DE Day 4 - Crabs, Craft Beer, and Comedy
Today started normally enough with an outing to get coffee. I went to The Point Coffee and Bakery as it was ranked among the Best of Delaware 2017 by Delaware Today. The coffee was gigantic and tasty. The barista recommended getting a flavor shot because she said you wouldn't need cream or sugar. I decided to get in the white middle class fall spirit and get a pumpkin spice shot, which she only teased me about a little bit. Then she told me one the most surprisingly dirty jokes I've heard thus far. Needless to say I might have fallen in love.
From there though things took a turn as I embarked on a harrowing journey I might have unknowingly been preparing for my whole life. I went to the Blue Crab in Bethany Beach and tried their all you can eat Blue Crab Feast. It was delicious, it was horrifying, and I am forever changed. I've decided to write about the over an hour long (!) experience of man's dominion over beast in a more stylized short novella, I've decided to very stupidly calll:
The Old Bay and the Me
You sit down at the table, bright eyed, bushy tailed, filled with hope for the meal you're about to engage in. The table is covered in a brown paper tarp like a slaughterhouse floor, but you don't pick up on this because you have not yet eaten all the crabs you can eat. In many ways you are still a child.
The waitress first brings out some homemade potato chips. This is the calm before the storm.
You finish the potato chips thinking this will be nothing. Then the waitress comes back with deep fried hush puppies and a bucket of blue crabs. She dumps the crabs out before you as if to emphasize that their lives had no meaning and neither does yours. Now it is just you, the blue crabs, and your black soul.
Your utensils are a hammer and a paring knife, the blunt and the cruel. The ritual of dismemberment comes to be a microcosm of life itself. The thudding trauma of the hammer on crab is the overwhelming first blow of birth itself. The knife is every day afterward slowly picking at you until you are nothing but a shell.
Halfway through the first crab, the waitress brings you a fried chicken leg and drum stick. No creature of the land, sea, or air is safe from man's unflinching death march.
You crack open the first crab and eat its brains. You gain its knowledge and realize that you and the crab are one in the same. They wear their shells on the outside, but we wear ours on the inside to shield ourselves from the harshness of this world. You gain a sort of respect for your enemy. This crab feast has taught you how fragile both shells are.
By the second crab, this respect has quickly given way to hate. The work being put into shelling and consuming does not reap satisfying rewards no matter how salty or sweet. The returns diminish with each hammer fall, and each dip of the crab's death into hot butter.
Graceland by Paul Simon plays on the radio and you realize that there is no grace left for you. You have entered this hell and you cannot leave until you meet the devil face to face. Will his eyes look like the crab's or your own?
You realize you are the only customer in this restaurant, dancing your dance of death, and that perhaps eating an endless supply of crustaceans by yourself is the highest form of loneliness. But loneliness is the natural order of things. You soldier on.
As the crabs get cold so too does your temper. You are no longer man nor god nor beast, but a machine, coldly going through your functions. Cracking, stabbing, and eating without a trace of feeling.
At some point on the fourth or fifth crab, at this point the numbers mean nothing, you realize that you are bleeding. Has the crab enacted a small vengeance from beyond the veil or have you lost the ability to discriminate that which your knife slices?
Finally, the waitress comes to you and asks if you would like any more crabs. The salesman in her wants you to say yes, but you look into her eyes and the human being in her begs you to say no.
At last, you say, "It's finished" and lay your cruel instruments on the slaughterhouse paper among the debris and the stains. There is nothing left but the shells. Nothing left but the shells.
4 Stars.
The End
After the feast, I walked along Bethany Beach for a bit. The motion was necessary, but I'll be honest I didn't absorb any of my surroundings and as soon as I got back into my car I fell into a 30 minute food coma.
Refreshed and (mostly) conscious, I drove down to Lewes to check out the last of the places the couple I met in Revelation Brewing recommended, Big Oyster Brewing. It's a craft brewery and restaurant in a big barn, and it was hopping with people when I got there. There was no way I was going to be able to eat anything for the foreseeable future, so I just got a flight. I had an oyster stout (actually brewed with oysters in the casks), a tripel brewed with blueberries and black tea, a cranberry cask aged beer, and a honey ale. The stout and the tripel were my favorites. I was surprised because I've had blueberry beers before and felt pretty indifferent towards them, but the black tea cut the sweetness a bit and together the flavor was really something cool.
From there, I went to the bar where the mic would be, Abbot's Grill. This place was also well regarded for their food, but still I was too crabbed up so I just had a few drinks.
The mic was a lot of fun. I was the only stand up, but there was a bit of everything. This was the first mic where I saw someone doing a poetry reading and I thought it was really cool. I think that's so brave, because I have to filter my thoughts through at least some layer of irony or silliness before I share them with a room full of strangers but there's something more honest about (good) poetry.
The musicians were also pretty good doing a mix of covers and originals. My favorite was a folk-punk love song called "I'm an Amoeba for Your Love".
If the poetry and amoeba songs didn't tip you off, it was a pretty hip and receptive crowd. The host had initially said to try to keep it clean because there could be families still eating at the restaurant so I went through my notes and made sure I had a solid 5 minutes of clean material I felt confident in, because I had kinda faltered in that regard last night. After I did my five clean minutes, which went really well, they said it was okay to keep going and to be as rude as I wanted so I did my silly blue material. I think the dirty stuff probably got harder laughs, but I suspect that it wouldn't have worked quite so well without the build up of the clean material. It was a great confidence building experience. I got to try out a couple new jokes too, so it's nice to not feel like I'm stagnating. I didn't try the making fun of white supremacist bit or the world peace bit because even though they're clean, and in hindsight I think the audience would have been down with political stuff, I wanted to feel like I could comfortably do a long set without them, just because I might have to in some places. It's funny when you end a set poorly, you always feel like you should have ended earlier on a big laugh, but when you have a set go really well you think about all the more jokes you could have kept doing. Such is life.
Favorite Random Sightings: "Fabricators Wanted"; Kick'n Chicken; Cotton Candy Grapes (No clue); "We have gigantic beautiful mums!"; Hard Luck Tattoos; Tidal Rave; "Turtle Crossing Next 20 Miles"
Regional Observations: Delaware accents are an interesting blend of Southern, Pennsylvanian, and New Jersey.
Albums listened to: Energy by Operation Ivy (a classic); England Keep My Bones by Frank Turner; Enter the Wu-Tang: 36 Chambers by the Wu-Tang Clan (Just a masterful debut, unrelenting beats and verses); Entertainment: Music from the Motion Picture (Just Black Night by Frank Sinatra Jr.); EP1 by Jukebox 101
People's Favorite Jokes:
What did cinderella say when she got to the ball? *gagging noises*
Song of the Day:
I can't imagine another completely clean song being less likely to ever be played on the radio.
