Archive for category Blog

Undead as a Dodo

I made the mistake yesterday of reading the news. See, I was desperately hoping to procrastinate a task and was clinging at any straw necessary. I typically avoid the news, as these days it always seems to involve bad news, worse, news, and something asinine that Trump said (seriously, stop trying to decipher his ramble, he’s lost it). I didn’t know what I was looking for, but I scrolled until I stumbled upon it: De-extinction Plan to Reintroduce Dodo to Mauritius

There was a lot to unpack here, so I poured another coffee, portioned out a leftover enchilada from the night before (unpacking requires calories), and I clicked. The gist is, geneticists have found a way to engineer a dodo bird by artificially inseminating a pigeon. They will then reintroduce the dodo to Mauritius, but how and where they are not sure.

My one experience with a dodo was enough to set me on a course of interest in the bird. I was visiting the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh in the late 1990s. He was stuffed, looking rather surprised. He stood about 2 ½ feet tall, he was stout, and he was covered in hair. I naturally believed him to be one of my relatives, so I read up on him.

The dodo was endemic to Mauritius and was reported to the West by Dutch and Portuguese sailors. They found it to be a fully fearless and friendly chap and since they approached humans they were so easy to catch. More, when other dodos heard one of their friends in distress, they all ran to the place where he was to help him out. And since the dodo couldn’t fly away once they realized how much humans sucked, they were all rounded up and killed. They were then eaten because they were so large, though the record is torn on whether or not the meat was worthwhile.     

The human population on Mauritius was tiny (never exceeding 50 people in the 17th century) so the dodo wasn’t eaten to death, but rather starved to death by the competition brought on by the animals the humans introduced, such as dogs, pigs, cats, rats, and macaques.

So, it would seem that we owe the dodo a de-evolution effort. I only hope that the dodo is influenced by the pigeon DNA that will surely mix itself as its host. I hope the dodo keeps its historical friendliness, but gets just a drop of pigeon shiftiness and cynicism. We’d never be able to round up pigeons, not even with a gallery of public statues to poop upon. Let’s hope the dodo is born with that gene.

I am also a little concerned about English idiomatic tradition. Given its propensity to walk up to the most dangerous animal on earth and get hacked to death, I get why we call the unintelligent and trusting dodos. But now that they are being brought back and crossed with pigeons, will this idiom still carry the same weight? Surely we’ll have to allow for the addition of the pigeon DNA and we’ll likely see it come to linguistic fruition at the end of our lifetimes. She’s a dodo – really good at avoiding traffic at the last second and poops on low-lying cement structures. Ah, I hate dodos! They’re giant rats with useless wings that are confined to Mauritius – seems you’d have to go out of your way to complaint about these days. The only idiom I know with pigeons is the uncannily British idiom to throw a cat amongst the pigeons, which means to throw an undesirable outsider among an otherwise content group. Can throw a cat amongst the crossbred-pigeon-dodo work as well? How about to throw a Dutch sailor amongst the dodos.

The other idiom is more troubling. To go the way of the dodo means of course to be obsolete, extinct. Well, I need not explain the problem. Will we allow for the updated meaning. Looks like the perm has gone the way of the dodo, came and went and then came back again. No, I don’t like this. Almost as much as I dislike the very thought of the de-extinction of the perm. We’ll just have to see.

I am happy to see the dodo come back to the world stage, if only in our hearts and consciences. I only hope that there’s some evolutionary memory to help them avoid a similar fate. Also, I hope we just leave them the hell alone. We’re also de-extincting the woolly mammoth. I give it a decade or so before we have teamed the dodo and the mammoth up so as to delight zoo-visitors across the globe.

Part of the reason humanity is undertaking these efforts is to make up for past crimes against nature and to inject a little optimism into conservation. Every day we hear about the sixth extinction and the devastation that dwindling habitat and resources are having on global flora and fauna. And I won’t lie – that has been part of the effect on me. But de-extincting two animals surely sounds like a premise being pitched in a Hollywood producer’s office after lunchtime. I wonder if it’s a horror movie. In any event, unless we make humans a lot less stupid, these efforts are bound to go the way of the dodo-pigeon.  

No Comments

Microresolutions 2024

Sometime in the last few weeks, between trying to bring the work year to a close and force myself into the Christmas spirit as Cinderella’s sisters might a glass slipper, I found that I was right on schedule. There were hints, you see. I’d open my notebook only to be greeted with a self-interrogation from the night before.

Will Damien December 2024 (hereafter DD24) be in the same place in 365 days as Damien December 2023 (hereafter DD23)? Will DD24 be OK with that?

