Convenience Store Rage: A Fantasia

With a name like Gideon Ernest (the surname need not be mentioned here), he would either turn out to be a wimp or a ladies’ man. There could be no middle ground; that much we know and we’re sure of. That he was small of stature placed him firmly, by the hand of the all-powerful author, in the camp of the former, where all the kids prefer to stay inside on hot summer days, in the air conditioning. It’s safer. The big bad world outside occasionally jumps up to bite you, unlike the softly upholstered innards of the prototypical suburban house.

But appearances can be deceiving. Good authors know this; that’s why we put characters like Gideon Ernest into the word processor and hit frappe.

Gideon Ernest, for instance, may have looked like a dweeb, he may have tipped the scales at just over a hundred and twenty pounds wearing his birth control glasses and his trademark white button-down shirt and black polyester trousers…but he was a killer.

They say clothes make the man. But a real man makes his clothes do whatever the hell he tells them to do, even if it means broadcasting a certain image that doesn’t quite line up with the truth. In Gideon Ernest’s case, he had a reason for looking like a total nerd. And for working at the local Seven Eleven hawking Slurpees from noon to night. It is a reason no one will see coming.

Appearances can be deceiving. We’ve said that before. But that was precisely why he had been written into life: to confuse the crap out of the reader for as long as possible.

Because that’s what good writing means.

Take this, for instance: Gideon Ernest walks to work on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays, Saturdays, and sometimes Sundays. Why? Because he’s selling you something. You the reader may think he’s selling you pseudo-cute nerdiness and the occasional chilled beverage or Slim Jim. You may even snap into all that. But what he’s really selling as he walks innocently into the Seven Eleven for the millionth time is the idea that he’s just your average innocent pantywaist. Mister milquetoast is selling you the idea that his shirttails are connected to his white cotton sock tops by way of elasticated stocking garters that keep everything just so. It’s a uniform he wears. It’s always the same, day in and day out. Why? So that authors can deceive readers so thoroughly that eventually the readers are so taken with the ruse that they actually want to be deceived.

The change occurs. It begins skillfully, so that the reader does not perceive its germination. A customer, one of the regulars, is at the Slurpee kiosk, self-servicing sloppily, getting some Coca-Cola flavored slush all over the machine, and it drips onto the floor. This sort of thing has happened millions of times before. This selfsame customer has also, many a time, strolled right up to the register and then held up the line by ordering a different brand of cigarettes, preferably ones that Gideon Ernest has to search for, each and every time. But today, the customer suddenly remembers that he wanted to buy five different kinds of Lottery tickets, insisting on paying in cash—using all his loose change. Most of it is nickels and pennies.

And when that happens…

BANG!

Gideon Ernest turns out to be Billy Badass. He appears to be a freak of modern science. His white button-down shirt begins to rip asunder, revealing mountainous slabs of tanned and bulging muscle. His polyester trousers were designed to have “a little give” in the seat and thighs, and God knows as Gideon Ernest his body never availed itself of such a textilic engineering marvel, but as Billy Badass the fabric begins to show signs of strain. Indeed, as the metamorphosis progresses, the trousers inexplicably shed their lower extremities, now appearing to be a sort of beachcomber gentleman’s capri, complete with jagged hems just at the top of his now bulging and shapely calves.

His glasses remove themselves from his face as his rapidly growing—and tanning—body rips his white shirt into miniscule shreds that fall away and disappear without a trace. The glasses, having barely escaped their own kind of doom, now transform into a shiny black male robot hawk. The hawk cock swoops around the room shrieking its fury at the various convenience store patrons, wide-eyed customers holding Twinkies, bad coffee, useless newspapers, and the odd half case of piss water domestic beer. The mechanized black bird returns to its master’s now prodigiously wide shoulders, spreads its wings, lowers its head, and shrieks once more.

