The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
This one is “A song you like with a person’s name in the title,” which means I have to lead with this video:
The challenge, of course, is to pick something that isn’t from that list. And therefore:
Challenge: what’s your favorite song named after a guy?
(Bonus song:)
And lo, on the 20th day, there was “A song that has many meanings for you,” and, man, this is another one of those “just pick a damn song” categories.
Consider this song metanarrative, if you like:
Yeah, shut up. Pick something better!
We watch a lot of cooking shows around here. I feel like this is generally a known thing, right? I’ve lost my patience over the last several years with a lot of narrative television and so a good proportion of the programs I watch are either reality TV cooking programs, generally with Gordon Ramsay involved somehow, or home renovation programs.
One of the things we entertain ourselves with while watching Gordon Ramsay’s shows is figuring out where the long hand of the production department has shown up. Hell’s Kitchen, in particular, is and always has been rigged as hell– nearly every challenge ends up in a tie before the last person shows up. Once in a while, sure, but it’s literally 95% of the challenges. Still entertaining? Sure. But you can’t take it too seriously.
One of the things Hell’s Kitchen does every season is a blind taste test challenge. The competitors are blindfolded and earmuffed and fed a spoonful of some sort of food which they must identify. Some of them are better at it than others, to put it mildly, and my wife and I have always been curious about how we would do in a similar situation.
Well:
Thirteen diced food-like substances, pulled together while I was outside clearing the driveway of all of yesterday’s snow. I knew we were going to do this, because we’d talked about it, but I don’t know that I knew it was going to be ten minutes after I walked in from outside, all sweaty and gross and looking like this:
That bandanna wrapped around my eyes is supposedly a Cooling Bandanna, and it’s not only thick cloth to begin with but it’s four layers thick the way I have it folded. I assure you that I couldn’t see a damn thing other than a tiny bit of light coming from the vague direction of my right nostril, which at no point was especially useful. I was fed with a spoon with the exception of the last two items.
You will, of course, be wanting a blow-by-blow of the entire process. And if you don’t, well, you’re getting it anyway. My blog. 🙂
ITEM NUMBER ONE: APPLE
Weird thing: it turns out that the taste of a thing takes a second or so to kick in. For the first moment or two you’re relying mostly on texture before you can taste anything, and I swear to you that I had a moment of pure bewilderment before the taste kicked in. At which point I guessed apple, and I was right.
ITEM NUMBER TWO: CELERY
I don’t have a lot to say about this one. I was expecting celery to be an item at some point, and got it right. 2/2!
ITEM NUMBER THREE: BROCCOLI TOPS
By this point I was feeling pretty confident. I’m two for two! This is easy, and this show with these professional chefs is obviously cheating! I guessed a bit too early and said cauliflower. It was not cauliflower. By the end of the chewing, I felt like I should have gotten this one right, but I didn’t. 2/3!
ITEM NUMBER FOUR: ONION
So, funny story: turns out my wife was unaware that I have a teensy bit of an allergy to raw yellow onion, or at least it rips the shit out of my throat, which might not actually be an allergy but there’s a good reason I never put raw yellow onion on anything? She felt really bad. At any rate, the taste of onion is overpowering and there was no chance of getting this wrong. 3/4!
ITEM NUMBER FIVE: CARROT
I was expecting carrots to show up at some point, too, and this one was also pretty easy. 4/5.
ITEM NUMBER SIX: GRAPES
I’m calling foul on item number six. It was immediately clear that I had some sort of fruit in my mouth, the only question was what kind– and in case I hadn’t made this clear, texture is absolutely critical to getting these right. And she’d peeled the grapes. I eventually guessed peach, which I wasn’t confident about, but I don’t think I’d ever have gotten to “grape” without being able to feel the skins. 4/6.
ITEM NUMBER SEVEN: POTATO
Potatoes are kinda interesting. We’d actually talked about how it was never terribly clear whether some of the food items are cooked, and who really knows what raw potato tastes like? Nobody eats raw potatoes, especially without any sort of seasoning on them. I guessed green pepper, purely on the texture, and I figured I was wrong while I was doing it. 4/7, and two wrong in a row.
ITEM NUMBER EIGHT: BROCCOLI STEMS
Cheating! I already had broccoli, dammit! And since I’d already thought broccoli was cauliflower and been wrong once, naturally I guessed it was cauliflower again, and was wrong again. Fuck broccoli, man. 4/8.
ITEM NUMBER NINE: GARLIC
NEVER LET ANYONE FEED YOU RAW GARLIC ON A SPOON. JESUS CHRIST. 5/9.
ITEM NUMBER TEN: RAISINS
I psyched myself out on this one, because I’ve actually been craving raisins lately, and there aren’t any in the house. I like raisins a lot and eat them pretty frequently. Well, I thought immediately that I had raisins, and actually said raisins, and then thought “No, there aren’t any in the house,” and paid a little bit more attention to the texture, and eventually settled on dates. They were raisins. She’d pulled them out of a box of Raisin Bran and washed the sugar off, because my wife is sneaky. 5/10.
ITEM NUMBER ELEVEN: BELL PEPPER
I got this one right– at first I said green pepper, then the sweetness kicked in and I amended it to “some other color,” and it turned out they were orange. This wasn’t especially difficult. 6/11.
ITEM NUMBER TWELVE: PAPRIKA
We’d previously agreed that two items would be dry spices and that I’d have to identify them by smell. She even gave me a hint, telling me one of the two was something I personally cooked with fairly regularly and the other was something that we used and had in the house but wasn’t super common. This was the “you cook with this” one– I put paprika on my grits all the time– and I had no clue at all. I guessed basil, which doesn’t smell anything like paprika. Wrongo. 6/12.
