Alberty's Blah Blah Blog

Being a “Creativity Specialist” is a little tough when you feel bereft of creativity.

I have this upcoming show that I’m writing for that is hanging over my head like Damocles’ Sword. And the hair it’s dangling from is one of mine. And if you know me, you know I don’t have the strongest strands in the world.

The writing well is pretty empty right now. And so I have done what I (and I must say others) have done. I have gotten a new computer game.

Lame, right? Not really. Many people in creative industries use games as a way to blow off steam and try to open their minds to other types of thought.

I have found that that actually works for me, quite often.

My problems: 1) I am pretty bored with the games I have; 2) I use a Mac.

I love my Mac, but boy is it light on the games, at least the games I like.

Oh, right. I have a third problem. I don’t like to spend money.

Well, I’ve found a game…and I’ve done it without spending any money…yet.

I have become …um… a little addicted to Trade Nations. It’s a little game for the iPad all about building a little city of your own. But one of the cool little things is that you “find” neighbors online and trade your own goods with them.

I really like that mock-social aspect of the thing.

What I mean to say is that I would love that mock-social aspect of the thing…if I had any friends that also played the game.

Here is the catch.

Magic Beans.

By using magic beans you can purchase über-cool stuff, help pay for regular stuff, and hurry the production of regular buildings and goods. But that’s not what makes them magic.

What makes these beans magic is their ability to make your personal cash disappear. This is where the game designers attempt to hook you. You can purchase as little as $.99 worth of beans all the way up to, I think, a package of $99.00 worth.

So tempting. I have not purchased any beans. But they are calling. And I have started to rationalize why I should buy some.

Here’s a good one: The app is free. I should pay something to them for this happiness.

I think that’s a good one. And an honest one. I need to pay these people.

But how many beans…I mean how much should I pay them? I can’t pay them $99.00 for 3000 beans. Right? I mean, that’s too much. Right? And I love my wife. So $99.00 is definitely way too much.

I’m thinking $4.99. That seems good for an app. I think I’ll go with that. I’ll check with my wife.

Anyway, I really like this app. I don’t have to think about it all the time, but it takes my mind off my creative slump. I think that’s just the balm my psyche needs.

See, it’s not a drug, it’s a medicine.

So, if you need a little medicine try it out. But make sure you tell me what your screen name is so I can get a few neighbors.

And if you want to throw a few beans my way, that’s cool too.

Popularity: 6% [?]

Every other year my wife goes to Japan. That sounds great, doesn’t it?

How about if I tell you she takes 7-12 high-schoolers for three weeks. Better? No?

Maybe not, but I want to go to Japan, too. And my desire is getting strong enough to do something I swore I would never, ever do: chaperone students on a trip…anywhere.

See, I believe in karma. As such, I have a precocious son who keeps me on my toes. Thus, if I were ever to chaperone, I would no doubt have to deal with a student much like myself. Not worth it … yet.

Though I must say, the desire to get there is pretty strong.

There is so much about the culture that I find fascinating and mystical and captivating. There is a spiritual quality that seems to run throughout everything, from festivals to finance.

I have friends that argue there is a spiritual thread in American culture. But I wholeheartedly disagree. You can be thoroughly, unrepentantly, blindly religious and not have an ounce of spirituality. That is part of what has happened to this country.

I am hunting for that special, soft, internal spirituality. Which is why I can’t really chaperone my wife’s Japan trips.

Her Japan journey always coincides with my summer spiritual journey: Classics at Brucemore. It is sort of my vacation/chaperone, joy/work.

So, unless my wife finally decides to do her “Adult Japan Journey,” where we go with friends on a month long journey to Japan, culminating in a hike up Mt. Fuji, I’m afraid I will have to stay home and get my spiritual vacation from theatre.

But a boy can dream, can’t he?

Popularity: 5% [?]

I have contracted an infernal illness. I will write on Wednesday. Sorry.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Okay, so morel hunting season is starting up, and, as I understand it, there are two camps:

Camp One is “Oh, my god, let’s get on our hiking boots, grab a big bag and go. I can’t wait!”

Camp Two is “What?”

I will take this moment to posit that there is a third camp, my camp: “I want to love the morel, but I just simply can’t put that thing in my mouth.”

I think that I can pinpoint my dislike — well, I can’t really call it that — let’s call it distrust — my distrust of morels.