Billy is now fully manifest, an awesome replica of the perfect Tom Selleck moustache now perched upon his upper lip. Billy Badass then reaches beneath the counter for what one can only assume will be the sawed-off 12-gauge. But ah, dear reader, thou dost assume too much. The author is still ahead of you by a mile, and this will be a cliché of an entirely different sort. From under the mild and unassuming Seven Eleven counter, Billy Badass, purveyor of fine low-cost dessert wines and certain smutty periodical publications, produces a gleaming custom made masterpiece of weaponry.

At least five feet long, as much for the visual effect as anything when this story goes to print as a graphic novel, his weapon is a Gatling gun with five barrels, already rotating with electric whir, ready to fire, fed with belted ammo. Only the ammo, naturally, isn’t ammo. No, to satisfy certain requirements for irony, the belts that feed this monster are linked to the change drawer in the cash register.

Billy Badass, who is now incidentally glistening with sweat and covered with grime from the pyrotechnic explosions that just went off in the cigarette case overhead, stands under a shower of sparks and winking fluorescent lights as he lowers the pentapotent muzzle of the weapon into the face of the regular customer.

Again, the reader expects Billy Badass to speak his lines a certain way by now, now that the author has established certain cliché criteria. But that’s where dear reader is wrong again.

You see, Billy Badass isn’t a man at all, and the robot cock isn’t what, certainly by now, you’ve assumed, is a sidekick. No, in fact, the ungainly eyeglasses-cum-transforming bird is the master, and Gideon Ernest-cum-Billy Badass is his wee little pet. Therefore, when he speaks, the language is garbled and unintelligible by all but the most rabid fan of Battlestar Galactica.

Yes: Billy Badass is a Cylon drone.

And all of it conspires to produce the Everest of accomplishment for any author: the moment when the reader says, “Whoa. Didn’t see that one coming.”

And then Billy, formerly Gideon Ernest of the Seven Eleven and now robo-puppet of the Cylon master race, speaks, his finger on the trigger of his Gatling money gun, his handy autotranslator dipping into the dank commonness of the English language of the Earthlings: His voice gnarled and metallic, his says with extreme prejudice, “Keep the change!”

We hear the ratatattat, we see the offending customer blasted by spare quarters and pennies, jerked up and back off his feet into the Hostess pies display case, everybody else dives to one side, Billy is standing there like Rambo blasting everything with his five foot long gun, holding it with one arm, screaming in rage. The robo hawk takes flight just as the ceiling gives way under a massive fireball caused by a supersonic dime slicing through an exposed gas main, and the whole place goes up in flames.

The robo hawk flies away to its mountain lair.

A new plan will soon be hatched.

And Book II will be out soon. This is how it’s done.

Capitalism and Ethics in the Web Age

I’ve become a regular customer at the local bicycle shop lately. I’m getting back into riding—I finally have enough free time to be able to budget an hour or so every other day so that I can take a good long ride. I originally stopped by the shop to see what new hardtail mountain bikes were going for—they had a few on special for five, six hundred bucks. Right in the wheelhouse, then, at least for my budget, and I thought seriously about buying one.

But then I got home and started surfing and Googling around, learning what was to learn. I wanted to replace my old banger; the fork was just done. I have a relatively late model Trek cruiser, too, the ones with the steel fenders and all that swoopyness going on, with a seven speed drivetrain. Being the ex-bicycle mechanic that I am, my gears were turning about swapping some of the good parts from my clapped out MTB onto the cruiser. A lot of that depended on the spacing of the rear dropouts, which, by the way, turned out to be identical. Long story short, I was able to swap everything I wanted to swap, and I only needed to buy new tires, tubes, and a saddle. I figured if I kept to the streets for now, I would ride more often if I didn’t have to drive half an hour to the trailhead every time.

I found some good deals for tires online, but you’ve gotta pay shipping, you can’t really look at the merchandise, and you’ve gotta wait for parcel post, especially if the item is bulky. So I walked on over to the bike shop. It’s only five blocks from my door to theirs anyway. I figured I’d see what they had.