DD23 did not know the answer. Assumingly, neither would DD24. But they both found more clues. My notebook – sort of unbeknownst to me, as those who write in notebooks will understand – became strewn with esoteric phrases and sentences. Routine needs a tweak. Hey asshole, dogs sense mood. There’s grass everywhere! It was clear that I needed to address some of these things.

My brain needed a New Year’s Resolution. But what?

Every year I do what I swear I won’t do by making a new year’s resolution. I justify these by pointing out to myself that the resolutions I pick are always an extension of something I already do rather than a complete overhaul or a radical direction shift. And even these sometimes – read, always – flop. I am mostly satisfied with the way I run my life. I work out regularly, I write, I eat my vegetables, I walk, I am rarely nude in public. And the last time I bit a stranger was just ages ago. So, the big pieces of the puzzle are in place.

And as I am careening with ever knobbly knees and back pain towards the age of 50, I have to be self-aware enough to know that undertaking an enormous change in personality is just unlikely. So, when putting some things together for how to approach 2024, I made sure that I avoided useless resolution like ‘live in the present moment’ or ‘smile at strangers’ or ‘try to see things from others’ perspectives’, mostly because these resolutions make me want to vomit. Yes, vomit while reminiscing about a time in the past when I wasn’t vomiting, on a stranger who is unlikely to consider a smile from me as anything less than the finishing touches of a sociopath. No, I needed real acts of forward movement and development. Things that will have immediate results, rather than things which promise change or development over time. Because that’s just stupid. I needed a microresolution.

A microresolution by definition (created seconds ago in my kitchen) is a very small resolution. This is in large part due to its prefix, which does the same when affixed to -penis, thus making us very sad and -aggression, thus making us very confused. A microresolution therefore is meant to be a thing that can be done in one go and whose successful completion in itself will provide me with the instant gratification most of us only get from stating a resolution. Not the delayed gratification we rarely attain. It is a perfect thing. Here is my list.

  1. Floss tomorrow.
  2. Watch Citizen Kane all the way through without saying ‘I don’t fucking get it’ more than six eight times.
  3. Watch an entire episode of a 22-minute show without looking at my phone once.
  4. Find a better lightbulb for my living room lamp (the light is too white now, it’s like hanging out in a dental office).
  5. Buy stamps.
  6. Buy a better bedspread on June 1st.  
  7. Read a Wikipedia page all the way through without jumping to another Wiki link.
  8. Spend one day speaking in quotes from Brooklyn 99’s Captain Holt. (RIP AB ☹ #BINGPOT4ever!)
  9. In July, ask someone if they like mushrooms and not berate them when they say ‘yes’.  
  10. Buy floss.   
  11. The next two times someone speaks highly of soccer, I will not talk at length about how boring soccer is and make fun of them for liking a sport in which nothing happens and in which the players are all complaining toddlers. After those two times, all bets are off. Soccer sucks.  
  12. Three times this year I will get on a bus without saying ‘God, I hate the fucking bus’.
  13. Six times this year I will not say ‘man I need to lose weight’ when putting on pants.
  14. Three times this year I will not say ‘man, I need to lose weight’ after eating an entire pizza on my own in a metro station.
  15. On September 24th, I will floss.  

There you have it. My list of microresolutions for 2024. Hopefully, DD24 will report a series of grand and glorious successes with his dental health, bedding, and his abilities to not be an overt asshole to someone’s face. Who knows, maybe DD25 will even be able to withhold his opinions on soccer three times. But I wouldn’t bank on it.

No Comments

Merry Carbmas

Christmas elicits a variety of reactions. There are those seemingly born for Christmastime. There are those seemingly born to bitch about those first people. Some get depressed, others find their inner joy. Some take the break to enjoy a personal reboot of sorts. Others stress themselves out more than at other times of year. There’s no one reaction.

I eat carbs. Yes, of course, I decorate a tree, I get into gift getting, and I coax my animals with heavy foods into pictures in front of the tree. I watch Christmas movies. I do all that stuff. But what I do most – and what I look forward to most – is that Christmas is the carb-eating season.

So, two weeks ago, when I announced into the flat ‘it’s time to cheat!’ Burke did give me an arch-eyebrowed look (that might melt one’s kidney). I quickly explained that I meant cheat on our healthy diet. Nota bene: my explanation was not quick enough to get me out of the Dog House.  

We do live a reasonably healthy lifestyle. Sure, a bowl of cereal is snuck throughout the week. Beer’s presence in my life is there more than it should be. And what would life be without cheese? But during the week we typically eat a vegetarian diet, very little bread, and lots of vegetables. On the weekends we eat meat (moderately) and carbohydrates. When I wake up on Saturday morning, it is indeed Sammich o’clock.

