Thursday, July 31, 2008

#8: The Corner Bar

I haven't been to the Corner Bar in a long time, but if you asked me yesterday, today and tomorrow where I felt like spending the evening and eating a crappy burrito, my answer would be the Corner Bar a thousand times over. Then, you'd wrinkle your nose at me and say, seriously?! And then I would shake my head and say, go on now, run along to Cheeseburger in Paradise, I'll catch up with you later. Now, after two or three consecutive years of trying and mostly failing to get people to go to the Corner Bar with me, I would like to make the official, written case for it (that is, of course, if my blog can be construed in any way as "official") in the hopes that just this once, I can make you people understand.

This place is a total hole in the wall. Its parking lot, last I checked, is one ginormous pothole. Inside, it smells partly like cigars and partly like carpet that has been steeping in beer spillage for several decades. The walls are adorned with vintage beer and booze posters -- not the shi-shi Guinness ones that have become de rigeur in Irish-themed pubs these days, but original tin ads for Schlitz and the like. All the tables are covered with wood-patterned melamine. There's an arcade game about bear-hunting. There's also an extensive beer list and a Humidor.

The deli sandwiches are tasty -- they make a mean Reuben -- but the burritos are glorious. There's nothing remotely Mexican-flavored about them, just a big lump of chicken and rice rolled into a flour tortilla and sopped in Pace picante sauce. The service is reliably terrible, just staggeringly awful, but so what? It was at the Corner Bar that I played my first game of Worst Song on the Jukebox on one of those new-fangled digital jukeboxes, where you get several friends to play the worst song they can think of (the object is to get everyone to acknowledge that your song was even worse than the one they chose). Funny, though, the crowd at the Corner Bar didn't seem to mind, or even notice.

The place is 100% unpretentious. There's not a trace of irony or self-referential smirking about it. It's just good beer, good cigars (if you're into that), and passable bar food served -- whenever the waitress remembers she's on the clock -- in a wholly un-flashy environment. The cocktails don't cost eight dollars, nobody has to go skulk outside to smoke, and you can hear yourself think. This is all I could ever ask of a bar. Usually, there's an element of "the only thing I don't like about that place is..." but with the Corner Bar, I can't think of a single thing.

Sunday, July 27, 2008

#9: Just Good Foods

When I first started making this list I realized that I could easily come up with Ten Restaurants I Will Miss Most About Kalamazoo, which only made me feel fat, so I had to eliminate at least a couple of restaurants from the equation. Just Good Food made the cut not only because of the food, but for the role it has played in my life from about 1997 onward.

I should have been fired after my first event, when I spilled red wine all over this lady's green linen suit during Tapas Night at the Gilmore Keyboard Fest. Instead, I got called back again and again for banquet service, which is why to this day I can tell you with a 3% margin of error the playlist at your cousin's wedding next month. This is the job I tried to leave time after time, selling or donating my uniform, because I was - finally - moving on to bigger and better things. Bless their hearts, they always acted sad to see me go and never once acted smug when I came back over and over again...just like everybody else.

Just Good Foods, alternatively known to those of us who have been there forever as "Just Food" or "Just Bad Moods", has a spectacular revolving door policy. "Once an employee, always an employee" seems to be a tenet of their business. That's why this is the job that got me through 2.5 college degrees, on and off. Of course, it isn't hard to understand why they have to welcome back their old, seasoned crew with open arms; they're mysteriously afraid to hire anyone new, ever. Perhaps it is out of fear that the never-ending list of idiosyncrasies pervading their business model is just too daunting for anyone who hasn't already been exposed to it for too many years to count. They're like, "So, you want to work for a wacky pair consisting of a SalvadoreƱan diabetic and a Northern Michigan NPR junkie with a heart of gold, eh? Well, in that case, you must polish these glasses, first with a towel to remove water spots, next with a cloth napkin to remove the towel fuzzies, and next...oh, to hell with it, can't we just get Christine in here who worked for us three years ago? Anybody know if she's still living in her van?"

I loved that job. If you were a hard worker, it didn't matter what a weirdo you were, you'd fit right into the family. The big, kooky, dysfunctional family. And if you sucked, you were swiftly ostracized until you made up your mind to quit. And the food is just as eclectic as the staff. And the regular customers are just as eclectic as the food. Highlights for me are the ginger sesame tofu and the vegie burritos, the "missing egg" salad and Olinda's home-made pesto, easily the best I've ever tasted. That's all in the deli; from catering, mostly I'll miss watching paunchy white people overeat, get drunk and do the chicken dance. Or maybe the moment when they first arrive and they're all lined up at the door waiting to be seated, and the catering staff is not-so-secretly sizing them up as if it's the red carpet at the Oscars.

