Denver

I’ve never loved this city.  I do have some appreciation for it’s urban pace and quirks, but the cancerous stretch and yawn of the suburbs named for the trees they buried and the predators chased away and murdered for making their living too close to the jogging paths grate on me.

I gave loving that life a real shot once.  It failed miserably.  Of course it all came with woman attached, as it should.

I remember sitting on the balcony of a $19.99 a night special motel room along I-70 watching traffic go by.  On an emptier road, traffic has a sort of high lonesome to it.  On a torrential suburban sprawling highway, it blends into a constant din and rancorous river of amber and red.

I wrote a letter to one of my friend’s old girlfriends on that balcony.  She was her own sort of super highway.  I mean that exactly like it sounds.

And so she was and probably ever will be.

Tonight, I’m writing a few letters.  I’m not sure which ones will be mailed.

That’s the thing about writing letters from the road.  Regret washes down cold on you and washes all the coals into steam and smoke and finally ash while the sun sets low over the heavy guns of the mountains.

Permanence may forever lose us, but I seem to be perpetually thinking of you.

Lunge

For the first time in a few years I hit 150 miles an hour, groundspeed.  It was the other week on a straight stretch of road that eventually peters out into a dusty trail that bends and winds and ends at the mouth of a coal mine in the Bookcliffs.  It’s not the first time I’ve hit that speed on that road, or the first time I hit it on two wheels.  In fact, short of helicopters and airplanes, I have never gone that fast on anything but two wheels.

There’s a scream and a rush to it.  It leaves you briefly exhilarated and exhausted.  While you strain to hold on, your own choices combine with the resistance of the ever present air to knock you to the ground.  Air can hurt.  It can be damaging.  It just needs you to be stupid and have your hand on that throttle, opening it up.

It is mostly official at this point.  Come this time next year, I will be a few months into a year-long stint in a dangerous place doing a dangerous job.  It’s lucrative.  It’s sort of stupid.  It’s just my style.

It’s hard to think of leaving, but I’ve done it before. I can leave a place easily, and mostly I can leave people.  It’s not easy, but it is a familiar ache, easily catalogued away. It’s not as easy this time.

While I know I would have nothing but regret if I did not take this opportunity to get in one more dangerous thrill before I am damned to mediocrity, I already regret the End.  With my hand on the contract, I let myself feel that brief luxury of waver, and through those undulose flickers I could only see you.  I know you’ll not be here when I get back.

I’ve never believed in living life with no regrets.  A lack of regret points to a life of artificial inconsequence.  If you feel true triumph or feel real exhilaration, it is always at the cost of feeling some regret.  There’s a movement and a form about you, and it will always be immortalized into my forever.  I hope that’s enough. For both of us.

My fastest speed ever (on the ground) was around 160.  The speedometer buried at 140 and the cable snapped at around 150.  I can only extrapolate from the redlined tachometer.  It cost me half of my foot pegs to hold those corners on I-70 and most of my luck to get around the trucks and overpacked Midwest minivans bound for glorious enraptured misery at some National Park wasteland or another.

As long as there is a fight, I will want a part of it.  You probably knew that about me all along.  You also know part of me that longs for peace and stability and, in those times I have something like peace, for you.

When you feel the lunge and hear the irregular popping turn to a scream between your legs and eject away behind you, it’s like nothing else.  Except maybe a broken nose. Or steel on target. Or tearing clothes off under the stars. Or under the streetlights.

This is not a very effective apology.

Recipe Thursday

Note: It is not Thursday

Also note: I do not post recipes often enough on Thursdays for there to ever really be a recipe Thursday.

Black Bean Stuffed Squash

I am generally considered a decent cook.  I am no chef, and certainly no gourmand, but I do enjoy roasting up some food.  My best cooking, like my best writing generally focuses on females and campfires.

So, how, besides the obvious and hilarious visual metaphor (I am twelve years old) of butternut squash (butternut! HA!), how does this have anything to do with any person of female disposition?

I have a new set of challenges in the cooking realm.  I ended up hanging out, in a sort of dating-like, sort of exclusive kind of way, with a vegetarian.  I know.