ITEM NUMBER THIRTEEN: GINGER
I actually insisted on tasting this, dipping a finger in it and licking my finger, and it actually smelled more familiar than the paprika had, and a faint soapiness led to me guessing it was cilantro. It was not cilantro.
So … six out of thirteen’s terrible, guys, and even if I give myself the raisins and the initial broccoli that’s still eight out of thirteen, which is only 61%, which isn’t a great score at all. This was harder than I thought it would have been, even accounting for the fact that I’m not a professional chef, which supposedly all of the folks on these shows are. I mean, I’m not a terrible cook if I have a recipe to follow, but that’s it.
We will be making my wife do this soon, by the way, to see how she does. I have some plans for her challenge, too. Honestly, I recommend trying this, if you have an hour to kill. It’s fun! It just turns out that I suck at it.
The nineteenth day of the challenge is “A song that makes you think about life.” Which is one of those “Kinda too broad to work” categories, because, well, “life” is kinda big. But I think this will work:
What’s making you think lately?
Day 18 is a song from the year you were born. I give you the single best live performance of 1976:
What’s the best song from your birth year?
Heh. Day 17 is “A song you’d sing a duet with someone on karaoke.” And there is no such song anywhere. I’ve done karaoke once, I got dragged up to the stage with a bunch of other people, and this was the song we did. It was not a duet, and they turned the volume down on us, and we deserved it, mostly because no one should ever try to karaoke this song:
What song have you publicly humiliated yourself to?
(A note, before I begin: there is going to be a nonzero number of you who know me in Real Life and also knew Becky. Her parents, who I know, and sister, who I really don’t, are on Facebook and have been monitoring her page. She followed Luther, but was not friends with his account. If her family sees this, they see it, but I would appreciate it if no one goes out of their way to bring it to their attention. I am, as will probably become clear pretty quickly, writing it for me, not for them, if that makes any sense. Thank you.)
Becky Arney died yesterday. She used to pull my hair in fifth grade, and now she’s gone.
She was two months younger than me, and had been fighting cancer for nine Goddamned years. She spent most of the last month of her life in the hospital until her family finally decided she’d had enough and brought her home.
Nine damn years. The cancer started off as a small-cell cervical cancer that, as far as I ever understood, had a five-year life expectancy just north of “you’re kidding, right?” and she managed nine years. I think it was actually liver failure that got her in the end; the cancer was in remission for a while but then popped up in a bunch of other organs and that was the essential body part that gave out first.
The biggest problem I’ve ever had in my life is being able to see my feet past my ample fucking gut and this badass bitch got handed a life where she had to beat the shit out of cancer on a daily basis for nine fucking years in her thirties and forties. And frankly she did not lead the sort of life prior to getting cancer that was going to lead to gold-plated health insurance, either. She worked in the arts. She worked in prop design. I can only imagine the extent of the medical bills.
She was my first real crush, in fifth grade. If you look at my fourth grade yearbook there’s one particular girl whose picture I drew a green box around, but I don’t remember anything about falling for her. My unrequited thing for Becky lasted two or three years, at least. It was a Thing for a While. She knew; I’m sure she did. There was one particular field trip in sixth grade to a museum in Chicago where she spent the whole day letting me take her picture next to dinosaur bones and then sat behind me and intermittently pulled my hair the whole way home. She knew. By high school we were friends; we drifted apart when I left for college and then reconnected via Facebook just after I moved home and got married.
The last time I saw her, I was with my wife and son at Bob Evans, of all the goddamn places, and she just happened to be there with her grandmother. It was the only time she ever met my son; my wife was a couple of years behind us in high school so they already knew each other. When I killed my personal Facebook account, she didn’t send Luther a friend request, but she continued to follow the page, and I got updates from my wife.
She lived with her grandmother after she got sick. Imagine that. Imagine being old enough to be a grandmother to someone in their forties and you eventually have to bury them. I can’t do it.
There is not going to be a funeral, which is good, because I am generally not good at funerals at the best of times and I think there’s a good chance that “absolutely everyone from high school is there!” will not qualify as The Best of Times. She was that person who had every single person from our graduating class she could find and a sizable number of the kids from within a couple of years of us on her friends list. The eventual “celebration of life” that her obituary alludes to will be a de facto high school reunion. I have already skipped three high school reunions. I don’t know that I can make myself go to this one. We’ll see.
I’m not old enough to have to be writing this shit yet. She wasn’t old enough that I should have been writing this about her. She should have been raising the kids she never got to have, or doing whatever else the hell she wanted to do if she didn’t want to have kids. I can only assume that a cancer diagnosis at 33 can tend to alter your plans.
I used to tell people that I wasn’t really scared of anything, other than blindness, which was my greatest fear for most of my life. But for the last few days, which have been spent mostly restraining the urge to ask my wife to check Facebook again to see if her family has posted any updates, I’ve gotten this cold sort of existential horror in my gut every time I’ve looked at my son. Because apparently I’ve reached the age where people my age start dying of fucking cancer and so that’s a thing I need to start worrying about. About leaving him behind, before either of us is ready. About, hell, something happening to him. Because she was young, but it ain’t like cancer is especially discriminating, now, is it? And it’s not like this has been unique to the last few days– she had had cancer for two years before my son was even born, and one thing every parent becomes familiar with very quickly after their first child is born is the notion of their own mortality.
(This is what I meant when I said I was writing this for me, by the way.)
I don’t know. I don’t have a cute or clever way to end this, so I’m just going to stop writing.
Fuck cancer.
A song that’s a classic favorite. No thought required:
Favorite classic rock tune no thinking allowed GO:
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