Home improvement

We have lived in our present location for a little over four years.  We moved into this house when our kid was a few months short of three years old.

One of the bedrooms is a converted courtyard or perhaps an old porch.  It is “built” (such as it is) at grade, with a picture window overlooking the fence, which is about two feet away.  It is a shitty little room with a warped floor and no insulation, but it is pink, so our young daughter decided it was to be her bedroom.

In the winter, this crap room would get very cold, and our needlessly labrynthine ductwork did nothing to heat it sufficiently.  The child never complained, but we were a bit uneasy having our kid sleep in a room with ice on the window.  We spent a bunch of money having insulation blown into the walls, with little effect.  We then spent a bunch more money to get warm air routed more effectively into this little space, which at least cleared our consciences somewhat.

A persistent bugaboo with this room, however, was the periodic materialization of two distinct smells.  One smell was a sort of deeply peaty scent, like rotting leaves or heavy moss.  The other was, well, quite unmistakeably sewer gas.

The vegetal scent was easy to explain.  The room had a cold floor and was built most likely directly on a slab, which had very likely cracked and was allowing the pungent scent of earth to waft on occasion into the room.  Not a major concern.

Sewer gas, however, is an altogether more noxious matter.

We had a plumber come check out a bunch of junk, and he found two toilets that were not seated properly.  Upon having them reseated, we found the sewer gas problem had disappeared.  But respite was brief.  After the course of a few months, it seemed to return, fleetingly but with some frequency.

The two smells combined to create a irritant with some real urgency behind it.  It seemed we would have to gut the room at some point to rectify the problem fully, probably starting with the floor, since the smells seemed to emanate from below.

Today, I woke up uncharacteristically early, and I decided it was high time I cross some of the infernal ‘chores’ off my ‘list’ that gets made on my behalf.  One of these chores (self-assigned I must admit) was to attach a safety strap between the wall in our child’s room and her bookcase.  The bookcase is rather heavy as bookcases go; add the fact that it is filled with books, and having it land on our child or any other would be unfortunate.

I got my drill, a screwdriver, and the necessary odds and ends.  I went into her room and was about to start working when I thought to myself, “Self, you know, this little thing is just another thing that will make this room more of a permanent installation.  You know this room has problems, and if you mean to solve them, you mustn’t ensconce your child further in this place.  Move her things into the ‘blue’ room up the hall, and get to work!”

And so we did.  We moved every bit of everything out of the room–stuffed animals, bed, dresser, clothes, that heavy-ass bookcase and all the books.  Dollhouse.  Etcetera.

And once the room was clear, I started picking away at the floor.

Pretty nice flooring.  Solid hardwood, mahogany-stained something or other.  Unfortunately not salvageable, as it was nailed in place.  Once I got one piece up, the rest came rather easily, at which point I was looking at a plywood substrate.

The substrate was fully wack.  Whoever had installed this floor had done so in the quickest, cheapest, most stupid fashion possible.  The section closest to the wall was at a thirty-degree angle to the rest of the floor.  It made me angry just to look at it.

I yanked up a section of the plywood and peered beneath it.  Aha!  Yes, the concrete footing beneath the wall was crumbling, exposing the room to the elements and thereby compromising all our efforts to heat it.  I dug a bit deeper.  “Ah yes,” I thought, “this thing isn’t even built on a slab after all.  It’s built on rotting joists over a patch of dirt!  No wonder it smells like vegetation in here.”

Beneath the next layer of plywood were some one-inch stringers, and beneath those was a layer of old hardwood, which looked to be a remnant of that old porch we’d imagined.  I peeled back several boards and looked beneath them.

There was a gaping maw maybe four feet deep, which looked to be full of wet dirt and debris.  It was a bit shocking to see such a raw, open, earthy space in one’s house, but I can’t say as it surprised me particularly.  We had expected some kind of crazy outdoor space had been here originally.

But at the bottom of the maw was a very large pipe.  “Well, that is a very large pipe,” I thought to myself.  “It looks to be quite old.  It looks like the kind of pipe that might once have been the main drain for the house.”  I got up and went into the kitchen, where I pulled open a drawer and removed a flashlight.  I went back to our child’s room and crouched down to peer into the maw.  I shone the flashlight directly on the pipe.

It was broken, clearly.  “Wow, that would be quite a thing if that pipe was in use.  What a problem it would….If I didn’t know better, I’d think those spider webs were toilet pa–”

I yelled my wife’s name.  “WHAT?”  She hollered from the other room.

“Would you…go in the kid’s bathroom and…flush the toilet?”

