I’m not Dutch and the chunk of cast iron on the counter does not look like an oven unless you are a cowboy, but this thing can cook like Bobby Flay with a grudge. It will make a good cook out of anyone, even if you have no defined recipes, which, I believe, is the whole point: a Dutch oven is its own recipe. Continue reading
Perhaps rednecks are changing. Even though they have always had less than normal proclivities – usually involving beer, fire and some type of explosive or gun or a combination of all three – they used to be somewhat civil and mannered, at least when sober. It was not a political leaning like it is now. It was not a religious statement like it is now. It did not even require camo or a truck. Okay, maybe it did require a truck, but a beat up El Camino would do just as well. Come to think of it, you might need some camo too. You did not, however, need everything you own covered in camo. I know a lot of rednecks and not one got married wearing a camo tuxedo. Not one has a camo recliner or camo couch or camo countertops in the kitchen. It definitely required dogs, probably trailers, a love of anything fried, a lot of denim and a pack of Redman or Skoal. Recently, however, I am finding redneck behavior rude and embarrassing. Perhaps you always found it rude and embarrassing. If you are one of those people, I hate to tell you it has gotten worse. Continue reading
If you want to lose weight, eat at the hospital. The selection is a lot like your high school cafeteria and tastes so bad you can probably shed 10 pounds a week just sliding your plastic tray across the metal rail, avoiding something that might be mashed potatoes or could be oatmeal or even grits. Hard to tell, even after you eat them. They always have meat, however. At least it appears to have once been part of an animal. I saw a piece of animal-shaped meat that resembled something I saw on Animal Planet from New Zealand. Cannot remember the name, however. A Tuatara, maybe?
Excuse me for a second. (mumbling in background) Continue reading
Rudy, our Jack Russell, has taken to acting like a cat. I never thought I would type those words.
He drapes his carcass on the backs of recliners and chairs and the couch for no good reason, as if anything else he does has a reason. Rudy is not a good cat imitator. Look at his face up there. You can tell his heart is just not in this thing. Yet he does it every day. Continue reading
A fried egg is as close to God’s original menu for Adam and Eve as anything I can think of. A fried egg sandwich will forgive several types of low-ranking sins according to a preacher I used to know. Continue reading
Recently it has come to my attention that one of Big River’s fellow tenants called us “circus people.” Granted, this comment was heard by one of our “circus” people while sitting in a restroom stall playing games on an iPhone, but that is usually where the truth comes out. Circus people. Really? Continue reading
On my way home from the grocery store, after I called my son to excitedly tell him about the new donut shop that just opened next to the pharmacy, I caught site of the man beside the road. He was wrestling with a strand of blue LED Christmas lights. I have seen this guy putting up his lights before. The first time, probably three years ago, a little boy was assisting him. The second time there was a younger woman, as I recall. Now it was just him and a dog. What are the odds of seeing the same man putting up the same lights for three years in a row? Continue reading
I have strange dreams around holidays. The one about Santa and a family of elf zombies kept me freaked for days. The pumpkins and nuns dream still bothers me on Halloween. My most recent dream fits today’s holiday if you live in certain parts of the country where Thanksgiving parades are not sponsored by Macy’s, but do involve flatbed trucks decorated with paper mache and waving girls in some stage of winning a beauty pageant. I say this not to make fun of any regional group, mind you, but to prove that I have, indeed, decorated such a float and dated such a waving girl, and I figured this experience gives me a small amount of credibility on the subject. Continue reading
When I was a kid, I loved automobiles. I drew them and designed them and lived for that special time in the fall when the new cars came out. Back then it happened on a single day. I knew that day like Christmas. My father would take me to the Chevy dealership and the Ford Dealership and Buick and Olds and Pontiac and Dodge and Plymouth. Even though the specific years run together in my mind, I can still smell the new Mustang from 1968. I remember how the leather seats on a Cadillac felt. Then, one day, my friend’s big brother got a motorcycle. I think puberty started for me that very same day; weird feelings and urges and hair growing in weird places. Nothing was the same after that.
This week, as we launched a new digital experience for Classified Moto, those old feelings came back. The adrenaline in Adam Ewing’s photographs came through my iPad screen. The raw elegance of big bikes, made by hand, each part fretted over, welded with love and driven with anticipation of finding a little piece of that feeling we all had when we saw our first bike.
I was asked to write a post about our new Classified Moto work, but it speaks for itself right here. Instead I want to say a few words about being able to live our dreams. That is what our friend and owner and founder and builder of Classified Moto, John Ryland, is doing. He was in the same business that I’ve been in all of my life. He began to build bikes in his backyard garage several years ago. Then one day, a bad thing turned into a good thing and John was able to do what he loved full time. Soon CNN and Uncrate and Jay Leno and Playboy and everyone else was talking about John’s artistic passion for bikes and his humble attitude towards a profession filled with badasses and tatted-up rebels. John does not fit the stereotype, of a biker or an ad guy. He does fit the stereotype of a man on a mission.
John Ryland is out there right now, scouring a junkyard for the perfect part or sweating behind a welding mask or putting his latest creation into a hairpin turn. And he is smiling that wicked grin. That’s what you do when you get to live your dream.
I know it is cheaper to print a menu on paper than hand an iPad to a table of hungry people in a restaurant. But if we go past the cost consideration, we just may get a glimpse of the future.
