Irish Pubs, A Not So Obvious Cornell University

Carl Sagan Finally Admitting It.

Prairie Fire: any shot that includes the addition of hot sauce.

I watched a younger woman order a tequila with hot sauce shot last night. She downed it w/o any reaction on her face. That's a feat. My eyes would be tearing had I drank that in combination. I guess that's what practice can do for you. The bartender, after a moment, then dares the girl to do a full shot of pure hot sauce. Without hesitation, she accepts the challenge.

She lifts the glass brimming with the sauce and throws it back. Down it went, and no tears, coughing or vomiting. Jesus!

Now I like Tabasco. There is a flavor in it once you get past the screeching pepper burn. It's great on eggs, chicken wings and I kid you not, popcorn. But to drink it? Better men (or women) have gone there and I am far too much a pussy to try!

*****

One of the people I enjoy talking to there is this guy S. Let me describe him. Picture Jesus Christ and Geddy Lee of Rush combined into one person. I don't mean Geddy Lee having the moral strength of Christ, just the looks. Got that? OK. That's S.

What will happen, is that we will engage in conversations about science that most times, annoys the crap out of others at the bar. But we can't help it. We start speaking of this subject and others sort of float away. The two of us have major GEEK streaks in our personalities and regard science as something fairly stunning. Of course you have to talk about it. There's nothing more bizarre than the discoveries and inventions that come from science. The Father of Planetary Exploration, Carl Sagan, was an avid pot head. Try that on for surprises. Imagine that the entire Viking and Voyager missions (to Mars and Jupiter) had their creation as Carl was musing, stoned to his gills, while lying on the grass in his backyard in Utica, NY. He admitted it.

So, S and I will go off on these tangents that only we two are interested in.

Last night, he brought up something I thought was long forgotten, Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. For some reason, we were discussing how to solve the ever occurring problems that life trips you up with. I had told him when I reach an impasse, when direct focus, struggle and grappling doesn't seem to work, I'll shift my focus and let my mind drift on it's own. I'll “feel” my way around, near the problem, but not in direct contact with it. I'll know the answer when I see it. Many times, this will work for me.

S says: “That's just using intuition.”

I say: “Gee...thanks for reminding me that I describe the hell out of things when one word would suffice.”

Then out of the blue, he brings up “gumption” that Pirsig talked about. He paraphrased Pirsig and I thought he was winging it too. That was till this morning when I Googled Pirsig and found out S wasn't pulling this stuff out of his ass. Here's Pirsig's actual paragraph on it all is this:

“I like the word "gumption" because it's so homely and so forlorn and so out of style it looks as if it needs a friend and isn't likely to reject anyone who comes along. I like it also because it describes exactly what happens to someone who connects with Quality. He gets filled with gumption.

A person filled with gumption doesn't sit around dissipating and stewing about things. He's at the front of the train of his own awareness, watching to see what's up the track and meeting it when it comes. That's gumption.

If you're going to repair a motorcycle, an adequate supply of gumption is the first and most important tool. If you haven't got that you might as well gather up all the other tools and put them away, because they won't do you any good.”

The long and short of it? At first, dive into your problem and start, you'll hone your skill as you learn.

S had nailed this the night before. Smart guy. I ought to give him more credit. Leave it to me to overuse my cynicism.

*****

Irish pubs are not just full of potato eating, bomb making, Prot-hating, Irish Republican Army veteran drunks.  Though you can find that. We're so close to Boston and there's plenty of illegal Irish that find their way down here. Some of them have regaled me with stories about Bernadette Devlin. Not just expat Irish from the 70's either but you will find a great swath of different types of people, from all walks of life, in these pubs.

Italians have their food and the whole culture that has sprung up from that. We Irish have our pubs, which can mimic Greek symposiums filled with Irish Plato's and Socrates...and a host of other disciplines, like how to properly use apple wood in a BBQ. I'm not kidding, the depths some of us go to in there over whatever subject can be astounding. Italians do this around a kitchen table, we do it over a pint glass.

Nice Irish Catholic Girls Accosting Someone with an AR-180

Entanglements

Finally the sun returns! This spring has sucked in my view, it's been way too cold. I find this surprising since the past few springs have really been remarkable.

It's been a while since I wrote anything down here but I ran out of ideas as usual. So here goes some griping.

Today, I managed to be jerked around by an online continuing education site, a business association that deals in my craft and the Dept of _____. It seems no one has the right information anymore. Add to this, I was t-h-i-s close to renewing my license when the computer page froze up after taking my credit card information. “If we try this again, the site may charge your card TWICE! We'll have to wait til it clears itself.” Nice, I was a millimeter away to solving all this. Now I've been advised to wait till tomorrow to do this by phone. Perhaps we should go back to parchment paper and the Pony Express. This way, there would be fewer things to fail.

