tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20001543535864691962024-03-12T22:19:33.847-07:00Scraps of LiteracyShort and long collections of words, with thoughts, stories, complaints and comments nestled in, along with peeking in at what other people are reading and watching.Rory L. Aronskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18173518202611695171noreply@blogger.comBlogger677125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2000154353586469196.post-69064761084389757952020-12-08T22:13:00.004-08:002020-12-08T22:13:44.497-08:00There Can Only Be The Memory<p>There comes a time when you realize you cannot recreate a memory, and you should not keep trying. My time came last night.</p><p>We didn't have pumpkin pie with Thanksgiving this year, and in fact, the frozen Marie Callender's pumpkin pie we bought is still in the freezer, relegated there when we found pecan pie from Trader Joe's and a blueberry pie from Ralphs that we wanted to try.</p><p>In past years, when we could reach Vallarta Supermarket in Oxnard before Thanksgiving, I usually went for the Jessie Lord pumpkin pie, made in Torrance, which had baked into it the heart and soul of whoever had made it. It was the one pie that wasn't quite the taste, but reminded me of the slice of pumpkin pie I had had at Six Flags Magic Mountain on a Saturday in early December 2011, when we had gotten free admission for the day after donating toys to the annual Toy Drive.</p><p>That slice was found at the Cyber Cafe, and I had seen it, among many, in the case there in the morning, before heading out to all the rollercoasters, and I had been thinking about it all day, up until the early evening when I finally got it. (<a href="https://scrapsofliteracy.blogspot.com/2011/12/someone-got-it-right.html">Read about it here.</a>)</p><p>I must have e-mailed Magic Mountain either right after I got home or in the days after, to find out who had made that pumpkin pie. Someone had put their heart and soul into that pumpkin pie that became slices, as prominently as the nutmeg and cinnamon and a crust that showed me that this was not the typical pumpkin pie. This was something rare and special.</p><p>I received an email that Monday of pre-Christmas week from someone at Magic Mountain, informing me that the pumpkin pie had come from Sysco, the corporate restaurant food distributor, and I was stunned. How had someone gotten this pie past their monolithic outlook? I needed to know, and I also needed to know of the person, if possible, who had made this pie. </p><p>I searched. I think I had even emailed whatever local Sysco email address I could find to ask them. But I never got an answer. The blessed maker of that pie disappeared into the ether, remaining a memory as potent as the ones that would follow when I began my five years in Las Vegas, smelling deep-seated, devoted cooking from a mobile home in the park we lived in in Las Vegas our first year, then from second-floor apartment windows just after the side entrance to Pacific Islands Apartments, where we lived our first year in Henderson in the back (and our final year, too, that time in the front), as well as the bread pudding I stumbled upon at the buffet at Green Valley Ranch (also in Henderson), and have never forgotten, just like the pumpkin pie. But those are stories for another day.</p><p>I vowed back in that December of 2011 to search for other great pumpkin pies when we finally moved to Las Vegas, but really it was just to try to find that slice again, a mission I also carried with me in my first and second year in Ventura. Now it's my third year here, and I got to thinking about that miraculous slice of pumpkin pie again after passing up another whole pumpkin pie at 99 Cents Only last Sunday. A few weeks before that, I had bought another brand of whole pumpkin pie there, from Canada, in my continuing quest to rediscover that particular slice, as if the person who made it might go from baking company to baking company, simply baking with the same heart and soul and moving on. </p><p>Last night, I thought about it again, an idle moment while reading <i>Where I Come From: Stories from the Deep South </i>by Rick Bragg, a collection of his columns and longer pieces from <i>Southern Living</i> and <i>Garden & Gun</i>. I am a Southerner by birth, not by blood, but I carry with me Southern tendencies for storytelling as he lets forth, and a love of language that usually takes a few days, but is always worth it. Perhaps reading of his memories of his South, his hometown of Jacksonville, Alabama, got me thinking about that slice of pumpkin pie. And I wondered if it was enough that I had simply had the chance, that moment, to have that pumpkin pie, which was completely unexpected anyway because up to that point, I hadn't really been into pumpkin pie. It was sometimes there as part of past Thanksgivings, but it wasn't one of my favorites then. </p><p>That slice of pumpkin pie at Magic Mountain obsessed me, made me want to know more about pumpkin pie, the traditions it served, the people that made it. But overall, I was always looking for another slice or even a whole pie exactly as heavenly as that one slice. It's not realizing that no future pumpkin pie could live up to such an exalted standard that finally stopped me short, but rather what I already have.</p><p>I have that memory of that particular slice of pumpkin pie for as long as my mind lasts, hopefully well into my 118th year. I was sitting at a table outside the Cyber Cafe (the inside had the computers where you could sit and surf the web for a price), the cold outside was a little sharp, but all that mattered was that pie, that it had obviously been made by someone with a huge heart who was thinking about the rest of the world and wanted them to know that they were thinking all the good they could about the world. It was so obvious. The pie was like a gentle family of pumpkin and spices that dearly welcomed you, that encouraged you to come on in and relax for a while, hear a story or two, or perhaps tell your own. And that also made me realize something else, something equally important.<br /><br />If I keep searching for another pumpkin pie just like that slice, and perhaps find it, then I diminish the glow of the memory of that slice because here is this one, and there may well be more just like it. It's not that I would completely forget my reaction to the pie at Magic Mountain, but it wouldn't seem as important as it once was upon finding its equal.</p><p>I want this memory as it is, for another reason as well. I'm doing research for a few novels, indecisive about which one I want to focus on in the first place. Most of these novels are made up of memories, certain ones that I want to mine in order to fully come to terms with traumatic times in my life, and some will fuel short stories where the characters are trying to recreate a memory as I tried with that pumpkin pie. There's even another novel I'm thinking of writing, where raspberry jam tasted so long ago in boyhood is the catalyst for what happens (inspired by when I tasted raspberry jam at Allison's Country Cafe across from the back end of the Pacific View Mall, directly facing the local bus transfer station, and went back a few weeks after that breakfast to buy a jar of my own). </p><p>There are other novels I want to write simply because I want to spend more time in particular places in my imagination, such as when I was a student at College of the Canyons in Valencia, and had the Canyon Call newsroom all to myself to write my article about the men's golf team, whose coach was my cinema professor. I wrote in the late afternoon and felt completely at peace, and it's what has inspired me to seek to write one novel in a journalistic tone and format because while I don't miss the vicious deadlines in journalism, I want to go back to it on my terms, currently studying the structure of long-form journalism, seeking to capture it through a newspaper, as I intend to set this novel amidst the years I lived in Santa Clarita, before newspapers went on an even steeper decline. In fact, I want to include that pumpkin pie from Magic Mountain in one scene of that novel.</p><p>I know that there's no way I can write nonfiction or essays about my life. I don't have many of the dates straight anymore, and overall, I usually remember pieces instead of whole days. It's better to fictionalize what I have and be able to use it that way. The pumpkin pie is still there, then. And I am still at the Cyber Cafe, in wondrous rapture over how a park that prides itself on rollercoasters can also think about providing personal moments like that, where a person discovers more about himself than he thought there was before that moment. If you've got to spend hours and days and months and years sitting alone and writing, you might as well have pumpkin pie as it once was, as energy for whatever emerges.</p>Rory L. Aronskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18173518202611695171noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2000154353586469196.post-53288307644295104772020-11-22T15:47:00.022-08:002020-11-23T13:12:38.650-08:00A Subscription Deferred<p>It was while transcribing audio of a long, business-fueled meeting last Saturday night for a Santa Clarita-based journalist who still throws me work after all these years that I started thinking about it again.</p><p>Having moved 17 times in my life, with no real solid sense of home, I started looking for one in print, something that changes with each issue, but comes from a foundation that has always been just that way in its aims. I've been reading since I was 2 and haunting libraries about as long, so surely there must be something.</p><p>Toward the end of this past summer, I found the July/August issue of The Atlantic sitting in the magazine section of my local Ralphs supermarket, directly facing plastic spoons, forks, knives, and paper plates, with napkins just a little further down.</p><p>The left-side flap glued to the cover intrigued me: "On the Nature of Complicity: Trump's enablers and the judgment of history" by Anne Applebaum." "The Looming Bank Collapse" by Frank Partnoy." "The Miracle of the Supermarket" by Bianca Bosker." "Can an Unloved Child Learn to Love?" by Melissa Fay Greene."</p><p>This magazine seemed to be a printed representation of how my mind runs. It jumps around like this issue does, but it seeks deeper insight than just the click-of-the-minute on Facebook and Twitter. I always want to know more than just what CNN blares on the front page of its site.</p><p>$9.99 is a little steep for one magazine, but it was my first time with it. I bought it, and dug into it right when I got home from Ralphs. And in those first minutes with it, I immediately found home.</p><p>There was a profile of Kevin Kwan and his supersonic fame from <i>Crazy Rich Asians</i>. Amanda Mull wrote a piece about it not being so criminal nowadays to have a cluttered house. James Hamblin wrote about the dangers of overvigilant hygiene. And that was even before the main pieces listed on the cover, which were not only exactly what had caught my interest by their titles alone, but they went far more in depth than I could have imagined, including Bianca Bosker writing about the formerly glorious Fairway Market in New York City, and Melissa Fay Greene discovering what has become of "tens of thousands of children warehoused in Romanian orphanages" thirty years ago.</p><p>Out of all the magazines I've read this year, this issue of The Atlantic is the only one I've kept, the beginning of a new home for me. </p><p>It may well be the latest (and hopefully last) stretch of the process that apparently started for me in 2007, when I worked under John Boston at The Signal newspaper in Santa Clarita, as associate editor of the weekend Escape section. John had worked at The Signal for 30 years, arriving in Santa Clarita in the mid-1950s and finding such a welcoming home for himself that was never present before that. He became Santa Clarita. He knew all of the valley's history, and what he didn't know just hadn't happened yet. I was deeply impressed by that, what with my fierce passion for, and love of, history. But he was also enormously kind, with time enough for anyone who wanted it.</p><p>When I wrote what was at first to him an underwhelming humor column for Escape, he sat with me in the paper's conference room and went over it with me, suggesting how I could strengthen it. He liked the concept, but thought it could be even better. As a young writer in his early 20s, I was devastated that he didn't like it from the get-go, and I listened to his suggestions through that dark veil of disappointment. He told me to rewrite it at home that night and email it to him by the morning. When I got home, I didn't care what would become of the column. I rewrote as he suggested, moved some sentences around, deleted others, but I don't actually remember what I did or how I did it. I just did it, and paid no attention while I did it. The next morning, I found an email from him that began "JIMINY CHRISTMAS, RORY!" and went on to say how, when he first went over the column, he honestly thought there wasn't a whole lot else to my column, but the rewrite I submitted propelled it into the stratosphere.</p><p>Is it any wonder I wanted to be like him as a writer and as a man? He subscribed to The New Yorker, so I asked him if I could have the issues he was done with so I could read The New Yorker, too. He swore by Tootsie Roll Pops, so I had my own bouquet of them, too. It was similiar to how, when I was 11, I read Andy Rooney's books (I had seen him on <i>60 Minutes</i> over the years, but didn't pay close attention) and was amazed that one could write about woodworking and restaurants and tools in the garage. I wanted to write exactly like Andy Rooney, and I tried, but then found I couldn't write exactly like him because I wasn't him. But John Boston was right in front of me, and even though I knew I couldn't write like him, I just wanted to be influenced by his sure sense of time and place that made him the true embodiment of Santa Clarita back then. I could strive to be the great good, gentle soul that he was and still is (that reminds me that I should call him this week).</p><p>Perhaps The New Yorker through John Boston was my first attempt to find a home in print. Both my parents were native New Yorkers, so it made sense, but I never latched onto The New Yorker. Many great articles individually, but to me, it felt too rigidly-produced. A certain time and a certain place seen only through this lens. I needed an expansion of exploration and the human spirit, even and especially in its struggle toward, and sometimes against, the light.</p><p>I read The New Yorker here and there for a year or two after John Boston left The Signal (Eventually I did, too), but then I fell away from it. Another move. And then another, and still more, which comprised five years in Las Vegas, where all that matters is trying to survive the summers and winters there (even autumn is starkly bitter in the desert), and sometimes just the day to day.</p><p>Living in Ventura, and especially the present hard year, brought back all these memories and made me think about seeking a home, even in print, that I could rely on. I felt it so completely with that July/August issue of The Atlantic, and I also felt like I had John Boston back as a regular presence in my life through those pages because he was always that interested in so many facets of life, always that engaged. I'm long done with journalism, preferring to focus on the books I want to write, but if John ever decided beyond the novels he likely wants to make the swan song of his life that he wanted to start another journalistic venture of his own (at least two didn't pan out), I'd join him. I would gladly go back into the sharp-bladed grind of deadlines for the chance to work with him again, to learn still more from him.</p><p>There's very little room in my reading habits for surprises. I know what interests me, and I know what I want to read. The Atlantic is the last platform for me that can provide those surprises, every page I turn to possibly containing something I either knew nothing about, or something I know about examined in a way completely new to me. It also helps with my attention span of late, because there are always very long articles and essays in The Atlantic, and sitting on the computer, on Facebook, on the Internet entirely as I have over the past few months has not helped. In fact, there's an anthology from The Atlantic called <i>The American Crisis: What Went Wrong. How We Recover.</i> that the Ventura County Library system finally got tired of me bugging them to buy and they finally bought it and had it sent to me through Zipbooks, where patrons can request titles and very possibly, it's sent to you directly through Amazon. When you're done with it, you bring it to your library of choice and they'll eventually enter it into the system and put it into circulation. </p><p>Many of the articles featured in the anthology were abridged since the articles as they had appeared in the magazine were originally so long, and that anthology had a lot of ground to cover. It was the first time in quite a long time that I had not flinched at the sheer length of those articles and essays. I was so absorbed in all they had to say, all they had to explain, that I didn't even notice the page numbers fluttering by, as I sometimes do. That's also how I know I need more of The Atlantic in my life.</p><p>The audio of that business meeting ran a smidge over an hour, and I was about halfway through it last Saturday night when I stopped yet again. Parts of it bored me, so there was a perfect right to take a break here and there. And it was then that I decided to wander over to The Atlantic website, where I became curious about that big red "Subscribe" button at the top right of the front page.</p><p>$59.99 for a 1-year print and digital subscription. Admittedly, a few weeks ago, I paid $54.99 for a two-year subscription on ItsYourTurn.com, where I play Battleship, which is called Battleboats there. But with that subscription, and the year I still had on my current subscription to ItsYourTurn, that extended me to November 29, 2023. And I go there every day, playing nothing but Battleship, so $54.99 stretches infinitely.</p><p>But $59.99? I could do it for ItsYourTurn, but I'm also still only working a part-time job while trying my hardest to land a full-time one. The price includes access to the digital side of The Atlantic, including the archives, but if I spend hours on a computer beyond my job search, my book reviews, the transcriptions, and my own writing, it's usually because I've discovered a web comic that I want to read all the way through from the beginning. This time, it's <a href="https://terminallance.com/" target="_blank">Terminal Lance</a>, the Marine Corps comic. I did the same with <a href="https://www.girlswithslingshots.com/" target="_blank">Girls With Slingshots</a> many years ago, and even bought the entire run in print. And I also did the same with <a href="https://www.questionablecontent.net/" target="_blank">Questionable Content</a>, around the same time as Girls With Slingshots, which I still read today.