be asleep when I played “Teddy Bear Waltz,” and his kids woke him up. I could not have bought such a moment with all the money in the world. Then, yesterday night, Tom and I saw “Get Out” at a drive in. A Drive In. I have not been to a drive in since The Westbury Drive In on Long Island became a multiplex. “Get Out” was the best horror film I’ve seen since “Parents,” a massively underrated film from the 80’s that is one three films in which I had difficulty sleeping afterward. The other two films were “Dawn of the Dead (the 1978 version),” and “2001: A Space Odyssey.” For whatever reason, the silent monoliths in “2001” scared the living daylights out of me, and this was a film I saw when I was 16. For some reason, after I saw this film, I just kept visualizing the scene in the film when a withered Keir Dullea touches the silent, black monolith, which turns him into a star child. Sorry for that spoiler. I really haven’t ruined much. And as the star child slowly turns in space until it’s looking directly at you…that scene terrified me, for some reason. And as for “Get Out:” okay, I slept after seeing it, but I’m not sure I would have slept that well had I been 16. It has been a long time since I’ve seen a film with such coiling, excruciatingly tense menace; it really is one of the most intelligent (and entertaining) horror films that I’ve seen in a long time. Which leads to this moment, when I sit here, drinking a Heady Topper, and eating a really great burger at The Three Penny Tavern, here in Montpelier, Vermont. Montpelier is simply not a place that feels like a state capital. Its Main Street is maybe four blocks, and the blocks that peel off of that Main Street become residential or non-store blocks quickly. It really feels more like a town than a city. Yet there are places to get good beer (as there are, it would seem, in all of Vermont), and there is The Three Penny Tavern, which serves Heady Topper, and has truly wonderful burgers. Alas, the beer distributor a few doors down was out of Heady Topper and Sip of Sunshine (as they often are), but that wasn't a big deal; I was just hoping to get another four pack for Megan. I have a good quantity of Heady Topper and Focal Banger, so I’m in good shape. I will also be giving some of this to Megan’s friends, Joe and Laurie Occhipinti, who have become my friends (always a good sign that a relationship is working). I have written about them so much in my personal journal that the word processing program I use to write these entries autocorrects me when I spell their name wrong. This is technological progress. The bartenders at The Three Penny Taproom are always nice. Today the bartender is Tiffany. She’s really nice; that’s her picture at the beginning of this entry. If you go to The Three Penny Taproom and Tiffany is working the bar, tip her generously. I did. Just had a wonderful conversation at the bar with some folks about “Get Out.” I was talking about how I’ve literally had conversations with folks at the school where I work where people have said things like “I don’t understand why black people are so upset, and why they do all this Black Lives Matter stuff (sometimes, these people use a word more intense than “stuff”); there were problems, and in the 60s, they took care of them. It’s over, and I’m sick of them whining about this.” Yes, they said this. These folks, being that we are in Vermont, had other ideas. The conversation was interesting. Anyway, I was driving back from Burlington, and I had a thought that was so new, so luminous, that I had to follow that thought. There I was, driving home, thinking about how I would arrive back at my apartment at seven o’clock, and a persistent thought began to invade my mind, like a welcome revolution that multiplies like a healing virus: “You don’t need to just drive straight home, you know. You can stop in Montpelier, and go to The Tree Penny Taproom, and have a Heady and a burger.” And so I did. So I sit here in The Three Penny Taproom. I have eaten a really awesome burger. Tiffany has given me a Heady Topper, which went perfectly with the burger. I have “The Nick Tosches Reader” by my side, and now, having written this blog entry, I can dip into it. I will be home in plenty of time to get enough sleep for work tomorrow. This is a good thing. Life, in fact, is good. Leif, over and out.
