Category: general

The new Mac is here. It got delivered yesterday, shortly after I mentioned it on here. So from China to Denver in about two days – pretty remarkable.

Having a new computer is always great to me. Just the smell of a new machine, right out of the box, is always incredible to me. It’s like a new car smell, mixed with the faint ozone of new electronics. I got the machine fired up in no time flat, and found a temporary home for it, right where the keyboard of my old machine usually sits. Using a firewire cable, I went through the import wizard, and after about 45 minutes of churning, my entire account, desktop, and all apps were on the new machine. There were a few minor glitches, but the big major thing – getting it all moved – went flawlessly.

The Macbook has a 1280×800 screen, which isn’t bad, but since everything of mine was sized for 1600×1200, some things were too big. But I got a Mini-DVI to DVI adaptor, and plugged in my old 21″ monitor, which is sitting behind the laptop on my desk. The internal video card is able to drive the laptop display and this external one, so I have two-monitor action going on now. The Mac in general handles two-headed displays better than Windows, with one exception – there is only one menu bar for all displays. You can choose what display to put it on, but there’s a 50% chance that will be the wrong place at any given time.

I’m always happy about the new toys. There is an iSight camera built into this, as well as stereo microphones. So if I ever need a mug shot or have to video conference with someone, there you go. There’s also a little IR remote to use FrontRow and watch movies or whatnot, although I don’t know how useful that would be on a laptop. There are a handful of new programs that weren’t in the last iLife, like the photobooth, and iWeb, a cheapie web publishing thing. And internal dual-layer SuperDrive – nice.

iTunes and iPhoto didn’t make it over correctly, because they were on an external drive. I plugged in the external and it worked fine. I don’t really want to move that shit, because it’s like a third of the disk space I have on the machine. So I will keep that stuff external and at home. If I’m on the road and want to hear music, I’ve got my iPod. And photos – well, they can stay at home too. So my at-home setup is huge: seven plugs hang off the left side of the computer. I need to buy a dock and do some serious cable management at this point.

Eclipse totally freaked out when I moved it, and I had to start over. Luckily, I had all of my crap checked in, and I could just start over. “Just” – it takes about an hour and a half to get Eclipse downloaded and then set up all of the Ruby, Rails, and Subversion shit. All of my ruby and rails stuff on my system, along with the rest of my Macports stuff, made the journey with no problems. I wonder with that, as well as other stuff, if they are universal binaries or not. I don’t know, but I do know that Eclipse starts about 80 times faster, which is sweet.

I ordered memory from OWC – a 3 Gig kit (1×2,1×1) was about $150. I still remember in 1993 when I bought a MEG of memory for $160, and now three GIGS is $150. That’s depressing in a way. Anyway, all Apple docs say you can only upgrade to 2 Gig with paired SIMMs, but you can really do 3 with no problems. The slight hit in performance from non-matched SIMMs is offset by the gain in memory. But honestly, even with a gig in here, I’m not really seeing any swapping. It also, by the way, is pretty damn cool in the Activity Monitor to see two CPU graphs because of the dual core.

I got another new toy yesterday, which is my new AM/FM/TV pocket radio. I bought it so I can listen to games, since they only broadcast on AM 850. (And it turns out that 850 is like all-Limbaugh during the day, which isn’t that great.) The TV tuner is interesting, too. So now I have a radio for the upcoming Brewers game, or whenever I want to listen here at home.

BTW, just installed skype – if you have it, I’m jonkonrath – drop a line.

98 degrees today. Guess there is no possibility of putt-putt this afternoon.

My new Mac has gone from Shanghai to Anchorage to Indianapolis, and is now in Denver as of six minutes ago, according to the FedEx page. I don’t know if that means it will get delivered today or Saturday or Monday, but I have my fingers crossed. I think FedEx is generally better than UPS or USPS, so maybe they won’t drop the ball.

