A peck of burning peppers

A few years ago, while scrolling through YouTube to pass a slow hour, the algorithm brought me to an interview with a (at that cultural moment) celebrity eating extremely hot wings. I didn't watch the whole thing. The extremity of the actor's agony was almost too much to bear. 

This snippet of video returned to me with volcanic force when our youngest, Evan, announced that he would be participating in a hot wings eating contest. This local challenge was based on the YouTube channel called Hot Ones, where, a celebrity is invited to eat 10 successively hotter sauces slathered on chicken wings while the host does the same. The host asks increasingly personal questions as the heat rises. This is the video I stumbled on years ago and Evan maintains that it is quite entertaining.

Our local brewpub, Four Saints Brewing Company, created a small-town offering for this very hot take on celebrity interviewing. Evan was part of the last panel to be willingly scorched. It was a spectacle to be sure and I will not soon forget the pride that I and his mother felt as he put his digestion to the test.

If you don't know anything about hot peppers or the sauces they make with them, I can get you pretty warm on the subject. Peppers produce a protective oil called capsaicin. This is what gives them their spiciness. Different breeds of peppers have different heat. Rating this spiciness is accomplished through the Scofield system, where a number is attached to each type of pepper. The higher the Scofield number, the higher the heat. Talented chefs produce sauces with these peppers and some people decide to eat them slathered on wings.

Evan's event began at about 6,000 Scofield; roughly equivalent to a basic hot sauce, like Franks or Texas Pete. The final sauce is so hot that it doesn't even rate on the scale: close to one million Scofield he guessed through streaming eyes and flaming red cheeks. The intervening sauces burn hotter and hotter. 

To give us some context, the night before the event, as we were gathered in our kitchen for homemade pizza night, he brought a sauce for us to try. Scorpion Sauce has a Scofield number of about 57,000. Each of us put a tiny red dot on a saltine and we were quickly gasping and sweating. Though I liked the flavor and the heat, it immediately made me realize just how unprepared I would be for the Hot Ones competition. Evan, however, had been doing his homework.

The point of this test of endurance is to get to the final sauce without taking a sip of water. If you don't drink, you will be entered into a raffle. Of course, to burn one's mucous membranes to a cinder is a joy in itself apparently for the people who participate. These fearless pepper fiends lovingly refer to themselves as "heatonists".

Heatonists evidently get some sense of pride from wading into the raging misery of capsaicin blasted lips and tongues and coming away unblinking—or, at least without sipping their drink.

The pepper's cleverly evolved capsaicin oils begin to produce—as one nears the final sauce—an entertaining physiological reaction. The nose begins to run. The salivary glands flush the mouth, eyes water, ears may tingle or buzz. With each commensurate increase in heat, though, the body begins to descend into a primitive emergency reaction. The adrenal glands secrete pure liquid fight-or-flight into the bloodstream. Heart rates increase. Eyes dilate. The extremities begin to tingle. The mind dials down to a level of concentration that filters out extraneous noise. This is why the host asked trivia questions of the panel: it's hard to access that level of minutiae when your body thinks it's being poisoned.

Eventually, things get so bad that the symptoms cannot be managed. The pain and the numbness and the sweat and the urge to wipe your eyes (don't you dare!) is so strong it becomes nearly impossible to function. After the final bite, the swell of heat leaves the contestants flushed, blinking, making big "O's" with their mouths as the body tries and fails to make the pain stop. Looking for all the world like they have been sprayed with police-issue mace (also made with capsaicin), they all get their medals, and shakily return to the audience. Evan, who had the forethought to purchase a liter of whole milk, snatched it from the bar fridge and began sipping immediately.

Luckily, Evan says, the decay is pretty short. The pepper burns hot but not for long. I'm sure with that level of heat—like putting a lit sparkler on the tongue—anything of greater duration than a second is hell. He told us this as he sipped his chilled whole milk and gasped and writhed in his seat. He described the somewhat worrying sensation in his hands as if he had been sitting on them and they lost circulation.

