Tracing the arc of a party

"Those were some of the nicest people I've ever met. There wasn't a single asshole in the bunch"

-My mother, describing the people who showed up for our 4th of July party last night

A party has a life of its own. You try and create the right conditions; you hope you've got good food and good booze, and you try and set up comfortable spaces for people to hang out. If you're lucky, once your guests arrive and start to interact with each other, things take off and all you have to do from that point is ride the wave.

We love our party guests. They call and email and ask what they can bring, they pitch in and chop vegetables and clear plates and bring wine and delicious baked goods. They help MizBubs pass food into the dining room when she can't get through the crowd; they tell stories, they re-light your tiki torches, they show up with extra people in tow...in short, they make your party. We are especially blessed to be surrounded by good people.

This year's party started right on time with people showing up at 4pm, while it was still raining. By 6 we had a good crowd, and they were hungry. The food got devoured, a good portion of the crowd left by 9:30 or 10, and then a few of us got to sit and socialize until almost 1. It was very relaxing.

Before



Early (it was still raining when the first people showed up)



Later (nothing like seeing your breath fog in July. I can't wait to move south)



Sunday morning: fine weather for a 4th of July party, huh?



After



The Sunday afternoon cocktail is Ska Brewing Pinstripe Red Ale, and whatever is left in the coolers.

Happy Independence Day

I like this country.

Have a great weekend!

OK, I owe you one

Maybe more than one, actually. After springing Pam and Mr. Tuggles on you, I figure I owe you a little visual palate cleanser.

Here you are. Think happy thoughts, the holiday weekend is just around the corner.

Besides, you need to prepare yourselves. One of our assets may be on the ground in Pittsburgh, reporting back from Anthrocon. We'll see...

Are you ready for the 4th of July?

These folks are:

Good times

Hey, where'd everybody go?

I miss em, the crazy bastards.

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The party Saturday was a blast. We had a great time, and I can't say enough to thank everyone for showing up and having a good time with us. It made us very happy to see all of you. Our guests are an extremely generous bunch. We ended this party with possibly more booze than we started with, we've got new tiki accessories and a vintage album by cocktail comedian Woody Woodbury titled "Booze is the Only Answer." Beautiful cheesehead pastry chefs showed up bearing sweets. People brought desserts and more desserts, and more wine. To those of you who couldn't be here, well, hopefully next time?

I think, counting kids and teenagers, there were about 60 or 65 people in and out. We managed to have enough food, enough ice, more than enough beer and sangria (anyone want to stop by for a drink or three?) and everyone seemed to get along fine. It's always fun to introduce people who've never met and then see them talking away later on. We had bakers, writers, cops, artists, entrepreneurs, sign language interpreters, engineers, internet musical geniuses, social workers, unofficial mayors of Chicago, IT professionals, HR marketing professionals, stay home dads, stay home moms, sophisticated European businessmen and mysterious beautiful women who asked not to be identified on this page in order to protect their privacy.

Here's the thing about parties. You do all this work, you get ready, make lists, clean, cook, all that stuff. You set up places to eat and drink, you arrange chairs in a way that you hope will encourage people to socialize. You worry about how you're going to deal with all the garbage when your cans are already half full from housecleaning, and all the food packaging you got rid of. You wonder if anyone will show up, because this might be the time that people realize they're just tired of your bullshit.

Then the party starts, and at some point--Saturday it was about an hour in--the number of guests hits a critical mass and the party starts. And, quickly after that, you lose control and the party becomes almost a living thing on its own. The chairs you set out get moved around, people end up hanging out in places you didn't think they would, your guests start to find their way around your place as they get comfortable and things just seem to run themselves. I love that ride.

So...it turns out that there's always enough food, and if it all gets eaten that just means people liked it. You can always find a good-humored kid who'll take a buck or two to climb into your garbage and recycling cans wearing a pair of your daughter's rain boots and jump up and down, compressing your trash into more manageable piles. When that one defective firework misfires and nearly hits a young girl in the head, setting her hair ablaze, her father doesn't punch you in the face and she actually turns out to have been excited about the whole experience. Lord, I hope so anyway.

See you later, alligators.

Farewell to the fourth

Man oh man.

Throw a party, put out some free booze and there's no telling who might show up.

Happy Independence Day

Saucy

MizBubs' elbow is seen slaving away in the Sprawling Ramshackle Compound test kitchen, stirring sauces.

The lighter sauce on the left is a North Carolina style mustard and vinegar based sauce. It's vinegary all right. The one on the right is a more mid-south sauce, heavier on the molasses and brown sugar. We ended up adding some chipotle and chocolate to make it richer, and it's gotten quite a bit darker since this picture was taken.

In many cultures, especially in our home, the man with the most pork is widely regarded as a god-king in the community.

This is what 30 pounds of pork shoulder looks like before it gets rubbed with spices and put back in the refrigerator to prepare for 8-10 hours of hickory smoking tomorrow. 30 pounds of pork shoulder will probably cook down to about 20 pounds of meat, and at 6 oz per serving for pulled pork sandwiches that should be about 53 servings.

Dystopia, our eldest, hoisted Old Glory out front today. It was an inspiring moment.

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One thing I like about our family are the random moments. Like coming home and finding this little tableau: a note written to our eldest while she was house-sitting, now spotted with some stage blood from the horror con. Resting on top of that was a sharp little gardening tool that the youngest had just used to tear up the weeds from the front walk. Here is the effect:

I don't know, it just looked kind of crime-sceney to me. In a good way.