But in late December, the short days, the dark, the plummeting temperatures, and the festive foods converge to make Christmas a time that begs a human to eat his weight in bread and pasta. And Christmas needn’t have begged, but rather nudge me in the general direction of cheese. And so for two weeks I plan and begin ordering a cavalcade of treats and foods: pasta, cheese – so much cheese, loafs of bread, ground beef (as a palate cleanser), cookies, cookies, along with a thousand other bits to bring together a Christmas feast.

It is Christmas today. I am sitting, half slinking on the couch. I have eaten a day’s worth of carbs and then started today with a morning’s worth of carbs. My elastic waistband isn’t elastic enough. In fact, it’s giving a bad name to elastic everywhere. Heartburn is rising in my chest and throat. Nevertheless, I have taken four journeys to my kitchen 10 feet away. Each time I have come back with a plate of food that is making me more uncomfortable by the moment. But, you know, tis the season.

Have I learned my lesson?

Fat chance, he says, with hindsight pun intended.

I am glancing at the half-eaten (half-uneaten for you psychopathic optimists) baking dish of mac-and-cheese and I am moaning towards it and reaching my chubby fingered hand towards it. I figure if The Force is going to work one time in my life, this would be the time. It does not move. Thus, I will be forced to engage in another pilgrimage. And then another. And then probably another.

Ho Ho Ho

No Comments

Margarita Christmas Shopping

Exif_JPEG_PICTURE

The mall is hot. It’s as though I have walked into a sauna with a sweater and jacket on over my towel. The sweat is dripping off my nose. Burke is carrying our dog in a bag. We are those people. I am getting some odd looks, but you don’t get to 49 and have an obnoxious laugh without getting used to looks.

We go to a shoe store. Burke carries around the dog to keep her quiet. I try on shoes and practice my Czech to talk about sizes and vocabulary to explain discomfort and to apologize for making someone bring you shoes and then not buying any. As we leave, the woman gives me a different look. This one hurts. We don’t get very many happy looks at the electronics store, the boutique outdoor shop, H&M, the chocolate store, and the coffee store. When we leave those shops, we incur unhappy and unsurprised glances. Even the pet shop was weird – a place where you’d think you could go with a Shih-tzu in a backpack and be accepted. Alas, no.     

The pen store brings us a mild victory. The woman eyes us up with uncertainty. When we buy a few things, she seems genuinely taken aback. As if the fact that we may use the pen for writing words is beyond her understanding.

After the pen store Burke reminds me that there is a ‘drinking place’ near the mall. By ‘drinking place’ she means ‘a pub’ and I not only remembered this drinking place, I was plotting an escape to it. Once at the drinking place we relax and mostly stop sweating. The dog chills in the backpack (which also doubles as a dog condo). The world makes sense again. The waitress eyes me up with caution, but she seems fine when we don’t start smashing glasses or singing at high volumes. After I relax, I have an idea for a gift. I jot it down (in words. with a pen). Then I have another idea. Inspiration stuck.  

When I was living in Pittsburgh, my friend Jimmie introduced me to Margarita Christmas Shopping. The concept is simple and, if you were paying attention, pretty much says it all. You drink margaritas and then you go Christmas shopping. The idea is, you loosen up and then go shopping. This makes it easier for you to spend money on stupid things and after little consideration. I took to it rather well.

I go back to the mall, which was near the drinking place. I burst back into the pen shop. The woman gives a startled look – but surely you won’t buy another pen. But I did. An orange one. And I asked for a box and a bag. Then I went to the coffee store. Did I buy flavored syrups for coffee? You bet. And I also bought measuring cups that I did not need. I was one shot away from buying a reusable baking sheet, but that one I – even in my state – couldn’t rationalize. But don’t count me out. There are six shopping days left and that drinking place is right next door.  

The gist here – do your Christmas shopping when you’re fra-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-fucked up.

No Comments

God Bless the Bishop, Everyone

December is a love-hate month. The weather and time turn against us. The pretense of autumn ends in late November. When we say things like ‘cold winter, eh?’ and some pedantic dildo nearby decides to inform you that ‘winter starts December 21’, you begin to rethink your stance on capital punishment and biblical stonings. For surely these people would be the first to go.

It’s currently 6:12 am on Monday. Outside my window it’s cold, it seems to be rain-snow-winding, and I know that sunlight will be a rumor until much later. And then, it’s a thing I’ll miss if I sneeze too long.

With the weather against us, you’d think it would be time for us to take it easy, hibernate, regroup, reenergize. But you’d think wrong. This is crunch-time for the people we work for – and whose NAME depends on your level of conspiracy theory. And, just for kicks, due to the lack of sun, light, and warmth, you have the energy (and consistency) of a seven-month-old tortilla that you found pressed up against the back wall of your fridge.  