</p><p>But The Atlantic's archives? It's tempting for a few topics here and there, but not extensive screen time. It reminds me of when I bought The New Yorker's entire archive in the late 2000s, which came on a hard drive that you hook up to the computer. I was that interested back then, but ultimately, I couldn't do it. Reading is more comfortable to me in my recliner than on this computer chair. </p><p>So $59.99 for 10 print issues for one year, and the archive of which I might use only a little bit. I wasn't sure. But then I saw the Academic Rate option: "Students and Educators save 50% on an Atlantic subscription." Well now! I work for Ventura College! I have a college email address! I'll use that!</p><p>I clicked on the Academic Rate ($29.99 for one year) and then I left it in that tab on my Chrome browser and got back to the transcript. A little while later, I thought again about The Atlantic subscription, but wondered about something in the Ventura County Library system, and I went to the catalog. </p><p>Before the pandemic, magazines were readily available at all libraries, including the weekly issues of People that my sister swore by, and which she hasn't had since early March, as the libraries were first closed down entirely and then opened up only for patrons to walk up to the entrance to pick up holds brought out to them by library employees. What about the magazines?</p><p>I looked up People first, because my sister would have a lot more to catch up on than I would, as she had been checking out every weekly issue before the pandemic. And there it was at different libraries: All the issues that she had missed, and even ones stretching back to 2008 if she so wanted. But more importantly, I noticed that there were many issues checked out. They're letting patrons check out magazines! Put them on hold like books, like DVDs, and you can have them too! I wasn't sure they were, what with magazines taken out of doctors' waiting rooms and such with the risk of transmission through the magazines. I didn't know if it would be the same with libraries, but apparently not.</p><p>So I put the latest two issues of People on hold on her card to get her started (we'll probably pick them up this coming Saturday), and then I went to look for The Atlantic.</p><p>Same thing! I can read all the issues available thus far, and <i>then</i> decide if I want to go for the academic subscription, or just wait for the library to bring in each issue. I have a comparatively minor interest in Harper's Magazine because Edmund G. Love published his article "Subways are for Sleeping" there, which became the full-length book of the same title that I spent $34 to claim lost at the Valencia Library, back when it was part of the L.A. County library system. I wanted it for myself, having read that particular copy from the Norwalk branch often as a student at College of the Canyons, usually in lieu of doing my math homework in the cafeteria there. And I found that the Ventura County library system has Harper's, as well as The New Yorker. So I have my magazine subscriptions now, freer than I thought it would be, and I can exhaust those first. The New Yorker doesn't have an academic rate, and is way too expensive besides (best to stick with the library system's holdings in this case), and neither does Harper's, though they're more reasonable for a subscription if it ever came to that. But as it will take time to go through all these holdings in the system, I'll see what transpires in my magazine reading over the next few months, also if the library system continues to get these magazines or they give them up. Then I'll see what I might do about The Atlantic. I'm just happy to have the chance to read them freely, and really, it would be more appropriate to consider a subscription after I land substantial work.</p>Rory L. Aronskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18173518202611695171noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2000154353586469196.post-81957705420025649582020-10-25T13:39:00.009-07:002020-10-25T17:27:05.030-07:00The Windows of New York<p>I haven't had time lately to look for my late father in books, particularly ones about New York City or set in New York City. New biographies about Eleanor Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, James Beard and Jimmy Carter horn in, as well as the first volume of the papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., and John O. Brennan's memoir about his career in the CIA. I have to get to the Eleanor Roosevelt biography first because there's only one copy in my local library system and two people have it on hold after me, but she is New York, so maybe I'll see him a little bit there.</p><p>For now, while I wait for those thousands of pages to clear, YouTube is useful. I look up the New York City walking tours, Midtown Manhattan, Lower Manhattan, 8th Avenue, and I seek him not only in the faces that pass by the camera, but the windows of New York in the skyscrapers, in the shorter buildings. I wonder who's in the office buildings, the hotel rooms, who's behind the windows next to the fire escapes in those very moments. Do they have the same energy my father had for the city? I know it's changed drastically since he was born in the Bronx and then lived nearby enough in Paramus, New Jersey, and also taught in New York City in the '70s, always noting the rats in the schools. Do those people have the same single-minded passion for their work that he had for his career? Do they have the same charismatic welcome that he had for other people?</p><p>PBS has those <i>Live from Lincoln Center</i> concerts with such luminaries as Patina Miller, James Naughton (who I will always remember as the Gentleman Caller in Paul Newman's adaptation of <i>The Glass Menagerie</i> with John Malkovich, Joanne Woodward, and Karen Allen), and Megan Hilty, these ones recorded in the Allen Room of Frederick P. Rose Hall at Lincoln Center, the windows of which look out on Central Park and Columbus Circle. I watch the performers here and there, but whenever the camera angle is large enough, I look out those windows at the traffic barreling down the streets, and I wonder how often my father drove those streets. You would never have caught him on public transportation like my mother had done when she grew up in White Plains, New York. She always said to my father that he never knew a true New York winter. He never had to ride the bus. He never had to walk in the snow.</p><p>I'm sure many of those drivers are as impatient as my father was, but it's because of his experiences driving in New York that he was able to navigate anywhere else in the world. We always joked that you could drop him in a paper bag, take him out to the middle of nowhere in, say, Kansas or Iowa, and he would be able to find his way around without hesitation. That was his gift. When we were first tourists in Las Vegas in 2007, and had never seen the city before in our lives, he knew where to go. I have that ability, but only locally. I can get you through Ventura, but not via the freeway (which is more a leisurely three-lane highway, and much more manageable than the six lanes of Los Angeles), since I never see it as a driver.</p><p>I know that in my search for him, my father would also want me to find what interests me about New York City. I think if the day ever came, I could visit it, but not in winter. I'm not trained for that, and never lived in such a climate, having been born and raised in Florida, spending all of my life in the bottom half of the United States, including Nevada, and now California again. But I love parks, and I've always been curious about Central Park. Ditto Lincoln Center itself, including the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts there, which has a wealth of theater performances on film and tape. For that alone, if ever given the chance, I don't think I'd ever leave that library.</p><p>So for me, YouTube is also a window onto Central Park and Lincoln Center. Watching the walking tours of Central Park, I wonder how often my father was there. He was most certainly talkative about the Bronx (he was born there and revered it his entire life), but I never thought to ask him about all those other parts of New York City he knew. He seemed to be so thoroughly of the Bronx, even given the brief period he actually lived there (I think he and his family moved from there to New Jersey when he was 7), that maybe it would have seemed strange to take him away from the Bronx, however briefly, even in questions.</p><p>Last Thursday, I started reading <i>John Steinbeck, Writer</i> by Jackson J. Benson, in honor of my old friend at the Ojai Library, the aging, slightly waterlogged copy that I found out was weeded from the collection there. This copy, purchased through AbeBooks, came from the Butte County Library in Chico, a discarded copy. I've always been curious about Steinbeck anyway ever since visiting the Steinbeck house in Salinas in 2006, but as I read the biography, looking forward to reading about the process of writing <i>The Grapes of Wrath</i>, I slowed down. I read about his years at Stanford University, his caretaker job at Lake Tahoe, and it became clear to me: I don't think I can be an out-and-out Californian. I like living in Ventura, I love the weather, which is incredibly convenient, but I don't have that overall appreciation of vast spaces and rugged independence. In the moment, sure, but not something I think about often.</p><p>This realization came to me because on page 138, with Steinbeck still in Tahoe, I thought about John Cheever. I've always felt closer to John Cheever. I saw Frank Perry's adaptation of his short story <i>The Swimmer</i> on Turner Classic Movies once when I was a senior in high school in Pembroke Pines, Florida, and I was completely stunned by it, devastated by the ending. When I was a student at College of the Canyons in Valencia, California, I found a volume of Cheever's short stories and finally read <i>The Swimmer, </i>as well as his other short stories and then moved on to <i>The Wapshot Chronicle</i> and <i>Falconer</i>.</p><p>I'm a Florida native, Southerner by birth, but not by blood, as I often define it. But I have New York City, and by extension, the east coast, from my parents. It's there forever. It's why I could never become a true Californian, but it's not an everlasting conflict within me. Parts of California have interested me, but never the whole thing at the same time. The north's perception of the south, for example, and vice versa. That interests me. But the overall life? The overall feel? No. I've always felt close to Cheever and his examination of the slow, conflicted, hidden simmer of east coast bedroom communities. Closer, historically, than I've been able to find for myself in California. Its history interests me, and I study parts of it, but to step inside is difficult for me. My history is east coast, even though it's likely I'll never see it extensively again, and I have no desire to visit Florida. We moved around so much that I never really felt I had roots there. So it doesn't matter as much.</p><p>Besides the East Coast connection I also feel closer to Cheever because in 2008, I wrote an essay about <i>The Swimmer</i> for an anthology by the Online Film Critics Society (of which I was a member) that ultimately never happened. I reread <i>The Swimmer </i>as partial research for the essay. I may post it here sometime, but I believe that experience is what hooked me on Cheever, and defined more my place in the world, where I am in relation to where I'm living. After discovering that while reading up to that point in the Steinbeck biography (I'll go back to it after I finish reading those new biographies), I put Blake Bailey's biography of Cheever on hold at my local library, as well as the Library of America volume containing all of Cheever's short stories, to rediscover them, being significantly older now, 12 years after writing that essay. I have spent a great deal of my life moreso in living spaces and the routines involved than anything else, so perhaps that's why I also connect to Cheever, that middle-class aspect. And Cheever lived in New York, too, just like my parents. Steinbeck has a place in my reading life, of course, but Cheever has a bigger place. It's in my genes.</p><p>Right now, I'm watching a YouTube video of a walking tour of the Upper West Side in Manhattan, "Columbus Circle & Lincoln Center," as the title notes. The first shot looks way up at the skyscrapers at the intersection of 9th Avenue and West 59th Street, and I wonder how often my father saw those buildings, if he was ever in awe of them or if they were just a normal part of his life, not something you really look at when you live in that environment every day. Then the walking tour begins, with another quick pan-up at the buildings, and then back to the sidewalk.This is the one video, the browns and grays of the buildings, and the windows alongside, that makes me wonder what I might have been like if I had been a New Yorker, too, if neither of my parents had moved out of the region. Would I have even cared to notice any of this? I wonder if my personality would have become more jagged, or more expansive, perhaps. The buildings, the windows, still fascinate me, though.</p><p>YouTube also has the full 2017 Thanksgiving Day Parade on CBS. Before this year of no usual Thanksgiving Day Parade, the CBS broadcast was always my favorite. And I'll probably watch this one again in the next few weeks because the sole focus of the NBC one was the Broadway performances in front of Macy's and the parade itself in tight shots. Never the atmosphere of New York City, or at least one part. In the CBS broadcast, they're on a platform way up, across from the Hilton Midtown hotel, and there's a greater stretch of buildings behind them. It feels more naturally New York, the crowd less processed than it feels on NBC.</p><p>Still the windows and the wonder. Is my father somewhere in the New York City of today? Or is he in the books of the past? I'll keep watching, and I'll keep reading. I know he's with me, but I want that context, too.</p>Rory L. Aronskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18173518202611695171noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2000154353586469196.post-61152850194634520812020-10-22T14:30:00.005-07:002020-10-22T22:22:16.584-07:00The Honey Roasted Peanut Guide to Sesame Sticks<p>It started at Dollar Tree.</p><p>A month, or two months, or three years ago (these last five years have been so very long this year), my sister and I were across the street from it at the FedEx store for her to turn her recent birthday present printed on regular paper---creamy shots of the ocean, likely here in Ventura, about to charge onto the sand---into a bigger collage on glossier paper, pulled from a .jpg on the flash drive she brought with her for the guy at the counter to do it.</p><p>She had first seen the shots at the Latitude Gallery in downtown Ventura, but the price for a framed print would have only been acceptable if we could have climbed inside of it to live in it, in lieu of rent. </p><p>So that was the best way for our budget. And after it was arranged, price paid, receipt given along with when to come back to pick it up, we thought about where else to go. Nothing in the current shopping center. No notepads needed at Office Depot, no lamps at Lamps Plus.</p><p>But there, across this stretch of Telephone Road, was WinCo and Dollar Tree, among other places. I, at least, hadn't been to Dollar Tree in many months. It has a far better selection of books than 99 Cents Only ever will, much as it occasionally valiantly tries (I have four promising ones from 99 scattered around, including "The Leisure Seeker," which became a movie starring Helen Mirren and Donald Sutherland). That was reason enough for me to stop into Dollar Tree.</p><p>We crossed the street, walking past the side of Blaze Pizza, Dollar Tree straight ahead. And in we went for me to see what books I could salivate over.</p><p>But surprisingly, this is not about books. This is about what happened after I picked out three books from the stacks that are such a joy for me to browse, and then to worry over when I think I've picked too many. As an insatiable reader, there's no such thing as too many, except when living in an apartment with limited space, and the front parts of the shelves of my bookcases also stacked with books, besides the standard usage of bookcases.</p><p>No, this is about hunger, temporarily satisfied until it started again five minutes later.</p><p>I was hungry. Arby's was nearby (I like their sandwiches), but I didn't feel like Arby's. Besides, this was a short outing. We'd be home soon.</p><p>I couldn't ignore it, though. I needed at least a little something. And I went to the aisle that has packaged nuts, to see what they offered versus what I pick up often at 99 Cents Only from the Dan-D-Pak brand, mostly almonds and walnuts.</p><p>I spotted a brand called Snak King, which offered a honey roasted mix that appealed to me because it included almonds, but I was curious about the sesame sticks in it. My late father really liked sesame sticks, and so I thought I should try this pack for that, in tribute to him. I ended up buying three because it had been a while since I had had this pack, and what if I liked it and was left with nothing till the next time that my Dollar Tree book craving hit? Besides, I am always in full support of anything honey roasted.</p><p>We left Dollar Tree to walk to WinCo, to see about one or two things my mother wanted to know if they had. I vaguely recall something about cotton squares, but more memorable were the Campfire Marshmallows I wanted to get her as she likes them, usually above what we sometimes get from Ralphs, though far below the seasonal marshmallows that Trader Joe's sells.</p><p>I tore open one of the packs and dug in, looking for the sesame sticks, honey roasted also. I found them, reliably coated with sugar, as many producers of honey roasted nuts tend to do, and I tried one.</p><p>And I stopped dead in my walk. </p><p>More than sesame sticks, my father loved halvah, which is usually a bar made of tahini (ground sesame seeds), with sugar, chocolate, or other flavors. When we lived in Santa Clarita, close enough to Los Angeles to visit the Fairfax District every now and then, he was on the hunt for that in the Israeli supermarkets. I liked it well enough, but I never latched onto it like he did. I love marzipan more, really love it, in the same way he loved halvah.</p><p>But these sesame sticks. I had had my share in years' past, but I never paid much attention to it. This was a different dimension. It wasn't the honey roasted aspect that did it, but the overall flavor which commanded attention, which told you to really think about the taste, what constituted it, where it came from. </p><p>It's salty, yes, but an in-depth saltiness. This is not the saltiness of Lays that you just simply shovel in because they taste good, and the more you eat, the more you get to keep that flavor in your mouth. This is a flavor that asks you to go piece by piece, to really consider it.