Fall

It was cold.

I had been wearing a plain white T-shirt earlier in the bright sun of an Eastern Seaboard fall. They don't do Fall in the Middle Colonies, really. Just hot, then cold. If you live by the sea, your life is determined by cycles of currents and climates you may never see. The Atlantic hates people. It has dealt with expansionist humanity for so long its disgust pours out in abstract weather patterns and bitchy little hurricanes.

I lived next to the Atlantic. The Atlantic decided to be cold. In the space of my twelve hour shift, the sky turned clear and the waters froze. I looked up into the cold from the mildew riddled concrete of the CALA. The stars were arrayed as clearly as I ever saw them back East. The cold chased away the smog. Dippers and warriors and lovers scorned were snapshots of the human condition manifested in the original Rorschach.

I packed up my guys and our tools into the ordie truck after the watch was set on our live ones and we went back to the shack. She was waiting there to take me home.

I don't mond the cold. I find it invigorating and affirming. She shivered, she had no insulation against the humid, icy atmosphere. I opened one side of my field jacket and let her squeeze in next to me. She took a deep breath with the coat over her nose. She loved the smell of jet fuel and nitrates. After she smelled it, she settled into me a little deeper. I waved to the flightline gate watch. Her little hand poked childlike from out of my coat to wave. He giggled in a way men with rifles rarely do and reciprocated.

Later, in our little shitty apartment, she was laying in bed. Though it was cold, our clothes found themselves lost and crumpled in the floor. I had needed a drink of water and returned to our little slice of temporal attained conglomerate bliss. We always got along when I was set to leave soon. I tripped over the packed seabag in the doorway. When I crawled into the bed and pulled the covers up, her icy body clung to mine and her face burrowed deeper into my chest. I could hear her internal little girl seeping out through the grown up she tried to be.

"You're always so WARM."

I love Fall.

How To Eat An Animal, Part II

To return to the issue at hand.

The animal is dead. You have killed, and forces of economy staining your manicured hands or forces of saltpeter and nitrate bruising your shoulder, it doesn't matter. The animal is dead and it's your fault irreversibly. The cut of the animal is a blade roast, and the animal is an elk.

A quick note, shoot a cow elk, preferably small, the meat tastes better than the huge majestic bull, though the trophy is more profound and so subtle as to impress no one. No one displays good taste on the wall of their den, but there are many men, and women, who have enormous racks (antlers) of killed beings festooning their enclaves. The statement, subtle as vodka vomit on the stairs, this makes about the man or woman's self image is so obvious that I won't even waste my time.

Take an onion, I prefer it to be yellow. It should not be plunder of another mindless trip to the grocer, but an example of the bounty of the good, red earth. My onion comes from the quaternary deposits, prepared with work and sweat, behind my mother's house. Discard the husk and first two layers of the onion. Cut it into quarters and then eighth's, the onion, if it is from dirt you have touched, is strong and full of fiery flavor. Onions are beautiful.

Select four or five potatoes. Pick the red potatoes. They are the sweetest. As you wash the good, red earth from the potatoes, reflect on how much love a person must have to take time out of her schedule to provide her family with such bounty. I like to cut them in quarters if they are of a normal size. If they are the enormous monsters sold in a grocery store, they should be cut smaller. The potato should be a bite, all by itself independent of the powerful punch of flavor in the elk.

Four turnips, planted in the dark of the moon, and make sure they are too small for bitterness to have taken them into its grasp. As you skin them, remember the man, the friend who taught you that small turnips are best and that they should only be planted in the void between the wax and wane of our lunar friend. Miss him, as he is dead.

Slice celery into four inch segments. It is good and flavorful.

Take a cutting board and coat it in black pepper and a small touch of cumin. Hold the blade roast in your hand, feeling the coolness. Reflect on how much that trip out to the Northern, rough country means to you. Roll it into the pepper and cumin, careful to grind it in with your own hand. Rub in a good amount of minced garlic, game meat tastes best without lame spice-in-can, but with robust flavors. Savor in the world of memory the experience of dragging the heavy beast four miles to the road. It was a good day. Exhausting, but full of laughing. And snow. Heavy, heavy snow that added another ounce of misery to extracting the 600 pounds of meat from the lap of the Earth. Remember your father's hopeful and infuriating comment, "Well, this snow'll sure make good ice tea come summer."

Roast peppers in a hot oven. I prefer pablano and chile piquin, but you may use any large chile. Mine come from my sister-in-laws little slice of the ever ancient and creepy Monument Valley. Somehow the red sand and fickle creeks, combined with her ancient and equally spooky name, produce amazing chiles.

In the pot, stack onions, another bulb of garlic (skinned), the potatoes, the meat, and on top, the celery and peppers. Salt and add sprigs of fresh oregano and mint as well as a lime, quaterred.

Turn slow cooker to a medium setting and go to work.

Incremental Honesty

Fr: c#####e@hotmail.com
To: Casey
Re: that chick

Casey, you've never thought chicks dig you that way.. have you asked her? How can you know if you don't ask her?

Fr: Casey
To: c#####e@hotmail.com
Re: Re: that chick

Well, you have a point. I haven't. I have a feeling anything between me and her would be pretty much physically based. Not that I mind. Well, geologically and physically based. She's coming out of a long relationship and there hasn't been anyone else. Our hypothetical relationship would probably be hiking, mostly, then recreating naked. The other day, well, it would have been cool.

We went for a quick rockhounding trip and got rained into a cave under a waterfall. I controlled myself. I am a good person. But thunderstorms, caves, and tall, skinny women with issues are pretty much the capping pinnacle of what I find erotically stimulating.

