Heyyyyy Brotherrrrr

You can remember so vividly that tree you used to climb. You knew exactly what first branch to grab and how to begin your ascent. You can close your eyes and remember step-by-step where to put your next food and hand.

You can even remember how the bark of the tree felt in your grip. For some reason you can still put yourself on that climb, and have the confidence that you would remember what branches would be where, what ducks, twists and reaches you'd need to make to go higher. 

You knew how far up the tree you were just by looking at the branches you were grasping. There was no need to look down or into the distance to see how high you had climbed, you knew that this was a journey to the top. You remember how the branches became smaller and thinner, yet you had 100% certainty that they would hold you, just as they always did before. You didn't question yourself or the tree because you had done this so many times. 

Finally, you reached the height of your ascent, and you and the tree became one; a balance between your own weight and the strength of the far reaches of the tree. You remember feeling that equilibrium, knowing that you couldn't go higher.

Only then do you look around to see the view, only then do you look down to see your journey and how far you've come.


I was 8 years old the first time I was proud of my brother.

I remember looking up, a block away into my tree and seeing a little red figure. It was my brother, at the highest part of the tree in his red coat. I ran towards the tree...I knew he was as high as you could go because of the branches. 

There I was looking up at my 4 year old brother on a windy, winter day, clinging to the top of the tree like a koala bear. But I don't know how he got there, did he use the same branches? 

In his memory he may have taken different steps; put his feet in different nooks, grabbed limbs I never noticed. He saw that tree differently. He saw his path differently. But he got to the top on his own. 

His was a different journey, and I am still proud.

Accidental Rage-ist

Someone in Georgia attempted to run an unauthorized transaction using my credit card number.  Yes I know this was probably the result of the grocery store I buy my dietary staples-Progresso soups and stir fry ingredients-having their credit card processing vendor cyber-attacked, it feeds well into my disdain for the South.  So why not make a completely inappropriate logical extension, shall we?

A Tale of the India Pale Ale

Scholars continue to argue fervently about the truth behind the mysterious origins of the India Pale Ale (IPA). And to this day, the list of wars that have started over this debate are countless.

Yet, there are some wizards and normal lay-people who believe it to be a gift from the Hanuman, the Indian deity who wanted to sleep with British women. The story follows that Hanuman was disfigured shorty after birth (in Sanskrit: hanu = jaw and -mant = disfigured/prominent). No one wanted to be his girlfriend...or boyfriend for that matter. Over the ages, he was always well-known as being a foolish, monkey god, who dances and sings, often prancing around like a little fairy. So on top of being ugly he simply wasn't very manly, and let's face it, British women didn't want to bed an Indian monkey to begin with.

So Hanuman dug around in his bag of tricks and created a potion that he gave out in pint-size samples to the East India Company from Great Britain. The traders loved the potion so much that they requested to know the recipe from Hanuman, lest they take their beautiful women back home to England and let Hanuman keep working at the local circus in Delhi. Hanuman, no longer wanting to work with the evil circus masters and desiring the fair-skinned women of the British Isles, decided to make a deal.

Hanuman told the East India Company that he would give over the brew's recipe as long as he could have 13 soirees with a different British lass for 13 consecutive nights. The traders agreed fairly quickly, as they had grown tired and bored with their women anyway, and told Hanuman that he could keep them and were probably going to sail away and never come back to the God-forsaken land in the first place. 

So The East India Company learned the recipe of the IPA, which they named after it being a paler ale than their usual counterparts. They found that coke-firing the malts produced less smoke and gave a lighter toasting to the barley, which as a result created a lighter color in the brew. Later as an afterthought, the traders decided to put India at the front because that's where they discovered the ingredients. Luckily, this overruled the naming sought from most of the native India population who wanted the ale to be called Hanuman's Piss.

Needless to say, Hanuman couldn't care less about the name, after all, they were just potions to him and he could probably make dozens different flavors if he really wanted to. In addition, he was excited to have his 13 British women to take out for a evening on the town. Unfortunately, his ideas for making monkey-love never came to fruition, as he made the mistake not once, nor twice, but 13 times in a row of getting his date so drunk they she barfed relentlessly until the next morning.

The end.

*I for one don't believe this story, as many British women at the time were in fact quite keen to monkey-love. But hey, every myth has a kernel of history to it.