My Name is Maverick...I Am A Foodaholic...

 

Throwback...2017

At the annual “Taste of St Augustine” and 5K event today, I managed to inhale too many samplers in a disgustingly brief amount of time. Roasted Parmesan oysters, grilled curried squid on a stick, a homemade Key Lime popsicle.

A forgettable band made up for their lack of talent with sheer volume and familiarity, playing Allman Brothers classics and monster hits of the 80’s. Carla had gotten her pulled pork slider and a few broiled Sea Scallops with Aioli. Both are favorites of hers.

After two hours of wallowing in an excess of food, music and crowds packed like a overbooked United flight, I needed to get the hell out of there. We were both ready to break camp and head home.

Then she reached into her top pocked and pulled out another red ticket. “One more!” she said. This was carnival style, you get tickets from the main booth on the way in, to buy stuff. Naturally I couldn’t just walk away with an unspent ticket, I’m not going to throw money away, right? So I bought three more. That was exactly what I needed to get a Tuna Tartare on a mini soft-taco with a spoon of coleslaw for crunch and a squirt of some Tahini/Miso white sauce.

There was no more room at the Inn, but I squeezed in another lodger anyway.

Then I REALLY had to get out of there.

I asked Carla to take the back way home. She had insisted on driving. “Um…OK! you drive” Since I’ve always been the one to drive, she thinks I’m doing her a favor. She’s eager for an excuse to drive her new little Honda Fit. With her favorite CD from The Band, “The Last Waltz” in her player ever since she bought the car four months ago, Carla cranked up the tunes. She knows every word, sung or spoken, and stares at me as she regurgitates them animatedly into my left ear while driving at least twenty over the limit. Swerving, gesturing, lost in her wild serenade, I’m the only one watching the road. I try to point out potential disasters, yelling over Levon’s drums and Garth’s organ runs, suggesting urgent and immediate preventative actions that may keep us out of the trunk of the guy in front of us. But really, she’s the one doing me a favor whenever I can overcome concerns for my life. Being driven is a luxury I can wallow in. Anyway, by taking the back road we would just happen to pass the new food truck owned by my friend Mike.

He smokes up the best brisket this side of Texas.

I thought it only made sense to get some provisions to take home, you know? And so we did.

Leaving the BBQ place and turning South on the highway home, we barely traveled two blocks before spotting a large refrigerated truck sitting on the corner of the Dollar Store parking lot. The canvas sign flapping along one side boasted in bright red letters the size of flagstones: LIVE CRAWFISH!

Live crawfish may very well be our favorite thing in the world. Well for me at least. My priorities are: Carla first, Crawfish second. Third place is a toss-up between Chicca, Ruth and Hannah.

Like many guys do with their wives, sometimes I force Carla to wallow in my sick fantasies. I guess that’s just part of being married. “Which is better, a cup of warm lump crab meat, lobster meat, picked Snow crab, fresh Mussels, or crawfish tails? All swimming in butter turned brown by Paul Prudhomme’s Seafood Magic seasoning, of course. “You have to pick. Which is best? Come on, pick one!”

Anyway, with the image of that crawfish sign burning into my head, I obviously had no choice but to tell Carla that it would only make sense to pull a U-turn. We fantasize about when crawfish season starts and had just been talking about ordering 20 pounds from the online vendor who ships them overnight out of Louisiana. We had no reasonable course of action other than to turn around immediately.

So we loaded up on mud bugs.

Once we settled in back home with a three-day supply of Crawfish and brisket, I started to worry about how we were going to be sure to not let the last of my sausage meat loaf go to waste, or the fresh batch of Royal Red shrimp that I had boiled early in the morning, or the Collards with smoked turkey neck.

Too much food and too little time.

Not wanting to stress myself out, I decided to watch an episode of my new favorite show: “Carnival Eats”. The fresh baked apple/cheesecake pie segment was mesmerizing.

My name is Maverick, I’m a foodaholic with a serious

substance abuse problem. The substance being much of the food that I tied off and mainlined today.

I need an intervention.

 

 

Mad Dog Marketing, Ground Zero...

 

See that rectangular building on the horizon between Carla and myself?

Jon and I had an office on the top floor back in 1996. Then and now, the tallest building in St Augustine. Our windows looked out over the iconic Bridge of Lions on the Intracoastal waterway. We ran our business, Mad Dog Marketing out of those 200 sq. feet. A desk and phone for each of us above the oldest continuously occupied European settlement in the USA. (I've been programmed with that spiel by the 30+ years we've lived here. Native Americans may take issue, but we did say European settlement...)

