Another kind of anticipation
If I argue that there will be no more than seven days between posts, I can claim that I’m still maintaining my blogging performance standard.
Hannah’s dysmenorrhea over this past long weekend prompted tonight’s dinner menu selection: rare steaks and steamed spinach. Which was fine with me. I like rare steaks and steamed spinach. I find that steamed spinach tastes just like lamb’s quarters.
Accompanying my rare steak and steamed spinach, I drank Guinness from a tall stein glass emblazoned with the logo of Dick’s Last Resort, a US bar chain whose motto is, “You can’t kill a man born to hang!”
I might have mentioned that I’ve been keeping some form of journal since approximately 1979. The volumes of notes I’ve made over the last thirty years now help me position things along the timeline of my personal experience.
March 3, 1989 - at an international Greenpeace conference outside of San Antonio, Texas. I am amazed to be here. San Antonio, Texas, United States of America. Most of the people here are American (obviously), and their experiences of canvassing are nearly incomprehensible to me. The situations that they must contend with simply do not exist in my experience as a field manager. I am astounded at their stories.
This is a conference of people who love canvassing for Greenpeace; people who live and breath and eat and dream Greenpeace. Sometimes I wonder if I belong here. I am an executor of tasks. I do a job. Sometimes I wonder if Greenpeace should not have someone more dedicated than me.”
In the summer of 1988, I started working as a door-to-door fundraiser for Greenpeace Canada in Calgary, and by March the following year, I was being trained to open an office in Edmonton and serve as its director. Training took place at a conference of Greenpeace International that was convened in San Antonio, Texas. Workshops in organizational skills such as interviewing, training, and recruitment filled our days, and in the evenings Greenpeace field managers from all over the continent tried their hand at door-to-door fundraising in Texas.
When the conference ended, me and my direct supervisor, a fellow of Polish extraction named Peter Abramowicz and I spent a few extra days seeing the sights of San Antonio and Austin. We saw the Alamo, of course. I remember sitting on an outdoor patio eating oysters on the half shell, and seeing Star Trek IV projected on an IMAX screen somewhere. And I remember Dick’s.
The room and picnic tables that made up Dick’s decore were painted the same dark green. Sheets of butcher paper covered the picnic table-tops whereupon stainless steel buckets of ribs or chicken wings were unceremoniously dumped before beer drinking customers (you used the buckets as bone collectors). The beer menu itself was a map of the world nailed to a post in the centre of the bar. You didn’t order beer by brand. Instead you picked a country and the Dick’s service staff brought you whatever beer from that country that they had in stock
I tried two kinds, I wrote in 1989, a local bock called “Shiner”, and a beer from Honduras. Central American beer is gross!
A band was on-stage, led by an overweight guy in shades and dreadlocks, playing “raunch Dixieland jazz”. His instrument was the washboard.
I loved it.
I guess I’d been thinking about Dick’s for almost twenty years then, when amandi_khera and I left our temporary home at the Monte Carlo hotel on the Las Vegas Strip to rendezvous with Prairie Jamie and Carlos Montoya at the Excalibur Casino.
We’d landed in Vegas late that afternoon and lost a bit of time taking an ill-advised drive up and down the Strip. (It was December 28th and the New Year’s Eve crowds were already filling the city.) Not yet having eaten, Amandi indulged my suggestion to try one of the Excalibur sports-bars for dinner, Dick’s Last Resort.
“Have you been to Dick’s before?” the bar-tender in a loud Hawaiian shirt asked us as Amandi and I climbed onto our bar-stools.
“I’ve been to the one in San Antonio,” I reported.
“Great,” the bar-tender said, “You can tell her about it so she doesn’t cry.”
It might go without saying, but a bar whose motto is “you can’t kill a man born to hang” has made being crude and obnoxious its service standard.
Prairie Jamie sent a text-message saying that she was too sick to come out that night. Amandi and I ordered entrees and tall glasses of Blue Moon Belgian White Ale and toasted to being in Las Vegas. The waiter made us paper hats with outrageously crude declarations written on them in black felt marker. A band was on stage, led by a young black man in dreadlocks, singing a raunch rock&roll cover of The Summer of 69. What would’ve been perfect would’ve been a nearly full dance floor and that band playing KISS’ I Want to Rock & Roll All Night!
