“1 Million of Your Closest Friends: Philadelphia’s Long-Awaited Super Bowl Parade” (for Good Sport Magazine)

https://www.goodsportmagazine.com/1-million-closest-friends-philadelphias-long-awaited-super-bowl-parade/

Half an hour after Eagles center Jason Kelce, dressed in a green and purple costume that could be described as ‘intergalactic sultan,’ wrapped up his lengthy, fiery, and profanity-fueled speech from the famous steps in front of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the buzz still had not worn off. “That was amazing, he dropped like five F-bombs,” gushed one of the nearly one million fans who had attended the Eagles’ Super Bowl parade on Thursday.

Kelce’s speech, in which he reminded the crowd of every player who had been criticized in the media, characterized the team and city as “hungry dogs,” and screamed until his voice was hoarse, capped a celebration for Philadelphia that had also been long, loud, and soaked in beer.

For many of the fans that lined Broad Street and filled City Center all afternoon, that celebration had started early. It was 7:30 when a man in an Eagles beanie opened a bottle of Hennessy on a bus from New York City. Within fifteen minuets, the bottle was being passed between rows as he scrolled through his favorite Instagram memes mocking Tom Brady and the Patriots. He offered me a swig from the bottle, and although I enjoy Hennessy as much as anyone, 7:30 was a little early for cognac.

The celebration hardly slowed down from there. As the bus moved through downtown Philadelphia at 8, three hours before the parade was scheduled to begin, Wentz and Foles and Dawkins and Ertz jerseys were already flowing towards the route. Within minutes of stepping off the bus, I had heard several “F*** Tom Brady” and “E-A-G-L-E-S” chants, the most common of a limited and repetitive but impassioned and stirring repertoire that largely entertained an entire city for the day. I was tired of hearing “Fly, Eagles Fly” before noon, but I couldn’t help but appreciate its power as hundreds of thousands of Philadelphians provided one last rendition after Kelce’s speech.

But what stands out from the day isn’t the incessant chanting, the truly impressive commitment to day drinking, the overwhelming civic pride, or the size of the crowd, estimated at 700,000 though reports earlier in the week had projected up to 3 million. Most striking was the contrast from Sunday night’s celebrations in the city, celebrations that involved overturned cars, kids dancing on top of moving cars, shirtless men in dog masks, and fans falling off of awnings and greased light poles. Thursday’s parade had all the energy and brashness intrinsic to Philadelphia sports fandom without the police scanner absurdity and imminent violence of Sunday.

Children, toddlers really, yelled “Dilly Dilly” over and over without a second glance from their parents. One fan, not satisfied with one win over the Patriots, suggested a plan for their next meeting: “They cheat, then you cheat. But you cheat better.” Strangers in a coffee shop couldn’t stay away from age-old football debates about the best quarterbacks and defensive backs of all time, even in what is technically the off season. One man suggested that Joe Montana is the best ever, but a police officer at the next table argued for Tom Brady, though the concession must have pained him. State troopers parked in the middle of the street used their megaphones to scream “Go Birds” at anyone walking past. White guys with giant Eagles flags carried speakers booming Meek Mill and sparked impromptu group dancing on the sidewalks, that could be heard for blocks, a situation that’s hard to imagine on any other day in Philadelphia. A fan from Richmond, Virginia had made the drive to the city the night before, and noted that the roads were crowded with Eagles fans. “Even at the rest stops I saw Eagles signs,” he said.

In a reminder that the Super Bowl champions were celebrating with group of fiercely proud and often brazen Philadelphians, Kelce’s speech ended with a collective shouting of “We’re from Philly, F****** Philly, No one likes us, We don’t care.” But besides a half-hearted booing of Pennsylvania governor Tom Wolf, the rest of the day had been exuberant and, naturally, triumphant. The same police officer debating the game’s greatest quarterbacks reflected on the day: “The city was peaceful, man. I think I gave out 1,000 high fives.”

“Californios: San Francisco at the Frontier of a Mexican Food Movement” — from the April 2020 (San Francisco) issue of Drift Magazine

Mexican food in the United States seems to exist in an endless state of identity crisis, a constant cycle of commercialization, bastardization, and occasional hybridization. At its worst, Mexican cuisine has been reduced to yellowy queso at Chipotle or bland fajitas on sizzling plates at any number of Tex-Mex restaurants. Closer to its best is the recent infatuation with the cooking of “authentic” Mexican food, be it the proliferation of taco trucks across the country, more formal restaurants that mimic Mexican classics, or the Instagrammable taco and burrito culture that has invaded cities like New York, Austin, and San Francisco. 