Now here’s the thing: I shop online for plenty of stuff. I don’t think it’s bad to do that. Part of what makes capitalism work is the beauty of choice, and we have plenty of it in America. Coupled with that liberty, though, is the attendant responsibility to choose wisely, to inform one’s choices with some measure of propriety. I’ve been saying for quite a long time now that capitalism doesn’t work at all when it’s been divorced from Christian morality. If we don’t have an absolute right or wrong as a foundation under us, we can’t begin to allow the market loose; it would tear the world apart. I think we have plenty of evidence of that in current events right now, which I won’t belabor, but it’s in big biz and government aplenty.

I ended up buying my tires at my local shop, plunking down forty bucks a pop plus tax, which was a lot. But I was rewarded, and as it turns out, unexpectedly. First of all, I was “keeping it local,” something the granola-muncher North End hippies seem to be into, and something with which I agree. I was helping to keep the doors of my local shop open by doing business there. I was also sowing a kind of seed, because when I popped back in a week later with some stubborn axle bearings that needed adjustment, they comped me for the labor, happy to sell me a tool and some parts on top. They figured I’d be back, which I will. But I also got my stuff right now, which, fast as technology is these days, no online retailer can match (unless they’re selling downloads, natch). I got to look over the merch, make a good decision, and take what I wanted home without jacking around with shipping. Of course, there was the sales tax, but whatever. On top of all that, my local shop has a box of take-off parts—tires and tubes for like, two bucks each. They’re brand new, they just came installed as original equipment on some floor model and got swapped out for something different, spec’ed by the customer. Everybody wins.

Anyway, that’s all. Support your local biz every chance you get. The Web has enabled the illusion of more choice, more convenience, et cetera. But the trade-offs are real. Shipping can take forever, if there’s a screwup of some kind you’ll wish you’d never ordered the thing in the first place because returns are horrible online, and you don’t get to hold the widget in your hot little hands before you commit. Besides, one day you might wake up to discover the only choice you have left is MEGACORP OF CHINA and you’ll be completely screwed. So wake up to your Christian morality and ethics, America, and be proud of your heritage; do the right thing. Keep it local. 

Michael is on SALE, YALL!

ONE DAY BLOG TOUR! 
MAY 17th!

Michael, book two in the Airel Saga, is live on Amazon TODAY ONLY for a discounted price!!

To promote Michael I’m hosting a contest where you can win a FREE copy of Airel and win a free Kindle Fire.

To take advantage of this awesome deal, head to Amazon and check out the eBook version of MICHAEL at its promotional price, then see below to enter the contest. Also, leave me a comment on this post. The blogger with the most comments will win the Kindle Fire! If I win, I’ll also get the chance to be part of a special giveaway in the next few months.

Praise for Michael


"Move over Twilight! Here comes Aaron Patterson!" --Joshua Graham, bestselling author of Beyond Justice and Darkroom


"I was surprised by how much I really, really liked this book. I have not jumped on the whole "fallen angel" bandwagon, just as I didn't jump on all of the vampire stories that came out after Twilight. This is not your typical fallen angel story. It is one that has left me breathlessly waiting for the next one in the series. Hurry up please!!!" --Sandra Stiles

Description of Michael


Michael did the unthinkable to save Airel from death, but now he must live with the choices he has made--both good and evil. Tortured by his past and haunted by what he believes might be his future, Michael seeks redemption--but will the past prove to be too strong? How can he break free of it and be the man he longs to be for Airel? If only he had never...

Airel. Michael's one true love. He had forced her to drink in new life only to find that old wounds and deep scars do not heal overnight. Can she truly forgive Michael, can she truly love him? And can he accept that forgiveness? Or is it all for nothing, and has he gone too far already? As the darkness of past choices closes in on them, chases them, intercepts them, coming at them from everywhere at once, how can their love possibly survive?

Aaron Patterson is the author of the best-selling WJA series, as well as two Digital Shorts: 19 and The Craigslist Killer. He was home-schooled and grew up in the west. Aaron loved to read as a small child and would often be found behind a book, reading one to three a day on average. This love drove him to want to write, but he never thought he had the talent. His wife Karissa prodded him to try it, and with this encouragement, he wrote Sweet Dreams, the first book in the WJA series, in 2008. Airel is his first teen series, and plans for more to come are already in the works. He lives in Boise, Idaho with his family, Soleil, Kale and Klayton. His daughter had an imaginary friend named She.