Ever the foodie, Evan not only did pretty well on the trivia, he also gave his opinion about the flavors of each sauce, while he could still taste anything or speak coherently.

Having tasted the Scorpion Sauce, I doubt any of the rest of our family would rashly jump into such a competition. If it were for a million dollars and I could use some of the cash to be treated at the ER, then I might do it. One thing I will say about Evan, if eating hot stuff is bravery, then he's one courageous heatonist.

The next day he told me that in the middle of the night, his body's final response to the peppers and sauces was as one might suspect. Proof positive to me that I'll enjoy the nutritional and immune benefits of eating reasonably hot peppers and sauces, but will likely not push the envelope by enrolling myself in the blazing echelons of the heatonists.

The Passenger, by Cormac McCarthy: a review of sorts?

If you've ever read anything by Cormac McCarthy then you know he's a bit of an odd duck as regards his writing. If you haven't read anything by him, you will soon find that out. He eschews quotation marks and apostrophes and he rarely gives you even the slightest hint of transition. His prose is like the handle of an ancient, well-worn shovel that has been outside in the elements for uncounted seasons. It might seem like this would be the tool one would skip over in order to use the sleek new, fiberglass-handled spade, but unlike the new one, the seasoned tool doesn't give blisters and is—mysteriously—a joy to use despite how it appears. McCarthy's economy of line is sensual, even when he is describing actions that do not forward the plot an inch.

The Passenger is not a "story". It doesn't have a plot, per se. Rather, it is primarily a series of non sequitur conversations between the protagonist, Robert Western, and the people he knows, as a part of his life unfolds before us. In between these conversations, McCarthy flips to intensely explanatory passages of Western's wanderings and doings and his memories. Then also, intermittently, McCarthy inserts sections describing dialog between Western’s sister Alicia, who has recently hanged herself, and a part of her psyche called the Thalidomide Kid, who entertains her with unspeakable acts of vaudeville, infernal minstrel shows and bizarre revivals of long dead Confederates. 

Alicia was a genius schizophrenic mathematics student before she killed herself. The conversations and dark entertainments all appeared from her tortured mind. Her brutal repartee with "the Kid" is seemingly inane, but it does feel as if they will eventually get to the solution of an equation that we cannot fathom. Whatever that solution is, it refuses to respond to the reader’s desire to make it all make sense. 

McCarthy’s prose wanders close to the edge of something profound, but as it does, it also tiptoes through the madness unraveling at the edges of consciousness; stage-lighting briefly the limits of our menial cerebral tools to codify the dark spaces beyond what we can see and what we think we know.

Actually, no part of the book makes total sense as it fits into the larger idea of a narrative within the text. The reader wants to understand, wants to negotiate the passages into something meaningful, something larger; maybe to create some explanation or point. As such the pressure to finish the book in the hope of finding a resolution is strong. I felt continuously as though I was yanking back on a dog pulling ferociously at the leash, understanding nothing about what compelled the dog to pull, nor knowing my own reasons to tug against it.

Bobby Western's isn't a story that makes sense even to him and although he and his late sister and the many characters are relatable and even likeable to us, they create a discordant, jangling universe, where conversations about race cars, mathematics and physics, the atom bomb, time, death, suicide, forbidden love, nature, lost cats, a parrot, reality, perception, chaos, solipsism, what it means to seize the day, a rather interesting take on the Kennedy assassinations (both of them) and the meaning of madness are just there to be digested, if not understood as a woven skein of story.

McCarthy is so well-loved an author that he can get away with writing a novel that doesn't have a novel in it. And though it generally follows a wobbling, befuddling course—except for the italicized sections referring to Western’s sister which take place in the past—it keeps fairly linear, if what we see in a kaleidoscope can be called linear. The book just doesn't feel like anything is resolved by the end.

What strikes me most about The Passenger is that only Cormac McCarthy could write and get this novel published. Anyone submitting this as their debut book to agents or publishers would get laughed right out of the business and into long-term employment at whatever food service job mirrors a form of eternal punishment in the Lake of Fire. The manuscript, eventually moldering, would lay forgotten in a ratty old Nike shoebox in the attic.