I know.

It actually doesn’t bother me as much as one would think.  Sure, most of my recipes revolve around dead animals, but those animals were honestly taken in most cases by family members or myself.  Meaning the blood was on my hands, not on my debit card.  This girl is vegetarian for the right reasons, in my mind.  She feels that the current mass production of meat products by inhumane exploitation is wrong and acts on that moral stance.  That is admirable, if somewhat deranged.

Because even animals killed in evil ways are still delicious.  Life lesson, kids. Write it down.

But let’s face it, most of us in our lives have been impoverished at one time or another.  I was born into a sort of poverty.  A staple meal in the summer consisted of dandelion greens (a.k.a. weeds) and asparagus (also weeds).  We did have enormous quantities of beans.  Pinto bean capital of the motherfucking world, bitches.  Recognize.

So, semi-vegetarian diets are not all that strange to me.  If you didn’t get a deer in the last month, you were vegetarian in my hood.

This is a knockoff of one of my favorite foods growing up.  I love squash in all forms, but butternut has a special place in my luke-warm-cockled heart. It is locally grown in Colorado, cheap, somewhat under-rated most of the time, and orange.  Like the Broncos.

Ingredients!

Loafy material:

• One (1) pound of cooked, drained, and rinsed black beans (I just used a can)
• One (1) cup of mixed starchy matter (see note)
• A sort of goodly portion (?) of celery, grape tomatoes, corn off the cob, carrots, and mushrooms, etc.  I leave this up to you.  The final mix of veggies should be roughly equal in mass to that of a pound of beans. Use whatever you got, but watch the final acid content or omit the bleu cheese.
• One quarter (1/4) cup chopped parsley
• Two (2) eggs
• Two (2) gloops of olive oil
• Two (2) small Mexican onions (just the whites, use the greens for garnish).  This is roughly one half a regular white onion.
• One (1) tablespoonish of bleu cheese
• One (1) teaspoonish  of paprika
• Four (4) (!) cloves of garlic
• Salt, Pepper, Chili Powders, etc. I leave this in your hands.

Note on starch material: I used a mix of oatmeal and roasted barley I had left over from recent beer making. I realize you are not as awesome as me and won’t have brewer’s barley laying around. Use whatever you lame motherfuckers usually use. Breadcrumbs or something. I don’t know.

Gravy:

• One (1) small beet, trimmed well and diced fine
• A couple cloves of garlic (I used three), also diced fine
• Around a can of vegetable broth. Not sure how much I used. It’s fucking gravy, dumbass.
• About 1/4 cup or so of onion
• About 1/4 cup of carrots, fine chopped
• Spices of your choosing. I went with sage and a little chili powder.  Figured the savory would work with the sweetness of squash.
• Flour.
• Salt, pepper, ashes of relatives, etc.

Loaf materials. Missing the tomatoes.

Process!

1. I halved and seeded the squash, then scraped out enough room for the rest of the stuff.  You don’t need that much.  Then I put the squash in the oven on the middle rack and got it heating to 400 degrees.
2. While that shit was going down, I put the beans in a bowl and cracked two eggs on top.  Choking down the gags, I squished the two in my fingers until the black beans were mostly paste. Then I added the oil, veggies, cheese, spices and parsley and mixed them in.  Also the grains. I set that mess aside.
3. I also rubbed a partial gloop of oil on my guns. the girl was on her way over. Thunder and Lightning needed to look their best.
4. In a medium saucepan, I browned the beets and onions and so forth (gravy material) for a few minutes.  I really let them cook until they were clear.  Then I dusted them with fine cornmeal (I was out of flour, fuckstick) and let it fry like that for a few minutes.  One everything was well and browned, I deglazed with the broth and added enough to make it sort of thick and soupy.  If you’ve made gravy before, you know what I mean. If not, I have no respect for you and you should die, you worthless snob.
5. Boil that shit for a minute or two, then cut the heat to a simmer while you stir. It should thicken up, unless you fucked up. Again.
6. It should be noted that anything concerning beets usually ends up looking like a squirrel smoothie. This is normal.
7. Anyway.  Around the time the gravy was ready to be left alone, I spooned the mess into the cavities of the squash, careful to round it off on top.  Then it was back into the oven for about 20 minutes.  It’s hard to know long to leave it in, so use a thermometer (finger) to make sure it’s done enough the eggs won’t kill you.  My oven sucks.
8. Or it is possible I am just incompetent cooking over anything but an open fire.

