My hens
and my chicks
they live again. Rotty
sludge time’s up. No more
mushy dank.

No more of that mold at the root.

O my unmoisteneers,
my Hens and Chicks!

Part 1: What Rankled

Stinking Bishop is a soft, creamy cheese from the U.K, made from the milk of Gloucester cattle:

It is also liquefied death in the nose. Old flyblown duck embryos. Warm hippo eye stuffed with fermented melon rind.

When I was six or seven, while walking to 7-11 to buy candy and Garbage Pail Kids, I decided to take a detour through a gravel ditch running parallel to a newly-built shopping center. Suddenly, before my nostrils had even registered what was happening, I reeled, and I saw at my feet, against the blinding-white sunstruck gravel stones, a pale, wet, hairless flesh-lump.

It was a baby bird. It had fallen from its nest and was boiling under the south Florida summer sun, eyes crammed with crawling things.

What I smelled at that moment — that’s basically what catching a waft of this cheese is like.

Odor aside (if one can, even intellectually, shift aside a sensation as brutish as this cheese’s funk), the taste actually offers layered savor: flan, nuttiness, traces of buttery caramel. My senses were confused trying to match up malevolent odor to nuanced taste. But since my senses like all that jostle, I was happy to be lost in the reek/flavor disconnect.

That pleasure didn’t last long though, as the nose coda hit about 5 seconds after the bite: coming back up through the palate and nostrils, haunting the mouth like a nightmare haunts a freshly awoken mind. It was at this point that the briefly-inviting flavor was totally ambushed by the reek. I put my knife down & left the rest of the wedge I had cut untouched: I’d been bested by the Bishop. My tongue hadn’t lolled in enough gutters to lap up & love curd like this.

I drank some water, I drank some lemonade. I ate some mustard on celery. I ate an orange. I bit into an orange peel.

Five more minutes passed. I glanced back at the Bishop. I got nervous. I fidgeted.

Then, automatically, as if in a trance, I reached over and ate the rest of the cheese in one bite.
   

Part 2: Why I Stay with Stink

What’s wrong with me? I wondered, as I sat there rolling creamy horror around in my mouth.

 (Read More . . .)

7 pm, work’s over, the subway platform’s stinking, boiling & rattling with jackhammers, a train arrives, it’s full and clearly seatless, I let it pass, another comes, haggard curds of humanity ooze out, I slip in fast and gratefully sink into seat, I settle in, air conditioning washes me, & I exhale.

And inevitably it’s happened: I find myself directly facing or seated beside some reeking, twitch-gripped, leering, sweating, muttering man or woman (usually man) on my hourlong subway ride home. Sometimes I get up and move, sometimes I don’t. If I don’t, it’s because I’m kept rooted by inertia, pride, masochism, exhaustion, or an abiding hope that the squirmy gremlin that’s unsettling me to the spine is just some normal schmuck who’s suffering from indigestion and/or my own warped & mottled outlook on fellow humans.

Would it help to survey faces before I take my seat? No — the sly dogs, they surprise me. They muster just enough poise & discipline to look like average, work-day-defeated middle-aged sighing subway-serfs like me — until the doors close, at which point the facade’s gone and they triumphantly collapse into the truth of their nail-biting, eye-darting, crack-jittery, randomly-cackling writhey selves.

I remember a 20-something to my left, staring at his filthy nails, picking them with clicking noises, looking at everyone around him intently, otherwise dressed neatly & normal-seeming; occasionally, in the midst of his disturbing spasms (fits that suggested some kind of allover-body itch), rubbing his shoulder into mine, and soon doing so deliberately, in what seemed like almost sexually physical appeal.

I remember a humid, damp-browed crone sitting next to me at the Port Authority 1 stop, cocooned in a black puffy nylon coat in the middle of spring, immediately setting her witch gaze on me as I sat and read the paper, saying, over and over again in what would’ve been a rich & sensuous slavic accent had the circumstances been different, shaking her head for dramatic effect: “It’s no good, NO GOOD what you do to yourself.” Stare, pause, headshake, repeat.

And I remember an old, bearded homeless man who would sporadically stamp his foot HARD on the floor, an enormous black & bulging garbage bag held protectively at his side like some alien, orificeless, insensate beast-pet. He’d utter something gnomic, vaguely threatening, stare out the window, and then petrify, remaining absolutely still. Time would pass. Hope would arise in our hearts, tentatively. Until FUCKING SLAM the next thunderous heel crashed down, more violent muttering, splintering conversation into dead shards. That loveliness lasted from 59th to 125th.

Oh, and lest I forget one vital detail, it was obvious to all seated nearby that gorgonzola-stuffed mackerel-carcasses were jammed deeeeeeeeep in the pockets of his sweatpants.