But even without all that, it was just as good as I remembered it.
Hannah’s dysmenorrhea over this past long weekend prompted tonight’s dinner menu selection: rare steaks and steamed spinach. Which was fine with me. I like rare steaks and steamed spinach. I find that steamed spinach tastes just like lamb’s quarters.
Accompanying my rare steak and steamed spinach, I drank Guinness from a tall stein glass emblazoned with the logo of Dick’s Last Resort, a US bar chain whose motto is, “You can’t kill a man born to hang!”
I might have mentioned that I’ve been keeping some form of journal since approximately 1979. The volumes of notes I’ve made over the last thirty years now help me position things along the timeline of my personal experience.
March 3, 1989 - at an international Greenpeace conference outside of San Antonio, Texas. I am amazed to be here. San Antonio, Texas, United States of America. Most of the people here are American (obviously), and their experiences of canvassing are nearly incomprehensible to me. The situations that they must contend with simply do not exist in my experience as a field manager. I am astounded at their stories.
This is a conference of people who love canvassing for Greenpeace; people who live and breath and eat and dream Greenpeace. Sometimes I wonder if I belong here. I am an executor of tasks. I do a job. Sometimes I wonder if Greenpeace should not have someone more dedicated than me.”
In the summer of 1988, I started working as a door-to-door fundraiser for Greenpeace Canada in Calgary, and by March the following year, I was being trained to open an office in Edmonton and serve as its director. Training took place at a conference of Greenpeace International that was convened in San Antonio, Texas. Workshops in organizational skills such as interviewing, training, and recruitment filled our days, and in the evenings Greenpeace field managers from all over the continent tried their hand at door-to-door fundraising in Texas.
When the conference ended, me and my direct supervisor, a fellow of Polish extraction named Peter Abramowicz and I spent a few extra days seeing the sights of San Antonio and Austin. We saw the Alamo, of course. I remember sitting on an outdoor patio eating oysters on the half shell, and seeing Star Trek IV projected on an IMAX screen somewhere. And I remember Dick’s.
The room and picnic tables that made up Dick’s decore were painted the same dark green. Sheets of butcher paper covered the picnic table-tops whereupon stainless steel buckets of ribs or chicken wings were unceremoniously dumped before beer drinking customers (you used the buckets as bone collectors). The beer menu itself was a map of the world nailed to a post in the centre of the bar. You didn’t order beer by brand. Instead you picked a country and the Dick’s service staff brought you whatever beer from that country that they had in stock
I tried two kinds, I wrote in 1989, a local bock called “Shiner”, and a beer from Honduras. Central American beer is gross!
A band was on-stage, led by an overweight guy in shades and dreadlocks, playing “raunch Dixieland jazz”. His instrument was the washboard.
I loved it.
I guess I’d been thinking about Dick’s for almost twenty years then, when amandi_khera and I left our temporary home at the Monte Carlo hotel on the Las Vegas Strip to rendezvous with Prairie Jamie and Carlos Montoya at the Excalibur Casino.
We’d landed in Vegas late that afternoon and lost a bit of time taking an ill-advised drive up and down the Strip. (It was December 28th and the New Year’s Eve crowds were already filling the city.) Not yet having eaten, Amandi indulged my suggestion to try one of the Excalibur sports-bars for dinner, Dick’s Last Resort.
“Have you been to Dick’s before?” the bar-tender in a loud Hawaiian shirt asked us as Amandi and I climbed onto our bar-stools.
“I’ve been to the one in San Antonio,” I reported.
“Great,” the bar-tender said, “You can tell her about it so she doesn’t cry.”
It might go without saying, but a bar whose motto is “you can’t kill a man born to hang” has made being crude and obnoxious its service standard.
Prairie Jamie sent a text-message saying that she was too sick to come out that night. Amandi and I ordered entrees and tall glasses of Blue Moon Belgian White Ale and toasted to being in Las Vegas. The waiter made us paper hats with outrageously crude declarations written on them in black felt marker. A band was on stage, led by a young black man in dreadlocks, singing a raunch rock&roll cover of The Summer of 69. What would’ve been perfect would’ve been a nearly full dance floor and that band playing KISS’ I Want to Rock & Roll All Night!
But even without all that, it was just as good as I remembered it.