I am just back from a sentimental journey.  For sentiment, one has several options:

a.  read the "boats against the current" thing in Gatsby again;

b.  go out for coffee with your college sweetheart, in the event she doesn't look like your mom yet;

c.  re-read your journals from that time when you dropped out of Oberlin and moved to NYC when you were 17 because, well, you were wasting time in college and life was passing and it was really  time to be a ... writer;  (FUCK ME did I write this stuff?)

d.  get in the car, turn left in Frederick Maryland, drive 850 additional miles, turn off the iPhoney-thing, and arrive in Iowa to see the Mom and Dad.

I chose (d).  Which was great, mainly because I also brought a couple of Jacques Pe'pin books and, I will say, therefore introduced a killer gratin to the folks more accustomed to the boiled and mashed.

I am just back from a sentimental journey.  For sentiment, one has several options:

a.  read the "boats against the current" thing in Gatsby again;

b.  go out for coffee with your college sweetheart, in the event she doesn't look like your mom yet;

c.  re-read your journals from that time when you dropped out of Oberlin and moved to NYC when you were 17 because, well, you were wasting time in college and life was passing and it was really  time to be a ... writer;  (FUCK ME did I write this stuff?)

d.  get in the car, turn left in Frederick Maryland, drive 850 additional miles, turn off the iPhoney-thing, and arrive in Iowa to see the Mom and Dad.

I chose (d).  Which was great, mainly because I also brought a couple of Jacques Pe'pin books and, I will say, therefore introduced a killer gratin to the folks more accustomed to the boiled and mashed.

Well, here's the summary:

1.  You guys are lucky to have NewPi.

2.  You guys are lucky to have DSL.  God, how bad has the Press-Citizen become?  I used to deliver that paper; my (?) used to edit it.  Who would want to have anything to do with it now?  

3.  You guys are lucky to have the Rec Building open -- for free -- for laps until 1 p.m.  I find that running a few miles in the morning, after an evening of sparkling pinot blancs, garlic-infused chicken, the random souffle', and, did I mention, a superior GRATIN?, is a pretty good idea.  So is Advil.

4.  You guys are lucky to have the Foxhead.  I didn't see Gable or Salter.  (You just can't go home again.)

5.  John's has changed a bit since I went there before basketball practice at CJH.  (That would be Central.  It's a parking ramp now.)  But John's has much better Calvados.  Net: John's is better!

6.  There were only three inches of ice on whatever the fuck you call 218 these days, the day (Monday) I had to drive up to CID.    Still, dipshits in SUVs were tail-gating me.  Query: how does an SUV stop on ice?  Answer: kinda like  nothing.

7.  126 (I think?) has stripped walls and floors and decent wine.  NOTE: I stripped the floors upstairs in 1983, where I started my first software company.  The waitress (server?) looked at me strangely, learning this fact.  Well, it's true.

8.  Jim Harris makes good book.   People say Politics and Prose is an important bookshop.  People are stupid.

The drive back:  cars spinning out randomly, cops out of patience, 5 below, in the dark, 20 mph wind blowing snow and  the truckers hugging 45 mph.  Thank god we have global warming, our new accepted doctrine. ("We are the global climate change"?)   If not, it would have been a difficult trip.

The Hawks are the 10th best team in the BigXI next fall like Cormac McCarthy and Lydia Davis and James Salter are done.  Good luck with that.  (Well, maybe Salter.  He lived in the Tedricks house on Ferson one year.)  I don't think KF is going to lie down and die, directly in front of son #2.  He does need to rout a couple of teams.  Wisconsin would be good.

(Thanks for putting me in the vote-off.  I have to say, I spent more time staring at the super-fit pictures in another candidate than re-reading my ramblings.)