Footsteps padding across the floor.  Gissssshhhhh from down the hall.  PISSSSSSSHHHHHH mere feet away.  Water gushed from the hole in the pipe.

“What happened?”

“What I thought might happen.  Go try our toilet.”

Gisssshhh….PISSSSSHHHHHHH.

I don’t know that our child has been sleeping, reading, playing, laughing, and dancing over an open sewer every day that we’ve lived in this house.  But she has been doing it some, sure enough.

Clown

People really not into clowns, turns out. Not sure why that is.

I really will do anything for her.

Gacy comment not five minutes after leaving the house.  It was straight-up sad clown, but I grant it was creepy, particularly by the end of the night.

At least a dozen “I hate or am terrified of clowns” from grown adults, many of whom would not look me in the eye.

Some teenagers dressed as Sexy Fill-in-the-Blanks insisted on taking a picture with me.

A confusing evening.

Jersey Shore, Part Zero

I saw two minutes of Jersey Shore a month ago.  It was my first and will be my only exposure to the television show.  It has taken me that long to process it enough to comment.

A few years ago, the MTV reality show True Life aired an episode called I Have a Summer Share.  A group of narrowly focused young people had a few weeks every summer at a cottage on the Jersey shore.

The episode of True Life offered a glimpse into a way of life that wasn’t foreign completely; it wasn’t that divorced from the behavior of high school jocks.  Thuggish activity, barely civilized, but the behavior was human.  Imprinted by familiar codes and patterns.

The behaviors were just distinct enough from behaviors I had seen before.  It was interesting to see the reactions to situations that were nevertheless familiar.  The individual roles were played with some vigor.  A musclebound hulk got in fights yet out of luck in love, caught in that loop and stuck in the closet.  A party girl fed her finale fetish as she established a relationship just enough to break it up.  A pretty boy lit up the club, did a churlish dance with the party girl, filled the gaps between their dalliances easily with other easy women.

It was easy to imagine where these people would end up in twenty years.  They will gaze with bewilderment at their faces in the mirror, wrecked by late nights and alcohol.  They will still smoke cigarettes as the corners of their mouths crinkle, as their teeth and skin yellow yet more deeply.  They will either marry luckily or remain mired in manual labor.

Jersey Shore is as if the characters on True Life were not only inbred but altered chromosomally.  Not only devolved, but backed down another evolutionary branch.  It is as if the clean line from ape to man had been forked and a subspecies of humanity had matured alongside us in an isolated hothouse, left to spin each other’s faults into a sea of random idiocy, until a hailstorm or meteor shower fractured the hothouse walls and set loose a race of bulbous and muscular mammals with bad skin and faces like hardened dough.

They have learned to void their cavities.  They cackle like hyenas and spout low-density communication.  They clean and stiffen their hides and fur.  They cover their hides with the skins of other animals and bits of cloth left for them by homo sapiens.

It is not apparent what the future holds for these creatures.  They may all die in the same fire.  They may choke on barely chewed steak.  They may die of perforated bowels from eating their own teeth.  They may drown drunk in a tub.  They may be executed after conviction of mass child rape and ritual sacrifice.  They may dissolve slowly into a puddle of gel.

Jersey Shore is not reality.  It is not surreal.  It is not post-modern.  It is not ironic.  It is subreality.  Its only profundity is in its sadness.  It is depression in a short sharp shock, and it leaves a hole in the heart and the head.

Eggs

I started eating eggs about six months ago.

Since I was a kid, I hated the way eggs smelled while cooking.  Cooked eggs give off an odor that is a raw expression of heated animal content.  Burning sacrifice of animal embryo.  I always found it totally unappetizing.

A few years ago, I started eating some of the terrible-smelling cheese that some people eat.  I think it began at a landmark meal Silkworm ate at Trattoria del Passatore in Santarcangelo d’Romagna.  They served us a cheese platter that had some truly abominable odor to it.  Everyone else said it was great, so I ate some of it, and sure enough, it was great.

Anyway, I started wondering at some point if a similar taste/odor disconnect existed with eggs.  I didn’t even mind the way they smelled once they were actually cooked, so….Like most egg neophytes, I started with scrambled, then over hard, then over easy, then sunny-side up.

Turns out I like them any old way.  I feel both stupid and pleased, which isn’t such a bad way to feel.

Near as I can tell, the most remarkable thing about the egg is that it can be infused completely with whatever flavor profile you want.  Just about anything, right?  Certainly sweet, certainly savory.  I’m not sure about sour.  Can you do citrus mixed with egg?  I don’t know.  I’ll have to give it a shot, I guess.  Anyway, as proteins go, you have dump rub on meat or marinate the hell out of fish to impregnate it with flavor, and that kind of infusion is nearly effortless with eggs.

