Oz by night

Since the whackos are out shooting up the mall we decided to play it safe and spend one of our rare rainless December evenings at Zoolights.

Unsurprisingly the kiddos love this Portland Yuletide macguffin. And I have to admit that these nocturnal admissions are the better of the times I've spent with them there.

The thing is, I still can't get around zoos as animal prisons.

All the lockdown behaviors; the pacing, the self-soothing stuff like rocking and repetitive motion, the compulsive grooming...they're all there. I hate seeing these creatures slowing going mad in their miniscule "habitats".

At least tonight the only critters in evidence were the elephants, who were pacing their way-too-small prison yard as always, and the sea otter who was doing rather the same thing only underwater. The sea lions, who usually swim compulsive laps in their tiny tank, were asleep.

This stuff bugs me and I'm never sure how much to talk about it with the kiddos. I think that they would understand, and yet, they genuinely love animals and love the zoo animals in particular. I think that it would hurt their hearts if they recognized their animal friends as desperate convicts locked in stir 24/7. And yet...there they are.

The Zoolights enable us to visit with as little exposure to the convicts as possible, and the light display really is beautiful and creative. The kiddos were sweet, oohed and aahed over the pretty lights, thoroughly enjoyed an illicit late-evening french fry gorge, and even managed to be decent about the loud crowd of Blazer fans on the MAX train-ride back to the parking space.

Now everyone is tucked soundly in bed dreaming of tomorrow, the last day of school for two whole weeks.

But I'm still awake, seeing in my mind's eye the elephants relentlessly pacing in the dark; back and forth, back and forth, their heavy feet falling again and again, soundlessly taking the measure of despair in the cold damp night.

The Twelve Beers of Christmas: Days 1 through 4

I'm not humble. We can fucking solid brew up here in the Pacific Northwest.

I don't know about the rest of the country. I've heard some idle talk about the quality of the beers in California, but I put that down to the natural arrogance of the Golden State; they think they do EVERYthing better in California. But they're wrong, oh, so, tragically, criminally wrong.

"California Pizza Kitchen".

I rest my case.

So this year I've tried to get myself into a little more Christmassy mood. And, to me, nothing says "Christmas" like "drinking".

Well, that and sex under the Christmas Tree, but if you think I'm blogging about that you're effing nuts. Beyond the tasteless factor Mojo would toast my organs of generation over the Yule log. I like the magic in my marriage the way it is, thanks.

So this year I've decided to test-drink twelve of our local "seasonal" brews.

Seasonal brew?

Yeah, I forget that a hell of a lot of you live in places where Budweiser is consider a boutique beer.

(Oh, and for the record, I'm not sure what Bud Light (or is it officially "Bud Lite"? Gawd.) being the "favorite beer of NFL fans" says, but I suspect that it slanders either beer, football, or the people who consume both)Every year's end our local breweries produce some version of a "winter seasonal" beer. The tradition usually extends to spring (when the brewers come up with a märzen-style), summer (which usually means a light, crisp brew - a pilsner or very hoppy ale such as an India Pale Ale) and autumn (which is usually greeted with an "oktoberfest"-style product). But seeing as how I like my beer like I like my women; strong, dark, and a bit of fun effort to wrestle down, the "winter warmers" are my hands-down favorites.

This year I've worked my way through four:

Deschutes Brewing's "Jubelale"
Full Sail's "Wreck The Halls"
Old Lompoc's "C-Sons Greetings", and
Ninkasi's "Sleigh'r"

So let me quickly catch you up to where I am in the Solstice Suds Sampling:

Day 1: Jubelale (Deschutes Brewing Co., Bend, Oregon)

Jubel is an Oregon classic; perhaps the single most thought-of brew when a webfoot thinks of the word "winter seasonal" or "winter warmer".It's an English "strong ale"; dark in color, malty rather than hoppy, with a powerful ale flavor over a very rounded, crisp finish. It does, in fact, "warm" you. I accompanied mine with a Kansas City-style T-bone, garlic-mashed, and winter vegetables, and it was nearly perfect. Jubel hits the tongue with a rabbit-punch of malt, teases the uvula with a tingle of hops, and swirls through the mouth with little hints of pepper and fruity goodness. It's a hell of a damn fine brew, and though this year's model is a little less...well, "perfect" than I expect - the brewmaster at Deschutes talks about how the formulation was changed back to the early versions this year and I noted a little more "sting"; less smoothness, more pepper than in years past.

But, still, the Jubelale is the King of Winter Beers, and the first day set a tough standard for the rest to follow.

Day 2: "Wreck The Halls" (Full Sail Brewing, Hood River, Oregon)

Last Tuesday I was working all day in the field and didn't really have much time to make a decent meal to accompany this brew. It didn't really need it; even with Stouffer's Lasasgna with Meat Sauce this tidy little IPA was tasty, hoppy, clean, and delicious.I liked that WTH was truly hoppy in the Northwest fashion but avoided the lip-puckering bitterness of some of the "brewmaster's reserve" creations that NW brewers seem to like to challenge their drinkers with. Darkish and full enough to make a mouthful satisfying the Full Sail boys did a nice job keeping their "winter warmer" free of the more commonly encountered sorts of holiday-busyness; no spices, no fruitiness, no citrus, just a lovely, rounded malt with a crispy hops tang and a lingering hit of alcohol - a tallboy had me pleasantly fuzzed. Damn fine.