The pictures suck:

This is what the veggie related mess looked like after mixing.

After baking, before gravy

Final product. Note festive colors. And squirrel smoothie.

Ending Notes:

Long story short, it all comes together in a fairly attractive finished product that I really enjoyed eating for two days.  This is a very moist vegetable loaf, probably due to the squash evaporating into it, as was my diabolical plan!  Chortle!

If the gravy seems too much, feel free to skip it. I was expecting something a lot dryer when I made the gravy.  I would have left it out of this post entirely, but the picture has gravy on it. Note lumpiness due to cornmeal.

Future mods include:

• A less acidic cheese
• Mole (MO-lay)
• Chiles. Lots of them.
• Excluding cheese entirely and adding crème fraîche (sticking with the more mexican theme)
• Might go the oregano route
• Incorporation of other vegetables (I think endives would work in place of parsley)
• Hotter, faster baking.
• BACON. OBVIOUSLY.

Growl

There was blood in the snow and the rabbit was growing colder.  I had a pellet gun reloading and a heavy rope bowlined to an empty chain collar hanging from my coat pocket.

I jacketed the chamber and began pumping the rifle full of air.  The rabbit had no more struggle left, but it was not dead.  It had not made its journey from metabolic reproduction machine to food yet.  Around me, in the bloody snow, heavy paw prints circled and wandered off.  They belonged to a wolf.

When you are young and read enough Jack London through your lens of naivete, you think you can own something like a wolf.  You think they can be a pet, like some sort of toy or fanciful first love.

The earth was turning out from under the sun and the refracted light ignited the West and liquefied solder clouds.  The gray sky failed the cottonwoods spectacularly and cut the somber, macabre scene into a network of shadows.  I raised the air rifle one more time, target on the post, iron under the post. One black eye, fading out with panting and bitter panic, eyed me like the sky.

Then he came out of the high grass. It was not grace that he moved with. It was efficiency superior to anything mechanical.  There was nothing anthropomorphic in his gait.  His head was down and he looked at me with those gold vampire eyes as he strode into the line of fire. He knew what a gun could do.  He’d followed me with something like prideful apathy along these trails through these wild fields and watched me destroy the lives of many.

He was not a dog. He was not a perpetually needing child.  There was no play in him but that which I imagined.  He had been maturing with the blood and rage of epochs and eons.  His truth was Archean. He was primal.

He focused those eyes on me and watched me lower the gun and point it into the snow at my feet.  He bent down to the quivering reddening rabbit and snapped his teeth at neck.  The rabbit convulsed and slackened and was dead.

Good dog, I told him, and reached to pet him.

From up out of cold time and the depths of the earth, his throat swelled and the deep rumble from around his bloody gums stopped me.

Dozer Lee

Dozer Lee is dead.

What? Dozer Lee lives on.  He’s still the same guy.

No, Dozer Lee’s dead.

Bullshit. You can’t kill Dozer Lee. No one can.

Nope. Dead.

Maybe just lurking.

No, Dozer’s dead. She killed him.

I don’t think that’s accurate.

She did. I saw you all happy and relaxed and not scary and brooding anymore. It’s cute.

Bristling

Dozer is in hiding. He scares people. So he’s hiding.

Dozer Lee may be resurrected some day, but he’s dead now.

No, Dozer Lee needs no one to resurrect him. Dozer Lee resurrects his fucking self, woman.

Awww. Look at you.

Hate

I am going to stab you in the throat.

See? I’m not scared because I don’t even believe you when you say that anymore!

Bitch.

Adorable.

Glass

My grandmother was born in a wagon somewhere between British Columbia and Colorado. No one knows where, or how old she really is.

