Grove Rag, Side A

In among the pines, with a useless toolbox I purchased on a whim, I gazed arborward. What could I do with so many wrenches? I had long learned that it only takes one. My partners had deserted me earlier and frankly, I let them, insisting that heading further into the woods was my thing and I didn’t expect anyone to follow. One of them hesitated briefly, the others turned and left. Their shadows galloped out of view.

Looking back, the pines aren’t that bad. I made me a nice little house out in a mystic grove, which dumb luck had delivered and I readily accepted with a pathetic sense of entitlement that one stranded in a mystic pine grove really can’t be faulted for exhibiting. Anyway, there is some strong evidence that a past civilization had criss-crossed the grounds long ago. They had evidently mastered hedonistic masonry and nihilistic poetry. They cast marble-plated shields that, at first, I couldn’t even lift. I made a friend in the grove. Her name was Melissa, and she had reached the grove about two years before me. She showed me how to lift the shields, how to suck the brains out of forest insects (the best part), and how to make my living quarters as livable as possible. She knows her stuff and I think she’s great. There’s this odd dynamic between us. Odd in the sense that it takes two to tango and one is an odd number.

In all honesty, that’s not the point. I sat up one evening in my favorite spot. See the grove is spacious and remote enough that I’ve spread out all through it. I've settled little areas all over the forest, but the best one was up on Great Round Hill.

A quick aside: I can’t claim spreading out was my idea; I found this incredible portfolio of detailed maps in a tree trunk’s unearthed south-facing rim. It took a night of drinking mushroom water with Melissa to figure out that the diagrams mapped to our mystic grove. A couple minutes after I showed her the maps, she said, "Those drawings are maps of the grove." I looked incredulously at the parchment. A few distinguishing shapes peered off the page and rapped at my brain: the perfectly straight line of trees along the creek, the marble columns arranged like picnic benches, all the little half-natural canopies ringing the Great Round Hill. "I think you’re right!"

My weekend spot sits at The Parlor, which is a landing on the fifth highest circle of canopies on the Great Round Hill. At that elevation I can see out over most of the pines, to the end of the pines, the concrete, the shore, and the sea. The landing is about 15 feet wide. It extends 6 feet from the hill. I dug thick round holes into the side of the hill using a tool I found in the grove. I plugged them with slightly thicker branches and then wove less hearty, leafier boughs together to form a roof over my weekend spot. It's easy enough to sit above the landing further up the hill for an unobstructed view of the stars - I rarely go up there though - I tend to stay within the confines of my landing.

I've been slowly adding personal touches to my place at The Parlor: berrymaze molding, marble beam covers, wooden spoons with little holes at the handles. The decoration is welcome, but to me nothing's worse than some lame quotation pinned up as if to stir some interesting emotion within the indifferent, chiefly absent audience. Having said that, we have some wonderful verses up here on Great Round Hill. If I ever hang a quote it would certainly be: "You're decomposing - leave the pines."

Norfolk Banks Rag, Side B

Bill fixated on her profile and dried his eyes. He made no adjustments. He snapped out of it but into something far worse: Bill rode down the road fixin' his vocals to the tune of something pleasant. Got grey right quick. The dawn in an instant left for the coast and in it's place a kingdom of ironbelt blue. Smoke stacks and rusty water bins disdained the tracks. Their stubby legs flexed and Bill swiped a cigarette from his pocket, sparked'er 'n' took'er for a drag. The orange flame swelled in the morning's hellborne grey - Bill's train inbound through the fog - ring electricity. He toyed with his cigarette and right then he shuffled half a short one and a lit, second stick. He squinted and drew his chin high and tight.

Shining lights grew tight. Without a thought but with a hearty serving of self, he flicked the cigarettes onto the track. A chunk of shale quelled the short one. The long one sparked wildly as it fluttered to a flame, a once-contained inferno that spread to the farms past the hills past the country line. A large hunk of crosstie caught it. The air above the rails boiled. A fire war raged out of control. Who's side are you on Bill asked himself. He panicked a little because after all it was his long one that started the mess. The fire danced on soulfree. The train had arrived and boarding began. Some drones missed the sparks. Others evacuated. Smoke piped all around. Bill leaned against a post.