But now there’s a new standard for Mexican food in America. Chefs are beginning to use locally sourced ingredients creatively to express the flavors and the sentiments of traditional Mexican cuisine without claiming authenticity. This “modern” Mexican movement features newcomers to the California-Mexican scene like Gabriela Camara’s CALA in San Francisco and Ray Garcia’s Broken Spanish in Los Angeles, which both offer adventurous takes on Mexican dishes.

Yet Californios, Val Cantu’s jewel-box restaurant in the Mission, is spearheading this movement in Mexican cuisine with a stylish 16-course menu that retains authentic flavors and a sense of tradition. 

Though Cantu rejects the label “modern Mexican” in favor of “contemporary Mexican,” his restaurant embodies the movement’s commitment to imagination and local produce.   The menu is seasonal, and relies heavily on local farms.“When we source ingredients, we pay attention to what’s in season. When we opened the restaurant, we always wanted it to be site-specific,” he said. This locational specificity leads to dishes that are very much Californian and incorporate timeless elements of Mexican cooking–dishes like tamales made with heirloom, yellow masa, tacos de hongos with smoked and grilled mushrooms, fall pumpkin empanadas with jicama, pepitas, and trout roe, and blood orange sorbet with passion fruit juice sourced from a farm in the Santa Cruz mountains.

Cantu’s young restaurant, opened in 2015, has already attracted high praise from The New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Michelin Guide, which awarded it two stars in 2017, noting its ability to “turn your entire understanding of this nation’s cuisine on its head” and to provide an experience that feels “intimate” and “personal.” It is this sense of personality that has made Cantu’s most distinct impression on the San Francisco scene and separates his cooking from other “modern” Mexican chefs.

Cantu, who is of Mexican and Venezuelan descent, grew up in his father’s Mexican restaurant and tortilleria in Central Texas. “Our food is always a very personal expression of Mexican cuisine. It’s unique to San Francisco, uniqueto the aesthetic that we’ve developed over the past three years, unique to the flavors that I love, and unique to the flavor memories that I have,” said Cantu.

Cantu’s cooking is contemporary in its expression of personality but traditional in its mindset. His favorite ingredient is corn, followed by beans, lemons, and limes, all pulled from the canon of traditional Mexican cooking. “I don’t see myself as an avant-garde chef by any means. I feel that what I’m doing is an extension of traditional [Mexican] cooking. It just looks different. It’s plated a bit differently. It’s in a different setting, but that doesn’t mean that the food is not at its core, at its heart, traditional.”

Yet  what makes Californios such a consummate example of the contemporary Mexican trend, and what makes the trend important in the restaurant world, is its stripping away of pretension and gratuitous risk-taking. Cantu prefers to focus on hospitality and comfort, which allow him to prepare food that is inventive and enjoyable if not strictly authentic. “I’m aware that our guests come in and they’re anxious. They’re anxious as to what they’re going to eat, they’re anxious as to if they’re going to have enough food, they’re anxious if it’s going to be delicious. So, hospitality that provides warmth and comfort is important to me and to the cuisine… It doesn’t have to be all shock and awe.”

For some, the U.S. has produced contemporary Mexican restaurants– Californios included–that surpass what Mexico has to offer. While that claim is premature,it does point to a rapidly-changing tableau that is altering the ways in which diners understand and judge Mexican cuisine worldwide. While Californios again received two Michelin stars in 2018, its renowned counterparts in Mexico are not reviewed by the guide, which ignores the ingenuity of  restaurants like Pujol, Enrique Olvera’s street-food inspired establishment named one of the World’s 50 Best Restaurants in 2016, Quintonil, serving reinvigorated-but-familiar Mexican cuisine, and Contramar, Camara’s original seafood house. These restaurants are serving upscale and sophisticated food in a city of almost nine million people, yet it is the Mexican cuisine being produced in the U.S. that is gaining a reputation as some of the most diverse and individualistic at the highest price points. 

This surge in attention, for Californios and other San Francisco restaurants has raised questions about where the best new version of Mexican cuisine resides. For Cantu, it’s a question without an answer, and one that is far too fluid to pin down. “I think the [Michelin] guide will eventually go to Mexico, but you don’t even need it. There are a lot of places that I think would have stars, probably multiple stars. There’s great cuisine in Mexico City.… (Mexico) is a beautiful country, rapidly changing and growing just like anywhere else.” 

