The Joy of Sake

Tonight my girlfriend and I will host a sushi party in honor of our friend's birthday. Sounds gracious, right? The catch, other than the one we'll purchase by the pound, is that he will have to make all the rolls himself. After slaving away at the large quantity of sticky rice, the finely sliced vegetables, fruits and pickles, exacto-knifing the raw fish, rolling it all together and feeding all the hungry seals, er, friends, he'll finally sit down to his own roll stuffed with the last scraggly bits and probably find that he's not even hungry anymore, having taste-tested everything along the way. Happy Birthday, indeed! In my defense, I would not have been so gracious as to invite him to do this if he himself hadn't requested it. The birthday boy is actually one of the most strategically adept people I know. There are still hand prints on my bottom from the last time he thoroughly spanked me on the chess board. I know he's also savvy to the karmic principles of giving and receiving and could probably graph out the many happy returns the universe will have in store for him after tonight.

Meanwhile, I'm hard at work blogging and the gf's gone out to by the myriad ingredients we've committed to buying in order to pull this off. Here's the bb's wish list of items so far:

Staples:

Rice (botan or calrose)

Soy Sauce

Nori
Wasabi
Pickled ginger

Fish:
Salmon
Tuna
Fake crab (or real crab is someone's feeling generous)

Fruits, Veggies, etc:
Asparagus
Mango
Sesame seeds (kuro -n- shiro goma)
Cream cheese
Bell peppers of various colors
Cucumber
Green Onion
Mushrooms (shitake preferred)
Spinach
Tomago
Snow Peas

Living across the street from a major supermarket and a bike ride away from Bi-Rite--the upscale health food market near Dolores Park which spawned the dreamy Bi-Rite Creamery (warning: flavor list may cause sudden salivation)--shopping won't be too hard. The difficult part will be finding sushi-grade fish that is also wild rather than farmed.

Finding a good sake is also a challenge. In my experience you can never judge by how cute or sexy the bottle might be. Generally, I find it safer to go with an unfiltered, milky sake rather than the clear type. Two resources I'd like to tap in this regard are:

1. Sushi Zone: A great little sushi restaurant in our 'hood. Not the best ever and it's running way behind on the customer service beat (see Yelp! reviews from folks who seem to know their sushi better than I), but their oyster appetizer and low prices are well worth the 2 hour wait time you are likely to experience. And the unfiltered sake we had there a few weeks ago was deemed by a dinner comrade as, "the best sake I've ever drinken." Since said comrade & spouse are moving in right down Pearl Street, only a few houses down from the Zone next week, I'll have plenty of opportunity to pop in there and find out what type of sake they serve.

2. The Joy of Sake: A convention happening at the Hilton Hotel next weekend. There will be 300 of the best sakes that will be laid out in their prime quaffability, plus plenty of delectable bites to clear the palate. Would anyone like to take me to this cost-prohibitive, but plenty posh party?

Gays in the Military?

I came across this hilarious video on Brave New Films after watching 5 minutes of the Republican presidential candidate debate, in which the panel of 10 white men, including Giuliani & McCain, attempted to individually avoid the question of whether gays and lesbians should be allowed to serve openly in the military until finally the CNN questioner (Scott Spradling?) asked for anyone on the panel to take the floor if they thought that the ban should be lifted and the seconds tick by in silence. So, after that depressing moment, I found this video to cheer me up and ended up writing such a long comment, that I thought I'd repost it here:



Besides the Republican line of the hour, "Lifting the ban is a social experiment that would be irresponsibly dangerous to indulge in at this critical time of war," what is Mark Smith trying to convey here?

First, he wants to make it clear that Mark Smith (or insert other generic white male name here) has a rampant heterosexuality that is uncontrollable to the extent that he cannot even focus on his own impending death when there are women in short shorts around. The female body as an unfailingly sexy object of desire is also important to protect the macho image of the virile male. If he can't get it up for a couple of Hooter's girls having a pillow fight on the front line of combat, he is probably not good for anything.

By the same coin, the ultimate macho man ends up taking the place of the Hooter's waitress when he is the sex object for the gay soldier. Thrown into a troop of (scantily clad?) Mark Smiths, the gay serviceman must be helplessly drawn to Mark Smiths unquestionable manliness. He MUST! If he doesn't, well that must mean that there is something wrong with Mark Smith's pristine masculinity! Yikes! How can Mark Smith even think of subjecting the troops to that kind of identity crisis, especially when we're in the middle of waging an ideological war?!

