Since I've recently regaled my legions of readers with miniature disquisitions on Montaigne and Milton, here are some more ordinary pastimes, opinions, and observations.
A good dinner may be secured at McDonald's, brought home, and washed down with two cans of Miller Lite.
Around 11 on Sunday morning is a good time to have two fried eggs, toast with butter and jelly, two strips of bacon, lots of greasy hashbrowns, and several cups of black coffee, though with sugar and cream in the last one, for dessert.
If you go to a "nice" place for brunch, and order a Bloody Mary, it is apt to come with way more than you need or even want. I just want the vodka, the tomato juice, ice, spices, and something to stir it with, like a pickle. Everything else is unnecessary and distracting.
I think I maybe developed my opinions about Bloody Marys at the Poodle Club, a bar on East Lake Street in south Minneapolis. It has since burned down, but in the early-80s, when I first moved into the neighborhood, it had a weekend breakfast special: two eggs any style, two toast, and your choice of a Bloody Mary or a screwdriver—$1.99. This was almost forty years ago, but still, as you'd predict, the Bloody was not accessorized. The first fifty I ever had were at the Poodle. I had them at the bar with the eggs and toast. On Saturday morning, the cigarette haze from Friday night had not lifted and was augmented by the smell of spilled beer on the floor. I'm not sure all the customers had been home. I remember once hearing the guy on the next stool tell the bartender he wanted "the special, with a screwdriver, hold the eggs, hold the toast, and keep them coming." The Poodle Club ambience got imprinted on my brain and associated with the idea of a Bloody Mary. When I finally had one somewhere else, and it came in a curvy glass with pepperoni and a radish. . . seemed sort of ridiculous.
It's odd that I have such strong opinions about food and drink but am not at all particular. Truest sentence my mom ever spoke was, "He's easy to cook for."
Pretty good chance that history will adjudge Trump to have been a subpar president.
The best game is baseball.
A lot of people who vote reliably for the Democrats have an unduly dismissive attitude toward country music. Hank Williams, Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn, Dolly Parton, Merle Haggard, Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings: every one of them, beyond merely terrific. Probably others too, more current, but I don't know about them. I do like Nikki Lane.
When I talk to young people who like me prefer the Democrats, and there are a million of them around where I live, I find that their reasons aren't my reasons. With me, it's got nothing to do with yoga or the horrors of genetically modified plants in agriculture. Have they noticed, though, that the other side is depraved and completely whacko? Nixon was a crook, Reagan an avuncular dunce, and George Shrub . . . wasn't avuncular. But look at their team now! Holy shit!
I think I've been channeling (subliminally till just this instant) a Twitter thread I saw in which people were challenged to confess their most "normie" opinion. So someone said they thought the Beatles were a good band. Someone else said with almost any band their best songs are the ones they did after their real fans accused them of having sold out. Someone said they liked the Eagles, to which someone replied: "That's a bridge too far." Or maybe Cold Play was a bridge too far, I can't remember for sure. Some of the responses were pleasingly layered, such as (paraphrasing on all these that are inside quotes): "Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is a great work of classical music, although people who don't appreciate classical music agree." Naturally, I remember the food ones, like: "The parking lot at Olive Garden is usually packed as the unlimited garden salad is quite good." Another contribution: "Melted cheese elevates many dishes." I got into the thread because someone I follow, Jennifer Frey, offered, "Potato salad, lots of it." My opinion about potato salad is that, as with the Bloody Mary, it's too often too busy. You have to let the potatoes speak for themselves, like the vodka. Within reason though. At Stand Up Frank's, a bar in north Minneapolis, if you ordered a Bloody for yourself and a screwdriver for your friend, the bartender would put a straw in one drink and two straws in the other, so that you'd know which was which, not that it mattered. My normie about that was, if you must have two, have three, so that you won't even be able to find your car in the lot and therefore won't try to drive it.