But then there’s Christmas. And whether this holiday causes you a great deal of stress or comfort or (for many of us) both, it’s a thing to be reckoned with. There’s shopping and parties. It all but takes over Netflix and one can’t help but break open a bag of popcorn and watch formerly small town now corporate women go home to a place called Autumn Hill or October Glen or Flannel Bend and realize that, yes, the small town is the place for them after all. And even though the smarmy big city boyfriend will have slick backed hair, a cheap suit, and will have just sold an orphanage of kids to an Air Jordan factory, you’ll feel a little bad, because man, he doesn’t know what’s coming.

In the end, Christmas is a force, both cultural and pragmatic, to be dealt with. And this can be stressful.

So, how to cope? Drinking. Walking. Drinking. Walking somewhere to drink. But as a walk to a place to drink rudely involves walking back with a stagger, I have gone for watching Christmas movies and reading a book about Charles Dickens. Charles Dickens’ timeless Christmas tale, A Christmas Carol is such a part of our Christmas culture that it has been done redone more times than ‘Hallelujah’. It has been done by the Muppets. It has been done by Mickey Mouse. There are now movies and books about Charles Dickens writing the book (the one I am reading now). You rarely see movies about Homer banging on his stone tablet while writing the Odyssey.    

But what I like about the story of A Christmas Carol is how realistic it is for Christmas. Dickens was under a deadline, his wife was pregnant, his latest book installments were getting ho hum reviews. The pressure was on. And Dickens only had a few weeks to deliver. And he did. And we all know what happened. Scrooge. Marley. Three ghosts. Bah to the humbug. Tiny Tim. And good ole Bob Cratchit.

The very fact that Dickens needed a drink after he was done writing this book comes straight out of the last scene. Scrooge, relieved, having avoided ghosts, hell, and probably an eternity of listening to Jacob Marley tell drunken stories, says to Bob:

A Merry Christmas, Bob!” said Scrooge with an earnestness that could not be mistaken, as he clapped him on the back. “A merrier Christmas, Bob, my good fellow, than I have given you for many a year! I’ll raise your salary, and endeavor to assist your struggling family, and we will discuss your affairs this very afternoon over a bowl of Smoking Bishop, Bob!

Yes, we’re happy about Bob and Tiny Tim (who will evidently now live to be Tall Tim). We’re happy about the happy ending and Scrooge’s redemption. But we are really happy about the Smoking Bishop.

A Smoking Bishop is a hot punch drink that belongs among a group of cocktails called the Ecclesiastics. This is a bunch of punch cocktails that are named after members of the clergy. A Smoking Bishop, the Smoking Pope, the Rich Pope, the Smoking Archbishop, the Smoking Beadle, and the Smoking Cardinal. These protestant-borne cocktails provide us not only with a good, solid drink, but a way to make fun of the Catholic Church. In protestant countries such as Sweden, the punchbowl is shaped like a bishop’s miter.

The original recipe was labor-intensive and took over 24 hours to make. Since I know you don’t have that kind of time, we’re using a boiled down recipe that’ll get you seeing ghosts in about 2 hours.

Ingredients

    750 ml ruby port

    750 ml red wine

    1 cup water

    1/2 cup brown sugar

    1/4 teaspoon ginger, freshly grated

    1/4 teaspoon allspice, ground

    1/4 teaspoon nutmeg, freshly grated

    4 oranges

    20 cloves, whole

    All of your sins written out on a sheet

    No ghosts in sight

Garnish: clove-studded orange slice

Instructions

    Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

    Wash and dry oranges. Pierce and stud each orange with five cloves.

    Place oranges in a baking dish and roast until lightly browned all over, 60-90 minutes.

    Add port, wine, water, sugar and spices to a saucepan, and simmer over low heat.

    Slice oranges in half and squeeze juice into the wine and port mixture.

    Serve in a punch bowl, and ladle into individual glasses.

No Comments

The Plunge

It’s about 6 a.m. and I’m standing in my bathroom doing everything but getting into the shower. I always come up with stupid ideas when I have too much time and can’t get outside. And this one is a doozy.

The ideas that come when I can walk around the park or down the street seem to have a different veneer to them. I come up with story ideas, guffaw at one-liners that rear their heads during a dog walk. Positively chuckle my brains out while stomping off down the lane to our local pub. I suppose this all makes sense. The outdoors, fresh air, the promise of a beer somewhere that isn’t my living room. These things promote ideas.

But with the recent onslaught of our daily 16-hour evenings and the wintry wonderland that hath become Prague, well, my thinking is done indoors. The air is bereft with animal dander and skin that has plummeted from our bodies to live in nearby cloth and the oppressive horrors of dreams dying and dead. You know, that sort of thing.   

