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 hey marty :)

Galleggiava Saturday

I have concocted a brunchy dessert/beverage, and dubbed it *drum roll, please*:

The Galleggiava.

I'm gonna fill out a bit more to this post, including origin story and photos, but in the meantime, here is the formula:

The Galleggiava:

*Using a 2 fl. oz ice cream scoop, Fill a tumbler w/4 scoops of coffee gelato
(or superpremium coffee ice cream)

* Pour a cooled shot of espresso (or 2 fl. oz of strongly brewed, dark roast
coffee) over scoops

* Pour in a shot (1.5 fl oz) of Amaretto

* Tap some microground instant coffee over top

* Fill to your liking with plain soda/sparkling water

Enjoy 

yes hello

Hey, here I am not on Twitter 👋

I'm gonna fire up this dumb old blog instead, & try to approach & use it a little more like Twitter. This means, I guess, short, frequent entries? Anyway, I hope that you guys I know online will stop by.

I put all my completed pieces of writing, such as they are, in one place a couple days ago. I added a page called 'Not Birb', which I intended to be a frequently updated approximation of a Twitter stream. But this was immediately problematic in ways I have exactly no idea how to fix. Instead, I wiped it clean & filled it in with what amounts to a blog post explaining my non-tweeting status, and linked its title to this very page. My dumb old blog.

So welcome & thanks for reading. I'm lurking at Twitter & I'm happy to DM there, but here's where I'm hanging out and actually typing. I expect it'll have a lot to do with food. I like food. And dogs, though I'm more inclined to leave pups in the paws of the experts. I'm a devout believer in the arts & sciences, so they'll show up.

Photo by C.T.Thatch Brooklyn, 2014

A Long Time Ago...

...just outside a weird, ugly building,

The UA 150 70mm/35mm, Seattle. Contact me if this is your image.

I stood in line with two six-year-olds, a seven-year-old, my friend who had just turned nine, and a parent. I was eight. The line headed down 6th Avenue then wrapped around the corner as more people filled in behind us.

My friend and a lot of the other kids in line were excited for reasons you might guess: the school year had just met its long-anticipated death and we were out to see a movie. A break in the routine. It was a warm, sunny day.

But some of us were... lit.

We knew. We knew something else was up, something bigger was happening. If you were a kid of a certain frequency, the crackle in the air was getting loud & roiling faster. The world had a different tint to it, a high watercolor plum. (I've wondered whether people like Prince are drawn to purples because there's something mystical about them. They seem to assert themselves around wonder & the extraordinary.)

#Damson Image thanks to Willis Orchards

We sank right into this magic & rode fast. Next to nothing was all the understanding we needed. This wasn't a thing of the head, it was visceral. And it connected us. It even caught some who were not tuned in. Even some adults. Something here was larger than the stuff of hours & days.

And this is just about the line of kids outside the theater, which had begun forming before the screening prior to ours & would be hours long all day. It busted the first block & spilled to the next.

Once we were in & seated, we waited seventeen goddamned years for the lights to go down, and then (spoiler alert): they did. I'll never forget it happening.

And then John Williams slayed us all & launched us into to a completely different life. It began with The Crawl.

The Crawl image thanks to Nerdist

No jaw was left unfloored. Many would not fully re-connect with their owners' heads until they went to sleep that night. 

And that was just music & reading. So to get that, remember two things:

1) Lit. We were not a just a bunch of excited summer kids. This was different, bigger & other, and now no matter who you were, if you were in that theater, crackling air was all your breath & skin would know for ninety minutes. You were on fire with the rest of us, and nothing felt ordinary anymore.

2) John Williams is superhuman, & music+memory is among the most potent & rich meanings of life as a human animal. We were welding that powerful music to this transcendent moment, and of that fusion arose a thing greater than the sum of its parts. That was The Force. 

Infused with it to bursting, we witnessed the opening scene. Here it is. What happens between 0:15 and 0:32 changed the way we see.

A number of the heads in the sea of people in front of us whipped around between 2:10 - 2:15 and found themselves looking squarely at the back wall of the theater. Can you imagine why that happened? They quickly re-whipped those eyeballs back to the screen. I didn't do this, but I could tell why those people did: their brains were confused about where the vessels came from. 

Industrial Light & Magic didn't just skyrocket our VFX standards by degrees; it re-wired our brains.

The emergence of Darth Vader (4:32) took me clear out of my skull. I wasn't in a seat at movie theater anymore. Seeing the cloak, watching him walk, turn his head, is burned into my brain for all time. I forgot myself, my life, and succumbed to the crackling air and the magic. I rode the rest of the experience like an E-Ticket ride that went on as long as you wanted to. The cheers & chills at the final scene were loud and crazy and completely involuntary & like never before.

