MAIN EVENT. A Good Place to Get Started --- a.k.a "Table of Contents"
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MAIN EVENT. A Good Place to Get Started --- a.k.a "Table of Contents" |
| MY GLASS HOUSE | THE PREVIOUS EVENT | THE ANNIVERSARY EVENT | THE WRITERS/GUIDELINES | |
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Baltimore - 5 March, 2000 : I did myself a favor this past Thursday, I treated myself to a glass of a wonderful California Zinfandel with dinner. It's not something I normally do, so it was a special joy. I even went so far as to have another glass after dinner.I don't usually indulge in wine with dinner for two reasons. The first is that I'm basically a Scotch man, though I do also drink my share of vodka martinis. The other is that I was spoiled by working in wineries in the Sonoma valley during my marriage.
It was not unusual for my ex-wife and I to drive over the hill from Sonoma to Napa of a weekend, trek down to Oakdale and pick up a case or two of Mondavi Cabernet, maybe a Chardonnay in deference to those friends of ours who had not matured enough yet to become red wine drinkers.
This was a perk of my jobs at the time, working in one wine cellar or another doing what is called "racking and blending." I was a cellar rat for the first years Deb and I lived in northern California. What I did was basically drag hoses and pull pumps in order to either move crushed grape juice into large stainless steel and wooden containers, depending on the varietal, or "top off" the casks of French and Spanish wooden barrels where the wine actually aged. This was a constant process for us rackers and blenders because oxygen is the enemy of good wine before it has fermented.
We would climb the huge pyraminds of barrels and meticulously take their bungs out, pump wine into the barrels, and then move on down the pyramid, barrel after barrel.
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In the pecking order of winery workers, we rackers and blenders were considered something of a privileged class. Vintners would actually dain to speak with us, something they never did with workers on a bottling line, stackers of cases, or the predominantly Mexican field workers who actually picked the grapes.
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Event # 206: ANNIVERSARY WALTZ
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At the classier wineries, like Chateau Souvereign, where I learned the trade shortly before it was acquired by Nestle, we were actually given samples of the products of competing wineries during our lunch breaks to assess. And then there was the special perk of being assigned to "top off" the brandy barrels. This was Hog Heaven for a cellar rat.
If you were a rat with a good reputation, as I became, you also rose in the pecking order because racking and blending is year-round work. While other winery slaves are seasonal, mostly working only during the crush season, an experienced racker and blender could be taken on full-time. That was everyone's dream.
The downside of this was that, because making wine is a 24/7 business, racking and blending took place in two twelve hour shifts. I worked from 6 in the evening until 6 in the morning for years.
We are talking about the early 1980s here, early in my marriage, so because we lived in the wine country, I was the only Black cellar rat in the entire county for a number of years. I saw my first *other* Black winery worker in about 1983.
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You'd think I was already out the door the way some of the writers have started to act in these parts. But I plan to at least keep the helm of the magazine through our Anniversary celebrations.Besides, as my friend Darryl in Pennsylvania has made it a point to remind me, I can't just slip away from here without completely telling you the story of my marriage, something I keep promising to do.
The passage above was a little more of the story, but I'm working up to telling you all....
And then, as mentioned last week, there's the prospect of losing our weekly PLANETARY MADNESS forecasts as we go into Year Five.
I received this e-mail this week from JENNIFER BLUE:
Subject: g21
dear rod,
another good edition of g21!
it is fabulous to see so much response to the zine (rampant vox populi).
it is wonderful to contemplate such great work from new writers along w/the consistently mighty work of the riveting regulars.
i always read each edition of g21 very Thoroughly.
it is w/sadness and excitement that i cease writing weekly planetary madness horoscopes. the sadness is heavier where g21 is concerned because g21 carried weekly planetary madness pretty much from its inception.
g21 has always been a truly eclectic magazine. where else can one find commentary on unpopular issues intermingled w/luscious reviews by robert powers and an offbeat weekly horoscope? (or is it that that the issues are popular but the commentary is unpopular?).
as the audacious and unruly publisher of g21, you have always taken risks that would cause others to wince and hesitate. you dared to offer a different coverage of the bombs falling on serbia by presenting us with a serb reporting from serbia (thank you dragana). thomas hart offers us mccain corruption antics while mccain is otherwise venerated in the mosh pit of mainstream media. rare is the media project that is willing to expose the bad conscience and taboos of society - and from so many different angles of perception. there is nothing else like g21 and so i am proud and happy that planetary madness was included within its pages for so long. and now, onward!
best regards,
jennifer blueMarriage
The one thing I have always been bothered by in my relationship with my close friend Barbara, one which has obtained over nineteen years now, is that she once told someone else --- and then me, to my face --- that I have always gone out with bimbos.
