★★★★★ The line of the hills was sharp and the river was deep blue. Roses bobbed on the bush; the fountain in its plain straight-line concrete tiers glittered. It was not too cold for a New York Ice Cream truck to have parked in the Mister Softee spot outside the Apple Store, nor for a Mister Softee truck to appear behind it, blow the horn, and reclaim the space. Every brick, every water-tank slat, and every still-green leaf stood out. Peeling paint showed on a cornice maybe ten stories overhead. The afternoon shade in the street below the office seemed like twilight, till the eye moved up and flinched at the sun-struck stone against the blue sky above it. A film-crew worker in the back of a truck and the apologetic man begging-ordering pedestrians to stay out of the shot both had their hands thrust into their pockets. The usual limestone pallor of the Empire State Building was awash in warm tones.

The Nevada City Wine Diaries

Nuevo Mundo Carignan, 2015 Les Hauts De Lagarde Blanc-Sec, Sean Thackrey “Pleiades XXIV Old Vines” California Red Blend, Gloria Ferrer Blanc de Noir

If Donald Trump were a wine, what would he be? I really can’t think of anything. If there is a joke here, I am not the person to make it. Which is too bad, because if not me, then who?

My debate wines: I started with a small, exploratory glass of that 2013 Nuevo Mundo Carignan from Chile I had a few weeks ago at my blind tasting. I decided that in fact I don’t like that particular Carignan. It’s salty. Now, is it a complete fuckshow of a wine like the 2014 Moss Roxx Ancient Vine Reserve Zinfandel that I had two sips of by accident on Saturday? (The only reason I am not giving you details of how that came to pass is you would die of boredom.) Lord Almighty, that Moss Roxx Zin — it tasted like a grape that ate a bag of sugar and then threw up on itself and then ate some more sugar to feel better. By comparison, the Nuevo Mundo is sort of “interesting” in that it doesn’t really taste entirely like wine, which, if you’ve drunk a fair amount of wine, can be a good thing. But it’s also just not that delicious. I like soy sauce, and I like wine, just not in the same glass.

About 20 minutes into the debate I switched to a 2015 Les Hauts De Lagarde Blanc-Sec, a white Bordeaux. It’s organic, it sells for about $14 or $15 and it’s a good, well-made, dry white wine probably like what you’d get in France if you ordered a €5 glass of white Bordeaux in a decent bar. Keep in mind however that the wine you got in France probably wouldn’t even be organic, because contrary to the beliefs of Monsanto-hating Americans who jizz over France/Europe as some sort of agrarian Utopia, Bordeaux is one of the most pesticide-ridden wine regions in the world. This is a nice daily-drinker white wine, made of Sauvignon Blanc and Semillon, dryer and more crisp than most American or Australian Sauvignon Blancs, particularly in that price range. I liked it but I wasn’t so apeshit over it that I felt compelled to hog it. I had one glass to slightly anesthetize myself against the experience of watching the debate then I checked out to wash dishes.

Before Donald Trump and Billy Bush’s adorable little chat took over everything last week what chiefly occupied my mind was a New York Times Magazine piece about natural wine. (Yes, I know, “8 days ago” is an epoch in time that should have been bulldozed into oblivion by now, sorry, let it live a few more minutes on this page.)

Bring on the Natural Wines

I have had a lot of good natural wines. And I don’t dispute that a lot of wines, most, in fact, are over-produced, over-handled, over-ripe, and contain a lot of weird additives. But the fact is that a lot of winemakers make great wines that are not natural and those people who say things like “I only drink natural wines” should understand that other people might find them hard to take. That said, I mean, this country was founded on the principle that any dude with a beard and a girlfriend who makes mugs from local clay for a living can drink exclusively natural wines although may I recommend that at least one of them gets a non-natural job so they can afford them. But the idea that people who don’t drink natural wines are somehow less human than people who do is what I might call “highly problematic.” Here is a description of New York sommelier Jorge Riera deciding if he thinks someone might like a natural wine:

What he’s really looking for is a certain flare of light in the eyes. “When a person seems open, I go there with them,” he says. He’s not just talking about wine; he’s talking about consciousness itself. He makes a selection. He pours. He watches. “All of a sudden,” he says, “they’ve been transformed.”

