Blue about the blues

February 12, 2018 ~ Chris ~ Leave a comment

I go to Chicago for a few days in early March, entirely for shits and giggles. I know what I’m going to do: the Art Institute, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House, 360 Chicago, a food walking tour, a play, a clutch of acclaimed restaurants, the International Museum of Surgical Science — you get it.

And I know what I’m not going to do: the blues.

Famous blues joints pepper Chicago, the most popular being the craptastic cathedral that is the House of Blues, a theme park boasting Mardi Gras “all month” (Mardi Gras, the seamiest excuse for a party ever — a tawdry, tacky, ta-ta-baring bacchanalia, crawling and bellowing with professional alkies and aspiring harlots) and wincing Sunday gospel brunches, plus Chippendales (that just happened), and bands like Breezy Rodio and, heart-sinkingly, The Good, the Bad and the Blues.

House of Blues is an 11-city chain of clubs and restaurants with an eye-singeing, carnivalesque, Hard Rock Cafe ambiance that grabs you by the lapels with neon gloves then barfs a bacon double cheeseburger down your throat to the blaring tunes of some godawful blues-rock cover band. You want chili-cheese fries and extra harmonica with that? Yup, sure.

Yet I don’t blame that lame chain (or its brethren, the hyper-branded, overpriced B.B. King Blues Club & Grill) for my distaste of the blues. I blame the music.

Obviously H.O.B. is but one garish facet of Chicago blues. Classy clubs, holes-in-the-wall, hipster bars — a constellation of blues venues lights up this big city. And there are whole taxonomies of blues music, just as there are for jazz (swing, be-bop, Dixieland), rock (metal, punk, new wave), etc. It’s a prismatic genre. It’s just not very good.

e32b7c952363e7b95d65043338c3364c — *Giving me the blues.*

I do like some blues — Robert Johnson’s oeuvre, Leadbelly’s “Where Did You Sleep Last Night,” and other classics — but I’m convinced the blues is an acquired taste. Jazz is too, I think.

Today I can take or leave jazz, but there was a serious stretch during college when I was an energetic jazz neophyte. I took an infectious jazz survey course (taught by the late Grover Sales, a cantankerous, spittle-flying savant) that made me a bit rabid. The first CD this inveterate hard-rocker ever bought was Miles Davis’ “Kind of Blue.”

My Dad, an incurable jazz aficionado, made sure I saw an array of jazz greats performing in the Bay Area before they passed on: Ella Fitzgerald, Buddy Rich, Stan Getz, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Lionel Hampton, the Duke Ellington Band and others. I was smitten. (If only I could have seen the late, great Gene Krupa, my elastic-limbed drum hero.) I also caught the classical music bug with Dad’s nudging. I’m still infected by its Beethovenian bite.

And then there’s the blues.

That one didn’t stick.

Many years living in Austin, Texas, exposed me to scads of blues at venerated shrines to the music like Antone’s and the Continental Club. It always sounded like the same guitar riff, same hi-hat shuffle, same plinky solos, coupled with growly vocals and, the nadir, infernal harmonica runs.

© Copyright 2014 CorbisCorporation — *Must. Stop.*

It still sounds that way. “It’s great for 20 seconds, and then I just want to go,” quips Fred Armisen in his new Netflix comedy show “Standup for Drummers.”

Armisen’s facial expressions are priceless as he feigns listening to a blues group, toggling from pleasant and expectant to baffled and bored and finally glazed.

On my 21st birthday in New Orleans, I tried to get lost in the local vibe in a blues bar. I had a beer and the band did its jammy, bluesy thing. My face sagged after the first song. Soon I was mummified in boredom.

(Surly sidebar: During two long-ago trips to Jamaica I was, naturally, subjected to endless reggae, which is as repetitive and predictable as the blues, and might actually be worse. I don’t think reggae will be an issue in Chicago.)

I have nothing but reverence for Chicago’s great, musically eclectic Chess Records, whose roster boasted Willie Dixon, Chuck Berry, Howlin Wolf, Muddy Waters, and Buddy Guy — some critical roots of rock ’n’ roll. I’m even considering taking a Chess Records tour.

Skipping the blues in Chicago, a naughty bit of blasphemy, I have my sights on a pair of bar-clubs known for multifaceted music bills, from rock and world, to country and punk: The Empty Bottle and the storied Hideout. There I hope to get my live-music fix, without the monstrous Planet Hollywood decor, baskets of mozzarella sticks and, god help me, the wheezing, whining plaints of a harmonica being tortured.

