Muggsy's Brain

Kate & I were sitting in the living room talking, commenting on how much noise there is in the neighborhood since the college kids moved back into town, when we heard a guy a little too close for comfort yelling, "It's all gonna burn!" We both stood up when we realized that the dude was in my yard, we got to the kitchen when we realized that he was mounting the steps to the back door. Kate got behind me as he started pounding on the screen door, the main door was open, since it was a nice night and I went to close and lock it when dude opened the screen door and started to come into my house! I headed him off and asked him what his problem was. "It's all gonna fuckin' burn," he repeated as he pointed vaguely in the direction of my yard, or the alley, or the garage -- it was hard to tell. I looked out to make sure nothing was on fire. "Why don't you just get out of here?" I suggested. "It's gonna burn, it's all gonna burn!...

A couple of weeks ago I was cooling a batch of Nicaraguan Organic when I heard a loud CLUNK! come from my coffee roaster (the Probat L12 pictured above), I ran into the roasting room from my office to discover that the main drive wheel in the back of the machine, also known as the "idler wheel," had snapped off at its shaft where it connects to the machine's body. I knew what had happened before I looked because it had happened before back when we first moved into our current location about three years ago. A call to Probat down in Tennessee, an overnight package, $180 and a few hours of tricky labor and we were back up and running.  The machine was making a particular rhythmic throbbing sound just before the part snapped, and after the repair it is still making a similar sound. I am waiting -- half- expecting it to snap off again at any second. I am under a kind of stress that I've never been under in over 15 years of coffee roasting, and it's taking a physical...

We were supposed to leave St. Joe at 3:15 PM, that would have gotten us to the Arrowwood Resort in Alexandria, MN and set up with plenty of time to spare. George took the Tahoe full of sound gear and offered Jeff and I the chance to drive his Camero -- and who would pass up a chance like that? It took some doing, but we got our gear into the tiny, little trunk and practically non-existent back seat area -- we had to put the top down to get Jeff's bass amp in the the back, but everything fit snugly and we were ready to go. Jeff ran into the coffee shop to get an iced latte for the road, when he got back to the car he was on the phone. "Take everything out of the Camero and put it in my car," he said, "we have to go back to St. Cloud to pick up the lights." So down came the top again, and out came our gear which we quickly loaded into Jeff's mini-station wagon. We drove to the roastery in St. Cloud, where we store most of our gear, picked up the lights and w...

I post frequently at a couple of online forums. Most of the talk is about Macintosh computers, at least that's the major reason the sites exist, but there are sections that talk about politics, society and other decidedly non-computer related subjects. There is a guy who lives in Florida who first came to my attention when, at age 20 he claimed that the 21 year old drinking age was nothing short of discrimination and that as a legally under-aged person he was being subjected to Draconian laws specifically designed to keep him and other under-aged people under the thumb of The Man. He went so far as to say that he knew what "real oppression" was all about. I found that statement to be patently offensive. I can't see how any logical thinking person could equate drinking laws with the Nazi persecution of Jews or the Jim Crow laws of the United States. You can't drink a beer, boo hoo. That changes as soon as you're 21. Jews couldn't own property or businesses...

My friend Chuck loves tequila. During trivia one year, he drank one shot per hour for the whole 50 hours, he said after a while he didn't get any more drunk, he just leveled off. I, on the other hand, don't like tequilla so much, I find the taste to be somewhat unpalatable, but I think the same thing about Jägermeister and drink it anyway. Only once did I ever have a truly exceptional tequila. My friend Jeff had been in the wedding party of a college friend who married a Mexican girl whose family business was making the stuff and each of the groomsmen received a silver hip flask filled with the family's private reserve. That stuff tasted like ambrosia! It was smooth and delicious, there was no need to pollute the taste with salt and lime. If I could get a hold of some of that again I would do so gladly. Back to Chuck. For several years in a row he would show up at my birthday party with his bottle of tequila in hand and would insist that I do a shot with him. I hated it an...

This has to have been almost 20 years ago now, it was a whole career ago for me and I was still driving a delivery van for the St. Cloud Times so I'd have to put it in the early 90s, I got a call from a friend of mine asking if I wanted to play a "pick up" gig in Montevideo, MN backing up Bob Hope. Who wouldn't say yes to that? A whole bunch of us from St. Cloud piled into a van and drove there for an afternoon rehearsal led by Mr. Hope's musical director named Jeff. We only saw Mr. hope for a few moments at the end of the rehearsal to run a gag he'd do during the song Buttons and Bows. As Music Director Jeff explained it, the gag went like this: the band would kick into Buttons & Bows and vamp the first four measures while Bob would talk to the audience, Bob would then cut off the band, tell a joke and count the band off again. This would happen as many times as Bob saw fit, and then he'd continue with the song. Near the end of the song there wa...

My Itasca State Park trip didn't start the way I wanted it to. I got up and cleaned the house as planned, took care of the cat box, recycling, got the garbage out to the alley and just needed to run a few errands in order to be out of town by 1 or 1:30. I gassed up my car, took it in for an oil change, ran to the roastery to pick up a few essentials and then headed to the grocery store and liquor store to provision up for the trip. The last thing I bought was a 20 lb. bag of ice which I put it in my trunk, all ready to go home and pack up the cooler. I got into my car, turned the key and was met with a click. "What the fuck?!" I wondered, and turned the key again. Click. "No fucking way!" My car wouldn't start. I'd had a recent bout of forgetting to turn off my headlights and draining my battery -- twice in one week, so that was the first thing I checked. There was no way I could have been in the grocery store long enough to drain the battery, and sur...