Chris White has an award for reading 750 books in one school year — from the 3rd grade. So yes, he’s more of a nerd than Aaron. Chris loves history, Sherlock Holmes, and anything that’s not virtual, like old motorcycles and mechanical typewriters. He also doesn’t get why we have these things called “smart phones” when all they do is make people dumber. Chris recently celebrated 10 years of marriage with his wife, April, and has two boys: Noah, age 8, and Jaden, age 3, who inspired the Great Jammy Adventure series; the OK-to-color-in picture books. Chris is working on a short story called The Marsburg Diary that will further explore the prologue to Airel, and he is finishing up his first novel, entitled K: phantasmagoria, due out in 2011. Chris has a major crush on Audrey Hepburn, who is now dead. His wife is okay with all of this.

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Different is Good

I don’t mean that being different is good for the sake of being different. That would be like art for the sake of art; a ridiculous idea, ultimately, that, like lots of things these days, sounds okay on the surface but doesn’t stand up to any kind of analysis. Art for its own sake is emptiness and meaninglessness. It would be the same in regard to daring to be different for the sake of being different. In other words, what would the point be? If we don’t have a reason for doing something, we’re just flailing about.

Take a guy like Claudio Roditi, for example. A jazz trumpeter of Latin American descent (Brazil), he’s different. Dizzy Gillespie was different, too, but Roditi goes one further. Most guys play just regular old Bb trumpets. For Claudio, that’s not quite enough. He plays a German rotary valve trumpet; a design concocted by, you guessed it, zee Germans, and intended for Teutonic stuff written by Richard Wagner (pronounced Ree-khard Vog-ner), the operatic genius. No, Claudio decided to innovate and be different. Why? The rotary valve trumpet possesses a singular tone; it’s rich and powerful when you give it the beans, yet it’s dark and subtle in the hands of a skilled musician who knows how to use space as well as sound. Plus the rotors can contribute, with practice, to faster fingering, having a little shorter throw than comparative valves. In other words, Claudio Roditi dares to be different with a purpose, to bring to Latin combo jazz a little something unique, darker, more colored, more vibrant, more introspective, something that burns a little hotter.

Different is good.

I refuse to get on the hybrid car bandwagon, for instance. I don’t think driving a Prius is green at all. The batteries, the heavy metals, the massive amounts of copper and energy that go into producing a new Prius, considering its useable life span (tied to the battery pack, natch, which costs around $4k to replace), all of it adds up, tipping the balance against. It’s far greener to keep an old banger on the road. Hello, that’s recycling in action. Plus old cars are just cooler. That’s my opinion, but it’s based on my thinking on the subject. The Prius and electric cars have been really oversold in the mainstream areas of our culture. It’s not as if they are grown on the Magic Tree of Communal Love and delivered to your doorstep by friendly polar bears walked on leashes by naked hippies sipping on soy chai tea lattes. They’re manufactured by heavy global industries. I don’t see what all the fuss is about carbon dioxide anyway; I thought trees loved that stuff. I thought they kinda needed it to photosynthesize. Ah, but I ask too many questions.

And I dare to be different, not “just because,” but because of thoughtful consideration. There’s a reason I have my convictions. I’ve earned them. You might assume I am some backward pro-Nazi conservative elitist, reading what I’ve written so far. But no. I’m actually not. Believe me or no, especially given some of the commentary I’ve written about current events the past four years; I am not easily defined as a person. You can slap the label of conservative upon my chest if you wish, but all that will do is prove your own ignorance, your own rashness and eagerness to label people.