Day 3: "C-Sons Greetings" (Lompoc Brewing, Portland, Oregon)This Imperial/Double India Pale Ale went with takeaway; haddock-and-chips from "The Fish And Chip Shop" on N. Killingsworth (one of the hidden treasures of North Portland - no-bullshit Brit workingman's food for a decent price) and was the polar opposite of the simple heartiness of the flaky fish and rich 'taties.This is one complex brew; spicy, hopped-up, malty, fruity...and at 8% alcohol it hits like Donder's spinning backkick.

I liked C-Sons in a very odd sort of way. One tallboy was outstanding, a truly interesting, challenging beer. But I can imagine that another might have been less welcome. And more then that? Just too much; too busy, too spicy, too...too.

So. I've polished off the fourth of our local winter brews sitting here with Mojo sewing and the two kiddos playing an exciting game with their "hex bugs"; everyone is having a heck of a good evening.

Day 4: "Sleigh'r" (Ninkasi Brewing, Eugene, Oregon)

Let me start by saying that I normally enjoy the product of the Ninkasi stable; they tend to make very classic Northwest beers.

But I found their seasonal to be...well, less than something to celebrate.It was drinkable, but just that. Supposedly a "dark double alt" it had very little altbier character being, instead, a fairly conventional Northwest dark ale. Surprisingly underhopped for a Ninkasi release, it was rather "flat" and malty, with a "muddled" impression that did little to enhance the ginger-garlic chicken stir-fry I made tonight. Indeed, the combination of our CSA kale with baby bok choy and Chinese sausage from Anzen was more interesting than anything in the bottle.

Not terrible, not even bad, but not particularly memorable or tasty. Not a keeper, in my opinion.

So there we are - another day tomorrow, another treasure from the Pacific Northwest. As good a way to pass the Yuletide season as I can imagine.

I'm almost surprised; at a time of year when I'm usually overwhelmed with curdled loathing for the masturbatory commercial splurgegasm that is the commercial Christmas season I have actually managed to get some pleasure out of this December.

It helps that the kiddos are not overcome with insane greed. They're excited about the upcoming loot but not utterly deranged about it. And we don't have any relatives visiting and infecting us with craziness, and without any real need to tote any out-of-towners around to Portland Christmasness we have managed to miss the most horrific of our local Wenceslausy glurge as well.

Now if my legs would just stop fucking with me. And we could catch and savagely beat the sonsofbitches that jacked Mojo's credit card and bought the airline tickets to Manila.

But those are stories for another day...

Haunting Christmas

Cassandra Wilson gives us a lovely, mournful alternative to the frantic drumbeat of a corporate Christmas season.

If there is any truth behind the Christ story, any meaning to Christmas at all, it is that life is unutterable tragedy redeemed by our love of, and sacrifice for, each other. As, so it is said, that God so loved us that he sacrificed her (his? its? How the hell does an infinite being have a freaking gender?) own child for all of us.

I don't know how you can find that all holly-jolly and Wenceslausy. But that's just me.

And here's Ray Charles with a little more traditional - but soulful - take on the occasion.Not a bad idea, the thought that Christmas music should be a little bluesy. When you think of it, being a little baby born with the weight of the world on your shoulders and the knowledge of your own death is a pretty good reason to sing the blues.

Have a lovely pre-Xmas weekend!

The Feast of Stephen

While I tend to find that my amused contempt for our human ability to disguise our own greed and selfishness under a wreath of holly and mistletoe prevents me from regarding the "holiday season" with much more than idle appreciation for the pretty decorations and a wry enjoyment of the hypocrisy of burying the birth of the impoverished, tragic Prince of Peace in his humble stable under a snowy Christmastide heap of war toys, gimme-gimme, useless bling and pious sanctimony (while ignoring most of the genuine suffering and want around us) my children are not so cynical.

Mind you, being as heathen as I, their only real interest is in the material gain and the pretty lights.

Hmmm.

I HAVE been enjoying our past week of sub-freezing weather. We've missed the bitter East wind typical of this sort of cold spell here in Portland, and the result has been a series of glorious frigid days, spectacularly deep blue skies over hoarfrost and icy patches where broken pipes have wept their sad tale of domestic expense onto the streets...But even a Grinch of a Daddy has to break down and give the littles a place to park their loot. So Mojo went ahead and booked us a ride on the Chelatchie Prairie Railroad "Christmas Train".

By the way; note the faces below. There was whining. There's ALWAYS whining. But more on that a bit later.What we didn't anticipate was the weather breaking the very night before; finally our typical December rain pushed up from the south and this morning the region was covered in ice.

