Tag Archives: friends

My Latest High Fidelity Moment

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Back in January, I wrote a post titled I Lived High Fidelity Before High Fidelity Was High Fidelity, about how I and a couple of friends of mine, friends I’ve had since we were in high school together, have been strikingly similar to the three primary male characters in the book High Fidelity, by Nick Hornby, and the film based on the book, by Stephen Frears, since WAY before the book was written.

(I’ll wait while you read the post from January…hint, hint, nudge, nudge.)

So, I was sitting at work yesterday, when I received an email from one of those friends, an email that set off our latest High Fidelity moment, an exchange I felt was entertaining enough to share:

Keith: WFUV is playing R.E.M.’s Belong. Holy Crap!!!!!!!!!!!!!

What a brilliant song. I haven’t heard it in forever, plus a couple days.

Me: There I was, happily listening to Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde album, but upon receiving your email, Keith, I immediately had to open Spotify and start playing Belong.

LOVING it!

That Out Of Time album was the peak of R.E.M.’s so-called “sellout” phase, which started with the previous album Green, but I never considered them a sellout.

Yes, their music became much more Pop than Rock & Roll, but it was some of the best Pop music out there in a sea of crappy Pop music.

The only song that I really still don’t care for, is Shiny Happy People, and I guess I’ve heard Losing My Religion too much on the radio, so it’s hard to fully enjoy that one.

Mike: I completely agree! I’m listening to the album now and am loving it, yet the two songs I don’t like are Losing My Religion and Shiny Happy People. I actually don’t dislike the latter one, I just don’t need to hear it. But I’m not a fan of Losing My Religion. How that became the single for the album makes no sense to me.

Me: Ok, I’ve moved on to other songs and I’m on my third time through Country Feedback…

Fucking.Awesome.Song.

Keith: I’m listening to Belong the rest of the day. I don’t have time for the remainder of the album.

Mike: Everyone knows that listening to one song 10 times saves a lot more time than listening to 10 songs one time. It’s the time-song continuum.

Me: I would challenge you on your theory, doctor.

The time-song continuum is, indeed, a very real phenomenon, but I assert that it functions in a manner opposite to the one you describe.

My Theory of the Time-Song Continuum: Listening to the same song 10 times consecutively actually uses up more time than listening to 10 songs, one time each.

Argument: Any song that compels one to listen to it 10 times in a row is a song of great power, a song that resonates on a quantum level, a song that actually draws the listener into another dimension, whereby the listener loses all connection with the dimension they normally exist in, and while in that other dimension the listener’s functionality, and by extension their productivity, by the time they’ve listened to the song approximately three times, has been brought to a state of inertia.

Upon completion of the 10th listening of the one song, the listener inevitably finds him/her self in a state of disorientation, followed quickly by the receipt of an email from his/her supervisor, requesting to meet on the subject of a mounting backlog of work.

With all due respect,

Dr. Long Strange Trip, MST (Master of Space & Time)

Keith: Dr. Trip, I had to read your message ten times just to start to understand it.

And now, the R.E.M. song, Belong, that started it all off:

Welcome, Kulshan Brewing Company!

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It’s starting to be the case that I can measure how long I’ve lived here in Bellingham, Washington by how many breweries have started up, and, in one case, have shut down.

Back in November 2009, I wrote about the two breweries we had at the time — Boundary Bay Brewery & Chuckanut Brewery — both are still going strong, winning numerous awards for their craft beers and ales, and, according to Wikipedia, Boundary Bay has become the largest brewpub in the country based on the number of barrels sold per year.

And when I mentioned in that 2009 post that Boundary Bay better watch their backs, because Chuckanut had significantly stepped up their game, having won the 2009 Best Small Brewpub award at the Great American Beer Festival (they won the Best Small Brewing Company award in 2011), I deemed this welcome and healthy local competition.

But when I heard rumblings some months ago that another new brewery was opening up in Bellingham, I really had doubts that our small city could support three breweries, especially considering that there were also several bar/restaurants in town that served good selections of craft beer.

Enter Kulshan Brewing Company, which just opened a few weeks ago, and already all doubts have been put to rest.

I went there last night for the first time, the place was packed, everyone was raving about how good the beer is, myself included, and so it seems they will really have to screw up big time in order to fail.

The ambiance is casual and comfortable, the crowd was a nice Bellingham cross-section, and they have a novel approach to food that I was initially skeptical about: food trucks.