I admit that this may well be as much a castigation of the writing industry as it is a lament that only great writers get to write what and how they want. No quotation marks? No punctuation? No apostrophes? Get real, pal. Here’s your form rejection letter. Get a degree and try again. No serious member of your local writing group, just humoring you, would even let that fly probably. 

This is not to mention the fact that, on top of this flagrant disassociation with the norms of style and composition, the story doesn’t do anything or really go anywhere (except maybe eventually to Spain). What remains is this question: who decides what makes a great writer; the readers or a cadre of gatekeeping agents and editors who use chimerical, nebulous goal post-moving standards to block the gates to the next Hemingway because "this style isn't popular right now"?

However that question is answered, The Passenger is not, in my humble opinion, a must-read book. If your reading is eclectic enough to withstand a few massive variations in style or if you're omnivorous enough to accept a book that isn't really a coherent story, or if you’re daring enough to risk a book that may not change you at all or that may change you entirely, then you should be alright picking this one up. 

You will, in the course of reading, come across the compositional miracle that is McCarthy's ability to neatly explain complex concepts in compelling words that even lay people can understand. Therein methinks, lies his true genius. In fact, it might be that the book is a kind of tasting flight at a brewery, wherein McCarthy places several topics he’s interested in sharing before you, but you will have to take those moments (and they are golden and beautiful and rare) as they come and not expect them to last or be comprehensive or to contribute to the whole or at least, not to a coherent plot.

My wife's English cousin recommended the book to me earlier in the year and said that The Passenger was wonderful because it contained all the things mentioned above, but that he wondered what the critics would make of it. This was enough for me, no matter what the critics think. If they’re being hard-headed, it might be something really good.

The reviews are in, though, and the critics are generally slobbering over The Passenger. Perhaps this is their default when it comes to McCarthy, who is nearly 90, long overdue for a book and whose Blood Meridian and No Country for Old Men are part of the cultural landscape of the modern era of American literary composition.

Overall, the characters are deep and well-crafted if uncertain and sometimes tantalizingly unfamiliar. They speak about things we’re maybe interested in and they all seem diverse individuals and relatable to that end. There are many who we might wish we got more of throughout these pages. The book captures a rare slice of Southern life in the late 20th Century and McCarthy's prose is Olympian—otherworldly—in its stark, terse construction. 

Incidentally, the title refers to the opening section of the book where Robert Western, who moonlights as a salvage diver, and his team are called to investigate a plane that lands intact and undamaged in the waters off the western coast of Florida. There is obviously a passenger missing. However, having finished the book, the passenger may well be Robert himself witnessing with us his own life passing. Perhaps the title should be The Passive Passenger.

Will you like it? Who knows? Did I? Jury's out, but there is hope in knowing that you may miss the point of it and still enjoy the hell out of the journey as a passenger watching Western's life unfold, even if you wind up more than confused and unsatisfied by what exactly is going on and why. I guess that much is how we all sometimes feel as we appraise our lives passing. 

I'd love to know what you think about The Passenger. Leave your comments below! 

Is there a book you want me to review? Let me know!

Time Enough and Time Again

My work week is a fairly programmed thing. Every day's schedule, as well as everything within that day, is set and unsurprising. As a result, my weeks are fairly quotidian. Time seems to slip by so that before I know where (or when) I am, it's Friday again and time for homemade pizza and then the weekend is over and Monday looms and suddenly it’s Friday again.

This rather prosaic routine provides me with some comfort, it is true. Each day may have small surprises, but the mechanism is unwavering. I know when I'll be at work and when I'll be at the gym and when I'll be home. I know when I'll be doing the gruesome data entry work, when I'll be helping the public, when I'll be wrapping up, packing up and heading home. I know when we’ll be meeting for dinner, when the trash and recycling need to be taken out, when the dogs need to be fed and when it’s time to sleep and wake.

