this/that

I shaved this morning, clean. A new era and all, but where’d my chin go? It’s always so disconcerting at first.

Two voices missed: Studs Terkel and John Leonard.

I’ve been drinking apple cider. I’ve been drinking it cold. I’ve been drinking it hot, zipped up with a cinnamon & nutmeg. I’ve been drinking it on ice with a splash of bourbon. Years ago, when I was more of a hippie, I washed my hair in it (the cider, not the bourbon).

Evidently, I now live in Snackville. There’s time-honored Sahadi, with its nuts and bonbons. Trader Joe’s is basically a snack store. And on Smith, something called the Nut House (or something like that) recently opened, full of pre-bagged nuts and bolts. For this weekend’s trip to Delaware Water Gap, I’m the man: the almond medley and the crack-like toffee-covered pistachios from Sahadi (I retain my loyalties) should make me friends amongst the wild hill people.

I just finished Norman Mailer’s Miami and the Siege of Chicago, about the anointing of that rough beast Nixon in Miami and the self-destruction of the Democrats in Chicago, 1968. “We will be fighting for forty years,” he says presciently at the end, after one of Daley’s Gestapo has punched him out. Bit of a different vibe at Grant Park the other night, eh?

I’m dipping into John Collier’s short stories, the literary equivalent of the Twilight Zone (for which he wrote). I’m really getting into A.J. Liebling’s World War II Writings, a book I got for my dad, but he’ll have to wait until Christmas.