They currently have three different trucks that rotate throughout the week, offering sandwiches, BBQ, and pizza depending on the day, and they plan to eventually widen the selection. Early criticism of the idea suggested that people won’t want to eat out of to-go boxes when they are out drinking $4+/pint beer, but the folks I talked to LOVED the idea, reported that the food was great, and, best of all, considering how pricey the beer is, the food was cheap! (My friends had the Cuban Dog from StrEAT Food last night, which was huge, delicious, and only $4.50!)

Finally, the beer.

I sampled all of the brews that they had flowing and was VERY impressed with how consistently good they were. Not all of them were unique or stood out, but they seemed solid, delicious examples of the styles they represented.

American Wheat Ale: Let’s just get this out of the way: I don’t like wheat beers. I tasted it, didn’t care for it, but folks who I talked to who were drinking it said that they liked it.

Bastard Kat IPA: I was doubtful when it was poured, because it was so light in color. Other light-colored IPAs I’ve had were WAY out of balance, insane hops and not enough malt, resulting in a beer that is too bitter for me. Bastard Kat, on the other hand, was a good example of a standard Pacific Northwest IPA, with great, citrusy hops and plenty of them, but balanced nicely with just enough malty goodness to make it HIGHLY drinkable. Yum!

Midnight CDA (Cascadian Dark Ale): Basically a dark IPA, this was my favorite of the bunch. Pours almost black, and has a really nice, full viscosity without being syrupy. The hops weren’t as dominant as the IPA, but nor were the malts overbearing. It was surprising how drinkable it was. I’m not sure what the ABV is, but the alcohol was not overpowering (nor was it for any of the beers, for that matter).

Porter: Probably the most unremarkable of the bunch, but not in a bad way. It’s simply a good example of a Porter, with very tasty roasted malts, a light, drinkable body, and a dark, rich color. Porters aren’t my favorites, but I think that a Porter fan would enjoy it very much.

Russian Imperial Stout: This, to me, was nearly an exact copy of my favorite imperial stout, Lost Coast Brewing’s Old Rasputin, but that’s not a bad thing at all. Kulshan’s is undeniably delicious, with a high alcohol content nestled in heavily roasted malts. Not a beer for sunny weather, in my opinion, so I’d be surprised if they kept it on tap for much longer.

Sadly, they had just run out of their other beer — Good Ol’ Boy Pale Ale — so I wasn’t able to try it, but people were talking about it and saying it was a great session beer.

I’ll be returning to Kulshan for sure, and I recommend it heartily!

R.I.P. Earl Scruggs

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It’s always sad for me when people of legendary talents pass away, especially when it’s someone who had a talent doing something that I happen to dabble in.

Thus, as a musician, because I deeply revere the masters of the art, I experience their loss acutely, almost as if the person was someone I knew, and it feels like I did really know them on some level, because they ultimately shared so much of themselves in their music.

And so it was this morning as I learned of the passing of Bluegrass music legend Earl Scruggs.

There are many items in the news today on this great banjo innovator and virtuoso, so I won’t go into details of his career here, except to say that he developed what became the quintessential Bluegrass banjo style that so many players after him adopted. Bluegrass is practically synonymous with the Scruggs-style three-finger rolling picking technique. (I would highly recommend a moving tribute to Earl that Steve Martin wrote in New Yorker earlier this year, a love letter to a man who deeply inspired him and with whom he was eventually fortunate enough to have played with and befriended.)

For me, I’ll always think of Earl Scruggs in the context of the great fortune I’ve had to make music over the years with a dear friend who plays the banjo, and even though she plays the older clawhammer style, she was the gateway for my learning of the banjo in general.

And now, without further ado, Earl’s signature tune, humbly (chuckle) named Earl Scruggs Breakdown:

Spring In Bellingham Is A Fickle Mistress

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Seriously, just this past Saturday my friend texted me the photo you see here, with the message:

Back deck, sunshine, beer, get over here now!

While we are blessed with mild winters here in Bellingham and springtime often comes early, which I’ve written about before (Post 1, Post 2), it’s rare that we have the kind of sunshine we just had this past weekend, with temperatures in the mid 60°s F, and I swear, this is what the conversation was like, out on that deck, basking in the glorious sun:

My Friend: Can you frickin’ believe this?!

Me: It’s amazing!

My Friend: I’m wearing flip-flops for godsake!

Me: It’s amazing!

My Friend: It’s like California out here!

Me: It’s amazing!

But then Monday came, heavy sigh, and this is what I woke up to:

An Open Letter To My Words With Friends Friends

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Dear friends…

…but not just “friends” in that Facebook kinda way, since we’re all real, in-the-flesh, friends, some of us separated by some thousands of miles, but very real, first and foremost unFacebook friends, nontheless.

The distinction is important, mind you, because, well, I’m not really feeling this real, unFacebook friendship when you’re kicking my ass in Words With Friends.

Seriously! Have you no mercy?!

Are you so dissociated from your humanness, so distanced by the technology, so disconnected from our personal connection that you don’t see the malicious brutality in your relentless onslaught of 50-point triple word scores?

Do you never take pause to reflect on our relationship, all the years we’ve shared and the bonds we’ve formed, as you viciously play words you’ve excavated from the bowels of the Oxford English Dictionary, words that were actually only ever used by just one person, one time, by some clerk in the offices of the British Philological Society, and probably a typo to boot?

Must you sadistically flaunt your ability to look at a scramble of random letters and somehow magically see all the words that can be formed from those letters by rearranging them in a particular variety of orders?

Have you no compassion for people like me, holders of Bachelor of Arts degrees in English with corresponding extensive vocabularies, who can only access a small, low-point-value subset of those vocabularies when staring at those scrambled letters, hour after hour after hour?

And you wonder why days, sometimes weeks, pass before I make a move, and now, with the latest Words With Friends feature, you “nudge” me to make a move after five days have passed, as if my struggle weren’t obvious enough?

Well, “friends”, I’ll let you in on a little secret.

During those days and weeks of waiting on me, I’m not just stumped, I’m taking stock and considering one of the most difficult decisions we humans face in these digital times of ours: to quit or not to quit, forever.

Oh, don’t even think of coming at me with the tired old “it’s just a game” line. You know damn well that this is nothing less than a battle for my self-worth.

(Pause. Breathe. Breathe. Breathe.)

Ok, so, I won’t quit. Even if you assure me that it’s ok if I do.

Because, I’m man enough to admit that I’d miss all the sarcastic chat we exchange. It feels good to call you bastards when you score 75 points in one move.

Oh, and if I quit I’d have significantly less reason to use my iPhone, which is just incomprehensible to me.

So, for now, unscramble this!

KCXBIJHBISECBHISEJBCUIGAVIEHBCISHOVCHIVIEHVF

Out of Office: Off to Nationals!

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Julian in Joshua Tree National Park

Last month I exercised my parental bragging privileges and wrote about how my 14-year old son, Julian, qualified to go to the American Bouldering Series National Championships, an indoor rock climbing competition.

Woot!!!

Well, we’re leaving this morning for Colorado Springs, where Julian will climb in qualifiers Friday night, competing against 34 other boys in his 13-14 year old age group. The top 16 that evening will move on to semi-finals on Saturday, and the top 8 will climb in finals on Sunday.

On Friday night, Julian will climb 4 routes. Prior to climbing, he’ll be in isolation, unable to see the routes until it’s his turn. Then, he’ll be guided out to a chair in front of the first route, with his back to the wall, facing an auditorium full of spectators, and when the buzzer goes off he’ll turn around and see the route for the first time.

He’ll have 4 minutes and can make as many attempts to complete the route as he can manage, getting more points the farther he can get, and extra points if he can complete a route on the first attempt.

Then, he’ll be guided to sit with his back to the next route, rest 4 minutes, buzzer goes off, repeat, rinse, repeat, etc.

Yikes! I’m nervous for him just typing that!

I’m incredibly proud of Julian for even qualifying for Nationals, and if all he gets to do is climb Friday night I will think of it as an amazing achievement. He’s been training his butt off for the past two weeks, and I’m so deeply impressed by his dedication and determination.

Meanwhile, things could be rather quiet here at Fish & Bicycles between now and next Tuesday. I’ll try to post news about Julian from Colorado, and I might have a few posts written ahead of time that I’ll schedule to be published here while I’m gone.

But, if that just can’t quite tide you over, feel free to browse around the vast Fish & Bicycles archives in any of the following ways:

  • Tags: In the sidebar, under Stuff About…, you can click on any of the Tags and see all the posts I’ve done that have at least something to do with those topics.
  • Recurring Series: At the top of the page, hover over the Recurring Series drop-down menu and select from options like Celebrating Eco-Progress, which applauds businesses adopting sustainable practices; Eyecatchers, a collection of photos, graphics, and videos that have, well, caught my eye; Video Fridays, my favorite video of the week pick; and more.
  • Monthly Archives: Towards the bottom of the sidebar, select a specific month to see everything I posted in that time period.

Go Julian!!!