Jeff Johnson's Blog: Will Fight Evil 4 Food, page 13

Creatures of Intuition

Intuition is the ability to acquire
knowledge without proof, evidence, or conscious reasoning, or without understanding
how the knowledge was acquired.

Detective Baby Moon Gow is an
intuitive genius and the protagonist in my winter project. I have a few other
things to finish up before I get back to that fun book, but in the meantime I
can’t help but think about some of the more powerful intuitivists I’ve known
over the years. Front and center has to be the late David Knoll, convicted bank
robber and epic Old Portland drug dealer. Dave’s favorite book was The Master
and the Margarita, not a book I ever had any special love for, and he was also
way into Jerzy Kosinski, a depressing Pole. We bonded over books in spite of
this, and in the time I knew him I saw Dave perform stupendous feats of
intuition. He once became convinced that someone was about to kill the guy who
lived across the hall from him. He had no real evidence. He would have told me
if he did as the guy was a blabbermouth once you had his confidence. When he
told me of this suspicion I shrugged it off. When he called a few days later
and told me to come over and check something out, I thought it was a graphic
novel we were both looking for, Zombie Elvis, but when I went past the shredded
police tape and stepped over the dried pool of blood across from his door I
knew he’d been right. He’d predicted the death of his neighbor. I went in and
discovered Dave had taped his guns, maybe fifteen of them, to the walls and to
the backs of chairs. They were all pointed at the door with strings tied to the
triggers leading back to the stick in his hand. With one pull he could send a
hail of bullets at his door. He predicted the killer would return. Amazingly,
after I left, the killer DID return but he was unable to break down Dave’s door
and get himself killed.

Amazing, but Dave’s most astonishing
feat of intuition was a scientific one. This was all almost twenty years ago. I
don’t even think I had a cellphone yet. But I just read an article on Fecal
Transplant and not only was I astonished that such a thing exists, but even
more astonishing? Dave knew something about it years before there were pages on
the internet dedicated to this. I mean, what? Do tell, you ask? Read on at your
own peril, and don’t bother to email me PC freak out BS because I warned you.
It’s going to be gnarly from here on.

Dave had a series of unfortunate mishaps all at once. A crack pipe blew up in his face and the resulting scabs became infected. Some kind of terrible germ got in his eyes just before this. His teeth were jarred in a parking lot brawl and his gums were swollen. There was more. Much more. One day he woke up with a fever, his tongue coated in white fuzz, aching and dripping with sweat, with tunnel vision and a loud ringing in his hears. Being a drug dealer he had high level access to all kinds of things, including antibiotics. Dave scored some kind of next level Swiss kill-all turbo pills and ate the entire bottle in a single night.

The results were nothing short of
crazy, and as his only book friend (rather than a drug pal who might steal from
him) I had front row seats. Those pills blew the unholy shit out of everything
in his system. Everything cleared up, even some old, lingering things he never
associated with infection. Within a week he felt better than he had in years,
except- Except he was getting thinner. He had wicked diarrhea. All the helpful
bacteria in his intestines had been decimated. He began to fear that he’d die
before it came back and hatched on a brilliant idea people are only beginning
to understand.

“Got a date tonight,” Dave
explained. “Stripper.” He pronounced it ‘strippah’. “Yeah dog, gotta eat her ass
out and get my bugs back.”

“I see.” I considered. “Why a
stripper?”

“Tough dude. Strong. I don’t want no
weak bugs.” He glowered, deep in his intuitive process. “This chick will
survive the zombie apocalypse yo. She could walk across the fuckin’ Sahara
barefoot, probably lives off Doritos and Pepsi, ain’t seen a vitamin in years
and she could beat the fuck outta everyone in this building.” He smiled then. “I
gotta have bugs in my guts, I want those bugs.”

He did just that. He was fine.

The late David Knoll is just one example. He cut a record in New York, Rooster And The Rockets, and I’ll pay top dollar for that just to hear his voice again. Another good example of someone with fantastic intuition is you. You inexplicably KNEW this story about Old Portland legend David Knoll was going to be frothy but still worth reading, didn’t you? Intuition is what separates you from the people who didn’t make it to the period at the end of this sentence.

