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Michigan Winter Beer Fest…first course

Posted by Aaron - 28/02/10 at 05:02:14 am

This should wet your appetite for now.

More from the Michigan Winter Beer Fest soon.

Beans!

Posted by Aaron - 27/02/10 at 05:02:20 am

Like most of New Years Eve, a forgotten gem.

Cuties…are you eating these?

Posted by Aaron - 20/02/10 at 12:02:28 am

Don’t call them little oranges. Probably the best thing to happen to the snack fruit market since the pocket-sized clementine made eating citrus cool again, Cuties have taken over the fruit portion of the food pyramid (and they are eying vegetables next).

So what is a Cutie? I would make sure your SafeSearch is set to at least moderate before googling the fruit.

And I’m just learning this, but a Cutie is actually one of two things. From November to January, it is a clementine mandarin. From February to April, it is a murcott mandarin. From April to November, you’re out of luck. I got all this from the Cuties Web page.

And, according to the Web site, Cuties are currently facing off against Junk Food in a soccer match. The score is nine, nil. Walt, 10, nil.

My brother first tweeted about Cuties more than a week ago. It got me interested.

On my next trip to the local Meijer, I snagged a box, so happy this is not just a West Coast thing. (By the way, the Web site claims Cuties have been around since 2000. Another thing I missed out on last decade.)

My Cutie intake is about two per day. The 5lb box is taking some time to whittle down, in part because my sister does not like Cuties. She had a bad clementine experience and has yet to recover. We will give her time. Apparently others have had less than bloggable Cutie experiences. From their Facebook page:

Welcome to 2k10. Even fruit has a Facebook.

Feeling included, a few paczki at the end of the day

Posted by Aaron - 17/02/10 at 06:02:26 am

I did not want to miss out on my paczki today. It’s Fat Tuesday after all, and since I can’t bear it all on Bourbon Street, I should at least be able to enjoy a fruit-filled, lard-laden pastry, or two. Yum.

The box of paczki (so paczki is the plural of paczek and there’s a little tail falling off the a in both words, but whatever) that someone brought into the office about a week ago disappeared in a matter of moments, before I even knew there was goodness in the newsroom. Today, a photographer brought in a box just as I was getting to work this afternoon.

Not hungry and not ready for a sugar-high-then-crash at the beginning of my shift, I waited. I waited a little too long and hours later, the box was empty.

So paczki-less, I sent a text to my sister, who I live with right now in Ann Arbor, telling her to be awake when I came home at 11:30 so we could celebrate Fat Tuesday with paczki together. She agreed.

Then panic struck. On the way home, I worried that the Kroger near her apartment may have been so overrun by Fat Tuesday, paczki-hoarding revelers that only boxes of prune filled pastries would remain. Not the case. An ample supply was left at the Campbell Road Kroger.

And I did not feel odd buying paczki at such a late hour. The four other people I saw shopping all had boxes tucked away in their cart.

Yummy.

Boredom kills…but carrots and celery will save you

Posted by Aaron - 11/02/10 at 06:02:36 am

Now that I have, as the folks at the sandwich shop called it, a big boy job, and can down-size my employment roster to only one, I have some extra time on my hands. I knew I needed a hobby to fill the hours I normally spent delivery food to the drunk, stoned and studying. But what?

Now this, from the Associated Press, Being bored could be bad for your health. Time to find something to do.

According to a study conducted by a few Brits, people who were bored were more likely to die sooner. I don’t know if this holds true for Americans, who have invented all types of ways to keep from boredom, like Google Buzz, or at least ways to broadcast to the world that you are bored, like Google Buzz, and that you will in fact die sooner than the rest so get in line for my stuff.

But seriously, these researchers found that bored people tend to engage in more risky behavior, like smoking, drinking and anything featured on ESPN’s X-Games. I always wondered who came up with the idea to do a backflip on a snowmobile. He obviously was really bored.

I just spent 30 minutes looking for a video of this guy who tried to do a backflip on snowmobile during this year’s X-Games and almost had the sled come crashing down on him. If you know where to find it, tell me.

Back to boredom. Actually, the really killer is not boredom but your heart deciding to stop working. Apparently, bored people do not exercise and do other things that make their heart see the value in continuing to pump.

No fears though, this can all be solved by carrots and celery.

“People who are bored also tend to eat and drink more, and they’re probably not eating carrots and celery sticks,” said Sandi Mann, a senior lecturer in occupational psychology at the University of Central Lancashire who studies boredom.

Studying boredom. That must be so…boring.

Wow. I had to. Thanks yall.

