While Americans might waste time waxing nostalgic for a declining age (visions of mom-and-apple-pie and the inflated egotism of our car industry), I would like to point out something that is truly representative of our nation’s greatness. Although the history of macaroni and cheese does not begin in the United States, I’ll be a patriot and say that the dish is quintessentially a reflection of America and the American experience; every foreign attempt has become a mere mockery.

Perhaps I should first emphasize the name “mac ‘n’ cheese.” Rather than the finer diction we associate with its European influences, the contractions point to our nation’s obsession with a news speak that is inventive, efficient, and proudly low-brow. We are the country that puts the “semi” in semiotics, and our nation’s dishes should reflect that tradition.

Mac’n’cheese is also regional. The southern states are traditional and the recipe is, not surprisingly, slow to change. S’mac, in Manhattan, appropriates the melting-pot diversity of the Big Apple. The Midwest eats the comfort food in the comfort of their casserole dish, while the city liberals out west can buy their organic noodles, veggies, and cheeses in any tangy whacked-out way they want. If congress is ever to stop its recent partisan bullshit, it would most likely be over many bowls of mac‘n‘cheese.

But let’s get right down to what “Democracy” should look like in the culinary world. The versatility of mac‘n‘cheese–the cheeses and noodles to choose from, the vegetables and meats that may be added, the heaps of bread crumbs or diced nuts and herbs (of any sort, subject to preference)–has market value, supports creativity and entrepreneurship, encourages competition, and allows consumers to live free without oppression. The homemade mac’n’cheese you make allows you to be you. Now that’s god-damn American.

-J. Kirk Maynard

Joseph Donnell can no longer update his facebook status, and unless someone living accesses his password or facebook changes its policy, he’s forever stuck with this: “Joseph Donnell: Knee Replacement, 5 day hospital stay … Rehab … 30 days in rehab and therapy facility … going home today, PRICELESS!!!!!!!”

In a literary sense, the narrative voice is unaware of the information readers are privy to, which is that JD is now dead. Furthermore, the fact that his status update describes an action when his present state is perpetual inaction points to a fault, an unforeseen design glitch that makes the medium incapable of fulfilling its ostensible genre conventions.

Beneath Joe’s status update, it says:
“Olivia Daniels Peachtree and 7 others like this.”

Though Joe can no longer participate as author of this digital version of himself, his friends can. And they have, and they cannot be trusted: There’s grieving disbelief: “OMG!!!” “I can’t believe it!!!!!” “Noooooooo!!!!!!!!.” There are eulogy-like communiqués to the world: “Joe was a good man. May he rest in peace,” and direct messages: “You, my friend, were the man.”

Once, we had a fairly fixed set of options for how to deal with the news of death. But facebook has altered the generic conventions of our rituals. A space intended for announcing to the world what we are doing turns into a place for our virtual friends to announce to each other what we once did. A constantly updating present becomes a perversion of our past. Certainly, our role on facebook is a kind of authorship of ourselves and others. We are signaling a version of selfhood, with links, wall posts, profile details, and various other activities we engage in. However, facebook encourages violations of sacred spaces and crosses boundaries, suggesting that we are not writing the apparatus, but the apparatus is writing a virtual version of us.

-Rob Dixon

Cars, of all things, know when their time is up. They try to break the news gently. First, an oil leak. Then, a rattle that wasn’t there before. Then a radiator. A heater coil. A head gasket. They strand us on the side of the road, hoping that perhaps we will simply walk away. Perhaps we will leave them resting calmly in the breakdown lane between the wildflowers and the rushing traffic.

But we cannot let go.

Instead, we drag them to some shaman, some miracle worker who reaches inside and removes the broken piece. The damaged piece. The piece that has been used up. In its place, he connects a new version of the same piece. A transplant from some other tired car or a new valve straight from the factory. When the shaman finally shocks the car back to life, it rises with a groan, with a sigh, heaving itself up to try again. It’s like a tired old dog who exists, it seems, to give three thumps of its tail each day as we scratch its head and croon over what a good dog it is, what a good dog it has always been. All the dog wants to do is crawl off quietly, but it stays for us, knowing we need its paper-thin presence on the dog bed in the kitchen.

Since we cannot let them go, cars and dogs are forced, finally, into something like suicide. They become incontinent. They drop transmissions. Small problems multiply like cancer until eventually, we cannot justify the expense.

Cars and dogs trade fearlessly on this practicality, bathing in our tears and protests, slipping into oblivion with the surety of one who knows that—while we will certainly acquire some new car, some new dog—it will never, ever be replaced.

-Robin Lee Mozer

“Brewing is a nature-based hobby that restores a measure of humanity and perspective to the art of living” – Sam Caliagione, Founder of Dogfishhead Brewery

Brewing a batch of beer in one’s backyard is like a breath of clean, fresh air. The process cannot be rushed. It unfolds in its own time. It always makes sense to me that medieval monks used to brew beer. The art, when one gains an appreciation for it, is deeply prayerful and meditative.

