Sugar Ridge (Part 2 of Bristol Series)

“I think if you do something and it turns out pretty good, then you should go do something else wonderful, not dwell on it for too long. Just figure out what’s next.”  - Steve Jobs

Mike looked down from where the shot had been taken; a place up on a hill they call Sugar Ridge. The ridge-land rose gradually above the Trinity River bottoms to form a geographic separation of town and country. On a clear day you could see Dallas from the ridge  and on this haze-less afternoon it was difficult for Mike to understand how a place so close could be so foreign. At 11 Mike knew there was something more to the planet than his non-incorporated township because film strips at school showed  places with beautiful hills, living oceans, and people dressed in clothing that seemed created by the movies. As surreal as the films were to Mike he accepted there was truth in them, and those truths imbued glints of hope that the world in which he lived was not how it had to, be nor would always remain.

Mike was cognizant of his gifts and even more keenly aware of his shortcomings. When he thought of his own capacity to think he wondered what  good was it to be intelligent, curious, and perhaps even mature beyond his years when what was celebrated was obedience, physical prowess, and a big smile? Mike had little of the latter and at the same time he hoped that the tools he had; his imagination and his intellect would somehow allow him to make his own choices one day.

Mike enjoyed dominoes games with his grandmother and as he gazed out over the river bottom to the skyscrapers on the horizon he was saddened to think how his grandmother had beaten him so badly earlier that day and in his mind he knew she would be waiting again tomorrow if he found the courage to challenge her again. Daily walks through the cemetery as well as berry picking and canning tomatoes were easy distractions for Mike if he chose to avoid the competitive allure of the dots in powers of five.

The bottoms were a place of intrigue to Mike as his father and mother would often disappear there on Fridays along with their friends. Mike and his brother were rarely included on these evenings to the bottoms and the allure of such adult camaraderie was impossible to ignore. Now, there he was standing on the highest point for miles and gazing down at the rusty old truck which had been abandoned out of necessity some years before. Every bit of glass in the rotting Ford had been shattered by rocks, bullets, and the occasional boot over its life at the base of Sugar Ridge. Now there was new damage to the old steel and Mike wanted to see it firsthand.

Mike's uncle walked slowly from his flatbed truck with a 30-06 rifle slung over his shoulder. Hank had been in the army just as his father had. Vietnam was not a memory Hank enjoyed and according to most of the family the war had changed him. Mike never knew Hank before the war and if Vietnam had changed him, Mike was content to accept that it must have been for the better as Hank was the dearest adult in the world to him.

The sounds of cars were now making their way along the road behind the ridge. Mike knew his time here alone with Hank would be short-lived so he hustled behind his uncle to get a look at the fresh 30 caliber hole in the decaying back panel of the old pickup. The ring of the shot had been violent and crackled the still air of fall while the faint smell of powder slipped quickly by his nose and just as quickly dissipated. Mike knew a bit about sound waves and even though he grasped how sound traveled and why it faded over distance it still seemed amazing to him that people miles away would not have heard the blast from the high-powered rifle. Mike loved all kinds of weapons and he had secretly hoped that the shot from his uncle's gun was in fact a special exploding round used to target some last vestige of fuel in the Ford and blow the whole chassis down the embankment. Explosions were a curiosity Mike would intermittently nurture the rest of his life.

500 people lived in Mike's town and he was convinced of those 500 only a select few spoke a language he understood.

The trucks soon arrived with hollers, back slaps, handshakes, and firearm show and tell. Mike noticed that the sounds of the voices altered Hank's steps, facial expressions, and speech patterns. To Mike, Hank was informative, matter of fact, and kind without any indication that would ever change. Around other men, and especially of the local variety Hank appeared to hide in simple pleasantries, nods, and deliberate actions. Mike supposed Hank did not like most other men and that was alright for Mike as he supposed he did not like them either.

The 78 Word Short Story

I just entered the Esquire Magazine 78 Word Short Story Competition. I like this challenge very much. Here is my story.

The Keys to Victory

Mike loved to toss his keys high in the air pretending to be Drew Pearson as he ran under them along the chilled blacktop. The keys frigid from the Hail Mary stung his palms as he celebrated his 6 am touchdowns. The dim guard light above the unkempt corner of town provided a stage for Mike’s morning press conferences. I would love to thank me for winning, Mike would say, just as the yellow bus to hell arrived.

HDR - Inspired fusion of Photography and Graphic Art

My wonderful friend, Loren J Root and his pursuit of photographic excellence has inspired me to begin creating in HDR photography. This high dynamic range is right in line with my interest in the dramatic.

