In Zurich, in a cafe overlooking the Limmat, I ate butter-drenched white asparagus pulled from the ground that morning; it had the aftertaste of champagne. I've been able to appreciate epic meals in San Francisco, New Orleans, Berlin, Paris, Las Vegas.

J. R. Moehringer

Categorized in : New Morning White Appreciate

While I fear that we're drawn to what abandons us, and to what seems most likely to abandon us, in the end I believe we're defined by what embraces us.

J. R. Moehringer

embrace ends believe

Any book is better than no book. Slowly, surely, one will lead you to another, which will lead you to the best.

J. R. Moehringer

book

To be a man, a boy must see a man

J. R. Moehringer

be-a-man men boys

Beer is amazing. Nutritional. Medicinal. A beverage, but also a meal.

J. R. Moehringer

beverages meals beer

Some of football's gaudiest displays of manliness are purely aesthetic. It's not what players do, it's how they look doing it.

J. R. Moehringer

player football looks

Write every day; never give up; it's supposed to be difficult; try to find some pleasure and reward in the act of writing, because you can't look for praise from editors, readers, or critics. In other words, tips that are much easier to give than to take.

J. R. Moehringer

editors giving-up writing

Your best is whatever you can do comfortably without having a breakdown.

J. R. Moehringer

breakdown can-do

Long before it legally served me, the bar saved me. It restored my faith when I was a boy, tended me as a teenager, and when I was a young man the bar embraced me.

J. R. Moehringer

teenager men boys

In Manhasset you were either Yankees or Mets, rich or poor, sober or drunk...You were 'Gaelic' or 'garlic," as one schoolmate told me, and I couldn't admit, to him or myself, that I had both Irish and Italian ancestors.

J. R. Moehringer

rich-or-poor yankees italian

A book is the only real escape from this fallen world. Aside from death.

J. R. Moehringer

fallen-world real book

I don't know. Sometimes I try to say what's on my mind and it comes out sounding like I ate a dictionary and I'm shitting pages. Sorry

J. R. Moehringer

sorry mind writing

If only Ed Fleming had a mother who gave such sound advice. The manager of Wazoo's, a downtown Denver restaurant, Fleming is a CSU alum who has been darned giddy about the Rams' recent success. So giddy that he donned a necklace made of Pez candies, a red blazer - and nothing else. A few people gaped (some actually set aside their beers), but most ignored Fleming as he strutted like a red-blazered rooster, demanding that all hail the Mighty Naked Beer King.

J. R. Moehringer

kings mother beer

Baseball, boxing, handball - sooner or later every game gets compared to narrative, but only in football are the plays perfectly linear, drawn up with letters, and only in football is the field itself lined like a sheet of notebook paper.

J. R. Moehringer

notebook baseball football

The greatest players use anger as fuel. Michael Jordan played every night with something like road rage.

J. R. Moehringer

player use night

It takes just as many men to build a sturdy man, son, as it does to build a tower. You will look back on this time and remember remarkably little of it, excpt the extent to which I tried or did not try.

J. R. Moehringer

trying men son

While I was busy hating Vegas, and hiding from Vegas, a funny thing happened. I grew to love Vegas.

J. R. Moehringer

vegas funny-things hate

History is the narrative of people searching for a place to go.

J. R. Moehringer

places-to-go narrative people

I began dividing life in absolutes... Things and people were either perfectly bad, or perfectly good, and when life didn't obey this black-and-white rule, when things or people were complex or contradictory, I pretended otherwise. I turned every defeat into a disaster, every success into an epic triumph, and separated all people into heroes or villains. Unable to bear ambiguity, I built a barricade of delusions against it.

J. R. Moehringer

black-and-white epic hero

Of course many bars in Manhasset, like bars everywhere, were nasty places, full of pickled people marinating in regret.

J. R. Moehringer

bars regret people

My father was a food lover and a deadbeat dad, and maybe a connection between good food and bad dads was forged early, in the deepest folds of my subconscious, where we make so many decisions about our parents.

J. R. Moehringer

good good-food food father