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15 April 2017
Saturday 1:54 PM After something like thirty years of journal writing, I’m trying something different, and it’s not easy: I’m trying to get more Writing out there for people to read. This makes it Writing with a capital "W." This is not to say that its going to be any good. Nonetheless, it is Writing that people I’ve never met (and may never meet) have the opportunity to read. This makes it far different from most of the writing that I’ve done in my life (much of which is writing with a lower case "w"). A good 95 percent of my writing—possibly more—involved scribbling things in journals, and often not even rereading the things that I wrote. I threw out many of these journals, in fact, and when I moved over to writing on computers, I deleted many files, or lost a lot when I switched to a computer that could no longer read the old files. Most of these journals involved my perseverating on one thing or another, usually regrets about the past, and anxiety about the future. I still write journals such as these. It a comfort to me, so much so that I often call this writing “comfort food writing.” The only trouble is, in my opinion, it isn’t really Writing. A couple of years ago, I took a Writing class (capital "W") with a teacher who was not the nicest person in the world. She asked what makes someone a Writer. Well, I said, it’s sort of like what Robert Rodriguez said about being a Filmmaker. Pick up a camera, he said, and shoot something. Okay, you’re a Filmmaker. She didn’t like that. Well, she said, if everyone’s a Writer, than no one’s a Writer. So okay, I’ll give her this much: to just put words down is not Writing with a capital W. I do, think, however, that it becomes Writing when I write for a stranger. That’s it. Besides writing for someone else, it has to be someone I don’t know. I’m not saying this makes me a great Writer, or even a good one. What it does mean, however, is that it does make me a Writer. I'm getting my Writing out there, where someone I don’t know can read it. They may not like it. That’s not easy to deal with. Still, though, it means that I’m doing more than just writing something for no one but myself, or some sort of private thing that’s just for another person. It means, instead, that I’m putting something out there for all time that other people can read and save and hold up as an example of my Writing. This carries with it the possibility that people may hold it up as an example of how I’m a bad Writer. There is always the possibility, however, that people may hold it up as an example of someone who knows what they’re doing. I’m never going to know, however, unless I put it out there, where total strangers can judge it worthless or worthy. This is what Writers do. And it is what you can do as well. Go to it. 14 April 2017
Friday 1:20 PM I have my microtop set up, and I write. For those who don’t read my blog, my microtop is my term for my writing tools of choice. This consists of an iPhone, an iPhone stand, and a Bluetooth keyboard. I use this setup because my laptop is bulky, and the battery doesn’t give it a lot of power. With this setup, I’m able to write for a lot longer. I keep the keyboard in a keyboard case that I’ve discovered can hold a bit more than just the keyboard. Consequently, I keep some extra laptop batteries in there (AA), one of those portable power pack things that allows you to charge an iPhone, a cable for the iPhone, and the power cable for the portable power pack thing. I usually carry around something to read as well. I’m almost always reading a hard copy book, and something on my ereader (the ereader is far more convenient when I’m on a train or bus). Right now I’m finishing “To Kill a Mockingbird” on the ereader, and am about halfway through a copy of “The Nick Tosches Reader” that I borrowed from my friend Tom. My friend Tom makes me feel extremely underread, as do most of my friends. My friends read like fiends when they were young. I watched a great deal of television. I did not watch cool television. One of my favorite shows, as a kid, was called “The Cheap Show.” On the show, people asked questions, while their teammate stood in what was called The Punishment Pit. When a person answered a question wrong, their teammate received dousings of slime and other horrible things. Perhaps I was actually ahead of the curve, as this was a good decade and a half before Nickelodeon took this concept and ran with it. I remember coming to school one day in 1978 and thinking that I was ahead of the curve because suddenly everyone was wearing a shirt that said Cheap Trick. For a few hours, there, I thought that this game show had become a massive phenomenon. I did, however, buy the “At Budokan” album, and Bun E. Carlos became one of my favorite drummers. It is because of Bun E. Carlos that I wore vests when I played drums in high school. When I was in high school, I was briefly in a band that was sort of “the” band in the whole clique of high school bands at the time. They kicked me out. These people from that band are now bewildered at my not wanting to be Facebook friends with them so that I can have a constant reminder of one of the most devastating experiences in the drama of my miserable high school existence. Some people. I tell you. Anyway, I love this. I love being here, drinking coffee, munching on an oatmeal cookie, sitting here writing. The only thing that I like as much as writing and drinking coffee is reading and drinking coffee. So. More about what I’m reading. Specifically, more about Nick Tosches, because plenty of people have written about “To Kill a Mockingbird:” Nick Tosches clearly met everyone and drank at every dive bar in Manhattan before the exponential rent increases of the 1980s made Manhattan dive bars all but extinct. His writing is all about doing manly things, anywhere and everywhere. Manly things, in this particular cases—and in the case of other writers such as Jim Carroll, Ernest Hemingway, Harlan Ellison, Charles Bukowski, Henry Miller, and others who do not come to mind at the moment—usually consist of strong drink (except for Harlan Ellison, who doesn’t drink), fighting, cavorting with women, and, it would seem, the ability to attend to the elimination of bodily wastes anywhere, at any time. This is, by the way, is not to say that doing manly things is always a good thing. To read this stuff is to come across many times where a person regrets not perhaps curtailing these urges from time to time. There are many men who have gotten into trouble from simply forgetting that there at times