100g raw honey
750ml water
2g Côte des Blancs dry wine yeast
Juice of 1 lime
It’ll be ready by Thanksgiving, hopefully.
Category Archives: Personal
Keep breathing.
He’s lost about 35 pounds in the last month, but he’s essentially the same guy. Friendly but reserved, stoic, working the room, managing things. An IBM man.
I got here two weeks ago, a day before his first round of chemo. I stayed nearly a week and tried to find ways to be helpful.
Two days after flying home, I got a call indicating that I should come back.
All day long, the phone rings: family, members of his church, nurses, hospice, neighbors, friends — the man’s known and liked by many, many people.
We’ve sat and talked for a few hours here and there; I brought a mic along so we could record some anecdotes about himself and our family. My father’s a born storyteller, but even if I remove 75% of the embroidery, they’re still ripping yarns:
- Many young men in the early sixties got involved in the civil rights movement because it was a fine way to meet girls.
- If your boss at IBM asks you to make a collections call, try to ascertain whether the customer is mobbed up before you remind him of his contractual obligations.
- My grandparents had a tremendous Meet Cute; she dropped her books, and he stopped to pick them up.
As ever, things shift from good to shit and back again in a flash. As I was helping him into bed from his wheelchair tonight, a TV presenter with bad hair and a nice suit explained that optimum health can be achieved if you maintain the right balance of micronutrients. Dad looked at me and rolled his eyes.
“Amazing how many names we have for snake oil,” I said. He laughed as he lowered himself carefully and tried to get comfortable.
Earlier, he’d fallen asleep in the living room while watching the local news (WOMAN INJURES ANKLE RUNNING FROM BEE SWARM). Everyone else had gone to bed, but he said he was more comfortable in the recliner than in bed, so he dozed while I ignored a loop of crime-scene tape, police cars and shocked neighbors from various felonies and family tragedies. I just sat on the couch, watching his chest rise and fall for the better part of an hour.
Before I came out for the first visit, a friend told me:
Keep breathing, my friend. Stay in the present as much as possible. Hold/touch your dad if he’ll let you.
We hug hello/goodbye, and we aren’t afraid to say “I love you,” but that’s about it as far as the demonstrations go. Tonight, I knelt behind his chair and laid a hand on his shoulder; we stayed there like that for several minutes as he slept.
I don’t think I’ve ever felt closer to the man.
Filed under Personal
I’m Too Sexy for my Keffiyeh
I don’t think of myself as culturally insensitive, but I guess I am. Today’s news reports that that three men from the United Arab Emirates were expelled from a festival in Saudi Arabia.
Apparently, the men shipped home were just too damned good-looking — positively Dionysian. Clerics deemed that these dudes were so sploosh-inducing there was a danger Saudi women “could fall in love with them.” The same reports mentions several grafs down that a woman from the UEA was also traveling with these guys, which isn’t allowed in Saudi Arabia. In that frame, this just could be a reprisal. But it seems like something else as well.
In my bubble of San Francisco, that sounded like an episode of Star Trek in which Kirk unknowingly is forced to survive on a ice planet populated entirely by graduates of Handsome Boy Modeling School. It also made feel like Saudi Arabia is stuck in the past, much to its own detriment.
Is there a room at King Fahd Airport where someone decides the ratio of pug fugly to askoutable men passing through Immigration? Maybe’s there dark room with a panel of women watching monitors through their hijabs, pressing red buttons when they see a man whose kiss could be on their lips when they turn our the light. I’m also curious who’s on the list, naturally.
Channing Tatum? Bradley Cooper? Going on principle, anyone who’d ever been named People Magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive is out, right? Maybe the people who run this kingdom and rely on fundamentalist clerics to ensure peace and order on the Arab Street will let this one fly. After all, it’s not as serious as as beheadings.
Look, I hate to be conspiracy guy here, but is it possible that we’ve all just bought into the narrative that our presidents hold hands with Saudi princes because there’s so much durn Texas Tea under their sand? (I guess I should stop calling it Texas Tea ‡, because I recently learned that also refers to a concoction of cough syrup and Sprite). But I digress.
The price of oil keeps going up and always will until we have we see dramatic cultural shifts in oil-producing nations, particularly the ones that rhyme with “Schmaudi Schrabia.” Or unless we start taking solar, wind and — ha, I was just kidding.
God knows, we haven’t cornered the market in the US dealing with racism, sexism. homophobia, but I believe rthat a little more exposure to Western culture couldn’t bad for a county that still literally treats women like minors.
We may turning the corner on marriage equality, but I’m not asking nations like Saudi Arabia and Iran to embrace that today. I’m just urging them to take a second look at how they’re perceived on the world stage. Someday, they won’t have all that oil, leverage, and they’ll have to start dealing with their citizens — and other countries on different terms.
(Sorry for the initial typos. This is what happens you try to write on public transportation.)
Filed under Current Events, Personal, Politics, Uncategorized
More Gaudy Patter 