Sunday, December 4, 2011

Spaghetti at Midnight or Spaghettata Di Mezzanotte


I thought this article was particularly fitting. Late-night spaghetti has become a sort of spiritual ritual for me, verging on a nirvana-like moment. With a large spaghetti plate, yes I have spaghetti plates (large ones), filled with freshly cooked spaghetti with my favorite turkey meatballs, I am at peace. Perhaps, the spaghetti is hope in a world of despair. Perhaps I like to overdramatize a bit.   Especially when the spaghetti is prepared in the twilight hour between midnight and 01:00. But it comforts me after a long day. It is a quintessential comfort food. It's also cheap and lasts a few days. $6 dollars can cover at least 2 days of delightful meals.

Anyways this article from the fine people at the New York Times hits it right on the spot. Their recipe is probably a bit healthier and just as cheap. Perhaps the most important thing is that with a little olive oil, garlic and maybe some capers your midnight spaghetti can be ready in mere minutes! I think I'm gonna try out a new recipe and I'll report back about how it turns out and my mental state upon eating it.

http://dinersjournal.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/03/spaghetti-at-midnight-2/

Thursday, November 10, 2011

"Life's altered you, as its altered me. And what would be the point of living if we didn't let life change us?"-words spoken during an episode of Downton Abbey. I think it may be a reference to a Jane Austin line. I'll have to check. Nonetheless, I really like it. 


Part of my job is conversing. The other day a customer went from conversation about the end of the world, to church, to the end of the world, to everything is going to shit, to suicidal thoughts in his youth. All this in a matter of two minutes. I stammered my response, obviously. 
Well, I'm glad you didn't do that, I said. And I meant it. He said thanks and walked away.



Tuesday, October 25, 2011


Wow. St. Vincent. Annie. Clark. You had me at the sound of your guitar doing wild and crazy things. A little over a year ago I heard these whispers that St. Vincent was pretty good at playing the guitar. Then I heard a passerby say impressive. She must have heard the same because her newest album is heavy on what she can do when it's just her and an electric guitar. Yes there's a band, but what she does is at the forefront.  On stage, sitting from afar, I only caught a glimpse of her stage presence. A lithe singer/songwriter one my guess at first glance, but looking a bit closer you see a strength. A thin arm is suddenly more, a shadowy bicep with definition appears. And there's the power stance that's all her own. A stance that tells you she's about to do something nasty with that guitar of hers.

Here's a clip of her guitar solo on the song Surgeon. Halfway through she's shaking her head but more so in agreement or approval with what the guitar is doing I suppose. 



Here's what Pitchfork had to say about her newest album.
            
"And anyone who's seen the Berklee dropout do her seizured duckwalk in concert while soloing on unhinged tracks like "Your Lips Are Red" knows her not-so-secret weapon is a lurching guitar style somewhere between Robert Fripp's sheet-metal prog and Tom Morello's 10-ton riffage. On Strange Mercy, she ditches Marry Me's naivety and Actor's ostentatious arrangements, boosts the inventive guitar playing, and ends up with her most potent and cathartic release yet."

At different points during the show I was both in awe and disbelief. I had seen her once before but this time it was more in-your-face and brutal. A good brutal and in-your-face. As I walked out of the show one thought was constant. I've got to get me an electric guitar. I've got to at least attempt to make sounds like the ones I heard throughout the night. Oh and that Annie Clark is a bad, bad guitar player.




Friday, October 7, 2011

169 and North Oak.

I'd like to call moments like this one I'm about to describe as Twin Peaks-ish or Lynchian (David). It's sort of like the bizarre or macabre that surfaces in the normal everyday life of average, everyday people. Here's a good quote that summarizes this Lynchian idea.
“An academic definition of Lynchian might be that the term “refers to a particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former’s perpetual containment within the latter.”
And so it was last evening as I made my nightly drive home from work that my car notified me that I was low on fuel and that I would need to make a stop at a gas station. I pull into a random place that I rarely go to and I can't even remember the name of the place. On that note, I did pass a gas station on the way to Parkville called Please Stop. Probably the most politely named placed I've ever seen, but it also makes me think that the place is in trouble and they're begging passing drivers to stop.

And so I get out of my car and go through my normal routine where I touch something metal on my car to discharge the static electricity that I have built up over the day, undo the gas cap, insert and quickly remove my credit card, select the gas, wait no go back, select against receiving a receipt and car wash, lift up the pump, then select gas, put pump in car and finally look around parking lot as car is being filled.