The unexpected pitter-patter of rain on a snoozy Saturday

February 10, 2018April 4, 2018 ~ Chris ~ Leave a comment

Today I walked two miles, to the cafe and back, and on the return journey the skies broke and a steady rain began to fall. Not wearing proper gear, I was lucky enough to have a plastic shopping bag in my backpack, which I hurriedly spread over my head like a hapless vagabond, rain gathering on top of it, overflowing and dripping down my nose.

15003576460_dbc95ece65_b — *This guy’s a pro.*

This lasted about 15 minutes, the remainder of my walk. Cars passed. Drivers surely sniggered at the sight. I paid no attention. I was annoyed but contained my annoyance by dint of the bag actually doing its job, for the most part keeping my head dry. My sneakers didn’t fair so well, but they’ll live. No water got inside my shoes, despite a hearty split along the seam of one of them, another bit of luck.

Later, the dog was taken out to do his business in the rain. He came back damp, not soaked, and he smelled like a pile of dirty wet towels. He started to flail about on my bed, limbs flying, nose snorting, but I stopped him in mid-tumble because he was, frankly, disgusting. No amount of rain is going to supplant a good bath. He’s currently air-drying with a little frown on his face. He smells like tacos.

funny-picture-1405841776 — *Wishful thinking.*

Rain is a pain. I’m not a giant fan because, well, it’s just a bunch of inconvenient water dropping on you. On my travels I pray for no rain, and I have been exceedingly fortunate that I’ve almost never required an umbrella on the road. When I do need one, I really hate it. I’m the guy whose umbrella turns inside-out in a gust, fuming.

Hours later it’s still trickling outside and the neighbor’s aluminum gutters are making a determined percussive patter. Tomorrow promises more of the same. We need the water. So much of the world does. So I don’t make a point of cursing the heavens. “Do not be angry with the rain,” said Nabokov. “It simply does not know how to fall upwards.”

Germane words from Orwell on the biggest, most obscene day in sports

February 4, 2018April 4, 2018 ~ Chris ~ Leave a comment

A non-sports fan of the most unreconstructed order, I found this bit in an op-ed in yesterday’s New York Times so very fitting on whatever today is, some big sports thingamajig I hear people give a disproportionate bleep about (bold-faced italics mine):

(George) Orwell noted that sports faded in prominence after the fall of Rome, only to surge again in the 19th century, in England and the United States, where games became “a heavily financed activity, capable of attracting vast crowds and rousing savage passions.”

For Orwell, the rise of sports was bound up with the rise of nationalism, both of them examples of “the lunatic modern habit of identifying oneself with large power units and seeing everything in terms of competitive prestige.”

A blog post that’s purely a pet project

February 3, 2018April 4, 2018 ~ Chris ~ 4 Comments

Cubby is the family dog. He is small and Schnauzer-esque. A rescue mutt. His long tail curls into a small O, like a bagel. He barks sparingly, if piercingly. He cuddles greedily. He is overgrown with charcoal-colored fur, like a neglected shrub that needs to be desperately trimmed into a topiary. He smells faintly of turkey bacon. Bath — he could use a bath. Freshly trimmed and clean, he looks like this, a canine Cary Grant:

Currently, he looks like a graying Ewok:

ewok-wicket

How we adore our pets. That’s a cliche, and I’m sorry that occurred. Still, we do. They are little people, extra children, crucial on both sides of the love equation. So human is Cubby that we sometimes believe there is a little man inside him named, mystifyingly, Pasquale, who can unzip an invisible zipper down his neck and chest and pop out ever-so fleetingly, utter his name — Pasquale! — then zip back up and return to being a dog. It’s terrific. We all need medication.

I require animal companionship. When I left home, where we enjoyed a pair of heart-melting black Labs and a bevy of feral yard cats, I went small with pets, namely fish and rats. (Yes. Rats. Deal.) I didn’t want the steep, familial responsibilities of a dog or cat. My independence, especially as a budding world traveler, took primacy.

Rats rule. If you know little about them, I repeat the slogan of rattie devotees: “Smarter than dogs, cleaner than cats.” They make magnificent pets — loving, social, funny, trainable. (And then they chew up half the house and all that goodwill curdles. For about a day.)

I have owned six rats, individually. The best were Phoebe, Becky and Tammy, who played and came when called and snuggled and loved to have their tummies rubbed and peed all over the place. And then, exactly at 2.5 years old, each got horribly sick and died. Rat life expectancy is ruthless and cancer or infection generally fells them. Each loss wrecked me completely.