He’s not just talking about wine, he’s talking about consciousness itself. People who want to drink natural wines have more life force in them. People who don’t are dead inside. Got that? Weird, because in my experience people who don’t give a shit about wine have far better personalities than people who do.

I realize I am skipping around here, sorry, but Friday night I saw the film The Girl on the Train. It was my third or fourth friend date with my new friend who I call The Little Red-Haired Girl, because she looks exactly as I have always pictured Charlie Brown’s secret girlfriend/beard who went by this name. During the movie The Little Red-Haired girl and two other two people who I don’t know that well (again, boring story) split a bottle of Sean Thackrey “Pleiades XXIV Old Vines” California Red Blend that I had brought and opened under great duress during the first extremely silent five minutes of the movie. The cork made a lot of embarrassing squeaking noises, but it was all worth it.

The wine was an unusual but not crazy light fruity red, made with a lot of varietals including but not limited to Sangiovese, Viognier, Pinot Noir, and Zinfandel, Thackrey’s entry-level wine made from the leftovers of his more expensive, single- or mostly single- variety wines. Thackrey is from Bolinas, and when I first found this out, I was skeptical — I dated someone from Bolinas and I don’t know if anyone there should be making anything. But I loved it, it was like a really good cheddar grilled cheese sandwich that someone puts like a little tiny bit of one obscure cheese into.

Another friend arrived late, after a forty-three-hour hair appointment, at which point we all split a bottle of Gloria Ferrer Blanc de Noir that is the Little Red-Haired Girl’s go-to movie wine. We drank this wine second — one usually opens an evening with sparkling wines — because it was just too quiet at the beginning of the movie to pop a cork. “We could open it during a loud train scene,” the Little Red-Haired Girl suggested, but no such loud train scene took place.

I decided I would open it in the bathroom. There were two women there when I arrived, and when they finished, more arrived, so I was just sitting there on the toilet, holding my Gloria Ferrer Blanc de Noir, feeling embarrassed. I imagined people looking at my legs under the stall and thinking, “There’s The Girl That Takes a Dump at The Girl on the Train.” But then finally someone flushed and I flushed at the same time and I opened the bottled and no one was the wiser. I carried it back to our seats upright in my big bag.

Gloria Ferrer Blanc de Noir is pretty good for sparkling wine that you can get in a supermarket. It tasted a lot better than cheap sparkling wine but not as good as expensive Champagne. What do you expect? If you’re in a supermarket buying sparkling wine and there’s this for $21 and something else for $14, spend the extra six bucks.

The Gloria Ferrer website says that their Blanc de Noir is “outstanding with crab, Thai cuisine, roasted pork, quail, foie gras or semi-sweet deserts [sic].” What it is not outstanding with is The Girl on the Train, because the film takes down everything in its path. The movie is basically about men hungrily kissing women’s necks while the women look up at the ceiling like “Ugh, you again.” Emily Blunt gets wasted a lot but then ends up being right about everything anyway, which is not a good message for your wives or daughters. The movie did end on a high note for us when Justin Theroux had his carotid artery pierced with a corkscrew and we were like, whoa, weird, we used a corkscrew earlier too.

What’s happening in the news now?

I’ve never seen a creepy clown
I hope I never do
But here’s what analytics say:
The fucking world clicks through

For any ladie who loves her oyntment

The Puritans were narcs and squares, we all know this. Since they killed…pretty much everyone out of paranoia and fear, we ended up with a lot more of their literature than we’ll ever need, and our perspective as Americans tends to be skewed. But generally speaking, if the Puritans were about it, it was most likely a bad idea. And if there was something that they thought was bad, guess what? It was probably good!* Or at least fine.

Take witches for instance, history’s horny crones. Out in the woods, studying up on homeopathic remedies, finding wild things to do with herbs. For ages, we’ve assumed that mythical witches rode broomsticks for all the symbolism—brooms are domestic and phallic, so if a woman can wield the power of both, she must be pretty threatening and cool. But according to Atlas Obscura, there was a more practical explanation for the image too: vagina drugs.

