on mirlitons and beer

Last week, the Beautiful Young Man and I drove to New Orleans to visit Saz and some other folks. We saw some of Eudora Welty's pins (*) while in Jackson, peered at the Windsor Ruins in the rain, and said hi to the carnivorous plants and other inhabitants of the kiddie garden chez Longue Vue.

On New Year's Eve, I helped Saz with some of the prep for shrimp creole. There was sparkling wine and an Abita pale ale and coffee... and we still decided to turn in before midnight.

Before we headed home, Saz handed us a bag full of grapefruits and Meyer lemons, which she'd grown in the back yard of her office. She added a mirliton, a squash popular in creole cooking:



It's kind of spiky -- I used a potholder to protect my hands as I peeled it. Raw, it tastes like underripe honeydew. I roasted it last night and will probably mash the remains for lunch. It has been worth its weight in entertainment alone -- the BYM has a very eloquent suspicious glare, and he was aiming it a-plenty at the mirliton during its brief residence on our kitchen counter.

There's not much else to report at the moment -- I'm contending with an almost-bout of flu (i.e., things haven't gotten ooky yet, but everything aches) and the usual turn-of-the-year paperwork, sketching out the start of some new poems, and working (the current project includes discussions of cannibalism and kinky nuns in 18th-century Spanish literature. My job rules).

I'm also still reading through the papers and books I collected on my drive through Florida and the Carolinas a month ago. One of the best pieces has been Julie Johnson's Hang Up the Hangover, which concludes with this advice:

When you wake up hurting, drink as much water or juice as you can hold. Take something for the headache, but not aspirin, which is tough on an already-distressed tum. If you're a caffeine addict, have a little tea. You don't want to add a caffeine-withdrawal headache to the one you already have. And swallow some vitamins, particularly B-complex and C.

Now, stay horizontal. Don't make any important decisions, and don't brood on the wreckage that is your life. You're in no fit state.

Instead, think back to the night before the morning after. You drank too much beer. If it was bad beer to boot, you deserve the pain. You ignored your limits, and you're cheap, too. If you were drinking the good stuff, you didn't stay sober enough to give it the respect it deserves. It's time to absorb the most valuable lesson that quality beer has to offer: Drink better and drink less. When you're feeling up for a brew again, go for the best, and learn to savor it.

[* Eudora's writing process was to type out a draft of her story and then to slice up the pages and rearrange them, as if piecing a quilt:

I revise with scissors and pins. Pasting is too slow, and you can't undo it, but with pins you can move things from anywhere to anywhere, and that's what I really love doing--putting things in their best and proper place, revealing things at the time when they matter most. Often I shift things from the very beginning to the very end. Small things--one fact, one word--but things important to me. (Paris Review)

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