Seeds

“Have you ever shot a .22?” Liz asked, a Marlboro dangling from her lips, an orange tuft of wiry hair shooting out from under her armpit. I desperately wanted a camera. “Yeah, when I was young. In Boy Scouts.”

“Well, let me refresh your memory. First thing you do is grab yrself two bullets incase you don’t hit the pigs brain just right and he goes apeshit on you or runs off. One bullet in the chamber, one bullet in the teeth, like this...”

As she explained the mechanics of the rifle and the importance of waiting for the perfect shot, my palms sweated in anticipation.

Soon, I found myself on the thick knees of my Carhartts in the back of a Mitsubishi Fuso, staring at a 200-pound Berkshire hog through the crosshairs. I waited. And waited. ‘Til finally the animal looked me dead in the eyes.

BAM!!!

In that split second after I pulled the trigger, the hog nerves spurt blood through its eyes, ears, mouth and bullet hole. There was so much blood, and the sound of the rifle so deafening due to the confines of the truck, I thought I had died: maybe I’d missed and the bullet had ricocheted off the metal support beams of the Fuso and hit ME between the eyes? I dropped to the ground, and looked up at Liz in terror, who was laughing her ass off as I screamed at the world, ‘oh FUCK I am DEAD!’

…

Up to my thighs in leggy Vashon grass, I thumb a long steel knife to check for sharpness. Satisfied, I glance at Eddy and Ed as they somberly hold the lamb steady on a wooden table. I pierce the lamb’s neck at the jugular, and in one swift movement cut in, then out, and crack the neck deftly. Iron-heavy blood flows into the ground as the lamb kicks and seizes with muscular spasms. I feel like I have been here before, among the grass, harvesting the sun.

…

A first memory: at the age of six I planted watermelon seeds in the Alabama clay soil of my parent’s backyard, and come full summer the vines had produced one sizable, lizard-green melon. In the South, the ritual of watermelon picking is high art, and no one has an eye for a knife-ready melon like the old, tobacco-stained men that work in the fields. Luckily, my step-grandfather grew up on a farm in the Mississippi backwoods. A short phone cal was all that was needed. He and my grandmother drove forty-five minutes from Tuscaloosa to Birmingham that weekend just to see it: “Yep, sure is a goodun,” Papa Gene muttered, as he methodically tapped the fruit with his fleshy thumb. My entire family sat entranced with his silent proceedings. An expert in action, watching Papa Gene was like watching the Crimson Tide play ball in their prime! At last, he determined it ready…We sliced and salted the watermelon, so delicious, to wash down the pork and corn.

...

Christmastime. My family is having a dinner party. While finely dicing an onion for a chestnut-lentil soup, the lysergic acid I’d dissolved under my tongue that morning flits around my brain space. Between the discussions of how much this bottle and from where comes this Pinot, I recall a discussion in my Japanese Religious Traditions class about Amaterasu, the Shinto god of the sun. Suddenly I am merging with the carefully prepped ingredients before me–carrots, roasted nuts, sprigs of parsley and thyme, tomatoes. Our cells interact as they have since the primordial soup bubbled in a rocky trough on Pangea. I am reconfigured solar energy, a permutation of the sun.

a business plan

my friend green and i are fixated with the idea of opening a wine bar in seattle in the next year or so. his friend colin from Vermont is the business head behind the idea, and this email is part of a three-way email discussion we've been having.

Yo Guy,

I tried to add to your responses but ended up writing my own. Not because I didn't like what you had to say but because I wanted to think it out for myself without seeing your answers to the questions.

Cheers,

Will

Target market: The hipster/young professional/cool people our parent’s age crowd that resides in the Ballard/Fremont/Capitol Hill, neighborhoods of Seattle. In my time working with the wine and food industries, I’ve been disgusted by the elitism that surrounds these ancient traditions. So a big thing for me in this enterprise is bringing wine back down to humbler roots. In countries like France and Italy, good wine is inexpensive and an everyday kind of thing, not at all a status symbol like a Lexus is in America. Obviously, poor folk from the inner-city aren’t going to be able to afford our product, nor will they be interested in it, and older, richer clientele will be attracted to our product, so I’m fine with striking a balance between the two: the hipster/young professional market. Why is this such an important point for me? Well, by reducing prices we are doing something different, unheard of even, in America. Sure, you can go to the store and buy 4 dollar bottles of wine but the shit sucks. Thin and lifeless. By working in bulk, and on account of the high-quality, inexpensive wines currently being produced in Washington State, I think we have a good chance of providing a very affordable product. Which I define as between $4 and $25 per liter. Also, by having low prices, the wine bar/distribution co-op becomes a place people come back to more and more. The cheaper the wine, the more people drink, and the more money we’ll likely make. I want people to walk in and go, “damn! this place is really cheap,” because that will leave a lasting impression and get people talking around town. As it stands, I’ll go to a wine bar in Seattle but it’s a special occasion kind of thing. I want people to feel free to drop in all the time, and feel welcome, especially because wine is an intimidating thing due to all the elitist bullshit that surrounds it. Think of the Hop Vine, Green. We feel like a part of the Hop Vine family and that’s how I want people to feel at the wine bar, too.