I have been doing this Rails coding for my old friend Jason, and as a token that I’m fixing more than I’m breaking these days, he sent me the Real World Golf game for the PS2. This was my choice, by the way – it’s something I wanted to mess with for a while. I have this strange interest in golf, although I am not that interested in spending $16,000 on a new golf club or paying some “pro” $800 an hour to have him improve my swing (or not). But I am interested in the social aspect, and it’s a kind of exercise that’s more interesting to me than, say, racquetball, or running.

I’ve only played golf twice, both times on a 9-hole course in Edwardsburg, Michigan. According to my dad, this Garver Lake course was a junkyard when he was a kid, and the owner had a stripped down, beat up, army surplus tank that they drove around to haul cars to their resting places. They cleared out almost all of the junk (there were still a few spots hidden in trees where you could see part of an old car carcass, or a piece of metal sticking up from the ground, like the remains of an old battlefield in France) and the course wasn’t bad. My uncle Jim had an old set of clubs that he got at a garage sale, and my uncle Al was a regular golfer. His son, Alan Paul, was a few years older than me, and was on the school golf team. (He was also on the football and wrestling teams, and made some rushing record for the football team that was a state record and might still stand. So yeah, slightly more athletic than me.)

I must have been about 14 when I went out there a few times. When my parents split, my dad lived with my grandma and uncle Jim for a bit, and then lived with my uncle Al for a while, until he bought a place. We’d go on these week-long visits in the summer, which were largely boring, because I was at that age where all I cared about was playing Dungeons and Dragons with my friends and watching MTV, and I couldn’t do either away from home. So golf was a diversion, and a good one at that.

Edwardsburg, as I’ve mentioned before, is not big. It’s population is smaller than my high school graduating class. So this golf course is a pretty sleepy place. The clubhouse was more of a shed than a country club manor house. The one thing I remember is they had one of those old-timey Coke machines that had the 16-ounce glass bottles behind a glass door, and you put in your money (probably like 35 cents) and then popped open the glass door and took your bottle. So yeah, any memory of drinking Coke from glass bottles is a good one.

I couldn’t play golf then – I still can’t, probably – but I think the problem then was I was too light and too short to really get any power behind my swing, so a 75-yard drive was phenomenal for me, but it turned a par-3 into like a par-12. What I did like was just the process of walking across the course. This was at an age where I spent a lot of time exploring, walking through the woods behind our subdivision, or riding my BMX bike in places I’d never seen. Once I got my license, this process lost its appeal, because I could drive to these places in no time flat, and I became a tourist and not a traveler. But back then, the experience of just walking across the mowed grass, looking at the woods and little bits of water hazard and sand bunker, that was something I could do all day, game or no game.

Like I said, I did horribly. I think in 9 holes, I was at like 83, 84. But both my uncle and my cousin were supportive, and gave me a lot of tips. And even with my bad game, it was still great to go out with them and do something fun like that. Golf is bonding in that way, and it makes me wish I had three good friends here in Denver, so we could load up the car and drive out to one of the ten million courses here and have a good Saturday morning talking and playing.

I guess one of the other reasons I think back to this a lot is that my Uncle Al died almost ten years ago, from brain cancer. And he died in my birthday, which is harsh. And what’s more, he lives in a neighborhood right near the Conrail yard, where there are tons of EPA superfund cleanup sites from hazardous chemical runoff, and he had well water, and that always makes me wonder if it was from the water. I don’t know. I do know that he was a great guy, the nicest to us, and I enjoyed the time I spent with him in the couple of games we played out on Garver Lake.

So now I have this computer game. It comes with a weird controller that consists of this pair of gloves that you wear, and those clip to a pair of cables that come out of this base unit. So when you stand there in front of the TV, any movement of your hands, including the velocity of movement, is detected and sent to your PS2. And in the game, when your dude is standing on the fairway and you’ve selected a three-iron or whatever, it can sense how you’re holding the club (you have this fake plastic club to play with; you could also use a real one, but I’m afraid I would break something) and it will control the player accordingly. If you half-swing and put no movement into it, you’ll tap the ball. Stuck in some high grass? Hit low and follow up high and you’ll chip it out of there. To get a good solid drive, you give it a really hard back, behind, forward with all of your might and it will knock the ball a few hundred yards. It’s actually damn hard to get a good swing, mostly because your back, your core muscles, and your arms all have to put some force into this unnatural movement. But it’s fun. I don’t know if I would go out on a course for a few reasons: cost, nobody to go with, and I don’t want to look like an idiot. But I know I could use the exercise, and I would be more apt to walk ten miles on a golf course than walk ten miles on a treadmill. So who knows.