To my left a teenager is getting out of his SUV parked near the street, while a female passenger sits. Closer, another teenager with a lanyard hanging across his neck and over his back is cleaning his windshield. To my right an older man with white hair and dressed in a suit minus the jacket is cleaning his rear windshield. No big deal. Normal, everyday stuff.

A second later I look around and the SUV teenager is pacing back in the street looking for something. Something must have fell out in the road while he was driving. The lanyard teenager is still cleaning is windshield. Hasn't this gone on for a little too long, I think. When was the last time I cleaned my windshield? I can't remember. It's not something I particularly think to do unless it's very much necessary. To my right the old gentleman is using that cleaning brush on his bumper. Huh? That's kinda strange I think. I don't realize it at the time, how strange this all is, but I keep watching the man in the tie and white shirt with sleeves rolled up. He's washing his bumper and license plate. He's going over the rear brake lights. I hadn't seen that before, I say to myself. I look over and the teenager is running across the street looking on the other side of the fairly busy highway. The other teenager is done washing his windshield as I hear his wipers drop and hit the glass.  That's normal, I think, I've seen that before. I look back to the old man he's going over the roof of his car now. What could he possibly be doing that for? Dust? Back to the teenager with the clean windshield. He's not done, but I thought I heard the windshield wipers hit. He's methodically going over the corners of the glass and getting the last streams of water. He's being very careful as he glides the squeegee over the glass. Back to the old man. Still going over his entire car. Back to the young man. Now going over the roof of his car. Back to the kid who is now walking back to the SUV, still not sure what he was looking for and it doesn't look like he found it. I stop when the gas reaches $10 dollars. I feel like I'm in a weird twilight episode. Something is just not quite right. I leave the gas station in a haste. I don't look back but I imagine you middle aged business man has moved on to his hood and front license plate and the teenager with the lanyard has moved down to where water has dripped on to the tires and is going over the curves with the squeegee. Maybe it's not weird. Maybe it's perfectly normal. And I suppose it is perfectly normal for people to combine the very macabre with the very mundane act of filling up your car with gas and cleaning the windows.

Friday, September 2, 2011

Haruki Murakami - What I Talk About When I Talk About Running


I recently finished Haruki Murakami's memoir What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. I actually read his memoir before having read any of his other more famous works. I guess what got me interested in his story was that he decided one day to write a novel. Now he didn't decide after hours of deliberation, weighing the pros and cons and deciding what he would need to accomplish the feat. No, his realization came at a baseball stadium in Japan and the exact time came around the time when an American hit a double late in the game. And as epiphanies go, he decided right then and there that he had to write a novel. So that night he went home and wrote for an hour. And the next four months he wrote an hour a night after work until he had something resembling a short novel. He entered it into a writing contest and the rest was history. The fact that he worked in a jazz/coffee bar for ten years before deciding one day to write a novel also caught my attention. So I read his book about running or rather what he talks about when he talks about running. He started running around the same time as well. Perhaps at the age of 30-32 and he went on to run most everyday eventually getting up to marathon and occasionally ultra-marathon status.
            I've never been much of a runner. I was always consistent but more consistently slow than fast, but what I liked about this book is how he equates his state of mind when he writes to this state of mind when he's running. There's a determination and focus that I'm finding most writers must have. Just as must runners must be focused and determined. There's a certain training regimen that both writers and runners must have to condition their mind and bodies to do these two grueling tasks day in and day out. It's interesting, though, because writing is extremely unhealthy. Right now I'm hunched over typing and if I keep this up I might not move the slightest for hours at a time all the while I'm in my head trying to pull out words. Some could argue that the best writers are extremely flawed individuals who are driven to drink(think Bukowski) and other unhealthy activities. And then there's running which I'm fairly certain is the definition of a healthy endeavor. Actually the idea of Charles Bukowski jogging each morning before he writes is a pretty funny image.
So anyways, I think it's interesting that Murakami balances one unhealthy activity with a healthy one. The balance of the two, I would imagine, keeps his mind and body trained. Ok, so I don't jog and I barely write but the memoir was good and I liked a lot of his ideas on writing and running. He described his state of mind when running, at one point he runs an ultra marathon (62 or so miles), and through his mantra (Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional) and also through the ability to clear his mind, to actually think about nothing, having a void of thought as it were, with only the physical motion of putting one foot in front with eyes set straight ahead, and through this training of his mind and body to upstand the rigors, Murakami has kept on writing and running day in and day out for twenty years.

