The World According to Chuck

To real capsaicin junkies — and there are at least two of you, besides me, I know — our passion for the hot stuff is proven by our failures. The men are separated from the boys not by wuss talk of sweaty brows or having to drink gallons of iced tea afterwards (yeah, like that’s a good idea, doofus), but by those times when we just had to stop eating. It’s possible to reach some sort of pepper nirvana but there are limits to human tolerance, and that’s what I’m talking about. Sometimes you fly too close to the sun, and only a fool goes further. Some places men were just not meant to go.

Aside from that, though, we’re always looking for more heat. Cameron and I got into this conversation in Boston, and eventually he rounded up some sauce from an Italian restaurant (capsaicin has no cuisine, or country; the usual suspects are Mexican and Thai, but really I’ve found good peppers in all sorts of food, and it works with all sorts of food). I dripped my calzone into it and I was happy.

It’s really what I’m after, these days, in food. Heat. I could easily become a herbivore as long as I’m allowed to add jalapenos to my salad or whatever. True heat seekers aren’t looking for taste, texture or smell, not really; we seek a transformative experience. In my perfect capsaicin fantasy, I finish my meal in the shower, weeping copiously. It rarely happens but I dream.

The other day, then, just eyeballing the “hispanic” section of my grocery store on the off chance that some buyer got a good deal and/or an upgrade in imagination, I saw a bottle of hot sauce that said, “HOT!!” Not that I’m normally swayed by advertising, but it looked like it had possibilities. So I bought a bottle for a buck and it was good, some nice heat, but those 6 ounces or so didn’t last me long, since I tend to put hot sauce on everything (including cereal and my forearm, just for lickin’).

That’s when I slapped myself on the forehead, partly to make sure I had beads of sweat there but also because I can just be so stupid. Twenty cents an ounce is a steep price to pay for essentially pepper puree with vinegar and a little tomato paste.

So the project began.

I had to wait for a night alone, since a quick peek at the Internet told me that blanching the peppers in boiling vinegar first was a good beginning. Vinegar steam is not only potent but sort of toxic, if you hang around the stove too long, so I didn’t want to risk injuring John or Julie on a cellular level if I could help it. Tonight, as it turned out, she was at the local high school watching “Guys and Dolls” and John had crashed for the evening, so I had the lab to myself.

And it was as simple as it sounded. I avoided recipes because the first few I read said to seed the peppers first, so they obviously weren’t serious. After blanching, I shoved them into the Magic Bullet with the tomato paste, a few spices I had hanging around (including my own, homemade chili powder and cumin, but that’s all I’m saying), some of the vinegar and water and there you go.

I used jalapenos because I happened to have several on the countertop in a plastic bag, needing to be used. Next time I’m adding some habaneros, but this worked. I made a few adjustments, added some water, got a consistency that was a tad thick but not bad, not bad at all, and then I dipped the edge — just the edge — of a tortilla chip in the sauce for my first taste.

Hmm. A little sweet; might need to be diluted a little. And fresh tomatoes would be better than paste, probably. I should have also put a couple of grinds of black pepper in, and a little cayenne would have been interesting. But, you know, first time, no measurements, just stuff I had around the house, a few minutes of work and now several cups of sauce. Not bad at all. Maybe just one more chip, with just a teensy bit more sauce…

That was 30 minutes ago.

I am still sweating.

It’s a good kind of sweat.

The nirvana sweat.

Don’t bother asking me for the recipe. Maybe later, when I get it perfect, but this was less cooking than alchemy. I took an ordinary Saturday night and turned it into gold. Liquid gold. Sort of red gold.

And maybe you’re not one of us, those who seek out our inner thermometer and aim to mess with it, so this won’t interest you. Fair enough.

But I made me some hot sauce tonight, all alone, and I couldn’t help myself but I had a fair bit of it, and my hair stuck to my forehead and my shirt stuck to the back of my neck, my eyes watered and my tongue danced and my nose sort of tingled, and I stood in the kitchen and stretched out my arms and said what all creators say when they’ve done good.

“It’s ALIVE.”

It is, too. I may take a shower tonight after all.

(For some reason, my weekly column isn’t online currently. I have no idea why not, but since some of you have e-mailed me I’ll cross-post it here.)
———————

My father was a latch-key kid, before that term was coined, before the metacultural era when everything seemed to be about us and how our lives were so different. The combination of technology, shifting sociology and a whole bunch of baby boomers let us navel gaze to our heart’s content, conveniently ignoring the fact that there have always been children, and some of them have always had to fend for themselves.

He was the eldest child of a single mother, and so sometimes he slipped through the cracks. He was shuttled, in the 1940s, between relatives and foster families, and what he remembered of his childhood (and he didn’t remember much) was mostly loneliness, wandering streets, sitting on trains, wishing for stability and relying, often, on the kindness of strangers.

