The Difference

If it had been him, it would have gone differently.

Two attractive young women on the bus needed help figuring out the local train system on their way to a convention centre.  That system consists of only one train, but the pair of gap-toothed old drunks who were trying to give them directions made it sound more confusing than the London Underground with all the signs rewritten in Cyrillic.  It wasn't that they were giving bad directions - they were just in that stage of drunkenness where you're still coherent but think you're not, so they kept giving the same directions, over and over, slightly rephrased.  Each repetition made the out-of-town ladies look a little more lost.

You can't interrupt them, either, because that will only make it worse, so you have to wait for the ladies to get off the bus to tell them you're going the same way they are.  The girls are dressed very nicely, but not for business - not the skirts or suits I'd expect going to Rexall Place, more like slightly-more-respectable clubbing outfits (but no less revealing), stylish makeup and hair, and the very definition of fierce heels.  They're friendly and bubbly and very grateful for simple directions they can understand.

I can hear in my head the story he'd tell me next week, if it had been him.  They would have been high-priced call girls on their way to a convention of small arms dealers.  They would have been working for a corporate espionage firm as part of a complicated scheme to blackmail a middle manager into stealing some files.  He would have scored them some blow and in exchange, received a black business card with red printing - no name, just a picture of a spider and a phone number in Amsterdam.

But it was me, so they were just two nice girls in a strange town who needed directions.  I told them to get off at Coliseum, and follow the signs; I wasn't going that far.

Post Script, 3:00AM: I relayed all this to him, and he laughed, and then he pointed out that Rexall Place isn't a convention center, and the girls were obviously here to see Lady Gaga.  Kind of ruined it for me a little, not least because, dammit...  I could totally have scored with the brunette if I was thinking about what I was doing instead of what he would have done.  There's a lesson here, I'm sure.

Phosphates

Trisodium phosphate, or TSP, does a great job cleaning stuff, but man does it smell bad.  Sometimes, if something is that hard to clean, it's just not worth it.

I've decided to officially write off the short story/novella/novel/epic saga/all-consuming black hole I've been working on on and off since before I left Montreal.  It's only getting to be more work without getting any better, and I don't think it's ever going to work - there are too many ideas for a short story and not nearly enough plot for...  Well, even for a short story, to be honest.  I'm happy enough with the version I wrote as a final assignment for my creative writing course, as a final assignment for a creative writing course, but it's never going to be anything else.

In theory this frees me up to write something else.  In practice, you're still more likely to get another entry about my latest beer.  (I put a lot of juniper berries in, about twice what's recommended, but I don't think I crushed them enough, because it certainly doesn't smell like gin...)

Ol' Draj

In a 750ml glass bottle (if you finish off that Old Raj gin, say, the empty will do nicely), combine:

• 1-2 stalks worth of fresh mint (at least, you could add more)
• 5-6 cinnamon sticks
• 1 tsp. cayenne pepper
• As much cheap vodka as you can fit in there with the other ingredients

Let sit for a good 48 hours or so before sampling, giving it a shake or inverting it once or twice.  The end result is a lovely amber coloured liquor that both burns and cools quite pleasantly.  Most congenial on a sunny day toward the end of summer.

Sadly, quite impossible for me to photograph adequately with the equipment I possess, seemingly.

Long Live Pere Ubu

There are far, far too many Pere Ubu albums I do not own.

I have recently been reading The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch.  It's an imaginative book, certainly, and it's clear he put a lot of thought into it...  But it's not very good.  It's full of ideas, many of which are good and many of which are original and most often they're the same ones, but it suffers from a few issues.  The language is very uneven; the prose often seems unedited, with unnecessary phrases and analogies that obscure rather than clarifying, and the dialogue can't seem to decide if it wants to be anachronistic or not.  The pacing is terrible, more like reading the author's detailed notes rather than the novel that resulted from them.  But the cardinal sin is that, with all those good ideas, the only thing Lynch seems to be building out of them is a big jumble of good ideas.  Ideas are like paint; you can mix all the best and brightest ones together, and end up with nothing but grey, and that's what seems to have happened here.  Things are looking up a little about halfway through the book - there have been a couple of hints that the plot will be beginning soon - but at this point I'm finishing it because I paid for the damn paperback.