December 13, 2003
Stouts and ales are for people who live in cold, miserable places like Vancouver. They are chummy, hearthside beers, the shepherd's pies of beverages. Now tell me, how appealing is the thought of shepherd's pie in that Louisiana heat?
Wine? Wine is a parasol. Fine for moderate days--delicate flower of intoxicants--it wilts in the heat, and bruises in extreme cold. Wine is for people with air conditioners.
Lager cuts to the chase. It is a bag of ice to the back of your neck, a bracing offshore breeze that raises goose bumps. If there were no popsicles, Southerners would let their children drink lager.
Surefire pathway to hangover: a clawfoot tub of ice generously displaced by bottles of lager + temperatures in the 'sweating in the shade' zone.
Antidote: a boiling spicy vat of crawfish, corn cobs and potatoes. Taken with lager, of course.
A friend of mine was at the jazz fest in New Orleans, soaking in a drenching sun and sipping wine--wine of all things--while vibing to blues, gospel and dixieland. And she had a habit of slipping phrases like "hot" "it's hot" "awful damn hot" into her emails.
I, being holed up in the dreary Vancouver grey, well...
So you wanna know what you're missing here? March. It's frippin' MARCH
again!
The heat's on. I took a bath. Even washed dishes, just to stick my frozen
to feebleness fingers into some awful damn hot water.
So stop telling me it's "awful damn hot!"
On the other hand, you have my permission to wax poetic on the subjects of
jazz and crawfish...
She apologised...then waxed...so I wrote to her of the virtues of lager.
p.