She is obviously a woman of some faith. She talks to God regularly. She says she throws in a word for me every so often, and I can appreciate that. She never had a birth certificate or any other living person sort of papers until after the Patriot Act was passed. She was a little worried about the Government knowing she existed, and the concern seems rightly founded.

But she had always lived and breathed here in Colorado. She had worked the orchards and dug the potatoes. She can make her own own cheese and her own shoes. She still makes her own clothes. She makes her own religion.

My Grandpa was run out of his house at 14 at the end of a shotgun. He never went to school again and started working as a farmer, a mechanic, or a truck driver depending on what season found him. He is a carpenter and his work is stunningly perfect, though it is usually assembled from junk.

I don’t know how they met. It was probably something to do with Church.

There is a god of the poor and the willful humble, but I’ve not met him. I’ve seen the religious poor blown apart and rended to ash by technology and policy they would comprehend as magic. They crawl and cry and–I assume–pray, but they are not found by any god but Vulcanus, and he finds them only because they were too close to some other country’s killing machines.

Sometimes I dream about them. The irony of modern warfare is that the increasingly brutal goes hand in hand with the increasingly banal. They were nothing but retranslated, pixelated ghosts, and I was late to dinner.

And it doesn’t hurt to kill a ghost.

But they could have been people. They might have had families and beliefs and loves and hates like me. Maybe those are what show up in the dreams I can hardly remember on waking anymore. Not the alleged people, but whatever they may have been besides collateral damage.

I heard the guy down the bar say something about killing them all and letting God sort them out. Turn the place to glass. Et cetera.

Real conscience, it seems, only comes with a body count.

Sometimes in this world, someone wakes you up and asks if you’re OK. Then you have the option of sounding like some cliche crazy former warrior, or making something up, or playing off the dream as only part of something else.

I was fighting her in my sleep.

She is not a ghost.

Things to think about

I once assembled a death box.  The death box was left in an obvious location where, should I not make it back, it would be found easily.  It was a box that held a total of six letters, one copy of my will, a few little trinkets and medals I think my survivors would appreciate, and instructions.  The letters were not addressed and unstamped, though the address labels and stamps were in the box.  I always liked the clean look of an envelope with a simple name on it.

I also figured since it was very likely that some form of the federal government had just killed my ass it would be a real dickhead move to have a bunch of federal markation all over the last article of mine handed to loved or liked ones.  Fuck the man, etc.

This is wildly jumping the gun, but I have been giving thoughts to another death box.

Instructions left would be the priority, as I have managed to whittle my life of suburban house and cars and wife and pets into a squeaky clean austerity.  With exception of the rifles and guitars that would doubtless be treated with the respect they deserve, I only own a single object worth more than a couple hundred bucks.  I would hope they threw away most of the shit I have accumulated.

The only ceremony I would care about would be at the Palisade Brewery with barbeque, music and everyone (including complete strangers) invited.  Shit, my Dad would be sitting on a half million Dead-Caseybucks, he could throw a kick ass party and fly in any friends who wanted come. Besides, it’s a small town. Most people would have some idea who I was and I bet plenty of community people would show up to do whatever it is the yellow ribbon crowd does.

A diverse group, no doubt.  I hope a fight doesn’t break out.

That’s a lie. I hope a brawl breaks out.  I could see that happening.  It would be fitting, I think.  If it’s my funeral, it stands to reason a few of my bad decisions would show up.  Just natural, I suppose.

I have a feeling that my family would want the whole honor guard and gun salute treatment when my box goes in the ground.  Were it up to me, I would just want my broken vehicle burned up and dumped in the river.

The strangest aspect of all of this (most likely) unnecessary planning is the backwards consideration of other’s feelings.  My firm belief is that whatever I am will be disintegrated forever when my brain runs out of blood, but most people disagree with that.  They’ll tell themselves that I’m still invisibly there and give a shit or something.  I find that a little amusing, since most of my life has been me actually, visibly being there and still not giving a shit.

