Richard Youngs
The Naive Shaman
Jagjaguwar

I love seafood. I used to be alergic but outgrew it like those old brown saddle shoes I used to wear back then.

I'll never forget the first time I discovered that I couldn't eat shrimp. I must have been about 10 or 12 and we all were at these friends of my swim coach. They lived up in northern Wisconsin, where they had restored and converted this old old barn into their home. They had built in these hidden passageways behind the walls leading to other rooms, false walls inside closets and the like. For a kid this was the coolest place ever. Heck, looking back, now an adult, it still seems like the coolest place ever. What fascinated me most was this mammoth grand player piano in the middle of the big room. I sat there almost all day, learned how to put new rolls in, sitting there on the stiff bench losing myself in those magical keys playing forgotten songs.

The only thing that got me to leave the big wooden machine was when they put all the food out. It was a long long table, medieval in my memory, covered with persian rugs and large plates and bowls full of lots of stuff I'd never seen before.

It was the first time I had been seen that shrimp cocktail thingy. You know, when you fan the shrimp out in a circle on the rim of a bowl filled with cocktail sauce? Well, it was the first time I had seen the sauce, and being a lover of condiments even at that tender age, I asked what it was - knowing by its darker color and texture, that this was no ketchup.

I went to town on those shrimp. That sauce was awsome. Sausome, really.

A little while later, sitting at the keyboard again, my stomach started feeling it. I soon ran up the stairs to a bathroom out of earshot of the others downstairs. I had diarreha and I had it pretty bad. I sat there a long while and then realized that my stomach wasn't through with me yet.

I started scanning the room for a wastebasket.

Well, these fancydancy folks had a mesh trash can next to the sink and that was it. Suffice to say, it didn't contain my vomit as much as strain it.

Richard Youngs is a strainer of things, as well. What's left in This Vessel that doesn't splash on your shoes is something very interesting indeed.

And The Naive Shaman is my record of the year for 2005.

Copyright © 2006 Alice Kenner