But there is no reason that chefs in the Bay Area, with access to California’s wealth of farms and ingredients, cannot bring a new respect for the broadness and diversity of fine Mexican cuisine to the U.S., despite an image that has been cheapened by typical Mexican food in America. If the nearly-immediate success of Californios is any indication, there is an important future for great Mexican cooking outside of Mexico City.

Said Cantu, “I think [Mexican cuisine] is growing. I think there will be more Mexican chefs who will rise to make more delicious food. People are definitely exploring their own culture and cuisine and going in different directions. That’s pretty awesome.” 

Is 2018 the Year of the Mini-Album?

Published on Bluntiq.com: http://bluntiq.com/2018/04/05/is-2018-the-year-of-the-mini-album/

A week ago, The Weeknd released ‘My Dear Melancholoy,’ a six-song EP that was received with as much hype and excitement as some of his recent albums. The EP totaled a playtime of twenty-one minutes, a tiny piece of work by The Weeknd’s own standards. ‘Kiss Land,’ released in 2013, included only ten songs but ran for fifty-five minutes. Not only was ‘My Dear Melancholy’ The Weeknd’s first official EP release, but it also includes the shortest and most compact package of songs in his discography.

Two weeks before that EP was released, XXXTENTACION debuted ‘?,’ which clocked in at only thirty-seven minutes despite featuring 18 songs. Unlike The Weeknd’s EP, this release was not out of character for XXXTENTACION, as his 2017 ’17’ included eleven songs but only carried twenty-two minutes of music, a relatively minuscule project that was still labelled an album.

2017 seemed to hint at a movement towards shorter projects. Two of the most anticipated joint releases of the year, ‘Super Slimey’ and ‘Huncho Jack, Jack Huncho’ totaled forty minutes and forty one minutes, respectively. Going further back, this trend seems to have grown out of the increase in collaborative mixtures. 21 Savage and Metro Boomin’ combined to produce the thirty-two minute ‘Savage Mode’ in 2016, while Drake and Future’s 2015 ‘What A Time To Be Alive’ included forty minutes of music.

But now, short albums are becoming the domain of individual artists, not just the product of partnerships, as illustrated by the work of The Weeknd and XXXTENTACION. As 2018 continues and we await releases from Cardi B, Flatbush Zombies, Schoolboy Q, Travis Scott, and maybe even Drake, it will be important to notice who is releasing shorter projects and to understand why that might be the case.

Are artists unable to carry an album with over an hour of music? Are they shying away from feature-heavy releases and thus producing shorter songs? Or is this a conscious decision to create shorter songs and shorter albums that will appeal to a young listening audience that might prefer to consume music in half-hour sessions?

The answer might be a combination of all three, but it seems most likely that artists are making a commercial decision to release shorter albums. Certainly, The Weekend and XXXTENTACION are not artists who make music thoughtlessly and without a great deal of intentionality. The Weekend is a massive global superstar, so surely each of his decisions is carefully managed to ensure commercial success and to create as much buzz and attention as possible. Of course, XXX is not on nearly the same level of stardom as the Toronto singer, but if his decision to include instructions for listening on the first track of the album, a track titled “Introduction (instructions)” indicates anything, it is that the artist has certainly considered how he wants his music to be heard and the type of experience that he wants to create for listeners.

Not only do these decisions seem to be calculated, but they are paying off creatively. ‘?’ in particular is an instructive example of the potential benefits of releasing a boiled-down collection of songs. The blend of metal rap, emo rap, rock, and even Latin music that XXXTENTACION includes on the album is a risky mix, and there are undoubtedly sounds that he will discard as he continues to grow. Tracks like “Floor 555,” “Pain = BESTFRIEND,” and “I don’t even speak Spanish lol” are sure to divide opinion and would normally alienate many listeners.

But on an album of only thirty-seven minutes, listeners are more likely to endure short tracks that they don’t enjoy when they know the album’s potential hits are only one track away rather than three tracks and twelve minutes away. The best, or at least most popular, songs like “Moonlight,” “SAD!,” and “going down!” appear next to each other or just a couple of minutes apart, making for an easier listening experience that earns the artist some leeway with if a couple tracks fail to hit.