There was the wedding where the floating candles melted across the necks of the hurricane vases and sealed off the oxygen to the goldfish and all the centerpieces not pilfered by children went belly up (the ones pilfered by children, of course, ended up flopping all over the floor when someone went to sit in the chairs under which they were hidden). There was the Kenyan wedding reception held in a barn, where they served a roasted goat just one floor up from where a live goat must have been asking himself, "what the hell...?" Then there was the one where several cousins lifted Grandma out of her wheelchair for a special waltz around the dancefloor poised on top of her husband's feet (Anne Murray: "Could I Have This Dance for the Rest of my Life"). That one pretty much brought the house down.

All told, Just Good Food is a central thread running through my time in Kalamazoo and I'm glad that I one day stumbled into that particular funky basement.

Friday, July 25, 2008

#9.5: The Two-Hearted

A top ten list seemed like a good idea, until I made my list and came up with eleven indispensable, irreductible items I couldn't remove. So, in the spirit that rules are made to be broken, I give you #9.5 of the Ten Things I Will Miss Most about Kalamazoo: Bell's Two-Hearted Ale.

Delicious on draft, even better in a bottle, but I'm getting ahead of myself: let's start with the label, shall we? Two watercolor ying-yanging trout, just as you would see them if you were looking straight down on them from the surface of a stream. Named for the Two-Hearted River, which Hemingway named a story after (although the river in the story isn't the Two-Hearted at all, as it turns out). For the longest time I thought they were morel mushrooms instead of trout, but we'll chalk that up to I can't get near the label without drinking copious amounts of the beer it's identifying.

I won't pretend that I've got some expert palate that can tell hops from barley or whether a beer has a crisp finish and whatnot. I've never much gone in for that sort of talk. All I know is that this beer is, to my mind, damned tasty. It possesses just the right balance of spicy, tingly, rich, toasty and sweet. It's a playful grizzly bear cub of a beer. It's a 1920's bungalow of a beer. It's a man in the shirt printed with tiny flowers whose masculinity nobody questions of a beer.

And, at 7%, one pint is enough to get me pleasantly, inconspicuously buzzed.

I was beginning to feel a bit depressed about having to abandon my favorite beer, until I learned that the B-movie-themed pizza parlor and beer emporium on the corner of my new street in Virginia has Two-Hearted Ale on draught. Which means that, once I move away, my proximity to Two-Hearted Ale will actually be greater than it is even now. Although I have to confess, I experienced a twinge of disappointment that it was there, once I had taken the trouble to squeeze it onto the Top Ten List at position 9.5. I am happy to report that, on draft and 750 miles away from its origin, it tastes a little thin and bitter. I wouldn't want it to be as good as it is here at home, but instead a reasonable simulacrum that leaves me an excuse to come back.

Wednesday, July 23, 2008

in other news

It's strange, not to mention a bit desolate, sitting in this empty apartment. People have been good about stopping by, some with external hard drives chock full of media to keep me entertained until the big moving day actually arrives. The lack of sensory stimulus in my barren three rooms makes it easy enough to concentrate on finishing my thesis, anyway, but somehow it still isn't even beginning to sink in.

I turned in my introduction and conclusion late last night, which means that for the next week all I have to do is revise and wait, wait and revise. I am not yet conscious of having written a book, another moment of realization that I'm curious to see when it arrives (if you reread that and find it grammatically lacking, SCREW YOU! Which one of us just wrote a BOOK?!)

I miss my neighbs. It was wonderful and important and maybe even necessary to see him surrounded by my furniture in our new apartment -- which is lovely, moreso than we had ever anticipated, and when I'm standing there I really feel that somehow I've finally arrived, in that grownup sense of the word. But so far it's just separation and distance and lack of furniture. He's got the posh apartment and the home goods, and it has not registered that the reason for that is that certain events in my life led us to choose Norfolk, Virginia as a common destination, and that he just happened to get there first.

Surprisingly, so far I've missed relatively few of my material possessions. If you've ever been to my apartment you'll probably remember that it was chock-full of furniture, somewhere between cozy and cramped, and that there was scarcely a vertical surface without something strategically positioned to detract attention from the walls (which are painted a delectable shade called "Oyster"). I now have two TV tables, a desk chair, a suitcase, an air mattress and a loveseat which will soon be turned out to stud on the front lawn. Occasionally I reach for something where it used to be, visualizing for example my favorite pen inside its desk drawer, then realize that the desk, therefore the drawer, therefore the pen, now reside across several state lines. Only then does it hit me that, within a matter of weeks, so will I, and I have a moment of vertigo.