</p><p>The sesame seeds are an important part of it, obviously. But what really makes it is what I didn't realize at first was the main attraction for me: Malted barley flour. Malted is the keyword, because I love chocolate, strawberry, whatever malts, and malted vinegar, thanks to when John Boston, one of my old, deeply respected bosses, came to visit me here in Ventura and we went to a fish place down South Seaward Avenue, near the best stretch of beach in all of Ventura. It closed since then and is now Pierpont Tacos, but I remember his preference for malt vinegar, and I was curious, too, because it was malt. This also went back to the time at The Signal newspaper that I wanted to be like him as a writer, as a person, and I got into Tootsie Roll Pops for that reason, and even subscribed to the New Yorker for a time because he read it. </p><p>Naturally, the more of something you want, the less there is (except for books, thankfully). And that was the case with these honey roasted sesame sticks. One pack was enough, and I'd save the other two for another time. But I wanted that flavor again. I wanted to think about it again for a while. I wanted the center it seemed to bring, time and space that usually feeds into the obsessive search for knowledge, into more books.</p><p>It had triggered in me another kind of search, too. Even after having the last two packs later on, I knew I couldn't keep buying that honey roasted snack mix from Dollar Tree just for the sesame sticks. Not with the book section always beckoning. I needed to find other sesame sticks that offered exactly what those sesame sticks inspired in me.</p><p>It began early last month. We were shopping at Ralphs and in their natural nut section was a container of sesame sticks. $3.99. A price I normally blanch at, for anything. Mostly in between jobs (though I still work part-time at Ventura College, and I'm thankful for that), trying to gain a solid connection in Ventura, I try to spend as little money as possible. There are necessities, groceries and such, but I've vowed to live as small as I possibly can. Even when I do land something full-time, I'll do the same. It's good training, because it's not worth the consumerist hassle. A local library is always a godsend.</p><p>However, I also judge $3.99 by how far we can stretch it. Honey vanilla almond milk at least lasts for a while longer than regular milk. And I wasn't going to eat this container of sesame sticks all at once, so it would at least stretch for a few weeks. $3.99 wasn't so risky here.</p><p>With Ralphs' offering, I learned that it's a matter of balance between the malted barley flour, bulgur wheat, and the sesame seeds. The honey roasted sesame sticks from Dollar Tree (through the Snak King brand), were on you right away, demanding that you notice, and I liked that. With the ones from Ralphs, you crunch a few times, and only toward the end do you get that weighty tinge of flavor. They were acceptable, they worked as sesame sticks, but it wasn't quite what I was looking for.</p><p>A couple Saturdays ago, while my sister was out with her boyfriend and they stopped at Big Lots, I asked her to look for sesame sticks for me, and she found the Good Sense brand that's ubiquitous in that aisle, Sesame Oat Bran Sticks. I'm nearly finished with the bag now and to me, it tastes too busy, possibly because of the oat bran. That thoughtful flavor doesn't come through prominently enough.</p><p>After that offering, I went on Amazon, scrolling through its pages of sesame sticks. $14.99 for 2 pounds of honey roasted sesame sticks from the Anna and Sarah brand. 3 pounds of smoky bacon maple honey roasted sesame sticks from SweetGourmet for $19.99. 2 pounds of narrow, lightly salted sesame sticks for $14.11 from Yankee Trader. Heftier prices than the $3.99 from Ralphs, and riskier. What if I don't like Yankee Traders' sesame sticks and I'm stuck with 2 pounds? Choose one of them, and that's all I'll be choosing for a while with those prices. Still I look. Still I mull.</p><p>Last Sunday at 99 Cents Only, I was in the nut aisle, picking up my usual Dan-D-Pak bag of almonds (I've given up the walnuts for a while, tired of them), and noticed more formidable-looking packaging for Dan-D-Pak's honey roasted peanuts. "Signature Product" it said on the top right. I hadn't thought much about honey roasted peanuts then. The last time I'd had them was Walmart's brand, which always has too much sugar crystals stuck to every peanut. It's why I haven't gotten them in many months.</p><p>But I was curious about what made Dan-D-Pak so proud of these honey roasted peanuts to package them this way, and I put a bag in the cart. </p><p>Not long after I got home, I tried them and was awestruck. Finally, there's a company that has made perfect honey roasted peanuts! No sugar sprinkled on them like other brands. No honey-sugary crust that completely ignores "peanut" in the name "honey roasted peanuts." The honey was there, both it and the peanut working gently in tandem. An impressive balance for a snack that isn't often known for that.</p><p>And I realized that that's what I'm looking for in sesame sticks, that kind of cooperation. I want that in-depth flavor, but I want it to be meaningful like that, that whoever makes it has clearly thought about what it should be and has undoubtedly tested different batches until they reached their ideal presentation. And these honey roasted peanuts were it, to the extent that every time I go to 99 Cents Only, I'm getting a bag of them. I'm also going to use them as the model for my ideal sesame sticks. I'm not ready yet, but I may take a gamble on one of sesame stick brands from Amazon. If I do, they're going to have a lot to live up to.</p>Rory L. Aronskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18173518202611695171noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2000154353586469196.post-29599921565699115332020-10-19T18:25:00.005-07:002020-10-21T00:21:48.921-07:00Double Concentrated Storytelling<p>My mother, my sister, and I live in an apartment complex that's directly behind Ralphs supermarket. Across the street from the Montalvo Square Shopping Center, which is basically our address, is Walmart directly ahead, and Trader Joe's to the far left side of that lot. I know all of them very well, as we go to Ralphs and Walmart for our basic necessities, and Trader Joe's when we're feeling adventurous once in a while. </p><p>Vons, which is further down Victoria Avenue, and actually sits closer to Telephone Road (which intersects Victoria at the Government Center complex), is more expensive than it's worth, and it's really only for the occasional fill-in that we can't find anywhere else.</p><p>But I know Ralphs and Walmart all too well. In the times I <i>don't</i> go grocery shopping with my mother and my sister, my sister calls me from certain parts of the store, asking if I want this or that, and I know exactly where she is. It shows up clearly in my mind, right down to any display racks that might be nearby, such as in the bakery section. </p><p>Both Ralphs and Walmart feed my interest of finding out where products are from, usually turning them over to read the company name and the city and state, especially Walmart because it feels like a more casual place to do it. I don't go up and down the aisles turning over every product, though, just those that catch my eye. I don't remember how it began, but it's been with me for years. Maybe I'm curious about what these cities and towns might look like, or maybe I just like their names. It may well be a combination of both. </p><p>Neither Ralphs nor Walmart offers a sense of imagination, because I know all those products quite well. I don't buy them all, but I see them often enough. It's not their fault, though, that I'm well familiar with the names and styles of the publishing companies of word search puzzle magazines. Nor that I remain disappointed that Walmart still hosts the Jif vs. Skippy peanut butter battle, with no other peanut butter valiantly trying to fight for their space on the shelves. That's all there is in my Walmart. Nor that I lately walk the aisle of canned tomatoes at Ralphs, not finding the Hunt's low sodium diced tomatoes with Italian seasoning, the only canned kind I really like, and so I mourn. In these two stores, what mostly occupies my mind is what we need to get, and what else I might want that's right there. Both are the stores of day-to-day living. You get what you need swiftly enough because you have other things to do.</p><p>There is a contrast here in Ventura, one that I hope is true of other cities and towns. That contrast is the 99 Cents Only store, which retains its novelty by changing its stock far more often than Ralphs and Walmart tend to. </p><p>It's hard not to notice that anyway, but it's even more acute when you lose something there that's important to you. Case in point was yesterday when we were at our local 99 Cents Only, also on Victoria, and I found that the shelves where peanut butter is had been rearranged to basically show that Peter Pan peanut butter, my absolute favorite, is not there anymore. It might be back the next time we go, but chances are, the way those shelves looked absolutely certain, I don't think there's a chance. Before we went to 99, I had one open on the counter to the right of the stove, and a spare on the larger counter to the left of the stove. The only thing I could think to do in that circumstance was put in the cart a jar of another peanut butter I'd seen many times, one made in British Columbia, Canada, just to try it after I finish my Peter Pan stash, and see if it's anything worthwhile.</p><p>99 Cents Only offers an expedition. You have to linger there. You can't treat it like your local supermarket, where you're in and then out as fast as you can. There are often unusual things here, or even miraculous things. For example, the last couple times we had pasta that we bought from Ralphs, I found the spaghetti---well, mostly spaghetti anyway---to be too starchy. Last night, my sister made a pasta bake with a brand we found at 99 Cents Only called Pastaio, which apparently comes from Italy, and might be from Sardinia, if the company's website is any indication. It was rotini, and it was the first pasta I'd had in so long that tasted like pasta should, not starchy at all. After all those times, I had forgotten pasta could be like this. It was miraculous to me.</p><p>Curiosity also blossoms in 99 Cents Only. The more time you spend in 99 Cents Only expands one's sense of wonder. A minor example from yesterday is when I found three stacks of DVDs on shelves near automotive stuff, and spotted a lone copy of <i>The Leisure Seeker</i> starring Helen Mirren and Donald Sutherland. I was amused because I had bought a copy of the novel it's based on from this exact 99 Cents Only a few months ago. And here was the movie. I bought it, of course, for whenever I can get to it, most likely after finally reading the novel, which is sitting on my nightstand. But I wondered about the journey of this one DVD to get to this 99 Cents Only. Who had negotiated such a deal? Who had determined that the movie wasn't likely to sell any more copies by traditional means? And how is it that there only ended up being one copy? Were there other 99s that received more than one? I wondered.</p><p>The real curiosity for me came early on in our shopping, in the same aisle on the same side as the Pastaio brand pasta. I spotted a longish box containing what looks like one of those old-time toothpaste tubes, with a small green twist cap, and it looks like you have to aim the tip of a sharp-enough knife just so to pierce the metal top. There's nothing to pull off from the covered top. That's your only choice.</p><p>The front of the box announced "De Rica Double Concentrated Organic Tomato Paste," also made in Italy. Immediately, I wondered what made it double concentrated, what the process to make it double concentrated is like, and wondered where in Italy it was made. Looking at the box right now and leaning on Google, I find that it's Cremona, Italy, in northern Italy, known for its violin-making heritage. </p><p>Lately, I've been in a European mood. A couple weeks ago I spotted a novel on Amazon called <i>Scorpionfish</i> by Natalie Bakopoulos and wondered why I haven't read a lot about Greece, especially considering that I love Greek food (I put it on hold in the Ventura County Library system, and am just waiting for the person ahead of me to finish it). I looked at that box with the toothpaste tube of double concentrated tomato paste (we bought it, of course, because it's one of the many kinds of novelties to be found at 99 Cents Only, happening upon what you've never seen before), and wondered the same about Italy. I should read more books about Italy, novels and otherwise, since I'm fascinated with the culture there. And last night, I started reading <i>The Inevitability of Tragedy: Henry Kissinger and His World</i> by Barry Gewen, Kissinger having escaped with his immediately family from Nazi Germany, but losing many relatives to concentration camps. My first reason for reading this book is because it's also governmental history, one of my passions, but Germany also interests me, namely because Peter Schilling, who sang my favorite song "Major Tom (Coming Home)" is German, and there's a kind of devotion to work I admire there, particularly because my mother and I discovered during the summer the Women's World word seek and crossword puzzle books, which are the best that we've had in so long. Both of them are published by Bauer Media Group, a German company.</p><p>Overall, this is what 99 Cents Only does. In your imagination, it takes you to places you either haven't been to in a long time or never been to yet. On one side of the store, to the left of the entrance, they're now selling flip flops, all hung up on the wall there. In another section of the store, in the cold case used to store fruits and vegetables, there were kiwi berries, which I've never had and might have been curious enough about to pick up a pack if I hadn't been spirited away by the discovery that Producers brand egg nog is there again, my favorite egg nog out of all that I've tried. They also have Rock View Pumpkin Nog, another favorite, but far less important than Producers, and as long as Producers is there, Rock View is dead to me. </p><p>I don't mind that egg nog is there already, just like how I don't mind that there were Christmas-themed word puzzle books in the book aisle. With the year it's been, I don't mind seeing all that before Halloween. More cheer like that is crucial, and I bought a quart of that egg nog and two smaller bottles of it. This 99 Cents Only will be my beacon until the end of the holidays because of that.</p><p>For me, a library generally does what 99 Cents Only is doing for me right now. But all patrons can do at our local libraries in Ventura County is pick up holds at the entrance. No one else besides staff is allowed in there. And my beloved Ventura College Library is still closed, just like the rest of my beloved campus. When things get to a point where we can lead a quasi-normal life, and more places are opening regularly, the first place I'm going is the Ventura College Library. And I'm never leaving. I work for the college anyway. </p><p>I know why libraries aren't open up fully again, and I respect that. Besides, from the way things are going, I feel like the Ventura County libraries may start cautiously opening back up in March, but not before. There's enough time for them to set out the policies necessary to open back up, along with planning for the contingencies that will undoubtedly arise from a restless public. That takes a lot of time and talent, and I've seen firsthand that they have the talent to do it.</p><p>But it's not the same looking up books on Amazon in order to fill out the "Tell Us What to Buy" form on the library website, or looking up books there, putting them on hold and waiting. This year has shown how important browsing the stacks is to my well-being, moreso in the college library. That kind of intellectual adventure keeps me whole. The books stay the same, but my interests shift, my priorities in reading change, and I go in each time looking for something different, but am always happy to bump into a different book at random. </p><p>So 99 Cents Only is where it's at for me right now. And I'm sure it'll be more often over the next few months as long as Producers egg nog is there. I need a place to let my imagination fly, besides my reading, and this will do. Also to see what changes, to see what interesting items suddenly appear that I'd never expected to see in a 99 Cents Only store, to wonder, for example, how Vons products somehow ended up here, including the three-cheese pasta sauce we had last night.</p><p>And maybe it works out better this way. In my college library, I generally know what to expect already, even though there are shelves in the stacks I don't see every time. I do know that the Leisure Reading section changes here and there as books that have been there for a while are moved to the main stacks, and new books, fiction and nonfiction alike, come in to fill the gaps (although I'm not sure how it's going to be when the campus opens up to some degree again, because budgets are not going to be friendly at least over the next few years). But whatever drives me into the library, whatever topic I want to read about, I know where it all is. I know which way to go. I know what books I'll pass if I go this way or that way. It's a kind of security for me, stability, my foundation that keeps me upright. </p><p>I do love that at 99 Cents Only, I absolutely do not know what to expect. I don't know what I'll see from one time to the next. Also yesterday, I found blackberries. No blueberries. Next time, it may well be blueberries, but no blackberries, which would have pleased my mother yesterday since she wanted blueberries. I know that all the aisles will retain their general shape, that certain products will always be in certain places. But how they change is what I'm after. Will I find Peter Pan peanut butter again? Or will it go by the wayside like those cans of Maxwell House cold brew coffee did? (Those were mistakenly priced at $0.99 each at the start, and I bought 6.)</p><p>Or maybe I discover something else to hold onto. 99 Cents Only is where I discovered Champion Raisins, which I like far better than Sun-Maid, mainly because in one small box, I found a piece of a branch inside, and it gave me a closer connection to the crop. I liked that, and the raisins are better anyway. The egg nog will be here for a few months and then it'll be gone again either right after Christmas or after the start of the new year. But right there, for a time, I have a big part of what I love during the holiday season. </p><p>Obviously the main reason to visit 99 Cents Only is to save money, and I think even if I got to the point where I was comfortable enough, I'd still shop at 99 Cents Only because there the sense of domestic adventure remains. Ralphs is reliable, but it can't do that. Neither can Walmart. It's the one place I know that makes necessary errands tolerable.