The Weeknd’s ‘My Dear Melancholy’ is far more mainstream and far less risky than ‘?,’ but the decision to release such a short EP all but guarantees that fans will stick around for all six songs rather than bouncing around the release. In this strange way, making a shorter album allows an artist like XXXTENTACION to get away with more musical risks, as listeners can commit themselves to a half hour of listening time rather than an hour or longer.

What would a cut-down, forty minute Drake album sound like? What if Travis Scott gives us only his best thirty minutes for ‘Astroworld’? If the trends we’ve seen in 2017 and early 2018 hold, we might have the answers to those questions soon.

BlocBoy JB Releases “Rover 2.0”

After “Look Alive” and its Drake feature racked up over one hundred million listens on Spotify, BlocBoy JB has released a follow-up featuring 21 Savage. “Rover 2.0” showcases a sound that is very similar to “Look Alive,” but this time JB himself occupies the first two minutes of the track rather than allowing 21 to steal the song. With back-to-back releases featuring verses from bigger-name stars, it will be interesting to see whether BlocBoy JB builds on the buzz generated by “Look Alive” and “Rover 2.0” with more feature-heavy releases or if his next songs will be all his own.

4 Must-Hear Tracks from YFN Lucci’s ‘Ray Ray from Summerhill’ (for bluntiq.com)

http://bluntiq.com/2018/03/19/4-must-hear-tracks-from-yfn-luccis-ray-ray-from-summerhill/

YFN Lucci might not be the most widely-known name in rap at the moment, but his music has been nearly ubiquitous recently. From “Key to the Streets” to “Everyday We Lit” and “Boss Life”, Lucci has produced several catchy hits that are recognizable even if the artist behind them is less so. But the Atlanta-born rapper has also been highly prolific in the last year, releasing an EP and three mixtapes since the beginning of 2017, the most popular being the most recent Wish Me Well 2. Last week, Warner Brothers released his debut album Ray Ray from Summer Hill . If you’re only familiar with Lucci’s work on “Everyday We Lit” and “Boss Life”, here are four worthwhile songs from his rookie release that showcase a surprising range for a debut album.

1. Too Much

YFN Lucci is at his best when his finds the middle ground between the slow, hyper-auto-tuned rut he sometimes falls into and  tracks that lack his signature blend of singing and rapping. “Too Much” finds a comfortable middle ground that is Lucci’s sonic sweet spot. He also selects the perfect feature for this type of track in Wale, who we haven’t heard from enough recently.

2. The King

If you’re here for the hits, this is the song for you. The King has a pace and sound that’s reminiscent of Boss Life, but it’s a track without features, which is a risky decision for Lucci to make with one of the best beats on the album. Yet the track is solid, and though it’s under three minutes, he is able to carry it alone. There is a crowd-pleasing balance of his sing-song signature tone and more traditional verses, and if there’s anything on this album with the potential to blow up, it is this song.

3. Street Kings

It’s a Meek Mill feature in 2018. Who knows how many of those we will hear? A must-listen for that alone.

4. When I’m Gone

Like “Too Much,” this song is just a good fit for YFN Lucci’s voice. The lyrical content isn’t anything special, which goes for the rest of the album as well, but it’s an enjoyable listen nonetheless. It’s the eighteenth of twenty songs on the album, but it feels like a natural bookend in that it points to Lucci’s strength, making music that is uncomplicated and enjoyable, and weakness, which is a lack of differentiation from other artists with the same sing-song sound. If YFN Lucci can build on this very listenable foundation while carving out a more personal sound, Ray Ray from Summerhill might be remembered as the debut of another Atlanta artist on the rise.

“Forty and a Half Feet”

I have sat and looked at this boat for five days now. It is quite a nice boat to look at, thirty feet at least and creamy white with deep blue trim and a polished brown wood swim deck and a strong looking tower for spotting fish. It is surely more expensive than the rest of the little fishing boats lined up at this dock. I am not sure if it is a yacht. I am sitting here next to my friend and I ask him when a boat becomes a yacht. I should say that I am really sitting here because of my friend. The responsibility has fallen to me somehow. I believe that he is thinking or meditating or self-medicating with UV rays or sitting here for some purpose or other. I am supposed to be with him so I am here watching this boat for lack of other things to look at. At the very least I should learn about boats while I am here. There are waves and houses across the inlet and some slow-flying birds, but I prefer the boat. I have seen a lot of boats and been on many boats, mostly small ones, and I could watch an inlet for many hours if it was crowded with boats passing and boaters waving at one another, but not five days. We use lots of sunscreen and go inside only for turkey sandwiches and watermelon at lunch. He sometimes takes his shirt off and spreads himself out with his back on the dock and drinks lots of water and says that it would be a nice change if it rained once in a while here or that it’s a shame people build such big houses and only spend half the year in them or that he can feel the fish swimming under the dock or that there are nearly fifty species of dolphin in the vast expanse of creation or that I should go back inside and cool down.

