Posts tagged ‘Takoma Park’
The last time I made beer bread was more than fifteen years ago. I had fond memories of being able to make your bread at home quickly without a yeast packet. And all the home chefs making beer bread on YouTube seemed pretty happy with the taste.
Easy. Simple. Fast.
The concept of making beer bread came to me while I was out at Value Village with the family. A neighbor texted me the following:
Hey man — do you happen to have a cheap bland beer I can have for making bread? I’ll give you a loaf . . .
I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Value Village on a holiday. It’s a mess. There were like nine hundred people and there were clothes all over the place. I really had no interest in being at Value Village so naturally, my thoughts drifted. And bam, like magic, that’s when I get the text about the beer bread.
I’m thinking all I need is flour and beer and I’ll have bread in like an hour. That sounded good to me. I checked out a few recipes and I was almost right except for the baking powder
They don’t tell you in the recipe that the beer matters. Back when I used to make beer bread, I used only Corona. Where I used to live in Queens, it was either that or Budweiser. I’m starting to think now that my taste buds weren’t developed back then.
The beer I used a few days ago was the Costco Branded IPA Beer. I think for anyone who had the privilege of drinking this beer can attest to, it’s absolutely horrible. No matter how cold it actually is, it has a warm beer flavor.
I made one loaf and it tasted like Beer Flavored Bread. It was weird like wearing your shoes backward weird.
I made the second loaf thinking that perhaps the first one was a bad recipe.
Nope.
Takoma Park, MD.
There are electric eels in my bathtub.
From the Inside
Take everything from the inside
and throw it all away
I swear for the last time
I won’t trust myself with you
Doorsteps
I can’t remember the last time there were three little birds, each by my doorstep. I sometimes see one bird or two birds, but never just three.
“In one or more parallel universes, there is a a plastic trash can version of myself in a suburban granola crunching enclave of Maryland. I receive messages from it daily, but I don’t fully understand what it’s trying to tell me. Every message starts with, ‘Tomorrow is the day.” And then after that, it repeats a whole string of numbers, starting with 63 and ending in 2,351.”
Admiral Ving Ving
The Spaceship Diaries of Admiral Ving Ving
‘A couple nights ago I met up with Lenny at Mark’s Diner. He’s an old friend from high school, and I hadn’t seen him since then. That was over twenty years ago, like when Pearl Jam came out with Ten.
He had called me out of the blue. I don’t know how he got my cellphone but nowadays everything is online. He said something like, “Hey man, I saw you were in town. You want to meet up for dinner and catch up?”
So we’re at the diner and he’s eating the bi bim bop with his hands. There’s beef juice and egg yolk running down his hands and onto his forearms. He says that’s how they really do it in Korea. I’ve never been to Korea so I say, “Is that so?” And then he talks about how he went to Korea after high school, started teaching English, and then married a “nice Korean woman with good values.”
“How does she like the U.S.?” I ask.
“She hates it,” he says.
There’s an awkward silence, and I stab at my udon soup with my wooden chopsticks. I wonder how long it would take for the chopstick to absorb some of the broth.’
The Dog Man Journals by GM Drogba
There are different kinds of scary. And if I had to choose what kind of scary I like to be, it would definitely be raccoon scary. I know some of you might think that if I had to be scary, why would I waste it on raccoon scary as opposed to something more popular, like zombie scary or rabid bear scary or mountain lion scary. Don’t get me wrong, I did think about those possibilities. But I felt that aiming for raccoon scary was a little more attainable, with the right attitude and frame of mind of course.
It was a lot easier to be raccoon scary than I was led to believe. I show up in other people’s kitchens after midnight and ruffle through all their shit. I love going through canned goods, searching for crisp apples in the refrigerator, and it’s always a treat to find those rare, sweet figs that are like nine dollars each at the food co-op. The other day I went into a kitchen and broke open the flour and threw rice and dry pasta all over the ground. I don’t know why I did it. It varies from night to night.
The one thing that does give me a hang up from time to time is if I’m confronted and questioned about my presence in “their” kitchen. It doesn’t often end well. I give my, “This is my place!” speech but that often fails. I’m asked to leave, I’m yelled at, I approach slowly, they threaten to call the police, and then I jump at them out of nowhere and ruffle my hands through their hair and clothes while they flail and scream. That’s the part I could do without.
Did last year bring you down? Well, you’re not the only one.
When I was in high school, getting a car of my own was like a temporary pass to adulthood. As long as I was in the car, I was free of the nagging and all the other host of real and imagined teenage obligations and expectations. But as I got older, the car was a means to an end, a necessary bill so that I could get groceries from Costco, avoid the rain and snow on the walk to the metro, or to avoid Delta Airlines so that I could drive eight hours to see family. But sometimes all that noise goes to the wayside when I’m not driving, just sitting in the back, looking out the window, with neither obligation or duty to talk to anyone. That’s my temporary pass to childhood.
e v e r y d a y aperture 