It doesn’t go well. If you throw into the mix Dax Shepherd, well then things get worse. Dax has a podcast that I love listening to. He’s an actor-writer, who I at one point admittedly considered the poor man’s Marc Maron. But this is by far no longer the case. He’s a very interesting person and far more intelligent than he might seem at first. And he does lots of cool things, some of which I have no interest in at all (race cars) and other things that seem like I should be doing (cold plunges).

This is where my trouble begins. The cold plunge. Cold plunging – at its core – involves plunging into freezing cold water. This is said to have a number of benefits, both for one’s physical and mental health. In a conversation Dax had with Eva Longoria, they described the utter amazement at how awake it makes them feel all day.

This piqued my interest. I was cooking meatballs at the time for an evening we were having with a friend and I stopped above my spaghetti sauce with a spoon. “Awake?” I asked aloud, thus once again convincing Burke of the fact that I have imaginary friends.

The idea of ‘being more awake’ appeals to me a great deal. I get up early, caffeinate my soul off, and then spend a few hours like a jittery robot on Ritalin. Then there’s the crash. Then the period of sedation wherein I’d fistfight Gandhi for an hour of sleep. Then the late afternoon resurgence, which occurs shortly after I go home. Then there’s the period of post-mortem exhaustion that occurs two hours before bed. Then there’s the wide awake that seems to coincide with the split second I lay my rump into bed. Yes, being awake is something to be explored.

In theory this is a grand idea. Wake up, do your work, work out, take a shower, and then finish that shower with an uber-refreshing invigorating blast of freezing cold water. In theory.

The thing with theory is, it always happens when you’re far more comfortable than when you have to do the theoretical things that will put you in theoretical misery. At the point of conceiving this plan, I was in my kitchen sipping Scotch and palming meatballs together. I was warm. I was in comfy clothing.

Reality is far from this. Standing naked at 6:58 am under a stream of warm water and convincing yourself to turn the water abruptly to the left to make it cold. This is hard. But I did it. The kind of cold that comes from a tap makes you long for the days of cave dwellings and sabertoothed tigers. When the water hits you, things that belong outside of your body disappear into it. Things that provide transition seem to lock up forever. The screech I made could be heard by local birds and distant rodents.

I counted to twenty.

I shut off the water.

I had done it.

I cursed Dax Shepherd in many multisyllabic words.   

Twenty-five minutes later, I dozed off on the bus.

No Comments

Notes on a Class

About three Tuesdays ago, I was in my office getting ready for my classes the following day when an extraordinary thing happened – I couldn’t remember anything. Oh, I knew my name and I knew where I was and after a quick look at my driver’s license and a couple coolly-worded questions to my colleague, those things were confirmed. I mean I couldn’t remember anything about the last class.

I looked through the coursebook for a reminder, but everything came up blank. A mild panic ensued, until I realized I was looking at the wrong book and, probably more problematic, was trying to plan the wrong class. This brought its own level of terror, but I quelled that by finding someone else to blame. The matter was all but closed.

But then my stupid brain started thinking, which never anywhere good. Brain said I should probably remember something that happened six days earlier. Brain also said I could probably do some things to remember things better, further explaining that I could probably locate some of these techniques on the ‘internet’ a thing I mostly used for work, for cat memes, and to find out who won the Eagles game. On the way home, I punished brain for its insolence with several blasts of 80 proof liquids (that’ll show em!). The problem is, brain doesn’t get quieter until like glass four of those liquids. From glass one to three, brain is loosened up and makes observations, some of which aren’t even ridiculous.

At the end of the evening, I had decided to make notes throughout each class to show that I was being present. These notes might be extemporaneous of language and involve the mood, the feel, tensions, a thing or activity which had gone particular poorly or particularly well (usually the latter). And it would all be in the hopes that I could look back the following week and be transported to not only the structure of the lesson, but also the lesson itself as it occurred with a whole bunch of people. (It should be noted that brain also came up with the idea to build a boat from all of my furniture and live on the Vltava ‘in peace’. But that was after five glasses of said liquid.)

And so, for three weeks I did just that. In each class, I’d make a note when class started and a note about how I felt and anything extraordinary that happened (nothing, so I had to make something up). Then, several times throughout class, like some learned (hard -ed) teacher, I’d step off to my notebook and jot a note. It all went more or less swimmingly, until I read those notes last week.

Last Tuesday, planning a class, I found that I needed a nudge to help remind me about the last class. Perhaps, I thought, I can not only get information, but help carry over some of the juice which had propelled the last class forward. I swung back through my notes with the cockiness of the well-prepared. I was gifted for my efforts. As long as ‘gift’ means shows that I am a lunatic who should no longer be allowed in public.