Sex, Drugs, and Broomsticks: The Origins of the Iconic Witch

European women have a centuries-long tradition of cultivating home-grown hallucinogens. Ingredients vary, but across the board people seemed to be able to agree that witches were making something they dubbed “flying ointment”:

In medieval Europe there were a number of hallucinogenic plants in fairly easy supply. First among these was the rye mold containing ergot fungi. With effects on humans similar to LSD, ergot was a powerful hallucinogen. Among other readily accessible hallucinogenic plants were henbane, deadly nightshade, mandrake, and, according to Johann Weyer in his 1563 Praestigiis Daemonum, these were all principal ingredients in any witch’s “flying ointment.”

There was a problem with drinking flying ointment, though: it was gross. It would make you nauseous and pukey while you were waiting for it to take effect, so the ladies improvised.

Much in the same way that dropping hallucinogens into your eyeballs or putting them into your sweet little anus will get you high more quickly, the resting vagina is another great avenue of chemical absorption. This wasn’t lost on the foremothers:

…among the other ways to ingest a hallucinogenic drug besides swallowing it is through the mucous membranes, such as under the armpits, through the anus, or for women, through the mucous membranes of their vaginas. And how might such a ointment be best applied to those delicate mucous membranes? From the 15th century records of Jordanes de Bergamo: “But the vulgar believe, and the witches confess, that on certain days or nights they anoint a staff and ride on it to the appointed place or anoint themselves under the arms and in other hairy places.”

One fourteenth-century investigation of a suspected witch yielded this amazing description, clearly penned by a hater.

“In rifleing the closet of the ladie, they found a pipe of oyntment, wherewith she greased a staffe, upon which she ambled and galloped through thick and thin.”

So when the townsfolk might have observed a woman “riding” around on her “broom” she was actually just “getting high” in her “free time.”

And if your family forces you to commute across the Atlantic Ocean on a wooden boat (where you survive both scurvy and the common cold over the course of two seasick months), all so you can move to Massachusetts and become a corn farmer (when you’re not bearing Josiah’s eight children—five of which will be stillborn), you should at least be getting stoned on a Wednesday night in October. You’ve earned it.

_____
*you don’t have to go to school now, I covered it all

You’ll Be My Mancrush If You Can Get the Sticky Cheeto Stuck In My Navel Out

And other answers to unsolicited questions.

“I need a new mancrush. Any suggestions?” — Crushing Carl

I’m not a big proponent of the concept behind the phrase “No Homo.” We should all be comfortable enough with our masculinity, sexuality, id, ego and superego as straight men to express that we find other men attractive, appealing and just plain fucking cool. Hey, we all sucked a few dicks in college. Oh, wait. You didn’t? Well, you probably should have. You might have gotten it out of your system. And picked up a few helpful pointers along the way. Even though the New York Times took a lot of the fun out of being bisexual a few years back. They’ve since back-pedaled. But no one reads a correction, do they, New York Times? And even though you might have missed the Newsweek article in the 90s that declared the Rise of Bisexuality. We didn’t yet have an internet to tell us what to do back then. Or whom to do.

So if we’re entering a Brave New Age of Sexual Self-Assuredness, you will want to have a Celebrity Mancrush. Every sophisticated metropolitan lad will have at least one. Just as we are allowed a list of celebrity ladies the woman in our life must accept our possible infidelity with should the opportunity arise. Mine includes both Ann Coulter and Rachel Maddow as it so happens. The others are all ladies from commercials.

I’m a Red Sox fan, and yet I still think Derek Jeter is the coolest man on the face of the Earth. Even if he’s getting a little gray and a little pudgy and is down to one good leg, the man still has it. It’s more like an IT in all caps. He dated pretty women, married one of them, always says the right thing and does everything with Class. He also has a weird sarcastic sense of humor. Always a bonus when you’re already hot. We joke that we’re looking for sex partners with a sense of humor. That’s a lie. We’re looking for people we’re attracted to.

