Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Category Archives: Memoirist BS
The Friday morning spew
Comments to my Pad Thai post jogged a few memories.
Alton Brown mangling the recipe reminded me of a horror Karen and I witnessed during my Stanford days. (more…)
There’s criminal child abuse. And then there’s war ball.
Note before we get rolling: I’m updating my blogroll. If I have been neglectful, drop a note in the comments, and I’ll get you added. I really do like to keep tabs on all the people who visit this place.
Remember this post, where I dropped some names in the hopes my old pals would find me by egomaniacally googling their own names? Great idea, but it didn’t work. My pal Sharon (whom I’ve known since Mrs. Bisetti’s kindergarten class) found me because I dropped a reference to Malice, cuz she had a bit role in the movie. I think you were in scrubs, Sharon, but I knew it was you. No one else in that Hollywood OR knew how to act.
So Sharon dropped me an email, and we shot the shit, and she mentioned that a friend of hers might know something about an old friend of mine, whom I had googled once upon a time and came up with bupkes. He recently entered the blogosphere, though, and with Sharon’s additional information that he’s a freelance writer, I tracked him down. His name is Mike Imlay, and I’ve added him to my blogroll.
Mike, this post is for you.
***
Mike and I had to be the littlest kids in our junior high school class. I haven’t seen Mike since 9th grade, so I’m guessing he had a late growth spurt and now I’m the only little kid left from our junior high. My life is kind of like that.
Because Mike and I made up a weight class all our own, we paired off together for wrestling. This worked out to our advantage since we were both bright kids and the other boys would have murdered us, given the chance. We didn’t do so well at other PE activities, and in particular, our lives were in jeopardy every effin rainy day. That’s because rain meant indoor activities.
Rain meant war ball.
What’s in a word?
It’s Smart Bitches Day today. For your SBD, I’d like you to consider the English language’s second-most mercurial word (next to fuck), love. (more…)
Talk therapy
Have you hugged your personal demons today?
They’re lonely, you know. And hungry. Oh, so hungry; they would love to creep back to their place of prominence and authority, sit on that throne they shared for many years — shared with each other, of course, but never with you.
Your demons are lonely and hungry, and they are as pissed off as a jilted lover with borderline personality disorder. Things haven’t been the same, ever since you banished them. Ever since talk therapy.
Thirteen smells
 |
I've been kicking this idea around for a few days now, and here it is, Thursday, and nothing else has sprung to mind. (I don't know what it is with me this week. Depression? Fatigue? Residua of the stomach bug I caught last Friday?) Here it is: life is episodic, and each phase has its characteristic smell. Here are mine. Please forgive my semiliterate style.1. How far back can my nose remember? Blueberry Buckle, my favorite baby food. I remember the precise shade of off-blue, the tart-but-not-too-tart taste, and, faintly, the smell. Runner-up: Vicks Vapo-Rub, which my mother knew had miraculous restorative powers when smeared liberally on a toddler's chest.2. My grandparents' house smelled like dog and cabbage and rye bread. It smelled like the shmatas my grandmother used to cover the furniture and never cleaned. 4. Later childhood: the low-tide mussels-and-oil slick smell of the Redondo Beach Pier. Runner-up: the smell of salt on the ocean air. My mother would claim she craved it, which I thought was typical nonsense, consider the source, yatata yatata (Yiddish for yatta yatta). But when we lived in Texas, I understood.
D. Leave a comment, and I'll link to your Thirteen list here. 1. JMC writes about food -- Yippee!
|
Get the Thursday Thirteen code here!
The purpose of the meme is to get to know everyone who participates a little bit better every Thursday. Visiting fellow Thirteeners is encouraged!
Yatta yatta yatta. Boy, am I sick of that paragraph.
Junky
New to my blogroll: Purrty Gud, written by a med student who will soon be matching in psychiatry. In his most recent post, Magnificent Bastard (Purrty Gud’s author) griped about a shooter with a Staph infection who kept injecting drugs into her PICC line. He jogged a memory — a gal I hadn’t thought about in many years.
