You Sane Motherf**ker!

In January 2016 Donald Trump declared that he could shoot someone on 5th Avenue and not lose a vote. In a string of disqualifying choices, I thought this one would end his run. We all know how that turned out.

I wondered, am I crazy?

I went to the doctor for my annual physical shortly after the 2016 election. She said, “Hello” and immediately followed with, “You have 3 minutes to dump about Trump. Go.” Clearly my appointment wasn’t her first Trump-election-fallout rodeo and my habit of processing shock with verbal vomit was well, normal.

My insomnia was also normal and considering the scope of reported Trump related health issues – heart palpitations, anxiety and high blood pressure to name a few, I got off easy with insomnia.

This was early days.

In the past two plus years of tailspin and topsy-turvy-twisty-turney mess, Trump has reportedly lied an average of 15 times a day. Surly that easy deceit suggests insanity but which of us is nuts? He’s the President and I’m home alone slinging curses at my TV.

My friends also lose sleep and get red-faced in the face of our faltering democracy and moral decay.

When I tell them I curse at the news, they assure me they do too. When I share my constant, unrelenting anger they’re right there with me. Lack of sleep? Check! Feeling of helplessness? Check, check! Protesting, volunteering, staying informed, screaming into the social media void and donating – thus doing the same thing over and over with the same result? YUP!

Is everybody just plain bonkers?

Healthcare is a mess so we can’t rely on the professionals. It’s time to self-diagnose and alert others. We need a universal and simple way to flag insanity. I propose something like a hand signal or an exaggerated wink. One movement to signal when you’re sure you’re on the edge and a different signal for when you see someone even edgier. Something subtle but with enough flair to alert folks in the area.

There’s just one problem. If feeling crazy is at epidemic levels, there’d be so much signaling that whole communities would fall into a never-ending, winking and waving flash mob.

Maybe best to focus on people who are absolutely, positively NOT crazy and take our cues from them? Right now, my beacons of hope are Cardi B (@iamcardib) and Snoop Dogg (@Snoopdogg).

From her condemnation of the shady politics that shut our government down, to her many other astute observations on politics and culture and her ability to own her haters, Cardi B knows what’s up and she’s not afraid to say it.

Snoop also had choice words about the government shutdown. But best of all, he’s confident in who he is and in his choices. When Snoop Dogg got a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, he said, “I want to thank me for trying to do more right than wrong. I want to thank me for just being me at all times. Snoop Dogg, you a bad motherfucker.”

So I’m taking their lead. Less questioning my sanity in these times and more doing more right than wrong.

And maybe more cursing.  It would feel good to let a heartfelt “Motherf**er” go right in front of Trump Tower on 5th Avenue.

I’m sure that’s not crazy at all.  Wink, wink:)

 

 

 

 

What, Me Worry?

Wisdom From Alaska – Where No Worrying Took Place

I suppose worry works for people like Tim Burton. He can turn even the fluffiest of holidays into an animated worry festival.

And whomever is responsible for network dramas, they’re making a mint off worry. In a trailer for a new TV show, a man was riding up an escalator to meet his waiting girlfriend. He had love in his eyes and flowers in his hands. He was surely going to propose! As she came into view, expectant and glowing, the floor dropped from under him and he fell from sight – swoosh – into the crushing bowels of the still moving stair he was riding.

Margagogo’s Seattle Bureau Chief cackled and snorted, “That happens … NEVER.”

I on the other hand, a frequent rider of NYC’s subway, feel sure there’s a chance – maybe a .00005% probability world-wide but that potential must leap to at least 20% at the Lexington Avenue & 53rd Street station here in Manhattan. The subway surgeons are there regularly, pealing back the metal skin of the long escalator riders rely on to ferry them deep underground and out again. Thanks to this show tease, I now imagine being the unlucky one in a game of Stair Roulette. If it happens, as my last act, I hope my disembodied hand rides the rest of the way up, propped upright in the metal teeth with my middle finger unfurled, to meet a waiting and expectant Governor Cuomo at the top.

Clearly, I’m a good candidate for the stairs but I like the boost. I don’t just ride, I climb and since I’m on an escalator, I do double-time without the speed related sweat.

Technology: Can’t live without it, take your life in your hands when you use it.

There’s some tech I vow to live without. Absolutely no fitness tracker for me. If I’m laying in bed awake worrying about robots taking over my job someday, I know I’m awake. I also know I should be sleeping. I don’t need a fitness tracker to tell me. 

I know when I walk a lot because, well, I’m there. My feet and muscles feel it and they know, without digital documentation, when distance has been covered. I don’t need a “buzzzz” or a “ding” to tell me to get off the couch. Doing nothing requires a choice just like anything else. Of course it matters if I climb no flights versus a zillion flights each day. But by my count, the fitness tracker always gets it wrong. And, I don’t want the last bit of recorded history of my life to be my free-fall through a stair. 

I’m not a showrunner so I’m ending this dark digression to get back to my starting point: Worry is a waste of imagination. I’d much rather imagine a great view and a margarita as big as my head. (Considering the whole purpose of this blog (see the origin story) that is a given.) 