If Gary Cooper represented masculinity before most of us were born and Alan Alda represented the death of masculinity before most of you were born, Derek Jeter represents what masculinity has become in the new Century: reliability, with flashes of true brilliance. And not just on the basepaths and batters’ boxes. He’s the kind of man you wouldn’t mind taking Valtrex for. He’s got lots of time on his hands now that he’s retired. Go get ’em, tigers.

Matt Damon’s Jason Bourne is the man we all secretly wish we were. If we couldn’t spend a day knowing what it was like to be Derek Jeter. Confident and deadly. Able to kill you in the streets or grab your hand and show you the way. These days he’s walking around with his head shaved. Which works for some of us but not for others. Damon’s got a great sense of humor, looks like Tom Brady and seems like the kind of guy who would be fun shooting pool with or being locked in the closet with. My friend told me I was a Ben Affleck, which is why I’m attracted to Matt Damon. She’s up for the Booker Prize, so she’s probably right.

Try Steph Curry, Zach Galifianakis, Jay Z, Bill Clinton, Vladimir Putin, Drake, Tom Brady and The Entire Cast of “Magic Mike.” And, yes, even Donald Trump. Doesn’t that explain a lot of his following? Insecure men who just want to roll around in the sack with the Donald? Do yourself a favor, Trumpkins. Seduce him. And get it on YouTube. Before Election Day.

“My girlfriend likes baseball. I don’t know anything about it. How can I learn to enjoy it more?” — What The Hell’s a Balk?

Good for you, man. Trying to expand the things you appreciate to fit with your lady. Sadly, if you didn’t grow up with baseball you will probably never love baseball. It doesn’t make a lot of sense. It’s boring for long stretches. It captures an America that no longer exists. Until we can invent a sport called Racismball, Basketball and Football are much better sports to watch on TV. Hockey and Soccer are better sports to watch in person. Baseball is passed down from parents to kids. And when it’s at its best it reminds us of just the simple game of catch we wish we’d had more of.

So, play catch with your girlfriend. It’s awesome to play catch. Even in the apartment. Especially in the apartment. Just putting on leather gloves, smelling them, whipping whatever ball you can find around. Maybe you can’t throw or catch. Don’t worry about it. It’s the effort that counts. And if you do throw it well or catch it well, you will feel amazing. I spent most of my baseball career catching behind the plate. Basically watching the ball whizz by and going to the backstop to pick it up. I loved every minute of it. I would go back in time to any day I played little league and gladly strike out four times again if I could.

Wagering makes sports fun. Bet on the outcome with your buddies. Winning money is always totally more fun than earning it. Even $5 can turn a boring game into a barnburner. You can secretly get a mancrush on one of the players. Like Big Papi. Why not, he’s got a great smile, a lot of personality, and a great ass. Don’t knock it until you try it.

You can also just try to enjoy your girlfriend’s enthusiasm. You don’t need to say anything smart. Or do anything at all. Just be there with her and enjoy the time together. Winter is coming and “Game of Thrones” won’t be on until July. Keep your Khaleesi happy.

Jim Behrle lives in Jersey City, NJ and works at a bookstore.

Does it even matter what day it is anymore?

You know how some mornings when a week is dragging on longer than usual you wake up on a Tuesday and think it’s Wednesday? That didn’t happen today, did it? No, even though time has slowed to whatever takes longer than a crawl — the next Nobel Prize for Physics will go to whoever determines how the fucking debates somehow manage to warp the passing of the hours for weeks after they transpire— you opened your eyes knowing full well what day it is: It’s Tuesday, and it’s going to go on FOREVER. Normally at this point in the year you’d be freaking about how Thanksgiving is next month, but this time? Who gives a shit? Next month is A MILLION YEARS FROM NOW. You will grow old and die before Thursday happens, who can even conceive of Thanksgiving? We’re never going to get out of this week and if we do we’ll all be so old we won’t remember what happened to us. Here’s some music. Enjoy.