You know where all this licensing crap came from? The Great Depression. When everyone was out of work, especially teachers, Roosevelt created jobs by having these out of work teachers train and confirm the next generation of them. This was the birth of the teaching certificate. Then slowly the “little piece of paper” was needed by damn near any occupation. It spread into everything.

Byzantine is the word that pops into my head. Where the simplest action has to be broken down into many parts with many people confirming, processing and stamping everything you need. Sure, you could fire all the bureaucrats, but that would result in the economy crashing once again. Hundreds of thousands of paper pushers out there competing against you for a job. Like that idea?

I'm reminded of a line from a movie... “The first rule in government spending is this. Why build one when you can get away with building two?”

*****

Like you I'm sure you were shocked and dismayed by the Marathon bombings and the gunfights that ensued on Watertown streets. The older brother now seems to have been some local nut fighting his own jihad. The younger brother, we're hearing, may have been this spineless follower who was dominated by the personality of the older. I guess the kid brother had the personality of the “beaten wife” syndrome. Caving in every time to the more powerful one. Though, this may be wrong as the media have blown the accuracy of this story a few hundred times already. We'll see.

Though, think on this, he's nineteen. At nineteen what the hell does he know? I'm not defending this kid but when I was nineteen I was a moron compared to who I am today. I've made typical mistakes as a nineteen year old but they didn't culminate in having 9,000 cops, a helicopter and SWAT teams from Quantico chasing my ass down. Then again, I didn't blow up kids either.

Even if he escapes the death penalty, this kid's life is pretty much done with. Nineteen and at best, he's headed to Colorado's ADX Florence facility where they hole you up 23 hours a day. You get one hour to walk in some yard where you can see concrete and the sky. Perhaps this kid may think twice on wanting to avoid the death penalty.

Other than dealing with our broken down system and weirdo bombers, I'm glad the sun came out again.

Out of Ideas, So I'll Talk About the Weather

I can sit here, with my eyes closed and I'm half aware, half asleep. Even with my eyes shut, the computer screen is bright enough to light up the inside of my eyes. I see pinkish white. The whir of the cooling fans and the dog's breathing are constant. Then I hear sounds I haven't heard of in a good while, people walking down the street, talking. I have my windows open and these things drift in.

Summer's coming.

The cold I've always been aware of. I had to tolerate, fight and deal with it. My hands and feet were always the first to grow cold and they said; “We're here and we're cold! We're here and we're cold! Don't you ignore us..we're COLD dammit!” It's very much like having a burn on your arm, the throbbing won't let you forget. It gets tiring and annoying. Much like acquaintance who keeps repeating the same stories to you but you wished they'd leave. Dull and slightly painful company. But tonight a change, the veins are popping out on the back of my hand, instead of ducking as deep as they could when cold.

And now I'm enjoying this little respite, with the softer sounds of the late night floating in.

One of the reasons I hated winter was due to growing up with a crappy heating system. We had an old oil burner, forced hot air system in our house that, I swear, was 4% efficient. I wasn't alone in that estimation, both my grandmothers agreed, our house was raw and cool in the winter. That kept the two of them away during most of the winter, much to my Dad's contentment.

My brother and I had this competition, if the heat came on, we both would dart to the living room air register to cuddle up against it and get nicely toasted. Yes, it sounds like we were homeless on a sidewalk heating grate. But, it was the best register as it had the least distance from the furnace and was hotter for it. It was well located too. I could peer over the arm of the couch and still see the TV screen while I was being bathed in hot air.

Eventually, real spring would arrive and that warmed the house through and through. It even made our upstairs bedrooms tolerable enough to actually spend time in them when awake. When sleeping, you aren't aware of how cold it is, once you pile on enough blankets.

To this day, most people stare at me strangely when I say that my house has no insulation. They look as if I said “I'm Jesus.” And again, I have to explain the history of this neighborhood. This whole plat was built in 1950 when heating oil was about 20 cents a gallon. Why insulate when you could keep your thermostat on 80 all winter and be dismissive about the heating bill, as it was so cheap.

So when spring arrived, it was a relief.

Behavior doesn't change much. As a kid, on warm days and nights, I'd yank every window open to get that wonderful air and heat in. I enjoyed the sounds I'd hear ambling in as I lay in my bed at bedtime.

What do you think I did today? I opened all my windows and until a few minutes ago, I was snoozing in this chair by the window, being lit up by a computer screen and hearing neighbors chat.