Creative Juice For All

“This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.” From a Ralph Waldo Emerson letter to Walt Whitman

Interesting to read words like these. One smart human writing to another smart human, and there is something powerful in these words for every creative type, maybe for everyone period. Recently I’ve been thinking a great deal about well-being, the care and maintenance of it, specifically. For whatever reason I’m wired to get a great deal of satisfaction from what I consider a job well done. But what inspires this feeling? I work in a handful of mediums and the criteria is different for all of them. Let’s take books first. If a book sells well, good, but if it doesn’t I don’t really care. I’m not a publicist and I don’t have a background in marketing. This isn’t my part of the job, though I’m always willing to help. Good reviews tickle me for sure, and I mostly get good ones (fingers crossed it holds), but the good humor fades. But a blurb from a writer I greatly admire? That’s what counts. The world of books can be a strange one. Your first few agents are always so disappointing (I recently added my name and efforts to 5000 New Literary Agents, a grassroots effort to inspire healthy competition in that field, problem likely solved in the next three years), publishers sometimes cut corners to their detriment and yours (some of them are also amazing when they don’t even need to be). There’s a big bookstore here in Portland where the most common and surprising thing said of me is not about my work but rather a point of personal trivia- I didn’t graduate from high school. It isn’t, I gather, shared in a positive way (underdog? I’ll take it!). That’s a short list of small cons outweighed by a huge list of pros. Writing is fun. Peaceful. Interesting. It helps me understand and appreciate the world around me in new ways. It makes me a better reader. All told, a pleasant experience.

Next, art, from painting to
tattooing. If you work with good people who like and support one another (I do,
but part time) then this is very gratifying. But for some reason the positive
glow of a job well done never lasts all that long. Tattoos are after all
pictures you make on a canvas with legs. They split as soon as you’re done. And
something sorta grim will happen to all of them eventually (don’t think about
it), so maybe that’s it.

Film, and I’m an utter novice here, but the harmonious, the tranquil, the ‘golden glow’… I haven’t seen very much of it yet. A novice wouldn’t. In any case, let’s take it from the top and look at Emerson’s letter one more time. But before you do, read this quote from the excellent KJ Bishop’s The Etched City to give it context. I’ve shared this quote before, but Emerson shines new light on it. Somewhere in all this is the real reward of making things.

“Art is the conscious making of numinous phenomena. Many objects are just
objects – inert, merely utilitarian. Many events are inconsequential, too banal
to add anything to our experience of life. This is unfortunate, as one cannot
grow except by having one’s spirit greatly stirred; and the spirit cannot be
greatly stirred by spiritless things. Much of our very life is dead. For
primitive man, this was not so. He made his own possessions, and shaped and
decorated them with the aim of making them not merely useful, but powerful. He
tried to infuse his weapons with the nature of the tiger, his cooking pots with
the life of growing things; and he succeeded. Appearance, material, history,
context, rarity – perhaps rarity most of all – combine to create, magically,
the quality of soul. But we modern demiurges are prolific copyists; we give few
things souls of their own. Locomotives, with their close resemblance to beasts,
may be the great exception; but in nearly all else with which today’s poor
humans are filling the world, I see a quelling of the numinous, an ashening of
the fire of life. We are making an inert world; we are building a cemetery. And
on the tombs, to remind us of life, we lay wreaths of poetry and bouquets of
painting. You expressed this very condition, when you said that art beautifies
life. No longer integral, the numinous has become optional, a luxury – one of
which you, my dear friend, are fond, however unconsciously. You adorn yourself
with the same instincts as the primitive who puts a frightening mask of clay
and feathers on his head, and you comport yourself in an uncommonly calculated
way – as do I. We thus make numinous phenomena of ourselves. No mean trick – to
make oneself a rarity, in this overpopulated age.”

“-read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.”

You’re the art.

Tattooing Down Memory Lane

A strange and fantastic day in the land of tattoos. I was
filling in at an old friend’s shop and I expected to do what you normally do
when you’re filling in on a Monday- read and maybe monkey around with some
watercolors. But it was not to be. Instead I took a stroll down memory lane in
the best possible way. An old customer from way back in the day contacted me
and asked where I was. We were less than an hour away from each other and boom,
just like that, a time machine activated.

I was maybe 23 when I first tattooed this guy. He’d just turned 18. I’m 49 now. That’s a long relationship and a good one, too. I did both of his sleeves along the way and looking at them this morning I remembered so many fun times. We sat down and I inspected my old work and then went over it, bringing it back to life, and while we did we listened to The Gypsy Kings, the soundtrack from that time. His life turned out good. Happily married, he just bought a patch of land on the Big Island and we must have talked for hours about solar and water reclamation, cooking, The Good Life, and the basically pleasant work of finding a goal worth shooting for and then getting it done. We both learned the same thing along these lines. When people tell you something is impossible they mean it’s impossible for them. The same people will look on their own lives with new hope once you cross the finish line. What a good thing that is.