He would muse on this, sometimes, and on how he was fortunate to have grown up in his particular time (he could be metacultural, too), when he was safer than he would have been a few decades later, or so he thought. I’d call him on this sometimes, argue that there have always been pedophiles and perverts, monsters in our midst, and he’d agree but qualify.

“People were better back then,” he’d say. “They took care of each other.”

I don’t know if this is true, or have the slightest idea of how one would prove or disprove it. I can only look at potential causes: Agriculture moved to industrial, rural moved to urban, community moved, maybe, to a closed circuit. Maybe we became self-contained, isolated, independent creatures who forgot how to socialize, and if that’s the case then it’s surely getting worse. If I want pizza and a movie on a Saturday night, just as an example, I can have them with virtually no human interaction. Add enough of those moments up and maybe we get a dysfunctional society; as I said, I have no way of knowing.

But maybe that’s why we crave stories like the one I’m about to share. Maybe we always have, and maybe we just like to be reminded.

You might have heard it already; it has a local flavor, and even though there’s been some national exposure it might resonate a little more here in the Northwest. I’m going to tell it anyway.

Sara Tucholsky is 5’2 and probably isn’t ever going to be any taller. As such, the senior right fielder on Western Oregon University’s women’s softball team didn’t hit for power, just placement, and with a batting average of .153 that wasn’t a sure thing, either. But as she came up to bat the last weekend of April in Ellensburg, in a crucial game against Central Washington, two players on base in the second inning, luck and timing came together in one glorious moment.

The ball sailed over the fence, Sara’s first home run ever, and as the crowd and her teammates erupted she watched the ball disappear as she rounded first base. Whoops. Missed the bag there, Sara. She stopped, turned to go back, and ended her college career with a twinge.

The anterior cruciate ligament, bane to athletes of all sizes, picked that moment to tear, and Sara crawled back to first while the crowd scratched their collective heads. Is there a rule for this?

It’s baseball. Of COURSE there’s a rule.

If a player is substituted, it becomes a two-run single. If she’s assisted by her teammates around the bases, it’s illegal and an out.

If she’s assisted by members of the opposing team, it’s a national story.

You can probably finish this one yourselves.

The picture of two CWU Wildcats carrying Sara around the diamond, stopping carefully to touch her foot to each base, doesn’t do the story justice. Nor does the coda, the fact that Western Oregon won the game and went on to the playoffs.

Nor, really, does the video clip of Sara telling her story, or Mallory Holtman, the greatest softball player in the history of CWU, the all-time conference leader in home runs, who came up with the idea of helping her injured opponent.

For me, anyway, it was the image of Gary Frederick, the Central coach for 40 years, now age 70, tears streaming down his face, talking on ESPN about his players.

Frederick reminded me of my dad, actually; about the same age group, growing up in the same era, the same beefy face and gray hair. My dad would have liked this story a lot.

And I infer nothing from it, no commentary on society at large, no silver lining in dark clouds, no glimpses of goodness in contemporary humanity. It could have happened anywhere, at any time, I’m sure.

But it happened in Ellensburg in April, a reminder maybe, a good story at any rate, and an answer for Tom Hanks’s surly coach in “A League Of Their Own,” who said, “There’s no crying in baseball!” There is.

I believe I mentioned sleep once or twice in talking about my recent trip to Boston. This was an issue, of course, because I took a red-eye flight back east and nobody can sleep on a plane without medical help, in most cases serious ingestion of ethanol. Which I don’t ingest. Which I may have also mentioned a time or two.

In addition, though, for the past few months I’ve been doing some work that’s required me to stay up late at night and watch movies and TV. Or that’s how it seems to work out, although have you seen any reviews here lately? No. Actually, I’m paid to feel grammatically superior to hard-working folks and speech-recognition software and to stay awake, which I’m grateful to do, although it took me a few weeks to adjust to sleeping later in the morning.

The other advantage, which I truly appreciate, is that I can do this from home, or anywhere with Internet access, although broadband is really necessary. So I continued my schedule even though I was heading into a time zone with strange new rules. This is also responsible for my sleep deprivation while in Boston and telling everyone that Frankenstein never scared me, but marsupials do.

Because they’re fast.

Anyway (never mind, somebody reading gets that joke, trust me), while I’ve had plenty of sleep since I got home I still have a strange schedule from time to time, including Monday (really Tuesday), when I filled in for an east coaster and therefore agreed to be responsible for four hours of boredom between 2 and 6 a.m. This was a little tricky but I managed to doze for an hour or so beforehand and fulfill my obligations and hit the sack just before 7 a.m., sleeping all the way until 1:30 in the afternoon, when I was awakened by my wife and son laughing at pictures of cats and cheezeburgers.