Truth be told, the facts are more…nuanced, to use a leftist’s politically expedient catch word. I don’t run with Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck or Sean Hannity. While I do agree with the conservative outlook mostly, I’m not fool enough to believe those guys are news outlets. They’re biased, just as sure as Chris Matthews and his lot are biased in the other direction. Media lives and dies at some point by sensationalism, and I’m not buying it anymore. I confess I did at one time, but I’ve grown past my Chicken Little stage. I’m all growed up nah. If I had to pick a box from all the political ideologies out there, it’d most likely be the one marked Libertarian. But it doesn’t magically fit every situation; that decision is revocable when things start to get ropy and fail to fit properly. I fall outside of the mainstream by choice. I reserve my final decisions until after most of the lemmings have passed by. Which, by extension, makes me extremely conservative, I suppose. At any rate, I’m different and proud of it.

And now that I’m on the topic of ideology, I might as well hammer it home by asking you a question: Will you be voting in November? Perhaps a few more questions: Are you going to abstain for the sake of total frustration? I’ve considered that myself. How about this: Will you be voting on the basis of some slogan? G.K. Chesterton said it best: “As an ideal, change itself becomes unchangeable.” In other words, slogans are just propaganda; they’re dead as soon as they’re minted. At any rate, I think it’s clear to anyone with a cogent stream of thought inside their head that the kind of change we’ve had to endure for the past four years is not the sort most of us wanted. I think most of us just wanted someone at the switchboard who had half a clue what to do to stop the hurting out here in the real world. Clearly, we’ve not yet found the right men and women for the job. This November, the search continues in America.

I still have faith in America, in us. Ours is the only nation on the face of the earth constituted as we are. We’re filled with individuals who love being different, who have deep conviction of principle, who have mountains of fortitude to draw upon as we go forward into the breach. We come together not under the coercion of some megalomaniacal wannabe dictator, but united by and under the duress a man like that has produced, and we unite so as to extract that poisonous barb from the fabric of our homes. And when that business has been tended to, we return to our many and various different enterprises. We go about our own business. Different, and we’re okay with all of it, because a body made entirely of heads would be really gross. A body needs a good thinking head, a neck to swivel on, a body to hold it, arms to help it, and legs to move it.

I don’t expect you to “celebrate diversity” by trying to fit inside some dictatorial state-mandated mold that looks like me. Neither then, should you try to force me to surrender anything rightfully mine under the auspices of fairness. This is America. We’re not even supposed to be the same. We’re supposed to be different. That’s part of what liberty is. I know what reasons I have for striving for my convictions. I don’t desire to force anyone to be just like me. Why would I want that? Then we wouldn’t be different anymore. 

Sunday Drive

Take a walk in the woods every once in a while. Feel the sunlight filtered through towering ponderosas, two hundred feet tall or more. Hear the rushing roar of rivers cresting rock strewn banks, swollen with snowmelt, pale green torrents of liquid ice. Walk paths overcast with whole trees crossing over, wend through the underbrush, see the ants scurrying, their body segments much larger here than in the city; here they look to be made of bits of juicy wild mountain blackberry.

Smell the earth. Breathe in the scent of freshness; clean, airy, light, woody, peppered with the spice of drying needles that crunch underfoot. Feel the river roaring nearby; shaking the boulders that stand on the sloping banks.

Be reminded of how we're quite small at the wrestling rapid riverside; under precipitous tree bough stabbing high at the winds in the air, where the eagles soar. And be reminded of how we’re also quite large as we stand high, stooping over the black ant, our head cocked to one side in curiosity as he goes about his business. Take time to stop along the way and see.

Drive your car on two lane roads. And slow it down, roll with all the windows open so you can smell the fragrances, feel the cool breezes, see the sheer sides of the canyon walls on which you ride. Don’t rush. The Sunday drive is an American tradition that’s older than cars. Imagine what it might have been like to ride in a horse drawn buggy. Take it slow. And when you see something amazing, pull off and stop. Get closer. Pause. Soak. Dip a toe in. You packed a picnic lunch, right? Good. And you brought the kids, too. Show them why their jaw should drop in awe, even now, even in this age of terminal boredom, when they behold the work of the Creator. Get up close and personal. See what’s to see.