Groundhog Day nonsense

Posted by Aaron - 03/02/10 at 06:02:56 am

So that famous groundhog, Punxsutawney Phil, saw his shadow today and cursed us with six more weeks of winter.

“As the sky shines bright above me, my shadow I see beside me. Six more weeks of winter it will be,” the groundhog apparently said. Didn’t know groundhogs could talk. Didn’t know black top hats were cool again.

Oh well, not much to complain about. This winter for folks around southern Michigan has been quite tame.

But with six more weeks of this stuff on the way, I ask:

Or drop me something else in the comments.

PS — I created the poll using PollDaddy.com. Any other suggestions out there for poll creation? I do like polls.

Other polls by me and help from Sarah Crone:
• What do you give Michigan for its 173rd birthday?
• Dropping a ball in Kalamazoo on New Year’s … boring! What should Kalamazoo drop?
• Carp and Cougars and Zhu Zhu Pets, oh my! Poll: What are you scared of these days?

They’ll catch me. They’ll find out

Posted by Aaron - 29/04/09 at 03:04:00 am

A sign near the door read “Escape Risk. Open Carefully.” Already intimidated by the warnings to not leave my car running unattended, the plasterings of signs reminding people to please keep all doors locked and the naked old man standing helplessly in the hallway that I walked around to get to the elevator, I rang the doorbell.

I don’t open doors with warning labels.

Delivering sandwiches to the psychiatric hospital always made me nervous. Standing outside the door of the third floor wing, I clenched the white paper bag holding a nurse’s sandwiches. My fingertips wrinkled the paper, making small indentations. I shifted my weight and wondered if the doorbell worked.

————–

Rumor has it that Malcolm X’s mother was once a patient at the Kalamazoo Psychiatric Hospital. I often wonder who else was or is a patient. The old naked man I walked around just looked lost. He didn’t look crazy.

The hospital opened in 1859 as the Michigan Asylum for the insane. At one time, the hospital had more than 3,600 patients. I don’t know how many patients are inside the haunting, sprawling buildings on top of the Oakland Drive hill. I have heard there are about 30. I have seen two, a naked man in the hallway and a woman who tried to talk to me.

————-

As I drive to the hospital, usually at night, I make up stories about the patients, treatments and history. I convinced myself that Edna Pontellier, the main character from Kate Chopin’s “The Awakening,” checked into the hospital, and Chopin made up that whole mess about swimming until she drowned as a cover. Sort of like when Lindsay Lohan goes to rehab. I invented an entire floor, the fifth floor, not accessible in the common elevator, when unmentionable treatments still occur. I envisioned patients hooked up to electrical outlets with bare copper wire for a low budget round of electro-shock therapy. Their hair is gray and frizzy, like a cartoon-stylized Einstein.

In reality, the hospital is not anything like what I imagine. Except for a small incident in June 2008, where a patient escaped, broke into a Kalamazoo home, ate some food, drank some beer, played Grand Theft Auto, stole a car and then ran out of gas in Indiana, the hospital has had a quiet 150 years. The remaining warning signs may just be vestiges of the hospital’s golden age.

Behind the door, still waiting for the nurse to come and get her sandwiches, I hear voices. First thought: Are those really voices, or am I just hearing them? Am I going crazy? Something about standing in the hallway of a pysch ward suddenly made me question my sanity.

What if they found out, I think, what if they know? That I talk to myself, long multi-sided conversations, that I make erratic noises just for my own entertainment, that I wish the food at the sandwich shop would talk, and I think me and the pickles in the pickle bucket would be friends. At least it would give me someone to talk to during my shifts. Never mind my co-workers; I’ll talk to the pickles.

Do they know I often believe improbable rumors and outright lies—like that I am adopted from Korea—just to make life more interesting?

Sometimes I think I am crazy. What if they do to? Will they grab me, fit me into a straight jacket and toss me into a padded cell? I bet they have plenty, jackets and cells. I bet they have my size. I better act normal. Wait, I am talking to myself. I’m caught, for sure.

But still, I hear voices on the other side of the door. They are real, and I suspect they are plotting. The voices, the patients. I know every patient in the hospital wants to escape because of all the signs warning about escapes and leavening your car running and the guy that got out in 2008 and the woman I talked to last time who asked me to give her a ride away from the hospital.

Surprised at the question, I answered, “No, I don’t smoke cigarettes,” jumped in my car, sped away, terrified to look back.

They must be plotting. They probably think they can overpower me, knock me down and take off for the elevator. It’s just a short ride down, a few turns and long hallway before they are out in the parking lot. Shit, did I leave my car running?

Maybe they will hold me hostage and walk out the front door into a waiting vehicle under threat of harm to me. I doubt they are that organized.

I could hear the voices, wispy and un-tethered, and the shuffling of feet behind the door. They are getting ready.

To distract myself, I read the signs posted outside the ward’s door. One outlined the items not allowed behind the door: ropes, sharp objects, cell phones, cameras.

“Well,” I thought, “Dana better come to the door, cause I can’t go in.”

Dana was the nurse who ordered the sandwiches. Her name was the ticket. I had my cell phone in my pocket; it had a camera. Two strikes. My keys, also in my pocket—means I must have turned my car off—were on a braided piece of rope. Strike three, but not out yet. I had a ball-point pen shoved into the band of my hat, and it had a sharp point. Strike four. I should have been out a while ago.

Dana opened the door about a foot, a serious door, about two inches of steel, painted brick red. She blocked the opening with her body and wedged her foot to keep it ajar. Many people open doors like this when there is a cat or dog that they don’t want to run out. Dana wore brightly colored rubber shoes. The heavy door dented the rubber. She was tiny, certainly no match for the army of patients forming behind her ready to make a run for it.

I handed her the bag of sandwiches. She signed her credit card slip. During this I peeked over her head, the top of it came about to my chin, and peered down the ward hallway. Patients milled about, some leaning against the wall. There was no mob, no horde of insane people ready to escape.

“Are they crazy,” I thought. They didn’t look like crazy people, not the way I had pictured them during my drive up the hospital, not the way television and movies had portrayed them. “Are they crazy?”

I would have studied them longer, but shifted my gaze after only a few seconds. I didn’t want Dana to catch me starring. But just before I did, the sad, empty eyes of an older man caught mine. Great big blue oceans. Vast. Vacant. He looked down, and I looked away.

“Crazy?” The question mark dominated my thoughts.

I walked away. The old naked man was out of the hallway. He sat in a room near the doorway, wearing a loose collared shirt and jeans. He had frazzled gray hair like an old Einstein. He looked lost, scared.

The room had a sign outside of it, “Processing.”

File this…

Posted by Aaron - 28/04/09 at 06:04:00 am

one under awkward moments from my young adulthood.

Scene. Aaron and girl sitting at the bar. Aaron has been talking to girl for most of the night. Girl asks a lot of questions.

Girl: Do you look my like your mom or your dad?
Aaron: My dad (proceeds to tell joke about being adopted from Korea. Girl laughs)
Girl: Well you must have a pretty cute dad.
Aaron: If you look like your dad, you must have a cute dad too. (does not go over well pause)
Aaron: Does that make me gay? (She laughs)

I got her number.

Fodder for some book sometime.

First sentences

Posted by Aaron - 27/04/09 at 04:04:00 pm

I’ve been thinking about Hemingway today.

“All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.”

I’ve been thinking about that.

Write one sentence.

I wonder if Hem ever danced around his room trying to come up with that one sentence. I did. I am. I am also folding laundry, drinking coffee and writing a poem. I call it poeming. It is an active process. The poem goes like this.

Forever Unfinished

someday i will write
a poem
and it will go like this
he wore a three-day old beard on his chin
but he was only 25 so it was pretty thin
then i will rhyme coffee
and spree
but i need words to hold them

The poem isn’t done. Nor will it ever be. It took me two months to write that much, and I wrote half of it just now, dancing around my apartment, trying to write one true sentence, folding laundry, drinking coffee. Wearing flip-flops.

I wonder if his friends called him Hem.

But I’m thinking about sentences, one sentences, true sentences, first sentences.

I’ve written a lot of first sentences; I’ve read even more. In journalism, we call first sentences leads, and we spell it wrong, ledes, because we’re journalists and that’s that. I’m good at ledes, I think. I take time to craft them into effective launching pads for my story. My mentor taught me about ledes, and there are many types, but you should find your own mentor.

But I’m thinking about sentences, one sentences, true sentences, first sentences.

Here are some first sentences. Some are good. Some are bad. Most are true. All are one. All are first.

“I’ve been thinking about Hemingway today.” Aaron Aupperlee

“I stood at the soda fountain, filling the big plastic cup that came with my value meal.” Aaron Aupperlee

“The tiny snapshot is fuzzy and stained with ink.” Jacqui Banaszynski, “AIDS in the Heartland.”

“If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.” J.D. Salinger, “Catcher in the Rye”

“There was once a boy named Milo who didn’t know what to do with himself—not just sometimes, but always.” Norton Juster, “The Phantom Tollbooth”

“Many a hand has scaled the grand old face of the plateau.” Kurt Cobain, “Plateau”

“The first time that Jean-Claude Pelletier read Benno von Archimboldi was Christmas 1980, in Paris, when he was nineteen years old and studying German literature.” Roberto Bolano, “2666″

“The concept of Christ is considerably older than the concept of zero.” Eula Biss, “The Pain Scale.”

“December 1958.” Mary Clearman Blew, “The Unwanted Child”

“When you grow up you can be anything, they said, but that’s a lie too.” Bryan Charles, “Grab onto me tightly as if I knew the way”

“The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call ‘out there.’ ” Truman Capote, “In Cold Blood”

“I can’t tell much from her silhouette.” Charles Bowden, “Torch Song”

“Then there was bad weather.” Ernest Hemingway, “A Moveable Feast”

The best part of that exercise was scattering books across my table like a real writer.

I just read the first sentences written by students in my mentor’s class. They are pretty bad. I just read many of my first sentences. They are pretty bad.

For instance:

“I think the biggest change came when I completely stopped obsession about actual women and decided to focus on the concept of women for my obsessions.”

That’s the first sentence of the first entry on of my latest journal. I wrote in on December twenty eight two thousand eight. I could dig up the first sentence of the first entry of my first journal, but it is at my parent’s house. I probably wrote it in 1995, and it is probably much better.

Have I gotten worse? No. I doubt I was at my writing zenith hunched over a notebook under a small light next to my bed in sixth grade penning about girls and wanting to be different and wanting to be accepted and wanting to be everything all at once at the same time, and I hadn’t even read Jack Kerouac yet.

No. I haven’t gotten worse. I forgot how to write a sentence.

The big write off that wasn’t

Posted by Aaron - 15/04/09 at 06:04:00 am

I guess it bothered him.

He deliberately reached over to my seat at the bar and grabbed the dollar tip I set in front of me. I thought to correct him—”no, that’s for the bartender young man”—but he starting loudly scratching the wrinkled surface of the dollar with a pen he pulled from his jacket pocket.

Great, I thought, another writer, trying to show how impulsive he is, trying to show the power of a thought explosion mid-pint by grabbing the closet thing to him and scribbling out a poem or sentence or phrase. Writers do this. I do this.

I moved to this town to be that erratic writer. Watch out, you never know what he will pen next. Hell, I had even walked into this strange new bar near last call on a week night just to stretch a few free-spirit muscles. I ordered a Pabst, sat down alone and set to looking at the bottles of liquor lined up behind the bar.

Yeah, I was writing, in my head. I was making up conversations between the different patrons, inventing story lines, fights, romances, and awkwardness. I tried combination after combination of words to describe the bar, none of them too flattering, not exactly my type of place. I even smoked a few cigarettes and followed the wafting smoke through the air with my eyes, thinking about how I was thinking about nothing and that was cool.

I was guilty of nearly everything I detested about the man who defaced my dollar, except his jacket—leather, shiny silver spikes sprouting here and there. Go home little punk. But I had come to the bar penless that night, completely unprepared for the writer battle about to go down all over George Washington’s face.

I rubbed the tips of my thumb, index and middle finger together, warming them up for the quick snatch and write I would have to execute as soon as I looked down at the dollar. I contemplated throwing out an American sentence, an Allen Ginsberg poetic form I had spent the day studying. Take that you uneducated barroom writer fighter. I’ve got the Gins.

He pulled his hand away. I leaned in, looked down.

Just a thick black line.

He had scratched out the words “In God We Trust” printed in the middle of the back of the dollar. He pushed the dollar back toward me. I relaxed, shrugged, and went back to drinking
.
I don’t care if my money says that we trust in God or not. I trust in Him, but I have not picked sides in the “In God We Trust” debate. I support the phrase out of laziness. It would be a lot of work to remove it. But oppose the phrase out of ambivalence. If people want it gone so badly, get rid of it. It is good that I am not the person in charge of these matters.

The man at the bar, he thought he was in charge of such matters. His erratic explosion that night was not to prove what a wild and crazy writer he was—maybe it’s just me then— it was guided by his desire to abolish that little phrase set before him. How long had those words ruined his night?

The man went back to talking to his friend. I caught a few words of the discussion. It was not about the dollar or the phrase but something even more trivial. I went back to the bottles of liquor behind the bar, admiring the different colors, the shapes, the order, and concentrated on making my last call beer last until 2 a.m. I did not want to pull another dollar out.

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