Another big eBay day – three going, two awaiting payment. That might not sound huge, but I had like five auctions end yesterday, so my mailbox was a flurry of eBay mail. Anyway, better get started.

I bought a new computer. It is the Macbook, the higher-spec white model, with the 2.16 Ghz processor. I bought it online, which means it hasn’t shipped yet, and now it’s a holiday, so it probably won’t ship for a couple of days, and then it will take a couple more days, so I’m like a kid trying to fall asleep on the night before Christmas. I also know when I get the thing, there will be days and days of moving files, reinstalling stuff, reconfiguring things I redid long ago, and so on. Plus I need to figure out where I will physically put the thing, and how I will hook it up. I’m trying to think of a way I can still use this giant 21″ monitor, and the laptop display at the same time. I don’t know how good Apple’s multiple display stuff is these days. I know it sucked in Windows.

So I went to the Apple store yesterday. I went to Cherry Creek mall, which is gigantic, and is a real mall in every way, not one of these de-malled shopping center strip malls. It’s like Short Hills mall in Jersey, or a bit like the Bellevue mall on the east side of the lake in Seattle. It’s all very upscale and high-end, all Williams and Sonoma and no video arcade. I realized that I have had some sort of seachange where it comes to malls. I used to love malls – ask Mr. Falli, I would go to any mall for whatever reason and spend hours there, even if I hated all the stores and didn’t buy anything. It was something hypnotic about the mall, relaxing. Now that I don’t have money to spend, don’t have that collector impulse anymore, and don’t like to walk as much with this mostly-healed-but-still-recovering foot, it’s just not the same. I guess I get some of the quaalude effect, but it’s also a bit depressing.

Anyway, Apple store. They had a ton of iPhones around, and I played with one for a bit. My first reactions: way smaller than I thought; I can barely read the text; I bet this screen scratches and smudges in ten seconds, look at my iPod screen; how do I get a menu or whatever, it keeps flipping and moving and the interface is weird, I feel like an old person trying to use a mouse; I can’t type for shit. (The best commentary on this in a baseball context is here.) Anyway, no $600 iPhone for me. I seriously use my cellphone about 6 minutes a month, so that’s too much of an investment, even if it does run widgets or a 20×20 pixel web browser. While I was there, I looked at the Macbooks that I ordered but didn’t have yet, which made me depressed, because I was typing away on something I will wait like another week to have. Also, the Apple droids bugged the shit out of me when I was on the iPhone, and then nobody talked to me while I was messing with the laptops, and I really wanted someone to ask me if I had any questions, so I could say “I just bought one of these!” and then they’d be all nice. Or not. Whatever. I’m sure they have tons of homeless people in there all day using their free internet.

The last three submissions to the zine have all been excellent. (Actually 4 from 3 people.) The good part of this is that all of the writing is great; the bad part is that it makes me worry about my own writing, and the fact that I am getting absolutely nothing done these days. Anyway, that has me up to 36,000 words out of 80,000. I think I am going to close submissions of stories shorter than 5,000 words so I can just get a few longer bits in there. I am also writing an article for Slouch Magazine about the production process of the zine, which is largely a huge rant about why I even do this at all.

Oh, I went to the 7-Eleven in Denver that was redone as a Kwik-E-Mart for the Simpsons movie. It was not as overwhelming as the ones I’ve seen pix of in California. The signage was all funny, and they had the Slurpee machines redone as Squishy machines. The one product they had a lot of was Buzz cola, and I bought a 6-pack. No idea what it tastes like yet. I will give a full report and maybe get some pix at a later date. (And no, I am not hording these cans as some sort of collector’s item because 1) soda cans rust over time. 2) I am trying not to collect shit anymore and 3) the cans will be worthless over time, because they made so many, and every Comic Book Guy will be hoarding them in their mom’s basement.)