Like the set perspective of a person on a never-ending merry-go-round, the seasons change, weekends come and go, holidays spring by like fleet gazelles chased by unseen cheetahs, but the routine reigns and is unwavering. This whirling rush of life can become somewhat comfortable and I sometimes find myself lulled into a blank drowsiness where time blends into one long smear of experience, like the blur of scenery from a speeding train.

Over the last few years, I started taking a week off of work near my Springtime birthday to get some groundskeeping done around our home. I use the time to facilitate an easier transition from blowing fallen Autumn leaves and raking winter’s twigs and branches to mowing the growing grass and weeds of Spring and summer. 

During this particular week off, the regular driving rhythm of the typical work week is exchanged for the undefined beat of a single human laboring under the sky. Time seems to stretch out before me. The days are almost luxuriantly long. The perspective changes and the spinning daily and weekly thrumming halts abruptly. Like stepping from the solidity of a dock onto a moored boat, the sensation is somewhat pleasantly disorienting. 

My time ceases to be defined by my schedules and meetings and projects and the ice-cream headache agony of regularly occurring drudgery. Suddenly, I am free. The clocks and calendars have no meaning. The hour between nine and ten in the morning on any given day seems to stretch on like a desert vista, the same in every direction.

By the end of that week, of course, the disorientation fades and the days begin to speed again, gaining momentum as I trudge around our grounds swinging my rakes and shovels and genuinely enjoying the mindlessness of physical labor, full of promise (and shorn of emails and meetings).

If I dared to take another week, by the end of it I would once again be lolling like a dozing cat in a sunbeam. The mechanical repetition of the yardwork and groundskeeping causing the moments to speed by unaccounted and unappreciated. The only difference being that rather than fading to fishbelly white under the bright fluorescents in my office in a daze, I would be browning nicely under the burnishing sun in a daze.

This is the mystery of being temporal entities, living as we do on the stream of passing time. The more we try to hold a fixed position, the more we realize how quickly life moves by us, like leaves on a rain-swollen river.

There is some merit in the change of pace, however. It stops the daily doze and awakens a kind of surreal understanding of the passage of time—or my passage through it. Every few moments, I can stop my work, look around and enjoy the Now. Of course, time doesn't stop. There are no anchored points; no solidity in the timestream, but they can become rooted in our awareness if we stop a bit and notice the Now. If we can break our mindless nodding to the unending beat of time and see the stable moments in our minds.

This is the ideal; the strange gift of our weirdly evolved perceptive abilities. "The trouble is you think you have time," says the unknown sage. There's an aphorism in AA that maintains, "Time takes time." These are mighty handy apothegms for keeping us steady in the day-today spin. We often look forward to some point on the horizon, excited for this or that event or change in the pace of circumstances. Sometimes we pine for ‘the old days’ when things seemed simpler or less frustrating. 

Right Now is all we really have and even that is an illusion.

The challenge is to remember that, as the great hurricane of daily life stuns us with its intense music of ticking clocks, we have the power to stand up, go to the window of our consciousness and look out, appreciating something that we would have otherwise missed. There are no two sunsets or sunrises alike but they are all beautiful. We miss them all if we’re not paying attention. A moment with Micki, time with our adult children; a walk, a dinner, a drop of stillness in a raging sea of things to do. We can carry them with us, but only if we stop to acknowledge them along the way. 

Life moves pretty fast, if Ferris Bueller knew what he was talking about. I don't want to be so zombied out by the steady, rhythmic, stultifying passage of time that I lose sight of my in-built ability to see things within time and appreciate them despite how quickly life speeds by. Life is too precious. Family and friends and our illusory moment together—the tiny blink of consciousness in the great well of human experience—all are too important and too valuable to be missed.

Sound Off

We've had portable communication devices now for at least forty years. They started out as a huge battery block with a handset attached, but cellular phones have been around for a while and now, just about everyone has a "smart" device.