Please find me on Picasa and Flickr

Break in Case of Emergency (or: why a wine nose is bad in a locker room) Part 1

WARNING: The following entry contains explicit and repugnant language as well as vulgar imagery of a scatological nature. Be warned, this is not a warm and fuzzy blog post.

Sean Beck, one of the best wine people I know and a bastion of knowledge and experience made a comment on Facebook the other day about how a trained wine nose is a wonderful thing, until the one with said nose enters a locker room. Sean, as usual, made me think about what he said and I decided it was time to call for change in the age-old system of locker room decorum.

Gyms should remove all seated stalls from male locker rooms. The locker room is not a place to shit, it is a place to change and, if you must, shower after a workout. It is simple as that. However, it is a commonly practiced custom for men to set their defecation cycle to the afternoon workout and thus pollute otherwise clean locker rooms with the foul stench of end of the day feces. Oh, I am sure many of you men are already steaming that I am calling out your sacred ritual. I am sorry, but those of us who are grossly offended by the aromas of bacteria feeding upon fast food would prefer you to crap elsewhere.

Now, for illness and emergency I can see that any gym worth their salt must find a solution; and I have this solution. There should be a locked restroom similar to a  janitor's closet with a container on the wall near the door holding a key housed behind a glass panel. On the panel is etched: "Break in Case of Emergency" using the small red hammer attached to the housing by a piece of butcher's string. In essence, no one should be shitting in a locker room without due cause; and that cause can only be imminent diarrhea, and nothing else.

There should most definitely be an audible alarm on the glass so to give the wayward shitter something to think about lest he break the glass for a non-emergency. In addition to the alarm a fine would be assessed for using the emergency dump-hole in the case of only minor lower abdominal discomfort. The emergency outhouse's sole purpose is protecting gym users from sharting due to the sudden onset of Ebola or related illness. You, Mister drink that extra cup of coffee at 3 to prepare your bowels for complete evacuation at 4:30; your days are numbered. When this post goes viral, and it will, gyms across America will be calling their contractors to rip out stalls left and right. There is no room in a modern America for a serial public defecator.

Now, the only exception I will make to this rule is Buc-ee's. For those of you who don't know, Buc-ee's is the king of roadside convenience stores and they have stalls in their restrooms with floor to ceiling doors, exhaust fans, and hand sanitizer in each stall. Basically, this is the only bathroom outside of my apartment or hotel room I would ever consider for a loaf-pinching, and I am not alone. In essence, Buc-ee's has built an empire on high-sugar snacks, kitsch, and clean restrooms for private events at private moments. Traffic backs up on the highway to get into these places and for good reason; because that little beaver knows how to treat a driver. If they had Autogrill food and coffee I might just spend my life driving from Buc-ee's to Buc-ee's eating, drinking, and shitting to my heart's content. I suggested to them that they install iPad docks with swing-arms at eye-level while seated in a stall. Who wouldn't want to rip through the e-pages of Kitchen Confidential  while tearing off a piece of the past in the splendor of a Buc-ee's bubble of privacy?

All of this being said, the locker room is not the place for unloading creatine-laced smoothies, Filets O' Fishes, or COSTCO $1 hot dogs. I have been trained to smell the difference between raspberry and raspberry jam, but I am certain I am losing olfactory capacity because every time I go to the gym, or an office building, or a Whole Foods restroom, some asshole has dropped their whole family at the lake and they are splashing merrily about without regard for their fellow-man.

Why? Why me? Why is their always some douche on the cell-phone in the crapper? Who talks on the phone while shitting?! The release and private pleasure of a morning emptying is on par with sex, Musigny, and white truffles from Piedmont. Why would someone want to go through the motions while carrying on a conversation about auto repair, weekend plans, or who is picking up the kids from school? Why are more often than not these caca conversations in Spanish? I cannot tell you the number of times I have rolled into some roadside restroom and the first thing I have heard is: "No, no puedo (followed closely by) thhhhhhhhaaaaaaccccckkkkk...and then "Si, si puedo".

We all know how far we have come with "Yes, we can" it is now time for "No we won't!" We will no longer say yes to locker room nasal abuse. Please go to your local gym today and ask them to remove their men's locker room stalls. When they look at you like you are crazy ask them to follow you in and smell for themselves. Perhaps the following sample might make them remove the pools for the stool.