Tuesday: 10:30–12:00            14.11.23

Class Notes

10:30 –

Class has started. Where is everyone?

10:38 – six people come in late. Six! This is the future of society!? These are the people who will be taking care of me in my old age?! Well, hopefully when I need my diaper changed, they won’t be eight minutes late!!

10:51 – How could they have misunderstood those directions? They were to read a sentence and fill the blank with the correct verb. We did an example. This is intentional. That’s what they were doing in those eight minutes before they came in – chatting about ways to mess with me. Argh.

11:03 – Do lawyers have a better life than this? Is it too late to go to law school?

11:09 – Man, this pen sucks. N ed a n w pen. Lo k at t is cr p, this pen can b rely get through a senten e without b ea ing. A g ! I b t lawy rs get be ter p ns.

11:21 – Oh, glory be! I found a better pen in my bag. Joy Joy Joy. Why does everyone hate November? I like November. It’s close to Christmas, which means two weeks of eating what I want. Also, food.

11:23 – Oh my God. I think someone farted.

11:23:08 – Yeah, it was me.

11:26 – 24 minutes left! Just 24 minutes left!!! Happy days are coming in 24 minutes!

11:41 – I’m hungry. I think I only brought a grapefruit and oatmeal. I hate morning me.

11:42 – Maybe I’ll get a kebab. IN 8 MINUTES!!!! Wait, I think someone just asked a question.

11:43 – Nah, they got it sorted out amongst themselves.

11:48 – The world seems bet er a ain…wa t a sec nd, ba ! Th s pen s cks to !  

11:50 – class is over! Complete mindfulness attained. I’m es ent ally Bud ha.  

No Comments

Martinmas Part II

Last Saturday, November 11, people all across Europe celebrated the feast of Saint Martin. In the Czech Republic and Germany, people opened the first young wine of the season at 11:11 am on 11.11; many others ate goose – the traditional Saint Martin dish. Others drank whatever they could in order to deal with the people who’d been drinking wine since 11 am. But what’s the story with this November holiday which targets fowl and celebrates young booze?

November 11th belongs to Saint Martin of Tours. Like many saints, Martin of Tours was something of a jack of all trades – soldier, monk, bishop, saint. Like many saints, his life was rather picaresque of the very good or the very bad. He gave half of his cloak to a freezing beggar one cold November day. He tried to avoid becoming a bishop by hiding out in a barn. Like many saints, he died an agonizing death (crushed between two mill wheels). On November 11th (his crushing date) we call upon superstitions and symbolism. He was ousted from the barn by a noisy goose, which he had cooked and thus we eat goose. Because of Martin’s good deed with the cloak, God grants us a few warm days in November called ‘Saint Martin’s Summer’. Because of Martin’s past as a soldier and pacifist, World War I ceased on 11.11 at 11:11.  

But Martinmas, like many other liturgical days, falls on a day already important to huge swaths of European society. Martinmas, like Halloween (or Samhain) is a transition day, for eons serving as the change from autumn to winter. It is known as Old Halloween, Martlemas, or Old Halloween Eve. The original date for Samhain, Martinmas was moved due to the Gregorian calendar’s pesky tendency to drop days. So even without Martin and his geese and deeds, Europeans practiced customs on this day with clear emphasis on food, booze, and practicality.  

As Martinmas marked the end of harvest season and beginning of winter, it was also a day of practical importance to the agricultural peoples of Europe. Animals were slaughtered and harvests were collected. Much surrounding those things came to an end or started. Leases were ended and started, rents were due, wages were paid, seasonal ploughmen and other workers finished their work contracts and prepared to move on. Hiring fairs were organized and a new set of itinerant workers was hired for the following season. People brought their work inside, men dropped their farm equipment and picked up crafts and mugs filled with alcohol.

Twas the season to be boozed up. The end of season meant a period of celebration, but rather than boohooing the end of summer, Martinmas welcomed the winter. Not to be feared, the winter was considered a period of indulgence. The outside time of the year was over for now so it was time to enjoy indoor activities: feasting, drinking, and partying – a song, by the way, I have been singing for three decades. It was all kicked off by Martinmas, went through Christmas and into Candlemas. (You’re no doubt noting a trend to these revel days, I suggest making festive days by adding the suffix -mas to everything. Fridaymas, Tuesdaymas, or My Birthdaymas has a nice ring.) On Martinmas they drank, ate, and took part in ancient customs like mumming and bonfires. They sent off farmhands with a feast, a thanks, their pay, and a hangover.   