Of note as well, going over the old designs and increasing the value (the contrast between light and dark) I was able to incorporate the soft tones of the old pigments and create something I would never have been able to. By the time we’re done I’ll be using shades and colors from many different good years. Hard not to smile. I don’t know how many tattoo artists get a chance like this. I’m glad I’m one of them. We laughed a great deal, and that has to be the reason.   

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Check out this cool ditty- https://youtu.be/SVNzDPtuoQ0

The Telephones

Man I had a great time with the first incarnation of The Telephones. The story of how that whole thing got started strains credibility (like most good stories) but its all sadly true. It began at this tattoo shop I was working at. The Hell Factory had a sort of open door, street shop policy that made winos and junky drifters feel at home, and that was better than it sounds. Most of them were harmless and even sort of fun. Grundy the Vet, Mad Rosco, Fruitfly, some good dudes really. One day a random weirdo popped in with a guitar and amazingly he didn’t want to sell it. He wasn’t interested in trading. No no. He just wanted to play me a song for no other reason than he happened to be passing by.

He played. He was good. Turned out he was the front man in an Irish folk band. I played him a song when he was done, sort of a bluesy one, and he suggested we get together with some friends of his. I figured what the hell. It had been years since I’d played with other people. We met legendary drummer Drawback Slim, blues diva Lisa Mann, and a few other people and voila. Jeff Johnson And The Telephones was born. Behold http://www.greatpinkskeleton.com and click on the Blues section.

Man, No Way- Our Freakazoan Universe

I was watching NOVA the other night before bed and Hoe. Lee. Shit. A nuclear wizard dork was going on about the Cosmic Yank. This is science slang for the accelerating expansion of the universe, something that of course I’ve never even heard of. Silly me, I thought it was expanding and that’s about as far as I got. So I sat up a little. Dudeboy was saying that for reasons associated with Dark Energy around four billion years ago the Universe abruptly started expanding faster. I mean, holy shit how fuckin’ weird is that? Check out this Wikipedia link-https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerating_expansion_of_the_universe

And it gets fuckin’ better than that. Behold-https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/12/life-may-have-originated-earth-4-billion-years-ago

What? No way! I know I know. This ‘Yank’ coincides with the origin of life on Earth. Net effect for me- confirmation that I am shallow. In no way do I want to think about such shit late at night.

Smart Kids Against Goats

These last two day in Portland have been perfect. This might be my last experience with early Fall here and maybe that’s why I’m reminiscing so much. Once, it seems like long ago now, Portland was a dream factory and we who ran free here at that time call it Old Portland. In Old Portland, fabled city of yore, I had my best perfect days at the Smart Kids Against Goats house. It was huge, three bands practiced there (mine included), my rent was fifty bucks a month and best of all there were three huge cherry trees in the back yard. For weeks we made pies every single day and I tell you what dear reader, there are worse ways to live.

The great clubs at that time were Satyricon, where we all made our rent, The Blue Gallery, which was good for a little weed money, The X-Ray, where you could go and become depressed in fine company, and The City Nightclub, which was mostly an underage gay dance club but a great place to score drugs. There was good music in all those places every night. The Portland arts and music scene was smaller and wild and far more fierce and it seemed like everyone knew each other in a positive way. It was a vibrant place, full of strange kids from all over who rightly heard The City of Roses was cheap because it rained so much, and because of Satyricon there was a real music scene. I was 17 when I started playing there and the club got around my age by never charging me for anything. Ever. I never paid for a single beer. People could get away with shit like that. Hitting Birth was my favorite band in those days and man those mad fuckers could rock. There were so many good bands ripping holes in space, cosmonauts all, exploring sonic boundaries by night, and everyone dressed in Goodwill’s finest. Heady times, and oh how we fleeced the fancy restaurants we all worked in part time when winter came. Imagine, punk kids and freakish mutants of every description stealing tasso pork and duck fat, exotic cheeses and smoked pork shoulders. It was the potency of Weird at that time that might ultimately the city’s undoing, many say. It drew a kind of proto yuppie pseudo-weirdo I’d never seen before and they transformed the city into something they liked better. Good for them, I guess. I don’t mind New Portland, but its just another fine city now post- transformation. Great food, and that will probably always be true, and great ingredients, and there are some kick ass painters here these days. In any case, musicians who work as dishwashers don’t move here anymore. Pretty much beginners in any creative field aren’t going to find this place the haven it used to be, but the place is still nice. I’m a West Coast guy, I pretty much like the whole thing. The East, some people really like it out there and more power to ’em, but I’m not one of them. All that soot and rust. To me, New York smells like pee and feet. There, I said it. Philadelphia is the same, but add onion rings, burning tires and greasy puke. After a quick visit to the other coast I seriously fuckin’ love New Portland. And there’s always a really magic city somewhere, dear reader, always! It won’t last forever so enjoy it while you can and you’ll be happier for it. I suspect the next magic town will be in Ohio. Look at their literary scene. The Rubber City Rebels are from Ohio. Even their tattoo shops have a singular style emerging.