OK, time for breakfast.

There’s a lot of Mexican food in Denver, which sounds like a pretty good deal. But I’m finding as of late that I can’t deal with spicy food anymore. And I don’t have a long history of liking spicy food in the first place, so maybe it’s not that my insides are looking like the sleeve on a wizard’s coat, but that there’s some kind of psychosomatic training issue that stands in my way.

When I grew up, we never ate any spicy food, ever. Ever. If we made tacos, they were out of the Ortega kit from Kroger, and half the time I would put ketchup on them. Probably the spiciest thing I ate in my first sixteen years on this planet was that shaker of red pepper flakes that’s at Pizza Hut, and when I did try it, I was so immediately shut down, I never wanted it again. This was long before Elkhart was overrun with Hispanics, so there were no bodegas or good restaurants. (And for the record, I think it’s kindof hilarious that the Hispanic population exploded there, given the number of geriatric racists in the town.) There was this local chain called Hacienda that was about as Mexican as John Wayne in a Klan robe, and later I worked at Taco Bell, but that was it, until I got to college.

In college, I avoided spicy food. This wasn’t hard, because there weren’t any Indian restaurants in Bloomington, and the Mex places were more like Tex-Mex, with fajitas and shit, and not really hot items. I guess the Chinese places did have some hot numbers, but I stuck to sweet and sour pork. Otherwise, I avoided anything with any amount of chile or spice in it.

I remember one time being in Chicago with Simms and Bennett, and they were totally Jonseing to go to this Indian place. And for whatever reason, probably because the only Indian food I ever had was the stuff Simms was trying to make in his kitchen, I really didn’t even want to try it, so I just ordered a Coke. Simms and Bennett had all of this shit, and were chowing down and saying “Oh man Konrath, you have to try this Dal, it is fucking incredible”, and I was like “well, this Coke is pretty good. Can I go find a hot dog cart or something?”

You also have to realize there is some subset of the tech culture that worships chiles like they are christ on a cross. I don’t know why; it’s the same reason geeks get into Star Trek – maybe it’s nature, nurture, the quality of the product, but it just happens. So half of the places I work have had all of their machines named after various types of peppers, and the sysadmin that does that usually has that big chile pepper poster on the wall of their cube. The insanity goes to the point of flying to New Mexico to get raw peppers and then dry them, or growing them yourself in your apartment like you’re getting a pot harvest going. But the one thing common was this huge machismo pissing contest about the hottest peppers, about getting the craziest most insane sauces, finding the hottest green sauce at the most obscure restaurant, and turning the lunch product of beans, beef, and a flour tortilla into some giant test of manhood and individuality.

And if you ask anyone in that situation, “why the hell do you even like chile peppers?” they will give you some great philisophical discussion that makes no sense. And I always wondered, did I need to be born in another state or country to get this? I mean, I absolutely hated my first beer, but after a few months, it was a taste I acquired. I didn’t drink beer in the way I drank Coke though; it’s something about the way you let the flavor set in, what you ignore and what you focus on. An example: I have been drinking tart cherry juice for my foot, because it supposedly helps because of some enzyme. So I got this stuff at a health food store (if you see cherry juice that says 100% juice at the grocery store, 10 times out of 10 it is 4% cherry juice and 96% apple or pear juice blend. They can legally say “100% juice”, they just don’t say which juice.) and I poured a glass of it and drank it, just like I would drink a glass of grape soda. And it was HORRIBLE. I couldn’t finish it. Later I talked to Simms about it, and he said to get one of those little nyquil cups and drink it as if it was medicine. So I did that, and no problems. I could easily do four, five, six shots of the stuff if I treated it as medicine and not a tasty beverage.

And that always made me wonder if I needed to approach the food differently somehow, like ignoring the pain when you’re in the dentist’s chair. After I moved to New York, I started eating Indian food, and I slowly worked up to hotter dishes by doing this. And it wasn’t bad – I was eating the food for the experience, more than the flavor. I don’t really know how to describe that, but I worked my way up to hotter and hotter things. (Although one time I was trying to eat a vindaloo and I had a front tooth that was slowly working to the point where I needed a root canal, and that hurt like FUCK and set me back a bit on hot foods.)

