Jamie Iredell's Blog, page 15

Review of CVS Pharmacy Lubricating Jelly

Personal Lubricant Gentle & safe water-based compare to K-Y Jelly enter registered trademark symbol, NET WT 2 OZ (57 g). This lubricating product works pretty well, I guess. It says to compare it to K-Y Jelly, but I've never used K-Y Jelly and I'm not really sure why or why not. I never really had much reason to use lubricants and so now all I can tell you is that the CVS Pharmacy Lubricating Jelly does its job. It is clear and slippery. Or, to be more accurate, it makes other things slippery. I'm not sure that a thing itself can be slippery; only other substances applied to things can make the latter thing slippery. But the slippery-inducing substance itself cannot be slippery, or can it? Feel like this is kind of like where did god come from? The CVS Pharmacy Lubricating Jelly is cold to the touch, but that does not seem to produce adverse effects. The car was not bothered by this fact.

Review of The Chick-fil-A Chicken Biscuit

I think that the Chicken Biscuit's only available for breakfast, but don't quote me on that since I've never tried ordering one at any other time than in the morning. They might be available whenever Chick-fil-A is open--so you can quote me saying that you will never get a Chick-fil-A Chicken Biscuit on Sunday because the guy who started Chick-fil-A is big into Jesus and no Chick-fil-A is open on God's day. I'm a pretty big guy and I can't eat 2 of these things. I mean I could do it; I have done it; but I never felt good after the fact. This morning I had exactly 1 Chick-fil-A Chicken Biscuit and a cup of coffee and that was a pretty good breakfast. The biscuit part of the Chicken Biscuit is a little crispy on the outside. You know that whatever the dough recipe is in the factory where these things are pumped out it's filled with butter and probably lard or crisco too, cause that's what gives the biscuit this texture. They're more crumbly than flaky, and because of this I don't think I'd want to have the biscuit by itself, or even smothered with country gravy. For that you want soft, pillowy biscuits, the kind of biscuit that cleaves easily when you sink the blunt side of a fork into it. But for this sandwhich, the crumbly biscuit works fine, unless you're driving (and I cannot remember a time when I had a chicken biscuit and I was not driving) because then the biscuit crumbs get all over your shirt and pants, and there's so much grease that these crumbs will spot your clothing not unlike potato chips will spot a brown paper bag should you dump them into a brown paper bag for whatever reason. I saw that on a commercial once, one that I think was advertizing less greasy potato chips. The chick part of the chicken biscuit is pretty good, pretty standard fried chicken, pieced together white meat. A big difference here though when it comes to the white meat chick is that it has the right texture of unprocessed white meat chicken. t's not like, for example, the Chicken McNuggets at McDonald's. Those things are completely unnatural; you can't tell where the nugget part might have come from. There's no striation to the meat; it's just been ground up and pressed into the nugget shape. The chicken at Chick-fil-A still has the strings of meat that made up the breast muscle of the chicken this meat came from, so it feels like you're eating a real chicken. The coffee, also, was pretty good.

I've got this excerpt from a nonfiction book I've been wo...

I've got this excerpt from a nonfiction book I've been working on for a year and a half up at Anomalous Press right now. I'm really glad that Anomalous decided to publish the excerpt. I'm really happy that everyone who has accepted or already published excerpts did so: Pear Noir! , The Collagist, Continent , Everyday Genius , Freerange Nonfiction , HobbleCreek Review, Sleepingfish , and Used Furniture Review. I'm happy that they've published these excerpts because I don't have much hope that the book will ever actually be in print. Well, I mean, I doubt that a major New York City publisher will take a chance on this manuscript. I will--fingers crossed--find a small press or specialty publisher for it if all else fails. 
I don't think New York would take a chance on the book because it's about California. Despite that state being the largest (in population) among our 50, New York often doesn't seem to acknowledge the West Coast's existence. On top of that the book is somewhat experimental--go figure. It's not too out there, but it blends memoir, history, pop culture, and critique of Catholicism. It's written as a kind of pastiche. All of these elements combined mean (to an agent): no dice. 
That is complete bullshit. I'm complaining and i haven't eve sent the book out anywhere yet. But this is my feeling, what my gut tells me.  New York doesn't give a shit about literature. It cares about the dollar. so I'm really pleased with those editors who have seen the merit of this book, or at least in the excerpts from it that I sent their way. They at least do give a shit. Wah, I'm a whiny little bitch.

I don't usually bother to write about this sort of stuff,...