The wood is very hot and burns my feet so I keep my sandals on and try to sit without moving. He says this dock is too small for yachts, which are generally known to be boats that begin at forty five feet and can sleep two people comfortably. He must be correct. I ask if fishing boats are probably not also yachts and he says that is correct. A boat built for fishing is generally not considered a yacht, so this boat we are watching with its fishing tower and space near the bow for many fishing poles is not a yacht. My friend knows many things about boats. I know a few things about small boats. He once flew to Alaska and walked onto the first dock he saw and asked a boat captain for a job. The first captain said no but the second captain said yes and so my friends spent sixty seven days catching salmon and halibut and crab thousands of pounds at a time and talking about conspiracy theories and redacted government files and holistic eating  specifically unprocessed bread with the second captain who had a long white beard and was afraid of chemicals and only went onto land so that he had better reception for Sunday morning gospel radio. My friend called me the day before his flight and asked if I wanted to make six thousand dollars in two months but I said Alaska got too cold and I would likely become sea sick. A month after he left I considered taking a trip to the Everglades but it was a four hour drive and the peak of summer was not a good time to travel there because it was too hot for the animals to come out and there would bee too many bugs.

I saw him two days after he returned and he showed me the calluses on his hands and told me that they had hauled in a twelve foot salmon shark and thrown it back and that he had new reasons that the moon landing was faked and why every corporation except for soy processors is afraid of plant-based eating. Perhaps I should have gone to Alaska. I have fortunately never been susceptible to even the best conspiracy theories. We both know fisherman who like to talk. The fisherman who like to talk are always smug.Everyone with a boat down here is a smug fisherman who will tell you when the redfish are running or how many weeks until the tarpon start biting or whether the night before or the night after high tide is the best chance to catch mahi mahi. I wonder if that is the only type of person we both know. No, we both know people who can recite hundreds of verses from holy books and people who are interested in buffalo and middle aged men who talk too much about craft beer. I am not sure actually if we know the same type of people who are interested in buffalo. My uncle has a buffalo head on the wall of his cabin that he claims he shot in the woods but I fail certain it is illegal to hunt buffalo and my uncle has never broken a law so I am suspicious that he bought it at a flea market. My friend once was in a car with the conspiracy theory boat captain who saw a pack of buffalo on the road ahead and stuck his head out the window yelling at the buffalo while chasing them down the road and off the road into a field until the pack split up and the car had to be pushed out of the muddy field back onto the road. It must be illegal to attack buffalo with a car even if it is a small car but I do not think there was a large police presence where the buffalo were walking. Perhaps neither of us knows anyone who really likes buffalo. I wonder if chasing buffalo in a car is better or worse than mounting one on a wall. I don’t ask my friend that question because he does not talking about life and death or doing dangerous things in cars.

We have been visiting this beach town and this dock for many years. Our mothers were high school best friends and very similar types of people who loved to run on the beach with kites and drink tall Styrofoam cups of sweet tea from gas stations and say they only do this on vacation and go snorkeling early in the morning before anybody else is awake so they don’t have to wait on their husbands. There was a time when we did very little sitting at this dock or anywhere, really. We might run across this dock quickly enough to get splinters on our way to our boat. I used to ask what he wanted to do today and he always answered with try to find someone who would let us borrow a jet ski or wait until it was dark and go diving off the bridge or gather up all our one dollar bills and pay poker against his older cousins. I said we should just go for a swim. Sometimes we fished for crabs with bits of fruit tied string on the end of plastic spoons, but the crabs with their grabbing little claws held more interest for my friend than for me. I did quite enjoy our boat while we had it. We ate lots of shrimp for dinner and bags and bags of popcorn at the closest movie theater which was twenty minutes away and fried fish and potato salad at his family’s family reunion each year. I was invited because his mother invited my mother. My friend very much desires peace and quiet now, perhaps because so much has happened to him recently and he believes some quiet time in the sun near the water will stop so much form happening to him so quickly. I am not sure, but that is my best guess. I feel more sure about that than I do about my knowledge of boats and their features and categories and the names for the birds that would rather sit in palm trees than have to fly and expose their feathers to this heat.