In the meantime, for reasons I can only imagine exist in some unexplored part of my mind, I feel a little as though this is my full reality, as though this is all the stuff I have ever owned, life has always been like this and will continue indefinitely this way. It's not bad, really. I don't feel lost or confused. It's as if I'm going through a breakup without all the pain. It's hard to motivate myself to do domestic stuff like grocery shopping, cooking and laundry; much easier now that it's just me and the dog to be like, oh well, I'll just eat Frankenberry and sit in the dark.

Okay, back to work.

the kalamazoo countdown begins (#10: 10th floor)

So, in an effort to begin reconciling myself to the fact that I almost don't live here anymore, I've decided to use the next three weeks or so to count down the top ten things I will miss about Kalamazoo. Although there are so many things happening all at the same time in my life right now, most of them worthy of at least one lengthy blog post, I feel that publicly discussing the aspects of Kalamazoo I will most sorely pine for will be a therapeutic means of letting go of the town where I've been living for twelve (gasp!) years.

It is my intention to post ten times in the three weeks I have left here, counting down my days and my experiences, giving you a brief description of what it is I find so wonderful about each of the places or things that made the list. So, without further ado, I give you the beginning of the end, and it seems the most auspicious of beginnings for this countdown that the 10th floor of Sprau Tower on WMU's campus is #10 on my list.

Now that I think of myself as being from Kalamazoo, it's hard for me to remember at times that college is what originally brought me here. Despite my lack of school spirit, I suppose I've spent more time at WMU than several of my professors and certainly more than most of my friends. For that reason, something from Western needed to be on my list, and Sprau Tower is probably my favorite thing about WMU.

It's pretty simple, really: from the 10th floor of Sprau Tower you can see the whole town. You get this amazing panorama with downtown pretty much visible behind the football stadium, across East Campus and the Crazy-Persons' Tower, down Stadium Drive, over to Video Hits, across the Valley dormitories and over the treetops of what's left of the Basswood preserve, and over all the little turrets and domes of K college. It's particularly spectacular in the fall because it's town, except with these incredible swathes of orange, red and yellow bursting out in every direction. At night it's usually deserted, and the Little Skyline That Could looks almost formidable from up there in the dark. In a good snowstorm, the town totally disappears and you feel like you're in a giant snowglobe, and during a lightning storm you feel like the gatekeeper and the keymaster rolled into one.

There's a kitchenette and comfy chairs, and nobody really ever goes up there except for the occasional janitor or English professor. Plus, you have to have keys, so I get to be the one who bestows this view upon the uninitiated, one of the few perks of being a graduate assistant sharing an office that used to be a storage closet with four other people.

So that's it, I guess, for #10. Stay tuned.

Wednesday, July 9, 2008

The trouble with me

So he wants to know, this former old friend of mine, whether I'm up for a "brief, potentially clumsy chat".

No, I am not.

The last time we spoke I was painfully aware that he was giving me some kind of last chance to prove myself. As a friend I had been placed on probationary status. Whatever it was he needed to hear for me to be redeemed I must have failed to deliver it. Somehow when we talk it always ends up with him saying, "you know what the trouble with you is?"

Yes, as a matter of fact I do.

The trouble with me is that I sometimes forget that I have a right not to like certain people. I go through life as if because of my many imperfections I have a responsibility to like people, to disregard their unkindnesses, to be the bigger person, the one who always forgives and gets along with everybody. I forget that I am not the only person with faults. I forget that I can choose which people I keep closest to me. I forget that I do not owe each and every person in my life my unswerving friendship and unconditional love.

The trouble with me is that, for years now, I have listened to each and every person who wanted to tell me what the trouble with me is and damn it, I've believed every single one. The trouble with me is that, if you tell me that I'm horrible, ugly, stupid and useless, I will walk away from this conversation believing you, and in every encounter I have I will wonder whether this is what everyone is secretly thinking.

The trouble with me is that I can hear your opinion about your favorite band, a Chinese restaurant or politics, and I can decide whether to agree with or dismiss it, but I cannot simply dismiss your opinion about me. I will trust any theory advanced about me, even by people peripheral at best to my life, even by people who need me to play the villain in the stories they tell themselves, before I will trust my own sense of who I am and what I stand for.

That is the trouble with me, old friend, and that is what I have decided to change: a transformation that begins, unlike most, with not returning a phone call.