I don't usually bother to write about this sort of stuff, because it can get annoying when everyone you know on Facebook posts about Occupy Whatever and riot police this, and everything else. I'm not really interested in being annoying, and most of the stuff I see feels pretty reactionary. Most of my friends over there lean pretty liberal and many of the blog posts or news stories they relate come from liberal-leaning websites, as opposed to the presumed objectivity of mainstream news sources. I know that that last bit is horseshit, and that there's really no such thing as objectivity. Anyway, I don't usually write about such things because it seems to me that if anyone is going to write about them with any kind of clarity, it takes time to digest each action and think carefully about all of the details, etc. Like, for example, the First Amendment gives citizens the right to peacefully assemble to address grievances. But that doesn't give people the right to camp wherever the fuck they feel like it. Like my wife (a lawyer) said, "Just because you have the right to free speech, that doesn't mean you can yell 'Fire!' in a movie theater." Simple analogy, yes, but it's telling.

But I am choosing to write about a couple recent things that scare the crap out of me: The New York Times reporting on journalists being kept from the removal of Occupy protests and in some cases arrested, and the Bill passed in the Senate that would give the armed forces the power to detain American citizens suspected of terrorism without due process. And just to be fair, I've not only included the NYT and Huffington Post reporting on these phenomena; here is Fox News and a Fox News affiliate reporting on the same (you can read that the rhetoric is slightly different, too). So, Obama says that he would veto this Bill should it come before him. He says that. Still, it's disturbing that such a bill should even be considered in Congress. And it's distressing to think that local law enforcement would try to suppress the dissemination of information to the public.

I asked my wife at what point we might seriously consider leaving the United States. And of course, since my wife's smart, she said, "And go where?" My response is always Canada, and my wife asks what we would do for work and I say we'd get jobs at Taco Bell, but I don't know if Canadians eat corporate Americanized Mexican food. She says that things could go pretty far and the US might still be best the best place on the planet for us to live. The reality of that is even more distressing than these vague possibilities raised above. Okay, the cops in NYC might have tried to suppress the press's right to cover the news, but we have processes in place for taking care of such transgressions; and because of our checks and balances the president could easily put down a proposal to lock up our own citizens without charging them for a crime. But what really scares me is that these things could come to pass, and there's nothing, really, that my wife and I can do about it. Congress cannot decide what to do about our debt, to say nothing of high and lofty political ideals like the Bill of Rights. So voting isn't really an option. Since we have our two-party system, and it's unrealistic that Independents or Libertarians or Communists, or anyone else, might take a seat in Congress, that leaves Democrats and Republicans posturing and never getting anything accomplished. So attempting to affect change via writing to my Congressperson or voting someone else in is moot. What really scares me is the lack of the freedom of choice. My wife and I cannot simply decide that this "democracy" is no longer democratic enough for us, and we'd like to go somewhere where it's supposed to be democratic, and perhaps not so imperial, like France, or Canada, or Britain. We couldn't get citizenship elsewhere, nor jobs so that we could feed our family. So what's really scary is that things could go to complete shit in the US, and if my wife and I are stuck here, then there are hundreds of millions of Americans stuck even deeper than we are (I mean, between the two of us we speak three languages, and my wife has already lived abroad for many years). That sense of being stuck is the ultimate end of freedom.

The other day someone I know on Facebook posted that...

The other day someone I know on Facebook posted that she could not sleep and found the cable for her television out of whack, and in the doldrums of 3 AM was left with no resort but to watch a movie on the DVD player. I was tempted (but did not) comment: "There are these amazing things called 'books,' and for some, while they are extremely interesting, informative, and entertaining, they also work as sleep aids." Admittedly, this Facebook friend (I should probably say "friend" with the quotation marks, because, while I went to elementary school with this person, we have not seen each other face-to-face in at least seventeen years, and we are not "friends" in the truest sense of the word) doesn't run with the literary crowd I associate with, is not a writer and--demonstrably not a reader--which, of course is fine (in fact I champion such freedom of choice), but still: why not just read something, anything? I don't think that in this person's case there was an aversion to reading, or a distaste for it; I don't think reading even popped into this person's mind as an option. That, right there, folks is where we're at. I say all this and I saw this person's Facebook status update on no other place but Facebook, when I was "reading" the newsfeed, and instead should've been reading a book. So, yes, it would be hypocritical of me to be judgmental. But let me say that I'm not trying to pass judgment, but am simply pointing out the possibility that the idea of reading (and I mean really reading, like reading a book) is for the majority not a part of the contemporary American's cultural DNA. Let me add that, while the freedom of choice to be a reader or not is one that I hold dear, for a democracy to function it's important to have voting individuals capable of understanding the basics of rhetoric. So again, I'll just say: that's where we're at. Preposition ending that sentence, and four sentences prior to that sentence. And that last sentence wasn't a sentence. It was a fragment. But that last sentence, the one before this sentence (which is truly the last sentence), the one about a sentence fragment, was a complete independent clause.

