The Weekend Eudemon

A Friday evening of cheap wine and cheap football. It was the Lions' pre-season opener, and it was the opening of Eric's first box of wine. A box of White Grenache from Franzia. Five liters for $9.00.

Eric doesn't drink a lot of wine and no one else in his house drinks it. The frequent result: he opens a bottle and ends up pouring out half of it. But Thursday night at the drinking club, friends told him that cheap box wines will last a month in the refrigerator (excepting the dark wines, whose sediment settles and makes it kind of nasty).

So Eric picked up a box of fruity White Grenache after work, poured a big glass, and walked next door to his brother's house to watch the Lions preseason opener with his two nephews.

After making the 12-second trek, he discovered that his nephew's new fiancé had arrived from Wisconsin. Eric offered to bring over the White Grenache, but his sister-in-law decided to toast the newly-engaged couple with a bottle of strawberry blush she had purchased at a Wisconsin winery instead.

Excellent stuff. Eric normally doesn't like fruit wines, but this stuff was incredible. The wine snobs would snub it (as they would the White Grenache), but no matter. If Eric cared what snobs thought, he wouldn't be able to wear half his wardrobe in public. The strawberry blush definitely tasted like strawberry, but in a reasonably subtle way, and the wine taste was there (we'd provide a better description, but we simply don't know enough about wine or its lexicon, so that sophomoric overview will have to do).

Here's how Cedar Creek describes the wine:

A very aromatic blush, made from white grapes with strawberry juice added. Like eating fresh, ripe strawberries. A great summer wine!

If you want more information, go to the Cedar Creek website.

(The Lions, by the way, didn't look good. On the opening kick-off, they were off sides, and they couldn't put the ball into the end zone. It was like 2004 all over again, which was like 2003, which was like 2002, and on and (sniff) on.)

About Malcolm's Messages
If books were babies, Eric would be headed to Hell. Not only does he routinely decline to finish reading books, but he doesn't finish books he has started to write. The literary abortions tucked into his study's book shelves would shock decent folk.

Malcolm's Messages is one of three books Eric finished. He even edited it quite a few times, but he hasn't found a publisher and doesn't expect to. Is it a conspiracy against WASP writers of German descent and Catholic beliefs? Possibly. Is it because the book market is ridiculously saturated and Eric's book can't get a fair reading? More probable. Is it because the book is no good?

(Did someone just notice a bunch of bells and red lights go off?)

Regardless, we're going to start putting passages of the book on this site. The book is different, that much we know for sure, but we also know it's a true novelist's nightmare. The book's primary intent is to make moral points, not tell a story, and that's the first thing a novelist is supposed to avoid. Moreover, the book's symbols are often shallow, but cloaked with odd prose that tries to mask the shallowness.

But even though its prose is odd and its primary intent is to impart moral principles, we think it tells a decent story and is easy to read. For a full description of the book, click here and scroll toward the bottom).

We'll post a passage every Saturday. We'll start with passages from the first chapter, even though it's available on-line already (click here if you can't wait). We're guessing most readers will want Malcolm in tiny doses.

After the first chapter is posted, we'll create a new page to your left and keep the entire contents there, adding to it every week. Eventually the entire book will be posted for your edification or disgust, as the case may be.

1. Malcolm Speaks
Malcolm came out of his basement. He had been there for years, reading. He had also been thinking. And seeing.

But after many years, he was hungry. So he came upstairs to eat. And having eaten, he went outside.

The great light hurt his eyes, but not as much as he had expected. He walked down the road, passing the neighbors he loved and wish he knew, and went straight to Eligire University.

He went and sat, in the Triangle, the heart of campus. He sat on a concrete bench, in front of trees, and watched the students walk across the wide concrete stage on their way to the consuming places that surround the campus, the bars, the football games, and the movies. He watched faculty walk by in jackets and sometimes a tie. He watched local boys try to peddle cheap dope to freshmen. He watched derelicts try to sit up straight. He saw a man playing relaxing music with a guitar. He saw a few groups of students sitting in the grass talking: of books or beer or even better.

He noticed there were no "no loitering" signs in that most public of places, and he thought that good.