I would never be the same, and course the world would never be the same, and we could not shut up about it, and we still can't. There are few things in this life that make me truly, purely happy, but that's one of 'em. 

The Force will be with us, always.

*light saber emoji*


P.S. Now, for a slightly older kid's perspective, go read Marty's post!

Literary Fireworks in a Cracked Article

From a "listicle" at Cracked:

“...I was on a ton of painkillers. If you've only had them for minor injuries and in smaller doses, you probably don't know about the hallucinations. By comparison, I was lucky: My roommate was tripping hard on his drug cocktail. I saw little animals coming in and out of the buildings outside my window, but that poor guy was hollering about the CIA coming for him and trying to formulate elaborate escape plans. It got so bad that I called over a nurse and told her that my roommate needed psychiatric help.

She told me I didn't have a roommate.

I was in the room alone.

When I didn't believe it, she pulled out the security video of the room, which showed me talking to an empty bed. So either I'd hallucinated so hard that I hallucinated a whole other person's hallucinations, or the CIA is really, really thorough.”

Gobsmacked. I scrunched in my limbs and gasped, "OH! Oh, oh my God!" I physically, vocally, viscerally reacted to this teeny tiny story & its big, fat surprise. When that happens, you cut that thing right out of your screen, pin it up and yank your muse out of the ether to take notes. This is every damned thing a great short story should be.

Wild, sustained applause, Anonymous and Evan V. Symon. Hat's off. The timing was cosmic. I'm taking myself out on a long-awaited, low & slow writing intensive tomorrow, my one day off this week. A date with an actual ink pen & a sheaf of erstwhile trees (and booze). And I am taking this tiny story as a reminder of what the fuck I am trying to do. Thank you. :)

Of Ice Ghosts & Unlocked Passageways

I felt like a Popsicle: A subfreezing rocket of wind hammered my forehead every with every step I took during the Siberian Express snowstorm a few days ago. I turned a corner into the protection of some buildings and thought, 'Whew, so relieved'. But then, 'Relieved? It's still four degrees Fahrenheit!' Hey, I'm cold-hardy, but wow is this tiresome. And when you are a weather-spoiled Seattleite, you get to feeling like, right, this shit is just not even called for.

Attempting to escape the shrieking attempted murder of a -15F Abominable Ice Ghost.

Fruitless search for image credit. Please claim.

New York City feels like home to me in an old, deep way. I will write at some point about what that means and why it was necessary to come live here. But starting now, I'm hunting, collecting & cataloging this city rather than passively soaking it in. Because? Because I'm heading back to Seattle. One more glorious NYC spring, one more scorching NYC summer, then home at the end of August.

Getting knocked senseless by lethal Arctic weather definitely spurred this decision, its timing (to some extent), & made it easier than it would have been, but. But, there's this whole other thing. About that, if you're so inclined, after the jump. 

How To Operate A Television Set

I just read the inimitable @dboshea's post "You aren't a 'pirate', you're a thief. asshole", which I applauded most wildly. You will see, in doing so yourself (reading the post, not applauding), why I was reminded of this bit in my project *"Mercury":

I learned, along with millions of other kids born in the throes of Generation X, to wake up at 5:30 a.m. on Saturday mornings.  I skated down the stairs to the main floor, whirled around to the next flight and scampered to the basement.  I turned on the television.  Back in those days, you had to physically walk up to the television in order to perform this operation.  So far as I can recall, a “knob” was involved. This was a thing not entirely unlike a button in that it protruded from the set, but – and stay with me, here – you would have to grasp it, with your index finger and thumb, and twist it slightly until you felt a snap.  A glowing white dot would then appear at the center of the screen, and after a few moments, the techy, ghostly thing would expand miraculously into an already moving image.  You did not break contact with the knob at this point, no; you would then continue twisting it slowly to the right until you heard sound emit from the speaker of the television.  Continue twisting, and when the desired volume was reached, you were finished.  Unless of course the image was of some dumb balding guy in a maroon polyester blazer, an unnatural void at his back, brow knit, voice weighted just so, head cocked professionally to one side and hands sloughing a sheaf of papers perhaps a bit too ceremoniously onto a particle board desk or tabletop.  In that case, you would turn your focus to a second, larger knob, this one marked out with numbers, 2 through 13. You grasped the dial and snapped a little arrow from one number to the next, until you found Looney Tunes.  Then, you were finished.

I feel grateful, Dan: This is a project that I've been having hard time facing, like a past due bill or an awkward acquaintance. Your words had me unearthing the file, opening it up and looking it square in the i's (dotted, the lot of them) and t's (crossed). I'm now drawn entirely back in. Thank you for that.