The thermometer lets me know when the water has reached the desired temperature for mashing in the grain. I drain the kettle slowly into the mash tun and pour it over crushed malted barley and wheat. A heady aroma of grain wafts out, clinging to tendrils of steam. I stir and stir until it reaches the right consistency. The entire yard smells of sweet bready notes that overpower even the lingering scent of propane.

When the timer starts beeping and the starch is converted, I lift the mash tun up and start draining the wort into the brew kettle. I pour sparge water over the grains to ensure every last bit of starch makes it in. An hour later, the boiling of the wort is barely audible over the roar of the propane burner. I add hops to provide balance and long life to the beer. After another hour, I add yeast to the now chilled wort. In its own time, the yeast will convert the starch to alcohol. Only then, does wort become beer; only then may it be put in bottles, conditioned and shared.

I’ve brewed with others who, like myself, are amateur brewers, doing it for the love of the process and craft. These are my favorite people to brew with; they are already attuned to brewing’s meditative and prayerful nature. We communicate silently, without words, each picking up the others’ thoughts and lending a hand without needing to be told. We are greater together than we are on our own.

-Brian Ballantine

Watching golf on television, preferably on a Sunday afternoon, is a divine daydream. It’s often mocked as a simple spectator sport, but mockers don’t delve into its gentle undulations, nor do they turn the spectacle down to a moderate, almost whispery volume. If they did, they would understand its glory.

First, it’s a perfect excuse for a snack: some cheese and crackers, a frosty Arnold Palmer. These are minor delights themselves, but they are especially delightful as the sedate voices and polite-clapping emanate from the tube, lulling you. After gratuitous amounts of crackers and about half-an-hour, you develop a pleasant low-level food coma, a buzzy, light-headed satiety that can only be improved by floating in and out of a postprandial nap.

Perfect.

If you wake, you’re treated to a fantastical world of lush, landscaped environments, populated by well-off middle-aged men wearing collared shirts and visors, watching athletes who display undeniable physical skill, yet don’t sweat. These country-club ideals traipse across the course in moderately flattering plaid pants and pink polos while caddy-servants carry their accoutrements and advise them on their next shot. Every ten minutes, commercials for overactive bladder syndrome, Fidelity’s retirement planning service, and Prudential parade past. Then, a return to telecast: a delayed-action putt taken during break, some milquetoast commentary and finally live action, where Sergio Garcia contemplates an eighty-yard wedge shot, his squinting eyes full of preternatural seriousness. The sport is simple: hit the ball in the hole. Yet it’s seldom treated that way — with the announcers’ hushed tones and the near-continual reminders of the honor and integrity of “the great game of golf” — the broadcast itself is noblesse oblige.

You wobble. You have a choice: slip back into sweet sleep or continue watching the absurd-yet-soothing pretensions before you. Either way, it’s a lovely, dreamy Sunday afternoon.

-Alex Starace

Anyone who’s talked to me this summer knows about my bowling team, “The Creepers.” For novices, “creeper” is the term for a slow moving ball. A bowling ball rolling very slowly down an alley. I’m being literal here, talking about the sport of bowling.

Wanting to be modest about our abilities (our bowling abilities), my team chose this name before we went to the first week of league play. But when we walked into Frontier Lanes, the sexual tension was instantly palpable. Our first opponent was “Gettin’ Some Head Pin,” a team comprised of one very pretty girl and three angry men waiting to explode. You think I’m implying something. But all I’m trying to say is if these guys missed, they went nuts on the ball delivery device. Crazy, I mean. They would kick it, hard.

When we played “I Can Smell Your Balls,” I asked a member of the team where the name came from, and he said they were all fans of the zombie movie, I Can Smell Your Brains. I wondered what made four men agree to announce their noses’ mutual and keen kinship with each others’ scrotums. The bowling alley, I realized joyfully, is some kind of Bermuda Triangle, a place where homoerotic word play among straight men is embroider-worthy. Welcome, Splits or Swallows! We salute you, Dry Bumpers!

When I was little, my mother—a former league player whose bad shoulder sidelined her—taught me how to manually keep score during a bowling game. I knew the difference between an “open” frame and a “closed” one. In junior high, I listened to my friends recount the wonderful horror of having “the talk” with their parents. I never got one. I thought my mother never wanted to bond with me about the birds and the bees. Now I know I just wasn’t really listening.

-Beth Staples

At this week’s soft opening of the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial in Washington, DC, a child yells out, “I have a dream,” mimicking King’s cadence. It’s a joyful voice, singing over the crowd. Everyone poses for photographs in front of the memorial’s elements: the Mountain of Despair, split down the middle, through which they entered; the Rock of Hope, from which the 30-foot tall statue of King emerges; the arcing wall, on which fourteen of King’s quotations have been carved.

On the Mall, our recent memorials have been somber meditations: the Vietnam Wall and the almost-life-sized Korean War soldiers. The National World War II Memorial went for stirring magnificence but ended up a jumble of clichés. Not since 1943, when the Jefferson Memorial was dedicated, have we had such a monumental monument.

Here, King faces Jefferson across the Tidal Basin, his literally stony gaze bearing down on the man who wrote “all men are created equal” but owned about eighty people. You might see this as antagonistic, the King Memorial as the defiant answer to the Jefferson. But look closely: each man holds in his left hand rolled-up sheets of paper. They are writers, speakers, not soldiers. They are alike. All men are created equal. It is self-evident.

