I am pleased as punch

The sort of punch distilled from a child's smile ground of their face and mixed with scotch. Oh yes, it was indeed a happy moment.

I had heard of bubble tea a few years ago, and it sounded bizarrely exotic. Buffalo seems to culinary be insular. We have great food here. But I the thai places are blah, I have yet to have good Chinese food, and most good restaurants seem to work on that American/French fusion formula "Large piece of meat and braised veggies". That is great and all but not the best place to expand your palate.

But while waiting for photos to be developed at Color tech Jim and I had a snack/dinner at Bao Bakery and Teahouse. Holy crap it was wonderful. It is a little Chinese bakery and offers a huge list of bubble teas and other drinks. I have been looking for a chinese bakery since I moved here. Even in tiny little Albany there was one filled with amazing baked goods.

If you don't know what is up with Chinese baking, it works like this. You take this croissant like crumbly pastry and fill it with anything, teriyaki chicken, BBQ pork, tofu and veggies. And oh man, these were do good and only 85 cents a bun. Two buns will satisfy anyone when hungry.

The bubble tea was so much better/weirder than I thought it would be. I had lychee flavor. 12 oz of lychee tea was so much more than I could drink. Gnawing on black pearls of tapioca is magically weird. It is, like Guinness, a meal in a can/cup.

So, if you are ever near Thunderdome/The Boulevard Mall please stop by and drink/eat until you are giddy from all the super tasty treats.

love

I found this article while looking for a picture of the Hutchinson house which is now the leveled parking lot of the Saturn club.

Here is an excerpt:

There is a fine line between something and nothing and Buffalo manages to walk it straight despite the large quantities of alcohol it consumed in hopes of blurring that line just a little wider. Unlike other cities, where it's easy to sink into the flow of everything's fine, in Buffalo, you must be a prophet or drown in utter mediocrity. Buffalo demands existential authenticity, and the rock we push up the hill (only to have it roll back down over us time and time again) is our only salvation. Like Rimbaud in the gutters and back-alleys of Paris, in Buffalo, you have no choice but to remake life; there's no bullshit left to buy, no palace gates to hide behind (I endure Siddhartha Gautama's 4 passing sights whenever I walk out my front door). Buffalo is the most advanced city in America; we progressed beyond progress.

And the full deal is here

enjoy kittens

Damn, I am good.


I don't say this to pat myself on the back. For I am pliable enough to do that myself and I am sitting down now anyway and the patting would be uncomfortable for the both of us.

But we are moving in a month, and over the two years we have lived here I have become my mother. This is not to say I have at any point lactated or made someone believe baby Jesus cries when you touch yourself; rather I have collected enough food to stock a bomb shelter for however long the half-life of Plutonium is.

I have no intention of moving several thousand pounds of adzuki beans, a metric ton of brown rice, an drum of olive oil, and enough canned tomatoes to bomb Drezden to the ground. So, it is up to me to use this cyclopian collection of foods up.

It was easy enough at first, there were palatable connections to make among the items. But over the last few weeks the options have become less enjoyable. Tonight I had a 28oz can of crushed tomatoes, some half and half about to expire, stale abarito rice, and various fresh foods. I should mention that out of concern for using all these staples, I have been ignoring all the veggies which are in various stages of rotting.

Well, creamy tomato risotto with chicken sausage and crimany mushrooms actually came out well. But I am affraid i am running out of possibilities. What do you do with a pound of freeze dried shitaki mushrooms, cannelloni beans and lasagna noodles? And if you say shitaki bean lasagna I wont hear of it. I wont make another culinary abortion like that.

But, just three more weeks until the moving van is here and life can resume to normal. And I can begin creating another future crisis of too much food that doesn't go together.

Hi folks,


If anyone is planning on using this information to torture/murder me I must warn you, it wont be easy.

I have a phobia, and it is really weird. Do you know anyone else that has this, because it is starting to make me think I am too weird for my own good; moving from charmingly eccentric to fucking psychotic.

I get really freaked out by gas giant planets. Jupiter is alright, but Neptune and Uranus boarder on bowel loosening terror. Recently, the discovery of this earth like planet were cause of panic. The planet itself is sufficiently earth like to be fine, but it's sun is much smaller and cooler than ours and looms 5x larger in the sky than our sun does. That was close enough to a gas giant to really let me get nervous. Imagine, the very life giving sun above your head is the source of your terror? What a hellish planet. I nearly spent the remander of the day under the bed sheets, shivering.

So, does anyone else suffer from this malady? Know anyone? Or am I stranded in this neurosis alone?

help.

Dear me,

What ever happened to the hardened alcoholic I fell in love with all those years ago? I used to watch you, in an existential sort of way, do a shot of grain alcohol and chase it with plastic jug popov vodka and smile. Oh, you would smile. For you were getting drunk, way too drunk to tell the difference between alcohol and laundry soap. But he's dead now. The self I fell in love with is dead to us all now.


So,

I thought I would take a nostalgic drink down memory lane and picked up a bottle of Seagrams lime infused gin. Last time I had a bottle of this particular gin I was atop a mountain in Pennsylvania along the Appalachian trail, tripping my face off with about eight other people. It was crisp and delicious, the way anything can be while on drugs if you convince yourself enough of it.

Man, while cultivating a certain refinement I didn't think my appreciation for the shittier things in life would wane. But wane they have. I have become spoiled by good wine and beer, leaving my love for cheap but plentiful hard liquor behind. And sad to say my first alcohol soaked love, gin, went first. But I thought I would be safe. I could still drink my cheap brand x whiskey. But that sweet, sweet taste of Jamison makes me wonder why I don't shack up with him.

For the first time in my life I can't help but to think that life would have been better had I been born in a prison. That way I could have raised my palate on toilet hooch. And now, among men of the free world, I would be wide eyed in wonderment that a drink doesn't cause throat scaring. That people have liquor cabinets and bars, not storing them in plastic bags in a toilet tank.

Truly, it would be a wonderful world.