Dogs, natch, live much longer. Cubby’s about 3 or 4. He looks 65. I’d say he’s got a good 10 to 12 years left in him, wonder dog. I’d include a recent picture of him, but you’d have no idea what you we’re looking at, except maybe a miniature yak.

I didn’t mention the two cats here, Tiger Lily and Spicy. They’re brother and sister and they look about as much alike as Barack Obama and Donald Trump. They wrassle and hiss at each other and Spicy scampishly steals Tiger’s food.

Cats are weird company. Their independence is enviable and noble. They thrive on solitude and hiding places. Pet them at your risk. With an imperious air, they will come to you when they want attention, not the reverse.

Come to think of it, that sounds something like me. I am definitively a dog person over a cat person. I love dogs’ gregariousness, neediness, demonstrativeness — their licks, wags and yelps. But I am not a dog, per se. I’m more Tiger Lily than Cubby. Yet I like Cubby better than Tiger Lily. What that says about me just sent a shiver down my back.

Pets reveal stuff about us. Dog person, cat person, rat person, all of the above. Knowing these creatures, all my life, I’ve been aware how far my fondness can stretch for a non-human being. Blasphemy, you say, but sometimes I think I like the animals better than the people. Just sometimes. Call it a pet peeve. I call it sheer devotion, always returned, unreservedly.

Getting my Goat, Chicago style

January 30, 2018April 4, 2018 ~ Chris ~ Leave a comment

A couple of blogs ago I rhapsodized about two fine-dining dishes I’m already swooning over before a March trip to Chicago: crispy duck tongues and wood-oven roasted pig face.

wood-oven-roasted-pig — *Roasted pig face.*

Served at the acclaimed Girl & the Goat, they sound so marvelously disgusting yet so tantalizingly tasty that my anticipation surges. My only fear is that the plates are so popular they’ll be out of them the night I order. I have no backup. It’s either fowl and swine or nothing. Keep your hamachi crudo and seared yellowfin tuna — I want barnyard animals! (Well, there’s always the titular goat. I ate goat once in Jamaica, with a complex of reactions.)

This is about Girl & the Goat. This post is then, in its adorable naiveté, free advertising. But let’s not forget: I’ve never been to the restaurant, never tasted its food. I’ve only read about it, drooled over photos of dishes (XXX food porn), watched Anthony Bourdain sing its praises and learned a bit about its chef and owner Stephanie Izard in the press. If I go and it even slightly disappoints, I will return here with a retraction, grumbling umbrage, quibbles and caveats. I am fair. And ruthless.

stephanie_izard_desktop — *Stephanie Izard*

But back to our hopes and dreams. A Chicago native, Izard is, famously, the fourth-season winner of Bravo’s “Top Chef,” where she was also named fan favorite. She opened Girl & the Goat in 2010 in the West Loop, followed by Little Goat Diner across the street and the Chinese-themed Duck Duck Goat around the corner. She’s become a mini-industry in Chicago, and G&G was nominated best new restaurant by the James Beard Foundation in 2011. Izard won the Beard award for Best Chef Great Lakes in 2013 and was tapped one of Food & Wine Magazine’s Best New Chefs in 2010.

I have meals planned at other admired restaurants in Chicago — Avec, Frontera Grill, Piece, Au Cheval — but for some reason Goat has me giddy. On paper, the menu’s a doozy, mouthwatering morsels and paradisiacal plates that can’t miss. I quipped before that I will only eat duck tongue and pig face. Not true.

The calamari bruschetta (clam baguette, goat milk ricotta, goat bacon, green apples) will be sliding down my gullet, as will the wood grilled broccoli (rogue smokey bleu, spiced crispies) and, if I don’t erupt first, escargot ravioli (bacon tamarind sauce, escarole and celery, crispy onions). (Please, god, let there be doggie bags.)

Girl & the Goat is but one more event in my ongoing daredevil dining excursions. It’s not that crazy, but its exoticism feels just right, and its menu is much more ambitious than those of the other eateries I’ll visit in the Second City.

Deep-dish pizza is great. Potato-goat sausage pizza is divine.

Dining out should be a thrill, a mini adventure. Not to get dopey or too obvious about it, but what’s the point of forking out for food that’s not extraordinary? When I buy a burger, I want that slab of beef to sing. I want the crispy Platonic ideal of fried chicken at The Wooden Spoon in Bloomfield, NJ, or the extravagant, inspired dogs at Ruffhaus Hot Dog Company in El Dorado Hills, CA, or the amazing mazeman at Ani Ramen in Montclair, NJ, and anything at Frenchie in Paris, France. I want my eyes to roll back in my head at each bite.