Rough Draft #2

Write a story about a place you loved that no longer exists. What was lost and what persists? How do loss and location mingle in your memory? What do we hold onto and what does that say about us?

It was on the right side of the road as I drove south and west. Just past a ditch and a 4-foot-tall wire fence, sitting on a small bump of a hill (all alone) was my favorite tree. I passed my tree three or four times a week and I always wanted to wake up early, when dew and low-lying fog covered the ground, and take a picture of that tree. But things happen and time passes and lightning strikes. And one day my favorite tree was gone. It had just ceased to exist. I think what happened was a storm, one of those Midwestern storms that come out of nowhere and turn the land black and ominous. I imagine through a sea of menacing clouds a steady roll of thunder filled the air and a flash of electric, blinding light carried on down to my tree. And through the smoke and fire, shards of tree lay scattered on the hill beside highway 50. Looking back on it now, it was only in a flash of time that I was able to admire the solitary tree. For a few seconds I would say ‘there’s my tree’ (and it’s funny to think but I felt a kind of peace of mind.)  For an instant at 60 miles per hour I must have appeared as a white streak of metal on tires. It was about 55 minutes into my hour and a half drive when I reached this spot just past Knob Noster. Of course the tree is now gone, but the memory and the feeling that I have of it will never fade. Nostalgia can be both a dear friend and a mortal enemy. It can give you happiness and it can also send you into a deep depression with no end in sight. I think the reason I was sad when my tree was no longer there was because I imagined the tree was me at my happiest. Always there through the storms and the perfect days, never wavering, always bending with the westerly wind and always growing up toward the sky and down through the earth.

Wednesday, August 31, 2011

Rhino

A Flash of Fiction #1
Reports are coming out from museums, some small and some large, of the theft of rhinoceros horns. You see the horns are being mashed up and sold on the black market. You see some believe, primarily in the East, that ground up rhino horns can be used for medicinal purposes as an aphrodisiac and in some cases a cure for cancer and other diseases. You see, don't you, that this is a great travesty and could only be worsened if rhino horns were replaced with something even more rare and apt to be ground to a fine powder and used as a cure-all. What if it were antique pottery found amongst the ruins at Pompeii?
Levi Surfdom, a detective from the Arts and Antiques unit in Cromwall, is urging museums to remove any advertising on websites and other publications of rhino's housed in museums. The remaining antiquated rhinoceros horns are to be closely guarded, behind a glass cage, with motion and laser sensors. Upon reading this a one-time criminal mind starts plotting the largest simultaneous museum heist for rhinoceros horns ever attempted in the world.


Wednesday, August 24, 2011

Journal and Notes

Monday 10-25-10 Notes

"But there is madness in everything. I am really confused these days. The realization that I must discover my own will and exert it seems brutal and unfair and unsympathetic and somehow uninteresting."
-Kerouac journal Friday January,30, 1947

The Wales Diary (a lost page)

Ferry is named Stena Caledonia(Castle w/ tall white walls)

There were twelve blue benches in the room and the smell of day old paint was in the air. It was between the hours of 01:00 and 02:00, and I sat on one of those benches up against an off-white brick wall. At the top of the wall the bricks went from horizontal to vertical, and above that fake plants sat in a mixture of dirt and wood chips. Every now and then an automatic door would slide open and the rush of the train's engine idling echoed into the room.
She wore a purple scarf and a pink coat. A cigarette rested between two of her fingers as she paced every corner of that room like a caged ferret let loose.
I look up and smiled as she passed me. It made me feel good. To smile and mean it. I always think that people can tell when my smile is fake, like when people know you're on the verge of crying as you fight to steady your lower lips and attempt to dry the wells in your eyes.
Opposite the train and beyond me and the fake plants, floated the ferry that would carry me across the sea to another shore. The ferry was white and looked like a house from the future that you see around these days. There was a large blocked upside L with horizontal and vertical lines that stretched out to what looked like an above ground pool.
She was sitting across from me on the only bench yet to be painted. I've always wanted to scream at someone "What are you looking at?" and at this moment I almost did, except I knew she was looking at the elephant ears arching over me. She was flicking her foot that crossed over her knee at a fast pace and she was now smacking on some gum. Her black suit-case looked worn and leaned slightly to the left.
"It's just an old fashioned Monday," she said. I looked up from the blue and realized she had directed the comment to me.
"Is it Monday?"
"No, I guess it's not" she said. She lowered

Monday, July 11, 2011

Rough Draft # 1

The ill will of a man with too much hair

"When someone fucks you over that hard, you've got to get revenge."