Furthermore, if Mark Smith can't face the fact that every gay male on the planet would not fall for him immediately, regardless of what he might actually be doing on the ground in Iraq (i.e. dressed from head to toe in camo, carrying upwards of 50 pounds of gear not including firearms, fighting for his life, trying to communicate with desperate people who speak another language, surviving attacks and dust storms, or other NON-SEXY things), then our manly troops couldn't handle it either.

What the Republican party in general is saying with this line (see the above-mentioned GOP debate for multiple repetitions of said line) is that they need to protect the masculine ego of a uniformly hetero, male military.

But wait a second... What about all those women we've allowed into the ranks? Aren't the good old boys going crazy trying to keep in line when bananas appear in their pockets every time G.I. Jane marches next to them? Oh, well, maybe it's just understood that the women in the military are those "rough" "tomboy" types anyway. So, the GOP would be okay with assuming they are all lesbians, as long as they keep their mouths shut about it and, indeed, about anything else other than patriotic sloganage.

This is a tough topic. Like many other political debates, I find myself torn by the disconnect between conceptual perspectives and practical realities. I'm hesitant to shout, "Gays in the Military!" at a protest rally, because I don't believe that war should be waged at all. I am a pacifist and cannot see any war as justifiable. Having complete peace imposed on the warmongers--THAT would be the real social experiment, and that is probably not possible right now, if it ever will be. Furthermore, our government's treatment of the troops is morally questionable and fiscally irresponsible. (See Aztlan y Vietnam for accounts of racist & classist draft practices during the 1960s. See Fahrenheit 9/11 for documentation on military recruiters in action.) Why would I want to fight a political battle so that my queer family can go and fight wars that only serve to keep old white men in power? Those are my main objections. That said, the reality is that there are queer people who want and are able to serve in the military, but are disallowed or fired for being honest.

Unequivocally, I feel that the government should not be charged with policing self-image and identity. Those are personal things that should not concern public policy. What the goverment should be doing is supporting those people who are strong enough to choose this violent, traumatizing way of giving back to their communities. The government should be serving those people to the best of their ability, not forcing them to subscribe to a certain perspective on sexuality, or to lie about who they are to the people they work with. This policy does nothing but demean the professionalism of all troops, gay or straight, and results in the thinning of their ranks with intent only to punish the existence of human diversity. It's reprehensible and should be stopped.

Go to Lift The Ban for more info on what can be done.

A Breath of Fresh Air

This is my second attempt at blogging. I plan to use this space to develop some good writing habits, and rid myself of a few bad ones, by publishing those inner monologues I care to remember here and, in case of actual intellectual content, juice up the roots of any ideas that have potential.

I'm also going to continue developing the art of the run-on sentence, because, after all, if it's good enough for William Faulkner, it's good enough for me.

That mofo knew how to make a sentence breathe!
Just imagine the expert flow through those nostrils:
sucking in surrounding particulate matter of all kind without prejudice,
until the color itself drains from the photo,
presenting us with the issue of blacks, whites and all the grays facing off between them,
making arbitrary definitions painful and fatal,
filling us up with all the space inside that olfactory orifice
until we cannot bear the sight of a sniffer swollen with such ugly history,
and, finally, exhausting these subjects in one prolonged, ghostly stream,
which raggedly flutters the wiley mustache hairs of dead white men,
in whom we have ceased to trust
and who can no longer betray our trust
unless we forget the whiskey stained nose of the writer who let it all out,
that last sigh,
frozen in time,
alternately indicting and exonerating
the perfect hypocrisy of a free life.

I have a defunct livejournal that I started in college and to which I have been sorely unfaithful. My purpose there was not so different as it is here, but I expect this one to flourish, since gmail makes everything in life so much more convenient. But maybe I'll just write this one entry and never come back. It's certainly a possibility, though not necessarily a tragedy. It could also be possible that if I don't spend any time blogging here at all, I'll become a speech writer instead and write some terribly underhanded speeches for the next GOh!P presidential candidate in which Shermanesque oaths are made under a veil of irony and sent out to the press 24 hours in advance. Throwing monkey wrenches into the belly of the beast sounds like an erstwhile activity, that would certainly benefit the world far more than web reminders to myself of how to clean one's bike chain.

Seems that I am setting myself up for failure either way, but there can be no success without failure. So really, what I'm looking at here, is clearly unavoidable success.