If only I had more knuckles on each hand.

I have never been huge on reductive philosophies, being a guy who comfortably dwells in the grey area almost all of the time. However, I am open minded. And, as such, I like to think that I am willing to admit it when I come across a good idea. I don't go in for good vs bad, black vs white, etc but, if I had to pick one dichotomy to reduce my existence to, it came up today:

Nature vs Culture.

This is of course contingent on how you define both Nature and Culture. But, so long as each of us defines them consistently, and truthfully, to ourselves, the reduction will still work for each of us. Allow, for the moment, that we are each capably of this, and give it some thought.

Obviously, this ties in with a whole metric assload of outstanding issues (nature vs nurture, god vs science, greenpeace vs BP, etc) but I think I would argue that this very open ended status is what makes Nature vs Culture the most compelling reduction I have stumbled on for a while. It acknowledges the broad complexity of both sides of the equation and does little to reduce either one any further than needed. For a guy who thinks philosophy is the major for people who can't turn off their cerebral shitstorm enough to slack off and get a normal, useless, expensive liberal arts degree, I am pretty stoked on spending the next few days looking at the world through this new lense and trying it out.

I've spent the day applying it to my previously mentioned foody situation, as suggested in The Omnivore's Dilemma; while it does not offer any weight to either side, it is the perfect way to break down the constituent issues of the larger argument. At first pass, it fit my views of religion too, albeit with the caveat that I buy into "science". Getting confused? Exactly. The perfect thing about Nature vs. Culture is that imposing this prism DOES NOT impose an implied judgment on either side of the issue, but rather using its broad reduction only to contextualize the factors.

Think on it, when you are done not worrying about anything at all. Then get it tattooed.

-OSB

Time flies when you are doing sweet fuck all.

So it turns out that, while I was busy not writing blog posts and doing other stuff, a whole year went by. Last October I started this shit to see what it would be like, and I guess it ain't so bad. Granted, I post rarely, rarely write about anything relevant and probably swear too much for most audiences in most red states. But, either way, here am I is, pecking away at the same old POS mac laptop with the same two fingers on each hand. Though this fall finds me significantly less employed, I should add that this development has been for the best (I think, I hope...)

So, whether or not you are in the same place (mentally, geographically, spiritually, literally, etc) as you were last October, thanks for reading all of the hot gas horseshit that I have managed to drum up. I would promise to do better as we go forward, but who knows. Maybe I'll get some ambition someday and find something actually worthwhile to write about. Or, god forbid, I might get a job and actually not have time to blast the cybercloud with my hourly mysanthropies. Who knows.

What I can say is that I will probably keep making some beer, and drinking some other folks' beer, while listening to obscure, mediocre music no one cares about. You might hear about it. And if I don't stay the course to end up in the same exact fucking spot next October, you might hear about that too. I'll worry about me, you all worry about... well, whatever it is you feel like you aught to. Or fuck it, one up me and don't worry at all. I hear that is really the way to go. Maybe you can try it and get back to me? I'll be right here...

Just don't forget to vote next week, or I will send Mike Huckabee, a komodo dragon and the security guard who tasered that kid at UCLA to stomp your ass. Really though, please consider voting.

Think its gonna rain rain down, thinks gonna rain!

Well, it would hardly be fair if, after my rant about the heat, I did not give the weather its due: its finally raining. We endured the gross humidity for the weekend, and sure enough, it payed off. Rain. Washing eight months worth of shit off the road and sidewalks, this storm is sure to make the already questionable drivers in LA a little more annoying, and a little more likely to skid into each other. Be careful if you are driving in LA today.

Also, look out for all of the deathwish hipster high school kids who have jumped on the fixed gear band wagon since last winter and have never ridden a bike on a wet street. Those cute little side to side bunny hop skids that make you look so fucking bad ass all summer will not work today. Oh no. When you try them you will either a.) not stop, keep going, skidding with no control, or b.) stop, laying your bike down flat, either into the curb or into oncoming traffic. Ooops. And, if, when it happens, there is some guy with a thermos of coffee and an umbrella sitting at the corner of the intersection in a lawn chair, snickering, it is certainly not me. Nope, some other guy.

Now to go dry off my bike that was parked in the rain and find some deserted hills to skid down. Maybe I'll grow a mustache while I am at it..

-OSB

Literated and Obliterated: Pursuit of an idea that may prove to be more than a little stupid...

So I am going to try a new "thing" on this here web-log, a sort of Special Feature for me to bust out from time to time when I have nothing more interesting to say. A while back I mentioned the idea of drinking while reading. It was specifically in reference taking a shot at the end of every stanza of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, a game that a younger me played with alarming regularity back during the campaign years.