★ When the cold medicine wore off, the night wind was rattling the blinds so violently they had to be raised before new and undrugged sleep was possible. In the real morning, dark clouds flowed quickly south under a solid layer of medium-dark clouds. The smallest, nearest, and loosest ones overtook the larger and more distant ones as they went. One looked like a galloping carriage, the older boy thought. Rain came to even out the gray. Half-changed oak leaves were down in the puddles and trampled on the sidewalk. Clothes were drab and protective. Forgotten or misused things needed retrieving or repairing, errands on wet pavement under the grim sky. A blue gap appeared on the northern edge of the gray, and in the span of a brief nap, the whole sheet of clouds was yanked away, too suddenly to even catch the sunset.

Lament Of The Online Journalist

Pity the poor web writer

Today I had to write about Ken Bone
I knew before I saw it on my phone
The text that said “I’m looking at the trends
And noting what I’m hearing from my friends — 
We’re going to need a post about Ken Bone”

Today I had to write about Ken Bone
It’s not the greatest shame I’ve ever known
(Nothing tops my having to assess
Who had the smartest take about The Dress)
But still, I feel a deep urge to atone

Today I had to write about Ken Bone
And even though I’m far from being alone
The guilt and self-loathing are piled so high
I might write a quiz on the best way to die
I bet my readers vote for death by drone

I’m sorry that you have to hear me moan
But how can someone claim to be all grown
When his job is so goddamn infantile
Predictable, shabby and juvenile
He has to turn out posts about Ken Bone

I’d like to smash my head in with a stone
My sense of hatred is so fully blown
I’d love to pour gas on the Internet
Ignite the whole thing with a cigarette
And laugh and say, “Fuck you, you’re on your own”

It’s a beautiful dream that will never come true
So there isn’t a lot else I have here to do
I’ve shown you my soul and you know my despair
That’s all that I am now, so please like and share
Today I had to write about Ken Bone

Go ahead, read the new Leonard Cohen profile.

His gift or genius is in his connection to the music of the spheres. In the song ‘Sisters of Mercy,’ for instance, the verses are four elemental lines which change and move at predictable intervals . . . but the tune is anything but predictable. The song just comes in and states a fact. And after that anything can happen and it does, and Leonard allows it to happen. His tone is far from condescending or mocking. He is a tough-minded lover who doesn’t recognize the brush-off. Leonard’s always above it all. ‘Sisters of Mercy’ is verse after verse of four distinctive lines, in perfect meter, with no chorus, quivering with drama. The first line begins in a minor key. The second line goes from minor to major and steps up, and changes melody and variation. The third line steps up even higher than that to a different degree, and then the fourth line comes back to the beginning. This is a deceptively unusual musical theme, with or without lyrics. But it’s so subtle a listener doesn’t realize he’s been taken on a musical journey and dropped off somewhere, with or without lyrics.

— If you are someone who enjoys old Jews talking about each other you are going to be thrilled by David Remnick’s profile of Leonard Cohen in this week’s New Yorker. That quote above comes from Bob Dylan! (It also contains the classic quote from CBS Records president Walter Yetnikoff, who in 1984 told Cohen, “Look, Leonard, we know you’re great, but we don’t know if you’re any good.”) If you are an old Jew yourself you may remember the New Yorker’s previous profile of Leonard Cohen, by Leon Wieseltier, which happened nearly a quarter of a century ago. If you are neither old nor a Jew, there is still plenty to enjoy, but you probably won’t feel the same stab of recognition when Cohen offers Remnick “some slices of cheese.”

Leonard Cohen’s You Want It Darker is out on October 21st.

A listicle without commentary

• practice
• leg day
• gains
• coach
• how we did out there
• home remedies for the thing on your foot
• this weather we’ve been having
• wait who said they’d tried the BK chicken fries
• Felicity-era Keri Russell
• Jessica Alba in Dark Angel
• secrets from your childhood
• what does this smell like
• razor burn
• the self care industry is a scam
• could everyone please RSVP to your roommate’s Facebook event by Wednesday, just… as a favor to you
• new emojis: too big?
• come on who farted
• what your friends got up to last weekend
• was Jenna there?
• did she look happy?
• wow man that thing really smells
• high protein hot sauce alternatives
• Muscle Milk?
• Pathfinder or CR-V
• your upcoming weekend getaway
• like two hours with no traffic
• not bad at all
• are rolling suitcases femme?
• how much you enjoy consensual sexual touching with the partner of your choosing