A device as sophisticated as an iPad is not needed for making a menu come to life at our table. All we need is a screen capable of playing HD video. Think of a miniature Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives. Click on an item and see it being prepared in a two-minute segment; in other words, a living menu. Continue reading
After reading Pete Dexter’s review of Jim Harrison’s new book, The Great Leader, a review where Dexter admits to and feels guilty about writing a 1956 book report on the Bible without having ever read it, I have a confession as well. I just wish I could write it like Pete Dexter, or Jim Harrison, or Rick Bragg, or James Lee Burke.
Like everyone, I had to write a lot of book reports in high school English. Sometimes I read the books; sometimes I did not – mostly not to be honest. I started reading “Moby Dick,” but after “Call me Ishmael,” I found the Cliff notes were better. Same with “The Great Gatsby.” I will not go through the entire list of books I did not read back then. I have repented and read most of them since, but what fun is it to admit to doing something good?
Even though I did not read most of the books I wrote reports about, I did have a system that worked quite well at the time, and if you are in school, do not try this at home.
Libraries are big places filled with books, some of them big and dusty and chewed on the edges by someone’s dog because they forgot to bring it back and left it on the floor. I tried to find books that dogs would not even chew, hoary tales not even my English teacher would have read. And that was the point. When I checked out a book I took it to my teacher and asked if it was any good. If they had read it, they would usually give me a short description. That meant I had to take it back to the library and look for a worse book. I did this until I found a truly terrible, thick book the teacher had never read. Then I did not read it either. I looked at the title, the first few pages, got a general idea right or wrong, and made up my own story, then wrote a report about it.
This may help hone your storytelling skills, but it is not exactly honest. I admit that part now. I am not sorry, however. It’s much harder to make up a story than to just write down what you read, especially when the book sucks to begin with. It worked beautifully through four years of high school and dozens of book reports. It worked in college pretty well too. College professors have their favorite subjects, so just pick something that is not in their bailiwick. Always remember the rule of thumb in college: papers are usually read by grad students who have their own academic fish to fry and would rather be drinking than reading your paper.
The practice caught up with me eventually. When I went back to my ten-year high school reunion one of my old English teachers had taken the time to read one of those books I lied about. She was not happy. She talked to me like I had stolen my education.
I looked at her and thought about apologizing. But then I thought better of it.
“Ma’am, you always said plagiarism was the worst offense a writer could commit,” I said.
“It is,” she said.
“Then I went as far as I could to get away from it,” I said. “What I did is exactly the opposite of plagiarism, wouldn’t you say? I never read those books so I certainly couldn’t steal from them. I’d say you taught me well.”
She squinted and her lip curled and squeezed out an exasperated breath and she walked away and I have not seen her since. Which, I suppose, is the good thing about lying to people you will never meet again.
“Mom, Dad, I’m done with this school. It sucks.”
When you drive past a “Dead End” road sign on your way to the end of a peninsula, things can only get more interesting. Off to the left, in the middle of the ocean, a huge white home sits on a rock island just big enough to fit the foundation, its façade bathed in a stunning, peach sunset.
“That’s one of the seven homes of some CEO,” said a local, greeting us in a wary friendliness exhibited by people who live near water. “Brought it in on a barge and slid it over to the rock. Pretty exciting.”
She said this in a manner that told me she had, indeed, seen more exciting things, but she was being kind to me since I was infatuated by a house on a rock in the middle of the water that she sees every day of her life, just off the coast, just out of reach.
Trees are almost naked on each side of us. Hurricane Irene wrinkled up concrete and docks and decks and roads and first floors of homes all along the coast. The one on the rock, however, looks untouched. The irony is not lost on those who glance at it while cleaning up their middle class messes. Rich people do not just get better tax breaks than the rest of us, they get bigger lives to go with their bigger houses and bigger cars and bigger bank accounts.
I think about that while standing next to the “Dead End” sign, looking at a dead tree lying across a brown and dying yard as the sun goes away and night turns everything to shadows. As if on cue, my smartphone chirps a CNN news blurb: “Apple announces founder Steve Jobs…” I did not need to click the Breaking News app to read the rest of the story.
In the coming dark, with the wind turning into my face, I think about a very rich person who just wanted to do something bigger than making money. And I think he did it.
The story has many versions. One of them has me showing up at Big River ten years ago with hair down to my ass, driving a red convertible with a six-pack and two strippers. That’s not true, no matter how much I wish it were.
Another story has me walking in, uninvited, wearing only a pair of Larry Bird-length gym shorts and carrying a pencil. That’s untrue as well. That happened in high school, not here.
The story most often told involves me magically appearing one day with a bunch of boxes. In this version, I just started working without ever having been hired. Again, not true. That was Fred.
On the occasion of Big River’s tenth anniversary, I have been asked to tell a story I have never told in over 900 blog posts. I’ve been saving it for this moment. Here is the story of how I became the third person at Big River. Continue reading
I heard his story as a young boy growing up in South Alabama. The names were different, except for Murder Creek, which despite its name, is a good place to canoe.
Long before he got killed, Lemuel Pitsimons was a dangerous man. Not that he was a mean man by any accounts. He was not. But Lemuel was a man not to be taken lightly if you got on his wrong side. And if the stories are to be believed, 12 people did just that before he was buried down near Murder Creek in 1953. Continue reading