Girl & the Goat looks promising, and this will be the end of my unsolicited promotional pamphlet for the restaurant. Perhaps I’ll follow up with a report on how it all — duck tongues, pig face and all — went down.

I will follow in this little guy’s hoof-steps. He looks like he knows how to dine with panache.

me as i enter.png — *Girl & the Goat mascot. How I intend to enter the establishment.*

me as i depart.jpeg — *The little fella after enjoying dinner. How I intend to exit.*

Being gutsy with the ultimate donation

January 23, 2018April 4, 2018 ~ Chris ~ 1 Comment

Clearing out emails yesterday, I came across one labeled “Donor registration.” It could have contained all manner of information — my monthly donations to the Humane Society and SPCA, clothing donations to the V.A., etc. — but, no, it was something nakedly startling.

The email, dated mid-2016, regarded my registration to donate my organs when I die. It rushed back to me, and once a morbid residue burned off, I was again at peace with my decision to be chopped up and disemboweled when the big day comes.

Fact: one organ donor can save up to eight lives. That’s a pretty good payoff. I can live —or die — with that.

I’ve always ticked the donor box on my driver’s license, yet it’s remained an abstract, faraway concept, like: This really doesn’t concern me in the here and now, so why the hell not?

So I signed up for an official donor program called Donate Life America. I have no idea how I chose them. I didn’t interrogate their credentials, and there are many other donor companies. I could be making a terrible mistake. Maybe they’ll drop my eyeballs on the floor, kick them around as they scramble to fetch the errant orbs.

DLA describes itself like this: It’s a 501(c)3 nonprofit “to increase the number of donated organs, eyes and tissue available to save and heal lives through transplantation while developing a culture where donation is embraced as a fundamental human responsibility.”

The group’s website also features the page “The Deceased Donation Process,” featuring tantalizing (terrifying?) links to “Brain Death Testing,” “The Organ Procurement Organization” and “Recovering and Transporting Organs.” (For gooey, grisly FAQs, go here.)

As I’ve said before, when I expire I plan to be torched into fine powder, suitable for an enormous ashtray. Frankly, being harvested for body parts — skin, eyes, heart, liver, kidneys, bones, arteries — makes me momentarily queasy, even a mite scared. But buck up we must. (Still, I am certain I don’t want to be poked and prodded, chopped and chiseled as a cadaver in a medical school. Family, please note.)

Organ-Donation-Day-Let-this-Human-Chain-Not-Go-In-Vain-640x320

My eyes, brown and clear, are strong, though they require reading specs, a big caveat to donor recipients, I imagine. My ticker is in fine fettle, thumping to the mid-tempo pulse of the Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive” when at rest and Metallica’s “Whiplash” when worked up, and there’s minimal plaque or bad cholesterol gumming up the works. Plus, it’s a big heart: it loves to love and has capacious room for dogs.

Although I’m afraid my liver is probably as useful as a burned charcoal briquette, my kidneys, I think, are performing their business fluidly. I have decent, soft skin, and my bone marrow, healthy, hale, is possibly edible. The subject of my intestines will be mercifully avoided.

Using the one-body-can-save-eight-lives calculus, I reckon I could perhaps save five or six lives. Better than zero. Better than one or two. It’s ghoulish, but golden. This is important work, and really, it’s no work at all.

Quack, snort and other adventures in dining

January 18, 2018April 4, 2018 ~ Chris ~ Leave a comment

I’m a relatively adventurous eater — I’ll nosh bone marrow, chicken hearts, snails, frog legs, foie gras, raw oysters, sea anemone, roe, goat, buffalo, pigeon, octopus — but, like most of us, I cleave to a less exotic, much less expensive daily diet. Those delicacies are for singular occasions, mostly while I’m traveling and living a bit high on the hog. (Hog, too, I eat that.)

Mulling a trip to Chicago, I’ve made a short list of restaurants offering casual to fine dining, from Rick Bayless’ Frontera Grill (Mexican) to Paul Kahan’s Avec (Mediterranean). Squeezed between those is Stephanie Izard’s popular Girl & the Goat, an ambitious family-style spot located in the city’s Randolph Restaurant Corridor in the West Loop.

