JonGorey.com

It was cold and raw enough today that we had to fire up the wood stove, even though it was supposed to be on summer vacation. It instantly brought me back to winter — but, mercifully, I hope only for tonight! This brings us to today's Top Five list: Top Five Months 5. December Between the first snowfall (when you're not all cold and jaded and bitter about winter yet), Christmas (and its associated cheer and carols and lights and vacation), New Year's Eve, and NFL playoffs and college bowl games... there's a lot to love. 4. September As much as I hated going back to school as a kid, come the college years I absolutely yearned for fall. There's the dry, sunny weather, and those first cool nights when you can wear long sleeves and shorts. But, most importantly, it's the presence of life's most profound melancholy: the sad, poetic beauty that emerges wherever beginnings meet ends. The fleeting last days of summer, the nostalgia of leaving an old apartment and t...

The Massachusetts Senate approved a sales tax increase last night , raising it to 6.25%. By a veto-proof margin, at that. Booooo. After all that hemming and hawing about not raising the gas tax during a recession, they're raising a tax that applies to...  everything else!  I understand they need to raise revenue, and quickly. But you're telling me that instead of raising the tax on gasoline, which would encourage people to consume less gas — something pretty much everyone agrees is a good thing — the solution is to penalize people buying stereos, books, and cars at at time when we need that commerce the most? Weak. I'm writing this Michael Morrissey fella to give him a piece of my mind.  (If you like sending angry emails as much as I do, you can find your elected officials here .) Last night I went to my first Sox game of the season, a great one (not to mention a fast one), and before the game we met up at the new "Irish pub" adjacent to the House of Blues , cal...

I went to lunch today at Friendly's , with my friend and his toddler, and I gotta tell you... it's not the joy factory I remember as a child. The BBQ chicken supermelt was pretty good, and I even got a sundae — chocolate ice cream with peanut butter topping, yum — but, well, my friend said it best: "Halfway through lunch I started feeling inconsolably depressed about my own mortality." (Besides the drab, early '80s decor and sparse crowd, we were the youngest diners in there by a good 50 years.) In other news, I cleaned up chicken poop this weekend, which was a first! And hopefully a last.

After receiving only one ticket for an expired inspection sticker this year (side note: when we lived in the Back Bay and my sticker would lapse — it always does, I can't remember even once when I got an inspection ahead of time — my car, just sitting there, minding its own business, not going anywhere, would get pasted with tickets, like two a day, until I'd finally find a way to skip work and get to a damned inspection station during their stupid banker's hours. Stupid giddy meter maids. My car isn't worth the amount of tickets I've accrued in its lifetime. But I digress, wildly. In fact I feel like we're so off track we should probably just start this sentence all over again if we ever get out of this parenthetical jungle.) ...what was I saying?  Oh, right: After receiving only one ticket for an expired inspection sticker this year, I got my ride inspected today, and — I'll be! — it passed. It's a fairly new car (my first new car ever) but this year...

A couple of weeks ago we tackled the first of our two... let's call them "vintage" rooms. (The other is the kitchen — an epic undertaking by comparison, so we thought we'd start off with the easy one!) Here's what it looked like before, in all its peeling, stained, wallpapered glory: After stripping off the wallpaper, the exposed plaster walls gave the room a kind of abandoned Greek island cottage look — don't you think? — which we kind of liked! After a couple coats of primer and some Ben Moore "Moonlight Yellow," we had a real spare bedroom at last. Honestly, the room wasn't even on our radar during its unfortunate wallpaper days... I rarely remembered it was even there. Now I walk in from time to time just to bask in its sunny glow. (And to huff the last of the paint fumes, obviously.) Voila! In other fixity news, I totally replaced our tenants' kitchen faucet the other night. Shazam! Anyway, since it's WOL Wednesday, let's do a ma...

I spent three weeks in a very cool volunteer (work-for-room-and-board) program in France a few years back, and one of the other volunteers had grown up in East Berlin. I was kind of fascinated to learn her perspective on things — what must it have been like to grow up behind the “Iron Curtain” (or giant concrete wall topped with barbed wire and AK-47-wielding guards, as it were)? What was interesting — and it makes sense when you think about it — is that she was just a kid, and she didn’t know that she was growing up any differently than anyone else. She had loving parents, they got by modestly, and that was life. (Aren’t kids great like that? They’re so adaptable!) But what really struck me was her description of the first few years after the Berlin Wall came down. They would go to the grocery store, and suddenly there were twenty different types of toothpaste. Before there had been just one: Toothpaste  brand toothpaste. And this went for everything in the store, and beyond — remembe...

So last weekend we took a (long-overdue) vacation to New Orleans for Jazz Fest. It was awesome. It was hot, and sunny, and everywhere you looked there was music (and booze to go, of course).  We went to the actual fairgrounds on Saturday, which was a little mental — apparently it was the largest turnout they've had since the first festival after Hurricane Katrina hit. This could have something to do with Bon Jovi playing? They are a hurricane of jazz, after all. Anyway I'm not sure. We never ventured over to the main stage; the smaller ones were packed enough, and the music was incredible at each one. (We did catch some of the Kings of Leon , at the smaller main stage, and it was ridiculous how many people were smooooshed in our faces.) And the FOOD! I'm a gumbo junkie. I ate it like twice a day and I need more, real bad, real soon. Or at least some etouffee. We also went to Acme Oyster House  a couple of times to gorge ourselves on oysters. They're like a buck a pop! A...