So here I am in Denver, and we went to this place called Rocky Mountain Diner, which is sort of cowboy-esque in its theme, and has a lot of giant plates of hearty food, like chicken fried steak smothered in gravy and whatnot. And last night I ordered the chimichanga. Now, from what I remember, a chimichanga is basically a small burrito that is tightly wrapped and then deep fried, and you cover it with sour cream and basically take a year off of your life. But when I got my food, it was slightly different, like maybe it was pan-fried, and it was smothered in this green sauce. And when I took one bite, my system basically shut down, and I knew my intestinal tract would be about as stable as the current Somalian government for days. I felt a need to eat a few more bites, but it ate away at my tongue so much, I just couldn’t do it. And it baffled me as to why I could eat the most fiery Indian dishes back in New York, but I couldn’t touch this stuff. Maybe I have some dental work coming up that I don’t know about? I have a touch of a cold, could it be that? I don’t know, but it bothered me a bit. I always hated having tons of dietary or culinary preferences, so every time I ordered at a restaurant, I would have to say “hold the sauce, hold the mushrooms, hold the peppers, hold the cheese, hold the meat – actually, just give me an empty plate and a glass of water and charge me ten bucks.”

I did go get the cure this morning – McDonald’s hash browns. You drunks know what I’m talking about. Man I love it when I manage to get to the golden arches before 10:30. (Actually, that time varies widely these days, so don’t fuck with me about how it’s really 11:00 or whatever.)

I’m starting to hate eBay. I have a million auctions; I have allegedly like a thousand dollars in auctions that have closed or will close. I have two people who owe me money. I have no packages to ship out. I have made about $100 on this sofar, and I’m more than a week in. I wish I could push a big red button and just say “ALL AUCTIONS CLOSED! SEND IN YOUR FUCKING MONEY NOW! GO! GO! GO!” but I have to wait. That means I’m going to the My eBay page 900 times a day.

Oh! I got us Rockies tickets for the 4th of July. Box seats, as good as the ones we had for the Devil Rays, except we don’t have to watch the Devil Rays. It’s against the Mets. I have no idea how they are doing – I will have to read up – but the show will have fireworks, and we have kick-ass seats, and if it’s 200 out, we can duck back into the ACed clubhouse. I actually walked to the box office to buy the tickets, and I got there at like 6:07 and they closed at 6. So I ordered online. I will go back down there and pick them up, if that’s at all possible.

If anyone wants a good laptop, I am selling my old one on eBay, but I haven’t listed it yet. It’s a P3 with 128M RAM and Win98SE, so it’s no speed demon, but it is ultra small and light, so it’s a great road computer. I think it’s worth a couple hundred bucks. More info if you need it, but I thought I’d mention it here first.

Speaking of, gotta go box up some crap that just sold. Whee!

I had an “I’m not in New York anymore” experience yesterday. I’m selling a bunch of stuff on eBay to try to finance a new laptop and to free up some space in my apartment. I’m also at the point where I care a lot less about collecting stuff, and would rather just have the stuff I need, and cash in the bank. So there are a lot of big-ticket items on there, and I’m amazed at how much profit there is in selling collectible coins and money. If I knew this earlier, I would have carefully invested a ton more in silver proof sets and gold bullion coins.

(And if you’re interested, I’m not hard to find on eBay. But please don’t fuck with my auctions. The last thing I need is someone running up the price on something so I get to pay all of my fees in duplicate.)

Anyway, my first auction ended on Monday, so I boxed it up, and prepared myself for the dreaded trip to the post office. See, in New York, the PO is slightly less comfortable than an unlicensed proctologist with rusty equipment. Rude staff, long lines, maybe one or two people per hundred customers, small lobbies, bulletproof glass, bad hours, and no convenient locations whatsoever. But now, I loaded up the package in the car (instead of hauling it on the subway), then found the place a few blocks away. It had a huge parking lot and plenty of open spaces. The inside was giant, and had separate stores for supplies, passports, and even a section for stamp collectors. Through some scheduling fuckup, I arrived right at noon, and expected a horrorshow. There was nobody waiting, and four clerks available. The guy that helped me was really nice, made small talk, and wasn’t behind two feet of solid lexan with a little tank turret slit. I was out in two minutes. Jesus, is this what life is like in the rest of the country?