It took me a long — a really long — time to get into fungi. I probably had my first fresh button mushroom in my early thirties. My knowledge of mushrooms was completely formed by cans and Chinese restaurants. Slimy, gray, pungent, slippery sticks of rubbery snot.

It probably didn’t help that I had to open those six-pound cans of mushrooms for my pizza job in college, the sickening smell, like food-borne formaldehyde, grabbing my forest of nose-hairs and ripping them violently up into my brain cavity. You might say that it left an impression.

My first memory of eating good mushrooms came from my wife, my then off-and-on-and-off-and-on-and-off-and-on girlfriend. She really only cooks about four things: fajitas, hard-boiled eggs, sautéed mushrooms, and … okay, maybe three.

Anyway, she was going through this mushroom phase and I was, quite frankly, a little appalled. But then I saw her cook them. Little white buttons sliced to about an eighth of an inch piled on the cutting board. Butter sizzling in the skillet. She dumped the buttons in the skillet, turned them a couple of times then coated them liberally with a mixed Cajun spice, and it was done. Simple.

You know how there are those people who believe that bacon makes everything better? Or, wait! I once had a friend who liked to say, “You can deep fry a turd and I’ll eat it.” I kind of feel that way about butter.

Butter got me over the hump. It was simple — three ingredients — and delicious. So that got me into the fungi.

I can’t remember when I started hearing about the whole morel thing. It’s like a weird food cult, you know. But I heard that a couple of our friends were avid morel hunters, so I mentioned it to them. They got all excited and turned suddenly evangelical about it. It was a little disconcerting.

They were heading out the next week and told me they would bring me back some good ones. I was pretty stoked about it.

What they brought me back was a Ziploc baggie of pale, slimy alien phalluses. There, I said it: Alien Phallus.

Now, as much as I like to think of myself as a “foodie” I am not a nose to tail guy. I once had beef heart at a restaurant well-known for its beef heart, surrounded by slavering beef heart lovers, and it was all I could do not to launch my half-digested beef heart onto the center of the table. I drank a lot of wine that dinner.

Anyway, what I am saying is that I am not the kind of guy who vacations to Bangkok for the tiger penis.

I couldn’t eat those morels. I could barely grab the bag they were holding out for me.

That was years ago. And I have recently been thinking that I might give it another go.

Then I was listening to my podcast of The Splendid Table. She was talking to this guy who was getting ready to go out morel hunting. They sounded like two basement-boys at a Comic-Con talking about the new Green Lantern movie.

Anyway, the guy said he liked to reconstitute his dried morels in milk. I nearly had to pull over. For some reason that just reached down my throat and pulled my stomach up to my larynx.

It might have put me off morels in perpetuity.

Popularity: 7% [?]

So, as one major project begins to wind down my mind has begun to wander to the next.

Here is the problem. I have been so blindly immersed in my present project that every other project has all but disappeared from my radar. Or, perhaps a better analogy: while my present project has been fixed with the goods from the front of the refrigerator, the others, pushed to unreachable back corners, have grown green fur and suppurated through neglect. So much so that it’s difficult to see their original forms.

Suffice to say, when I finally sat back and looked to the next project — assured of a momentary respite — I actually had a bit of a panic attack. There is simply too much I want to do and too little time. Or, to be honest, too little energy to do it in my desired time frame.

I am finding my focus wandering much more of late. Instead of my thirty-minute lunch television, I find myself having ingested a full hour or hour-and-a-half of relatively mindless, though enjoyable, cable pap.

I’m tired. It’s that simple.

And while I would love to be a buck-up-and-do-it drill sergeant type guy, I’m not. So the sweet water of focus and drive come from a very, very deep well with a small bucket and a long rope.

Waah waah waah.

So, I guess I’m going to have to fall back to the one gimmick that pulls me through, if forced, during these dry and self-loathing times: schedules.

I hate them: schedules.

There is a smack of creative stunting to them for me. Stunting as in impeding creativity, not stunting as in jumping a clown car over a flaming short bus.

So as this King reclines dying, sated and fulfilled though he is, I must look to the heir apparent. Or at least schedule his impending coronation.

Popularity: 6% [?]

I love cooking shows. I may have discussed this before, so sorry … but …

Especially the competition shows. It’s like watching instant creativity. I’m suffused with wonder and respect for the chef and, I must admit, envy.

I had, at one time thought about becoming a chef.