There would have been no better time of year to feast. Animals would have been freshly slaughtered – pig, goose, and beef would have been enjoyed by all. The Germans called November ‘blood month’ for reasons that make us flinch and animals sprint for the hills. Records from a 1492 monastic Martinmas feast show beef, mutton, ale, and wine. The sheer proportions made it three times larger than their Christmas feast and suggested that they probably involved local poor in the festivities (sharing with the less fortunate as Martin had). They paid singers and minstrels and put them up for the night. Similar accounts for churches, communities, and colleges mention eel, paycock, swan, goose, pig, and beef. It was a great day of the year to be a hungry human and a less great time to be a domestic animal or a bird who lived near water.  

That Martin is the patron saint of winemakers, soldiers, tailors, cloak makers, goose haters, and millers (sick joke) – all tracks. But he also happens to be the patron saint of shoemakers, tanners, leather-dressers, glovers, purse-makers, and parchment-makers. All no doubt owing to the many things made from the abundance of recently abandoned hides lying around at the end of the Martinmas slaughter. If you were an animal in November, someone was going to eat you and then wear you.   

But Martinmas was big on the other side of feasting too – getting pickled. It was a time to revel with young wine, ale, and hot ale posset. In his 1592 satire, Pierce Penniless his Supplication to the Divell, Thomas Nashe lays out the eight kinds of drunkenness, the sixth kind of which is a ‘martin drunk’ – a man who’d drunk ‘himself sober ere he stir’. Social drinking at its best. The German and Dutch agreed, terming ‘Martinsman’ a ‘jovial festival drunkard’. An early Scots weather proverb goes ‘between Martinmas and Yule, water’s wine in every pool’. AKA: The forecast calls for extended periods of wine-drunk idiots peeing in your bushes. Although references to the common Martinmas drinker seems to allude to a cheerful, fun-loving drinker, some never got the parchment. It was a day of excess, filled with drunken quarrels and, naturally, jousting. Because what you really need when binge drinking is to be atop a horse with a giant sharp stick charging another drunk atop a horse with another giant sharp stick. If they didn’t get killed or lose their faces, people acted out of line. One 1421 record shows that a John Hedon (no joke) ‘became disorderly and propounded inane questions, uttering opprobrious words against his companions’. In other words, Uncle John ruined another Martinmas with his opprobrious propounding! John was fined 12d; others not so lucky. Some took advantage of this day of revelry by unfairly sneak attacking their enemies. They’d catch their enemy not only off-guard, but shitfaced or hungover. Something I think should be mentioned in the Geneva Convention with opprobrious words.

This all is a formal way of saying what we have known for years – November is a time to prepare for winter, to revel, to drink and to eat heartily, to fatten up for the cold months. It’s practically in our bones and fatty cells. Jeans tight in December? Who cares? You are only following your historical directives. Leave your worries and weight loss for the spring and summer. Today, we drink and dine.

To celebrate we’re going to concoct a posset. The adventurous among you might just drink it, too. This is a drink of ale, curdled milk, and spices. It should make you forget any problem you have as long as that problem isn’t lactose intolerance. The posset dates back to at least the medieval period. It appeared in John Russell’s Boke of Nurture in 1460 and if there’s one thing we know about 1460, it’s that people were less comfortable than we are today, the TV shows weren’t as good, and shitting yourself to death at age 20 was not uncommon. So, they knew how to make a drink. (Nota bene: this drink will not make you shit yourself to death, but please see above comment on lactose intolerance).

Ingredients

–        Two egg yolks

–        1.2 cups of Cream (or 1/10 of a pottle for you Olde English nerds)

–        A pint of your favorite ale, or lots of those

–        Cinnamon stick or a bit of powder

–        Nutmeg

–        Sugar

–        A pot

–        A posset pot (or any glass that has handles)

–        Pants with an elastic waistband (or no pants at all, who are we to judge?)

Directions

Mix up two egg yolks and set them aside. Boil the cream, add a cinnamon stick (or powder). Revel in the warmth of it all. Mock those who do not revel. Strain the eggs with a little cream. When the cream is well boiled and as thick as your Uncle Jim remove from heat and add the eggs. In another pot heat up your ale/beer with some sugar (Why not? It’s cold outside!) Take a moment to think of Martin crushed between two mill wheels. Then add some nutmeg. When all is heated, inhale deeply and enjoy the atmosphere of a medieval Martinmas celebration ozzing into your kitchen (sans the ubiquitous stench of feces and the tormented shrieking of animals being butchered). Then pour the cream and egg (after removing the cinnamon stick) into your beer and drink. Drink to Martinmas, to the reveling season, and to the god of elastic waistbands.