The steel composite crisped and charred...undocumented, unregulated fluids ignited...compressed gas combusted...the platform was alive. Several bells rang, drones crawled, pigeons flapped their wings up and shot their faces into puddles and sucked up dirty water, some folks figured doom and began to climb up and out of melting metal window frames (the doors hadn't slid shut). The flames, with gusto, kept on. The heat barreled beyond "intense." Bill watched it all unfold, imagining her.

The day failed to break. The sun wandered off, dusk settled in. Poor men and women had wiggled partially out of the burning train through windows rimmed in fire. Fragments of aluminum poles began melding into their skin. Their faces disfigured slowly, slow enough for Bill's heart to begin racing. He saw a woman with short hair and a shiny black pocketbook with gold buckles lose her left cheek to the pole. She could scream through her distended, disfigured mouth. She screamed. Bill jumped to the top of the burning train and leaped towards the front car, he couldn't feel the slightest warmth.

At the head car, Bill fell on his stomach and took his palm to the conductor's tinted window. He rapped. Bill got really desperate, he hung over the side and pounded wildly at it. He yelled louder than the sodered masses behind him. At once through the tinted chamber the man at the train's helm faded up into view. His back was turned to the wheel and he looked directly at Bill. An old, white-haired, bleak man with fiery eyes stared intensely at him. Through the dense air, Bill's horror overflowed as he gazed a haunting scene deep inside eyes identical to his.

Please turn to Side A.

Norfolk Banks Rag, Side A

Despite the discomfort Bill was all blissed out, porker chasing turkeys down a hill 'top Slider Island. Beef and creamy bunsy, night to dawn, short a shirt, breathin' hard for minimum wage, developing wrist tendinitis, thick guitar chords oozing out strong, quickly surrendering - sidestepping to the carefully-delineated shoulder, near tall, skinny birch trees.

That afternoon, Bill drove through sunlit ivy-covered underpasses. Shadows angled down the highway, and as he peeked the rear-view, his heart sunk as his city retreated. Driving down Kingsley (quarter-mile), thinking about getting off early, really turning the thing on its head, leaving it legs up in the sun. Bill pictured the scene:

An endless drive in a storm of stories, nuisances with wings, headed down east. Billy sighed 'n' rolled his eyes, affirming the family of clouds banded together over their heads, blindly approving of the historian's "analysis" of his ancestry. Maybe drugs would make this trip better. This was truly as comfortable as Bill's bear's lair: neatly organized war novels on the top shelf; pristine non-fiction par with his bloody eyes; cookbooks, transcriptions, and folk tales on the next two shelves. A green crusty old-taled sofa, figurin' for a drink, ridges deep and dark, pronounced "oh-no oh-no." A thick maple kitchen table with two refurbished, sturdy benches that could comfortably seat four, beneath fruit-stained stained glass with dark dirty black lines tracing the shapes of strawberries, pickles, and pears.

Endless driving all afternoon, weaving left turning right weathering the storm's onslaught. As for hope, as for the tunnel's exit light, Bill blinked morosely, took a drag of wild fantasy, and puffed some tumbling white cloth, tan skin, and human touches out the window. The road opened with the tenderness of a pregnant embrace. As if seasoned by the intricate coast and the unfracked Western springs, the signage smiled, the road ricocheted warmth, and inbound chromejets soared in silence. All this was undeniable. Bill had absorbed these violent fistfuls of shackled action before. He'd walked away with his hands in his pockets, and he knew he was headed down that same highway.

They arrived at the old bay house. Bill exhaled to erase the vision of a four-sided dungeon on the cove. She appeared. She wasn't wearing red shoes or a red ribbon in her long strawberry-blond hair. The house lacked a rickety, shingled water tower on its roof. Bill swallowed meekly, and the storm's comedy commenced. Laughs labored as they evaporated into the clean crisp air. Tales flowed as her tumbling white cloth vanquished the crappy little waves in the bay. Seconds later, more plastic planks like the ones on the recliners stirred the scene and punctuated Bill's uphill struggle.

Please turn to Side B.

Lushy Noodles

Lushy noodles (Bucatini and Bacon)

If you have 20 minutes to spare and a functional attention span, give this Serious Eats Food Lab article a read. I'd love to know what it says. I have a feeling it's relevant to this post though, because cooking pasta may be the most challenging part of this recipe. It's easily the most critical component of the dish.