Forgive me for the neophyte observances if I am stating the obvious.

Marmalade #3

Always full of surprises. For some reason.

I Can See the Rain, 1967.

Excellent YouTube comment: I first heard this at Outback Steakhouse and I haven’t forgotten it since.

The Grateful Dead, Part Three

[continued from Parts One and Two]

I don’t write too much about my line of work here.  I am obliged to avoid it, and I do so in the interests of self-preservation.

Suffice to say it’s analogous to professional gambling.  It is specialized work.  A lot of money is on the line on a regular basis, and a certain amount of catastrophic risk is assumed.  Every time something active happens, which is several times a week, we risk blowing ourselves up.

It’s legal, and there’s nothing wrong with it ethically.  But neither does it add anything substantial to the world.  Other than the good that comes from giving away some of the money made, it is at best a value-neutral proposition.

If I’m not making money, the job takes the same amount of time and effort and produces yet more stress.  And if I’m not making money, it’s hard to make the argument that it’s value-neutral.  I have no money to give away, and the inevitable preoccupation with the not-making of money sets in.  I spend less time on things that are not value-neutral, like other people, writing, reading books, and making music.  At such times, what I do for a living goes from a lucky stroke to a monumental drag.

Well, work was a monumental drag for six months.  And in this car that felt unaffordable even though it was paid off, I drove to this job every goddamn day.  I wanted nothing more than to stop thinking about everything I was thinking about.  To stop thinking.  Escape.  Move off my obsession and preoccupation and worry.  Be removed.  Remove.

Whatever we do, we do it primarily for comfort.  We do it to satisfy some need incompletely met.

We feel much of the time that comfort shouldn’t be enough.  If we mean to be worldly, versed in our environment in some substantial way, then we need to be surprised.  We need to branch out.  We need to pursue variety.

Some of us (not nearly all of us) like to be surprised, and a few of us enjoy being shocked.  Every now and then, being disgusted isn’t so bad.  But you have to be invested in discovery to value those things enough to pursue them.  Otherwise, comfort is enough.

Yet it’s hard to be to admit that you just don’t care enough to try something new.

And when both comfort and discovery are elusive, distraction is the next best thing.

Enter the illusion of variety.  The illusion of choice.  The illusion of discovery, of new territory, of invention.

The sound made by the Grateful Dead is from a limited palette.  The music is never too light, never too heavy, never too fast, never too slow.  They avoid rocking, almost carefully.  And yet, during the period in my life when I listened to this music for an hour a day, I never knew precisely what I was going to hear.

Click on the satellite radio, and I might happen on an unusual arrangement and decent guitar playing, perhaps the studio version of Playing in the Band.  Then again, it might be a live version of same, an utter mess.

It might be Casey Jones, that well-summed impression of the supreme jitters, way too high.

It might be Uncle John’s Band, more enjoyable than it deserves to be.  I know you can have tidal surging in rivers if you are close enough to the mouth, but ‘riverside/rising tide’ is still a bothersome rhyme.

It might be China Cat Sunflower.  A murky brown streak with muttering at increments.  It might be the worst version of Not Fade Away you’d ever hope to hear.

Taken as a whole, in a vacuum, it didn’t sound necessarily like the easy way out.  Which meant it didn’t feel necessarily like the easy way out for me.  Within its limited universe, it felt like a range of possibility.  It felt like an expanse of sorts.

One day, some degree of boredom and irritation set in.  A minute too much space jam.  Nothing seismic, just a sense that I needed a break from my mild obsession.

I clicked over the Garage station.  It was playing The Seeker by the Who.  The Seeker was released as a single in 1970, a few years after the Dead started plying their trade and smack in the middle of the Who’s productive period.

At its worst, the Who’s music is embarrassing and makes me angry.  At its best, it is like a fucking plane taking off.  The Seeker isn’t quite their best, but it is close enough.

It was 85 degrees outside, and in an attempt to stay connected to reality, I didn’t have the air conditioning on.  But the hairs on my arms stood up.  I turned up the radio as loud as I could stand it.  I howled the oohs with Pete, through the moonroof, like a werewolf brought out by the sun, bending them to hear my own voice diverge and then blend with his.  “I asked Timothy Leary / He couldn’t tell me either.”  “Focusing on nowhere / Investigating miles / I’m a seeker / I’m a really desperate man.”

I wasn’t distracted from the rest of my life.  I just forgot about it.  It seemed pointless in a very real way.  The Seeker didn’t feel like a bubble, an alternate reality, a blast from the past.  It felt like terra firma, the real me, now and then and later.

