AMC & the Little League World Series

Hi.

Each August as a kid, I'd find myself in southeastern Ohio visiting my grandparents for a few days. They lived in a sleepy town, Marietta, wholly unremarkable. I was chronically understimulated being there. Occasionally, I could hang out with the next door neighbor kid. My mom's childhood's friend's daughter was my age and cordial when we dropped by. The library never quite had anything I wanted to read. When I was older, I became aware that the nearest mall was the next state over. Every so often, we'd get to use someone's pool or borrow some tennis rackets. What I remember most was channel surfing in a spare bedroom, racked with a desire for anything to watch. Most years, our trip coincided with the Little League World Series, so I'd watch that for a while and pretend to care about baseball for a few hours. Then I'd surf around. In those days, AMC stood for “American Movie Classics.” I wish I'd watched more of whatever was on then! Game shows never held my attention for very long. I am still unsure what the rules of Supermarket Sweep are.

At some point, I'd get up to look through the mid-Century record collection. Mom had purchased the West Side Story soundtrack when she was a tween, and I'd giggle listening to “Gee, Officer Krupke” for reasons I wouldn't fully understand for a few more years. They had a copy of the Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass classic "Whipped Cream and Other Delights." That also briefly held my attention, though not for any musical reason until college. (I wonder how many people associate AMC's heyday with this album; probably more than a few, for similar reasons? How does one look into this?) When my grandparents moved out of their house and passed away in the years soon after, I wondered what became of the records. They had never been a priority for anybody else in the family, so they disappeared.

These Unprecedented Times feel like a months-long visit to my grandparents' town. Hours of lazing around with no real goal, odd musical adventures and rediscoveries, scant in-town interactions, and unpredictable access to outdoor fun.

This is apparently my newsletter about June? Who could have predicted this gap? Heck, let's elide, slide, and glide June and July's newsletters into one fell swoopin' issue.  

Reading: Matthew Klam had an essay in The New Yorker that has stuck with me, about how friendships shift with age. I finished reading the Bruce Springsteen memoir “Born to Run” which just got better and better as it went on. I also have in my June reading notes the strings “stv” and “dep.” What do these mean? This may remain a boring mystery. And my last notes from June come via my friend Steve K. He once wrote an ode to “the coffee of church halls, auto plants, and family parties.” And he shared with me a guide on how to write a thank-you note. In July, I made my way through Jennifer Finney Boylan's "Good Boys" (lovely) and Eric Smith's "Don't Read The Comments" (adorable). I started Gretchen McCullough's charming "Because Internet." It sits at an exciting intersection of Internet and language for me. Whetstone Magazine was a beautiful digital experience. My friend Marion Leary wrote about pandemic home cooking/eating. I explored the Internet Archive's mounting of the Electronic Whole Earth Catalog. Twitter pal Brandon Taylor had a lovely short story that I read on the beach one day. And I read an Esquire piece about why the movie Airplane! was so funny. 

Eating: June was a blur of stirfries, applesauce, and juicing sad fruits. Also egg salads, but those are less blurry. I attempted to make aquafaba meringues and failed miserably. July was a bit better in the food world, with delivery from Pizzeria Beddia, a breakfast sandwich from The Tasty, and a number of at-home projects. It'd been too long since I'd made mango kulfi, so I did that. We had pizza from scratch about once a week. Why the hell not? And I went to town on some herbs making things like cilantro herb oil. Somewhere along the way I picked up a simple recipe for drop biscuits you must try immediately. Finally, because it's summer, there was at least one blueberry clafoutis. 


Beating: Our artists-in-a-jar project led us to listen to Jaco Pastorius, Miles Davis, and Adele. I spent a day listening to a curious little oldies station in Texas. One of my goals for the rest of the year is to listen to more live radio, even if it's streaming.  An old friend, the sort of guy I thought had disappeared from the Internet, is apparently hosting a radio show in Portland; he shared a recent minimal techno guest set that I enjoyed greatly.

Deleting: I made no particular progress in this regard in June or July. There simply wasn't the drive. 

Retreating: June was a month to shelter at home from everything, though I found myself glued to my screens for the first few weeks. July was a lot better: we biked to Pier 68 and also spent a week in a house by the Jersey Shore. I realized there that I had developed new relationships with three apps that were about the sky: Dark Sky (RIP?) for weather, Flight Aware for what aircraft are nearby, and Sky Map for very amateur astronomy. For a few evenings in July, we had our Minnidip pool out back.

Meeting: I'm on a recent episode of Kidflix and on upcoming episodes, plural, of Dying Message. This Friday I'll read the fake-ish news for People of Interest once again. 

Hey, that was alright, wasn't it?
Neil