Product and service: The idea for this business came from a wine bar I visited in France: you could bring in a glass/plastic bottle, a nalgene even, and get it filled for half the price of sitting down and drinking in the establishment. There was also a small menu with happy-hour type foods. The place was bustling with toddlers, old fucks and hip young French cats. I think we can make a lot more money by distributing, but the only kind of distribution I want to deal with is the local, bring-in-a-bottle-and-we’ll-fill-it type of thing. No shipping. Why? Because another important point for me in this business is selling Washington wines and Washington wines only, for ecological reasons as well as to support the burgeoning wine industry in the state; shipping all over the country would work against the idea of locality. Obviously, if this constraint limits our profit, I’d concede by including Oregon and California wines, too. I want the wines to be in barrels, the varietal and vintage written on the barrel front in chalk, which will definitely contribute to the rustic charm I’m going for, and will undoubtedly bring people in the door. The co-op idea is one that still needs conceptualization: do we have people invest in wine shares? I don’t know much about how a co-op works, but I like the idea. Any thoughts, Colin? In terms of service, we’ll need servers to work the floor (servers the same as our target clientele). Also, we’ll need someone to man the barrels for those who are coming in to fill bottles.

Competition: Green addresses this question fully. I’ll add that by selling inexpensive, quality wine, we separate ourselves from the Woodinville scene and establish an independent, unique business. I think the Woodinville market is far enough away from Seattle as to not pose much threat to the business. Not to mention that our target market is different than theirs. A lot of people like wine for the fact that it’s fancy and don’t want to be served wine by some dude in chuck taylor’s and ripped jeans. Those snooty people will stay in Woodinville.

unfinished poem

we parasite the clean beef we

worm in through silver skin and sinew we

parasite the ferrous red flesh we

worm in through tendon and tough muscle

we parasite the clean beef...

last night

last night

i saw on you

purple black and blue

a bruise

on your wrist

your woman-ness

wrung out

by your macho man-

fuck that fuck him fuck you

and your loose screws

for sticking with him

you lose

a praise poem

when,

after dinner

I sit headless

having amassed the energy of the sun

and rearranged it unthinkingly into the thick veins

of my arms, the thick blood

rivering through my lung walls.

and when,

in the long morning

sacked out naked drinking endless

cup after endless cup of coffee

and when,

entheogen hit the main vein

and brain come turn on and triangulate

with tree and earth and sky and face of a friend

and when,

having finished the homework

i don't give a fuck about

i cut loose to the blues in my kitchen,

i think:

i am not

what i have been told.

told.

and retold.

since day one

by an unthinking tongue

long severed

from the universal order.

why write?

words

written

to a willing audience of one

like hand stroke cock

or finger flick clit–

auto

erotic

a yawn

a yawn

held deep

in the pink

aveoli network

of lungs

is an audible

and out-right

display of

boredom.

a yawn

drawn

into the

bronchioles

and held tight

by diaphragm band

is a strained and

unthinking admission

to your company

that you’d rather be

in bed at home.

Dear Kyle

Kyle,

you called me in for a three-hour training shift and I showed up cleanly shaven in a chef’s coat, a whole load of homework, hangover and money-stress kicking in the back of my whiskey addled brain piece; I was surprised you had me washing dishes and cutting lardons from slabs of pig belly when the rush hit. I asked questions of the new guy, “where does the ring mold live?” “Is this how Kyle wants the hanger steaks?” while you sat in the back of your bistro on the internet, not talking. A three-hour stage turned into an eight hour full­­­­– Hatred for the asshole boss men of the world slowly braised as I mopped the floor and finished the dishes, and then for the glad-handing formalities, all the cooks and wait staff weary. “Kyle, I really enjoyed my first day here.” You asked for a resume, which I did not have, on account of your having hired me last week after a short conversation about my experience: cooking Sunday meals with Sienese grandmothers, knowing by muscle memory every step of the salumi making process from pig in bullets head to ideal climactic conditions of the dry cure, my punk rock, fuck-it-all-for-the-food line cook sensibilities. What did I do wrong? Kyle, call me vain and prideful (you’d be right) but I do not want to work for you or your bourgy establishment.

Best,

Will