Oh, and Happy Thanksgiving.

I'm at the combination pizza hut and taco bell and everyt...

I'm at the combination pizza hut and taco bell and everytime I try to type "hut" I automatically type "hit" and that tells you something about modern american architecture.

Never did this before

Mexico City Noir by Paco Ignacio Taibo II

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Some of these I would not call stories, as they're more like attempts at condensed novels, or episodes from a novel. They don't have to be "stories", obviously, for this anthology series, but those that certainly did read as such were far more interesting and successful reads. The story by the volume's editor (Taibo) stands out in particular. Also, a number of the selections here I would not call "noir" subgenre in the traditional sense; they're closer to the Hardboiled tradition. Overall, this ain't a bad read, it's just, yeah, okay.



View all my reviews

The other night in class (Noir Fiction) I asked my studen...

The other night in class (Noir Fiction) I asked my students to talk about what they like to read. I had I thought 3 writing majors in this class (I teach at an art school that has this major) while the other 8 were some variation on sequential art or animation or advertising or graphic design or game development. The writing majors are of course excited about this class and they responded to the question immediately. As you might imagine there were a number of graphic novels in their repertoire. Although I realized when I got home and looked at my roster that two of them weren't actually writing majors, but instead fashion and graphic design. The third actually was a writing major and mentioned Lovecraft and a few other kings of particular genres. But these 3 that responded actively to my question at least were reading and reading a lot, and they liked books. Crickets for everyone else. I said, "I don't care what you read, just tell me anything, blogs or websites, magazines. Do you read your bills before your pay them? That's fine too." Crickets again, for a minute. A solitary tumbleweed rolled across the classroom's floor. Then this one kid said, "I just don't read. If I'm on a website or something, I scroll past any text until I get to a video." One woman, whom I learned was a writing major after I came home, echoed this guy, saying, "Yeah, I don't really like reading." A WRITING MAJOR. Holy crap. After a departmental meeting this afternoon I learned that there's an MFA student who confessed that she does not read anything at all--except the Bible. Seriously, what the fuck? How, why, would anyone choose writing as a major if they don't read? I mean the Bible is perhaps the world's craziest most interesting novel and you can read the crap out of it and get some great ideas, but you've got to read more. To not read at all. Hmm. Methinks there's trouble astir in democracy land.

This is my family's vineyard, where my grandfather tilled...

This is my family's vineyard, where my grandfather tilled petite syrah. The vines are over a hundred years old.

¡Pepita wey!

I have a whole shitload of dried pumpkin seeds leftover from Halloween last year. I've used a good bunch, made a pumpkin seed salsa and a couple moles, but I'm gonna use up the rest before Halloween rolls around again and I get a fresh batch of pepitas.

To make a pepita salsa I take a cup of pumpkin seeds. Here's the bitch of using these things (hence the reason I still have a ton of them): peeling the shells sucks. I'm sure you can buy shelled pumpkin seeds, but I suppose I'm a purist and I figure if I'm getting them at Halloween anyway I might as well use them up through the year. That obviously does not work out as planned, but anyway. You take a seed at a time and, using your fingernails, peel back each side of one shell from the seed inside. It takes about 20 seconds to peel one seed. So, yeah, 3 seeds/minute = 90 seeds/hour. So to get a cup of seeds should take about 4 hours. You could try to shell all your seeds at one time, but then the seeds themselves will go stale. And of course it takes fucking forever. Like I said, you can probably buy these pre-shelled and I could look that up and link it for you, but I'm basically writing this for the heck of it (it is a blog, isn't it) so you can look that shit up on your own.

Once you've got your shelled seeds you're going to roast them in a frying pan. I use a cast iron skillet, but any frying pan will do. Don't add anything except the heat (medium) and toss in your pepitas, stirring them constantly until they toast, getting browned on each side. They'll pop a little bit so you'll know they're done. Remove them from the heat.

You'll want to have already chopped up half a white onion, some cilantro, a jalapeño, two large garlic cloves, and have roasted three or four tomatillos. Dump this stuff, along with your roasted pepitas, into a blender or food processor. The roasted tomatillos should provide enough moisture to turn the mess into a salsa, but if you need a little more juice, use chicken stock. The consistency should be, well, salsa-like. Add salt to taste. The salsa should be earthy, nutty, a little spicy, and gray-green in color, and some badass shit. And putting it on tacos, or enchiladas, or sopes, or or tortas, or whatever mexican dish you want should make all the life you wasted peeling the goddamn seeds worth it.