Frank's Annual Hibernation

Every year when the weather turns to shit I hibernate. Two solid weeks. Call in sick or take some stress leave. It is good for you and you should try it. Here are the ingredients for an enjoyable and rewarding hibernation: 

• beer (both dark, and amber for variety)
  
• wine
  
• benedictine and brandy
  
• stuff to make caucasians (kahlua, vodka, milk)
  
• homemade soups
  
• homemade stews
  
• take-out menus for when the soups and stews get old
  
• netflix
  
• a woodstove (I recommend the giant Cawley 800 with cast iron beavers and deer on the doors - none of those fancy enameled things)
  
• a kindly outdoorsy neighbor to split and deliver wood to my door each day (bless his backwards country soul!)
  
• a single incredible, life changing book that you will read slowly, only pages per day, in order to appreciate and savor the inexorable goodness of it  
  

So, for this year's rest I chose one of my all-time favorite books: Cannery Row, by John Steinbeck. If you haven't read it, no need; over the course of my two-week boozy retreat I will blog a few choice passages (though there are really too many to narrow down). And if they do not move you to get your own goddamn copy and read it, then piss off. No, I'm kidding. But seriously, you should piss off then. 

"Cannery Row in Monterey California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses. Its inhabitants are, as the man once said, 'whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches,' by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, 'Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men,' and he would have meant the same thing."

Sleep well,

Frank