Cocktail Sundays: Hondo Ohnaka's Asteroid Belt

 

The most difficult thing I've dealt with so far in cocktail exploration is cherries. Or, I should say, cherry-flavored drinks. I don't like them. They never taste quite right.

Part of this problem is with me, except that I don't think it's just me as my wife acknowledges having the same problem. The problem is that we grew up with cherry flavored... everything. Okay, not everything. But, you know, cherry-flavored medicine, cherry-flavored cough drops (okay, sure, it's sort of medicine, but it's also mostly candy), and, most of all, cherry Life Savers. All of these things have the same chemical cherry flavor, which is completely unrelated to how actual cherries taste. It took me a long time to like real cherries at all because, to me, they didn't taste like cherry oughta taste. There's a conflict between reality, expectation, and, then, what the drinks have tasted like, which weren't like reality or the built-in expectation of artificial cherry flavor.

We got some Luxardo maraschino liqueur, but... I guess it's fine on its own if you just want a taste, but the flavor isn't like cherries or artificial cherry flavoring. And I've never liked maraschino cherries, so I don't even know if that's comparable. It also hasn't worked for me in any cocktails we've added it to to boost the cherry flavor.

At this point, I'm just going to toss in here that I don't really know why I got so invested in making a cherry drink other than that it became some kind of weird challenge.

Here is what has worked: We got some Amarena Fabbri cherries, initially, because we needed the syrup for something. These cherries are amazing! And the syrup is delicious. Actually, this stuff is perfect on vanilla ice cream, not that that is what I've been using them for. They never last that long. We also got some Heering cherry liqueur, which was my last ditch effort at making a worthwhile cherry cocktail. The Heering is much better than the Luxardo, but it still didn't do the trick. I decided that cherry cocktails had defeated me.

Ah... but then I devised Hondo Ohnaka's Space Punch, which is not cherry, but, on a lark (because I wanted to add some cherries to my drink, I decided to try a cherry variation. And, wow!, am I glad I did! Not only is this drink possibly better than the space punch, but, with it, I conquered the cherry cocktail. Or, at least, a cherry cocktail, which is good enough for me.

So after probably too much explanation (but I needed to build some suspense, right?)...
Wait, does this make me like one of those cooking bloggers who writes 10,000 words before telling you that it should only take you three minutes to sauté some onions? Hint: it takes much longer than three minutes to sauté onions.

Here's the recipe:

1oz lemon juice

1oz cinnamon syrup (you can also use demerara syrup, depending on the flavor you want)

1/2oz Curacao

1/4oz Tawny port (regular port will also work and provides a deeper red color to the drink)

1/2oz Velvet Falernum

1/4oz Heering cherry liqueur

1/2oz Licor 43

1/4oz allspice liqueur

2oz rum

2 dashes Angostura bitters

3 Amarena Fabbri cherries

Add ice or however you want to chill the drink.

I've been making this with Mount Gay's Eclipse rum, but I think I also want to try it with a darker rum, maybe their Black Barrel. Once I pick up a new bottle of it.

Just to be clear, the cherries are the asteroids.

Day Two

Sunday, January 21, 2018

The internet is still not working. I think I’m going to go crazy. All the things I usually do are gone! Including talking to my friends. Mom says I should use the phone, the actual phone. She says that’s all she had when she was a kid and that that ought to be good enough for me, too. But talking on the phone is weird, and I can only talk to one person at a time. And I can’t share pictures on the stupid phone.

Maybe if they would get me a cell phone, but Mom says not until I’m 14. Which got changed from 12 when I turned 12. All of my friends have phones! Sometimes I hate my mom!

Like today. She made us go to church. All of us, even Dad. Dad never goes to church. But Mom said we all needed to get right with God and that that included Dad, too. I hate when she starts talking about getting right with God. What does that even mean? Being good? I’m a good person... except for the porn, but I like it and I don’t really get what the big deal about it is. I’m not mean to people or anything so what’s the problem?

Except that I’m obviously not right with God which is why I try to never go to church. I hate it. It’s the most boring thing in the world and the people are all stupid with their fake smiles about how good it is to see you before they go off and leave you in a corner to sit by yourself while they all have fun with each other.

But there were a lot of people at church today. It was packed. And weird. There were even a few of my friends from school there which was the only thing that made it okay.

Everybody was still all fake, though. Pretending to be happy and that everything is okay when clearly none of them think everything’s okay. But no one was talking about it. Whatever “it” is. Mom tells me to be quiet whenever I ask her what’s going on and that I’m not old enough to worry about it. Maybe I wouldn’t worry if I knew what it was.

Is it just that they all think we’re in a war? No one is saying that. And haven’t we been being in a war for a long time? I don’t understand what the big deal is and no one will explain.

During church, the pastor kept talking about China and the “damn commies.” He never said we were at war with China, but he blamed the internet on China, too. Maybe that was just because Trump is blaming the internet on China. Which probably certainly means it’s NOT China because when has Trump ever told the truth about anything?