When I finally decide to be honest with myself, I might admit to finding that kind of stuff what I want anyway. Some insightful discussion on the latest Nova and some corporeal communication. PBS and lovemaking would be the goal. Well, nerdy wilderness talk and fornication. Maybe just outdoor expedition and some less than moral fun.

Ok, I want hiking and fucking.

How To Eat An Animal, Part I

The first step to eating an animal is to kill it. You may prefer to do this with a credit card slid through a machine at the grocery store or through the placement of a gun shot. Either way, the animal is dead. Practically, most prefer the labeled friendly pink packages that let them disassociate the act of consuming from the act of killing. That is your prerogative. The initial step of preparing to eat the life that used to be, is to be suitably mindful of the gravity and beauty of what you are doing. You are contributing to the potter's hand shaping the pot. By eating another living thing, be it a carrot or a caribou, you are propagating the balance of life and death necessary to the beautiful mechanization of all living things and their orchestration in a grand improvisation.

Before you eat an animal, or any living thing, this is the first step:

Gratitude.

There are two prayers that have made their way trickling through generation after generation of men of faith who share my adjective surname. This is profound as my family is Protestant. Actually, it is incredibly more complicated than that, but "Protestant" is what my mom told me to tell the other kids who asked me about my religion. Protestantism, at least the American rural variety, finds organized prayer to be a good example of why all those worldly churches are empty and soulless.

The first prayer, preferably prayed in a cold, cold river at altitude fed by snow melt, is thus:

(Insert name here) has made it known that he has wanted to join with the blessed family in the Household of Faith. He has received the lead of Holy Spirit and is a Believer in the birth, death, and resurrection of your son, Jesus Christ. He understands that this baptism will give him the right in the eyes of God and men to preach, teach, and testify in the General Assembly and Church of the Firstborn until such time as you see fit to take him home or return in Glory. (Insert name here), I now baptize you in the name of the Father, The Son, and the Holy Spirit.

The other is even less formal, but still pretty important to me:

Heavenly Father, we thank you for the opportunity to meet here in the presence of our Brothers and Sisters to partake in this meal. We ask that you look in on our widows and orphans that cannot be here with us today and hold them in thy perfect thoughts. Lord, we ask that you keep a kind heart and watch careover our Brothers and Sisters on the highways and serving their country overseas, and bless them to return safely to the fold. Heavenly Father we ask that you'd bless this meal as nourishment to our bodies and our bodies to your service.

Amen.

This last prayer is also used loosely when an animal has fallen to a bullet and will be consumed by the hunter and his family. It may come as a shock to many, but in the part of the country I'm from, the difference between hungry and fed in the winter is still the taking of an animal during the Fall's hunting season. Well, sometimes in season. Strict compliance with the law has always been the luxury of the rich. We were always so poor. More than a time or two, God and Winchester fed our huddled, poor family when times got tight.

These prayers meant so much to me. Rather, they mean so much to me. I may not believe as the rest of my family, but I did have a small and insignificant conversion on the road the other day. The road was not Damascus, it was Little Park, and the light was not from heaven, but from my two misaligned headlights. My conversion was not that big a deal, really.

Anyway, my favorite cut of elk meat, besides the ambrosial backstrap roasted over a fire, is the shoulder blade roast. The best way to cook it is in a Crock Pot. I will provide this recipe in part two.

06SEP1980

I had a really amazing and heartfelt piece of literature to impart to the world in this little corner of a big waste of time. Then Blogger ate it. I don't know where it went, I don't know why it seemed tasty. I do know that I can't for the life of me remember what I wrote.

Anyway, forgot it was my birthday yesterday until a friend left me a nice email message. I appreciated it greatly, even though I don't give two shits about birthdays. I thought birthdays were cool as a child, but I also thought Transformers and the gravel in the driveway was cool.

I might still think transformers are cool. Gravel might hold my interest sometimes. Gravel is so important. You blog people don't even know. Go on talking about iPods and clothing options. You know what you would have without gravel? Nothing. Take a look around you and count the concrete structures you need, both above ground and under. Concrete is a mixture of portland cement, sand, and gravel at a ratio of 1:2:3, usually. In other words, your grocery stores, theatres, highways, tunnels, and pretty much everything else you need if you don't live in a grass hut is mostly gravel.

Transformers are giant robots that turn into cars and trucks and shit. I stand on the solid base of my tastes in cool.

Now, birthdays are, much like almost all fornication in certain parts of Asia, a commodity. You have only so many possible, and the stock in the those birthdays is a function of the continuing formulae of supply and demand. While the number of available birthdays, like my own, is suspected to be great, such as when you are mid-twenties, or if you prefer the cold ten year rounding, late-twenties, they mean very little.

In other words, I find no reason for ribbons and streamers, or any foofiness whatsoever for a birthday that has no significant numerological value or dwindling forecast for future possibilities of another birthday.

A birthday for 1-10, sure. It only makes sense, as you haven't been alive long enough to flood the market with years in which to celebrate. 13 holds the distinction of being the first in our language of numbers to carry the suffix "teen," thus deserves noting. None of the following teens, save voting age in your locale, carry any weight. 21 holds some meaning in the US for no other reason than some fairly ridiculous legislation. After 21, there really is no reason to celebrate. You've had enough childish little shindigs and need no more.

Welcome to adulthood where no one cares how old you are unless you are targeted for procreation and people make fun of you for playing with Transformers. Your life is over. There is no reason to note any occurence, save marriage or the creating of a new set of birthdays in the form of progeny.

I will allow my minions to celebrate any birthday of mine after 100, but it will probably be more of an imperial holiday at that point, anyway.