Because of those beliefs, I really have no last requests, whatsoever.  I just know that my people, being the nice and serving people they are, will only feel OK if they’re doing something for me (who would no longer exist).  It is out of my consideration for them that I have any plans at all. I’m giving them a job to do because that’s how they deal with stuff.  They work.

It’s a very complicated task to plan for not being there and still considering the feelings of people who believe strongly that you are.

I guess just leaving behind a one line statement like, “Bitches get over it, I’m worm food!” would be a little crass.

Normally, Summer is not my favorite season.

But this summer has been fairly exceptional. It has grown into itself well, and the days had a movement to them.

It’s over soon.  I’ll leave soon and come back in the fall.

Time has always been my favorite revelator.

Fat Fried Fat Covered in Fat (MMMM)

My brother (the chef instructor) made a dark maple glazed donut fried in duck fat and covered in bacon.

Picture:  http://twitpic.com/dnetw

I don’t think further writing is necessary.

Do You Think the End of the World is Coming?

Excuse me?

Do you think the end of the world is coming?

He looked down into his cup as he brought it up, focusing what smells to be a very dark coffee.  His eyes cross as the cup gets to his face and he looks away, from the question and the cup. His brow is furrowing at some great far off mystery.  The umbrellas kick around in the wind and a piece of trash goes rolling down the street outside the wrought iron fence separating the sidewalk from the coffee drinkers.

They always separate themselves. They always have, one people from another, no matter how minor the subdivision.  Division and distinction are the only true capital in human economy.  Unfortunate that I am easily the most distinguished from these consumer peers, but am something less than human.

I think, he says, that the end of the world is always coming. It never stops coming, but it’s dangerous to say when.

She’s not satisfied with the answer and lets it show around her own drink.

He continues weakly: There are always people seeing signs and saying it will end soon, that’s been true forever.

Then how is this different?

Because, we know more than they did.

The blast of heat and light from the sun weakens behind a rolling cloud.  The street takes on a gray tinge.  The breeze takes on a more urgent hiss.

How can you even say that? She’s getting irritated.

Because, we have more research available to us than anyone ever has. I mean, we can read news all over the world all the time and see things coming to pass. All over.

They both take a cool drink, careful to look at anything but each other. Inside, the music escapes the old record player and flows around the line of customers and the torrent of mechanical coffee making noises to find its way outside, modulating a little in the gusts of building wind.

She turns her eye up to him and speaks. But maybe these things have always come to pass all the time.  There’s always been all these signs, but we didn’t know because we didn’t have the news and the papers.

Exactly, that’s how you know these are real signs. Everyone sees them.

But it’s just better technology.

And it’s exactly what you’d have to have for signs to even be signs.

So, we invented the means of the apocalypse?

He considers that over the last drops of the cup.  His mother was dragged off of a walking trail, raped, and murdered when he was a toddler.  He was with her, but doesn’t remember it. He was never told. He thinks his nightmares are evidence of a demon possession that he keeps away from his Church and his family.  He is right, but like most demons, his are more real than he can ever imagine.  His dreams, waking dreams at times, of being drowned by a great gnarled sinewy black death-creature are not totally without merit.  His mother covered him with her body while she was stabbed to death.

I know. I was there. I’m always there.

The sky has turned a sick and pale gray-green and the lightning fires its first salvo into the ground.  A charcoal smudge of the coming tumult reaches out of the bowels of the clouds and batters the hills.

He tells her he has to think more on that.  He pulls the last slow and lonely drop of coffee from the cup. He doesn’t sleep well and needs this little chemical molestation to make it through a day of hearing his flock’s questions and tragedies.

She tells him she has to go and they both stand.  She breathes a little too much on him when they embrace and he quickly backs up and absently fingers that one gold band. She has no such acoutrement. Friendly words are exchanged and they turn and take separate paths.

He walks toward his office in the basement of his church and she toward me.  The Red Horse walks by me and looks down at me with those vampire eyes that flare metallic and she smirks just enough to betray our ancient aquaintence.

I feel old when the rain starts to fall. The sky is rent in green white lightning and the report is a cannon.