With all the miracles of technology that come with those smart devices (many of which we now firmly take for granted) is a myriad of sound notifications and ringtones. At the risk of sounding like a griping oldtimer, when I was a kid, there was only one ringtone. Okay, I just had to say it, but it's true. 

These sounds and notifications were so cool, back when we first got our new smart devices. You could go onto a website and download your favorite snippet of sound from a movie or game and then, whenever anyone texted you or called you, you could regale the entire family with your musical or cinematic tastes.

For Gen Xers, this was a fun way to communicate your preferences to other people of your generation. Micki's ringtone for me was Aragorn's theme from Return of the King and her notification tone was Jarvis, Tony Stark/Iron Man's artificial intelligence butler saying, 'Excuse me, there is a message for you.'

My own shifted (I change things up a lot on my phone, just ask my wallpaper) from Metallica or Iron Maiden to the X-Files theme to the music from The Magnificent Seven (original, not the lousy remake). My message notification was thunder echoing over the hillsides.

Nauseating as this must have been for our digital native children, they stayed fairly quiet about our noisy pocket computers. However, I began to notice something about their devices. Almost as if in reply to their parents' fortissimo tunes and movie quotes, their phones got more and more silent. Nary a ping or burble did I ever hear from their devices.

At first, I chalked this up to them living in a surveillance state. We were tough about monitoring our boys' social media use and although we knew when they were texting or messaging, a silenced device would prevent us knowing how often they were getting messages. But it wasn't just our boys. It was universal. I work with teens as part of my job and most of them also didn't use notification or ringtone sounds on their devices. 

Why not?

Intrigued, I put my phone on the vibrate setting as an experiment. I've never looked back.

Look, I still have no real sense of why the kids decided to do this in the first place. Ever afraid of being like their parents (who are deeply uncool and lame), perhaps, they decided it was too mortifying. Who can plumb the depths of the awkward social strictures of Teen World?

If I were to guess, though, I could venture some of the evidence I gathered from my own experiment. First, I was a bit relieved to find that I didn't have a day full of digital noise—well, even more digital noise—than usual. The moments of silence, not even disturbed by a ringing phone, were somehow an anxiety reducer. Even if my phone is ringing, and the vrrt vrrt vrrt of my vibration setting is not enough to jar me from whatever else I'm doing, they'll call back.

Another reason is, the silence of an event or meeting or funeral or graduation is not interrupted by the theme from Star Wars at the worst possible moment (as if anything could be worse). This alone is enough to forego all sounds of a digital kind. You rest assured knowing that, since your phone is always on vibrate, the goof everybody is shaking their heads at isn't you.

Finally, I think that there is a philosophical problem of having a device that allows you to be in constant connection: you lose sense of the here and the now.

A vibrating phone on the table in the other room isn't usually a life or death problem. It will be occasionally, but that problem is solved by knowing that there are people out there who can connect for you. If they can't reach me, they can call someone nearby. The whole world is saturated with phones. I'd have to get pretty far afield to be unreachable.

Being in connection all the time is great for when you're out in the wilds buried in an avalanche. That tether of digital media is a wonderful thing. But some of the time, silence is the best and most comfortable part of any day.

The joy of silence is one of few afforded us by a world full of sounds that aren't naturally occurring. Sitting by a window listening to a storm or by a fireplace listening to the crackling flames were once rewards for the long days and dark nights of our ancestors. Their lives were by no means quiet, but there likely wasn't so much excess noise.

I'm not judging anyone who keeps their phone turned on, of course. To each their own. Some may need to feel that they can hear messages because they have responsibilities greater than mine. For me, being able to keep one small corner of my life quiet has been a relief and one, it must be said, that keeps me feeling less overwhelmed in a busy, noisy digital world.

Back At It

The Internet age has shown so many sides of our precarious social nature. We love to interact with people, but we don't love how they share their own feelings or beliefs and they feel the same about us. We have become so easily radicalized by platforms with nefarious algorithms and Bond Villain Billionaire owners. It is unbelievable how quickly this all came to bear, and as I've said before, it all got pretty old pretty fast. At least for me.