</p>Rory L. Aronskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18173518202611695171noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2000154353586469196.post-44932785481368386992020-10-17T15:10:00.011-07:002020-10-18T12:25:16.709-07:00A Traveling Name<p>My name has been in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada. Windsor, Ontario Canada. Saint George, Utah. Reno, Nevada. Cedar Rapids, Iowa. </p><p>I've never been to Canada. I only know it through what famous people have come from there to the United States. Ditto Saint George, Utah and Cedar Rapids, Iowa. I've heard of them. I've no interest in visiting them.</p><p>I only knew Reno, Nevada from <i>Sister Act</i>. Then, after my family and I moved to Las Vegas, I only knew it was closer than it had ever been before. Five years later, we left Las Vegas, and that was still all I knew of Reno.</p><p>I've been thinking about this because of an assignment that Stephen K. Peeples recently gave me. He's a journalist who worked at The Signal newspaper in Santa Clarita when I started as his intern in 2006 through College of the Canyons' Cooperative Work Experience Education program (CWEE). He left the next year, but blessed man that he is, I started working for him again, two years ago on a freelance basis, doing audio and print transcriptions for him (the latter being .pdf files of articles, and typewritten manuscripts that he wants in Word), proofreading, and the occasional rewrite, and we've still got that rapport going.</p><p>Amidst his many projects, he's looking to restore his early career, pulling out unpublished articles from when he was a young journalist, and later articles he hadn't seen in years, wanting them on record in Word. This happened to coincide with the features he was writing for his website about what would have been John Lennon's 80th birthday, and one of my many tasks was to transcribe .pdf files of an article he wrote for the Signal's weekend Escape section from December 2, 2005, which noted that Lennon would have turned 65 the previous October 9. </p><p>I noticed, on the bottom of the three .pdf files containing the article, that he had pulled it all from newspapers.com, and I got curious. I have in my closet a sealed plastic bin containing the entirety of my run at The Signal, including when I was made interim editor of the Escape section for five weeks after John Boston, a 30-year veteran at the paper, left, as he believed, rightly, that they weren't paying him what he was worth, and the owners at the time, based in rural Georgia (which was really useful for a newspaper operating in Santa Clarita, California), were indeed notorious skinflints. I also have some of my movie reviews from the Teentime pages that were in the back of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel's now-defunct weekend Showtime section, which I wrote for from the tail end of middle school to the end of high school. But that's all I've got. I don't even remember what article got me second place in the Journalism Association of Community Colleges' mail-in competition when I wrote for the Canyon Call newspaper at College of the Canyons.</p><p>So I wondered what newspapers.com might have of my work. I went searching, and that's when I found that my name had been in more states and countries than I've been to (only if you don't count when my family and I spent five days moving cross-country from Pembroke Pines, Florida to Valencia, California in August 2003, and passed through Alabama, Mississippi, Lousiana, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona). </p><p>The first time my name appeared in a book was not when <i>What If They Lived?</i> was published by BearManor Media in March 2011. I wrote to Roger Ebert's "Questions for the Movie Answer Man" column in very late 2001 because in his review of David Mamet's <i>Heist</i>, he says that the line spoken by Danny DeVito, "Everybody needs money. That's why they call it money!", is one of the funniest lines David Mamet has ever written. I didn't understand why or how it was funny, and I asked Ebert for his rationale. </p><p>Now, I don't know if Ebert had a full-fledged website up and running at the time, but I remember that my question was answered. And many others followed on the same topic from other readers, who also didn't understand why the line was funny. Then came the publication of Roger Ebert's Movie Yearbook 2003, which contained the Movie Answer Man questions and answers from the previous year. And there my name was, in print, in Ebert's book: "Rory L. Aronsky, Pembroke Pines, Florida."</p><p>I was proud of my reviews for Teentime, but to me, this was a mountain above that, the sun shining on me even brighter. My name was in a book! It was there for many to see! And I had a reason for being in that book!</p><p>Unbeknownst to me, until now, my name had traveled farther. And through newspapers.com, I've found that Ebert's "Questions for the Movie Answer Man" column was in newspapers too, syndicated in many places. I see here that my question and my name appeared in The Gazette of Cedar Rapids, Iowa on Thursday, January 17, 2002. The Star-Phoenix of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada on Saturday, January 19, 2002. The Windsor Star of Windsor, Ontario, Canada on Saturday, December 29, 2001 (which I see is why I made the cut in Ebert's Movie Yearbook 2003; I was right on the edge to tip into the next year). The Daily Spectrum of Saint George, Utah on Friday, January 4, 2002. And the Reno Gazette-Journal on Thursday, January 3, 2002. I was going to graduate high school that year, and I'd barely been out of Florida, save for one notable time in 1994 when my family and I flew on Delta to Newark, New Jersey because my father's grandmother (maternal, paternal, I don't remember) was in the hospital. I was also told that I had been in New Jersey as a toddler, and that I had lost my Cabbage Patch Dolls figurine in the snow and was so upset over it. Only when the snow melted did my father's parents (not really grandparents, which is a whole history in itself that doesn't interest me enough to rehash here) find it and mail it to us back in Florida. I don't think knowing that my name had been in more states than I had been to then would have changed anything. Back then, I was gung-ho on becoming a full-time film critic somewhere, and I was going to get there (that changed after five weeks as an interim editor at The Signal. Not only was I unsure of where the industry was headed, just like everyone else in it, but I determined that I didn't want to live on an ulcer farm anymore. The upside is that the average deadline does not at all compare to a journalism deadline, so it puts me at an advantage in my work because I don't flinch in the face of them). It impresses me now, though, that my name has traveled like that.</p><p>And for some reason, I see here on newspapers.com that my review of <i>The Producers</i> for the website Film Threat ended up printed in the Tallahassee Democrat on Friday, December 23, 2005. I don't think Film Threat ever syndicated reviews like that. They appeared on the website, and that was that. I haven't seen the layout of it yet, but I'm interested to know.</p><p>Besides all that, in scrolling through my journalistic past on newspapers.com, I'm floored at how ambitious and prolific I was. That's not bragging, because I wrote movie review after movie review for the Teentime pages, earning its 2000 Teentime Movie Reviewer of the Year award, its 2001 Teentime Movie Reviewer of the Year award, and because I was graduating high school, the overall 2002 Teentime Reviewer of the Year award. I wanted that full-time career so badly, and man, did I ever try to work toward it. </p><p>I think if I had found newspapers.com's holdings of my work in my 20s, I would have been embarrassed by my writing, thinking to myself, "Thank every powerful god within range that I can do better now than I did before." But now, at 36, having passed the point of no return to 40 (at 35, you still have a choice of sorts, can try to pretend to delay it), I want to remember my mindset back then, that burning ambition, that all-consuming passion for movies. I want to see if all that work (of which there's at least 310 pieces, if not more) reminds me of things I haven't thought of in years, that I didn't realize I still remember. I want to remember the late Bob French, one of the two kindliest editors I have ever known, when I interned at the Sun-Sentinel's satellite office in Weston, whose rare anger came as a total shock. There was one day when he was on the phone and his voice rose with a venom that would seem new to him, and the entire office went dead silent. His anger was an event, much like Halley's Comet. <br /><br />I also want to remember how I thoroughly admired John Boston, the other kindliest editor I have ever known, when I started at The Signal, to the extent that I got into Tootsie Roll Pops because he liked them, and started reading The New Yorker because he read it. I even had a subscription for a time. I'm still in touch with him every now and then, but back then, I wanted what he had, being so completely steeped in the Santa Clarita Valley, where he had lived since the mid-1950s. Having moved so many times in my life, I had never known a place like that and wanted to know what it was like (not for Santa Clarita, just the general feeling). Also, he was, and still is, a phenomenal writer (he writes weekly columns for The Signal, which has been under new ownership, local ownership, for some time now), and that was reason enough for me to want to be in his orbit, to learn how he did it and how he maintained it. When I was 11, I admired Andy Rooney, had a few of his books, and tried to write like him. I realized then that I couldn't because I was Andy Rooney, and I had to find my own style. But what people to admire as I tried to figure out who I was in journalism and what I wanted out of it! I'm glad to have done it, but I don't regret not being in the game anymore. Trying to get my next book projects going is busy enough for me. It's enough just to have the chance to be back in these memories, which don't come about all that often these days in the midst of my writing. But I hope to find pieces, work ethic examples, and moments that could even inform what I'm doing now.</p>Rory L. Aronskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18173518202611695171noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2000154353586469196.post-52239131560811210552020-10-11T14:10:00.002-07:002020-10-11T15:30:53.918-07:00You Age Around It<p>For the past few days, I've been watching videos of the Tomorrowland Transit Authority PeopleMover on YouTube. Living in Florida, for some years close enough to Walt Disney World to go every weekend, Tomorrowland was my dreamworld, a possible vision of the future that suited me, basic as it looked compared to other visions.</p><p>I liked that it didn't have an entire, demanding, underlying structure. You could walk Tomorrowland, you could go on Space Mountain, the Tomorrowland Transit Authority (as it was called in my time), the Carousel of Progress, and let your imagination carry you. You were the future.</p><p>The last time I went on the PeopleMover was long before PeopleMover returned to the name (it was originally the Wedway PeopleMover from 1975 to 1994), as if the attraction wasn't already so obvious by its look and purpose. You could hardly mistake it for the spinning teacups in Fantasyland.</p><p>I missed out on the TTA at my Grad Nite in 2002, because the powers that be at the Magic Kingdom did not want rowdy, near-high school graduates throwing things from above, or jumping out of the vehicles while they was moving, or a host of whatever else their imaginations conjured, though likely accurate enough in years' past to put me at a disadvantage, given my love of the TTA and the Carousel of Progress, which was also closed because Audio-Animatronics are expensive. (Or at least me and the rest from Hollywood Hills High School were near-graduates. I know that there were other schools who had gone directly to Grad Nite after graduation.)</p><p>So the last time I was on the TTA was in 2000, when my father took all of us with him to the Florida Educational Technology Conference (FETC) at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando (According to <a href="https://thejournal.com/Articles/2000/02/01/FETC-2000-Overview.aspx">this article</a>, it took place from Tuesday, February 29 to Thursday, March 2, so I may have missed school then, which was worth it).We arrived early enough in Orlando to go to the Convention Center, see the exhibits, and meet whoever my father knew. (My father also may have wanted to go because Frank Barker of BellSouth was speaking, and even though he was back teaching for four years at that point, my father worked for Southern Bell (which later became BellSouth while he was there) for 19 years, and that experience was still very much with him.)<br /></p><p>The next day, while my father spent the day at the Convention Center, my mother, my sister and I went to what was then Downtown Disney, to walk around, see what we hadn't seen in many years, and we also went to the then-AMC Pleasure Island 24, where my sister and my mother saw <i>Snow Day</i>, and I saw <i>American Beauty</i> for the third time (the first time was a press screening at the AMC Aventura 24 (17 miles north of Miami), and the second time was at the Muvico (now Cinemark) Paradise 24 in Davie).</p><p>The day after, we went to the Magic Kingdom, and my father said he'd meet us later, since he wanted to spend more time at the conference. Back then, with no cell phones, my mother designated a meeting place to check in throughout the day, and I had to. If only I had tried to convince her that Tomorrowland would be a good meeting spot. That would have been very convenient, because as soon as we got to the Magic Kingdom, and decided where to meet up, I made a beeline to Tomorrowland.</p><p>Before that, at the Ticket and Transportation Center (TTC), which is also the monorail station, we learned that it was an Early Entry Morning for passholders and hotel guests. We were neither, but after hearing of our experiences going to Walt Disney World every weekend when we lived nearby, and sometimes during the week just for dinner, the older guy manning access to the monorail station let us through. And because of that, and my rush to Tomorrowland, I was able to ride Space Mountain three times before it started to get crowded.</p><p>Except for meeting up throughout the day and eating wherever we ate later on, I spent the entire day in Tomorrowland. For a while, I hung out in the arcade that used to be next to Space Mountain, and took advantage of the CD jukebox that played the music throughout the entire arcade. Sheryl Crow's "All I Wanna Do" sounds nice that way when you're walking around and also peeking through the one of the large porthole windows at the back, watching the train chug by. </p><p>I don't remember if I went on Space Mountain a few more times that day. I probably went on the Carousel of Progress once or twice, or, I hope, three times at least. I wouldn't have missed that for anything, being one of my dearly favorite attractions. </p><p>But one thing hits me now that I wasn't quite aware of that day, or even all the other times I went on the Tomorrowland Transit Authority (and I'm sure I did <i>many</i> times that day, because with its constant cycling, which is one of its notable features, there was never a line for it). After passing the taller view of Cinderella's Castle, and turning into a tunnel, you pass an extensive diorama of Progress City, which was Walt Disney's vision for the future, and also inspired EPCOT. What's amazing about it is the dusky blue horizon in the background, which seems like it could stretch even further back.<br /><br />But after that, on the right, is a portly robot waiting to board a small rocketship called the Cross Galaxy Express, the area of which, in one YouTube video, is decked out in muted Day-Glo colors, and in other later ones, up to at least March of this year, somewhat brighter.</p><p>When you're actually riding the Tomorrowland Transit Authority (PeopleMover is for those who ride it today), it's hard to take in all the details like that, like the sign for the Cross Galaxy Express, not only because you're moving fairly swiftly, but because there's so much going on around you, such as the brief memory of the diorama, and the narration playing above you, and next the windows looking down into what was then Mickey's Star Traders (souvenir store), but is now called just Star Traders. And then you're looking out on the Autopia track on the long stretch to Space Mountain.<br /><br />It took the YouTube videos to really make me see the details of the robot waiting to board the rocketship, the Cross Galaxy Express name, the Day-Glo poster for Pan-Galactic Pizza, "Hot Delivery - Right to Your Planet." But one thing YouTube videos like those absolutely cannot express is the sheer number of years that have passed and all that has happened within them.</p><p>I last rode the Tomorrowland Transit Authority in 2000. Since then, I graduated high school (and lost out on riding the TTA at least one more time because of potentially rowdy Grad Nite attendees), moved to Southern California (first year in Valencia, the following eight years in nearby Saugus, all in the Santa Clarita Valley), worked as an AVID (college-facing program) tutor and as a substitute campus supervisor at La Mesa Junior High, where my father taught; attended , and graduated from, College of the Canyons; was an intern and then associate editor and then interim editor for the weekend Escape section at The Signal newspaper, also in Santa Clarita; moved to Las Vegas for five years; worked in the Clark County School District in myriad positions, finishing out my time there as an elementary school library aide; went through all of the stress and worry and sorrow of my father's stage 4 colon cancer diagnosis; moved to Ventura; spent a lot of time looking for work; witnessed my father pass away from the cancer, and my beloved, elderly dogs a few months before that; worked for a failed startup; was hired by Ventura College to work as an Instructional Lab Technician in the Learning Resources Center; worked as an administrative assistant at LIV Sotheby's International Realty in downtown Ventura; finally made it into the County of Ventura government after two solid years of trying, working a temp job in Elections for the Presidential Primary this year; worked again for Elections in early August for about a week and a half, ahead of the November election (there may be more work to come, but I couldn't work in their new, makeshift call center in Oxnard when I was offered because one, I don't have a car right now, and two, I'm within walking distance to the Government Center, where I worked all those times before, and wouldn't give that up); and am hopefully in the running for a few other job prospects.