We were in bed with two crazy English millionaires who flew across the pond to bring us a suitcase with $6000 cash in it, once a month. Jon and I split that to hold up our software distribution end of the deal, Mad Dog Marketing, here in the states.

That was a sweet gig.

Our office, there in the old First Union Bank building, was a two-man space that only cost us $225 a month.

Jon and I each had our desks pulled up to one of the two windows. We watched the Bridge open and close for the steady procession of water traffic. Yachts, sailboats, civilian and commercial, shrimp boats with their nets held high, flanking both sides. We watched the cars scurry over to the Island and bottleneck at the base of the bridge as they came back into town, everyone forced to stop when the gates dropped as the bridge opened its mouth for the boats to pass. We sympathized with the occasional windsurfer, struggling to navigate around the pilings under the bridge.

Best views in all of St Augustine.

As soon as our Englishman hit town, they wanted to get out, they thought this town was so hokey. Both lived in expensive London flats. One of them asked “should I bring a banjo next time?" 

They insisted that all of us to fly to Vegas, which we did, so they could have lap dances in the strip clubs. Rich guys married to much younger trophy wives. I asked them, why on earth do you want lap dances when you could just go hire some upscale girl and spend the night?

No answer. They were like little boys away from home being naughty.

I hated it, but that delighted and encouraged them even more, so they paid multiple girls to come lap dance for me, just to see if I would get embarrassed by the attention. They simply never believed that it was possible for a grown man to not to want some woman he doesn't know to grind her barely covered crotch on his ear.

I'm not a prude, I simply thought it was childish and creepy.

Mr. Excitement, I just wanted to back go home, take a sponge bath in Lysol, and hang out on my back deck.

But I admit, I did like the middle-of-the-night slot machines, the sound of the bells designed by experts to please, and the cavernous, calliope of a room, where there was no way to distinguish between 3am and 3pm.

An unending party in a place where time itself had been banished.

But I was always more than pleased to get back to my observation deck at the office, watching the ebb and flow of life, six stories down.

 

 

You’re From Texas…

 

Pardon me stranger I hope there's no danger

You'll think I'm getting off of my range

Oh but I calculate that you're from my state

And though you may think its strange

I allow as how you're from Texas

Because the lingo I understand

I'll bet my cale that you hail from Texas

There's no mistaking the brand

You've got a smile like an acre of sunflower

Your eyes are blue bonnet blue

Shake hands its grand that you're from Texas

Cause I'm from Texas too

You've got a smile like two acres of sunflower

Your eyes are blue bonnet blue

Shake hands its grand that you're from Texas

Cause I'm from Texas too!

Bob Wills, 1942

 

The pool life...one man’s story as an expat in Mexico...

 

Rain Day...

 

I love a rain day.

It’s my excuse to stay home and take a break. After so much staying home and taking a break for more than a year now, I need a vacation. So while Carla and the dogs pretend to be asleep because they know I want something (not the same something)...

I bumble about in my Astral Plane..

 

 

The Letter...

 

There it was, sitting alone on the time-scarred surface of that old mahogany table. She must have brought it in. 

Waiting in ambush, screaming like an air horn that only he could hear.

Almost a relief, really, after too many years of having his guts churn and twist every day, wondering if there would be a letter waiting to turn his life upside down, or end it, when he got home.

The envelope was fat, well-traveled.  No surprise there. Always unmistakable, he knew that handwriting, had a mental image of the writer. The irony of stamps that boasted of “equality” “justice” and “liberty” struck him like a hammer. Certainly intentional.

Now it was finally time. He knew he had to decide. After playing this out in his mind a few thousand times, this was it. Fish or cut bait, right?

He thought of his stainless 38, perched on top of the armoire. He thought of the couch where he was sitting and the clean wall behind him. The white wall like a canvas for some Pollock explosion of crimson blown across a field of lumpy gravy.

He thought of the Jeep keys, and the full tank of gas.

He thought of somewhere over the rainbow and he thought of oblivion.

Nothing could make the letter go away. Now he was the one who had to go.

One way or another.

Winter Dawn

 

Piercing sun angled sharply over the lake this morning as it began to peek above the tree canopy to the East.

First frost had no chance to linger in its glare.

Two black dogs helped disperse the rime, running tag-team circles in frosty grass, their unleashed frenzy panting greener trails, concentric and intersecting.

A lone Muscovy warmed his paddles, sucking a contrail of lake fog from the dissipating mist behind him.

As winter as it gets here in Florida.