Marg Over The Zambezi – Highly Recommended

Here’s to a worry-free 2019!

Love Is The Way!

What used to be Puttanesca, an Italian restaurant and my neighborhood local, is boarded up and beneath the “Post No Bills” warning, someone scrawled “Love Is The way” in white paint.

This week, someone with more time and more color, embellished the original.

I did love Puttanesca. I doubt the graffiti artist(s) want me to think of food when I see their work but every time I walk by the empty store front, I miss my local and wonder where it went.

One day it was there and the next, it wasn’t. Every table, every chair, every scrap was gone. All that remained was some dust and a few light fixtures left to glow within the cavernous space. The cute Serbian bartender who liked to talk literature and gave me free wine while I wrote blog posts at his bar, moved on to who knows where. The place where I ate (along with hundreds of others) post Super Storm Sandy, wiped out.

Is it possible to put a restaurant’s face on a milk carton?

What’s weird or weirder or maybe just weird to me is that they renovated just before closing. They expanded the bar area to cash in on the wine bar craze and they reopened a few months before they emptied out for good. Clearly, a plan went catawampus.

The building was sold. Could that be the twist?

It’s a corner lot, 6 stories, brick and a little run down. But it’s New York City real estate. The building reportedly sold for $17 million. It’s just a few blocks from “Billionaires Row.”

57th Street (which must be “Billionaires Row” though the moniker is new to me. It used to be, less colorfully, considered part of “Midtown”) is transformed with one high-end hotel next to the other and of course, there’s the monstrosity that gave us the most expensive apartment ever sold in NYC. The sale price? $100,471,452.77.  Yes, that’s right, $100,471,452.77 – I’m sure the seventy-seven cents sealed the deal. Don’t have $100,471,452.77 to fork out for an apartment? I suppose even some Billionaires might find that pricey. No worries! There’s an apartment for rent in the same building and it will only cost you $150,000 per month.  At that rate, you could live there for over 55 years before being all-in on the current high water mark in apartment cost.

I live a few blocks away from “Billionaires Row” so I get to bask in the glow and enjoy the halo effect from my neighbor’s bling-ness. Or to look at it another way, my rent went up 6% last year and 10% the year before.

Glow aside, I wonder if everyone else sees what I see: Do you see the people and places giving NYC its character – the very things that suck in Billionaires and non-Billionaires alike – leaving the city? (I wrote about this once in more detail. Check it out here and I’ll move off of this particular soapbox for now.)

I started with love and rambled quite a ways away. As I read back, I’m afraid I seem a bitter about Billionaires.

I’m really not … mostly … I mean Billionaires are people too and I’m very pro-people!

And love really should be the thread through it all so I invite anyone willing to take the stroll over to Hell’s Kitchen to join me at my new local, Bello. It’s been around since 1985, the Northern Italian food is tasty and when I sit at the bar, they give me a little extra splash of wine. I love a little extra splash. I also love the Rigatoni Matriciana.

I haven’t asked them to make me a margarita yet. They’re sort of hard-core on the Italian cuisine vibe so I haven’t made the leap. I’ll get to it though and I’ll give you an update when I do.

I don’t know if sky-high rent drove Puttanesca out of business but given the changes happening all around us, rent seems a likely culprit. On the bright side, I found Bello!

Maybe everything happens for a reason. Maybe I’ll see you at the bar, smiling over a big splash of wine. And hopefully, like the sign says, love is the root of it all.

Love Is The Way! Hell’s Kitchen, NYC

PS to all Billionaires, Would-Be-Billionaires and Total-Non-Billionaires: The bar at Bello can be chatty so please join in. And FYI, I’m not one of those people who gets offended when someone offers to buy me a drink. So if you’re hesitating and debating, “Should I, shouldn’t I” the answer is always, “Yes, you should!” Love is the way and a lovely glass of wine is a fine and loving expression. And if you’re nice, I might buy you right back. It’s only neighborly. And while we’re on the subject, here’s good reading for any neighbor: The Gentrifier’s Guide To Not Being An Asshole – hot of the press from The Village Voice – a look at neighborhood change from a deeper perspective than my wine glass allows.

Food Glorious Food!

I’ve been actively watching what I eat. And by that I mean I eat whatever I want but track each morsel, with laser-like focus, as it makes its journey to my mouth.

I know what you’re thinking: “It’s not Food’s journey. Food isn’t trying to get into your mouth!” Really? Are you sure about that? Think about it this way: If Food doesn’t have a mind and influence of its own, they why can’t I stop eating the tasty bites?

My relationship with Food is by far the most complicated in my life. (That’s a bold statement for someone like me who’s made many questionable dating choices.)

Food is celebration, sorrow, entertainment, quality time and nourishment but it’s rarely just fuel. I get the concept of “calories in” and “calories out” and the impact of that delta on my waistline. I still find it’s easier to get the calories in. So this time of year, after the high of the holidays and as we slog through the last slow, grinding, snow-filled days of winter, my meager attempts at mindfulness are taxed to the max. That’s a problem.

