The cut off date

My grandfather died.  Three weeks in the nursing home.  Two months of known cancer.  Closer to two years of suspected cancer.  Five years of CHF.  88 years old.  The numbers are the hard part.  I have one grandparent left, my mom’s mom.  When she dies that’s a generation concluded, the pages in their history stop there.  I know little to nothing about my great grandparents.  That is why this is important.  I know my grandfather’s mother would always pick me up and not put me down until she left, that she’d exercise every morning well into her 80’s, that she traveled the world.  I know my grandfather’s dad died young.  Thirty five years old, fell over in the the fields of his farm and was done.  I know my other grandfather’s dad was a water dowser.  He hunted water and dug wells.  I don’t know anything about his wife.  We don’t know anything about my other grandmother’s parents.

My mom’s dad, we watched him die for decades.  He was diagnosed with Parkinson’s when he was forty and then went quickly after some surgical complications.  My Dad’s mom fought cancer brilliantly and left this world more elegantly than I thought we are allowed.  These two passings were okay to get through.  My Dad’s dad was another story.

When the doctor said six months, it all got worse.  For four years we were under the idea that some hidden heart attack would bop him off out of the blue.  He had two unfixed blockages and didn’t want to die on the table so he just wanted to ride out the time he had.  He made it expressly clear when he had my dad write up his do-not-resuscitate papers.

I was okay with the heart disease.  I was okay with the randomness of life.  When the doctor made my grandfather start down that time line, it got harder.  The night we got the official diagnosis, I stayed up reading Lucille Clifton.  Breast cancer got her.  It isn’t that it suddenly got real, or that there were new emotions that weren’t there before, it was just the knowledge of how much he had to spend, how much life he could afford.  At least for me, the haze was gone and then there wasn’t any doubt.  I’m okay with not knowing.  I’m sure some of that might be denial, but I’m also sure probably not very much of it.

So we watched him grow thin.  I said my good byes two days before he died.  Anyways, not sure what point I was getting to in the end.  But again, anyways, my grandfather died.

On Cooking Stock

This is not a tradition I was born into.  There was no grandmother who invited my curiosities into the kitchen, no mother slaved over the dull heat for hours.  Stock was clear.  Even beef stock, the very term conjuring up the density of great, stubborn animals, stood clear as beer bottles.  Stock was simple, added to give moisture and moisture alone to casseroles or meatloaves.  Stock was a mystery.

On the stove chicken stock.  The horrible feet of chickens reach up and around and in all directions pointing their white toes.  They float and move in the heat.  They are batted down by the thin layer of gelatine which is the hallmark of good stock.  Onion skins and wilted stocks of celery rise up and fall like some great architecture.  In two spots, bubbles stumble upwards and collect until they punch one quick hole in the surface.

The girl I love put the pot on and let the gas stove hiss at its lowest temperature.  She has moved on to other projects and I linger by the pot.  I remember thinking this is terrifying, like witnessing the structure of a bad dream.  The image of unraveling damaged things stuck in my head for days after the first time she prepared it.  This sensation was a strange one.  I’ve eaten the exotic and intimidating with enthusiasm.  Short of man-flesh, I’ll try most anything.  But there was something haunting about the chicken feet, something cauldron-esque.  It was as if some gateway opened up and a bit of hell oozed up.  I reflected on this many times.  Perhaps it was the thought of the chickens changing.  How birds are more dry than you imagine and now they are plastic looking and smooth.  Even the bones lost their fragility when the calcium bled out.  And from this all, the aroma was otherworldly.

Eventually the day finished its duties and the stock was done.  The house was perfumed and the collection of body parts was placed in the freezer (The little bits of excess vegetables and bird parts apparently gets better with each new batch).  The batch of mason jars begin to fill out.  We set one aside for soup.  The soup takes a fraction of the time to prepare and serve.  The girl gloating about her hard work says you can easily taste the immeasurable difference between this and the store bought stuff.  She says this and in the end, I can’t tell the difference.

The Problem with Inspirational quotes

No, I’m not going to begin with one.  I am one of the many slaughtered masses.  Not one of the people who lives tragically, but one of those who tragically lives.  Shit job that can’t pay off student loans, relatively clean living with no interesting vice, quasi opinionated but closed off, that’s me.  And at the aforementioned shit job, because the powers that be know it’s a shit job and don’t really care how much shit is involved with the shit job, erected a committee to polish this turd.  I was on that committee for two weeks.  So how does a bloated, faceless cooperate mass grave look to improve the spirits of an office they have successfully downsized every quarter for the last year and a half?  Holiday themed stickers on the cubicles and a daily inspirational quote chosen by the manager.