</p><p>And that's not to mention everything else in between, including my first book published in 2011 (which is thankfully still on Amazon), all that I clung to fiercely to try to survive in Las Vegas (including the roast pork at #1 Hawaiian Barbecue at the Walmart shopping center next to one of the runways at McCarran International, and the Vietnamese iced coffee at 99 Ranch Market on Maryland Parkway), the five years I volunteered at the Green Valley Library in Henderson, the two times I was a substitute library aide at Paradise Elementary on the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) campus, and immediately went to Lied Library in the hours before I had to report to work, and got lost both times on the way back, etc., etc., etc.<br /><br />And here I am, well after graduating high school, 36 years old, and the robot and the rocketship and the Cross Galaxy Express sign are all still there, still lit up in Day-Glo colors. They never changed. They were spruced up, but their basic functionality never changed. 20 years and it's all still there. That's the kind of longevity we hope for in many things, but we age around it. I know that if I ever went back to the Magic Kingdom, I would still spend the entire day at Tomorrowland. Since 2000, I have added to my interest in science fiction with the <i>Tron</i> movies, especially <i>Tron: Legacy</i>, still hoping for a third one. I love the <i>Blade Runner</i> movies, and at least once a month, if not on DVD at least, I watch clips of <i>Oblivion</i> on YouTube, which also came from Joseph Kosinski, whose <i>Tron: Legacy</i> made him one of my favorite directors.</p><p>I'm still trying to actually read science fiction, because I know the imagination can be much more potent than what you see on the screen, but I haven't been able to settle in as much as I'd like to. Other books get in the way (lately, it's a collection of essays by the late Brian Doyle, who I discovered in one of the <i>Best American Essays</i> anthologies, and I'm anticipating new biographies of Eleanor Roosevelt, John Steinbeck, James Beard, Jimmy Carter, and Abraham Lincoln from the library), but I'm also trying to find the right way in for me. I watch the <i>Star Trek</i> franchise here and there, and read it occasionally, too, but I want to be consumed by science fiction. I haven't found that entrance yet, which I hope will be the equivalent of when I used to walk through the entrance of Space Mountain and hear the recorded orchestral introduction that held the inspirational promise of the future. That, and the space music track further into the walkway, are the only two tracks from Walt Disney World that I have on my computer and still play occasionally.</p><p>So there's the robot still waiting for the flight. There's the old Tomorrowland Transit Authority logos on the Red Line rocket ship and a nearby column. There's the sign on the lip of the boarding window that says "Watch Your Rollers," before the robot that's in the ship to lift off. And I am older now, with a lot more responsibility, and far more ideas for books and novels and poetry and plays than I had back in 2000 and earlier (15 pages' worth in a Word file). But the wonder is still there. Wonder that the robot sculptures still stand. Wonder that the Day-Glo still glows. And, thankfully, I still remember the wonder I had wandering Tomorrowland, riding the Tomorrowland Transit Authority, and imagining and dreaming. I can count it as one of the few times I truly felt at peace in my life, and it's something to carry with me as I continue to seek it. To remember that sense of wonder is valuable. I think it's more muted in me now, more attuned to how I can use it in my own work, but I can get back to it whenever I like. </p><p>The robots are still there because they're invaluable to that part of the TTA experience. Or upper management hasn't been able to think of what to replace them with. Either way, it's quite a contrast to look back on them on YouTube and realize not only that they're still there, but how far back I remember them. My life wasn't free and easy then, either, but in that day in Tomorrowland, and the other days I was there and went on Space Mountain and the Carousel of Progess and the Tomorrowland Transit Authority, I lived my purest life, completely free to imagine, inspired, engaged, endlessly interested in how all of it ran and how that atmosphere was created. It certainly ties into who I am as a reader and a writer today, and I do like knowing more now than I did then, but it was really something back then to feel my imagination expanding as wide as the universe. I hope to have it again.</p>Rory L. Aronskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18173518202611695171noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2000154353586469196.post-4212722866477904562020-10-02T00:48:00.014-07:002020-10-02T13:37:37.878-07:00Pandemic Disappointment<p>I found out yesterday that there's a new Steinbeck biography coming out called <i>Mad at the World</i>, the first in 25 years as the marketing claims.</p><p style="text-align: left;">After filling out the "Tell Us What to Buy" form on the Ventura County Library website, to urge the powers that be to buy it, I suddenly remembered an old friend I hadn't seen in a while. It resided comfortably at the Ojai Library, possibly my favorite library in Ventura County (it feels like a wood-paneled reading room without the wood paneling, although its ceiling beams are crucial to that atmosphere), and one of my all-time favorite libraries, alongside Lied Library at the University of Nevada Las Vegas (UNLV), the Boulder City Library well removed from Las Vegas, and of course the Ventura College Library (more formally the Evelyn and Howard Boroughs Library).</p><p style="text-align: left;">In the Ojai Library, my old friend used to face the first window before the side entrance to the Ojai Library because that's where biographies once were. It was a paperback edition of <i>John Steinbeck, Writer</i> by Jackson J. Benson, that I occasionally bumped into in past years elsewhere, but never fully read it. </p><p style="text-align: left;">The Ojai Library not only invites you to explore what's deepest in your mind, but gently encourages you to give a try to that which you put to the side but can't completely dismiss because it's part of you. Before the end of last year, when my mother, my sister and I were in Ojai, I vowed to take it home with me and try it again, instead of eyeing it hopefully and then walking away like I usually did, certain that I already had too many books to carry home with me on the bus. I wanted a souvenir of Ojai to take home and this was it, and generally, whenever I checked out books in person from that library, I always read them because I didn't want to lose the magic I felt they had by dint of living there.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Here's the thing about institutions, such as libraries, that are closed during the pandemic: The people who make them what they are get busy. They reorganize. They streamline. Projects that were pushed to the netherworld because of the sheer number of things to do every day to keep a library open to the public rise and demand the attention that they know is now there.</p><p style="text-align: left;">For libraries, this also means weeding the stacks, taking a good hard look at what's gotten dusty, waterlogged, warped, but stayed on the shelves because that's what the library had. Take a book still readable in those conditions off the shelf and the hole it creates might not be filled. It's budgets, how many new books can be bought in the fiscal year, and a host of other factors. Sentimentality comes into the weeding, but there's no place for it if the library is to remain vital and approachable.</p><p style="text-align: left;">That's the reasonable, public-facing explanation. Sadness is left to patrons like me.</p><p style="text-align: left;">It's not that <i>John Steinbeck, Writer is</i> bad; it was always just the sheer length of 1,184 pages that I didn't have the patience for throughout the years, much as I admire Steinbeck and want to know more about him. The same thing happened that time before the end of last year. I didn't get through it. Now that I've taken up reading a lot more than I used to (and not just because of the pandemic; this has been going on before that), I figured that it was time to seek out my old friend, that somewhat waterlogged copy sitting elsewhere in the Ojai Library, away from that particular window, but still there.</p><p style="text-align: left;">I thought it would still be there. I looked it up in the Ventura County library catalog, and I was crestfallen. All there is of Jackson J. Benson is his biography of western writer A.B. Guthrie, Jr. and his anthology of critical essays about Steinbeck's short novels such as <i>Of Mice and Men</i> and <i>Cannery Row</i>. My old friend, one of many things that made me feel at home at the Ojai Library, is gone. Weeded. Every time I went to the Ojai Library, before biographies were moved, I looked for it as I passed by that first window, and sometimes that was all I would see of it. But it comforted me that it was there, the possibility that I might try again. With this pandemic, there are a lot of "Had I knowns..." in the world and of course, had I known, I would have sat down and finally read it the last time I checked it out of the library.</p><p style="text-align: left;">I decided to do something to honor it. From what I can tell so far, Interlibrary Loan isn't available again yet in Ventura County. I'm sure that not every participating library is at full strength yet for that. I wasn't going to wait, though. So I went to AbeBooks and found a fairly reasonably-priced paperback edition of <i>John Steinbeck, Writer</i>, under $10, which, for a 1,184-page book is pretty damn good.</p><p style="text-align: left;">This time, I will sit down and read it. Not because I paid for a copy, but because my old friend deserves it as a fond farewell. Should the day come when I can once again go inside the Ojai Library, I'll miss seeing it. I hope it got at least one more try with someone else.</p>Rory L. Aronskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18173518202611695171noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2000154353586469196.post-80045905297404485232020-09-28T17:47:00.008-07:002020-10-06T17:25:03.427-07:00Pandemic Disconnect<div style="text-align: left;">Last October, I was hired at Ventura College as an Instructional Lab Technician
I, Learning Resources, working only on Saturdays, mostly for CSU Long Beach's
Master of Social Work satellite program, which met in the wired classroom on the
far side of the B.E.A.C.H computer lab. I want to say that the hours were 9 a.m.
to 4:30 p.m., with the students in the program attending two classes, with a
lunch break in between at 12:15. The only thing I consistently remember now about the classes
is that it was my job to make sure the Internet connection, the webcams, and the
microphones (for the students to ask the professor questions or participate in
the discussions) worked for the entire day. On those rare Saturdays when the
classes didn't meet (and I think there were two in that pre-pandemic time), I helped out
students in the computer lab, since it was open on Saturdays from 8 a.m. to 1
p.m., far shorter than the rest of the week. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">I remember some of the faces of the
CSU students now, not the names. After the pandemic hit, I was assigned to Ventura College's distance education help desk, sitting on my laptop at home every Saturday to
field calls via Skype and answer any emails that arrived in the distance
education inbox, which was more and more as Ventura College switched completely
to online courses. I remember striving to be as dedicated to these students in
the CSU program as my late father was for all his students in his teaching
career. In fact, I like to think my father had a hand in my being hired for the
job. I love campuses, especially college campuses, and it started with him,
because he taught at Silver Trail Middle in Pembroke Pines, Florida, where I
attended 7th and 8th grade, and I had the run of that campus, especially when
the school opened its own campus after winter break one year. During that winter
break, my mother, my sister and I were there with him, moving things into his
classroom, organizing things, all the while other teachers and administrators
were doing the same. It was the only time in his career he got to open a
brand-new campus. But it stuck with me, and very likely he knew how hard I'd
been trying to get into Ventura College and here was the chance. He saw
computers being involved, he knew I had the skills to do it, so here it was. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">But
the pandemic brings on this immense feeling of disconnect. Was I really in
charge of the tech side of the CSU program? Did I really do all that? Did I
spend a few minutes every Saturday morning daisy-chaining a few of the
microphones so the students at those particular tables could use them, even
though one of the rows of two students had to step over the cords because it was
the only way to make it work? Was I really paying attention to some of the
coursework, genetic inspiration from my mother's degree in sociology, which had
a large presence in these courses? Did I really have my beloved college library
one floor above me, and the ability to dash up there during a break in the
morning class to return the books I'd finished and check out new ones?</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">Memory is
valuable to a writer, and we can play around with it as we wish, either simply
writing an essay about certain memories, or turning them into novels. But the
challenge sometimes is trying to recall the exact feelings we had in those
moments. I felt pride in the CSU program. I still do whenever I receive the
weekly email from the program with the Zoom links for the classes. I'm not
physically involved in it right now (and won't be at least through the
spring, as CSU Long Beach and Ventura College, among other campuses, are still
going to be online-only), but I remember my dedication to it. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">It's hard not
having that Saturday to be on campus. When I was with the County of Ventura the
first time in that temp job in Elections for the Presidential Primary earlier
this year, I couldn't work Saturdays because I had the college. They understood
that I'm under contract to the college, and I wouldn't have had it any other
way, especially given that I was being paid more by Ventura College on
Saturdays. But I miss being able to pivot from government work to the campus.
When I returned to Elections in early August for some preliminary work well
ahead of the general election (most likely with more to come once ballots in
California are mailed out to registered voters), the work day ended on Friday,
and then nothing the next day. No campus to go to. Besides that, when I started
at Ventura College, there was Alexander Fredell, also known as Rock, who was the
nights and weekends attendant there. In the evenings and on the weekends, he was
the highest-ranking figure on campus. He had all the keys, he had the golf cart, he
had such extensive, deep knowledge of the campus and the college district that I
aspire to. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">We got along well because we had the same passion for history, the
same wide-ranging interest in art, the same knowledge of pop culture, including
Adult Swim. After every single conversation of ours, I just wanted to dash up to the college library and feed my passion for history, which became greater in his presence. And he was, and still is, an enormously talented graphic artist. I
knew that every Saturday, with him and I sharing the same office (at least until
it was time to set up the CSU classroom---putting out the microphones and
plugging them in, testing the webcams, etc), there would be a conversation that
I could only dream about the rest of the week. Rock had started out as a student
at Ventura College, and ended up working there in so many different capacities.
Nights and Weekends Attendant was only the latest. And he was pursuing at least
two degrees at CSU Northridge, including a Bachelors in history, still in
progress. He was there on what became our last days on the campus before it all
shut down because of the pandemic. I kept up my work on the DE student help
desk, and he was going for something much bigger. He had always been valuable to
the Ventura College campus, including heading up the student help desk from
home, and creating modules for students to use to familiarize themselves with
the basics of online learning. And then he finally reached what he had wanted
for so long: He was promoted to Marketing, Communications and Web Design
Coordinator for the entire Ventura County Community College District, even more
convenient for him since he lives in Camarillo and the district offices are
there, too. There were times when he attended classes at CSU Northridge and then
drove to Ventura College for his evening shift as Nights and Weekends Attendant.
I don't know how he managed it as he did, without exploding into molecules, but
he did, with a lot of energy drinks to further boost his abilities. After all he
had done for Ventura College, he deserved it, especially being able to work
where he lives. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">I've been trying to think of the word that could describe how I
feel about all of this, about not being part of the CSU program in that way,
about not having Rock around anymore. What happens to a soul when all that is
suddenly lost, for someone like me who has known nothing but change all my life
and had hoped this would at least last a little longer (I know that life is
nothing but change, but having moved 17 times, I'd like <i>some</i> things to
last a little longer)? I'm grateful for the time I had, and may it at least
continue in person with CSU Long Beach some day. But I think I found the word:
Hollow. It's not only losing all of that so quickly, that regular ability to
connect like that, but I like Ventura. I felt that with what I did within the
CSU program, I was contributing something good to my town. I wanted to keep
building on that. It's kind of a hazy void. I'm glad that Rock reached the
pinnacle of his goals, and at least there is the joy in that having happened in
the midst of all this desolation. That's another good word for it. Because where
do we go next? Do we dare try again? We should, because that's what there is.