This is what the man with jet black, wavy, and long hair had said to his co-worker as they waited for their fast food at Extreme Burger. They stood on the back of their heels—resting—with arms crossed and eyes scanning the kitchen. They both wore the same uniform- a denim shirt with writing on the back and jeans that were stained a dark brown. Frank didn't see if their shoes were the same because he was too busy looking at the ceiling—pretending not to be listening in on the conversation. He hadn't really been listening to what they were saying. Up until he heard the wavy haired man speak of revenge he only heard sounds coming out of the two. Sounds like the sound of pigs going into a freshly filled trough that mixed with the chomping of meat in a booth by a family of three—who all three had a knack for smacking. There was a hard of hearing conversation by a couple sipping their discounted coffee in the back and that combined with the sizzling of meat and the continued wrapping of burgers. Frank tried to remember what he had ordered as he blocked out all the other noise that was going on to hear more about the revenge. An uncomfortable silence with his ears strained. The conversation was over- he thought. Though conversations while waiting for food sometimes take long pauses in between talking- maybe the man with the hair was thinking of another ancient proverb. Frank didn't hear anything else from them.

The two workers ticket was up. The Extreme Burger employee was very nonchalant about their pickup and didn’t look to make sure that everything was in it. He flinched as the hair man snatched the bag from his grasps. They were off. Frank was glad. They had been blocking the drink dispensing machine and he was afraid to ask them to move. He filled up his drink and waited for his value combo meal to be made. It had to be a value combo meal that he ordered because that was all they ever served. Each day he would say a number and ten minutes later, after paying, he would get his meal. The hair man probably got the number 8. The number 8 consisted of a Double Extreme Burger, Extreme Fries, and extra pickles. The hair man only ate burgers that were undercooked. They had to be dripping of red juices and pink throughout. The pickles were stacked in threes all across the surface of the burger. It was a combination that fueled his need for revenge. The fries were saved until after he finished his burger. They also required extra pickles. Frank imagined that the hair man would come storming in, hair wind blown and off his back as he raced forward to the counter. “Where’s my pickles,” he’d say as he pounded his fist down on the purple counter, knocking over a tower of cups. With his other hand he’d grab the nonchalant one by the collar until he got his extra pickles. He didn’t come back in though. He probably ate his value meal, combed his hair again, and went back to his work.

The hair man probably worked in a tough business. A business where he was used to being fucked over and occasionally when it was hard he would seek revenge. Maybe he always had a golf club handy and would use that as a means of exacting revenge. But then again the hair man wasn’t someone who a person would want to fuck over on purpose, especially at his job, where he earns his money and the respect of his chums. For one the hair man was a man who, when you looked at him, was very menacing. His hands were constantly in fists and he made an effort to look everyone he passed square in the eye. And secondly he didn’t seem like he worked where he would have to deal with people. The septic truck, outside the Extreme Burger; which Frank had parked next to must have been in the possession of the jet black, wavy haired man. His plight which made him seek revenge must have been caused by something else. It's possible that he started thinking that way on one unsuspecting night as he returned home.

The man with the jet black, wavy, and long hair had sped home from a night out drinking at the local tavern. He spent the time at the bar spouting with his co-worker about the decline of the moral fabric of a society in which a sporting event could end with a man chomping at another man's ear. “Why would you want to bite someone’s ear when you can punch them? It just doesn’t make sense.” After five beers and two bowls of pretzels he gave his goodbye to his co-worker, who never did say much-- he actually didn’t say anything in all the time the hair man had known him, but he nodded frequently, grunted occasionally, and always met the hair man’s gaze fair and square.