Thank God for today, and trust Him for tomorrow. Live apart from regret by seizing the now; drink in deep, empty the cup today, for it is all we have. Life will keep happening to you until you begin to happen to it. Don’t sit at home. Get out and about. Take a drive in the mountains. Get right up alongside their roots, drive right up through the crevices, ride up their ramps into the heights, and behold the view from the summit. Feel the intensity of the sun up there and let it burn its warmth into your skin, and carry that into your next Monday. It will better you.

Michael, Book II in the Airel Saga

I’ve been privileged to work with Aaron Patterson for a couple of years now, co-writing and brainstorming with him on a few ideas that have proven to be more than worthwhile. I can state now for the record that we work well together.

And I hope when Michael releases on May 17^th that you agree.

Fans of the Airel Saga won’t be disappointed. Book I, Airel, ended with a big bang and our intent all along was to follow that up with more of the same. Michael opens with the long-awaited explanation of just what the heck happened up there at the top of the cliff, though of course we take our time revealing all the consequences of that as the story unfolds. I don’t want to spoil anything for those of you who have yet to read Book I, but you can bet you’ll find plenty of drama in these e-pages.

You’ll also find new characters. We introduce a go-getter FBI agent and her rookie assistant, Harry, to the story. Naturally, in a missing persons case the authorities would nose their way into the situation. What they find at the bottom of their investigation is quite a shock. We also decided that we had to give Airel’s parents a little of the stage, so they make a cameo or two. But two of my new favorites are Ellie, a brass knuckles badass kind of girl who carries a mysterious accent and an even more mysterious past, and Mr. Emmanuel, who wears a white fedora when first we meet him and who has… let’s just say… a way about him. Whatever the case may be, and I’m not making any specific statements about any of these characters (you’ll just have to read the book), but I just adore a good villain. Let’s just say that chameleons can give a guy lots of character ideas. Plus it was really cool to dip into African mythology. Beyond that, I cannot go here.

I had lots of fun writing this one. If Airel bore more of Aaron’s imprimatur, Michael bears more of my own. Aaron and I tried changing up the nuts and bolts of our creative process for this one, and it shows in the final product. When we decided to collaborate on Airel, the rough draft had already been completed and edited by the time I had a crack at it, so I didn’t intrude much. But Michael was rather formless and void, a book with which the creative process was far more open-handed between us. Aaron delivered it to me in four sections over the space of many months, so when I made certain tweaks I wasn’t sure necessarily where he was going with some ideas. By the time we got down to the fourth section (Part Eight in the Saga), I found that I had a lot of catching up to do in order to reconcile our work. In the final analysis though, it just flat works. And well, I think.

We’ve pulled out all the stops on this one. When Aaron and I first started talking about Michael, we decided that we had to really go for broke on the setting. From the beginning we’ve been thinking about the Airel Saga in terms of high production value in regard to what the “camera” sees; we look at the storyline as if it’s a storyboard for a movie in a lot of ways. We want to write something that might translate well to the silver screen, in other words. We therefore decided to incorporate dynamic and sweeping visuals into the story, utilizing all the imaginative tools in our kit. The action scenes in Michael go beyond what you’ve seen in Airel. Where the first book had plenty of awesome Old World epic battle scenes that were a total blast to write, the second is a study in contrasts, not only to the first book but also in comparison to each other right inside Michael. There’s a high speed car chase in the rain at night, the blending of high tech weapons with swordplay, and two gorgeous places: Ascension Island in the South Atlantic, and Cape Town, South Africa (I actually spent six months there in 2002, so I was itching to write a bit of that into the story line from the get-go).

If you’re craving romance, Michael delivers on that front as well. As I said earlier, I don’t want to spoil anything, but there’s a scene with Airel and Michael in a torrential downpour that ought to spark something in you, at least if you’re not dead inside.

But that doesn’t compare to the scene near the end where one major plot twist comes finally unraveled with Airel and Kreios. That one is my favorite.