My friend Jerry, whose parents made him come to church, too, said that his dad said it can’t be China. His dad works with computers or something and said that what’s wrong with the internet is too complicated to be China. I don’t know what that means. It all seems complicated to me. Jerry tried to explain it to me so he seems to understand, but I don’t get it. He kept trying to tell me that there’s nothing wrong with the internet itself and that’s why it couldn’t be China.

Then he said I didn’t understand because I’m a girl, so I punched him in the stomach.

Shithead.

The pastor talked a lot about China and getting rid of foreign invaders. Foreign invaders pretty much means anyone not white, and lots of people have already moved away. They just left, including my friend Tamira who left right after school started. He also talked about purity and getting right with God, but he didn’t say how to do that. Probably getting rid of porn because people at church are always all weird about sex and that’s another reason I don’t like going to the youth stuff because all they ever talk about is how bad sex is.

I wanted to go out to eat after church. A bunch of my friends were going, but Mom wouldn’t let me. She said it costs too much, now, and I guess it does. We haven’t had any fruit or vegetables in months. Everyone says it’s because of California. The prices are really really high, now, and we can’t afford anything more than potatoes. And meat. Meat is still cheap. It doesn’t come from California.

I started three different books today, but they were all dumb. Mom’s stupid romance crap. I just want the internet back.

To Whom It May Concern at Caltrans: Fuck You

So there we were driving west down 80 through Sacramento. It was late Sunday afternoon and nothing was going on that should have made traffic bad...

But wait. Let me give you the visual.

We were on a section of 80 with four lanes, so let's designate those so you'll know what happened.
Here's how they're laid out:

left left lane          right left lane          left right lane          right right lane
      LL                           RL                        LR                             RR

Makes sense, right? We were in the LR, and traffic was actually moving smoothly enough.

Now, as I was saying, we were cruising along and, suddenly, there was one of those concrete lane dividers in between the RL and LR and a big sign on the right saying that that was the way to the I-5 interchange.

Let's just be clear here: There had been no signs warning about construction. There were no signs explaining what was going on. There were no signs about anything except the one on the right saying that that was the way to I-5. My wife is the navigator, so I expressed my concern to my wife about the sudden division in the highway. She said, "Well, we don't want to go to I-5." So I did what I think anyone would have done being in unfamiliar territory (I don't live in or near Sacramento) with no other instructions: I moved from the LR to the RL.

We quickly realized that this might not have been the correct choice.

See, the cars in the left two lanes, the cars that were now in what felt like some sort of cattle chute, immediately began slowing down. And stopping. This began one of the longest hours of my life. Actually, more than an hour. And, yes, some hours are longer than others. It's relativity.
Shut up.

We could see over the concrete divider, and we could see the cars in the right lanes zipping along their merry way. And, well, all of the exits were on the right side of the wall. Imagine if you will that you had never been to Sacramento before and you were coming in but were in  the fast lane and this wall suddenly went up and you were stuck in  this congested traffic and, as you were inching along, you saw your exit... on the other side of the wall! No, that's not what happened to us, but it could have. See, once you were on the left side of the wall, you were on the left side of the wall!

So we drove and we watched the traffic on the right moving at normal paces and we watched the exits go by and we wondered. We wondered what the fuck was going on and why there was a wall in the road. And we would drive a bit, then stop a bit, and move a bit, then stop a bit, and we couldn't figure out why that was, either. Why was traffic on our side of the wall so bad and the other side was normal?

You know in movies and TV shows when they have the orphan, street kids hanging out at the window of a restaurant looking in with that "please, sir, can I have some more?" face? That's what it felt like being on the left side of the road wall. Time goes faster on the freeway, so we were really there for some exponential amount of time beyond the actual amount of time we were there, so, yes, we were starving to move. Why did all of those other cars get to go and not us?! "Please, sir, we want to go!"

Then there was a hole. And a big sign saying that was the exit for I-5. Remember how we didn't want to go to I-5? Well, we still didn't want to go to I-5. So we watched this one opening in the wall go by because we couldn't tell what the fuck was going on! And we continued down our cattle chute, and I made jokes about how we were going to be slaughtered when we got to the end... until everyone told me to shut up.

That was when the lanes merged. Yes, LL and RL became just L, and that was why the traffic was so bad. Okay, not all of why, but we're not to the rest yet. See, at the end of all of this was a bridge that went over the Sacramento river, and the cattle chute we were in had to be merged back into the other traffic to go over the bridge. That, of course, made it all stop and go again.

Yes, you read that correctly. At the end of it all, the traffic was just merged back together. That was it. No apparent reason for the divider or anything, just a shunting of two lanes of traffic out of the flow and merged together for no fucking reason at all! So, yeah, that was more than an hour to go less than 10 miles (8? maybe even just 6?).