This is life, no matter the circumstances. We've got to keep trying somehow. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">So
here I am, gradually accepting yet more changes yet again. I'm still in touch
with Rock here and there, but I know it won't be the same as the intellectual
theme park I reveled in every Saturday. When I read the weekly emails from the
CSU program, I try to imagine the progress the students must be making. It's not
the same as actually being there in front of them, monitoring the webcams and
microphones, listening to the questions they have, and the professors'
responses. But this is life, even with the pandemic-driven holes still there. So
what now? What next? </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">I found a bit of consolation recently. My local library
system is becoming more advanced in its ways. For one, in the coming months,
they plan to eliminate all overdue fines. During this pandemic, when the
libraries were able to open back up on a severely limited basis (only available
for picking up holds, and then only while standing at the front door at the
table set out in front of it), they decided not to charge overdue fines because
there was a 5-, and now 6-day quarantine for books dropped off in the book
drops. They hold them for 6 days before they check them back in. I guess this
got the director of the libraries and assorted staff thinking about whether
overdue fines have any value to the system anymore. They found that last fiscal
year, the $64,550 in fines collected amounted to less than 1% of the system's
operating budget, according to the Ventura County Star. There's not much
significant financial value in it. But that wasn't what impressed me, even
though it is admirable. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">Ever since my family and I moved to Ventura in 2017, if
I wanted a specific edition of a book, say one of the
<i>Best American Essays</i> editions that come out every year, I had to go into
the old version of the library catalog on the County library website because
they had a space to request a specific copy when you put an item on hold. I last
tried that two weeks ago, when I wanted the 1997 edition of
<i>Best American Essays</i> from the Ojai Library, and they sent me the 2001
edition from the E.P. Foster Library in downtown Ventura. No one even read that
part of the request. I'm not sure if the system even has that capability
anymore. So it was a most welcome surprise to me (nice to have that in the midst
of a pandemic) to find that the regular County library catalog now allows you to
reserve specific copies on your own. In the <i>Best American Essays</i> listing,
for example, next to the information about each copy is a link that says
"Reserve This Copy." You click on it, type your library card number and your PIN
number, and then choose the library you want it to be sent to, and that's it! I
am reading the 2001 edition of <i>Best American Essays</i> anyway, but once my
holds list is below 20 titles again, I'll put the 1997 edition on hold that way.
And I found that it works wonderfully, because when I was searching for the
complete essays of Montaigne, I found that I had two choices: the Fillmore
Library or the Ray D. Prueter Library in Port Hueneme. I chose the Prueter
Library and now that specific listing says "Transit Hold." It's on its way to
me. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">This is a comfort because I can't see the Ojai Library like I used to, nor
wander the historical stacks of the Foster Library (just like the Boulder City
Library in Nevada, they don't seem to weed anything, and I'm grateful to
them for that), and when I put the 1997 edition of
<i>Best American Essays</i> on hold, I know exactly where it is in the Ojai
Library. In my mind this way, I can walk around the only library in the system
that feels like a wood-paneled reading room without the wood paneling. The
Prueter Library in Port Hueneme feels like my spirit library, even though I've
never been there, because their holdings are so imaginative and so curious about
the world. There's also a naval base in Port Hueneme, which may explain that
approach. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">It's nice to have a choice of libraries for holds, although I wonder
what that will do for each branch's circulation numbers. Will patrons still just
use the general "Request Item" option, which pulls the title from any County
library that has it, or are they going to be as specific as I am? I hope it
raises the numbers, because it's nice to have an even greater choice like this.
And we can support our preferred branches even more this way while waiting for
the day to come when we can go inside again. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">That seems to be the only approach.
These changes have happened and will happen more and more. All we can do is hang
on to the stability we can find. Being able to put books on hold from specific
branches is good enough for me.
</div>Rory L. Aronskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18173518202611695171noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2000154353586469196.post-31270586564408297182020-01-09T22:05:00.000-08:002020-01-13T09:33:34.769-08:00The Heart's Crossroads (Without Having to Choose Only One)My heart yearns, reaches for different places. Not necessarily to live there (except for Ventura, where I do), or even visit, but just to know.<br />
<br />
On California Street in downtown Ventura, which is the most direct access to the beach, at least if you're not driving (else you have to stop in the parking garage on the left side at the end of California, in the looming shadow of the Crowne Plaza hotel), there's the Channel Islands Lodge No. 214 for the Masons, though they place it on East Santa Clara, because that's where the entrance is. But the side that I gape at is on California, about three floors, all brick on that one side, going up, up, up. I look at it, I gape, and my mind thinks of...New York. New York City. My family genes in motion in my mind and my heart, being that my late father was from New York City and so is my mother. Mainly, I think about my father in such instances because he lived New York City, he drove those streets, he knew them. My mother lived in New York City too, a regular bus rider, but my father knew full well right off the rhythms of those streets, how you had to keep moving lest you wanted a taxicab up your ass as a fashion accessory. The brick of the Masons building on that side of California doesn't look as hard as the brick you'd find on some buildings in New York City, because it has never lived the life that those New York City buildings have. But in my mind, while I look up at that building from that empty parking lot, which is seldom used, I think of those streets. I imagine my father walking them at times, but mainly driving. I look for him in that brick, and I also think about how badly I want to read more about New York City, in history as well as in novels. I think to myself that I will get to it, provided other books don't get in the way. I try to carve out a section for them, because I want to try to find my father in those pages, to get a greater sense of him through the New York City that others have seen and lived and felt deep in their bones. I will.<br />
<br />
Of course, I think about Ventura too, the history I still very much want to know. I know some, like how before the Ventura County Government Center was on that particular sprawling spot on Victoria, it was all lemon groves. Same with Via Ventura, our first apartment complex, on Telephone and Saratoga. All lemon groves, too. I also know many times over that the Barnes & Noble shopping center on Telephone, which includes Michael's, PetSmart, Ethan Allen, Sprouts, Kohl's, and a few other places which don't seem as important with how large those loom, was once a drive-in movie theater called the 101 Drive-In (for the 101 freeway, which abuts Ventura at that certain point). I also know about the movie theater on Mills, near the mall, which showed the first Star Wars trilogy when those were originally released. I love movies, which is probably why I've found out more details about both theaters than really anything else in Ventura. But I'm getting to know more, since I live here and I like it here and I hope to be here for a long time to come. For example, I know very well the security guard station not a few feet after you enter the Hall of Administration in the Government Center, as that's where I've taken so many tests, been on many job interviews, and will hopefully be working there soon, even temporarily so I can do my damndest to get my foot in the door in pursuit of full-time work. But I had no idea that there's a security command center in the basement monitoring the cameras all around the Hall of Administration. More security than the one security guard there which, no matter who it is, is always a good soul. There are terrific men and women there (When I was a volunteer at the Green Valley Library in Henderson, Nevada for five years, I knew Ed, its now-former security guard, quite well. I was also a substitute campus supervisor at La Mesa Junior High, where my father taught, for six years, which provided a kind of security on the campus, also herding students to class and escorting students to the office at the radioed request of whoever there wanted them, and monitoring everything going on during lunch). Of course there are also the maps in the Hall of Administration and the various departments, and I've been interviewed in many of them, and been there when the Board of Supervisors has been meeting, watching some of the proceedings on the closed-circuit flatscreen TVs they have at the entrance to the chamber. I want to know much more, though. I've been to the Ventura County Museum back when they had an exhibit of menus from various Ventura County restaurants in decades' past. I'd love to dig into the history in the research library they have there and I have an angle I may want to pursue as a book, about Ventura County's only empire, an unusual one compared to the typical definition of an empire, but no less important to us here in Ventura County. <br />
<br />
And then there was today, full-on rush back into my Southern past. I'm a Southerner by birth, not by blood, having been born in Florida, so I don't have all of what the South is thought to be in personality and range of memory. I do have a fierce love of biscuits, sweet tea sometimes, but most especially storytelling as it is in the South. I adore how time is taken to tell a story well, to comb through all the memories, all the details, to slowly yet surely find that path that draws it all together and touches the heart. <br />
<br />
I was at Ventura College this morning, where my sister has begun her latest pre-nursing semester, taking another math course as well as Children's Literature as an elective. Today was her second day of the new semester, but I went with her because the administrative assistant in my department, English, Math and Learning Resources, had her last day today ahead of transferring to the Student Services Center a mere hundred feet away, in the Admissions & Records department, a stepping stone in her ultimate career desire to become an academic counselor, as she's also finishing up coursework for her graduate degree, with the major test coming in February involving so much that made me think that the tests I endured in college weren't so bad. <br />
<br />
That was my main objective, because when I joined the department as the Instructional Lab Technician in the Learning Resource Center on Saturdays, mainly overseeing the tech side of California State University Long Beach's Master of Social Work satellite program (there are two classes, one at 8:30 and one at 1 p.m. (with time in between for lunch), both done via webcam, with local CSU students in a classroom in the LRC set up for just this purpose, with the webcams and with microphones so they can ask the professors any questions they might have, or participate in the discussions, with one microphone per two students), Susana was not only willing to answer any questions I had, but she also informed me in my first week that even though the Associated Students of Ventura College (ASVC) office was closed on that particular Friday, she called over so that Angeles, one of the main figures there, would know that I was on campus and would be coming over to get my picture taken for my ID. I think I was there that day to also get my TB test done, as is required by the Ventura County Community College District (VCCCD, which also oversees Oxnard College and Moorpark College), and was grateful to her that I could get that done at the same time, as that ID also serves as my bus pass, all bus routes being free to VCCCD students for another school year. I might well be the only staff member who uses the bus system regularly. <br />
<br />
So I wanted to see her in person and bid her a fond farewell, even though I had essentially done that already by email. Sure she's only going to the building next to us, but people get busy, and our department still has needs to take care of. This was also one of those days when I didn't have to go to work early downtown, and I found out yesterday that there was going to be a Classified Senate meeting from 10:30 to noon (Classified being where I am, amidst administrative assistants and others in the same realm. Even though I only work Saturdays, as per my contract, I was still very much welcome and welcomed at the meeting), I had to see what that was all about too, and as it turned out, I met a lot more people here than I do on Saturdays. I needed to get a greater sense of the college I call home. And I did.<br />
<br />
But before that, after wishing the very best for Susana and also talking to my boss, the dean of the department, for a little bit about <i>Jeopardy!: The Greatest of All Time</i> (she's obsessed with it and even though she's very much a fan of "Jeopardy!", it sounds like she's even more excited about this), I spent time in the library one floor up from my department, a library that I consider my true home in Ventura. This is a library that breathes, that leads, that senses what you want and guides you to it, sometimes without you knowing that you wanted it in that very moment. It happened to me today.<br />
<br />
At 9:45, I decided to go to the restroom in the way back of the library, which, from the Quiet Reading Room, involves walking past the shelves of discarded books and textbooks being sold by Friends of the Library, and walking past the librarians' offices as well, including the head librarian, whose mess of an office I admire. It's not a mess for the sake of being messy, but a determined search for a sense of order, just as soon as this one thing gets done, and then this other thing, and then oh look, it's time to go home. That mess has personality. <br />
<br />
After the restroom, which is one of the many things I love about being on this campus (it's always clean, but more than that, it actual feels restful), I pulled up the library catalog on my phone to look for <i>The Road Taken: The History and Future of America's Infrastructure</i> by Henry Petroski, which I had returned to the E.P. Foster Library downtown in order to replace it on my nightstand stack of books with <i>Nemo Rising</i> by C. Courtney Joyner, billed as a sequel to <i>20,000 Leagues Under the Sea</i>. I found that the college library had a copy of Petroski's book and I figured to get it there since I always keep space on the shelf of one of my bookcases for books from the Ventura College Library. <br />
<br />
I tried. I looked it up and I was ready to go find it. Actually, even though I had intended it to be the one I checked out today (the other four slots of my library account are still full, with five books maximum allowed to be checked out), I got distracted once again by the Leisure Reading section near the entrance/exit of the library when I first walked into the library. It was there that I found out that last October, <i>The Fall of Richard Nixon: A Reporter Remembers Watergate</i> by Tom Brokaw was released and I knew nothing about it. This was the first time I had seen it. I needed to read it and there went the one slot I had for <i>The Road Taken</i>. In Leisure Reading, I also found <i>The Optimist's Telescope: Thinking Ahead in a Reckless Age</i> by Bina Venkataraman, and thought to myself, "Ok, I'll save that one for next time. And The Road Taken, too. And I need to write this out on the ASVC notepad I have so I can keep these in mind for the next time my library card's empty."<br />
<br />
I don't know how or why it happened. After leaving the restroom, I had the location of <i>The Road Taken</i> on my phone and was going to look for it. Then, within the Library of Congress classification system that the library uses, I somehow ended up in F209, which I call the Southern section. My life. Part of my heart. I couldn't believe the sheer number of books about the South there was. I mean, I know that there are so many books about it, but this particular selection! There are four volumes of <i>Encyclopedia of Southern Culture</i> and I intend to read all of them. In this section, you can have your pick of Alabama, South Carolina, some of Florida and all the others, Virginia, too, that make up the South. The book that got me deeper into getting back into the past that rests within me was <i>Heart of a Small Town: Photographs of Alabama Towns</i>, which I flipped through and knew I could finish it before I left for the meeting. Didn't have to check it out.<br />
<br />
I looked through these deeply evocative photos of street corners, storefronts, churches, parlors in Alabama, and also the quotes that accompanied them, which I include here after transcribing the photos of them from my phone into a Word file I called "Southern Passages":<br />
<br />
<i>"When I’d finished I sat on the corner of Phil’s father’s stone and smoked a cigarette and enjoyed the utter quiet of that country graveyard. I watched the Spanish moss swaying, swaying, in the two live oaks by the gate. I was in a kind of spell when I left, peaceful, thinking placidly. . . of all the generations which had passed this way since the Spaniards landed in 1519."</i> – Eugene Walter, <i>"The Back-Roads"</i><br />
<br />
<i>"When death visits our little town, each one left knows that he is diminished, by little or much. No man here is a nobody. Everybody is a somebody. And the sadness at death is genuine. What is more, long memories hold the departed in mind and heart. The vacant church pew, the missing face, the voice, the laughter—the good and not-so-good are remembered and missed."</i> – Viola Goode Liddell, <i>A Place of Springs</i><br />
<br />
<i>"What was this building used for in the past?" he said.<br />
"It was a church, then a bank, then it was a restaurant and a fancy gambling house, and now we got it,” Halley explained. “I think somebody said it used to be a jailhouse too."</i> – Ralph Ellison, <i>"The Golden Day"</i><br />
<br />
<i>"Now, as a matter of fact, I have called in the Devil just recently. He is the only one who can help me get out of this town. Not that I live here, not exactly. I think always about somewhere else, somewhere else where everything is dancing, like people dancing in the streets, and everything is pretty, like children on their birthdays."</i> – Truman Capote, "Children on Their Birthdays"<br />
<br />
All of these quotes are me. I yearn for Spanish moss, even though I only saw it once in person, on the way out of Florida, through Tallahassee, essentially at the beginning of a five-day cross-country drive, moving to Southern California. Death, well, I know exactly how that quote feels. And Truman Capote's quote, well, I'm not looking to leave Ventura, but as has been witnessed here, I do think about other places. But Ventura allows that. It senses that many of its residents are from other places and those places are still in our minds. It gives us space to still explore whatever we want about them, and it doesn't mind because we are here. We chose Ventura. <br />
