Favorites 6.14.13

The wedge salad: Do you know it? A crucial salad event—half a head of lettuce, chopped down the middle and sprinkled with blue-cheese dressing, tomato, and boiled egg. Plus (if you're lucky), more blue cheese crumbles, caramelized onions, toasty croutons, et cetera. I don't do bacon. Aaanyway, I'd never even heard of the wedge until recently. I apologize for my tardiness on this matter.

Grey's Anatomy: I'm watching the whole series, start to finish. Kinda melodramatic, sure—but there's some wow moments in almost every show. Don't start an episode unless you're prepared to blow a night on three or four. Cliffhangers.

Going home: Fun is sorta fragile. It tends not to last. When the fun expires, you can feel it in the room like a drop in the air pressure. There's a skill to identifying this moment and promptly saying goodbye.

The National, Trouble Will Find Me: Didn't you know that The National had a new album? It's nice. Fraught, and sad in a lovely way. Also, two out of thirteen songs have my name in them. A sign?

Inside Llewyn Davis

We all need things to look forward to. I'm looking forward to the new Coen brothers movie. Love you, Joel and Ethan!

So ... set in Bob-Dylan-era Greenwich Village. Yall know how I feel about Bob. Also, cats, guitars, downtrodden folk musicians, John Goodman, JT (Justin Timberlake, for peeps who don't know), and a bunch of other good stuff.

"That's why all the same shit is gonna happen to you—because you want it to!" ....... I can relate.

Like Summer

Last weekend, for a whole weekend, all I did was what I wanted. There was blue sky in the afternoon. I worked in the garden. I skated several mini ramps and drank wine out of a honey jar while everyone else drank beer, and Lefty laid in the shade of a table stealing scraps when they fell like a good boy. It felt like summer. It was summer?

Summer Readz: A Short List

Roll Me Up And Smoke Me When I Die—Musings From The Road, by Willie Nelson: I'm gonna put this on my nightstand and pick it up now and then when I want to be told a little bedtime story that—before it really gets anywhere—always seems to disperse into a cloud of weedsmoke.

This Is How You Lose Her, by Junot Diaz: A book of nine short stories by this magnif Dominican-American writer concerning such summery topics as love and sex and obsession and stuff.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle—A Year Of Food Life, by Barbara Kingsolver: I love me some Kingsolver. Poisonwood Bible and The Bean Trees are so, so good. The desert! Take me there! Aaanyway, this one's a non-fiction, all about how she and her family "abandoned the industrial-food pipeline to live a rural life—vowing that, for one year, they’d only buy food raised in their own neighborhood, grow it themselves, or learn to live without it." I like food. I'm intrigued.

Adios

As I may have mentioned before, this here log cabin—the house I grew up in; the one my dad and grand dad built back in the '70s when I was just a sliver of a pine cone inside my parents' tinder box—was bulldozed recently to make room for a mansion-y type thing. Vacation home for the owner of the San Diego Padres I think? I could be wrong, I don't follow sports. Anyhoo, I'm not sad about it. It's sad to say goodbye to your roots, but I did that a long time ago. What's nice is to think about the place and all the happy, wild days I had running around barefoot in the middle-of-nowhere mountains.

-Shot the plate-glass window out of the green house with a BB gun during an ill-fated target practice and got in the kind of trouble you still remember 24 years later.

-Climbed on the roof regularly to sit atop the chimney and feel free.

-Fell in the creek countless times—never drowned.

-Crept around in the pastures eating bugs and examining plant life.

-Woke up early on the first day of summer—smelled the green grass smell; heard the crop duster flying overhead spraying mosquitos—and knew instinctively that everything desirable was already around me in abundance.