Also last night, I got this really strong weather deja-vu. It was really hot all day, I think it even broke 100. We went out to Safeway after dinner last night, and the weather had this really eerie resemblance to many of the nights in 1992 I described in Summer Rain. The still air of the day broke down from the temp and gave the atmosphere this charged, energetic quality. I always thought this was because I endured the hundred-degree heat with no AC, and when it dropped at night, it felt good. But I spend all of my time in the AC now, so it must be more of a heat/humidity thing. I think in New York, this never happened, because the whole place is a concrete radiator, and the winds are broken up by the buildings, and you never have that rapid of weather change on a regular basis. But here, and in Bloomington, the air has that really specific taste to it, and that brought me back.

I almost wanted to re-read SR last night, but then one of two things will happen: I will think the writing is horrible and cringe-worthy and get all depresso about it, or I will suddenly want to write a similar book but maybe in Seattle or maybe in Elkhart or whatever, and I’ve vowed that I can’t go back to writing that kind of stuff. I mean, I’m not writing anything else these days, but if I was, it would need to be more like Rumored.

I’m currently reading the Anthony Kiedis bio, Scar Tissue. It’s not bad. He had a pretty weird life starting out – his mom was a hippie, his dad was a drug dealer, he got into some after-school specials as a child actor, his dad used to hang out with Sonny Bono, a really weird survey of events. I’m just to the point where the band starts, so we’ll see how it continues.

I am walking again, and off steroids, so that’s good. I won’t be running any marathons any time soon, but I hope to start taking some walks to get my legs back to normal (or better). I also, for whatever reason, want to learn how to canoe or kayak. I’ve canoed before, but not in a long while. I don’t know about the kayak – it sounds okay, except for the flipping upside down part, which would freak me out. But there are some very cool lakes around here, and if I could find a place that I could give them $20, and then paddle around in the middle of nowhere, and maybe take a camera with me, I think that would be a good waste of time and money. Another thing I wish I could do is cross-country ski, but I don’t know how hard it is, or if it would fuck up my ankles or knees. Also I don’t know how much balance it requires, because I’m damn lucky I can walk upright, let alone do anything that requires coordination.

Okay, time for dinner.

I’m going to babble on about root beer. I can think of a couple of distant memories from my childhood that somehow make root beer important to me. One is that when I was a little kid, maybe three, I had this plastic cup. I think it was one of those sippy cups, but you could take the top off or maybe put a straw in it. But the cup was brown plastic, and the outside of it was textured like a root beer barrel, with a fake imprint of knotted wooden boards. I probably didn’t drink much root beer – more like Hi C – but it was my favorite cup forever, and I think even twenty years later, that thing was still knocking around my mom’s kitchen cabinets somewhere.

The other thing is that when we lived in Edwardsburg, Michigan, there weren’t many culinary options, except for “drive to Elkhart”. But there was this drive-in restaurant, one of the only places to eat in town. (From what I remember, there was a sit-down dinery type place that we very occasionally hit for a Sunday brunch, and I seem to remember a hole-in-the-wall pizza place, but I don’t think we ever ate there.) Anyway, this drive-in was a local and independent that resembled an A&W, but had its own branding and details. It still had all of the old-school trappings though: carhop service, the menu with a big metal button you pushed to place an order, the trays with the rubber hooks that hung onto your car window. Fries were in plastic baskets; broiled burgers came in foil envelopes. Even thinking about the food now makes me wish I could drive two thousand miles and order ten of everything. But the big thing was the root beer: cold, frosty, sweet, and served in glass mugs. I think the restaurant had some sort of baby bear/mama bear/papa bear sizing theme, although I could be hallucinating that. But I do remember us kids got little tiny root beers, but the adults got a huge mug. That root beer, the taste of that super-cold, super-sweet carbonated soft drink is what always sticks in my head as to what “good” root beer should be.