I always scan the online menus before I make a reservation. Pushing past the goat plates, two dishes at Girl & the Goat had this fledgling foodie hooked: crispy duck tongues and wood oven roasted pig face. After a flinch, I promptly decided I’m having both.

These delicacies are inarguably a vegetarian’s writhing apocalypse. I know. We must move onward.

I have of course never had duck tongue. Beef tongue, perhaps. No idea what to anticipate, so I’ll allow the gustatory gurus at Serious Eats explain the specialty:

“Surrounded by a faint hint of meat and papery thin layers of cartilage, duck tongue is predominately a vehicle for juicy pockets of fat. At barely two inches in length, the tongue may seem small and insubstantial, but its flavor is intensely duck-like. When freshly fried, duck tongues are positively addicting with a crisp surface and a creamy, slightly fatty interior that melts in your mouth.”

This …

eend-met-zijn-uit-tong-30749275

… becomes this:

Like duck tongue, no appetizing euphemism masks what pig face actually is: the meat and fat sliced off the face of a pig. I may have eaten pig cheeks before, but this is different, a full facial. Again, Serious Eats explains:

“It’s the multitude of harmonized flavors and textures that make the roasted pig face of one my favorite dishes ever. From the succulent wood-fired pig face patties, sweet maple gastrique, and tart tamarind vinaigrette, to the crispy potato sticks and gooey sunnyside-up egg, it’s clear why this is one of Girl & the Goat’s signature dishes.”

This … Cannon-and-Cannon-Meat-School-pig

… becomes this:

*Wood oven roasted pig face with sunny side egg, tamarind, cilantro, red wine-maple, potato stix.*

As I momentarily salivate (daub, wipe), it strikes me that both meals are commendable for their use of animal parts that might otherwise, and usually are, thrown out with the beaks and snouts, offal rejects. This is mindful, sustainable cooking, but it’s also, let’s face it, delicious, deeply indulgent cooking, sinful, decadent, irresistible. (It’s a lot like the bone marrow I adore, seen below from my recent Russia trip.)

Right, I haven’t tasted the duck and pig yet — maybe I’ll gag into my linen napkin — but my experiences with exotic, zany foods comprise a solid track record of gastronomical daring and concomitant success. In other words, I enjoy this kind of food, and I’m not only amenable to it, I’m beguiled by it, too.

Omnivorous by nature and choice, I will pursue my culinary escapades for the foreseeable future — that is, a very long time. Vegetarians may scowl and harrumph, and I get it. I can only respond with a lusty chomp and gulp and the thrill of tasting whole new worlds.

Want a reminder that you’re going to die? There’s an app for that

January 16, 2018April 4, 2018 ~ Chris ~ Leave a comment

I don’t get people who don’t consider their mortality — the actual, undeniable fact that one day they are going to die, forever (because you are, reader, you are) — at least once or twice a day.

Surely that’s because I think about my death specifically and death as a brute phenomenon generally many times a day. This has been going on for years. Like since I was seven. I maintain a shelf of books about death, from “The Denial of Death” to “How We Die.” (My id is a vivid, hyperactive place. My therapy bills, exorbitant.)

Who needs a reminder of death? I wonder. It’s right there in the face that looks back at you in the mirror.

Who wants a reminder of death? my friends retort.

Apparently a lot of people, mostly millennials, do. They want a brief if pointed reminder that they are indeed going to buy it sometime. And they want it exactly five times a day, randomly. On their phone.

10We-CROAK1-blog427 That’s what the new app WeCroak offers: quick, jarring jabs calling attention to users that, yup, death is waiting around the corner. With homilies like this from Herman Melville — “Death is only a launching into the region of the strange Untried” — the 99-cent app exists expressly to galvanize consciousness, a little existential poke to nudge you into the now. And maybe to scare the holy hell out of you.

“Each day, we’ll send you five invitations to stop and think about death,” says the WeCroak site. “It’s based on a Bhutanese folk saying that to be a happy person one must contemplate death five times daily. The invitations come at random times and at any moment, just like death.”

By turns soothing and somber, quotes are culled from the likes of Emily Dickinson, Thoreau, Charles Bukowksi, Lao Tzu and Margaret Atwood.

“The grave has no sunny corners,” goes one. (For pessimists.)

“Begin again the story of your life,” says another. (For optimists.)

methode-times-prod-web-bin-b0093bb2-e034-11e7-a1a7-d23b605d14fb

(That one, for fatalists, I think.)

We think we have control over our lives by doing the right things — exercising, eating healthfully, thinking positive, traveling, communing with art and nature, procreating.