<br />
I loved the photos in that book, and besides these quotes, there were others also in the book that impressed me just as much that I only copied down the authors and where the quote came from in order to find where those stories appeared and to hopefully find them in other books so I can read them in full. Those authors and titles are in my phone, and that's going to take a little while. But I don't mind. The South is a significant part of who I am, not the typical South as others know it, but Southern as I know it, as I carry it within me. <br />
<br />
So here I sit with a Ventura College sticky note with four titles on it, including one I found a little while ago in the college library catalog called <i>Swinging in Place: Porch Life in Southern Culture</i> by Jocelyn Hazelwood Donlon, from the University of North Carolina Press in 2001. I desperately want to read that one because I know some of that culture. I've lived it. I wish for that ease that porches bring, but I find it in other things here, including my home library at Ventura College. So that suits me. <br />
<br />
But here is this list. And there on my shelf is not only the new Tom Brokaw book, but also <i>How the Post Office Created America</i>, <i>Ten Restaurants That Changed America</i>, and two others I had intended to read during winter break, when the campus, and therefore the library was closed, but never got to them because public library books horned in, including ones on Interlibrary Loan. I think I would like to read them now, but there's the South calling to me in those books. Is it strong enough to prevent me chucking them to the side if something else comes along that sparks my interest? Is my Southern heart stronger than that? I'd like to think so. I hope so. These ones reach me deeply, pull at me hard, beckoning insistently. Here is where I once was and I need to go back to it. I need to know more. <br />
<br />
I used to think that I could pick only one, that it was either New York City (even though I haven't seen as much of it as my parents and ironically don't have a great desire to go beyond perhaps seeing the FDR Presidential Library and Museum some day in Hyde Park, and Strand Book Store on Broadway in New York City) or Ventura and therefore more of California history, or my origins in the South. We only have so much time to live as it is, but as it happens, I don't think it's a crossroads of the heart with me. I go down one road for a bit, turn around, and go down another one. Yet, with those quotes above and what I read in that book, the South in those words is how I want to write, how I want to live in my books to come. So maybe more of that. But the others can remain. I'm not sure yet whether I'll read what I checked out from the college library, or return them all (except for the Brokaw book) and start over. But based on what I've found there, and that F209 in the library beckons so wildly to me, I think I'll be with it for quite a while. This is the road I'll take for some time in order to reacquaint myself with that Southern storytelling tradition, which may also be in me at this very moment, to be unearthed in whatever story feels right. I don't know, but I know this feels right, right now. Hopefully longer.<br />
Rory L. Aronskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18173518202611695171noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2000154353586469196.post-55062948625431721962019-06-01T00:47:00.002-07:002019-06-01T00:50:36.766-07:00The Empty RoomsTo those who might check in once in a while to see if I'm still absent, this has been a longer absence than usual.<br />
<br />
In August 2016, while we were living in Nevada, my father was diagnosed with stage IV colon cancer. There was surgery due to extreme pain that discovered it (Nevada is where washed-out doctors go to practice, and he had complained of stomach pains to the one he had, but that doctor laughed it off and just prescribed more pills), followed by chemotherapy sessions, and then back to Southern California, to Ventura this time, where there was more chemotherapy, ER visits, three hospital visits, and at the beginning of this year, the decision to enter hospice, not least because we had been going at it alone for two years, all of us, and hospice could at least provide a level of support that was crucial, because his body could no longer handle the chemotherapy. In that same month, we had to have Tigger, our 15-year-old miniature pinscher/Italian greyhound, and Kitty, our 13-year-old Italian greyhound/terrier, put down, as they were elderly and desperately ailing. Tigger likely had kidney failure, as there were many times when I'd be walking him, and he would lift his leg, even though he had already peed before and had nothing to give. He thought there was more. Kitty's joints were causing her so much pain, but even with that, she still often dashed in her way to the side of my recliner, wanting to come up and cuddle with me. It was devastating when we had to let them go, particularly because the night we had to do it was the night my father came home from the hospital the second time (he had been in the hospital once the year before). I stayed home with him because he wasn't back in our orbit yet, and my mother and my sister went to take our dogs to the all-night vet that was nearby.<br />
<br />
Unfortunately, it wasn't only the dogs. I'd like to cancel the rest of this year because on Wednesday, May 22nd, my father died. The end of his battle with cancer. He died with us remaining three surrounding him. Also, I was born on March 21st. My sister was born on March 23rd. He was incommunicado in that hospital bed in the living room by the time it happened, but he was still very much there. He couldn't talk, his eyes were closed, he was sleeping most of the time, but it's apparent to us that he chose the day, or, rather, the night: the 22nd. He wanted to be between me and my sister. <br />
<br />
We still have so much to do, a sudden new world to inhabit, to figure out what we do without our patriarch, without our dogs. We had only just begun to reluctantly accept that our dogs were gone when this happened, and it made it fresh all over again. Three in one year. In the immediate aftermath a little over a week ago, I wondered if anyone had discovered a way to go to sleep afterward and then wake up fully-formed in the next phase of life with everything good already arranged.<br />
<br />
Alas, here we are, our apartment too quiet. He had a presence, a personality that filled a room, even in his silence. And we've been getting e-mails from his former fellow teachers, principals, assistant principals, and so many others who remember him fondly. There's been an outpouring of support from students and staff at his final high school, the one he said was the teaching job he had waited for for 40 years, the one he loved the most. He wanted to be at Graduation so badly at the end of this school year that we're going to go in his place, as they plan to honor him during the ceremony.<br />
<br />
Still so much to do, so much to go through. I may write more about him, the fond memories I have (he was the only one of us that you could drop into a town he knew absolutely nothing about, and he would be quickly be able to find his way around), and in fact, I might have already in past posts, but I also plan to get back to writing more often. Not just in this blog, not just my book reviews for BookBrowse. I have an 11-page ideas file in Word that I really should start cracking, novels I want to write, poems, children's books. My father died. My mother's getting older. No more time to waste.Rory L. Aronskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18173518202611695171noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2000154353586469196.post-9336206656836801712018-11-15T13:27:00.003-08:002018-11-16T00:17:13.791-08:00Where Are You in Your Mind?Last night, while trying to get to sleep, I fretted about having so many ideas for nonfiction books and adult novels and YA novels and picture books and still more, and yet I haven't made much headway on any of them. Not out of laziness or ambitions being bigger than my abilities, but I guess it's the paralysis of choice. At least in the way I saw it before thinking about it more this morning.<br />
<br />
I wish I could live in a library. Not necessarily a public library. Probably a college or a university library on a sprawling campus (the best kind), with enough space for regular exercise, walking and perhaps eventually even jogging, and a supermarket nearby, maybe some fast-food joints, a bookstore here and there (not only on the campus) to see what's being sold in the area based on what's continually in stock, and perhaps a movie theater or two. In this, I think about Lied Library on the University of Nevada Las Vegas (UNLV) campus, which is all on Maryland Parkway, which I consider the most vibrant corridor in Las Vegas, which, if continued to be developed properly, could be one of the great hopes for the city perhaps being known a little more for something else than what it already is and always has been. Further down is the Boulevard Mall, which includes 99 Ranch Market, Goodwill, Ross, Seafood City, which is the local Filipino supermarket, and a Wing Stop Sports bar which, if you know Wing Stop, is much larger than your average Wing Stop, with lots more individual tables, TWO soda dispensers, an honest-to-god bar with alcohol, which is considered amateurish by Vegas standards, and big flatscreen TVs all around. I would have wanted to live at Lied Library, if not for the extreme desert heat and cold that I endured for five years. But that library, my god. Not only was there always more than enough room to walk the UNLV campus, but in the two times I was there as a substitute library aide at Paradise Elementary, which is also on the UNLV campus, I got lost on my way back from Lied Library to the school, before starting work there at 10:30 a.m. Both times, I didn't think I'd get there on time.<br />
<br />
The stacks inside Lied Library are so massive that they're located on three successive floors, four if you count the serpentine design of the Leisure Reading section on the first floor, which I never noticed until the final time I was there, as part of our family's farewell tour of Las Vegas, which was cut short at the Wynn on another day when the movers called and said they were going to come to move us out on Sunday, and it was Friday. I was impressed by the sheer number of interesting titles in the Leisure Reading section, which, being in a university library, was far more extensive than Ventura College has in its Leisure Reading section, but it's no less interesting here.<br />
<br />
The stacks with call numbers A-HJ are on the third floor, HM-PR on the fourth floor, and PS-Z on the fifth floor, all under the jurisdiction of the Library of Congress classification system. And with what they have, with all the presidential history books I could ever want, translated novels from different countries, every subject that could pop to my mind on a given day (from architecture to music history (especially 1970s music) to various biographies and memoirs and still more), I could easily spend the rest of my life there if such a thing were possible.<br />
<br />
And yet, there are other libraries throughout the country, too, such as the New York Public Library (the main, famous one) and other university libraries which very possibly hold as much, if not more as Lied Library. Chances are many of them do, though. It would serve to make me indecisive, but there are considerations which limit me, such as weather. Nothing on the east coast since it gets too cold in winter. Same with the Midwest and in the Great Plains, tornadoes and such, so I wouldn't want to root myself there either.<br />
<br />
But that's what it comes down to: Roots. I don't have any. We moved so many times throughout Florida, twice in Santa Clarita (although we did end up in Saugus for eight years, after our first year in Valencia, but there wasn't much in Santa Clarita that made me feel rooted, although I do miss Stater Bros. supermarket), and five times in four years in Las Vegas, owing to various bleak circumstances, such as neighbors next to us and above us smoking constantly and the smoke seeping into our apartment, which caused us to move out after that year), as well as last year at Via Ventura here in Ventura, which ended with our dogs having a massive flea problem because they never properly treated the grounds, and now at the new Island View Apartments, behind the Ralphs supermarket. It's interesting, what with a fourth-floor rooftop deck that takes in a lit-up view at night of Oxnard and Camarillo, further to the west, that's far more impressive to me than the Las Vegas and Los Angeles skylines. <br />
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Therefore, to be connected to a place? To know it intimately? To feel a sense of civic pride in it? I don't know how that works, nor do I think I'd want to learn. Not that I think we'll move again so quickly, although I hope we don't, as it would be interesting lately to be in one place for more than one year, and by that I mean one apartment complex, but we didn't have a choice from Via Ventura to Island View. We had to get out of Via Ventura, which looks progressively worse and more desperate to bring in tenants since we left. Maybe there's a chance with Island View. There are a lot of problems within the apartment, which are actually much better than what we came from at Via Ventura and before that in Las Vegas. But they do take their sweet time in addressing them. When the Santa Ana winds howled through recently, an incredible draft blew through the gaps in the front door, which made the vertical blinds in front of the sliding patio door billow and I really felt it, since I sleep in the living room, my bed there and my bookcases nearby, towards the back door (it's a two-bedroom apartment, so my parents have the master bedroom, and my sister has the other bedroom). I like it because my TV serves as the living room TV and I've got the kitchen right there. What more could I want for a room? But that front door, which is actually considered the back door by the complex, since what is actually our front door, with our number on it, faces a hallway that leads to doors that open into garages also for rent by residents, needs weather stripping. I'm guessing right now, even though the manager of the complex came with the head maintenance guy last week to look over exactly what we needed adjusted and repaired, they'll run out the clock leading up to Thanksgiving and then let it sit until after Thanksgiving. Hopefully they'll address it afterward, but it's been sitting for so long. Even so, still better from all that we came from, including a bungalow in nearby Henderson, Nevada that had shoddy, stringy carpeting, black mold behind the washer and dryer, and a leaking air conditioning unit from the ceiling that not only required us to put a bucket underneath to catch the drops, but which broke down before the hottest day of the year that year, after a few times in which the shitty maintenance crew there insisted that nothing was wrong with it. It seems to me that matters of shoddy maintenance, as well as delayed maintenance, seem to only exist in the western United States. Never had that in Florida. Can't go back, though, what with hurricanes getting worse, and as a native Floridian away for so long, I've most likely lost my immunity to the humidity.<br />
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Anyway, through all of this, it took many years to realize that books, and moreso libraries, have always been my home. I seriously considered a career in aviation, first as a commercial pilot, and then an aircraft mechanic, and then a mechanic for Air Force One, before then trying journalism, which, even though I'm proud of what I did there, I left because I didn't want to live on an ulcer farm. And it was afterward that I realized how much libraries have been there for me. I started reading when I was two years old, and I particularly remember, before Hurricane Andrew hit South Florida in 1992 (we lived in Coral Springs, and only got the feeder bands, but they were fierce), worrying about not being able to return <i>The Little Mermaid</i> soundtrack on audio cassette to the Coral Springs Library, since they had closed right before it was due, and any fines that might accrue because of that. Fortunately, I don't think there were any after they reopened. I also remember ignoring my math homework from Broward Community College on Friday afternoons when I was in the Southwest Regional Library in Pembroke Pines, diagonally across from the then-tiny campus, in favor of looking for movies to watch on the weekend, which was how I discovered <i>The Fabulous Baker Boys</i>, starring Jeff Bridges, one of my favorite actors, which became one of my all-time favorite movies. In fact, since my dad dropped me off early at BCC before he went to work as a computer and business education teacher at Silver Trail Middle just down the street, I was always there before the library opened at 7 a.m. and spent my entire semester there before we moved to Southern California. Subsequently, I failed that college Algebra course and had to retake it when I registered at College of the Canyons in Valencia.<br />
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There are lots of other stories like that, and libraries have always been my one true home like that. Oftentimes, in my head, in my imagination, I go to those libraries I've loved. I spend time in the stacks at Lied Library, I walk through the Whitney Library on Tropicana in Las Vegas, proud at how they always consistently met the needs of that at times-downtrodden community, and reluctantly ignoring the awful, distracting tile flooring at the main Clark County Library on Flamingo, also in Las Vegas, to admire their paperback collection, as well as their eager interest in so many other subjects in the hope that others will be interested, too. I also look at photos on Yelp of the New York Public Library, as well as photos from inside other university libraries and imagine myself there. In each one, I feel like I'm home. It's why I like living in Ventura. The Ventura College Library is my favorite place in Ventura and between that and the holds I always have from various locations in the Ventura County library system, I'm never short of books.<br />
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All this helps me to not panic so much over all that I want to write and haven't begun yet. Those works can be a second home for me. Characters to meet and follow, ideas to expand on. Places in my imagination to explore, unusual things I've thought about that I wonder if others think about, and the only way to find out is to write them and see who reads them. It's more difficult, more challenging than simply opening up a book and reading, but I want to try. Our main computer here in this apartment doesn't feel as much in a dungeon as it was in that apartment at Via Ventura, so that's a start. Plus there's a lamp next to it and it actually becomes cozier at night. So there's some encouragement. Just try. Get up and try. And with enough effort, these stories I want to tell can come to feel like my life with books and libraries. Another place in my life to fondly call home. And I know it will never move.Rory L. Aronskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18173518202611695171noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2000154353586469196.post-82686035562855921562018-11-13T15:11:00.001-08:002018-11-13T23:44:23.270-08:00Desire, Long After a MealAs a Las Vegas resident, it was often difficult to get to absolutely everything that the city offered in food, at least that which interested me. There'd be that long stretch of summer in which practically hibernating in one's apartment with the air conditioning running 24/7 was critical, at least until 9 or 10 p.m., when you'd strategize about what to put in the cart at Smith's or Vons that wasn't so critical in refrigeration, and then try to get deli last so that it wouldn't be so affected by how warm it still was outside. Ice cream you'd have to rush home, and forget doing that during the day because it would immediately melt. It's why we never bought cans of shaving cream during the day, and then even when we were looking toward summer, we'd stockpile them so we wouldn't have to buy them as often. Otherwise, they would have exploded when bringing them from Target to the car. And in winter, sure you could stay out a little longer if you were bundled up enough, but the desert cold is still uncomfortable enough to make one laser-focus enough on what's already known. In most cases, it would be a long, pilgrimage drive to IKEA with the heater on full blast in the car.<br />