I should add that in my adult life, I’ve been to two surviving A&W restaurants that weren’t the bastardized mall franchise versions. One was somewhere in Southwest Washington or maybe Northwest Oregon, and was across the street from a putt-putt golf course where I went for an afternoon. It was this strange octagon shape, with an inside restaurant and outside drive-in stalls that were closed. The other was near Cornell, that little town that neighbors Ithaca that Mick Foley is from, and I’m too lazy to look it up. Anyway, this was an honest-to-god A&W and still had drive-up service. I bought the biggest size glass mug, which I still have. I also got a quart of root beer to-go, and they pulled out a plastic milk-type carton and filled it from this big tap that resembled a beer keg’s tap. I drank the whole thing on the way back to my hotel because I had no fridge, and that put me off of root beer for a bit. But now I wish I had one of those taps in my kitchen.

Come to think of it, there was a bastard A&W in College Mall in Bloomington. It was somewhat scary, and I think they didn’t have hamburgers at all. They had a hot dog that was passable, with cheddar cheese and bacon bits on it, but their hotdogs were very nitrite-y and also overpriced, and the place was always very skeevey anyway. The root beer came out of one of those bag-in-box fountains, just like any other soft drink at a fast food joint, and in a wax-coated paper cup, didn’t do much for me. But it still had a faint connection to its drive-in lineage.

I’ve tried a lot of root beers in the past, and I think what I like contradicts what “serious” root beer connoisseurs might enjoy. First of all, any of that vanilla creme shit is off my list; I really don’t like it, especially when it’s a really fakey, artificial vanilla taste. It always tastes like some kind of cough syrup to me. Any of the creme soda versions of root beer are, to me, not root beer and are removed from the discussion. There are also a bunch of sub-categories of root beer that either I don’t like or that should probably not be in the same division, like black cherry or any of the other cherry-oriented root beers out there.

I think one of the other major axes of division is the general taste. Stuff like A&W or Hires are pretty far in one direction, with very little taste and a lot of sweetness to it. To me, that’s where it’s at, although you can go too far in that direction and get a really synthetic taste. (Buy a fountain root beer at a Burger King in an airport, and there you go.) You can go off in the other direction with much more sarsaparilla, birch beer, or anything that tastes slightly more bitter, rich, or has more “root” or “beer” to it. Don’t forget that the “beer” comes from the fact that old timey root beer was actually brewed. Instead of jetting carbon dioxide into giant tanks as big as your house (which is how Coca-Cola does it), people would mix the flavor, some sugar, and a bit of yeast, and let it sit for a while to ferment. (Hey, that’s where the barrel comes from!). This makes a root beer that has much more of that darker flavor. It can also add a percent or two of alcohol to it, but who’s counting.

(And yes, I tried this. In college, I worked with a couple of people who were all about brewing beer, and they got me hooked up with a store that sold the yeast and flavoring. I tried a two-liter test, and it turned into liquid poo. Plus it’s cheaper to go buy a 2-liter of A&W at the corner store than to fuck around with your own brew for weeks. Still, there’s a certain romance to the idea of making your own mix, although I’m too lazy to try again.)

Format is important. A giant icy mug of fresh draft A&W with a tall head: good. A can of A&W from the supermarket: not as good. A fountain-poured A&W from the food court in a paper cup: maybe bad. Glass is important; even if you have a two-liter from Kroger, pouring it in a real glass mug with some ice makes it twice as good. When IBC first came out (or when I first saw it anyway), that was magic, because it was at a point when glass bottling was going away for Coke and Pepsi and others in favor of the 2-liter, and here were these six-packs of amber old-school bottles that made it all better. (I loved drinking those in the halls in my dorm, so the RA would freak out thinking I had a real beer.) So glass is good, maybe for a temperature thing or a taste thing you get from metal cans, but maybe it’s just nostalgia.

