[Double click on any of    [Continue reading]]]> Friday morning, the hurricane-formerly-known-as-Earl had wimped its way out of North Carolina — without leaving us so much as a drop of rain or a gust of wind. But at least the surf was up at the end of the island and I got to watch a little wave action.

[Double click on any of the pictures to see them in all their full-screen glory!]

Saturday was the local farmers’ market and art fair, held every Saturday morning during the summer around Carolina Beach Lake, which is supposedly the closest fresh-water lake to salt-water in the world. How close? Damn close: cross the street, walk through a parking lot and you’re in the ocean. In years we’ve had ‘real’ hurricanes, you can get to the ocean from the lake via kayak; they’re pretty much the same body of water.

I came home with a bunch of vegetables and some neat shell/bead/dragonfly earrings. And, obviously, lots of pictures.

We are graced with GREAT local musicians and we got to hear lots of them this week-end at my favorite venue: the local Tiki Bar — plunked on an old pier jutting out over the ocean. Here is Root Soul Project performing Saturday night.

Yes, that is the ocean in the background. I’ve watched the moon rise over the ocean (not this week-end, of course) while listening to great music (with a hint of surf in the downbeat) and drinking a good NC craft beer. Really, what could be better? Heard three good groups and did LOTS of unabashed people watching Friday, Saturday, and Sunday evenings. Too loud to eavesdrop, unfortunately.

Finally, here’s the Boardwalk and our own Carny Town. This is the second summer we’ve had a summer-long carnival along the Boardwalk. The carnival has had its friends, its foes, and it has revived the local Redneck Riviera title just a bit, for both better and worse.

I haven’t been to many carnivals since my son finished middle school, so I’m not that into the latest rides — most of them don’t seem to have changed all that much since the Olden Days when I actually went on all of them. But this floating bubble thing — this was new to me.

It was new to our carnival, too. Earlier in the summer this little spit of real estate held the bungee jump. But a carny worker was reportedly inappropriately groping young females as he was ‘helping’ them into their bungee harnesses — though I’m not sure what constitutes appropriate groping. So he and the bungee jump were run out of town and in came the bubble. (Did I mention that some folks were not too excited about having a summer-long carnival in their back yard?)

This bubble thing creeped me out, though the little kids bouncing and rolling around looked like they were having a blast. You get pushed into this giant flat beach ball and then they inflate it — and zip you up so you’re waterproof/airproof and roll you into a big pool of water. It’s almost impossible to stand up and you bump and bounce around until, I guess, you pass out from lack of oxygen or the bubble guy decides it’s someone else’s turn. Couldn’t help it; I kept hearing Paul Simon singing in my brain.

One final, sweet note to the Island tour: just-made tiramisu gelato. Mmmm, good!

And that is the way we — at least one little sliver of us — looked to a distant constellation this Labor Day week-end.

How about you?

Maybe he inched    [Continue reading]]]> Remember being at a party or a bar or in a class when you saw That Guy across the room — and he was looking at you, too? And how, all of a sudden, the day got just special, kinda exciting? And your heart started beating just a little bit faster?

Maybe he inched toward you, maybe you inched toward him — can’t remember exactly who moved first, but pretty soon there you were and there he was, standing right next to you. Your heart was pounding so’s that’s all you could hear. You were too giddy to speak, hoping he’d go first.

You held your breath; he opened his mouth and –

Nothing. He had nothing, really, to say. He was bland. He was boring. He wasn’t That Guy, after all.

Ladies and gentlemen — meet Earl.

Not the bad boy Earl we’ve been obsessing over for days, but a kinder, gentler Earl who merely grazes our southern fingertips with his lips instead of moving in for a whirlwind deep kiss before leaving us, broken and powerless.

And it’s okay. Yes, it is. We saw waves this afternoon, and they were plenty big enough for me.

Maybe we’ll get some rain. We’ll probably get some wind, but it’s still pretty wimpy out there. Honestly, I will be happier without tree limbs crashing down. And with the electricity staying on. I’m still a little spacy from the root canal I had this morning so I’ll probably go to bed early. A little bland and boring myself…

But I fully intend to be on the beach first thing in the morning to survey whatever Earl has left behind.

Oh, look. Isn’t that Gaston in the corner there, by the punch bowl? I wonder if he could be That Guy?

I wanted to show that delicious, healthy food can look just as unappetizing as the artery-clogger I posted on Friday. This is my seitan, right before getting sliced and tossed into a yummy stir-fry. Sorta    [Continue reading]]]> …I thought I’d post this picture of the seitan I made and wrote about a couple of weeks ago.

I wanted to show that delicious, healthy food can look just as unappetizing as the artery-clogger I posted on Friday. This is my seitan, right before getting sliced and tossed into a yummy stir-fry. Sorta like skinless chicken breasts, which also look pretty nasty, especially to chickens.

If anyone is interested in the recipe, leave a comment or send me an email and I’ll write it out for you. I combined a bunch of recipes, added some ingredients, forgot to add some others, and it came out great.