I just now listened to it ten times in a row.

Here they are doing it as old men.  It’s living music, outside of time despite topical reference.

The Dead, by comparison, so free by reputation, are in the end hobbled and, worse yet, intentionally so.  The sense of possibility I sensed is from a small range of potentials and, critically, in the wake of their contemporaries the Who, now felt like it.  The music is so hidebound and linked to a particular time and place, it was date-stamped the moment it came out.

It was as if I’d had my head cleaned out with a fire hose.

And that was the last time I listened to the Grateful Dead.

Ribs near-nirvana

OK, I got it. Just about.

Only had to deal with one slab tonight. Much easier proposition than six.

Large chunks of hardwood charcoal, not too many. Half a big chimney if packed in there. Equal parts applewood and hickory for dry wood, but again:  not too much.

Indirect heat with drip pan. One slab. Typical rub. Black pepper, sea salt, garlic powder, a little turbinado sugar, all ground to total dust.

Dusted slab evenly, both sides. Grill HOT, like 400 degrees F.  Only had an hour and a half to cook it.

No matter the kind of barbecue, the smoker should be smoking persistently but lightly.  Not pumping it out like a chimney. Cooking can still happen in the latter state, but prop open the smoker lid so the extra smoke leaks out the sides and does not befoul the meat with excess smoke.  When the smoke chills out, close it up again.

Slab went meat side up right on the grill over the drip pan.

Cooked it 15min or so, just until it got a little color. Did not develop deep color or char yet, given the proximity of the drip pan. The effect was almost like a cross between smoking and steaming the meat. Flipped the slab and cooked it meat side down for a while, another 15min. It loosened up here and got kind of floppy. It got damp with moisture from within the pork and also from the drip pan.

Pulled the slab once it had a little color and the moisture had steamed off.  Took off the grill and removed the drip pan.  Set up smoker for direct heat.  Rearranged the coals to apply maximum heat to the slab and get a bit more smoke out of things.

Mopped the slab very lightly on the bone side and put it right on the grill, bone side down.  Mopped the meat side.  The mop had tightened on the bone side.  Flipped slab to meat side down.  Repeat, still high heat, with light dust of rub at the end.  Cooked that way for about 30min.

The mop was Lem’s barbecue sauce (ketchup, vinegar, pineapple juice, I forget what else), some apple juice, and several teaspoons of tart cherry extract. I bought the tart cherry extract at Harvestime Foods. It was $11.99 for about 16oz, but shit, they claim it’s made from 12.5lbs of cherries. So I guess it’s worth it. I’d already made some pretty great sorbet with the cherry extract as a key ingredient, and I wanted to see how it played with pork.

Pulled the slab.  Painted it with a mixture of apple sauce and a little apricot jam, with some of the mop mixed in.  Both sides.  Wrapped it in foil, back in the smoker for 10min per side, still high heat.

Pulled the packet of foil.  Opened the foil and removed the slab.  Placed the slab right on the grill again.  Poured a little mop in the used foil to deglaze the apple sauce and apricot jam stuff, which had developed a fond.  Painted the deglazed fond back onto the slab, flipped the slab, painted the other side.  Flipped once more.  Cooked like that for maybe 15min tops.

Let the ribs cool.  Cut ‘em up and ate them.  Maybe a bit sweet.  Probably didn’t need the apricot jam or at least less of it.  Otherwise,  a more-than-happy marriage of Lem’s-style high heat barbecue and competition-style glazing and fussing about.

Probably the best ribs I’ve managed yet.  I think I understand the cut now, finally, after many years.

3rd of July

Near-disaster making ribs.  Smoking without a drip pan because I get away with it usually.  Had a pretty bad grease fire while I had the lid open spritzing them.  Pulled the ribs, took out some wood that had grease on it, let the rest burn off.

The ribs weren’t perfect.  The grease and too much early smoke gave them a hint of acridity that bugged me quite a bit, but enough else was right with them that they were salvaged.  I think Andy and Vick were the only other people who noticed.  Andy ate like a hundred of them, and everybody else seemed to like ‘em a lot, so in the end I felt like they were on the right side of terrible.

Similar near-disaster at the park.  We light off fireworks in the middle of the ballfield there.  People aren’t exactly far away, but these are pretty standard-issue fireworks, nothing artillery-grade.  One of the multi-shot rocket things must have been made towards the end of a double shift.  It didn’t have enough sand in it.  The first load knocked the firework on its side, sending subsequent loads a) into the backstop, b) right at a couple of kids, who scattered and spent the rest of the evening watching from a couple hundred yards away, and c) right at my wife, who got a burn mark in her skirt for her trouble.