As always, the intent with the Airel Saga has been to provide a little something for everyone: drama, romance, action, adventure, intrigue, suspense, even some light humor. Michael delivers all of these and more. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

To all our fans: thank you so very much. We couldn’t do this without you.

Darrin’s Coffee Signature Blend Coffee

Full disclosure: I went to school with Darrin Marion, now the craft roaster of fine coffees in my old adopted hometown of Indianapolis, Indiana. I’ve been chatting off and on with him via social media for the last year or more, talking about all things entrepreneurial and coffeeish. I finally pulled the trigger on a pound of his whole bean Signature Blend last week after he shared a video with me, in which he appeared on local TV in Indy talking about his small coffee roasting biz.

I was more than excited to receive my coffee in the mail. It arrived parcel post, taking about three days to get from Indiana to Idaho, in an air locked gold foil bag; very high zoot. I was therefore assured that my coffee would be as fresh as possible.

The first thing I did was coarse grind a goodly dose of his Signature Blend (I used ten tablespoons for a standard large sized French press, typically called a four cup press) and got the water on the boil. You’ll want to use filtered water, natch.

The first thing I noticed was that he roasts his coffee quite light; it’s nothing like what you get from “Big Coffee,” as he says, which tastes burnt to some of us. Now that the green mermaid has mostly stopped taking over every other street corner, I believe it might be safer for some of us to express our true feelings about over-roasted coffee. Darrin’s is decidedly unique.

I brewed for five minutes, which is pretty standard for French press coffees. When I took my first sip, I was blown away. Darrin’s Coffee is like nothing else I have ever experienced. Somehow he has managed to engineer a roast and a blend that brings the totality of coffee’s flavors to the fore. His Signature Blend is very full bodied; it explodes on the palate with an intense cocoa flavor that is balanced with fruity suggestions of berry and orange. I tried it black first, and for my second cup I added cream and sugar. It was just as good that way.

The next day I tried using a little less coffee and brewing his Signature Blend in my Bunn drip coffee maker. This machine brews a full pot of coffee in three minutes; ideal for drip (you don’t want it stewing for like, ten minutes or anything). While it was good, with Darrin’s, I personally felt that it was better as a French press coffee.

And that brings me round to the final verdict. Darrin’s isn’t an everyday coffee for me. Here’s why: One, it’s best in a French Press (though my wife preferred it brewed as drip coffee—to each their own, and you’ve gotta experiment). Two, that implies some attendant ideas about how to best use it; i.e. making the enjoyment of Darrin’s an event in and of itself. Three, a pound of Signature Blend costs $15, which is reasonable, but shipping for me was $7.50. If we’re rounding up, that means I threw down nearly $25 for a pound of coffee, and that’s probably too much for most of us.

But that’s what makes Darrin’s Signature Blend a coffee for occasions, as far as I’m concerned. In other words, I think it’s best to brew a French press of Darrin’s and pair it with a snack. Darrin recommends apples and almonds for his Signature Blend, but I daresay it’s great with orange slices or even chocolate and berries. It’s such an intense explosion of flavor, and it’s so unique—I mean, like nothing you have ever tasted—that it needs to be paired with something equally as intense that can stand up to it.

Darrin’s Signature Blend is a powerful coffee. Contrary to what the green mermaid, peace be upon her, might tell us about real flavor requiring longer roasts, Darrin has managed to extract huge flavor from his craft roasted blend with a light roast. You'll probably want to try his other varieties as well, including his organic Yirgacheffe, his Sumatra, and of course Kona. He even has Jamaican Blue Mountain, the rarest of the rare. When you open a bag of Signature Blend for the first time, you’ll know what I'm talking about here. You’ll be greeted with the intense scent of cocoa intermingled with the slightest berry tartness. It’s a revelation. And while, for me, the cost makes his coffees a little prohibitive, it’s worth paying more for quality on occasion. ‘Nuff said, and all the best to Darrin in his endeavors.

Check out his Web site and his Facebook page. Thanks, Darrin for sharing your work with me.