The Little Words Mean the Most

How to serve the best beer in the world

It takes a little work, but it's worth it.

Cut a lot of brush during the green months. Pile it in your "work garden," the one that's not for visitors. Wait for a snowy day.

Today was perfect. Dry, light snow accumulating to 6 inches. Temperature: 17 degrees Fahrenheit. Translation: you can build a throbbing fire outside and not burn anything down, such as the house.

Activities in the snow are exhausting (the three-pound fleece-lined boots) and exhilarating (the rosy cheeks). Beer is a perfect companion.

Go get any favorite beer. Today, mine was English-style ale from Carlson Craft Brewery, Branford CT. An oversized 1 pint 6 fl.oz. bottle, big as two kidneys. Recommended by my favorite beer-guru. I snugged the bottle down into the snow; think alcoholic mortar round dropped down the tube.

Burn brush for four hours; wind gusts to 15 mph. Every five trips or so, dragging fresh-cut limbs to the fire: sip. After four hours, the beer will start to freeze. That's what you're going for.

Outdoor semi-freezing produces the best beer in the world. As you start to encounter flakes of ice in your beer, flakes the size of confetti, slush beer, you'll notice a remarkable change in taste. More intense. Stingingly so.

My publisher thinks I suck

I sent this picture to him, as a sketch of an idea for the cover of my new book called Seeing Through Donors' Eyes, and he wrote back that it was two things: creepy and the Lone Ranger. I wrote him back that the Golden Rule for brainstorming was "no discouraging words, cowboy." And he apologized. So okay. World no wobble.

Crisis of confidence; or I don't always love my work

Uncertainty. Of course. Hiding in my drawer are at least three decent book manuscripts still unknown to publishing. Why start another? Writing forces my mind to imagine, a skill never sharpened enough. The story is called Rayrex. It's set in the future on Earth. The advantage of future fiction: no research, at least not the kind where you might be wrong; merely trying to entertain.

 

Chest-borne sayings

To stimulate the world economy, click here.

Black cat business

Kitty

Our contribution to Kitty's wake was a Dutch apple pie, with the crumbly crust. Kitty's dead now a week from an overwhelming onslaught of cancer, in her brain her lungs everywhere. She was around 70 years of age. Just about that number of fans attended "church in the barn" today, Sunday, to hear her grown children play sad Handel and friends talk about her aloud to the congregation: how smart she was, how self-sacrificing, how determined, how involved, how insistent an atheist. The minister brought that up. She had lived in Switzerland, attended elite schools, just about won her Ph.D. in philosophy when her third child came along, proved autistic and absorbed her for decades. People were jammed in tight as the layers of an onion on concentric rows of folding chairs. The little barn was 20 degrees at the start and 80 degrees at the end. There was afterward a feast of potluck bringings. A fair number stood outside in the apple-ripening crisp air and on frozen mud, talking comfortably to strangers and sipping hot coffee. To my wake bring Jameson's and cider for my teetotaling wife.

Refrigerator magnet Rorschach

  What does it all mean? These magnets, about us? Well, we're hard on Republicans. Truth out: the Republicans are the party that freed the slaves, not the Democrats. As I learned from reading Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln. Want to understand the Barack Obama campaign profoundly? Read this book. It weighs two bricks (no joke) but it reveals the Lincoln we all should know, for lessons learned.

Another cold night journal entry

We collect masks

Not serious collecting (who has the money?), but admirably when we can. Meet Bolivian tin work, using discarded cans for the "Slave King," a stock figure.

We are exercising

Mostly Simone though. Who is my inspiration. She reads romance novels while she tightens her thighs on the Bowflex, a sculpture passing as an engineering marvel. I am not a couch potato; I am an overripe banana bred with a couch potato, with lazy sauce on the side.