The Insanely Long Half-Life of Insignificance
I can’t remember much about seeing Jimi Hendrix play live, though I saw him twice. But I recall every detail about the night I ventured forth to a bar in New Jersey to see Root Boy Slim.
Who Can Forget Novac, the Phantom of the Organ? I Can’t.
Without these low-rent memories, who am I?
One night back in the eighties, I found myself in the men’s room of a bar in darkest New Jersey, inhaling lines of coke off the top of a urinal with the Reverend Charles M. Young. We had ventured out from Manhattan to this remote roadhouse to see Root Boy Slim and the Sex Change Band. But the men’s room called to us, as it so often did in those days.
Now, I know that boomers can bore you rigid with their tales of vintage dissolution in any decade other than the one in which you, a tragically unhip person, have found yourself trapped. And I know that one such boomer — Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., lately a big wheel in the Trump administration — has been retailing a story similar to the one I’m retailing here. His, however, offers no connection to Root Boy Slim and the Sex Change Band, and is thus inferior to my own.
Root Boy and his group are long gone now, as is the Reverend Young (a great guy …
Thanksgiving Cranberry Report
Knee-Deep in the Icy Bogs
During the greatest October sports season in Wisconsin’s history, the Wine-Dark Land of UTIs
Will there be enough cranberry sauce this year?
I’m a woman. At times, I must call upon the cranberries. I have puckered my way through many quarts of sugarless juice, and popped plenty of encapsulated concentrations to flush infection from my urinary tract. But this time, curled over in agony on the floor of a hotel room next to SeaTac, I couldn’t dally around with folkways. I rushed to urgent care for a prescription to nuke my UTI.
The timing was uncanny. I was about to fly to the world’s cranberry Mecca, to investigate where cranberries come from and hunt them in their bogs, standing knee-deep in cold water in order to provide my best estimate of whether America would be properly sated come Thanksgiving, the holiday in which the majority of the country’s cranberry product is consumed. But I was on the verge of canceling my reporting trip, foiled by the very scourge that the tart red berry has historically cured. Shivering and shaking, …
The Marlin
Gone Fishin’ in North Carolina with Michael Jordan, the GOAT
A friend named Cadillac comes along for the ride
Captain Harbour takes Morehead City
For many years I had heard of the Big Rock Blue Marlin Tournament. Six days, hundreds of boats, trolling from 9:00 AM to 3:00 PM in search of the biggest blue marlin along North Carolina’s Crystal Coast. Each boat could fish four out of six days, two lay days being mandatory. The event included many different levels, or sub-competitions — for tuna, for wahoo, for mahi-mahi — but these were all sideshows to the main affair.
The Atlantic blue marlin. Makaira nigricans. Apex predator. Feared by mackerel, squid, dolphinfish, more. Solitary. Migratory. A beautiful enchanted symbol. At home in the waters between Boston and Brazil, South Africa and Spain. They live, per Professors Block and Booth, “a nomadic lifestyle in the open sea.” Long as 11 feet. Fat as 1,300 pounds. Raison d’être de Big Rock.
In this fretful and tangled world, in which one is wrenched from one vanishing desire …