11 Comments

Saint Martin’s Day

It’s an ugly Saturday – wet, cold, early dark, the sort of day that’s ideal to watch Harry meet Sally or Andrew Lincoln kill zombies and everyone else he meets. However, we have been invited by friends to Czanksgiving. This is a Thanksgiving feast created by a friend of ours that blends Czech and American. So, alongside our turkey and mashed sweet potatoes we have Czech dumplings and cabbage. The booze is of international variety, the conversation is warm, and we soon forget about the rainy day and lean our shoulders full force into merriment and mirth.

When our friend’s brother arrives, everyone wishes him a happy name day (Martin) and, having completely forgotten, I of course jump on board so as not to look like a schmuck. As I stand in the corner drinking pear brandy and listening to the different stories being told, I review what I remember about Saint Martin’s Day.

There’s a lot going on with November 11, Saint Martin’s Day – or, if you prefer, Martinmas, Martinmesse, Martlemas, Old Halloween or Old Hallowmas Eve. As you may have guessed from the list of names, St. Martin’s Day is an ancient holiday. Sort of like a Halloween in the Roman world, like Halloween (or Samhain) it too marked the end of summer and the beginning of winter. Harvests were collected, animals slaughtered. It was the end of the economic year, workers were paid, and it was time to wish farewell to travelling ploughmen. Work was done, and so it was the beginning of the winter revelry season, marked by storytelling and mumming.

Helping them in their revelry was the first wine of the season. Saint Martin’s Day is traditionally linked to the pouring of the first young, fruity wine of the season. Combining this with the first animal slaughter makes it a pretty big day historically. But in many European cultures, the wine was poured for people outside the city gates. In Prague, the first pour takes place at 11:11 am on 11.11. So, as you can imagine, by the time we were running across the city to visit our friends, the people we encountered were pretty red-faced and cheery.

If something taking place at 11:11 on 11.11 sounds significant, it should. The Great War was ended at those exact coordinates and this is why in Europe this day is Armistice Day and in the U.S. Veterans Day. But the Great War was not the first conflict ended nor the first treaty signed on this day. The Treaty of Granada in 1500 divided the Kingdom of Naples between Louis XII and Ferdinand II of Aragaon. The Treaty of Zstiva-Torok (1606) was a peace treaty which ended the 15-year Long Turkish War between the Ottoman Empire and the Habsburg monarchy. The Canandaigua Treaty in 1794, the Treaty of Sinchula in 1865 – Bhutan ceded lands east of the Teesta River to the British East India Company.

Perhaps this goes back to St. Martin who is the hero of St. Martin’s Day, well, after the church takes things over from the pagans. It’s within Saint Martin that we see lots of themes associated with this day. He was a soldier until he threw down his arms and refused to fight. He was a bishop, gave half of his cloak to a beggar that ended up being Jesus (good guess!), and spent a night sleeping in a goose den.

Nevertheless, and no matter the motivation, merriment was had by all. Then some more. Then some more. I didn’t eat goose, but I did eat two birds (turkey and duck). And I didn’t drink any wine, but I drank enough beer and pear brandy and gather that St. Martin and the itinerant ploughmen would have been proud. It was a lovely night and the bad weather stayed at the door.   

No Comments

Two Weeks

I love reading. But it wasn’t always that way. I remember the days when I was punished by being sent to my room with a book and being ‘forced’ to spend an entire afternoon whiling away the hours just reading and occasionally daydreaming about being on the cast of The Real Ghostbusters. When I got more into reading in my early twenties, I realized the foolishness of looking that particular gift horse in the mouth. 

When I finally took to reading, I never looked back. I buried myself in all sorts and ate them up. And reading has been its own education. Not just in the obvious ways, but also an education about myself. One who lies to themselves about reading is in for a tough row. Books take a few days to a few weeks to read and if you pretend you like Sartre when you really prefer Terry Pratchett, well, it’s going be a rough one. 

It was perhaps two months ago when I realized that it was taking me a very long time to finish books. Why was that, I wondered. One of the many voices in my brain piped up and coughed and pointed to my phone, the slutty succubus who hangs out in my pocket and drains me of all energy to intellectual pursuits or things that don’t rhyme with Creddit. But then there was also the fact that I am very busy and therefore, at the end of the day, very tired. When I finally stop my work on any given day, I am exhausted and find that Netflix has a better chance of being watched than just about anything else that might happen. 

But as it had taken me two months to read a 312 page mystery novel, a change had to be made. I have therefore created an edict. Whenever I open a book, I have two weeks – 14 days – to read it. I am now trying to come up with some punishment for if I fail. 

If you have any ideas – that will not result in bodily harm to anyone in my house – feel free to comment. If you would like to join me, please let me know. As you know, misery loves company. Or at least I read that somewhere and it didn’t take two months to get.  

3 Comments