I don't agree! Have I preferred sexy, attractive women on my arm? Yes, but what man wouldn't? Have they all been airheads --- I beg to differ!
But what's worse is that some have also claimed that I went after a lot of these women for the sex.
What offends me about this claim is that *there is no way anyone outside of a relationship can know about its true internal dynamic.* And there is also the fact that ANY WOMAN who has actually been involved with me would tell you that I am a Romantic at heart.
That said, I think a lot of people completely misjudged my marriage....
One of the cardinal rules between my ex-wife and myself was that we never air our dirty laundry in public, no matter how angry we were at each other, that we never make a "scene," and that our private life remain private. It is to her credit that Deb always honored this rule, as did I.
That is why so many people were shocked to learn that we were getting a divorce. After our vows especially, we were considered the Perfect Couple.
Any fissures in our relationship, and there were quite a few, were concealed from the public completely after our marriage. This was very difficult because we were a couple under a lot of pressure.
Terry, my best man, had almost gotten in a fist-fight with my new father-in-law on the night before we were married.
I could have killed him because, at the time, my next-day father-in-law was offering me money to cover some of the expenses of our wedding which I was totally paying myself --- to the tune of thousands of dollars.
The Plan Deb and I had developed was that we would put all of our friends and relatives who showed for the wedding up in a lodge --- a series of cabins --- located on the Eel River, one of our favorite places. We had been living together, as was the practice of our generation, for over four years. The honeymoon would be nice, but not a big deal for us. So we planned that the people we loved would spend the Honeymoon Weekend with us. This was no small expense.
But I loved Terry, so I let it ride.
Then there was the fact that we had moved to California, and postponed our marriage for a year, because we needed to take care of my disabled future mother-in-law who had undergone a brain tumor operation and needed to be taken on daily trips to the nearest large town, Santa Rosa, for chemotherapy treatments.
AND there was the fact that we arrived in California to find we needed to cover her $20,000 in debts, medical bills, et cetera, because neither of Deb's brothers would pitch in a dime to help with their mother's bills for reasons of their own.
So I found myself relocated to Healdsburg, California, a lily-white little Wine Country town, the year before my marriage, with thousands of dollars of debt to handle, the only one able to work in our household, and nobody around willing to lift a finger to help out.
And --- oh yeah! --- did a mention that most of the people in the family hated me, my future father-in-law refused to visit us, and the town was not exactly welcoming because I was a Black man engaged to a White woman? I should have, but I'm sure you were waiting for that one.
I didn't think of it as a big deal. Hell, over my serious rutting years I had slept with women from every ethnic group in the world except Native American. I always regretted that omission, but there are only so many hours in a day. I did have to spend some of my time writing, after all, instead of only chasing skirts.
BUT THERE'S MORE: Not a single one of my relatives attended our wedding. Reason? My mother never gave them the invitations. This was during the period when she was maintaining the convenient (for her) fiction that I had become a hippie back in the 1970s, moved to San Francisco, and died from an LSD overdose.
I only found out about this rather creative fiction from my sister-in-law years after my divorce, while I was dating The Count.
I think you'll begin to understand now why my "motherless child" metaphor is so appropriate.
All of these factors make talking about my marriage, what it was, how it evolved and crumbled, a difficult challenge. But I'll keep trying...
Hey, Kids! Check out this page. We want you to join us.Things That Bother Me This Week
- Letting go. Accepting that I must walk away from the magazine for a while in order for it to thrive, but wondering what I'll come back to.
- Making such a large commitment to Andover.net.
- A back-breaking writing schedule.
- More queries from potential writers than any magazine deserves.
REMEMBER: Tell every single one of your friends about this Web site.
Why do we keep doing this? Because we like you.
Thanks for coming back this week."Work like you don't need the money,
"Love like you've never been hurt,
"Dance like no one is watching..."
Rod
This is another Web site made on a Macintosh.
EDITORIAL CORRECTIONS: This page had a few minor typos last week. Otherwise, we seem to have done okay. I apologize for the errors.
ROD AMIS has published this magazine since 1990. It first appeared as a hardcopy 'Zine. In March, 1996, he launched it here on the Web. Rod was a Contributing Editor at Suite101.com, where he wrote the " 'Net Publishing" feature. His work has been featured in the San Francisco Bay Guardian Online, NRV8, and at WebLab's Reality Check site. Rod was also a contributing writer on technology for Faulkner Information Services.
Rod is now a columnist for the Andover News Network, where he writes on web design and development issues every Thursday. He is principal writer and Editor for IT Manager's Journal, where he reviews technology issues five days a week. His opinions on the Info Age began appearing on MethodFive's HYPER technology newsletter in March. 1999. He became the Managing Editor for Electronic Mail/Newsletter Publications at Andover.net at the end of February, 2000.
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