I recently deleted Twitter. So much for the public square of the Internet. I left Facebook ages ago when it became a feeding ground for the worst of the best people that I knew. 

I like Reddit but it, too, has its own serious issues. I know that there are other social platforms that work okay, (Instagram seems harmless enough for me, though I'm not a teenage girl) and I have so far successfully avoided TikTok. I watch YouTube videos, but that's where it all seems to end now.

The rapid shortening of the general attention span has made anything more than 280 characters a painful experience for most people. An article, an essay, a thesis or monograph are agony to anyone used to the other formats. We prize brevity, especially as regards anything of import. No wonder children squirm and rage in their classroom seats—once you have tasted the all-consuming sugary high of the Internet, how can you go back to the rigor of pedagogy that didn't even really work before the pandemic? 

During all this, I felt a natural desire to contribute, to weigh in, to be heard. That's what people do: they share their feelings. Then as now, I prided myself in having some (somewhat feral) skill at conveying my ideas. I wanted to share what I wanted to talk about; what I found interesting about music, movies, books, philosophy, family and whatever else came into my head.

For a short but successful time, I wrote a bi-monthly column for the library where I work, which was great practice and a wonderful opportunity. I lasted just shy of five years and in that time I angered and challenged enough people to get my job challenged a few times, I am proud to say. I enjoyed it. It was fun. I grew. I got better. I learned. It was exhilarating.

When the community paper for which I wrote devolved into something all too modern and sadly irrelevant, I and many like me who wrote local content for its readers were essentially canned. For a while I continued to write but with nowhere to submit, it became an act of futility. I tried Medium, but the response was, well, not good. I admit that I like to have people read what I write (as do all writers). 

So, early on, back in the early part of the last decade, I started this blog. I was as different then as the world back then seems now. It has been but a meager decade; the sad cliché is quite right: the more things change... 

I hope to regain some of that urge to write but coupled now with some solid writing experience and a little more grey at the temples, maybe it will be enaging to read. I hope so.

Anyway, in an attempt to have things back (a bit) like they were and to clear my head of all formats and algorithms and Bond Villainy, I would just like to get back to the pure, simple art of writing. It's not cool or perfect or even, probably, very interesting, but I think my sanity probably depends on it.

So, here it is. The spot where I will (for those who want it) put my thoughts on things. I'll write about anything and everything. If you don't like political theory, stick around, I'll ramble on and cover something else.

That's my whole point. I want to get better and in order to do that, I have to stretch and then train these writer's muscles. I'm rusty and stiff in the joints, but I think I can come back to my old swing. Maybe I can even swing for the fences.

It is now (I think) less about attention and more about that good mental exercise, anyway.

Micki, my award-winning author wife, who has always inspired me to try harder and to work smarter when it comes to words, is also always bettering herself. In all the years we have been together, she has always written—in her journals, her monthly newsletter, her stories, her books. She is fierce and unrelenting at her work and she has encouraged me to write and write well. I have floundered, feeling small and unworthy in the reflection of the brightly-colored haze of neon narcissistic micro-blogging on the web. She is a master of words and marketing. I am a lowly amateur, but in order to make a prize-winning breakfast, eggs must be broken. Who better to emulate?

A final note for the Agéd Ancestor who has been so dedicated to both Micki's and my writing. My paternal aunt, the matriarch of that part of my father's side of the family, has been what my wife calls my "spirit animal". She is and has always been a brilliant, fearless, strong-minded example for me for breaking free of the backwards, bucolic ancestry that precedes us. She made it clear that I should submit some of my writing. Daunting as that has been (some of my short fiction has been rejected, I'm proud to say) it helped me find some belief in my work at the keyboard.

Perhaps I will continue with that, but in the meantime, so that she knows that I am also laboring at the wood pile of non-fiction words, these will be for her, too.

Here's to writing and all the mysterious, magical, maniacal ideas that we may yet be honored to work through.

Thanks for reading. Let's ramble.