That's when the jokes started. You know, some disgruntled traffic controller or something messing with things just to see what kind of traffic snarls he could cause. Or weird experiments. I don't remember what all now. What I do remember is that no one was happy.

I mean, seriously, what the fuck is up with that? Maybe it was all because of some construction project (which wasn't active on a Sunday afternoon), but, still, there needs to be some sort of warning and explanation so that people can know what choice to make. Like I said, we hadn't wanted an exit (until, actually, we did, because my wife was looking up a better route because of the traffic issues, but we couldn't get out of the cattle chute, so it didn't matter), but, if I had been coming into town and had intended to take one of the, oh, I don't know, dozen or so of exits we passed, I would have been pissed. And probably lost, because, when it's just me, I write down my directions explicitly, and having an exit I need to take be closed can really throw me off. Having no access to any of them would have been devastating for my paltry skills of navigating (which is why my wife is the navigator (and I'm the pilot)).

Whatever the case, I have only one thing to say to whomever was responsible for that catastrophe of road design: Fuck you!

Growing Up In the Race Divide (part 4)

Probably, you should go back and read part 3 of this series before going on. The two are somewhat related.

As I said last time, the reason my mother gave me for not allowing me to invite my black friend to church was that "it wasn't a good idea." At the time, I couldn't really figure that out. We were told every Sunday in Sunday school that we should invite our friends to church with us and, the very first time I wanted to do that, I was told it wasn't a good idea.

Needless to say, it was a long time before I ever wanted to invite anyone to church with me again. A really long time.

So let's jump ahead to high school. And I'll try to keep only to the relevant data.

My church employed a number of janitors; they were all black. The building superintendent was white, but all the guys that worked for him were black. Also, my mom was the cook at my church, and all of the help they ever hired for her was... I'll say non-white. I'll also say that, as part of the "paid help," my family, as with the building super, was barely passable, and that's just because we were white. The non-white employees didn't actually attend my church, and the janitors (because we still called them janitors, at the time) were specifically forbidden from entering the sanctuary during services. They could only come in to do the clean-up afterward.

I didn't know about all of this until later, but it all has to do with why it wasn't a "good idea" for me to invite my friend.

One morning, I was walking with the guy who was in charge of the bus ministry. He was helping a little, old lady from the "gym side" of the church to the "sanctuary side" of the church. When I say "little, old," I mean it, too. She was at least in her 80s, unable to walk without assistance, and what you would call wizened. Without any of the wisdom that came with it. As we entered the connecting hallway (the church was laid out in a large U), one of the janitors was leaning against the wall near the intersection. He was supposed to be doing this. They were stationed at what were considered the rear doors so they could open them for people (and to keep out "undesirables" (seriously)).

I liked this guy, and I wish I could remember his name. He was taller than me (not surprising), in his early 20s, had a big smile, and laughed easily. By this point, I was already working at my church, so, sometimes, when I was doing work in the gym area and he was around, we would joke and stuff. Plus, he played basketball with my brother who was only in the 10-12 year old range, at the time, and he treated him like a person, not a kid.

So... there he was, leaning against the wall, as the three of us came out of the other hallway. I went to say hi, the bus guy went to say hi, the old lady... She didn't let us say hi, because she -- pardon the language, but there's really no other way to say this with the same meaning -- lost her shit. Right there. She started screaming that there was a "nigger in the church!" She had a cane, and she, this lady who could barely walk, raised it and tried to go after him screaming about the "nigger" the whole time.

I think my brain froze up, because I just stood there not knowing what to do or how to respond. Evidently, the bus guy had dealt with this kind of thing before, because he just guided the old lady around the corner and off down the hallway while looking back over his shoulder and mouthing an apology. In what I'm sure she thought was a whisper, the old lady was saying, "Did you see that? There's a black person in my church!"

And the janitor? He just shrugged and waved it off. He even chuckled about it. But I stood there, mortified. I hadn't done anything, but I went over and apologized. It was the first time I felt, well, shame at being who I was. Because I was white. I felt soiled just from having walked down the hall with the old lady, not to mention that I had helped her off the bus and into the building. I wanted to go wash my hands. But he said it wasn't a big deal and not to worry about it. It wasn't me, and she was old, and it didn't matter.

To some extent, he was right. I mean, it wasn't me and she was old, but I couldn't get behind the part where it didn't matter. I thought it did matter. I mean, we were in church! What kind of person acts like that to begin with, but what kind of person acts like that at church? Which made me wonder what she'd been like when she was younger and that kind of behavior and been acceptable. And not just acceptable but expected. And I got all sick feeling again and ashamed of being white.

And that's when I understood why my mother had told me that it wouldn't be a good idea for me to bring my friend to church. I never came to a conclusion, though, as to whether it wasn't a good idea because she was concerned for my friend or if she was concerned about any potential labels that might have gotten attached to me or our family over it. After all, "nigger lover" was still a pretty common term in those days.