Once in college, I rolled into the restroom near the cappuccino bar at the University (I will not even begin to discuss coffee shop restrooms) and when I entered I heard a sound like the body of a feral cat being torn in half, followed very closely by a stench of F5 magnitude. I had by then long mastered the urination breath-hold through years of swimming pool games, so I managed to get out my stream of relief and made it out the door before having to take in a retro-nasal taste of pure country and just in time to bend over double and inhale deeply to return oxygen to my brain. At that moment out of the bathroom came the bucolic security guard, Frank Green. I looked up at Frank with eyes like the victim of a hate crime and he simply adjusted his flashlight and in the friendliest voice imaginable (and N Texas country accent) said "well hello Michael." I came to my feet  as he ambled back towards the security booth and I knew I had been scarred for life.

...to be continued

Why am I here?

I don't believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive.

Joseph Campbell

That particular question has driven me to write, travel, read, and think since I was old enough to remember doing any of those things. It is now once again the question that is ringing most loudly in the storm of my thoughts. Why am I here? Why am I in Colorado? Why do I want to write? It seems with writing, it is not about want, but some inner drive to create, to see things manifest from the immaterial of my memories and the images that come from absolutely left field in my head. I have done this kind of creation with directing and acting in the theater, firework shows, stand-up comedy, and of course storytelling both written and oral. I love an audience! I am pretty sure I am better at anything I do well with an audience.

Give me a nice meal to cook for 2 and it can be solid and quite good. Give me 4 dinner guests and that dinner will sing with compounding vigor. I hate being part of a crowd, but I love to be in front of one. I am not waiting in line to see, do, or eat anything unless the line is short and moving with alacrity; however, I would happily sit patiently while people wait in line to see me put on a show. I need an audience and I feel more fully myself when I have one.

Well Michael, how does writing fulfill this need of yours, you ask? You see, for me this blog is spiritual, my connection with God and the hero path the universe has shown me. Writing feels the same as designing the soundtrack for a fireworks show. The writing is the groundwork for a greater production of Michael David Housewright while the soundtrack to a pyro show is the melody and the explosions are the harmonies. If I write something interesting and people enjoy it, they will want more of it and therefore, more of me.

Travel, dining out, cooking, and encounters with crazies while working in a liquor store are all ammunition for the assault of the Michael show on the planet. I want to go about this attack through writing this blog, screenplays, and books. I want to do one man shows in theaters and readings on NPR like Sedaris. At the end of the day it is much like I told my technical director in college. "I do not do art for art's sake", I want to entertain, I want to make people laugh, cry, cringe, and crow. I am not on the fast track to deliver some literary masterpiece. I honestly just like to hear myself talk and enjoy the company of others who find my voice unique and/or irritating enough to curiously enjoy. I am not a train wreck, but I get the appeal. I am like Larry David in a redneck gentile costume. I call it like I see it and my mouth has gotten me in more trouble than I can remember so why not let it go even further and see if there is an audience for my humor and candor rather than fighting against my tendencies and coming across like a vacillating pussy.

The first group that challenges me are bloggers. I have been derided that I write too lengthy posts and post too infrequently to be a blogger. I tend to agree with this assessment, I am not sure I am a blogger as much as a  guy who tells stories on a website and likes to take pictures of things. Most successful bloggers I find are semi-journalists or even professional journalists who enjoy the creative license a blog gives them to report the news in a manner that suits their individual bent. I don't really have news or recipes, or any formulas for what I want to write, I just want people to be entertained. I am also aware that my writing and my blog are not going to have a mass appeal. Great, because in my experience anything with mass appeal on a grand scale I tend to find rather milquetoast and limp. I come at you with cazzo duro and if I need literary Viagra to keep it that way, then I will lean on Hemingway and Krakauer for my emotional chops, concision, and fact-finding. When it comes to honesty I want to be the Slim Shady of forthright. I am not going to publish every 3rd day on some schedule, because my thoughts and impetus to write do not function on a timeline. I write when I want, what I want, and how it sounds best to me on a given day. I write because it is the closest thing to a daily audience I can muster.

I am also challenged heavily by my own sense of perfection. I read this morning that Katie Parla, one of my favorite food writers on earth sometimes spends 6 hours on 250 word blogs. You see, I get this, I share in this kind of lunacy because at the end of the day I want to first and foremost impress myself, and when you've drunk Vogue Musigny it is never that easy to go back to Beaujolais (at least not in the same meal). Once something has been good, the internal pressure to keep it there overrides all sense of time and space. I can imagine Krakauer sitting there in anguish over whether to use pejorative or deprecatory, and I know that anguish. The more I read, the more I learn, the more damned difficult it is to choose the next word out of my keyboard.