Why would something as simple as brave or historic words spoken by titanic figures at the exactly right moment of time be so annoying?  Because we aren’t the people who spoke them.  We, the measured and failing everyone, aren’t the abdominal spirit of hope or triumph.  And taking these words, like taking any words, like anyone pointing to text in a holy book, are irrelevant in a vacuum.  Last week I saw someone on facebook post a rather nice quote from Ernest Hemingway in which the author called for a life bravely lived.  And as we all remember, he blew his head off with a shotgun.  Even more strange was a random quote sent out by our manager by an anonymous speaker saying that life is too short and we shouldn’t let anything get in our way.  Why, oh why, would you send this quote to a group of people who unanimously have no other option in life at the moment, than work in that pit of despair?

I love words.  I truly do.  I love quotes as well, but when they are cheapened or the research isn’t done to properly they are meaningless.  And they are dangerous.  Someone may have quoted a Tale of Two Cities while they beat someone to death in an alley way.  It’s dangling bits of power that exuded from someone who had all the cards at the right time.  It’s channeled laziness through great mouths.  So when my company thinks they are improving my attitude by whispering the lucky and the unstoppable in my ears, they are a bit mistaken.  If they wanted us to work happier and more productively, they wouldn’t have nailed the chairs to the desks, taken away half of our breaks, and placed a standard warning of disciplinary action in every company wide email.  Hell if they had any sense they would have instituted a weekly ration of vodka.

So remember, Gandhi started out as a racist, Henry Ford was a megalomaniac, and every sports figure we ever put on TV is a genetic anomaly we have paid too much.

Food Reviews: Wendy’s

They say hunger is the best spice.  Nostalgia is a rather potent one too.  Having missed all the big meals of the day and the sun getting lazy and low, my girlfriend and I spied that familiar, freckled cartoon face.  I’ll say this before I begin: I was raised in the fast food culture.  I harbor no ill will to any of the cancer and cardiac compromising demons.  Well, maybe with Chick-fil-a but that is a different conversation for a different day.

Now, something I had forgotten about that I found absolutely charming about the fast food kitchen is that it sounds like mission control for the space program.  The dings and deep tones of machines communicating with their operators gave me a kind of childish glee.  That, and when one of the fry cooks yelled across the restaurant, “if we don’t do this now it will be like cooking at grease lake!” I couldn’t help but imagine an old world war 2 pilot back there, giving out orders and constantly complaining about the newer generations of ingrates.

I haven’t eaten at a Wendy’s restaurant in nearly a decade, and the food was right where I had left it off.  Hopefully metaphorically.  It was sloppy, and salty, and wonderful.  I bet it tasted the way infidelity feels: wrong, but with the abandon to enjoy it.  The fries were crispy and with a bandoleer of those tiny ketchup cups, it was like being ten years old again.  The sandwich tasted like it could have come from a living animal at one point, and in the fast food industry that is a great compliment.  I trounced the entire meal in 10 minutes and we went on our marry way.

As we drove down the road, my girlfriend and I, we talked about how more than anything it was the nostalgia of the entire experience.  To have a poignant moment like that completely on a whim, to remember dead relatives and times long lost, that is something special.

Beginning

So, for some reason I feel the need to explain, if to no one else than to myself, the reason I start writing projects like this.  I think in many ways this is my response to much of social media.  There are so many facets of the big communication platforms I find distressing.  Facebook I find obnoxious because most of the ramblings put on that site are misunderstood.  Either too much or too little thought is put into the digestion of what is said.  Twitter I would find useless if I ever signed up because I’m not a celebrity or politician trying to ruin my career, or I’m not trying to coordinate a revolution somewhere out east.

There are more pulpits to scream from but my argument for all of them is this: we as a society, maybe as a species, have become way too reactionary towards information.  By that I don’t even mean our knee-jerk reactions towards the news or celebrity gossip.  I mean we go with our own understandings and our own ideas of the world on most every social or political subject that is beamed across a screen somewhere.  With every idiot having a way to spew an idiots’ ideas across a huge spectrum, no matter how insane the idea, everyone will find company.  I’m looking right at you Ancient Aliens viewers.

So here’s the idea, I wanted my own space where it isn’t met with the expectation to be read but with the knowledge that it could indeed be read.  Something that ensures a standard outside my own head, but not with an exact point on what that standard should be.  A way to talk into a hole and not expect an echo.