This left me primed, at 7pm, for election returns.

Julie had left to attend A Thing, and John, himself sleep deprived, had crashed in his room, so I had the joy to myself. I made a big pot of chili (I took advantage of the solo time, since the smell of roasting peppers makes John nauseated and whiny), read blogs and watched Keith and Tweety and Rachel and Pat and that other guy and the guy with two first names, and I was in hog heaven. I love me some politics, particularly when the candidate I’m rooting for has a good night.

The only human contact I had during most of this, actually, was from a Loyal Reader, who emailed me to share the joy. I’m not going to identify this Loyal Reader since those of us who like Obama sometimes have to live with and/or deal with loved ones who favor Senator Clinton, and thus are grouchy and mean all the time.

Oh, JUST KIDDING. That’s what we Obama people do. We kid.

Aside from my personal preference, I’m happy because we’re closer to settling this loooong race, and it’s necessary because John McCain is turning out to be a CRAZY PERSON. I was one of those people who lean left and generally vote for the Democrat, even Dukakis, who liked McCain a lot a decade ago and wished I could prove my integrity by having a chance to vote for him in a Presidential election, assuming he was running against Dukakis (or someone similar). Even last summer, when things looked bleak for him, I thought he was a viable choice for me, particularly considering the fact that the nutcases on the Right hated him so much.

But the more I read and research and learn, the scarier he seems. Not finger-on-the-button scary, but dim-witted scary. Even the multiple position reversals (I believe some people call this flip-flopping) and the ugly pandering and the violent temper don’t bother me as much as the fact that he just doesn’t seem too bright. Or even interested.

Of course, I could just be falling for liberal, pansy, atheistic, America-hating propaganda.

We’ll see. But I have a feeling my summer will be a little more peaceful now that the sides are shaping up. And I can go back to sleep, which is what I do best, of course. That and making really hot chili. Even though I’m still scared of marsupials and McCain.

Mary Bunger, a 44-year-old single mom from Abington (Indiana), emerged from the town’s general store on Wednesday, the only place to purchase a snack in a 10-mile radius.

“I am definitely going to try to go with Hillary,” she said. “I almost feel like (Obama’s) the anti-Christ from the Middle East.”

—————

Benjamin Franklin, upon leaving the Philadelphia State House in 1787 at the end of the Constitutional Convention, was asked by a woman, “Dr. Franklin, what have you given us?”

“A republic, madam,” he replied, “if you can keep it.”

Of course, he probably wasn’t thinking about rural Indiana…

It’s been 15 years since I started interacting with strangers online, skimming AOL chat rooms late at night, looking for company. A few years later, I was conducting all of my employment-type adventures in a virtual environment; there are still influential and important people in my life, people who mean a good deal to me and with whom I share a history, with whom I’ve never shared a cup of coffee or even a moment in the same physical space. We’re flesh strangers but electronic friends.

Not that this is new. History is full of long-term, long-distance relationships that were never consummated, so to speak. George Bernard Shaw was really good at this.

I can understand, though, that some people find it odd, or confusing, especially when it comes to that strange “Internet” thing that people do. It’d be easy to see the disconnect as generational, and there’s some truth there, but mostly I think it’s lifestyle. Some people are just not comfortable spending time in front of a screen, and so they don’t, and then there are those who fear for their privacy and guard it.

I don’t, obviously, have these issues. My life is pretty much an open book (it’s actually a book, come to think of it); I’m easy to find and there’s little to hide, although I’ve done my share of hiding, surely.

Over the years, then, I’ve developed relationships. Most of these were instigated by readers writing to me, although I’ve done some instigating myself. And I cherish these people, love to hear about their lives and exchange thoughts. It’s an efficient friendship; the nature of this kind of communication, even as quick and easy as it is, edits out a lot of irrelevancy. We speak when we have something to say, generally, and observe in silence the rest of the time.

But we know stuff. I know what my Internet friends look like, usually, and where they live (and what that looks like, too, sometimes). I know about their families and their passions, their pets and their eating habits. The stuff of friendship, really.

Four years ago I met a couple of online friends, taking advantage of being in roughly the same geographical location (it was Texas, and that can be kind of rough), and I found out there is a moment, just a moment, of merging the two worlds, one physical and the other virtual. Sort of like zooming in with Google Earth. And then it’s just folks.

Last week I had another opportunity. Liz Slaughter-Ek (Lizardek of Live Journal fame) and I have been exchanging words for about five years now, ever since I ventured into the blogosphere back on my Salon site. She’s always been a favorite; she lives in Sweden and I love the exoticness of that, the distance and the difference. I also love her writing, and enjoy peeking into her life and watching things happen.

