11/25/2020

This morning has been a whirl of wind in preparation for Thanksgiving.

Picked up these adorable floral arrangements at the local farm store, potted in pumpkins. They used decorative cabbage, roses, alstroemeria, in these lovely purples, yellows, oranges. It is a fresh feeling I get when flower watching, I could just get lost in them. They clear my mind, until I am fresh and new again.

Listening to a new record, I just heard “drinking Coca Cola and red wine”. I wonder if this is an adaptation like rosè and Sprite, or if this is my mind playing tricks on me again. Sometimes I like to live in a world as if there were no google. It’s similar to how I felt as a kid I think, where I could with impunity believe things and just explore the world. I can remember times when I’d take closed containers of spices, a wooden spoon, and a bowl and pretend to mix the ingredients. I have a vivid memory of climbing into kitchen cabinets and holding my breath as long as I could. I must have watched an episode of Sesame Street or Mr. Rogers that talked about it. But I felt so free in that moment, I knew I could hold my breath just as long as those oyster divers would.

Waiting on a batch of three pumpkin pies to cook, I set up green bean casserole. Earlier this week, I looked online for the original green bean casserole, the one they used to put on either the can of mushroom soup or the can of Durkee fried crispy onions. This version was transcribed by a family member long ago and it now belongs to my sister. I recall looking at it a time or two as an adult, the neat handwriting on the index card. Yesterday, as I browsed YouTube, I could not find the original recipe. Many of the new renditions have sliced mushrooms, bacon, fresh sliced onion, even cheese. The only one I have ever eaten has soy sauce, I know that for sure.

I dumped them all into a pyrex dish:

1 can Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup

1 16 oz frozen French cut green beans,

1/2 Cup heavy cream

1 tsp soy sauce

handful of French’s crispy fried onions

Stir it all together

Bake 350 degrees F for 25 minutes

Add the rest of the fried onion toppings on top

Bake 10 minutes

Let cool 30 minutes, then serve

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Media placement

The single most important part of my day is when I am alone in my car driving to work. Alone I listen to the thoughts of the day and prepare my thoughts, getting some interesting fodder for future talking points. This format, sitting in car listening to the radio, is a place I have been many times, and the first thing that I remember when I wonder why it is so important to me is that I feel like everyone is a blank slate.

We all start out the day in much the same way as Bill Murray in the movie Groundhog Day. We all get to wake up, hit the snooze alarm, take a shower, drive to work, and all this is not often imitated purposefully, but is often the same process through which our bodies go every day. I feel lots of times in my life I am just carrying myself from one place to the next, in my pod, which happens to be a red pickup truck. Tons of places later, I still have my little space ship to listen to whatever I want, retort aloud to some ridiculous thing I heard on the radio, and no one can touch me. I feel it is a bit like living in the vacuum of space, where there is no feedback but one’s own input.

I feel like this isn’t the first thing I thought about when trying to answer why I ranked radio as my favorite form of media. I feel a little hesitant to admit that I instantly recalled that day fifteen years ago when I had just filled up my car at the gas station. I had been listening to the radio describe a plane that had flown into the World Trade tower. I recall in my mind, but maybe not on the radio the shape of the plane. Was it a cessna? Who was the pilot? Was he flying too low and missed his mark over the building, or was it engine failure? I flew that plane in my mind, thinking about how many people fly everyday, so what’s so different about this flight that he crashed?

After thinking those thoughts I got back in my car and drove over to the library. I remember talking to one of the librarians, or maybe she just spoke into the air, about there being two planes. How moments after I had gotten into my car, a second plane had hit. I remember the rest of that day in trips I took around the city, wondering about the tallest buildings in the country, and how many of them were safe. I remember thinking about moving to Canada. I ran around town with my thoughts in my little balloon and I was afforded the luxury of having no one else say anything back, no one else to wonder, except me.