Spent most of the day hoping something interesting would happen…

On November 9, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Uncategorized2 Comments

…and thus far it has not, at least nothing interesting enough to overcome my desire to lie in a heap and stare at the wall and groan. The drive home from Nashville was considerably more taxing than the drive to Nashville, particularly the more extended post-Louisville part, and “staring and moaning” has been about where my head has been at all day. There was some raking of leaves. The front lawn has, oh, 80% of the leaves that it had earlier today. A spot of shopping. Very little else.

Yeah.

How was your weekend?

#Nashville: Final food post

On November 8, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Cooking, Stories5 Comments

So we decided to go to Jack’s Bar-B-Q last night. Me and four of my colleagues, packed into my rental car which, as it turns out, does not have a middle seatbelt in the back seat. Whoops. Nashville in general is a horrifying tangle of highways, right? It’s confusing as hell. And downtown Nashville at first did not appear to have much going for it. Until we hit the neighborhood where the restaurant was:

Oh. So this is where Nashville’s nightlife is. And there was some sort of major concert going on tonight, so there were millions of people out– look at the upper left of the picture to see the size of the crowds on the street.

Eventually we found a spot in a parking garage and left. Then my boss pointed out the door we’d walked through:

This door has no external handle. Once it’s closed, you can’t get back through it. Because it’s secret, you see. So we were gonna have to figure out another way to get back to the car on the way home.

Finding Jack’s wasn’t hard, and the live music blaring from literally every door on the block made waiting in the holy-shit-people-are-you-kidding line worthwhile. The reason finding Jack’s wasn’t that hard is that the line extended out the door and halfway down the block.

(Not pictured: a hundred people behind us.)

Once we got inside I saw this sign, which I post here, and also on Facebook, without comment:

Right before we got our food, I turned around and took a picture of the line behind us, which hadn’t exactly gotten smaller. Remember, this gets outside, turns right, and goes on for another couple hundred feet:

Now, a genuinely weird, if oddly convenient, thing about this place: their service was slow as hell, which partially accounts for the length of the line– but also meant that finding a table wasn’t terribly difficult, because people were tending to eat and go.

I got a combo platter again. Brisket, sausage, and pork shoulder, plus a piece of something called “chess pie” at the recommendation of my assistant principal, who grew up in Tennessee:(*)

Apparently something happened to my eyes when I had my first bite of chess pie. I want to marry chess pie. The barbecue was goddamned delicious as well. Even the cornbread in the corner, which doesn’t look like much, was pretty good. The food made the endless wait well worth it.

And then we went to the Parthenon. Which doesn’t seem like a sentence that I should be ending an article about barbecue with. Did you know that Nashville has a full-size replica of the Goddamn Parthenon? Because it does:

The food made the trip worth it.

The end.

(*) True thing: spellcheck just tried to tell me that “Tennessee” was incorrect, the little wiggly line not going away until I removed an S. I double-checked, feeling that perhaps I’d lost my mind, and fixed the spelling back to how I’d had it to begin with. Weird.

In which I continue to eat well

On November 7, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Work3 Comments

Made some better decisions today– I bought some stuff last night to have for breakfast this morning, so I wasn’t roped into paying extortionate prices for granola, and walked over to the convention center rather than taking the shuttle so that I could explore a little bit. I found a sushi place, far enough away from the bulk of the convention that there wasn’t going to be a line at lunchtime, so I ate well for lunch. Like fitty-dolla-to-hell-with-it-I’m-getting-reimbursed well. Om nom nom, goddammit.

I’m currently holed up at a bar in the atrium. The bar is actually closed, so it’s basically just a free seating area, and I’m going to work on the book while I wait for the next session to start. I’ll do one more today and then head back over to the hotel. Tonight, barbecue.

This is the waterfall twenty feet away from me:

It’s cooler in here today, too, which might be because it’s a bit cloudier outside or might just be because I’ve managed to avoid the ridiculous crush of people that yesterday was so plagued by. This place certainly does pretty.

Anyway, I’ve got an hour before I need to find my next session. I’ve gotten some fiction done today already, but I’d like a four-figure word count before I leave the conference. Wish me luck.

My favorite hotel WTF

On November 7, 2014November 6, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy9 Comments

See if you can spot the problem here. Hint: it’s not the water or the towel on the floor. I’d just taken a shower.

In which #Nashville redeems itself

On November 6, 2014November 6, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Cooking5 Comments

It is known: if you cast a net and ask “Where shall I eat?” and then you see the same place mentioned by more than one person, and those people cannot reasonably be suspected to have colluded, you should probably try and eat at that place.

To wit: Nashville’s Loveless Cafe. Which is, as it turns out, really far away from my hotel, meaning that if I hadn’t rented a car there’d be no way for me to have gotten there, which justifies renting the car all by itself.

Worth.

It.

I am moving, children. I’m going to move into the parking lot of this restaurant and just live in a tent and eat there every day. The conference has been a bust so far, and I do not suspect that tomorrow will be better than today was. Dinner has redeemed the entire trip.

That is what they call the Southern Sampler Platter, which meant that I didn’t really have to choose what I wanted to eat; I could just say “Bring me everything!”

Ham. Fried chicken. Fried catfish. Hush puppies. Turnip greens in potlikker. Caramel sweet potatoes– oh, my Lord God, the sweet potatoes. Not pictured: some melt-in-your-mouth motherfucking biscuits. And sweet tea, of course.

Seriously, people, I could live off the sweet potatoes– and, oddly, the ham, which I was not expecting to be the star of the meal. “Ham’s ham” is something I might have said before eating that ham. Ham is no longer ham.

Tomorrow we are going for barbecue. I haven’t picked a place yet– I’m leaning toward Martins— but definitely barbecue.

(The conference has been crowded and hot and over way too big of an area and the conference center sorta sucks and the sessions I want to go to keep getting filled up before I get there or there are physical space issues that make me unwilling to stay. I’m not happy with the conference, at all. But oh man, did dinner make up for it. So happy.)

(Despite two straight “oddities” posts, I have no gripes about the hotel. It entertains me in places, but it’s fine.)

(Parentheses!)

Oh, almost forgot– our waiter’s name was Owen. Well, is Owen, as I’m pretty sure he’s still alive. Owen was an awesome guy, the type of server who makes a meal better. Hooray for Owen!

More hotel oddities

On November 6, 2014November 6, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Photography5 Comments

How many times did this happen before they put the sign up?

And this I don’t even have a snarky comment about. Just pure WTF.

Beginning to suspect this won’t go well

On November 6, 2014November 6, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Work2 Comments

I am in the type of place that thinks nothing of charging $13 for a couple of granola bars and a bottle of apple juice but can’t provide functional wireless access. This is not encouraging.

On the plus side, the atrium looks like this:

On the other hand, well, see where pretty gets you.

On the hotel

On November 5, 2014November 5, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Work2 Comments

The hotel is somewhat suspect.

This is the pool. You may notice that it is in the middle of the damn lobby, which means the entire hotel smells strongly of chlorine. There is a reason most hotels do not do this even above and beyond the ABSOLUTELY EVERYONE CAN WATCH ME SWIM aspect.

This is the rest of the lobby. It’s a big nothing.

The view from my door. No, not my window– my door, because apparently for $10 less, you can book the motel rooms at the hotel, which our travel agency did, which had my boss spitting nails. I look out over the parking lot.