First, the baseball update. I now have tickets for the following games:

• 4th of July vs. the Mets, club box seats on the first base side of the press box. This is also a fireworks game, so there will be many explosions and flares and whatnot.
• Aug. 8th, Rockies vs. Brewers. Afternoon game, I have an infield box seat between third and home, below the club seats we had for the Devil Rays. I took a seat like 20 rows back, to avoid the sun.
• Sept 3rd, Rockies vs. Giants. I have a seat in the second row of the rightfield box. Unfortunately, this is too far for me to throw D-cell batteries at Barry Bonds’ giant mongoloid head. (Also, I’m sure if I did, he would keep them for the Barry Bonds Hall of Fame.)

I also bought a cheap AM/FM/TV radio to bring so I can hear the announcers during the game. I can’t believe I could not find one lying around the house. We got this free shit MP3 player from Qwest, and it has a radio, but it is FM only, and the games are only broadcast on AM in Denver. (They are on FM pretty much everywhere else in the state. I heard this was because the Broncos preseason was more important than the Rockies, so they pushed them to AM. And with the way the Rockies have been playing lately, I’m not surprised they got bumped for news coverage of local junior-level amateur womens’ golf.)

eBay is slowly paying off. I have made about $1100 since I started about a week ago, so I can get a new laptop. I have a bunch of other sales pending, then I will get all of my money out of PayPal and/or get a debit card from them and go to the Apple Store and try to beat down all of the idiots drooling over the iPhone. They might as well call that thing the iScratchAndSmudge, because I don’t see how that thing doesn’t turn into a giant smear of grease and abrasion. I look at my iPod, which I treat fairly well, and then imagine that it would be pressed up against my face, and also that it would cost at least three times as much. I’ll stick to my Sidekick, especially since it now looks like a huge bargain.

I’m going to the gym now, so the foot is pretty much better. I’m not, and the treadmill is killing me, but hopefully that will go away soon.

We saw the new Die Hard movie this weekend, so I feel obligated to mention that in the context of some kind of review. First of all, I’ll say that Bruce Willis may be horrible in about 90% of the movies he tries to make, but this franchise is the one kind of role he can really pull off. I think the first two Die Hards were decent, above average but nothing that made you think or had a really intricate plot. The third one, with Samuel Jackson, was excellent. The chemistry between the two of them balanced it out. And even though the plot was over-the-top stupid (who the fuck can get from Wall Street to Central Park in like three minutes?) I still liked it.

This one was not as good as the third, but it wasn’t bad. The parts where the “I’m a Mac” kid joked around were pretty good. The computer stuff: 100% fake. 200% fake. Kevin Smith: stick to directing. The dialogue in the serious parts: corny to the point of laughter. But the action scenes? Jesus fucking christ they really tried to outdo themselves. Crashing a car into a helicopter? Taking out an F-35 jet? This stuff was awesome beyond belief. The plot in general was about the same as any of the other Die Hards. The one thing missing was that the bad guy wasn’t related to those Nazi fucks that were in all of the first three films. I guess they ran out of brothers.

This film fits in well with the whole summer blockbuster lineup, and is probably the one I wanted to see most. I have no desire to see the Transformers movie; I was too old to play with Transformers as a kid, so I never got into them in the first place. I’m sure the film will be 90% inside references to the original toys or comics or cartoons or whatever. I’ve sworn to never, ever see a movie based on a comic book again, so that cuts out like a third of the lineup. I would like to see the Simpsons movie, although I think there’s about a 50% chance it will bomb. Rush Hour 3 might be decent. The Bourne Ultimatim might not be too bad either. Now that movie tickets cost less than Rolling Stones reunion tickets, I can justify seeing some not-top-tier movies.

Okay, got a whole stack of crap to go to the PO, so I better get to that.

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

. (Actually, that time varies widely these days, so don’t fuck with me about how it’s really 11 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

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.

Yes, another baseball game report, but this is the big one: Yankees versus Rockies. Another annoying bulleted list:

• This game was HUGE. I got there about an hour early, and it was roughly three times more crowded than last Friday’s game. (The Yankees are a bit more popular than the Devil Rays.)
• The ten dollar lot across the street was charging $30.
• There were an insane number of Yankees fans. There were more Yankees jersies and hats than you’d see at Yankee stadium for a home game.
• Also present: lots of large bald men with no necks acting like assholes. Also lots of loud-mouthed women with orange tans, frizzed-out frosted white hair, and pure black eyebrows. It was like being back in Astoria.
• For $60 each, our seats were shit. Section 149, row 20 - that’s straight back from first base. It’s the worst of both worlds: you can’t see the scoreboard, and you can’t really get a good look at the field. They’re also uncovered, and not near any food.
• Sarah had to meet me there a half hour late from work, so I had to fend for myself. See above about no food - it was a real struggle just to get a hot dog and a water. The lines at everything were completely insane. Every hot dog stand was like a confessional at the rapture.
• There was a guy sitting in front of me that looked just like James Cromwell (aka George Sibley from Six Feet Under). He had on the old-timey hat and the nerdy dress-casual clothes and the whole deal. While I was sitting there, about three dozen people tried to cut through his row, and he got more and more pissed, which was both funny and annoying.
• The stadium SOLD OUT. It was probably twice as full as Friday’s game. Even the nosebleed seats were sold out. (And nosebleed might be a literal term, given anything above the 20th row in the top deck is above 5280 feet.)
• I don’t think I’ve seen a single Asian person since I moved to Colorado, which is somewhat amusing considering I used to live in a neighborhood where I was the only person not born in China. Well, over from us was a whole gaggle of Japanese, all holding up giant posterboard letter-per-person signs spelling out MATSUI.
• Sarah pointed out later that each team had a player named Matsui. They were probably rooting for Hideki, but maybe they support their country and not just one team.
• I mentioned that maybe if they wanted him to pay attention, they could have at least spelled out the sign in Japanese.
• The lady next to me was this typical Long Island piece of shit that had the “New York is the best city in the world and we’re so much better than anything else, although I don’t actually live IN the city, just way the fuck out in Long Island” thing going on. Which brings me to my next point.
• I don’t know if I am a Yankees fan or not. When I was in New York, I was a Yankees fan, because so many of my coworkers were Red Sox fans, and I was sick of hearing about it. And there, a Yankees game had a lot of tradition to it, and it was a nice little thing. It was like going to Coney Island and getting a hot dog at Nathan’s, or going to Times Square and beating a homeless man with a lead pipe: good fun for the whole family, in the spirit of the Big Apple. But I’ve found that when you leave New York, the kind of people who still associate themselves with New York are the pathetic, soulless assholes who are trying to cling onto this fake ideal as a way to define themselves. And part of that fake ideal is being a total prick. Yankees fans HATE it when people come to Yankee Stadium and cheer on the other team. Why is inundating the Rockies’ stadium and acting like an innsuferable prick any better? It isn’t.
• I suddenly found myself surrounded by 40,000 of these assholes. I also found I was suddenly the biggest Rockies fan in the universe. I wanted them to win the World Series at this point. Hell, I wanted them to win the Superbowl, the Masters, and the 08 presidental election.
• Jeter got the kind of response that George Bush would get at a conservative christian gun show. If you remember that Being John Malkovitch movie where he crawled into his own head and only saw John Malkovitches, if Derek Jeter did that, it’s pretty much what it looked like, with all of the Jeter jerseys out there.
• You can get a Yankees fan very pissed by loudly saying “Now A-Rod, is he the one that admitted he used steroids, or is he still denying it?”
• It’s also funny because I don’t think any of the Rockies players except maybe Helton could actually afford to buy steroids.
• The game started really fast - pitch, out; pitch, out; pitch, out. I thought we’d get to the 8th inning at 0-0 in 20 minutes.
• Pretty much every Yankees pop to the outfield was effortlessly caught, which became more and more hilarious as the game progressed.
• The Yankees were having real first-base problems due to a lack of a certain someone who is injured right now. They called in so many people to play first base, I seriously thought maybe I had a chance to get down there for an inning or two.
• To me, the only thing funnier than watching an NL pitcher with a batting average of like .130 come up to bat is watching an AL pitcher with a .000 have to bat at an NL stadium. I swear Mussina was going to start crying every time he got to the plate.
• It was sort of pissing me off that Jeter could get to first base and the crowd pop was bigger than the first Beatles concert at Shea Stadium, but when the Rockies scored, people were largely like “yeah, whatever.”
• Torrealba hit a home run, and I thought the Dina Lohan clone next to me was going to have an aneurysm.
• The biggest tension of the game was in the 8th, when the Yankees loaded the bases with two outs, and Posada came up to bat. This was right after Hawkins came in to pitch, relieving Fogg, who had a good seven innings. Anyway, every Yankees fan in the place was absolutely, positively certain that Posada was going to hit in a grand slam and end the game. Strike, strike, strike. Much mullet hair pulled and obscenities shouted. First the Sopranos go off the air, then this. These people had nothing to live for, except maybe the hopes that Billy Joel would do a summer tour.
• Some Rockies fans started getting more vocal about things toward the end. The George guy in front of me kept shouting stuff, like yelling “postseason!” when A-rod was at bat.
• Also, it appeared that the rockpile (i.e. bleacher) seats were all bought out by drunken Red Sox fans, who started chanting “Yankees suck” and questioning if Johnny Damon’s mother was in fact married when he was conceived.
• I gimped up at the end of the 8th to try and get closer to the doors, which was a bad idea, because the entire deck was filled with people, and I had to struggle to see the last of the game. Then Mr. Damon struck out, and it basically became Kent State. The team with the highest payroll was beaten by the team with the third-lowest payroll, and to a contrarian like me, that’s good baseball.

Photos here, although they aren’t that groundbreaking if you saw the last two sets.

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

.

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.