November 19, 2009
Eight minutes
A full tank of gas…
Stared back at me from the lighted dashboard where the important nuts and bolts of my car’s information were. I had a car full of hopped up drunk concert goers who wanted a road trip. I fell into the driver’s seat by default, being the last one to find a seat and sat staring at the full tank wobbling in a watery black lake. The steering wheel slowly morphed into a knotted ring of roots with worms and ants prowling the edges. The mushrooms hadn’t yet worn off but driving couldn’t be that hard. There were only 5,000 of my closest friends in steel boxes also trying to navigate away from this place. Colors rang in my head and swam before my eyes as I turned the ignition. It worked! We were driving! Hand me a beer! Rolling down my window the night smelled good, fresh and willing to let us play in it. The wipers came on and someone said it wasn’t raining. Lets get this road on the show, some girl said, pounding my seatback. OK I think I thought and stepped on the accelerator hearing the escalating RPM’s ramp up in my eardrums. All the windows were now down and we were laughing, yelling, and having a gay old time. I never knew driving could be this easy.

Ten minutes
I didn’t recognize you…
In all of the photos, in all of the letters, in all of my memories you didn’t look like this. We spent a week together in Burma, traipsing across the Irrawaddy river valleys, eating stunning guacamole at Inle lake, sharing lives as single travelers bound by the beauty of a far away country. Continuing our travels you went back to Thailand and I went north to Nepal but we stayed in touch through general delivery. Back in Savannah you wrote longwinded personal stories to me, opening up a world I had only briefly tasted. I sent back letters filled with the ramblings of a lost twenty something, letting ideas and thoughts spill onto the page like overturned coffee. We wrote back and forth over ten years. You got married, divorced. I proceeded through my twenties, and into my thirties refusing to grow up, with nothing to show for my life but experience and a few thousand in saved dollars. I was still working seasonally, still traveling four months out of the year while you started an ad agency, found yoga and herbal teas and the cosmic meaning to the universe. I loved coffee, booze, travel and women, but not necessarily in that order. Your sister found my address and most of my written letters in a box in your closet. I went to your funeral. That wasn’t how I remembered you but death is often the last impression we are given. I don’t go to funerals anymore.

Eight minutes
The old worn frame…
Was only one of many lining the walls of this venerated music hall. Everyone from Bo Diddly to Miles Davis to the Grateful Dead had played here, immortalized in signed prints and worn out photos. Pictures, and posters, black and white, color and etched drawings. Sitting directly above the lone water fountain was my favorite. In a peeling black frame not much bigger than an LP sleeve, was a flyer from 1970 advertising Jimi Hendrix, Cream, and Ten Years After. For five dollars. It was a summer show but inside the Fillmore seasons didn’t matter as it was always time for a party. I walked by that poster countless times, wishing that I could have been 20 in 1969. I imagined spending all my hard earned money in places like these, and now, I just wish the frames could talk, tell me stories about what it was like, how it smelled and , most of all, how it sounded! Every picture tells a story.

A windy guttural day with little to aspire to as the briskness of a walkabout brought revelatory thoughts about food. My good friend Erik, himself a chef and self described food snob, recently offered up this question...what cooking class, if any, would you most like to take?...and i was at a loss, because personally I wasn't sure I wanted a new cuisine in my repertoire. I would rather improve my skills in Italian, Pan Asian, Euro-influenced, Mexican...but new? Sushi, maybe. And traditional French (but I don't eat that way so what would be the point?). I know I want to bake better-breads, cakes, cookies, pies, pastries (ala Monica) and work on my Tapas resume. More improvement than anything new, and then I thought of barbecue. Not the beer belly hotdog slinging barbecue of yore, but the BBQ of the south-good old fashioned down on the farm, dukes of hazzard deliverance style BBQ where you take brisket, shoulder, ribs and slow cook it in an open pit, then slather it with secret sauce! That's what I'm talking about! So,yes, Erik, show me THE BBQ!
Having just been to Kansas City, home to fabulous BBQ and lousy baseball, I now consider myself an expert amateur on the eating of said culinary delights. Not an expert on process, but an expert in the way that eating at five different places in four days will give anyone an opinion on anything. We ate at a diner, at a wedding reception, at a swanky bar, and at a grease spot next to a racetrack and military base. The variety of establishments equalled the degree of quality we encountered and traveling with another couple gave us the opportunity to try multiple things on the menus. We ate pulled pork (sandwich and just the meat), beef brisket, pulled chicken, long and short ribs, beef ribs and pork ribs along with the requisite sides of cole slaw, potato salad, curly fries, tater tots and, my favorite, baked beans with carmelized bacon fat swimming in them (YES!). I managed to pass on eating the ribs because of my cannibalistic fear of gnawing meat off a bone, but did scrape some off of Brennan's plate that was fantastic. It was all terribly good, a whole new world of food had been opened to me that is almost entirely regional, reaching maybe to colorado but certainly into texas, tennessee and oklahoma. After four days of a nearly vegetable-less diet, my digestive system was on its knees begging for mercy.
There are as many ways to BBQ as there are BBQ joints, and in Kansas City there are over a hundred such places. There's different rubs, sauces, agings, smokes, methods, and everyone has their personal favorite and it's always the best. Much like Alaskans love of smoked salmon, mine is always better than yours and we could spend hours talking story about the methodology. Same as Olkahoma Joe's, Pat's Pig, The Smokehouse in KC all one up the other in the all important medium of bullshit.
It's not terribly creative but the difference between a moist tender melt in your mouth pulled pork sandwich and a tough stringy dry one is method and the folks at Oklahoma Joe's have nailed it. They've been in business over fifty years and I'm sure the 'pitmaster' has been there as long perfecting his art behind the scenes where no one watches. I applaud his talent and his drive to be the best but most of all his love for what he does because that first hung over day in kansas city, that succulent sandwich and beer that i had at his place was the best I've ever had.