12 miles at 7:16 pace. 97 miles for the week. ---------------------------------------- A great chasm stands between beer and wine in the state of Pennsylvania. There are laws on the books that separate the sale of both such that the seeds of distribution corruption will have an equal chance to germinate in two distinct fields. Graft and back alley profiteering serve as the radiant sun which shines down upon both of these fields. Obese, third-string Pennsylvanian aldermen then come along and harvest these two fruits, forcing those of us that imbibe on both sources of alcohol to forever fund their 15-foot Ranger bass boats, pleather sectionals and their wives' collection of hundreds of garish, Liza Minelli-esque cocktail gowns. Despite all this, it's worth noting the differences between the stores. Since I frequent both, regularly, I fancy myself an astute observer and fully qualified to write such judgmental, raging, shameful satire. In other words, I fully intend to insult, disparage, and mock the remora for people and the shady for processes of alcohol distribution and sales in this otherwise fine Keystone state. If you are anyway associated with this or have a sensitive psyche and like prancing ponies and politically correct, emoticon-spewed writings, then go hide underneath the banner of www.merunhard.com or go lurk around someone else's blog. The beer stores are dark warehouses with high ceilings; their cash register clerks are usually 22 year-old miscreants who wear their baseball caps backwards and are always in mid-conversation about some act of unreal sexual conquest as I approach the counter. From time to time, they share the counter with the first chink in the great graft chain: the fat man with the long nosehair. This guy's role is to stand behind the miscreants with his arms folded and to supervise the proceedings--grunting in vicarious laughter upon hearing the juicy end of the stories about all the sex and the sex and the smelly, sticky, unreal sex---and then ensure the appropriate funneling of the cash to all the right people. He's also there to make sure to have a few extra crisp $100s to place into the alderman's palm whenever he's in the area and needs to buy some exotic Killians Red for his wife, the Minelli fan, who's going through a funk because of Minelli's compromising of her career by appearing too regularly in Arrested Development. Nosehair man's got an aluminum baseball bat in the back just in case things get out of hand with the customers or with the 22 year-olds who got five extra pints of sex-infused testosterone. The liquor stores, on the other hand, have short ceilings and lights everywhere. A liquor-test-babe stands right in front of the door and half-expects you to sip some new Italian Sangiovese just because she wears a short skirt and laughs a lot. The rest of the store is 100% men. Unlike beerland, they all carry themselves more as men should; they wear tight collars and peer down at you behind thin glasses that are seconds away from falling off the bridges of their noses. Almost all of them have those sponge glasses that you see at the post office or bank. The guy I bought wine from today played the role of Pontius Pilate and dipped his fingers too often into the sponge glass with too much yellowish water collected at the bottom; during checkout, this was his routine: take credit card, dip fingers, run credit card, dip fingers and flick them dry against the side of the glass, open bag, dip fingers quickly, hand card back, dip again, etc. The liquor store still has the first chink of that corruption chain, but he's trimmed his nosehairs and he doesn't fold his arms; he instead puts them on his hips as he stands in a money-counting office with large blinds adjacent to the checkout counter, watching all of that alcoholic dough come in and dreaming of early retirement; he visualizes cruising in his bass boat, plowing the waters of a silent, misty lake on an early morning far away from the addicts and the skimmed profits. ------------------------------ As proof of the cork shortages we got in the world among other things, the wine that I bought today was sealed with some sort of plastic gasket. I don't have a wine suction sealer thing or an extra cork, so I am sealing it with a wad of my daughter's modelling clay that she needs for an art project on a make-your-own dinosaur: the rockosaurus. If some of it gets into the wine, it's non-toxic and it should help mask the flavor of cheaply harvested Sangiovese grapes. ------------------------------- Whether you realize it or not, there's a furniture hierarchy out there. I used to sit at the bottom: particle board on top of particle board. I then moved my way up to actually going to a furniture store; then something big happened and I was knocked back down the ladder, to the underground, which is reverting to upside down boxes and West Point trunks for most things. Well, today, I have crawled back; I've moved a couple notches past the particle board stage to the next, more noble stage: unfinished, real pine furniture. I bought a small desk where I will complete my first writing marathon. I'm on Tony Jasica, Balance Bar(TM) pace and expect to finish this marathon in about 30 years but at least I got somewhere to put my writing-cramped elbows besides my kitchen counter. ............................... Maybe not so fast. The desk-in-a-box has 400 parts which require dowels, glue, and measurement. The combination of all these elements with occasional glancing at the instructions will result in something resembling my parent's mailbox which I also built, upon graduation with a Civil Engineering minor degree. The mailbox fell over the first time the mailman closed it and would not still stand today were it not for the pieces of concrete patio block that my father shored it up with. I suspect that was a poorly crafted analogy. Let's try another. How about all my model airplanes which I built using so much glue and so little attention to the instructions that the landing gear would go 90 degrees and hinge on globs of that Testors glue that you would find in the orange tube that smelled so damn good? The decals, always the best part of the process, just went wherever. "DANGER: JET INTAKE" was upside down over by the tail of the plane and the flashing teeth of the A-10 Warthog were always ripped in two and dangling off the side of the plane's nose. As with most things in my life, the process was more to hurry up and be over with the damn thing than to study, read, and learn.