He came home to his wife that evening. He parked his jeep on the gravel road in front of the house and walked across the wet grass of the lawn while crickets droning came from the back yard. His wife was kissing the long hair man's brother. The brother had always had his eye on the wife. Before the brother's brother, that hair man, had gotten married to the wife he had tried desperately to be with the wife. The brother, whose name could have been Cooper thought Frank, had evidence that his brother was unfaithful to the wife. He had planned to show it to the wife but lost the evidence in a fire. A fire that had been set by a couple of teenage arsonists, Cartwright and Lou, who were never caught and soon after realized that they were mistaken in thinking that arson was fun. The fire torched Cooper's apartment but was stopped from spreading by the Maseline Volunteer Fire Fighting Crew. The evidence was lost, burnt and left in the gray embers, but it was never really evidence because that wasn't Cooper's brother in the picture. It was definitely a picture of a man kissing another woman. Same jet black wavy and long hair, but it wasn't the same hair man, the same man who was the brother of cooper and husband of the wife. It was an actor named Tex Phelps. His real name was Ricardo Lupe De Los Santos but after heading off to Hollywood he was convinced that his name lacked a certain amount of brevity and that it needed to be changed if he were to make it big. He had made a movie downtown around the same time that the hair man had proposed to the wife, lets call her Jolene, and Cooper knew of this. That is when Cooper with his camera stood behind a barricade as he watched Tex kiss his leading lady on a crowded street. Cooper didn't know that Tex would be kissing a lady, which from his angle looked like his brother kissing someone other than Jolene, but he did know that he liked him as an actor and enjoyed taking pictures of actors as well as people that he liked.

Without the evidence Cooper had no chance of getting Jolene to stray from the hair man, or so he thought. Jolene, who worked in a salon, had grown tired of the hair man. The way he acted, in all of his bravado and self-righteousness, was really annoying to her after awhile. He was also too needy and he had an inferiority complex she thought. When she had first met him, he was kicking his boot into the ribs of her fiancée. A crowd had formed to watch, and she, being short in stature, was left standing on the outside of the crowd watching the silhouette of the hair man and his waves of hair flowing back and forth on the side of a Big Rig. Jolene had been looking for a way out of her engagement for awhile, by then, and the hair man gave her that opportunity.

Cooper on the other hand was the complete opposite of the hair man which attracted Jolene. It’s possible that in another world, another story, another perception, Cooper would be known as the Yul Bryner look alike with the prominent forehead. He kept it shined and the moment Jolene saw him she felt inclined to rub her hand on his dome. She had never seen such beauty without hair. So when Jolene approached Cooper, moments before the jet black hair man came home, they really went at it.

Frank had been waiting for his value combo meal for at least ten minutes and the number on his ticket had just now been called. Numbers after him had been called for people who had ordered meals and held tickets, but Frank didn't bother with those details because he was enjoying his drink and he wasn't really hungry.

The conversation that he had overheard was much unlike any he had heard before in Extreme Burger. Yesterday he overheard a lady talk in anticipation about a package that was in the mail. It saddened Frank when he thought of the pain the lady would go through after finding her missing pet's head in the package with a ransom note that demanded 15,000 dollars or else she could expect the rest of her pet’s heads the same way. Then there was the nonchalant one’s uncomfortable feelings towards thick dairy products and he would mask that feeling each time he would ask “Why can’t you do it?” when a milk shake was ordered. He had passed out once, from drinking a shake too fast, and as the coldness rushed to his head he collapsed and smacked his head the arm rest of a leather recliner. Moments after, he revived with a swollen lip and uncontrollable drool seeping out his mouth. There were always other conversations that were clearly inferred upon by Frank and it was long before Frank only inferred upon the ones that were most exciting.

What the hair man had said was golden, thought Frank as he picked up his meal--it turned out to be a number 8 at as well--and began to walk towards the exit. Frank just wished that he had heard the rest of the conversation because he couldn’t think of how the hair man would get revenge. Maybe there were two mounds in a secluded part of woods on the outskirt of town that held a secret. Or maybe he beat his brother up, boots to ribs, and got back with the confused Jolene. Or maybe he, himself, went off to Hollywood to be a stunt double for Tex. Or maybe…

“Are you even listening to me?” asked a woman to someone through her cell phone.

The hair man, along with divorcing his wife and disowning his brother, had taken up a vow to ignore and not speak to the two. He no longer felt any kind of emotion for them. It was an odd kind of revenge but he felt it served his purpose. He was to return the hurt that they gave him with no feeling at all towards them. If there was one thing about the hair man that both Jolene and Cooper liked it was the undivided attention he gave them and the reassurance in his words. The hair man always knew what to say and from then on he knew not to say anything to his former brother and ex-wife.

Thursday, March 10, 2011

Handclaps. Whistling. Group vocals. Strings. Rising crescendos. Harmonica. Accordion. Deep, heavy Bass lines. All things I like in a song.