Now this sort of "black ice" is VERY Pacific Northwest, and we usually wait it out. Typically the warm air follows, the warm rain - well, okay, it's forty-two, but that's "warm" compared to the frozen ground - melts in and the next day we're back on the road.Today, however, we had to chance it. So we got in Bob the Subaru with all the impedimentia of a family with two kids under eight; sippies, blankies, snacks, toys, etc., etc...and drove up to the wilds of Clark County, Washington.

Yacolt is about as rural as you get within an hour of Portland. It's an artifact, a tiny timber town kept alive by its whiteness and proximity to the Vancouver/Portland area. If you want to live in the country undisturbed by scary black or brown people, hipsters, or people who think that Dick Cheney is the AntiChrist - but still need to work in the Big City - Yacolt is your kind of place.The drive in was frightening, a controlled slide through the shaded northwest woods, but the sun was out in Yacolt, the train was waiting, and the ride was sunny and chill. The icefalls, artifacts of our freeze, were spectacular. Santa had cookies and presents, and the proper douglas-fir was identified by the Boy, tagged and loaded, and al we had to do was ride back to the little town and drive home.Mind you, on the way home there were haircuts and carousel rides at Jantzen Beach - we spare no expense for fun here, y'know. And in general the kids were happy and fun to be around. There was whining and pouting - especially from the Peep, who seems to be having a hard time being a first grader in general beyond the greed-specific whining, pouting and tantruming he's experimenting with. Frankly, he's been something of a pill lately. The boy has toys to die for and yet within moments of coming indoors he's whimpering about how bored he is.

I was a truly impressively self-entertaining child. I would set up my little armies and conquer Parthia, or storm the walls of Minas Morgul; arrange my little cars and trucks for chases or traffic disasters. I loved to read and still do. So it really sets my teeth on edge to hear this whingeing - it makes me want to toss his toys in a bag for the Goodwill. We're working on this attitude, Mojo and I, but the boy is a stubborn little curmudgeon. I see a lot of myself there, unfortunately. I did NOT have a productive and successful youth and young adulthood.But the littles decorated the tree with minimal help from the bigs, and were quite proud of their work, as well they should have been. Little Girl watched her Barbie Swan Lake for the third time, sighed happily and went to bed with the soft teddy Santa gave her. Big Peeper cried because his Grandma didn't send him a toy he could play with right now and went to bed with his mother.So this is how the world wags; a little happiness, a few tears. And tomorrow I have to be up at three to be down at the coast to work.Ah, well. Hope you and yours had a lovely last-but-one-weekend-before-the-Big-Explosion-of-Gifting.

God and the Soldier We Adore

In case you haven't been to one - or in case no one has ever told you - war is one of the most boring things humans ever invented.

It is a sort of Perfect Storm of bad food, worse hygiene, unchanging scenery and incessant companions punctuated (if you are unlucky) by moments of bowel-loosening terror.

And then you get up and do the same fucking thing again the next day.

And the next. And the...

You get the idea.

So now that we're neck deep in the Annual Holly-Bedecked QuasiReligious Festival of Corporate Greed, perhaps you can spare a moment to help those stuck in this craptacular business. One of the best ways I can think of - short of storming the Capitol and forcing the congresscritters to watch repeated showings of "From Justin To Kelly" until they agreed to make peace and bring the deployed guys home - is here, at "Books for Soldiers".

(h/t to my battle buddy Jim over at RangerAgainstWar for turning me on to this site).

Let me tell you a little story.

Almost thirty years ago I got an all-expanse paid vacation to the Caribbean. It was the first time any of us but the platoon sergeants and above had actually heard a live round fired in anger, and, frankly, we were not all that thrilled about it. It turned out to be a sort of extended joke on war, but we didn't know that at the time.

But the real revelation was how freaking flat-out dull it was. We spent hours sitting on our collective asses doing nothing. LOTS of nothing. Even within long rifle-range of the "enemy" we ended up digging in and sitting around for most of the day while our sister battalion chased a handful of idlers around the little town of Ruth Howard.

As it turned out, the military crest we occupied had been the original overnight position of one of the Division Ready Battalions who had deployed with their rucks packed for worldwide deployment. which meant that they had all their cold weather crap, eight cases of "C" rations, all the ash and trash that the 82nd SOP called for.

Needless to say, they had dumped all this stuff as soon as they could.

We didn't want their junk, either, though those of us not immediately occupied in setting up the defense (like Doc Me) rooted through it in hopes of finding some candy or a porn mag or something.And as luck would have it, I came up with a coverless paperback edition of Jim Webb's "Sense of Honor". So while my airborne brothers dug in and my sister battalion played hide-and-seek with the Grenadian Axes of Evil I read about Annapolis in the 1960's and managed to kill a fairly painless two hours of quasi-war.

So in the spirit of my nameless book donor and to do something really decent to poke a thumb in the eye of your corporate masters (who want you buying something spendy and trendy to celebrate the birth of the impoverished Prince of Peace), how about kicking down a spare twenty or fifty to help some OTHER dogface make it through a long day somewhere in Central Asia?

Like you need another fucking Christmas sweater, right?

(crossposted at MilPub)