Fording

I will now start occasionally suggesting quality beers to you. That I
feel empowered to do this may not surprise those of you who know I
drink 16 or better hours per day, or that I have very little to do
with my time aside from type things into the internet. But here is the
real reason I am suggesting quality beers to you: tonight (just now!)
I opened this bottle of Sprecher Abbey Triple and it's like a bright
burst in my mouth. (Believe it or not, that was not intended as a
double entendre when I wrote it. ) It's light and fruity like other
Belgians but thick as well, just enough. A hint of wheat.

We have this liquor shop nearby that sells all kinds of quality beers.
The only disappointment I've had so far was a bottle of the usually
remarkable Dogfishhead's Theobroma, which purports to be assembled
according to the same specifications that went into specifying the
fermented chocolate drink swallowed by Aztec royalty. Well, this
bottle of stuff I held while playing computer games well into the thin
light of the morning tasted neither chocolate nor worthy of royalty.
No chipotle burn here nor spiece tingle. Just watery beer.

That said, almost everything produced by that brewery is pretty great.

That's it for that.

Now moving on: maybe I will say here what I am sure at least some of
us are thinking: I am sort of jealous as hell of Dave's job, in that
he has found a career in which someone will pay him to do, more or
less, what he likes to do. Now, I know that there is a wide gulf
between constructing bar graphs and images of kids contemplating how
many menu items they can buy with their combined $3.16 and master
minding cartoons, but I put to you that this gulf is less wide than
the one between academic advising and, well, masterminding cartoons or
books or what have you.

I am also jealous of Dave's town, and Rominger's town, in that it is
still fairly close to the Action, has culture, etc. I am not jealous
of your snow but really, aside from the weather, what do we have here
in Orlando? Cultural diversity, yes, that is good, and sometimes good
shows, and there is a bar a few blocks off which I just last night
learned hosts amateur burlesque. We also have a few airports and are
an hour from the ocean but do you know when I last touched that water?
And the locus of what I would consider literary culture in my
neighborhood, despite the fact that we live downtown, is a yuppy
bookstore a block off that carries almost more cafe menu items than
interesting works of fiction. Sarah and I did almost fall into the
social orbit of a death metal singer but then our friend stopped
dating him.

And we are now in this position where we have both sort of openly
decided we don't plan to be here long enough to invest energy into
developing relationships with people we're not all that interested in.
Yet we still plan to be here long enough (ie, at least 18 more months,
this lease plus one more) that we are probably going to turn into
brown recluses without social interaction. She knows some smart, funny
people from her job but they live far off, and we both get home at
nine pm, and they are embedded in their lives here, etc. So we are
alone with the cat. And the spooky thing, more spooky than any
loneliness, is that it really doesn't bother me, doesn't eat me, I'm
fine fine rolling around the floors of this place drinking coffee and
tapping into the computer and maybe fording my way through the hobos
outside to the grocery store or library and then returning home to tap
tap or whatever. It's okay if it works out in the end, if my social
aspect comes back upon me, but if it doesn't? What happens then? We
entrench ourselves deeper into our routines and suffocate slow.

The pizza's done!