C. Way/ SnailCrow.com © 2008

   

Of all the Cabrales pictures I found while scouring Google Images, this seemed most to communicate the forbidding-ass, hoary, curmudgeonly flavor of this most formidable blue cheese.

Cabrales is a Spanish blue, usually from cow, but in the case of the piece I bought, a blend of sheep’s, goat’s and cow’s milk. Like other blues, it’s aged in caves until it’s pretty damn raw.

I bought mine at the Whole Foods in New York at Columbus Circle. I had no idea what I was in store for. I only picked it because it looked the most grumpy. It was sitting there on the far end of the blues, hunkered down, surly, like a grizzled, feral cat.

Anyhow, I got home, unwrapped it, tried it, and was stunned. This cheese is a troll grandfather whose savage breath makes you shut your eyes but whose zyklon war stories & randy secret-wife asides open them right the fuck back up.

In non-troll terms — it’s a tough cheese to love. It’s surprisingly acid, not very tender, sort of molar-sticky. But the flavor once you get past the bouncer is incredibly complex: woodsy-nutty, tangy, forceful, rich. It takes 5 or 10 seconds to really settle in. Language lets me down (or vice versa), and I don’t have the ready stock of adjectives/jargot that wine-nuts do — “vegetal”, “notes”, “tannins”, etc etc — so I’ll just say simply that the flavor is unlike that of any other blue I’ve tried, and is much stronger, more stubborn, and less cheese-like than I thought I could care for.

In this regard, it’s more like a hard red wine than a cheese. It makes your mouth sort of freak out and huddle (4th quarter time-out style) before rallying and realizing there was nothing to be afraid of after all — JUST STANKY BLUE LUV.

There’s a stretch of overpass somewhere after 40th on the Westside Highway, from within a cab, at night, the wind in your face, the cool wind in your face bathing your eyes, where on your right launch these sudden things, planet things, high-rises and apartment-towers lit up and mysterious like glowing-algaed underwater obelisks –

& maybe you’re a little drunk, maybe you’re relaxed and dissolving into the seat a little during this stretch of overpass after 40th, at night, when you’re in the back of this cab and everything’s okay, the night finally over, everything settling in your brain like cool milk, like a soft cool hand on your hot forehead –

– five minutes, five little minutes where everything’s absolutely okay, nothing has yet happened and nothing yet will, a glad stasis, a waiting-and-not-waiting, a being, breathing in through your nose so hard your throat feels ice-watered, the wind in your face, on your skin, in your brain –

when come the sudden things,
the giant underwater glowing things,
the high-rises noble, dispassionate,
a little cruel,
like ancient statues,
bearing witness like olmec heads, like maori,

and you’re a boy again,
on a daytrip to the beach,
praying the car won’t stop,

the salt-sea smell in your nose,
hearing the shore grow closer, distant gulls,
tasting sandgrit in your molars,
watching power lines dip and rise, dip and rise,
wanting nothing to ever choke this perfect sleeping breath
of pure motion.

Music, a toppling, clamoring mess … I’ll go to the store to buy an iced tea or something and suddenly — like that — a melody, a little infant Athena-ed into my head, and I almost turn around to go home and sing it into my tape recorder before I lose it, but I’m lazy, and overconfident, so I walk on, down peaceful quiet streets, hurrying before the melody unfolds into a shape I won’t be able to remember, and all of a sudden, crash, noise blaring around me, the world conspiring to distract me from my little useless ditty, like someone saying ‘6, 4,14,2,4′ when you’re trying to count to ten, cars honking, old women grousing, little kids bleating and stamping, dogs yapping, manholes clanking, landscapers buzzsawing and mulching refuse, thunder cracking from the sky, hogs being loosened into the street in a great stinking honking outrage, volcanoes erupting at my feet and tossing me like a fucking penny up into the air, geese hollering and biting my crotch, airplanes crashing all around me in hillocks of shrapnel and mutilation, Polynesian orchestras marching into each other with all sorts of tuba trombone and piccolo dissonances, and me crawling through it all, trying not to be distracted, cupping my song in my head like a smoker palming a lighter’s flame away from the wind, looking like an idiot mouthing my pathetic little motif to myself, and then — Thank god — I’m there!… temporary reprieve! — I reach the safety of the Rite Aid! The air conditioned quiet safety of its aisles… until suddenly Beyonce comes sallying out of the loudspeakers, scrambling my brain, giving me epilepsy — I froth at the mouth, I scratch my scalp to ribbons, I pass out — it’s madness — I’ve taken to walking around in earplugs — maybe I’ll stop going out period –

   
C. Way/ SnailCrow.com © 2007

“Knock it down,” the man beside me says, “clean it up.”

A building is being demolished outside, there are strange sounds, the steel beams are squealing in shocked animal protest, people walking dogs pause and gawk, bikers brake and linger.

Stand long enough and little white particles will accrete to your hair and clothes and to the alveoli of your lungs, blown by the wind from the wrecking place. Yet we stand, and watch. And some thrill.

We were born with a hunger for violence –- atavistic, slumbering, forgotten, euphemized, dressed up in the clothes of progress and civilization, but never erased, never unyoked to our spirits.

And if we can no longer slake it, from atrophy of will or muscle, we build things to do it for us –- or sate ourselves by proxy of army and mob.

   
C. Way/ SnailCrow.com © 2006