I still carry a little of that Old Portland magic around with me. We all do. My house is, to me, a magical place, full of art my friends made, antiques, books, and the numinous tools and ephemera of dreams. The next house will be too. My Portland native fiance is, no joke, part forest elf. And I can make the magical Smart Kids Against Goats cherry pie whenever I like. Now you can too! Here ya go-

The crust:

1 ½ cups flour

½ cup veg oil

3 sugar packets you swiped at Starbucks

Dash of salt

2 tablespoon water or milk

Mix that shit and roll it out with a wine bottle. A little more than half is the bottom and the sides of the pie. You can bake this part first to firm it up OR you can oil the pan a little (better, faster, easier, superior) THEN dump in your pitted cherries from the tree out back. You want to get a shitload of them in there. Then cover the top with the remaining dough. DON”T poke fancy holes in it. There’s no sugar in this interior, no butter, just… cherries. You need that juice.

Bake at 375 until it looks just right, which isn’t that long. 30-45 min. Then eat! And listen to some music like this- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Crc30IhvDWw

Remembering Writing My First Book

This morning I carried my coffee outside and sat down in the
sun. My phone was beeping and chirping as people emailed with news that ranged
from good to who cares to junk mail, but I wasn’t looking. Somewhere in the
distance someone was hammering on a rooftop and blasting Smashing Pumpkins.
Siamese Dreams. Brought back some good memories of writing my very first
material. Those were good times.

I’d broken my right hand, my dominant one, and I was out as far as the tattoo shop was concerned. In a lucky coincidence, my old pal Tranny Steve moved back to town. Steve was a violent punk psycho who sometimes wore women’s clothes, but he also grew weed. He moved into the giant crappy house I was living in by myself (no one wanted to live in North Portland in those days) and suddenly my money problems were over. All I had to do was never go in the basement. I was always a big reader and right then I was on a sci fi bender. Somehow I wound up with a super primitive computer and one morning after several bong hits I was off. Smashing Pumpkins, dialed up to face-melting, was the soundtrack.

That book was called Miracles of Altitude, about some grifters from Detroit who encounter runaway lab experiments. When I was done I showed it to three people. Two of them liked it. I showed it to my older brother who slyly suggested I commit suicide for being so insane as to think I could write with anything but crayons. In the end I lost the entire thing before I sent it anywhere else. But I learned from that book. Writing is fun. Its relaxing. Peaceful. And best of all, after writing that first book I enjoyed reading more. I didn’t know why at the time, but now I do. I could sense some of the craft behind it all, and that heightened my appreciation. A couple dozen short stories, seven published books, four television pilots (sold but never made as is the industry standard) scripts contributions and paid doctorings and even a few ghostwriter gigs later I still type without using the last two fingers on my right hand. I just noticed. I had to leave the emergency room cast on for six weeks (getting a real one was out of my price range) and they were taped together.

Tranny Steve liked that first book. A hard scumbag with a fight on his hands was his kind of yarn. Without that guy I’d have been a one-handed homeless guy, so it was good on good that he enjoyed it. That psycho was the only family I had right then. I have so many good stories about that cool dude. One time a whole bunch of us were driving back from the coast and we stopped by this farm to see these biker dorks Steve knew. They handed him a trash bag full of nitrous and after one giant lungful Steve faceplanted into their bonfire. Popped right up and continued with his story, uninjured. He never believed it even happened. Tranny Steve later disappeared while on vacation in Mexico. Tough guy, so I doubt he’s dead. Maybe I’ll dedicate my next book to him. Then again maybe not. We never knew his last name.