(Before I forget, I will mention that Hires root beer has a different meaning if you work around computers a lot, and that always trips me up.)

(Oh, also gotta pay homage to Tom Sample here. From the NecroKonicon:

“Have a rootbeer!” On McKinley road, somewhere before Mishawaka and South Bend and on the way to IUSB, there used to be an ice cream place that had a sign out front in the summer of 1990 that said “Keep cool! Have a root beer!” Somehow derived from this, Tom Sample and Jon Konrath had a ritual of yelling “Have a root beer” at pedestrians to scare the living shit out of them.

I’ll mention two other brands that don’t really fit into this classification. The first is Barq’s; it’s been around forever, as a smaller or regional brand. But it got bought by Coke and pushed nationwide in the late 80s. I remember it really exploding around 1994. This was a weird time for soft drinks; Coke was trying to get OK Cola going (which didn’t), and the Crystal Pepsi mess had just went over. A million boutique brands were flooding the market, and the majors were trying to keep up. One second it was tea, like Snapple. Ten minutes later, it was refined water, like Clearly Canadian. This was a great time for the consumer, except that you might get hooked on a product that went away in six months.

So Barq’s came out of that, and it was different. First, it had caffeine, which is good. It also has less sugar content, which supposedly gives it more “bite”. It doesn’t have less sugar for the sake of any heavy flavoring, though. And it’s less carbonated than other root beers. I like Barq’s in theory, but I find that the carbonation makes it sort of “heavy”, and it just sits in my stomach and makes me sick. I think my fondest memory of Barq’s was when they had those stick-on tattoos included in each box. Right before a second date with someone, I put this giant heart with an arrow through it on my chest just below my shirt line, and did the “hey, I got a tattoo yesterday!” and freaked her the fuck out.

The other root beer that doesn’t fit the model is New York Seltzer. Back in the day, they had these clear or almost-clear sodas that had a flavor to them. My favorite was the grape, but I also enjoyed the root beer, which had just a faint amber color to it. It didn’t taste like a strong root beer, but it also wasn’t like these flavored water drinks that are flooding the market now. They also came in glass bottles, which I loved. I remember first getting turned onto these when I was in upstate New York for a couple of weeks in 1988. So the memory always reminds me of sweating it out in the Catskills, watching Morton Downey Jr. late nights on local TV, driving around the Hudson River valley for hours to see a historic plaque, and that sort of thing. Good times. I heard a rumor this stuff came back, but is horrible, so what can you do.

The reason I got on this trip is that we were at Cost Plus and I bought this party keg of Virgil’s root beer.. I have to admit, my only motivation was that I really thought the idea of root beer in a keg was cool. So I got it home and completely stripped down and reconfigured the fridge so I could get the thing in there upright, and left it for a few hours to cool. This was a real party keg made out of metal with welded joints and the whole nine, not just some plastic hokey deal. To get it rolling, I had to pop open a valve on the top, which released a huge hiss of pressurization built up from being thrown around the back of the Subaru for an afternoon. Then I turned and pulled out a little tap, and root beer magically flowed into my glass mug, at first producing a ratio of head to liquid of about 18:1.

Virgil’s isn’t bad stuff. The carbonation is a little low for me, and it has a very dark taste to it. It’s microbrewed, all natural, and they take great pains to tell you it isn’t like the stuff made in giant vats. You can taste the difference, and it’s not bad, but it reminds me that the stuff that takes me back isn’t this. The novelty of the gravity-pour keg is pretty overwhelming, though – I wish I could get Coke like this, except for the part about the fire department having to cut me out of the house and load me onto a flatbed truck six months from now. The keg has its downsides: you’re supposed to drink it all (just over a gallon) in eight hours, and I’m the only sweetened soft drink drinker in the house, so that didn’t happen. It also takes up half your fridge, and I have no idea what to do with it when it’s done. Also, spending $20 on a gallon of root beer is sort of ludicrous, considering you can get two 2-liters of Dad’s for maybe $2.50. But you gotta try new things, right?

Anyway, that’s my nostalgia trip for today. And now I must go, because I am inexplicably thirsty.