But where is my compassion? Where is my empathy? Here are people trapped in dire straits, whether streetlocked, disabled, mentally-disrupted, emotionally-taken-apart. They mean me no harm. They are suffering more than I am, ever will perhaps, ever could. And yet here I am, privileged & whining about having to occasionally endure them. What the hell is wrong with me? They deserve a handout, or some compassion, not a wordy web-post.

I used to excoriate myself in just such a way for my recoil, disgust, irritation. I used to really lay into myself for failures of understanding around these kinds of encounters. But gradually I started accepting and owning my responses, and realizing that empathy doesn’t preclude frustration. New York, after all, poses pretty serious social challenges to some of us: we’re thrust into each other cheek & jowl, from dawn to dusk, wedged & pressed & forced to accept the kind of proximity that doesn’t come second nature to us introverts and/or transplants (I’m from Florida). Most of the country (for better or worse) lives at a remove from others: sprawl is the rule, not the exception. New York, on the other hand, for all its splendor & beauty & opportunity, is a goddamned fetid warren of flesh, and you can’t get away from that aspect of it if you live, work & love here. You’re going to run smack into it, in all its vast array, in all its bewildering catalogue of souls.

So, given what we have to face, is it so wrong to have our reactions? What’s more New York than being blunt about what thrills us, annoys us, delights us, disgusts? All this compress of skin & face is burden, and if it ease it at all to allow ourselves mutter & groan about that compression’s occasional extremities — someone deranged, lecherous, menacing, reeking, explosive, insulting, insinuating, deranged, invasive; whether rich or poor, black or white, male or female, young or old — then why the fuck not? We can & should have our understanding, compassion, awareness of everyone’s circumstance — AND we can be gagging, fuming & ready to switch cars the next time a gorgonzola-pants lumbers near and starts stomping imaginary roaches.
   
C. Way/ SnailCrow.com © 2008

I’m back from bright lands: Tucson in spring, the air wild with sun. A country of such sweep. Sabino Canyon crackled with dry spring energy as my girlfriend led me to the low streams. Everywhere crisp with the season’s turning. All hues vivid, every green saturated to pulsing.

The desert is so honest. There is no hiding. Across the desert nothing interrupts the sweep of your eye but cholla and scrub until spike of peak or range. Along a mountain: a scatter of saguaro, little else. It’s a terrain too naked for secrets.
   

I’ve lived in New York for five years, so I found that desert openness unsettling. Life here is rich with alley, shadow, nooks for skulk. And secrets. This is a land of compression and dwelling folded in upon dwelling and endless chambers of discovery, some forgotten, some concealed. Packed buildings lean in like endless members of committee and I’m the child caught up in their robes & ceremony, comforted by all the density and drone. Lost among cold fathers, mothers. Their squeezing machinations. Dank & dour. I love them.

But Tucson I miss your open palm. As much as I’m made for this place’s pocketed fist.
   
   
C. Way/ SnailCrow.com © 2008

I was in the grocery store the other day, buying a wee load of fruits and veggies. I was in the same kind of mood I always am when I come home from work: a little peeved, ready to get home and fix myself a drink and put on sonic youth. I’m sure it showed.

Anyway, as I was being rung up I noticed the cashier: she seemed down at the mouth, surly. I recognized her; she was always like that. Then I noticed the bagger, a new dude, some 40 or 50 year old guy, bald, sweetcheeked, kindly. I could tell by his patter and body language that he was keeping up his valiant good humor in the face of the cashier’s bitterness. A little checkout line cold war.

Anyway, all that shit I sussed out unconsciously and it led me to smile at him and say: “Hey there, how you doin?”. His response was immediate. He smiled with enthusiasm, we exchanged small talk (”wish this rain would stop” “cant wait to go home”), and I truly had the sense that I’d lifted this man’s spirits.

Meanwhile the cashier was still harrumphy. She said something under her breath to him about “hurrying up” as he was putting my stuff away. The bagger maintained his composure and said something like “yes, well, I’m going to double bag for this young man since he took the time to be nice”. I was touched. It was so direct and simple and honest and I was mildly shaken by it. I collected my food, said a few more things to the bagger, and left, moved.

On the walk home, I was a little perplexed. Why had that encounter left me so touched? Was it that I helped combat the cashier’s grumpiness by assisting the bagger in this little unspoken temporary alliance we’d formed? Was I pleased to realize the effect a little smiling talk had on the guy? Was I happy to have someone else assess me in such a positive light, and — despite the crusty way I was feeling that night, and despite the way I feel about myself in general — be able to summarize me as a happy, “nice” young man?

A little bit of all that I guess. All I know is it started with a simple, unconscious decision to smile instead of remain emotionally aloof. I felt such a powerful sense of the direct impact you can have on people in your day to day life. All with the subtlest of modulations of your voice & face. The rest of the day I sat with myself thinking: what the fuck? Why don’t I do this more often? Direct, face to face contact that leaves everyone involved feeling bolstered and glad.

But here I am fucking blogging about it instead of going about and trying to make it happen more.

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.