Here’s a ditty for ya-https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-KE9lvU810

Joy In The Rainy Season

Looks like the rain is back here in the Northwest. I dig the rain. This is day two and I’m already a little more creative. Summer is great, don’t get me wrong. Portland, The City of Roses, is a sweet place to be when the sun is shining. But this isn’t my city anymore, rain or shine, and it hasn’t been for years. When the rain comes all of Old Portland rejoices. The rainy season used to be when we spent the most time in the nightclubs of Old Town, now long gone. Satyricon, The Blue Gallery, The X-Ray. There was so much magic here once upon a time, and the rain brings its ghost back for a late night waltz for every last soul who remembers.

Still, its rain. Unrelenting months of it. By January this
place will be mostly crazy, and due to mirror neurons, that crazy is contagious
as a motherfucker. Explain, you ask?

Mirror neurons are a type of brain cell that fires when you do an action, and also when you simply watch someone else doing the same action.

That’s the definition from AlleyDog.com, A Psychology Students Best Friend. Say you leave your house after months of rain and boldly venture to the grocery store. Inside are Portlandia emigres freaking the fuck out at their poor decision making process. Face after pasty face of dismay, the consistent body language of woe, and there it is. Vibe smear. Aural backwash. Mood cooties. You return home feeling off on some level. Enjoying the rain takes stamina, dear reader. Here are some of my old tricks- avoid drinking. Down that road lies madness. Like every other human being, I am (was) an anxiety/depression/stress drinker. These days I just find the problem and change it. It’s way cheaper. But you can’t change the weather, so- Explore a new group of cookbooks. Get those Diane Kennedy books and work through some of them. Totally worth it. Cooking is Art of Life 101. Avoid New Portland hot spots. False cheer is stupendously gutting in the rainy season. Improve your pool game with other aging punks. Good times (steer clear of the dart board). Walks- all outdoor activity is best done between the hours of midnight and three AM. In the rainy season you have the city all to yourself. And super important- DO NOT binge watch reruns of The Walking Dead. You actually want to lose your mind?

Full disclosure- we are leaving for the entire rainy season.
It just worked out that we have to move to LA. Neener! 

Distractions

Distractions

Today I woke up early and began designing Farlup Junction, the small town I need for the new novel. I discovered a new outline process when I was writing Perfect Lingerie and I’m using it again. Incredibly time consuming, but it’s worth it in the end. I’m using the tiny Oregon city of Dufur as a template. My gal and I pass through there a few times a month on family outings and it has the right kind of feel for a strange crime. Most of those little towns do, I guess. When you pass through a small town in Texas you get the feeling that a crime is going on at that very moment, that everyone hid their guns when you blew through. Dufur has a sleepier feel, as if things are good there. A better stage. The map and all the notes took four god damned hours however. It’s almost 11 AM. I’m done, but here is the incredible amount of shit that happened while I was doing it.

-A collect call from prison. An old… I don’t know how to
describe this guy. Not a friend, exactly. One of the many strange people I met
in my years working in the tattoo world. Long story short, he beat up some kind
of Mexican wrestler (possibly a transvestite) with a stick in the parking lot
of a lodge run by his evil neighbor.

-A brief email (one of many) describing the misbehavior of some dork I know through the book world, describing his ‘unbalanced, bipolar rages’ and ‘shady ways’ and ‘suffering from depression’ bla bla. This poor little finger sniffing mama’s boy has upset so many in the last few weeks, but how can I care? Laughable, considering. See previous paragraph. The guys antics can’t compare.

-The movers showed up a day early (we’re moving) to measure
this and that and THEY’RE FRENCH. At least I think they are. This made me feel
like I was going crazy myself. The movers didn’t like me, either. Shorts and
flip flops, screwed up hair, furtive, worried expression, shit, all city
cartographers look like that, but to these poor guys I was obviously another
maniac.

Time for lunch. After that, back into the peaceful land of dreams. As I look at that sentence I can’t help but think of the difference between harmonious and obsessive passion. With harmonious passion you pursue an activity because you love it. It makes you feel good. Harmonious passion is associated with well-being. Obsessive passion is the opposite in many ways, all about validation and external rewards. Obsessive passion is associated with depression, anxiety, and unethical behavior. There may be a third kind of passion, one I think of as a horny cousin to harmonious passion.

Vacation passion.