where doing manly things is not always the best thing to do at particular given moment. A quick nugget about Jim Carroll: I interviewed him back when I was in college. Really nice guy. He was the guy who turned me onto the term “Manichaeism.” “It’s all about that dualistic thing, dividing the world into good and evil and all that,” he said. Later, when I took a science fiction class taught by this brilliant professor, Ernest Gallo, he used the term when discussing Ursula LeGuin’s “The Left Hand of Darkness,” a book about a group of humanoids who shuttle back and forth between being man and woman. It contains the memorable line: “The king was pregnant.” And a bit about Charles Bukowski: I had a copy of “Tales of Ordinary Madness,” but I lent it to this guy with whom I went to high school, and he never returned it. He was in that band that kicked me out. At the time, he dressed really cool and seemed to know exactly the cool places to be. I wanted to be like him, as did a lot of other people; he found me to be a pest, and at the time, I was. He’s another one who wanted to be my Facebook friend. The sight of his name brings back memories of that band. So. Nick Tosches and Harper Lee. That’s what I’m reading right now. A bit more about the things I own: I do not have many possessions. I own a few pairs of jeans and many gray tee shirts. This is what I wear when I’m down in New York. When I’m up here in Beverly Massachusetts visiting my girlfriend, I wear all sorts of cool tee shirts About the word "girlfriend:" I love the sound of that word. Even in this liberated times, it’s one of those times where “girl” just says more than “woman.” Somehow, for me, “woman friend” sort of sounds like someone who’s over six feet tall, extremely broad, and fond of brandishing a rolling pin. About clothing: I have white oxford shirts and black pants. I own some decent pairs of black shoes. This is what I wear to work. About accessories: I wear a watch. It is a Wenger Swiss Army Watch. It is a good watch. The jeweler who replaced the battery deemed it such. “Ziss…ziss is a very good vatch,” he proclaimed, in this awesome Russian Jewish accent. My older brother gave me this watch. We did not get along for a long, long time. We get along now. The watch reminds me that I can spend so much time thinking about winning a war that I can lose track of how much better it is to win peace. More about clothing: I have a few hooded sweatshirts. One of them zips up. It is a gift from WFUV, back when I had much more money, and could make large contributions to public radio stations. I also have a black pullover hoodie with Tom Laughlin from “Billy Jack” on it. That is another gift from my brother. He has a black sweatshirt with 1960s Cleveland late night horror television show legend Ghoulardi on it; that was a gift from me. My brother wears this sweatshirt all the time. He is still a bit thunderstruck that I got it for him. This whole peace thing was quite an unexpected development. My brother is very happy at the frequency with which I wear my Billy Jack sweatshirt. We occasionally quote our favorite speech in the movie, when Billy Jack says that he tries, really tries to control his temper, but that Bernard’s humiliations of assorted people—including a girl that everyone, according to Billy Jack, calls “God’s Little Ray of Sunshine”—makes him go berserk. In truth, most of my friends quote that speech from time to time. They either quote that speech, or the line that ends with “and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it.” People who’ve seen this film know that exact line I’m talking about. Still writing here in Beverly. I will continue to do so. And read Nick Tosches. And Harper Lee. So this is how I write most of the time:
I have a case in which I keep a Bluetooth Keyboard. I also keep some other things in there, like a pair of double A batteries, an iPhone stand, and a phone charger. I keep my phone in my pocket. With these things, I have all I need to write. I have written this way in cars, with my iPhone between my knees, functioning as this computer screen. The keyboard sits on my lap, and I tap away, as I am now, with my friend Julian Parker Burns driving to the Discovery Festival in Turner’s Falls, Massachusetts. He will be photographing a whole lot of stuff. We have just stopped at a scenic overlook. Julian stops to photograph stuff. It is gorgeous. As he photographs, I put my phone on the hood of the car with my keyboard in front of it, and tap away. Julian runs back to the car. Why did you go back to the car, I ask. He shows me a telephoto lens. “I want a lens that gets me into the whitewater,” he says. He steps off the guardrail he’s been using to get a better angle. “Okay,” he says, “enough of that.” We get back in the car, and drive to Turners Falls. We enter Turners Falls by driving over this beautiful WPA bridge. Turners Falls is one of those towns that just sort of lays itself out for you. “It really has the grandeur of those classic mill towns,” says Julian. “When I came back here recently for the first time in twenty years, there were five Ford Model As parked in the street.” We stop for coffee at the Second Street Bakery, which is on Fourth Street. I’m sure there is a story there somewhere. We have now met all these artistic folks that Julian will photograph to promote a show of theirs. There is Nina, Lea, Candace, Samantha, Trish, and Edite. Turners Falls is right next to a river which was dammed, presumably to provide the mill with power or something. This causes the water to race by underneath the bridge. The water is really high. Samantha is saying that they were able to walk almost all the way across a little while ago. That is impossible at the present. Julian arranges them at key parts of the riverbank, and takes more pictures. He just has a way of knowing the right place to go to get a good picture. It is good to be alive at the moment. Specifically, it is good to be alive right here at this moment. I am wearing a sweatshirt, and really don’t need it, although the weather is such that I will probably need it later. A sign warns me not to pick up rocks around here. There are apparently many fossils. I shall not pick up any rocks. Julian is arranging Trish, Edite, Candace, Samantha, Lea, and Nina so that they look assertive in a really cool Girl Power sort of way. I feel very male, and simply sit here, iPhone between my knees, keyboard on my lap, sitting here on a rock by the riverside, tapping away. This is what I do. Julian continues to photograph. This is what he does. |
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