This is what happened with wine. Some of you know that in 2001 I started down the path for MW. It took me less than 2 years of study, tasting, and meeting MWs to realize the deeper I went into it, the more myopic my focus would become and the less of me I would indeed become. I don't need to know at a moment's notice the premier cru vineyards of Chablis or the latest DOCGs in Italy. I discovered what I loved about wine was the wine itself, the place where it comes from, and the people who make it, drink it, cook around it, and those happier because wine exists. I am in no way denigrating those who pursue mastery, I just knew that mastery of wine in all its subjectivity would leave me  painfully deficient in a dozen other areas of life I would enjoy knowing better. Now, I am certain others are capable of much more than just an MW or MS while in their pursuits; not me though. I know the things about wine that I love, and I retain the details that allow me to be acceptably well-versed in the subject for myself and my individual pursuits. If I had stayed with wine, I would be a prisoner to my own perfectionist tendencies and likely would have grown to hate the industry.

I have a very close friend who has tasted and enjoyed more great wine than anyone I know at our age. When my buddy is faced with drinking pedestrian bottles of wine, no matter how tasty they might be to the standard 2-3 bottle a week consumer, his face is wrought with frustration that suggests he simply cannot even enjoy this perfectly charming, if innocuous bottle of  wine because of his elevated standards. Is it not true with all things? If you have great sex with someone and then they die, or leave, or decide to change sexual orientation and the next person you are making the beast with 2 backs with is not exactly their equal, are you happy? What if you have a great job and all is great then the company is indicted by the feds and the CEO gets a 10-15 year set of in-shower bent-over rows as the company and your job are liquidated? Is your next job "selling real-estate" for your uncle at C 21 going to get you jacked when your last job had a gym, a Starbucks, and a smoking hot secretary that smelled like happiness? It is our own standards that create expectation and breed misery.

I had to get out of wine because I was miserable. I remember one time sitting and tasting wines that some poor California farmer toiled to make and listening to a colleague tell the supply rep that the farmer should pull up his vines and plant lettuce because grapes should not be grown there. This is the kind of shit said in tastings all the time by dilettante buyers and inexperienced sales people in wine shops around the country.  While travel-weary supply reps  fight for that last second placements to earn a 6 day canned trip to Burgundy. On this "trip of a lifetime" they have the pleasure of tasting 150 green wines a day while listening to some jaded French importer who cheats on his wife with the fat girls on the trip wax on about terrior.  I was right there in the mix as the "quality" whore more than happy to deride some poor sap or laud some over-lauded esoteric masterpiece. I thought I was skilled and supremely confident my wine selections made me and my place of employment superior in some way.

However, I came to realize no matter how good I thought I was, I actually had little choice in the path my programs took. Oh, I hear  buyers around the country right now screaming that I am wrong; "I do my research and my list is dictated by me." Come travel with me a bit my friends and in each American city you will see on the shelves and on the restaurant lists the work of the distributors' salespeople of the year.  Cities are sheep led to the capitalist slaughter and for every bottle of Ribolla Gialla on a shelf or on a wine list there are 25-30 different labels of Malbec from Argentina. Wine buyers are given the perception of control and power by their bosses to assuage the mental and physical damage  of 60+ hour weeks. I once had a boss from the financial sector who offered me a wine job at a disgustingly low wage and when I asked him about the dollar figure and why so low, he simply said, "I don't know, you wine people just seem willing to work for so much less than other people." That has stayed with me since 2004, along with many other interesting assertions he made about the character of wine people (most of it absolute rubbish). In essence, the interplay between buyers,clients, distributors, and business owners is a complex dance that I like to call the "Stockholm Waltz". If you want to be a buyer with creative license (at least a modicum of creativity) you must own the business. Even owner/buyers are faced with the undeniable truth that every buyer in every city in America is subject to trends, fads, and their own inner circle of local wine pros who want to be like other wine pros in other cities which are perceived to be on the cutting edge, more sophisticated, or simply "better".

For some, this life is LIFE, for me, it was just another carefully disguised rat-race of whose whos and who will be or who won't be. I am here now in Colorado because of opportunity and luck. The opportunity my wife has to travel as a specialized and talented RN and the luck that I had meeting her and that she found me interesting enough to bring along with her on this life ride. I am also lucky that I spent only 15 years in the wine, food, and travel industries before realizing at only 40 years of age I could return to my youthful dreams of storytelling. Do not get me wrong wine people, I love many of you like family and the events I encountered while in the industry have given me great writing material for years to come. Wine has given me joy, travel, amazing meals, and more experience dealing with lies, liars, disingenuous customers, sycophantic suppliers, fair-weather friends, and tyrannical or inept owners  than one industry should ever offer in such a short career. While that may come off as sarcasm it is not meant to be, as I am truly grateful for my wine days because they have led me back to the most important question of all. Why am I here?