A 2019 Wisconsin compilation.

Atop the electromagnetic powered, fifty-foot beast sits a glass ball inside a copper egg.

Dr. Evermor’s space capsule.

Transformers and transistors; gauges and springs. Tack welded and tied together by bolts and pins with stockpiled remains, salvaged from breweries and the Apollo 11 space shuttle. Converted to retrospective science fiction contraptions with no shop drawings and no cut sheets.

An ornamental, free-floating grandiose, three-hundred ton creation.

Forevertron.

The only blueprint was in the mind of the now resting in slumber. A wild-eyed Doc Brown: Dr. Evermor, an outsider with a lot of whimsy and even more industrial scrap metal. Two 1880s Edison dynamos and lighting rods accentuate the piece above the seventy-member Bird Band Orchestra, The Epicurean, and gigantic insects like Juicer Bug and Arachna Artie.

The lights – red, green, amber. When green, the power is on. It transports the navigator on a highball to heaven. In masterful preparation for space and time travel The Gravitron was to shrink Dr. Evermor to fit the sphere. The Celestial Listening Ear would allow him to broadcast his observations from orbit to the naysayers peeping through telescopes back home.

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Leisurely travelling from the future by glass pod I traversed wormholes to visit Dr. Evermor’s Sculpture Park in Sauk County, Wisconsin. My second coffee of the day was from a pause at Rockford Roasting Company. My nostalgia for this particular roastery-café is colossal since I had worked on a Tollway project in the area for two years. Folding geometrical space-time it was a pining of sentimentality to be back.

During my tenure, I had established early on that there was in fact no other good coffee roasted or available in the city of Rockford, Illinois.⁽¹⁾ A twenty minute jaunt, one-way, from the now-razed iconic Clock Tower, I racked up quite the mileage on the company vehicle going back and forth every single day.⁽²⁾

Always well worth it in order to avoid settling for burnt Starbucks’ charred liquid ash and Dunkin Donuts hot garbage water.

Before landing at the glorious Forevertron and the forged metallic garden of wonder, I had to stop for charging. At a table inside Sardine at Machinery Row in Madison, right off Lake Monona blanketed beneath grey, rain pouring skies, I indulged.

Wisconsin ham Croque Monsieur with gruyere and béchamel. Frites somewhere over there to establish a contrast to my grail of St. Bernardus Belgian Tripel. A giant pour in the same goblet once entrusted to Joseph of Arimathea. The very cup that caught the blood on Golgotha.

The two owners of Sardine, very intentional with place and tradition, originally met one another in an unassuming three-flat in Wrigleyville. They, the providers of lakeside bistro brunch, bonded to a singularity in order to spark a renaissance at Machinery Row.

Historical, once-existing wooden tobacco and icehouse flats ran the coast facing Williamson Street. Machinery Row was a Conover & Porter design in Romanesque Revival – rusticated blocks of sand stone and Abelman tile which rise to brick corbelled cornices. A cylindrical sniper tower at the northwest with battlements suited for the Capital City’s finest archer.

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That afternoon found me at Octopi Brewing in Waunakee sipping fudgesicle stout and Oreo porter at a bar of reclaimed timber from Navy Pier. Like a band of shape shifting ocean dwellers, Octopi as a contract brewer nabs hyped-up beers produced in two or five barrel systems and rocket scales them up.

Untitled Art is contrived and formulated in their production facility, flowing through Octopi in the conscious mystery.

Before ending the trip with dinner at a Madison venue of which I cannot recollect, I paused at Funk Factory Geuzeria to experience the Art of Fermentation: Méthode Gueuze.

Lambic and Gueuze inspired cherry dreams in Eucharistic stemware I board Forevertron. The Great Space Coaster in orbit, I circle strawberry spiral galaxies and blueberry planet orbs, listening to the imperative notations of Dr. Evermor from beyond the vanilla swirling veil. Fleeting ultraviolet radio waves cast to the receptors.

The resistors?

Red shift and then blue shift, the obstructionists are left, jaws to the ground, gazing in the ether.

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1. This only applies to the timespan from April 2017 through October 2018. I did the extenuating work in order to find that there was in fact no good coffee in the City of Rockford, Illinois, other than from Rockford Roasting. I mean, try me. We can talk about it.
2. I remember offsetting the mileage on my company vehicle log by every few months just driving my personal vehicle one day. The 180-mile round trip between Chicago and Rockford was pretty easy to offset my coffee voyages with one single trip. Anyway, this brings back other memories of having such a long commute. One thing was that I’d use my own credit card for gas and tolls, and I’d get reimbursed the expenses. But the charges were so high (we’re talking a full tank of gas every 1.5 days) that it really had a positive net effect on my Amazon card points. I would buy new records and books on a regular basis simply from those charges alone.