About 2 years ago I lost weight and thankfully I haven’t found it again, though those pounds stalk me.

I didn’t have a weight loss plan. When my doctor asked how I lost the weight, I told her I was on the “close my mouth” diet – Food can’t jump in if you don’t give it an opening. I ate what I wanted. I just ate less and less often.

The cornerstone of my weight-loss plan was (and still is) my diet donut. Every morning, I have one old-fashioned donut. And here is where the mysterious and mythical power of Food peeks out from behind the curtain.

The diet donut isn’t about portion control. Food has always been a little standoffish with me in the mornings and I don’t pig out at breakfast. It isn’t a health choice. After all, donuts are fried and to the best of my knowledge, a kale, beet, chia seed flavor donut is yet to be invented. The diet donut is a bit funny and a bit of comfort. I remember going to an old-time cider mill as a kid and getting crisp and hot, real-deal donuts. My diet donut is not one of these. It is not the stuff of memories.

I think my daily, diet donut is all part of Food’s master plan. It’s just tasty enough to call me back again and again and just bad enough to prime me for even more deliciously bad things. Like last Sunday at brunch when I thought it was a good idea to have a margarita with my cinnamon strudel cake at Sonny’s (Portland, ME).

Margarita + Cake = Sigh 🙂

You should go to Sonny’s if you’re ever in Portland. The brunch was awesome (even the parts with protein and no tequila) and they take their drinks seriously. When you go, you should take me. Let’s do it before I give up donuts and pry loose Food’s grip on me.

I will quit them one day – donuts, that is. It is my intention to break up with them and keep up the diet. I’m just not ready. I’m not ready to take Food on and break its mysterious hold on me … maybe after one more great meal…?

Disclosure: I wrote a draft of this post back in January after an amazing dinner with margagogo correspondents at Meadowsweet (Brooklyn, NY). The Down East Bureau Chief, the Head of Borough Research and margagogo’s Medical Director all gathered for one of the best strategy sessions ever. The food and drink at Meadowsweet was so good, I’d go back there as fast as the subway will take me. After dinner, we moved the meeting over to Baby’s All Right. It was NOT all right (Ok, you probably saw coming and it was double cheap because I stole it from a Yelp review.) But the waitress promised us a pitcher of margaritas with “like 7,000” limes.

5 Limes short of 7,000

7,000 of anything plays perfectly into my notion of excess so even though there was live music in the back and different music blasting in the front and even though our pitcher of margs was “like” 6,995 limes short of the promise, the evening was great.

So tonight I will go home and have soup and an apple for dinner as a token step toward freedom from tasty treats. But as I slurp soup, I’ll be thinking of friends and margaritas and dinners and cake and all the great things I can do with 7,000 limes – like maybe make a donut.

The Best Margarita I’ve Ever Had

In honor of National Margarita day, I want to tell you about the most well-balanced, perfectly shaken, slightly smoky, not sweet, not sour, perfectly-citrus-with-a-tequila-tang margarita I’ve had all year. (And by “all year,” I’m going for a rolling 12 months and not the less than 2 months of 2015.)

That’s what this blog is about after all: The search for the perfect margarita.

The thing is, I don’t remember. I don’t remember the best margarita I had all year.

I remember my vacation in Colombia with my friends when my only concern was where I was getting my next great meal and what would be on my plate when that meal was set in front of me because my Spanish is sub-par at best. I sipped margaritas, looked at palm fronds waiving in the breeze, rolling ocean and cloudless blue sky. Every one of them was perfect.

There’s something about context that colors a whole experience.

I was in Costa Rica after a day of horseback riding through rain forest and eating with a local family when our guide offered us cashew wine. Cashew wine, you wonder with a raised brow and wrinkled forehead. Yes, it turns out a cashew is a nut and a fruit. A fruit that looks a little like a giant apricot or pepper with a claw.

Cashew Claws

And cashew wine, in that moment in the forest with macaws cawing in the trees was extraordinary. So extraordinary that we couldn’t wait to try some at home and sitting with friends in a New York City apartment, it was the worst thing ever.

In Portugal, we sailed the ocean blue and drank vino verde. I loved it. I loved its green tint and young, crisp taste. The sun set over the ocean and sails filled with wind and the wine was the best thing I’ve ever tasted. And then I got back home and you can guess what I think about vine verde now.

But I remember those moments and those drinks and always will. Those moments and those drinks were the best.

Last week, Moss Beach Distillery (Half Moon Bay, CA) was the scene of a perfect moment if not a perfect margarita. I was with people I love with a view anyone would have to love and got a margarita that would be hard to love if not for all the other lovely things that went along with it.

The perfect moment if not the perfect margarita

I realize this blog isn’t about the goal of finding the one, single perfect margarita but about the journey and all the fun and friends and family who keep my company on this path. “Perfect” is a subjective concept anyway, right?

So maybe I’ll never find that “perfect” drink. But, I’ll have lots of fun trying.