Jump back to the late 1980s. I’m in my month #2 Internal Medicine clinical rotation, this time at the local county hospital, and the team consists of me, a severe ex-Marine PGY-2*, and an unlikely intern — more on him later.
On my first call night, we admitted a thirty-something gal with bacterial endocarditis. Fever, chills, joint aches, and a penetrating whine:
PLEASE GOD GIVE ME SOMETHING FOR THE PAIN, THE PAIN, I NEED MORPHINE, AND NONE OF THAT 4 MILLIGRAM SHIT . . .
She was blonde, cute, junky-thin. My PGY-2 radiated disgust the way a dog shakes off water. He told me and the intern, “Go for it, boys. She’s your private patient.”
Leech-keeper to the stars
I’m sick, folks, siiiiiiick, with some sort of gastrointestinal thing. I have no appetite, I’m bloated, and the only reason I don’t feel like throwing up is the fact I have 4 milligrams of Zofran coursing through my bloodstream. Zofran, the Mercedes of anti-emetics.
This might be my only post for the day. I want to crit a friend’s chapter, then it’s back to bed for me. But first, I wanted to introduce you to a lovely critter, Hirudo medicinalis, the medicinal leech. Here’s a hungry leech,
and here’s a well fed leech, (more…)
Praying to the porcelain god
Here’s another dorm photo. It’s not me — I don’t think I’ve ever had that much hair — so I pixelated the face to protect the guilty party. Aren’t I nice?
I’ve written previously about the B’nai B’rith Youth Organization, a Jewish youth group that aimed to convince parents their kids were meeting Jewish teens of the opposite sex, while simultaneously introducing us kids to the joys of cheap beer and stem-rich pot. I can thank BBYO for getting me rip-roaring vertiginous drunk for the first time in my life on — oh, Lord, I’m so ashamed — Schlitz. From a keg. God help me.
On the way home from that BBYO Social (such a wholesome name for it, don’t you think?) I realized I had forgotten my house key. At 2:30 AM, sheepishly, drunkenly, I knocked on my own back door. My dad opened it, and I said, “Fuller brush!”
Lying down, or stepping forward
I pinched this picture of Sproul Plaza from ollin.net. Of his Berkeley experience, the author writes,
I was attracted to the idea of going to U.C. Berkeley for the reputation it has around the world for being politically radical and a place of great intellectual stimulation. That and the fact that I had lived in Los Angeles all of my life. I wanted something new, I wanted to experience less oppressive living conditions than those that I faced while I lived in Watts and commuted to school in the more affluent westside of Los Angeles.
I could have written something similar, except instead of Watts yatta yatta yatta I would have to substitute “my parent’s household.” But, still. Berkeley was “the bird sanctuary,” as my ultra-conservative calculus teacher put it; and if the town had given him the willies, I would be right at home.
And, I was.
I went hunting for a picture of Sproul Plaza because my last post got me thinking about Berkeley in the early 80s. Sad to say, the Young Republicans were the fastest growing group on campus. The student body was swinging to the right, even though the city was (and still is) firmly at the polar left.
True, when Reagan won the election in ’80, people flocked to the streets for candlelight marches. And, true, the threat of a draft followed (or preceded) by an imperialistic invasion of El Salvador or Nicaragua brought us out into Sproul Plaza by the hundreds. But the heyday of UC Berkeley protest had passed. Without the Vietnam War or the draft to galvanize the student body, our activism could and would only go so far. Even Insane Anglo Warlord (a rearrangement of Ronald Wilson Reagan, popular at the time) and the threat of unilateral aggression against Central America couldn’t push us as far as we should have been pushed.
Daniel Ellsberg spoke to us one day in Sproul Plaza, a noontime demonstration in protest of America’s policies towards El Salvador. Towards the end of the protest, he instructed the students to lie down and play dead. I didn’t understand the image at the time, and I still don’t. Did he mean to provide a living illustration of the dead and injured which would follow from a Central American invasion? I don’t know. I laid down with everyone else (peer pressure, what can I say) while the Feds milled around at the edges of the crowd, snapping pictures.