One of my clearest memories is of a dinner I made for my family. I was in high school. Maybe sophomore year. My mother had these great Time-Life recipes of the world books. I pulled out the French one, Provence, I think. The whole dinner was from that book. And the thing I remember most was the cream of carrot soup. That dish, perhaps that dish alone, fired my desire to cook.

My first couple of years of college I worked for the college’s pizza delivery company, Wild Pizza. I love it … after my first nearly ruinous night. I was asked to make the dough — I think it was for the next day, but I can’t quite remember. Anyway I misread the yeast. I converted tablespoons to cups. Yeah, bad, and even worse, stupid — stoooooopid.

I loved Wild Pizza. We would put anything on our pizzas. The O’Malley, although new to me was an old pizza for Boston: Just crack a couple of eggs on top. It could be a sausage O’Malley or a pep O’Malley or even an Hawaiian O’Malley. But we had stoned and drunk frat boys calling in for Lucky Charms pizza or pastrami pizza. We worked out of the food service hall, so if we had it we put it on. I even have a vague memory of making a pizza pizza, where we took a frozen pizza, chopped it up and put it as toppings on a fresh pizza.

Then at the U of Iowa I worked at the State Room, our fine dining restaurant. I worked for a crazy Frenchman named Andre. I started at Salads, did desserts, and ended up on Grill. This experience kind of took the food wind out of my chef sails. It wasn’t the hours, which were horrible, especially for a college student. It wasn’t the heat, though it only took leaning once against the tile wall by the grill to learn not to do it again. It was the insanity.

Andre was insane. The megalomaniacal Greek sous chef was insane, mean, and had a zip code-ego. The staff was filled with kooky, pot-smoking, gad-about nymphomaniacs. Don’t get me wrong, that last part was fun, but really, really, really, tiring. And they would screw each other (metaphorically) to make themselves look better, paid better, and get more time off.

It was the politics of insanity in a relatively irrelevant world. I don’t do that well.

So when I see people who work in that insanity (because I know that insanity is prevalent in restaurants) able to rise above the petty groo-groo whackum, and clear their minds enough to create tasty food on the fly, they get my instant artistic respect.

I feel like I get a little  creative boost from their creativity. And that kind of art, edible or not, feeds my soul.

Popularity: 5% [?]

I love names. Nothing makes me giggle uncontrollably like a good name. And by good I mean unusual or, even better, totally inappropriate. Chihuahuas named Mongo and Bruiser. Newfoundlands named Pixie. Poodles named Spike. And that’s just the dog world.

My first wife was a cat lover. I was allergic and didn’t really care about the feline petanalia, but she loved them, so we got one — a beautiful black cat with a pleasant personality. And by that I mean she didn’t leave the room when I came in. We named her Sam.

After about a year, we got another cat. This one was more like a dog and I really liked it. But the naming of this cat was perhaps one of the first cracks in our domestic blissdom. I was really pushing for Ella. I mean I loved the idea. And she did, too. Until I spilled the beans on the reason. Sam and Ella. Sam an’ Ella. Say it out loud and think of chicken.

We ended up naming her Lucy. She wasn’t a Lucy. If anything she was a Mongo, but alas. In the divorce my ex got that cats and I got her ABBA CDs, so …

When I worked for dad in high school —

TANGENT: If you have never worked for your parent as a high schooler, I can’t really consider you an adult. It’s like Israeli compensatory military service, or Mwiri scarification, or Kuria circumcision, or whatever in god’s name the poor kids of the Baruya tribe from Papua, New Guinea have to do. Don’t look that one up. I’m telling you, there is not enough mind-bleach in the world to undo that knowledge.

My dad’s rite of passage was making out with his cousin, Lulah, behind Phillips derrick #428. But that’s what all the boys did. It was kind of like working for a parent. At least it involved some form of nepotism.

— when I worked for dad in high school, I began collecting names. He worked for a humongous insurance middle-man, and it was my job to open the envelopes, sort the incoming insurance applications into their respective companies, and alphabetize each pile.

It was a treasure trove. A veritable Xanadu of monikerial bliss.

Unfortunately, my notebook of that time was lost in a flurry of post-adolescent anti-nostalgic cleansing, but I do remember some of the good ones.

There was an old guy, maybe 80, who was applying for insurance (I remember thinking that was funny and “ironic” thirty years ago — now it’s just become … well…), anyway his name was Flenoil Lane. Crazy. I’ve loved that name for years.