These are two titans of American history, one’s home is on the nickel, the other’s birthday is a national holiday. Conservatives and liberals alike see themselves as the rightful heirs of both men’s legacies.

There was an earthquake on Tuesday; a hurricane is due Sunday. Air and water and earth can take their shots, but they cannot knock loose the pages the two statues hold. These memorials are built to last, built to help us remember that words have changed the world, can do it again, will always do so.

-Colin Rafferty

Maintenance man Bob with the mullet coiffure says, “Th’ain’t jus’ become bitches and assholes, they’ve always been that way”– a time-weary observation shared by most of the staff. The job is paper-pushing, but it requires a moderate level of strength to push oneself through the thirteen floors of elderly tenants ranging from plantation inheritors to once-babely Rockettes.

Step into 802. Find Mr. Langhorne painting watercolors of the nude divas he dreams up, listening to Liszt on vinyl. Open 304′s door. Find Mrs. Cottingham in a wheelchair feeding her dachshund Vienna sausages. Find 708 passed away in her dusty velvet recliner, Section 8 papers in hand, ready. On the way, stop to smell the fish sticks and hear the Walker Texas Ranger that 501 has ritualized at 2:00 p.m. everyday.

Find the bingo room full of war veterans panicking over a nation collapsing in flames. They heard tell of their Social Security checks not arriving this month: “M’boy could run this country better’n Obama, and he’s touched! Bless his heart.”

Find the widows flocking to the widowers, batting their blued eyelids hoping for a shred of attention from the white-haired, toothless boy next door.

This job is finding without searching. This job is seeing veins surface blue and neck waddles hang a bit closer to the clavicle with each passing birthday. This job is hesitantly accepting the pecan rolls and casseroles that would make Paula Deen denounce her gods of butter.

Bob asks me what I’m doing this weekend. I tell him, “I dunno, probably porch drinking.” He suggests I “jump rope, smoke dope, kill somebody.” Bob’s been here a long time, everyone has, but time stands still at Clara Verner. Wednesday has ice cream socials; Friday is Bingo Night.

-Kori Hensell

May 31st – Loss gets weighed and re-weighed. August 14th – The lights go out on New York. September 11th – A childhood friend dies in a plane crash in California; I go on a first date with my future wife. Anniversaries are opportunities to recount, to share experiences. They are elastic tethers that draw us back while confronting us with the distance we’ve covered. We fracture into idiosyncratic perception.

July 19th – My first drink. March 17th – We dress up, go to the courthouse, and get married. June 8th – I smoke one of my life’s three cigarettes. Some anniversaries lose meaning, but they’re how we remember to set the alarm for the house, how we withdraw money before identities are stolen, how we step out of pools of self. We hope that this day becomes that day, that it becomes something to remember, that it won’t be forgotten.

November 4th – I ditch the embassy party and sleep at the train station. July 31st – I move from a Midwestern city to a Southern college town. May 9th – She admits her affair. August 2nd – Enough is enough again. We must remind ourselves to be serious: no frozen drinks, no waterslides—all calls go to voicemail. We must remind ourselves it is all random. That it is often the imposed wishes of others that ruin celebrations. Anniversaries distinguish both our joys and our suffering, and so join everyone who keeps tally. We choose a date around which to coalesce a vortex of diffuse moments, each of which altered us, each of which is a constant substitute for what we cannot comprehend. There must be less of everything. There must be fear of what we’ll be if we forget what inspires us to pay homage.

- Jeremy Allan Hawkins, Brian Oliu, Carl Peterson, and Lucas Southworth

I moved into my apartment without meeting any of my roommates. I did not know then that the phrase “that’s classic Luis” would soon enter my vocabulary. When he broke our only trivet the other day, that was classic Luis. He broke all of our plates and now we’re down to two. A while back, he went on a date with a girl who turned out to be really into Twilight, and she left while he was in the bathroom. Today he was rapping in the shower, and I think he was throwing in extra swears. In between lines, he gave commentary on things. “NO SPIDERS,” I heard him say firmly in reference to his famous arachnophobia and the spider that lives in our bathroom. My cat is afraid of Luis. We tell Luis it’s because he has a beard, but really it’s because Luis is always stomping around and dropping shit.

But he also knows more about Asian cooking than any other Mexican I’ve met, and he high-fived me all day on my birthday, and one night at 3 AM he helped me write an apologetic letter to a friend I’d pissed off. That’s classic Luis too. Last night it was hot in our apartment and he had taken apart his ceiling fan, so he was just lying on the hardwood floor and trying to sing “Blinded By the Light,” but he only knew the words to the title. I told him the rest of the chorus. “Now you’ve ruined it,” he said. “Fuck you.”

Luis is moving to California in three days, and I’ll soon have a new classic roommate. I doubt I’ll ever see Luis again. I’ve never even learned his middle name, but I know him better than I’ll know most people.

-Erin Lyndal Martin

Original Post: #29 – The Park Across the Street from My House