I roasted a chicken tonight. Hot damn, I love roasting chickens. Tonight's was a free range hen courtesy of Trader Joe's, which came out splendid. I also made mashed potatoes, and put together a little salad replete with my first ever batch of croutons (an excuse/opportunity to use up a drying baguette).
It has been an intense, soul-searching weekend. We've both been under stress lately, the end of the semester looms, and on top of it all, up pop the occasional ghosts from lives past.
Mainly I remember being 20-21, driving around Charlotte in my 1978 Honda Accord with the paint sandblasted off ("The William F. Buckley, Jr." after the columnist), noting as I went by certain corners that person(s) with whom I had a past could be right there and I could happen to cross paths with them. I remember a sometimes overwhelming sense of the place being haunted. The one thing I liked about the experience was the exhilaration of potential danger or conflict.
Conflict never ensued. If it had, it would have run its course, as these things do. This may seem machismotically stoic, but I think it's true nonetheless: most things run their course. Even curses obey statutes of limitations. And what I still possess from those weird tense days is a set of memories, most of which are pleasant enough, and a few of which focus on the perfect freedom one can only experience at 20-21, in an old junker, driving in warm afternoon sun with all the windows down and good music on the stereo, with one's first tastes of Pyrrhic victory, craziness, politics, emancipation, and wine on one's lips.
I learned there aren't really any ghosts. There's just jerks in white sheets saying "boo."
It has been an intense, soul-searching weekend. We've both been under stress lately, the end of the semester looms, and on top of it all, up pop the occasional ghosts from lives past.
Mainly I remember being 20-21, driving around Charlotte in my 1978 Honda Accord with the paint sandblasted off ("The William F. Buckley, Jr." after the columnist), noting as I went by certain corners that person(s) with whom I had a past could be right there and I could happen to cross paths with them. I remember a sometimes overwhelming sense of the place being haunted. The one thing I liked about the experience was the exhilaration of potential danger or conflict.
Conflict never ensued. If it had, it would have run its course, as these things do. This may seem machismotically stoic, but I think it's true nonetheless: most things run their course. Even curses obey statutes of limitations. And what I still possess from those weird tense days is a set of memories, most of which are pleasant enough, and a few of which focus on the perfect freedom one can only experience at 20-21, in an old junker, driving in warm afternoon sun with all the windows down and good music on the stereo, with one's first tastes of Pyrrhic victory, craziness, politics, emancipation, and wine on one's lips.
I learned there aren't really any ghosts. There's just jerks in white sheets saying "boo."
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