However, it could be so much more. Re-reading that post, and coming on the phrase "literated and obliterated" got me thinking, thinking that there are websites, and probably even library full of drink pairings for every dish imaginable, drinking games for every movie, special cocktails for every occaison. Without actually researching this hunch, I have decided to just assume that I am correct and proceed under the assumption that (despite the irony of storing this information in libraries) such a database does not exist for literature. Again, research could prove me wrong, but since I won't be doing any research, I'll assume I am right. That's what you'd do in my shoes, yeah?

So, if you are sitting down with the latest New Yorker, or your new audiobook from the library, or whatever you actually call whatever it is that you read on a Kindle, consider enjoying a beverage simultaneously. This new Literated and Obliterated feature will be about pairing written works with their best mixological counterpart, hopefully providing useful information about both. In true OSB form, it may not happen again for months, or it may happen thrice this week. Who knows, but its my parade and I will stop and smell the funnel cake if I damn well please.
-OSB

Literated and Obliterated #1: The Waste Land, by T.S. Eliot.

Written in 1922, this wild piece of poetry is not to be undertaken lightly. Don't let that discourage you, it is well worth the effort, but you might want to read it sitting down. The work is conveniently broken up into five parts, so that you can get up periodically to refresh your beverage and scream into a pillow, or at the very least flip your record to side B. Speaking of music, I recommend metal. Nothing fast or grindy, but something heavy, ponderous and a little spacey. With titles like "The Burial of the Dead,""A Game of Chess,""The Fire Sermon,""Death by Water," and "What the Thunder Said" its easy to see how each part of this opus could be and has been inspiration to throngs of over-read under-socialized hessian youth.

For fear of boring you any more than I already have, I will leave all of the lit crit to many under-employed English majors in the world, and stick to my strong suit: booze. Without giving away too many juicy bits of the poem, I can say that its a bit on the dark side, and, coupled with an appropriate soundtrack, will require some careful planning on the liquor front. I recommend a five tiered approach, one per part.

To begin, you'll want something strong and stable to sip on as you settle in and get used to the meter. Something tasty but not distracting, allowing you to focus on the reading while you can still focus at all. Beer. I suggest Hopworks Rise Up Red, from Portland. If that's not around any high gravity craft brew should do just fine. Enjoy your beer, get into the poem and by the end of "The Burial of the Dead" you'll be ready for something a little stronger.

Part two, "A Game of Chess" is a good time to savor that whiskey you've been saving for a special occasion. For me its Stranahans Snowflake Colorado whiskey, but to each their own. Try two fingers on ice. Let it sit and mellow on the rocks while you flip the record and then settle back in. You should be feeling melodramatic and a little fuzzy by the end of this section. Remember, this early 20th century poetry. Everything sucked back then, seriously. No twitter, very few cars with A/C, half of the western European male population offed each other in the Great War, civil rights were unheard of, and then this Eliot asshole goes and subjects you to this morose onslaught. Heavy stuff no? Yeah, its ok to top off the whiskey...

Part the third, "The Fire Sermon," is time to really get down in the shit. By now you are drunk, a little confused and trying justify your growing interest in whatever the hell it was that Mr. Eliot was drinking or smoking in 1922. Its time to start checking out, so you can wind down by the end of the poem. Good smoky mezcal, as much of it as you can stomach during part three.

"Death By Water" is only ten lines long, so just have one more tug on the mezcal, and then for the love of christ put that shit away before its too late. No seriously, I mean put it away, somewhere that the sober version of you would never look for it.

Aside from being the most epically titled passage ever, "What The Thunder Said" is your last taste of Eliot's genius for today, so savor it. And savor it the way they did back then, with some absinthe. Didn't see that coming did you? By the time you get to the last line of the poem the Hindi should look like English and vice versa. Take a moment to reflect on the whole experience, finish your absinthe, turn off the record player and check your watch. Oooh, look, not as late as you thought. Your mind might be on another planet, but you haven't missed Glee yet. Head for the boob tube and forget the whole ordeal...
-OSB

Hot, like temperature, not like spicy...

Yeah, I know, anyone who has ever met me saw this one coming, but I couldn't get up tomorrow and look myself in mirror if I did not come through: Fuck this heat. While today is back down to the balmy 90s the record breaking 113 on Monday is still (literally) burned into my memory. September huh? Jesus.

In all fairness though, this was, weatherwise, the best summer ever. It was never hot, all summer long. Clearly El Nino, or Thor or whoever the fuck controls the weather was just biding their time, letting the blast furnace heat up a few extra degress before opening it up and pumping the bellows at Los Angeles. Which is nobler in the mind? To sweat a little bit all summer long, grumble about the heat and put up with my incessant shit talk, or to enjoy a three month June gloom that burns up in September like Georgia in front of Sherman? I guess I would have to choose the later, even if it means I have to pack a whole summer's worth of bastardry into a few weeks. At least I don't have a job to distract me from bitching about the heat, right?

Peaches and Beer

So, as I sit down to finish Micheal Pollan's The Ominvore's Dilemma,(which I previously abandoned for some flavor of the week fiction) I find myself back into the seemingly eternal, liberal guilt ridden, first world dilemma of food politics.

I think what I actually mean is food culture, a thesis supported by Johnathan Safran Foer in his first non-fiction book Eating Animals. I would quote him more effectively if I had actually finished the book, but I have to admit to making a tactical retreat from anthro-culinary theory in the middle of the chapter on egg factories. This choice was made, months before the latest ovo scandal, because I wanted to keep eating eggs. I could tell from page one of the chapter on egg factories that if I, in the name of academia, or masochism or whatever, soldiered through the rest of the chapter I would never eat "conventional" eggs again. So I put the book down and remained un-enlightened until the shitstorm of salmonella tainted eggs hit the major network fan and I was forced to resign myself to $3.99 a dozen guilt free eggs from the farmers market, or a voluntary exile to veganism.

But, anyway, food culture right? Without filling pages with the fine points of the millions of arguments for and against veganism and vegetarianism, and volumes more with the inherent hypocrisy of my own practice thereof, I am willing to admit here on the internet, before you, god, myspace Tom and Al Gore that being vegetarian is getting more complicated.


It is quite clear that the food culture of the typical California veg-head is in no way more sustainable than any carnivorous diet. Factory farming soy for meat substitute and cheese substitute and all other manner of "fake" food is as problematic as grazing in the rain forest, albeit on a smaller scale. Can you be a sustainable vegetarian? Sure. But it is as labor and cost intensive as being a conscientious omnivore. The really responsible thing to do is to eat everything, so long as you can vouch for its origin (with the added asterisk: and can afford it). This was recently modeled by a friend of mine who nose dived off the vegan wagon in pursuit of an humanely raised hog who spent its last days in Oregon on a bender of peaches and beer, or whiskey, I can't remember.

So, if for the moment we pretend that a meager paragraph puts the whole sustainability question to bed, it seems that the politic choice of diet is clear no? And here we run into the more abstract notion of food culture, which is very thoroughly covered in Eating Animals (before the egg factory, of course). Without trying to paraphrase Foer's explanation and without citing his well constructed examples, my word will have to be good enough to convince you that food culture is a more driving force behind almost everyone's dietary choices than politics.


Since this is my blog, and, in this case, my dilemma, we are obviously working up to talking about my food culture. When I gave up meat, it was easy. I didn't really miss anything (except for all beef hot dogs, boiled not grilled, with brown mustard) and there was a whole world of veggie options for me to try. But beyond the simple dietary logistics of my choice, its cultural implications helped ease the process. When I gave up meat, and to some extent still, I was waist, if not chest deep in punk rock. Posi high fives, vegans on bikes and Tragedy backpatches made giving up meat really easy. It was another cultural rallying point beyond tattoos and shitty bar chords. Even the worst domestic beer is elevated to a higher level of culinary relevance if its paired with the latest recipe from some vegan blog from Portland or Brooklyn or Olympia or wherever the fuck.

Am I jaded? Maybe a little. Suffice it to say that the non-dietary trappings of my chosen food culture have started to annoy me. Portland, that idyllic liberal utopia, is still the stuff that punk rock dreams are made of, but is now also maybe so wonderful and idealized that I fear that a final relocation would be inevitably anticlimactic. If I see another fucking fixed gear bike in day-glo-forbidden-zone-misfits-green I might call off the whole thing and buy a Hummer, with a gun rack and some truck-nuts for good measure. Not really, but you get the point. My cultural vegetarianism is slowly choking itself out, and I need to decide whether I can continue on political grounds, or if the responsible thing to do is to choose peaches and beer. I still stand behind veggie/vegan culture, and most of the other trappings of punk rock, but as I cook more, grow up, read more, and generally let my self doubt second guess everything I have ever done, I cannot help but pose the question: why am I doing this? The answer is far longer and more complicate than ever this verbose rant can address, but this is a start.

So, maybe I'll just ride my fixie down to the local vegan restaurant and eat some animal free food, rub elbows with some dude with a Jawbreaker tattoo and ponder my next homebrew. Or maybe I'll let another field of soybeans go fallow and go stuff my face with some local sausage.

Who knows? Eggs for breakfast anyone?