It’s rubbish.

WeCroak’s passages are meant to put you in touch with an untapped aspect of your spirituality, to jolt you out of complacency and into perhaps uncomfortable soulfulness. In fact, hokey as it sounds, I’d say the messages are nutrient-rich food for the soul.

The benighted disagree. People have actually called the app “sick” and “disgusting.” These people are babies. They are in craven denial. No matter — they’re still going to die.

“Death never takes a wise man by surprise; he is always ready to go.” — Fontaine

I don’t know if WeCroak offers that jewel, but it should.

Museums of mortality — spooky, sublime

January 15, 2018April 4, 2018 ~ Chris ~ 2 Comments

Last year I paid visits to those twin emporiums of ick and awe, the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia and the smaller but almost equally macabre Kunstkamera Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia. Festooned with bullet-riddled skulls, deformed fetuses crammed into jars, gnarled, twisted skeletons, diseased human organs, rusty surgical tools and random gangrened digits, these palaces of the perverse satisfied the ghoulishly curious. They were extravagantly ack-inducing, deliciously quiver-making. Paradise.

As noted earlier, I’m deliberating my next journey, and, because I went large last year, I’m thinking small this year. Which means I might go to Chicago, a 2.5-hour flight away. And which means, more importantly, the International Museum of Surgical Science, a less squishy warehouse of medical wonders than the two above, but still a marvelous assemblage of stuff that spurs contemplation about our mortal flesh and all that can go wrong with it via disease, accident and sheer shitty luck.

Highlights include a vintage iron lung machine (can I climb inside?), an exhibit about pain and anesthesia through the ages and one about the history of wound healing (“From the use of herbal ointments and therapeutic clays among prehistoric hunter-gatherers to Galen’s treatment of injured gladiators in Ancient Rome, the care of wounds is among the earliest applications of medicine”), and the museum structure itself, an elegant, historic lakeside mansion. And who could pass up the exhibit “A History of Blood Transfusion: 350 Years of Apparatus Advancement”?

Caesarean section.jpg — *Mural of early Caesarean section. Gleefully* *gruesome.*

Reviewers note that the four-story manse is compact and, naturally, its array of freakish displays is no match for Philly’s world-class Mutter. Small is all right; I enjoy a good bite-size museum, especially one of such narrow scope. Sort of like the Russian Vodka Museum or Tokyo’s Meguro Parasitological Museum.

polio-machine — *Iron lung machine. May I?*

For more grim exhilarations, I pivoted my research to Chicago cemeteries — I’m always up for a calming stroll through deathly opulence — but decided to skip the offerings. Several notable cemeteries pock the area, boasting the resting holes of everyone from Al Capone to Jesse Owens, Emmett Till to John Belushi, Gene Siskel to John Hughes. I sought out film critic Roger Ebert’s grave, but he was cremated and his ashes are kept by a private party, most likely his lovely widow Chaz.

We should all be so lucky. Cremation is the way to go, although I don’t want my cremains kept by anyone but the wind and the water -— whoosh. Thoughts like these will surely visit me at the Surgical Science Museum, a place rife with death and decrepitude. But they won’t get me down. They’re wondrous in their way and, far from depressing, something of a mind-reeling, soul-stirring tonic for the living.

Visual antidotes to winter’s vicious freeze

January 10, 2018April 4, 2018 ~ Chris ~ Leave a comment

With my love of cold weather, my fervent devotion to fall and winter, to thick jackets, chapped lips and goosebumps, I’ve come to the conclusion that I am part polar bear, part moose.

I relish the big chill. I rather enjoyed the “bomb cyclone” that recently tormented the entire East Coast. Undoubtedly, the swirling mega gusts and ravaging ice storms truly unsettled. I’m actually no fan of voluminous snowfall. Slush, mush, argh. But give me some solid 30s and 40s F and I get to bundle up, thrill with the chill and, this is critical, not sweat.

Yet things are warming up, and this week the New York area will enjoy an inhumanely balmy 60 degrees — a wee too warm, but my survivalist instincts will kick in.

It is said winter lovers are a rare breed, anomalous, daft. I ask: Why don’t more people hate summer? Baffling. I loathe the warm months. It’s a me thing. Shorts and I are on rancorous terms.

I’ve traveled wide and far in positively scorching, humid, sweat-sodden climes and I thought this quintet of watery photos from said journeys might warm up the cold-adverse reader, reminding you of the great thaw to come, soon. All too soon. Splash.