Here's the premise: make a tomato sauce, saute some bacon, combine the two, and then cook the pasta for its last two minutes in the tomato-bacon juice. You'll end up with succulent noodles, drunk with rich, fragrant, tomato flavor, stumbling through a maze of slightly crispy, but equally inebriated, chunks of pork.

The wholly non-tragic tragedy of using Oscar Meyer bacon.

Ideally, you'd use a pork product that isn't as in-your-face as Oscar Meyer Thick-Cut Bacon. I'll admit bacon hogs the spotlight pretty obnoxiously, but who are we kidding, we keep buying tickets to the show. If you can get your hands on good imported pancetta, the kind you'd ask the deliman to slice a single, 1/2 lb. ring off for you, that's what you're in the market for - well, actually what you really want is guanciale (ie. "face bacon") - an apparently prevalent cut of pig outside the northeast US.

Chunked guanciale from Buon Italia.

Guanciale is cured pork meat from the cheeks or jowls of the pig. People go nuts for this stuff for good reason, each little bite packs a haymaker punch of porkiness, it's like concentrating a 500 pound pig's worth of porkiness into a couple ounces of meat. I find the Italian Market at Chelsea Markets to be the best place to purchase it, as chunks of vacuum-sealed guanciale chill out unassumingly in easy-access baskets. If you're forced to pronounce it, go with "gwan-cha-lay."

Once it hits your lips! It's so good! It's so good!

So about this lushy noodle bit: your goal is to create a thin tomato juice that your pasta can be immersed in right before serving. The noodles will chug the tomato sauce without abandon, the pasta equivalent of shotgunning a beer, the fratboy equivalent of doing a fully-clothed swan dive off a balcony into your neighbor's new pond. In just a couple minutes, the pasta will glow deep orange, infused with flavor, studded with decadent little bubbles of pork fat and deeply-concentrated tomato essence. You don't need cheese with this pasta, you don't need a swig of olive oil, you don't even need a drink - because you'll finish this plate in no time, and by all earthly measures, you will have died. Enjoy!

Bucatini with Bacon
Serves 2

4 cloves garlic
Fresh basil
1 large sweet onion (like Vidalia)
4 tbsp. extra virgin olive oil
28 oz. can peeled tomatoes (Nina, San Marzano, Luigi Vitelli, etc.) 
Kosher salt
Cracked black pepper
1 tbsp. sugar
1/2 lb. thick cut bacon (about 12 oz pancetta/guanciale)
1/2 lb. bucatini (or thick spaghetti)

Peel the garlic cloves, squash them a little, chop the onion roughly, and tear up some basil leaves. These ingredients won't appear in the final dish, they're only flavoring the sauce (so they don't have to be cut perfectly). Heat up a medium sauce pot, add the extra virgin olive oil followed by the garlic, onions, and basil. Add about a tbsp of salt to the mixture and mix well. Cook the ingredients over medium-high heat until translucent and reduced, about ten minutes.

Meanwhile, pour the peeled tomatoes into a bowl and gently break them apart with your hands (watch for squirters!), discarding anything unusually tough or discolored. After the vegetables cook down, add the tomatoes to the sauce pot. Add salt and pepper to taste. Add the sugar. Cook the sauce, uncovered, for 30 minutes at a very slow simmer.

Slice your pork about half an inch wide. Heat up a saute pan and add the pork. Cook over medium heat until the edges crisp, then turn the heat down to its lowest setting.

After 30 minutes, place a strainer over a different sauce pot (you may want to do this step over a sink). Pour the tomato sauce into the strainer, and with the back of a spoon, press as much of the liquid out of the sauce as you can, through the strainer, and into the bottom pot. Put the clear tomato juice on the stove over high heat and bring to a vigorous boil.

Bring aggressively-salted water to a boil for your pasta. Add the pasta. After five minutes, begin checking the pasta for tenderness every 30 seconds. Once it's just tender, but still essentially inedible, it's go-time. Pour the tomato juice into the bacon saute pan, and turn the heat up to medium. Using tongs, transfer the noodles from the pot to the saute pan and stir well. Cook the noodles about 2 minutes, stirring.

Transfer the pasta to serving bowls with a circular flourish (it's all in the wrist), make sure to distribute the pork evenly, and garnish with a hearty sprig of pretty basil leaves.

They're all wasted.