When we got the GE account, I remember thinking we would get a lot of hoity-toity Eastern rich names, like Bowden Rutgers-Brown III, or something. But the one, or two, that I remember from that spate was a set of twins: Avalanche and Spring Summers. I mean, seriously?

But the best name of my youth actually came from a friend of mine (and I know you are reading this). He lived across from a man named Gaylord Seaman. Gold, I tell you. GOLD.

Popularity: 8% [?]

There’s this crazy thing that sometimes happens when I’m with my kid. Usually he does something— what he does changes — but anyway, it hits me at some sort of molecular level. I can’t breathe for a second.

I had two of those today.

The first one was this morning. He woke up earlier than normal, about 6:00. Se we had kind of a full day before our day normally starts.

So we did what we do when he’s home all day: We went grocery shopping.

Anyway, I picked up a pack of Hebrew National All-All Beef Franks and handed them to him to put into the cart. He grabbed them with both hands, gritted his teeth and did his Incredible Hulk shake, then said in his monster voice, “Iiiiiiiiiii liiiiiiiiiiiiike meeeeeeeeeeat!”

Yes, he does an Incredible Hulk shake. And he has a monster voice. And he does, in fact, like meat.

It took my breath away. I can’t even say why.

The second moment of the day was after I picked him up from PDO, which is kind of a daycarish thing. We went out to find a rake for him. He loves to rake — go figure — but we only have adult sized rakes, so it just makes him angry.

Anyway, we found a rake, and he was so excited. We got into the car and he started singing, “Rake, rake, rake.” But halfway through his, I think it might have been his 82^nd “rake,” he fell asleep.

That was a big breath loss.

That one I think I can kind of pin-point. I kind of melt when he sleeps. I think it’s about a kind of helpless innocence. Like I’m somehow his caretaker. Like I’m needed.

And I guess that one is just that simple.

Popularity: 4% [?]

I had really gotten into a good rhythm with my “new eating pattern.” I had done the Food Matters Detox for around nine days, which, as I understand it, is pretty long. And I did it while I was ragingly ill with bronchitis — I like to remind you of that because I am a man and each illness feels like it may be my last.

Then I continued the morning veggie concoction and alternated the lunch swill with cooked food. I was feeling good and looking good … um … better. Then I went on Spring Break with my wife. “I’ll be fine, Honey. I’ll get back to it when we get home.”

Right?

So, I’ve slipped back into my bad habits. Damnit! Every time. I can’t tell you how many times it’s happened. I feel like a food-smoker, you know?

I was going to launch into a litany of the foolish reasons I have given myself each day for not getting back into that healthy rhythm. I probably would have made it funny. But fuck it.

I just have start it up again. And hope that this time I can keep that rhythm going.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Sounds like something Hunter S. Thompson might say to a waitress in Reno.

“I want to naked choo choo.”

Alas, it has become a bit of a thing at our house. My son has entered that stage where he clearly loves to feel his penis bouncing up and down more than he loves to be warm.

We have this big empty diaper box that I have taped a long dog leash to. He sits in it and we pull him around. He calls it his Choochoo. Well, now he loves to ride in it naked.

Here’s the thing. It’s one of those boxes where the two top flaps don’t come together. So, on the underside, there is a good inch and half gap where there is nothing to cushion him from the carpet. I don’t know how he doesn’t have debilitating rug burns on the underside of his scrotum. But, he doesn’t. Yet.

After his bath he will yell things like, “Naked play!” or “Naked chase!” Sometimes he yells, “Naked Daddy!” which, thank god, does not mean I am naked. What it means is that he plans to run naked from the bathroom, through our living room, stand at the edge of our sunken tiled room, look at me and yell, “I’m naked!” Then he will turn around and bolt toward his bedroom. Sometimes he will stop in mid-stride and just jump up and down.

I know what he’s doing. He’s just enjoying the jingle-jangle.

And here is the bad part…the really bad part.

I’m envious. I want to strip off my clothes, jump up and down and feel the jingle-jangle.

But, alas our house is surrounded with six foot tall picture windows and very sheer curtains.

Well, that and the last time I jumped around naked I hurt myself. It’s not just the boobs that drop, ladies.

Anyway, I’m trying to embrace this new puerile joy my so is experiencing without being too buttoned up about it.

I’m just worried his next phrase will be “Naked dog wrestle!”

Popularity: 7% [?]