So when I found out she was going to be in Boston this spring, and I had a potential trip to Boston on my agenda, worlds collided. I had enough flexibility to schedule my trip to coincide with hers, so last Wednesday we did it, old friends who’d just never got around to meeting.

Her mom came, too. And Beth and Cameron were there, along with Thann, their roommate, and his cat. Just in case you thought we were meeting at a motel. Your minds are all in the gutter, you know.

And it was just like before; I knew her, she knew me, there were no surprises, we had a wonderful night with good food and great conversation, most of which I don’t actually remember because I was well into my 30-something hour of wakefulness. She brought presents and everything, though, and I found out a couple of things I didn’t know (like how she met her husband; I won’t go into details, but just think of a forgettable Bruce Willis movie from about 20 years ago. Not “Bonfire of the Vanities.”).

So thanks, Liz (and Linda) for what I assume was a fun night. It made my trip even more special, and I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. Or even a nap, although that had crossed my mind.

(Liz and Sleep-Deprived Crazy Person with Red Sox cap)

I gave the guy with the booklets two bucks, just because. They were cheap, amateurish photocopies of grave sites at the Old Granary Burying Ground on Tremont Street in Boston, and this guy stood at the gate, asking only that they be returned on our way out. There was a note inside, though, suggesting donations to pay for the pursuit of history, or heroin maybe. I opted for history; he looked like maybe he could like history.

And there was history, if a little dusty. Over 2000 graves are in the Granary, and maybe twice that many, who knows? Samuel Adams. John Hancock. Benjamin Franklin’s parents. Victims of the Boston Massacre, including Crispus Attucks. And Paul Revere, who had a nice marker that I posed by while Cameron took a picture, which I can’t load onto this site for some reason. You’ll live. See update below.

Paul Revere wasn’t particularly famous during his lifetime, or for 50 years following his death, until Longfellow immortalized him, and his ride, in verse, giving him the lion’s share of credit for what was really a community project, although he certainly rode and did his part. Props to Paul, then, but I’m just saying. Poetry and history; something’s going to give with that combination.

(And surely he never said, “The British are coming!” He was British. But these are little things.)

The graveyard was a little spooky; it looked like The Haunted Mansion at Disneyland, and the clouds had started to make an appearance by the time Cameron and I walked through the gate. And I wonder how much of Paul Revere remains anyway, after two centuries, although I haven’t researched this. Still, it was awesome, reading the stones, some from the 17th century, and imagining. I see dead people, etc.

I highly recommend it, if you’re in the area. It set the mood for the rest of my afternoon, a long walk that ended in the North End, home to a million Italian restaurants and Mr. Revere’s house, which apparently has been painted. The cobblestone has buckled in places, but the buildings look in amazingly good shape, and it was only a short walk to Christ Church, the Old North Church, where sexton Robert Newman carried two lanterns to the steeple at the direction of a silversmith and patriot, a little light at midnight, signaling that the soldiers were crossing the river to Lexington, letting history know that things were about to get lively.

(more to come)

You’ll be glad to know, I think, that I didn’t succumb to temptation and climb down the steps of the Cheers bar, hoping to find Norm and Cliff in the middle of the afternoon. I knew, of course, that it didn’t exist, that it was a Hollywood set and that the facade was all I got, that down those stairs was disappointment and despair and a tourist trap, but I still was tempted to go. I wanted to believe.

But I didn’t. I was too busy seeing Paul Revere’s house, and other stuff. There was enough reality in Boston without finding out awful TV truths.

Sleep was the casualty of this trip; I sacrificed gladly, but I’m just now sorta recovering. I slept seven hours out of 72, which left me functional but sort of odd, talkative but not making, maybe, a whole lot of sense, and now things are starting to stabilize again. Aside from two hours on the runway in Philly, a side effect of the thunderstorms that covered a swath of the country this weekend, it was an easy trip home, just long and boring and not helped by “The Devil Wears Prada,” which I didn’t watch anyway (I brought my own movies, thank you very much, and podcasts and music and memories).

Now I have a column to write and weight to lose and money to make, and that’s just this morning, so I’ll have more thoughts later. I will say that it was about as perfect a trip as I’ve had, or think about having, from the weather to the company to the sights and sounds, to the amazing ice cream I was introduced to (Oreo cookie cake batter, if you must know), to the deli in Brookline to watching “The Departed” on Friday night, to achieving my secret goal of getting everyone in the house to talk like Christopher Walken. Just about perfect, and if I didn’t find Sam Malone tending bar, well, I wasn’t really looking for him in the first place.