The next day, activist Stoney Burke gathered a crowd (as he usually did, and as he apparently still does. Nice to see that Stoney is still giving ’em hell!) He surprised us by railing against Ellsberg who, as you might imagine, was one of our heroes. But Stoney couldn’t forgive him for having us all lie down. As best I can recall, what he said was: That’s what they want you to do — lie down — and that’s exactly the last thing you should do.
Back then, me and the other guys talked a lot about what we would or wouldn’t do. Should we put in our names for Selective Service? Burn the forms? How public should we be about it?
Should we step forward, or lie down?
I feel like I’ve been lying down most of my life, and I’m sick to death of it.
There’s something swirling in this head of mine, something that feels like activism. Maybe I’m thinking along these lines because I received my copy of Crashing the Gates today, and the more of it I read, the angrier I get. Or maybe I’m still thinking of V.
From Alan Moore’s foreword to V for Vendetta:
Naïveté can also be detected in my supposition that it would take something as melodramatic as a near-miss nuclear conflict to nudge England towards fascism . . . .
It’s 1988 now. Margaret Thatcher is entering her third term of office and talking confidently of an unbroken Conservative leadership well into the next century. My youngest daughter is seven and the tabloid press are circulating the idea of concentration camps for persons with AIDS. The new riot police wear black visors, as do their horses, and their vans have rotating video cameras mounted on top. The government has expressed a desire to eradicate homosexuality, even as an abstract concept, and one can only speculate as to which minority will be the next legislated against. I’m thinking of taking my family and getting out of this country soon, sometime over the next couple of years. It’s cold and it’s mean spirited and I don’t like it here anymore.
It’s a new century, and the times are far worse than depicted in this, Moore’s 1988 time capsule. As we watch Bush and his cronies wriggle out of one fiasco after another, whether it be something as subtle as spying on your political critics, as disdainful of human life as the bungling of the Hurricane Katrina disaster, as flagrantly treasonous as outing a CIA operative for political payback, or as crass as shooting your hunting buddy-slash-campaign contributor in the face at ten paces — yeah, I could go on, I haven’t even touched on Iraq, Abu Ghraib, or Guantanamo — it would be easy to give in to hopelessness.
And yet I feel hopeful. Why? Because we’re in the majority, and thanks to the blogosphere, we have a voice. We’re getting organized, smart . . . and active.
We’re not going away. We’re not lying down.
D.
It’s that time again
|
|
Thirteen Gastronomic Orgasms The challenge here is to come up with thirteen omigod food experiences which I haven't blogged about. Let's see how far I can get before I have to fall back on some old favorites. 1. Funky red bean paste dessert. Let me describe this Chinese confection to you, since I don't know the proper name. It uses a sheet-like wrapper derived from tofu to enclose sweetened red bean paste. The packet, sort of like a flat burrito, is deep fried and sprinkled with powdered sugar. It's amazing -- hot, sweet, a bit salty. 2. Shrimp scampi at La Pergola's, North Beach, San Francisco, early 1980s. Yup, you'll need a time machine for this one. Karen and I went back there in the mid-80s, ordered the scampi, and it just wasn't the same. The key features of die-and-go-to-heaven scampi: fresh prawns cooked to perfection, and a buttery sauce, no skimping on the garlic. This has to be one of the most commonly messed-up recipes, since I am inevitably disappointed. 3. Eggplant parmigiano, Il Giardino Restaurant, Ashland, OR. I make a mean eggplant parmigiano, but mine does not compare to Il Giardino's. Theirs is unparalled for melt-in-your-mouth goodness. I suspect they use Chinese or Japanese eggplant, since your typical fatso aubergine won't turn behave like this, no matter how you coddle it. And, yes, I've tried salting it, rinsing it, and squeezing out all the excess water. No go. 4. Soft tacos, El Grullense, Redwood City, CA. As hard as I try, my soft tacos can't hold a jalapeno to the ones they make at El Grullense. We first ate there in the mid-80s, when they were a hole-in-the-wall place serving food to go, lines spilling out on the sidewalk. Now they're a chain, and as busy as ever. My guess as to the secret ingredient: pork lard, and lots of it. The perfect soft taco: pork carnitas (or lengua -- beef tongue) on a homemade corn tortilla, garnished with chopped yellow onion, cilantro, salsa, and a squeeze of lime juice. 