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OK, can we start blowing stuff up yet?

I love this

It's quiet, no one's stirring yet and I have time to go over lists and just...sit. We've got some gardening and tidying to do out in the yard, and today looks like a perfect day for it. Costco and the Jewels will be getting a decent amount of my money later today; Binny's Beverage Depot already got their cut.

MizBubs got the day off work and she's sleeping in, bless her heart.

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I'm about halfway through a really good book: Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War by Joe Bageant. If you liked What's the Matter with Kansas? but wished it had been more brutally direct, or set in Appalachia, then this is the book for you.

The author, Joe Bageant, has a great home page here. You can read some of his essays, pungent little exercises with titles like "The audacity of depression" and "Pissing in the liberal punchbowl again."

The very first thing I ever read by him was this piece:

Welcome to middle class lockdown. Now shut up and buy something.

It opens with this quote:

"Take away America's Wal-Mart junk and cheap electronics and what you have left is a mindless primitive tribe and a gaggle of bullshit artists pretending to lead them."

The instant I saw the term "bullshit artist" I was hooked.

A little farther down I came to this passage, and as someone who is actively contemplating his exit to that imagined simpler, more pastoral life, this really hit me:

Now it took me one helluva long time to claw my redneck self into the middle class and it took me even longer to figure all this out about its inauthenticity. Always one to fuck up right in front of the whole damned world, I loudly declared American middle class life to be a crock of shit and vowed to kiss it off. Go someplace simpler. Run nekkid in the surf in Saint Kitts or smoke pot in Belize. Catch my own damned salmon on the Galician Coast. But whoaaa hoss! This bad news just in: Not only do you have to buy your way into the American middle class through forceful consumption of the lifestyle, but you have to buy your way out of it. I'm serious. Buy your right to live in poverty. Let's say you've managed to get your kids through college one way or another, usually via a second mortgage and loans, and you decide like I did to say: Fuck this. I've done right by my family. Now I've got high blood pressure, a bad back, and a million other stress ailments. I'm overweight and have terrible lungs. Now I want to escape the ever rising cost and stress of playing the game, the grinding chase after enough net worth to feel safe about such things as health care and a safe place to shit. Spend a few years in some warm place blinking at blue, unpolluted sky before I go tits up. To my mind, these are completely understandable sentiments for any reasonable person. But, alas dear hearts, the American middle class is a lockdown facility. One that takes a lot of cash bribes and blackmail payoffs to break out of.

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Sorry if that seemed like a little bit of a downer. I didn't mean for it to. I actually find his writing to have a galvanizing effect on me, which I need more often than not. As the holiday approaches we need a Joe Bageant to cut the grease from all the "God bless the USA" we're going to be subjected to for the next couple of days.

The dangers of fireworks

Key phrase to remember: "after leaning over a professional grade firework."

Bottom line? Backyard fireworks are not safe, but if you do decide to stage an illegal amateur fireworks display in your backyard, for God's sake, keep your mannequins and your melons at a safe distance.

Stupider, and yet rocking harder

In between running errands and getting ready for the holiday, the eldest and I have been busy preparing 100 % all-American music playlists for the party. (*Note: The girls are lobbying to include Nick Cave as an honorary American based on his love of country death songs and the fact that he sounds American. Plus he's one of the Sons of Lee Marvin.)

I was listening to some Ted Nugent to check the sound quality, and as Wango Tango blasted out of the speakers I turned to her and said "you know, you can actually feel yourself getting stupider as you listen to this."

To which she replied, "yeah, but you can also feel yourself rocking harder." She held up her right hand, flashing a perfect set of metal horns, and left the room.

Yep, we're getting ready

Cousin Clete is all excited. He took the gate off the neighbor's dog run and he's getting all set up for the big party this weekend. He felt cheated when we didn't throw a party last year, and he's promised to make up for lost time.

Happy 4th of July

I hope everyone ended today's celebration with all the fingers, toes and eyes they started out with this morning.

Differences between men and women: 4th of July Edition

According to MizBubs, it would never even occur to a woman to do something like this. Which I think is too bad.

Here comes Independence Day

Right down Independence Day Lane...

Well, I'm not as much of an html retard as I thought. I'm html handi-capable, as it turns out, and I was able to restore my beloved links without much trouble once I was awake enough to concentrate. Now I have a Katie Schwartz meme to attend to, and a backlog of stories involving peacock throttling freaks and random other stuff that's caught my eye.

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The next couple of days are shaping up to be fun but busy. I've been working day shift, from 8:30 to 5pm, since May, which has been a nice change of pace. Today is different. I have to go in at noon to meet the other honor guard officers so that we can practice marching up and down the square in preparation for the 4th of July parade tomorrow. Fortunately our uniforms, while damn good-looking, are not nearly as spectacular as Liberace's.

I'm working nights tonight as part of a crime suppression unit, which means we'll basically be going out to local problem areas looking for gang members and obnoxious drunks. Then, first thing tomorrow morning, it's back at work for the parade.

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My mom called me yesterday after finding this quote in the Sunday paper:

Ninety-nine successive years have we set aside one whole day for killing small boys, putting out eyes, rending limbs and scaring horses as a glorification and symbol of the American idea of freedom.

--Chicago Tribune editorial, July 4, 1875

Yes, it seems that people think of me when the conversation turns to fireworks and accidental injury.

Now, sadly, the combination of work schedules and a mid-week 4th mean that we're not having a big party this year for the holiday. And that means Cousin Clete won't be building his chain link rocket launcher: