cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- It starts out about mead but this is really about the butterfly Have you ever drank mead? You probably haven't. Most people haven't. Most people aren't even quite sure what the fuck the stuff is. Fermented honey. Honey, in water, with yeast doing its thing to turn sugar into alcohol. That's all mead essentially is. Game little buggers, yeasts are. Point is, I'm drinking it. And oh mother fuck is it ever good. There are 2 foodstuffs that the rest of the world has never yet topped me at making. Steak and mead. Oh sure, I'm really supposed to be the beer specialist. I've been making that almost constantly since I was 17. But everyone is making beer. The competition is fucking everywhere. I can make good beer. But I make fucking great mead. Now I've tried buying the stuff. You can in fact find it if you go to a good beer store. But that shit mostly tastes like sweet wet cardboard. The stuff I make, which I am drinking right now, tastes like you're inhaling the stars out of the night sky. Yeah. It's sweet and hot and cold and sending shivery little sparkles down your throat and out into your body and through all of your finger tips and sundry other parts. Mead is, in all liklihood, the planet's oldest alcoholic beverage. Think about it. Honey is a ready-made concentrated source of honey that is easily encountered in the wild, though a bit of daring is involved in the getting of it. Even more handy than grapes, which have to be squeezed into juice first. All someone had to do, untold hoary ages ago, was let some water get mixed in with the honey and then let it sit around for a bit in it's gourd or bladder or whatever while wild yeasts did their thing. Yeah, and that was mead. And our ancient ancestors sat around and quaffed this stuff and got swooney and probably fucked each other and begot our next ancestors and you and I would not exist without it. That's what I think [takes swig]. When I make mead, its not much more complicated than the original stuff. I put honey in water, but I do usually boil the mixture for a few minutes to kill off any bacteria that might take hold and impart off-flavors. Then I also add a touch of lemon juice as well as some dead yeast (bread yeast that was also boiled to kill it). Look, the ancient ancestors untold hoary ages ago could have done that as well, right? There were lemons. The dead yeast is to provide yeast nutrients that give the live yeast a head start. And of course instead of wild yeast I am using typically a wine yeast of some sort. A premier cuvee this time. The secret is to let it sit around. This shit was way too sweet when it first looked done. So I let it sit in a gallon jug for a few months. Now its unfuckingbelievably good. Its still a bit sweet, but now it knows what its doing. I haven't heard from Erin in a bit about Merida. I hope she doesn't take my buying of tickets to Munich the wrong way. I still want to go to Merida with her. Asit is saying now that he's getting tickets to meet up with me in Munich, which would be interesting. But I still want to go to Merida with Erin. That's a whole thing that I thought about and decided that it should be done. It would cost so little money in the grand scheme of things, there's no reason why we shouldn't just do it. In fact, if she doesn't think she can swing it by the end of the month then I will see if she'll just let me buy her the plane tickets. In the grand scheme of things, I might add, it is usually better to have had an interesting experience than to have a bit of money. Amazing how long it took me to figure that one out. 'Grand scheme of things.' That phrase is right up there with 'soft white underbelly.' Point is, if Erin and I run off to the Yucatan for a week, it will inevitably be interesting and odd things will happen that I will remember for the rest of my life. And what would otherwise happen during that week? Probably nothing. Probably a month later I would struggle to remember any of it. To put things in perspective, I'm GLAD that I got food poisoning in Marin County, CA, 5 years ago. I am. Having food poisoning is so much better than being dead. I will remember that for the rest of my life. It was a thing that happened and is part of who I am (drunk on mead am I). Anyone remember the hunting trip I wrote about here, years ago, when it got so cold at night that I thought I was going to die and had to put on all of the clothes in my pack to stay alive? No, you don't. There is no 'you.' Nobody who read this 3 years ago is still reading. I doubt anyone but me reads this at all. Well, the following morning and the rest of that day I did not see a single deer. But not a week goes by that I don't think of that day. That day when everything was covered in a frost so heavy that it literally looked like several inches of snow, weighting the boughs down so that trails through the woods turned to white tunnels with the branches all bent over my head. That day when I stood there in the meadow, in my old surplus Australian Army green woolen clothes from the 1950's with an iron-sighted military Mauser carbine in my hands and I watched a single white-yellow butterfly dance in the air in front of me. How could it have possibly survived that night before? But there it was, flapping about over the white blanketed meadow in front of me. All alone, I smiled as I looked at it with my rifle held ready. Like some out-take from 'All Quiet on the Western Front.' It was worth it. That night of mad shivering and panic the night before. It was all worth it for that moment with the butterfly. I really mean that. And nobody really knows these things about me. The moment with the butterfly and so on. I don't think that anyone reads this diary any more. Trish has no idea about any of this. She does not know about the butterfly. She does not know much about me, now that I think about it. How do you start telling things like that to someone after literally half a lifetime of not saying such things to that very person? You cannot. So I haven't. And I don't know that I ever will. Actually, I've tried. I start to tell the story. I begin to explain and something else catches her attention and she asks some other question and I answer and this leads to something else and there we are on a completely different track. Not this exact story about the butterfly but others like it. It never works. She wouldn't care or understand even if I ever had the opportunity to get it all out. If I write a novel and I put that in it, maybe she will read it. But she wouldn't quite understand. I know this now. Only in the last year did I realize this about her, but she would never understand something like the butterfly in the meadow. She would skim past it like she would Hemingway's grasshoppers in the morning chill beside the trout stream. Yeah, she wants the hardboiled eggs and the cold white wine. The grasshoppers and the butterflies are lost on her. It's better that way, I suspect. There was someone once whom I told things like that to. Before I met Trish. It all ended badly. When it ended, I listened to 'I'm so Tired,' off the White Album, again and again and again. I forget if it was Aldous Huxely or Terrence McKenna who said 'Once you've been, why go back?' One of them. Some acid guru of one stripe or another. I've been but I'm the type that can't just leave it without wanting to go back. I ought to do acid at least one more time. But I'd need acid. And someone to do it with. Also crayons. You really should have crayons for that. You must understand that there was a butterfly and that it was alive against all odds and that it flew right before me; even while I carried this instrument of violent death in my hands. You must understand that it is obviously dead by now, by one cause or another. And yet that this utterly insignificant creature is etched indelibly onto my memory and has become a part of who I am, against odds that are if anything even greater than those of the night of early winter when I camped by the river to hunt deer. You must understand that since then I have killed large creatures that wished to live, and I ate them, and that this was cruel of me. You must understand that any one of those deer were of greater consequence than one little butterfly over a meadow. And yet. And yet. And yet I keep thinking about that butterfly and how my frozen face smiled at it with the sun in my eyes in the frozen morning. I don't know what's worse about the passage of time. The pieces of one's self that fly away and get lost forever, or the pieces that one picks up and will never be rid of. I'm probably just drunk. Ignore me. 11:41 p.m. - 2009-06-07 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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