5. Any sausage at Top Dog, Berkeley, CA. Certain moments in my life have crystallized as images of paradise. One such is the time I ate three sausages in a row at the Top Dog on Durant Ave. It was summer, the sky was that shade of China blue I've only ever seen in the Bay Area, the temperature was around 70, and those sausages (a Polish and a couple of brats, if I know me) slid down the gullet like raw oysters. The counter guy joked I'd need a new stomach. Wrong! 6. Thai seafood hot pot, Berkeley, CA. I don't remember the name of the restaurant, but they've long since closed. This hot pot featured unbearably fresh scallops, prawns, and calamari, all simmered to perfection, along with an exquisite balance of pepper, garlic, fish sauce, and cilantro -- yet another Wonder of the World I have not been able to reproduce in my kitchen. 7. Hazelnut gelato, Vivoli's, Berkeley, CA. Gggrrrhlllhgggrrllhgglarrrrhll. 'Nuff said. Oh, and the alternate lifestyle wimmen who own and run Vivoli's -- total fantasy material, hairy armpits and all. 8. White sandwich bread, Virginia Bakery, Berkeley, CA. Are you beginning to understand why I miss Berkeley so much? If I won the lottery, first thing I'd do, I'd buy a house in Berkeley, north of the campus. I went into Virginia Bakery one day and asked the counter gal, "My God, what smells so good?" She had just pulled a tray of white bread loaves from the oven. I couldn't believe white bread could smell so good, so I bought a loaf. "I'm taking this home right now," I said, and she encourage me to try a slice. What, no butter, no jam? Yes, just a dry slice of white bread, and yet it tasted like heaven. Nothing compares. 9. Soft shell crab, New Orleans. I wish I could remember the name of that place -- a converted church, if that rings anyone's bells. Karen and I ordered one helping of the appetizer. The waiter said, "What? Only one?" Um . . . yeah. "But there's only one crab per order," he said. This shocked us, given the price of the appetizer, but aw hell we're on vacation let's splurge and get two. Two of the BIGGEST mofo soft shell crabs we had ever seen in our lives, each one swimming in its own sea of clarified butter. Needless to say, we had no room left for dinner, let alone dessert. 10. Bread pudding with whiskey cream sauce, Palace Cafe, Santa Barbara, CA. At last, something we have been able to reproduce at home. Karen uses Wonder Bread, believe it or not. If I had a loaf of white bread from Virginia Bakery for Karen's recipe, we would all die with smiles on our faces. 11. Fried clams from the East Coast. Will one of you east-coasters tell me if there are still fast food joints that serve nothing but fried clams and French fries? I remember this from childhood, our occasional 12. Blood pudding in France. I mentioned this on someone's blog recently, but never here. When Karen and I honeymooned in Europe, we tended to order without knowing what it would be. I'm not sure I would have ordered blood pudding knowingly. I remember something savory, spicy, so good I was sopping up the remnants with my bread and wishing for more. 13. Mussels in Paris, in a place across from the Louvre -- also during our honeymoon. I don't think I had ever tasted mussels before, so I didn't know quite what to expect. I've had good mussels since then, but nothing quite as good. There's nothing worse than a bad mussel, and nothing better than a perfect one. Yippee! I did it. Not a single repetition from previous food posts (I don't think; although, it's hard to imagine I've never raved about Top Dog before on these pages.) Okay, your turn: what gives you a resounding gastronomic orgasm? D. The Thirteen Crowd: 1. Kate Rothwell holds forth on writing; 3. Joan imagines a bunch of stuff |
Get the Thursday Thirteen code here!
The purpose of the meme is to get to know everyone who participates a little bit better every Thursday. Visiting fellow Thirteeners is encouraged! If you participate, leave the link to your Thirteen in others comments. It’s easy, and fun! Be sure to update your Thirteen with links that are left for you, as well! I will link to everyone who participates and leaves a link to their 13 things. Trackbacks, pings, comment links accepted!
View More Thursday Thirteen Participants