We should make a little enclosure for the things next year.

 

 

Fighting

My brother and I used to beat on each other, but there was some kind of code. We only punched each other in the back. But it was more or less constant.

Eventually, my dad got us both boxing gloves, and we’d whale on each other that way. Even then, head shots weren’t really part of the deal–we never discussed it, they just weren’t done.

My brother is much bigger than I am, and even before he passed me in height, he had me beat on wingspan. Fortunately, he has about as much of a killer instinct as I do, so our boxing matches were mostly the steam release that my father had hoped they would be.

One day, when I was 10 and my brother was 8, I punched him squarely in the face with a jab, right in the eye. He got this shocked, emotionally hurt look on his face and started to cry. I remember it vividly. I felt terrible.

That’s the last time I punched someone.

A few years later, a few years older.  Nice summer evening.  Touch football in Bonner Park with my friends. Other team was some kids from Sentinel, which was the jock high school on the other side of town.

The Doss kids were on the other team. Ulysses Doss (amazing name) was an African-American studies professor at University of Montana. His kids, Kim and Mike, were athletes, good ones.

The game got a little chippy at some point. We weren’t really strong buds with these guys; we just all found ourselves at the park at the same time. I tagged Mike Doss kind of hard, and he fell on his ass. He threw the ball at me. I said whatever the 1984 equivalent was of WTF. He got up and was all like “WTF yourself,” and he knocked off my baseball cap. And then he shoved me.

I get mad rarely, and when it happens, it doesn’t last very long. But I do get there, it’s a total meltdown.

In this case, I had a Sentinel jock (both descriptors being meaningful at that age) getting all bitchy at me for knocking him to the ground, during a football game. Which was irritating. But then he had to challenge me physically. So…everything went kind of red. I lunged at him with both fists up.

I cannot stress enough how stupid this was. I was a scrawny kid of 14 or whatever, and I had never been in a real fight. I wasn’t in bad shape, but it was soccer shape and nothing that was going to aid me in pursuing some act of aggression. Mike Doss was all sinew and quick-twitch muscle, a sprinter and basketball player, like 4% body fat and probably someone who had been in a fight, if anyone else had been dumb enough to engage him.

Miraculously, two or three of my friends took it upon themselves to grab me. One of them grabbed my right arm. Leading with my right, ugh. I would have been killed. The other one or two grabbed the rest of me.

It was awesome, perfect. It appeared that I was going to be a badass and fight this kid, but I didn’t have to lose any teeth or otherwise endure the beating I surely would have gotten. As far as anyone else knew, I got “held back” from exacting vengeance.

I don’t think I ever thanked these friends of mine adequately. I should do that at some point before we all get old and die.

Roasting marshmallows

Two schools:

1. Classical
2. Art brut

The Classical school of marshmallow roasting requires significant technical ability and proper tools, as well as an appropriate environment within which to roast.

The roasting stick should be one of the following:

• A long, slender, stiff branch of green wood (dry wood will burn too readily)
• A non-painted wire coat hanger, unwound to be more or less straight
• Some sort of specialized marshmallow-roasting spear, purpose-built for the endeavor

The Classical roasting environment is ideally a dying fire of dried hardwood or lump charcoal. Paper and charcoal briquettes should be avoided, as they produce ash in quantity, and ash will stick readily to a roasting marshmallow. The fire should be burned down to embers before endeavoring to roast a marshmallow, though skilled roasters can manage to produce good work with a flame.

In a pinch, a more static source of heat is sometimes acceptable. A stove burner, propane torch or grill, Bic lighter, etc.  Lack of wood smoke puts the Classical roaster at a distinct handicap, and optimal results should be considered impossible.

Classical roasting technique requires that the roasting stick is held perpendicular to the heat source, as to expose the surface of marshmallow maximally to the heat. The marshmallow must be near enough the heat source to roast slowly to a golden brown, but not so close that it roasts rapidly, the interior having failed to melt to the point of goo. Once positioned, the roasting stick must be rotated at a speed sufficient to keep the marshmallow from igniting, but it must not be rotated so quickly that one obtains the dreaded “pale crust” condition.

The Art Brut school of marshmallow roasting requires only a marshmallow, sufficient heat to set it aflame, and any mechanism by which to distance the roaster from the heat source.  The outside is burnt black. It is then removed and eaten. The remaining marshmallow matter is then burnt anew, the outside is removed and eaten, and the process is repeated until the marshmallow is gone.

It is for savages.