Sara Smile

I SHARE this happy sight in order to please my fellow beer drinkers, and to drive my good pal Doc Nagel insane with jealousy. Say what you will about the wonder of wonders in California, you can't get Saranac out there.

You can get Sierra Nevada, which made me very happy for a good while last month, when I had a fridge full of Saras and Sierras, which is a fun thing to wrap one's mouth around. This should be fun as well, finding Saras to go along with the Harpoons. At some point, I wanna try the brown ale with the Harpoon IPA, but I gotta figure out what sort of lunch that would go best with. Something grainy, perhaps.

Today's lunch was the cheeseburger at the local. Normally I do that on Tuesday, but the lady who now manages on Tuesdays, whom I thought to simply have a slightly bland personality, and then considered a bit of a weirdo, and thought might just have man issues, turned out to be a psycho hose beast. Evidence of this is forthcoming, but first: this conclusion was reached when I went in on Wednesday rather than Tuesday and found out my pal Jaimie, the hostess, actually went so far as to cancel her Tuesday shift so that she wouldn't have to deal with this nutzoid.

Quod Erod Demonstrandum. Thus it is proven.

The process actually started last week, when I was observing the last bit of foul weather the month had to provide, which was foul indeed: nasty, rainy, windy, cold, just rotten, this in the middle of some classically bodacious North Carolina Fall weather, with blue skies and temps in the 60's. SO I started in jotting down lines for a variation on the Eliot bit. I read a couple of them to Jaimie, who, despite not being what you'd call a big reader, has proven to be a valuable sounding board on such matters in the past. She liked the first few lines, so I went back up front and got her to kibitz as the first few improvements revealed themselves. As this went on, I started getting a weird vibe from the manager chick. Towards the end, when I was all but done eating my burger, I approached the front to share another couple of lines. Jamie said, and this is a direct quote, "Dude, if ****** sees you up here talking to me, she's gonna yell at you."

At this point, Jamie was madly doing the standard hostess-up-front-cleaning that is the fifth business of any restaurant hostess trying to avoid catching crap from a batshit manager. That put the writing on the wall. Manager decides she's gonna yell at a customer? Whacko. Manager giving Jamie grief? Batshit. Everybody likes Jamie.

So at that point, I decided, after another brief chat with Jaimie, that maybe my Tuesday tradition was at an end. Heck, I figured, I guess I could start coming in Fridays. On Fridays, the Red Oak (locally brewed lager, yum) is on sale. So, just as an experiment, last Friday I went in, and my pal Jaimie was not working. And who was manageing? ******. I don't know which God I pissed off, but I must have done so on a holy day.

So today was better, I got to see my pal Jaimie and have a cheeseburger and a couple of Sierra Nevadas, and the manager was someone who actually likes me.

So anyways. Here's the fuckin' poem:


MUTABILITY, RECONSIDERED

Far from being the cruelest month,
April is a moody bitch, lovely in her shapes and ways,
But coarse in her shifting manner.
Sun-coroneted days
Turn to steel-cold rains
As April gets her last licks in.

All things are opposable
From thumbs and spindles to reasons and rhymes,
Weather and seasons and lives and times,
Moods and musings mutable
Changing and inevitable
As day winding down to dusk.

As clouds break loose on the broad horizon,
Spreading rose-tint glow far and wide
As cool moist winds breeze and glide
Tousling the treetops along the hilltops,
Painted pink and green leafy lollipops.
April can be a pretty cool chick.