Very little has happened to me but I would rather not be sitting here doing very little and looking only at a thirty foot fishing boat that is not quite a yacht because it is not quite long enough and because it will never be a yacht as long as it is meant for fishing. At one point I thought that a lot of things happened to us here. I learned to water ski and kneeboard and scuba dive. We were too young to scuba dive but my friend’s father rented three tanks and told the woman at the dive shop they were all for him. After thirty minutes of looking at the sandy bottom and some silver and brown fish I knew the basics and floated back up to the boat but they stayed under for an hour more and brought some sand dollars and a very smooth conch shell up with them. My friend went tubing with his uncle and broke three fingers when the tube flipped and caught is fingers in the handle and wasn’t allowed to leave his condo for three days when he stole his aunts bottle of white wine. Those things are not like the things that are happening now and now they feel so small and simple that they were not things that happened at all but rather things that filled the time before the real things started to happen.

So yes that is where I am now and perhaps a bit has happened to me but certainly more has happened to my friend here and the things that have happened to him are markedly more interesting and involve far less of the everyday things that happen to people like taking a new position at a a younger, smaller firm with an espresso machine or traveling to a new state that is famous for its barbecue and good hiking. For instance I found out that he was a Mormon just two months ago. My first thought when I found out that he was Mormon, before I even thought that all I know about Mormons is that they are polygamous and are not allowed to drink Coke, is that before he became a Mormon he was the best lizard catcher I ever saw. He would chase lizards when we were kids and grab them by the tail and hold them up to show me and then make them bite onto his ear like a wobbling and gaudy black and brown earring. Sometimes the tails would tear away from the lizard in his hand because their tails were meant to regenerate as a way to escape predators. I was always a bit scared of lizards and I did not want to end up with a bloody lizard tail in my hand. Now it seems a bit absurd that a Mormon would chase a lizard. My friend is face down on the dock and his back is very red and I ask if he thinks learning to scuba dive is different than trying caffeine for the first time. He says that I can have some of his water if I need it.

He gave me a copy of the Book of Mormon the first day we sat looking at the boat and from then on I decided that Mormons must not chase lizards if they did not drink Coke. Before he became a Mormon he moved to Los Angeles for three weeks before someone found him in asleep in his boxers on a street with Spanish style homes with circular driveways and pools where people paid a lot of property taxes so that nobody about to undergo a religious conversion ended up nearly naked on their curb.

It turns out that Mormons are no longer polygamous and that he now has a quite attractive girlfriend who I am supposed to meet soon and who the family loves and I am looking forward to meeting. It also turns out that Mormons call kissing smashing. I am not sure because that is just what they call or because they want people who are not Mormon to think they are having a great deal of sex. It seems odd an odd thing for a Mormon to want so I should ask my friend about it later. Or perhaps I won’t ask him because then he will ask me if I am dating anyone and he may call me a fornicator. Even though I have not fornicated in too long and wold like to do some smashing, the Mormon type or the regular, type I would like to avoid that. There is a bar near the beach not far from this dock that I should go to whenever we leave. At the moment I can’t think of anything worse than being called a fornicator. It sounds very absolute and sinful, if that is the type of thing you believe in.

I am happy for my friend, even if I don’t want to spend a sixth day on the dock. I don’t see it getting better soon for me, so at least it has been getting better for him. Maybe I should take a fishing charter tomorrow to give myself somewhere to be. No, that would not be enjoyable alone. It would mean a whole day of small talk with a boat captain that would start with where I’m form and what I’m doing down here and how many times I have been fishing and end with him asking me what I really see myself doing and telling me that his wife really thinks it’s time he sell the boat and find something more stable to do. I do not like talking to fishing captains or marina workers or boat mechanics. They are always so smug. I am not sure what value they believe their knowledge of tides and engines and the corrosive capabilities of saltwater to be but they feel it is something deep and mystical that I will never grasp. That may be true, but I would forget those types of things quickly. They are not useful anywhere but here. I can just imagine myself trying to sound impressive at a dinner party in some house on the water with big glass windows by explaining how much I know about the different shapes of fishing hooks and the difference between a yacht and a plain old boat and forgetting if yachts started at forty feet or fifty feet and sounding not impressive but quite boring and useless.