I do have a couple of southern vegan/vegetarian cookbooks: Cookin’ Southern Vegetarian Style and a really neat split cookbook: Hot Damn and Hell Yeah/The Dirty South Cookbook. They are both filled with tasty recipes. Big Bubba Tofu in the Trailer Park Specials section is living proof that grease and salt are not just the provenance of the meat and potatoes set.

But Southern cooking is a lot more than barbequed rodents and chicken-fried tofu. If you drive along a country road in the south you’ll pass cotton fields, tobacco barns, then a Free Will Baptist church. More cotton fields, then the Pentecostal church. Tobacco and another Baptist. And so on.

Southern cooking is covered-dish lunches and suppers at these little country churches. (I know, it’s not just a Southern thang, but since we’re here….)

I got to experience real Southern cooking and hospitality during the middle of NaNoWriMo. It was a glorious clear, warm fall day and my little church choir drove a couple of hours to sing at a tiny Universalist Church that was celebrating its 125 years as “an oasis of liberalism in a desert of orthodoxy.”

What an understatement. In the church foyer, looking like the Smith Bros. cough drop box, hung two pictures of the founding ministers, side by bearded side. One had served in the Confederate Army during the Civil War, while the other had fought for the Union, indicating from the get-go “the congregation’s willingness to embrace diversity of opinion and outlook.”

After the service, we went out back where picnic tables were piled high with the most amazing assortment of dishes: fried chicken, chicken and dumplings, fried okra, fried tomatoes, succotash, Crowder peas, baked beans, mashed potatoes, hush puppies, fruit salad, collards, green beans, ham, cornbread, biscuits and gravy, all waiting to be washed down with big pitchers of sweet tea.

While we ate, the kids played hide and seek in the ancient church graveyard next to the picnic tables. Birds sang, the sun shone, leaves rustled in the breeze. Time was…timeless.

Then we moved on to the dessert table, and Lordy, Lordy!! Pecan pie, chocolate pecan pie, red devil cake, lemon squares, cherry pie, chocolate cream pie.

Yeah, I had two slices of the made-from-scratch 7-Up pound cake. It was awesome.

And that is Southern cooking. Enjoy, y’all.

Wow, talk about Signs.  I’ve had a bunch of them in the last couple of days.  First, my brother called and started talking about The Situation forty – forty! – years ago.  I don’t want to get too far into it here, but I did something selfless back then to help my family. It radically    [Continue reading]]]>

Wow, talk about Signs.  I’ve had a bunch of them in the last couple of days.  First, my brother called and started talking about The Situation forty – forty! – years ago.  I don’t want to get too far into it here, but I did something selfless back then to help my family. It radically and completely changed the entire trajectory of my life, and not necessarily for the better.  (I’ll never know, will I?)

If my family had listened to even one word I’d said for the preceding eight years, The Situation wouldn’t have existed and who knows where I’d be now, but probably not Here.

And no one noticed what I did and what I lost (or possibly gained) by doing it, or acknowledged it, or even had the good grace to thank me for it.

Until my brother brought it up in a phone call yesterday.  He had noticed, it turns out, and has felt bad for the past forty years that he couldn’t do anything to change the situation at the time.

Well.  Ya think this is conjuring up a whole host of thoughts, memories, ‘what if’s’?  My mind is in overdrive.

While noodling over this, I got a Facebook message from an old friend who remembered that thirty – thirty! – years ago I told her I’d wished I’d written the book Kinflicks.

Kinflicks?  I can barely remember it, and I haven’t read anything by Lisa Alther since then, although that’s about to change.  According to an Amazon review, it’s  ‘a realistic warts-and-all view’ of coming of age in the ‘60’s.  Since that could describe my life back in the day, fer sure I’ll catch up with it again.

The grand finale in the ‘What next?’ sweepstakes came this morning when I finally organized my office and put things into my new filing cabinet.  I was putting something on the already-crammed bookshelf when a book fell to the floor.

Hmm… Steven Schoen’s The Truth About Fiction.  I don’t remember buying it, let alone reading it, but there was a yellowed strip of newspaper holding my place, so I must have at least started it.  I opened it to the bookmark.  Ah, Chapter 4: Plot.

Here’s the first page of the chapter:

If you want to make yourself depressed, all you have to do is go to a library or one of the new superstore book vendors.  Wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling books and magazines.  Page after page of fiction.  Obviously, everything that can be written already has been, right?  What new is there left for you to do?

Take heart.  The fact is, in the broad strokes, on all those pages, there are really only six plots.

First of all, there are only three basic conflicts:

a.   A person at war with another person.
b.   A  person at war with his (sic) world.
c.   A person at war with himself.

And there are only two outcomes:  either the protagonist wins, or he loses.

3 possible conflicts X 2 possible endings = six plots.

Whaddya think?

I’ll let y’all know what I think of the Schoen book.  I can already tell you that it’s 115 pages soaking wet and that Amazon.com is charging $44.40 for it new.  Which makes me think it must be used as a text in college writing classes, where the cost of student textbooks is shameful.  Which pisses me off, and is another reason I’m glad I’m not in academia full-time anymore.

So:  Now I need to figure out how to connect all the dots life has presented me with in the last 48 hours.    Stay tuned.

Suddenly the sky moves and I wait. Robins, dozens of them, land on the branches.

The tide rises. The tide falls.