The Greatest French Fries

What makes a great French fry? Is it the oil? Peanut? How
they’re blanched first? Or is it all about the potato itself. Red, white,
yellow, russet… Why is the ‘f’ sometimes capitalized and sometimes not? Is
Thomas Jefferson really responsible for the popular term for these here in
America?

All good questions, but who cares in the end. The best questions- where are the good ones and what is it about them that makes them worthy of inclusion on a world’s greatest list? Here we go-

Paris, France

Rue du Four and Rue de Grenelle isn’t an intersection. It’s
a sort of tangled snaggle of worn cobblestone roads. The streets in the Latin
Quarter are thick with restaurants, but right in the area where Four and Grenelle
almost meet is a gyro and falafel place run by a super rude fat lady with a
hairy mole. It was there, years ago now on a rainy night in January, that I
first fell in love with her. That harsh, steely eyed she thug serves up the
finest two dollar mountain of French fries in the world. They come in a wax
paper cone, so hot you can barely hold it, so get some napkins. You can usually
get two out of the filthy dispenser before The Mole takes note and tries to strike
you. The hand cut fries are crisp, golden, slightly salty, and they taste a
little like all the other shit they fry in that boiling oil- falafels, spinach
things, you name it, but the best part is the yoghurt sauce Mrs. Hatchet
squirts on the top and sprinkles with dill before she reluctantly hands it over.
You have to eat as you walk, ducking along the rainy streets moving from awning
to awning. I always have a good time in that town, but time and again, the
powerful magic of the steam of those fries rising from that cone on a stormy
night draws me back. Sometimes, when its late and I’m smoking a cigarette and
the world is quiet, I’ll look up at the moon and wonder what that genius woman
is doing, if she’s serving up some of those fries right then. They’re that
good.

Asilah, Morocco

This place has no name and reportedly there are now two or
three places using blue shower curtains as shade tarps, so you’ll have to look
for the place with the glass display in front that houses tuna sandwich
ingredients. The plastic chairs in front (there is no inside) were once white
but now they’re sort of bone colored and webbed with an astonishing number of
minute cracks. But the French fry sandwich here is so overpoweringly transcendent
that you’ll remember details like those tiny cracks in your chair forever. The
roll they serve these incredible fries in is white with a French bread crust.
They gut it, as in yank out all the bread, and then pile in the fries. Mayo on
top and then on top of that the deal maker- small chunks of deep fried olives.
Sitting there looking out over the ocean with a breeze, grazing through a few
of those, I thought about Henry Miller and the dusty Saharan nucleus of
Brazilian raindrops, the unlikely fact that I was eating French fries on a
planet in the Orion Spur of the Milky Way. A little part of me is still there. The
blue and white city is Asilah, Boulevard Moulay Hassan Ben Mehdi, deep blue
shower curtain.

Zurich, Switzerland

This bizarre bummer of a city keeps me coming back. Zurich is a monument to stale in a way Canadians can only dream of. The people are so polite they seem artificial, like high quality androids. Its so clean you could have major surgery on the sidewalk, and I get the feeling passing pedestrians could and would knowledgeably help is such a situation. The average American will instantly shrivel and wilt in this antiseptic environment. The only sane course of action is to get belligerently hammered. Enter Caduff’s Wine Loft. You should be drunk before you get there because wine is expensive. Everything in the entire city is expensive, so drinking is a sly paper bag deal to begin with. But Caduff’s is worth getting arrested, as you well might in that fucked up city of the future. The food there, all of it, is… perfect. It’s as if the absence of soul, the astringent nature of the city itself, caused all of its magic to pucker and dimple into a single hidden spot. The first time I went through town I was after mushrooms and duck. I had no idea what I was doing. I should have been hunting for the numinous. The French fries at Caduff’s aren’t available all they time. They aren’t, for instance, on the menu right now. But if you’re ever close call and see what’s up. The fries are more than textbook perfect, blanched in peanut oil and whatnot. The oil might be compressed or superheated in some way, I can’t say, but the surface of them is ever so slightly pocked and crunchy and the interior is light yet earthy, almost as if the potato was plucked from Middle Earth and ferried by elves directly into the kitchen. Otherworldly indeed.

In scenic Portland you will find nothing like any of these
masterful French fries, but… In the long darkness that takes up most of the
year, you can duck out of the weather and get the black truffle fries at Little
Big Burger on Division and then hit up the slow, slow, slow but good sushi
place next door. Get the sushi first and get the fries to go and eat them in
the tiny plaza behind. A little sushi, a little black truffle, a little
fountain. It can hold you over.