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So based on the weather in Las Vegas, and how hard it was to live there most of the time, in apartment living and in work, options were comparatively limited, but no less interesting or reliable. Vietnamese iced coffee came from the VeggiEAT Express counter in the small food court at 99 Ranch Market on Maryland Parkway, near Ross and Goodwill further down, which backed right into the Boulevard Mall on the same property. Although I've heard since we moved that VeggiEAT Xpress closed at 99 Ranch Market, I worshipped it. Every time I went there, I knew I was getting heavenly Vietnamese iced coffee and always the warning when I ordered it without ice that it would be too sweet. <i>I didn't care!</i> We went to 99 Ranch Market once a month, maybe twice, and I wasn't wasting the chance. I knew I could go there and it would always be excellent.<br />
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And then there was roast pork from #1 Hawaiian BBQ on Eastern Avenue, which was next to the street that was the main artery to the Walmart shopping center, next to the back of one of the runways at McCarran International. This particular Walmart was one of three options for us. There was the one on Marks Street in Henderson, a slightly sprawling shopping center, which always had the Sunset Station hotel tower in full view, as well as a 99 Cents Only store further down to the right that had more books than I've ever seen at any other 99 Cents Only store, in Santa Clarita and in Ventura. I think it was because this store, as well as the Whitney Library on Tropicana and the main Clark County Library on Flamingo, was attuned to people's needs during the summer. Being that we couldn't go out much, if at all, during those torturous hours, they knew what people might want and they supplied it. I got the sense that more people read in Henderson, even in Vegas, than they seem to here. <br />
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There was also the one on East Serene Avenue, which had a Wienerschnitzel nearby, an Office Max next door, and a Home Depot on the far right end of the property. That one was the more serious of the Walmart Supercenters in Las Vegas. It didn't loom like the one on Marks did, and in fact, I have an idea for a novel set in that one. And it didn't have the momentary distraction of planes taking off next to you at the McCarran one while you got out of your car and locked up before going inside. You simply joined the subdued herd and went in to get whatever you wanted. That was the domestic game, though. If one Walmart didn't have what you were looking for, you went to the next one, and then the next one, and always kept track of which Walmart had what, in case you didn't want to spend too much time in one.<br />
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Anyway, about the roast pork, I knew that was the ultimate for me. They did it well there and it was the only place I'd swear by for roast pork. Same with Capriotti's Sandwich Shop and their Bobbie, with turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce, and mayo. <i>Once</i> in a while, I'd drift to the Slaw Be Jo (roast beef, provolone cheese, cole slaw, Russian dressing and mayo), but 90% of the time, the Bobbie was for me. I love Jimmy John's here in Ventura because they don't show off like Jersey Mike's does, and their sandwiches are often better, but I still miss my Bobbie. However, I never want to go back to Las Vegas, for anything, so the Bobbie will remain a fond memory.<br />
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It's different in Ventura and its relatively nearby environs within the county. Take tomorrow, when I have to go to the Ventura County Community College District office in Camarillo for a test for an Office Assistant position. The office is on East Daily Drive, and about a block or two from it is an intimate strip mall that contains Basil & Mint Vietnamese Cafe. Now, when we moved to Ventura, I swore by the Vietnamese iced coffee at Pholicious, which has since been renamed Pho & Tea, in the food court at the Pacific View Mall. But the first time I had to go to that district office for a test for another job I didn't get, we discovered that strip mall, that Vietnamese restaurant, and I was curious. Could they possibly have Vietnamese iced coffee? And what was it like?<br />
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As it turns out, if I must compare Vietnamese iced coffees between the present and the past, the iced coffee at Basil & Mint is worlds better than the iced coffee at the VeggiEAT Xpress counter at 99 Ranch. After the second or third time, I learned from my favorite waiter there that they make the iced coffee every morning, using Cafe du Monde coffee from New Orleans and condensed milk of course, and it's the coffee that makes it because of the chicory. Now, I could buy the coffee and the condensed milk and try to make it myself, but I prefer to anticipate it. I don't need it all the time, and I know, having been to Basil & Mint four times, that there is absolutely no chance I could be disappointed by it in the future because the owner of the restaurant is entrenched in Camarillo, as his cousin owns Bigstraw Boba on Verdugo Way, in that leafy shopping center, near the Old New York Deli & Bakery. And there, at Basil & Mint, I always get a Vietnamese iced coffee right when I arrive, and then another, to go, on the way out. That's my tradition there.<br />
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I also think about the sandwich I had from Westridge Market in Ojai a few weeks ago, when my mom, my sister and I went up there for the day. It was a baguette sandwich, from Boars Head, an Italian sub, as they called it, with Genoa salami, pepperoni, capocollo, lettuce, tomato, their deli dressing, red onion, and provolone cheese. I'm not into Italian subs, and I only try a bit if someone else in my family gets it, but this was the most perfect sandwich I had ever had. I didn't know much about baguettes before this, but I think it is the perfect sandwich bread because it requires the sandwich maker to be subtle, not to overload it, to offer flavors not often considered, and to meet the demands of the bread. It all has to work together and not spring apart because there's too much between the baguette slices. <br />
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I won't ever forget that sandwich and I'll hope to have it again the next time we go to Ojai, if we don't end up at Ojai Pizza Company again, or even Bonnie Lu's, a country cafe that has pico de gallo that I swear was made by fairies. I've never tasted other pico de gallo so fresh like theirs is. That sandwich taught me that it's not enough to simply make a sandwich. You have to think about the bread and you have to think about the ingredients you want to combine. My other favorite breads for a sandwich is straight rye and marble rye. I can't imagine any other kinds for a sandwich and the only time I make an exception is for a standard peanut butter and jelly sandwich with whatever bread we have in the house, which is usually wheat bread. But even with that simple peanut butter and jelly sandwich, that baguette sandwich still looms in my memory.<br />
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I know it's the consistent weather here that allows for such ongoing desire to have what one loves in food. The second best Vietnamese iced coffee, to me, is at Boba Smoothies in what they call the Rose Shopping Center on North Rose Avenue in Oxnard, that strip of stores facing, yes, a Walmart. In fact, we go to that Walmart because our own, much smaller Walmart, doesn't have everything we need, although our own Walmart is still our go-to for disposable razors, toilet paper and paper towels, and I hope they stock Producers Egg Nog this year, although they don't stock much else of the Producers brand anymore, which is still around. It helps that we have it across the street from us, along with Trader Joe's, and our apartment complex is located directly behind the Ralphs supermarket. <br />
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That particular Vietnamese iced coffee from Boba Smoothies is sharp and involving like Vietnamese iced coffee should be, whereas the one at Pho & Tea in the Pacific View Mall is sometimes drowned out by the condensed milk they overuse. Even at the Pho & Tea at The Oaks mall in Thousand Oaks, where the prices are higher, there's still the risk of getting the same kind of Vietnamese iced coffee as at the Pacific View Mall, namely because the same company owns both malls, and it's the same owner for both locations.<br />
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There's a contrast to all this, of course. Last night, we had takeout wings from Wing Stop, and I decided on an order split between their Louisiana Rub and garlic Parmesan, instead of all garlic Parmesan like I usually get. I'm not fond of Wing Stop. It gets boring and the only reason I got a different order than usual was just to see what the Louisiana Rub was like nowadays. Not out of genuine curiosity, but just something different to look at and get it over with. After I finished, it all disappeared from my mind. No further thoughts like the Boar's Head baguette sandwich from Westridge Market in Ojai, no anticipation for it again like the Vietnamese iced coffee from Basil & Mint. Wings don't interest me much, which is probably it. Give me pork, give me turkey. In fact, with turkey, it always interests me how different places roast it, what they use. We don't cook a whole turkey for Thanksgiving. We generally order a roasted turkey breast and it looks like this time it will be from Sprouts, provided my father orders it by the end of the week, which is what he wants, but man, we're getting down to the wire on that. Even so, I never get tired of turkey because of the different ways that I can find it. And I think I know why all this continually fascinates me.<br />
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I never knew who made the Vietnamese iced coffee at VeggiEAT Express at 99 Ranch Market, since it was always already in containers in that glass door refrigerator on the wall behind the register. It had likely been a while since we'd been there and I just wanted it. With the roast pork at #1 Hawaiian BBQ, I sometimes thought about when they might have put it in the oven to roast, what might have been done to it beforehand, but that was it. Once I got my order, I didn't care any more about the methods to my dear madness. <br />
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Here, I know. I can imagine them making the Vietnamese iced coffee at Basil & Mint after the waiter told me all about it. I can imagine the care that went into it, because I can taste it. I don't know who made the Italian sub that I bought at Westridge Market, but it's clear that they love sandwiches. In fact, that sandwich is what shifted my list of my favorite foods. My top two are quesadillas and nachos. My third used to be Fettucine Alfredo, but that one sandwich is what put sandwiches at #3, knocking Fettucine Alfredo to #4, if I even still go for it. I know it was also the setting at Westridge, when we found a table nestled behind a sharp "U" shape of bushes outside the store, that looked out at those majestic Ojai mountains that always make me think, "Who the hell needs TV?" For that lunch with my mom and my sister, there was also deviled eggs and orange milk that Meridith had wanted to try from a glass bottle in that refrigerated section. She and my mom had had sushi, but all that mattered to me was that sandwich. <br />
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Here, within food, it's also the people. Here are people in Ventura County who care. In Camarillo, the rest of the Basil & Mint Cafe menu, besides the Vietnamese iced coffee, is phenomenal. I love their sandwiches there, especially their pork offering, and I can sense the dedication from the kitchen, the pride in their work. Here in Ventura, there are good people. The ones at Jimmy John's are not only fast, but they know exactly what's wanted in each sandwich. They must glance at that order receipt right away and then commit it to memory in a split second. <br />
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Oh, and CJ's Barbecue in this Ralphs shopping center! I nearly forgot about the rib tips and the black-eyed peas there! Pork rib tips, which was already a plus with me, and they do some magic to those, too, but it's clear that whoever does it has been fascinated and completely in love with barbecue for years. And their deep, rich, salty flavoring for their black-eye peas makes it my favorite side. <br />
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See, we're not a demonstrative town. We won't hype anything up like Los Angeles hypes things up all the time, from movie premieres, to expensive Apple store openings, to whatever else requires media coverage. You have to look for what might interest you and then decide, on your own, what's worth your time. There are no outside influences, and that's what I like here. And when you find it, you hold onto it. I don't know who actually makes the ham and cheese croissants, for another example, that Master's Donuts sells across the street from me, but they're the best I've had in Ventura County. If it's actually the ones who run the store, more power to them. I'm not entirely sure because when we ordered one of their enormous donuts in order to thank the movers that we had on the morning we moved from Via Ventura to Island View Apartments, behind Ralphs, it was a croissant box that looked like a shipment box, from somewhere deeper in Southern California. So maybe they do order the ham and cheese croissants to sell in the shop. Even so, they know quality. They're aware of what's wonderful, what would raise their profile even more than it already is.<br />
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It's also like Luna Grill, which is in the Vons shopping center, which I worshipped when we lived nearby at Via Ventura. I haven't been there in a long time since there's been other, closer (and not so close) distractions, but besides their gyros quesadilla being one of the best quesadillas I've ever had, they have baklava wedges that I swore by. In that small kitchen, though, they definitely don't make those. They come from Baklava King in Santee, in San Diego County. And this is another example of people here caring, of wanting what matches the quality of what they already serve. Someone probably fielded offers from different bakeries that make baklava, and decided which one would be best for Luna Grill. And it is indeed as if they made it themselves. <br />
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It'll be the same with Thanksgiving. Yes, we're likely having the roasted turkey breast from Sprouts, and the cornbread stuffing from the Trader Joe's box, and the cranberry sauce from the Trader Joe's jar (the best I've had in so long), and probably green bean casserole and the usual candied yams, as well as pumpkin pie, wherever that might be coming from (I haven't decided yet, although I did like the pumpkin pie we got last year from Vallarta Supermarket in Oxnard, which came from the Jessie Lord Bakery in Torrance, but I might want to try a different one), and very possibly apple pie, too. But I will still read up on how others are celebrating Thanksgiving, what they like, because there is always an interesting combination of flavors to be found in any Thanksgiving feast and actually, despite quesadillas, nachos, and sandwiches being my favorite foods, my favorite meal is a Thanksgiving feast. Not even an hour and a half at Golden Corral (which had its grand opening in Oxnard today, so we'll be going soon) can top that. And there again, I wonder about all those who make this possible. The knowledge. The passion. The care. That's what it means here in Ventura, and I'm glad to have it.Rory L. Aronskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18173518202611695171noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2000154353586469196.post-83296489886400857232018-06-07T13:40:00.001-07:002018-06-07T13:40:14.278-07:00Trial and Error at Ventura Harbor VillageTwo weeks ago, my father and I went downstairs to the elections department in the lower plaza of the Ventura County Government Center in Ventura (conveniently down the street from where we live) so he could register to permanently vote by mail. <br />
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While we waited for his application to be processed, I got to talking again with the delightful bearded guy behind the counter and the subject came around to Ojai, where he had grown up. I told him that whenever we went to Ojai, namely my mom, my sister and I lately, we always go to Ojai Pizza Company, which my mom loves for the pizza and which I love for their iced tea, which comes from Peerless Coffee & Tea in Oakland. I love the Ojai Library for its wood-paneled reading room atmosphere, and that iced tea matches the atmosphere, although I can't bring it there because they don't allow it in there, or any other food or drink. But while I do drink it, I imagine myself in the library in it, no matter if we're in Ojai Pizza Company or eating at the beautiful park nearby.<br />
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The elections guy told me that his favorite thing at Ojai Pizza Company is a calzone with pepperoni, pineapple and extra black olives. It appealed to me because I love calzones, empanadas, any foodstuff that's enclosed. Even McDonald's apple pie once in a great while. Then I raved to him about the pico de gallo that comes with the quesadilla and possibly more at Bonnie Lu's Country Cafe, also in Ojai, about how that pico de gallo is not only the freshest I've ever tasted, but it had to have been made by some means of a magical alchemy or by fairies themselves in the kitchen. There's no other explanation for how spiritually incredible that pico de gallo is, and obviously I've never forgotten it.<br />
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But even as we talked about that pico de gallo, and how he told me, shockingly, that he's never had it, I was thinking about his calzone recommendation. We haven't been to Ojai Pizza Company, or even Ojai itself, since before the sheer fright of the Thomas Fire that also bore down on Ojai. We figured to let time pass after the fire for everything to get back to normal in Ojai, including the water supply (for my iced tea), before we ventured back there. But life got in the way. Me and my sister's constant job hunting. My father ending up in the hospital again owing to a kidney infection and a severely low white blood cell count. Him gradually recovering from that eight-day stay and getting back on chemotherapy. More job hunting. Looking to live somewhere else in Ventura, namely the apartments behind Ralphs. Us exploring in full what might be available there and eventually finding the unit that's right for us, with about 30 square feet more than our current apartment, and slightly more space to work with, including more walls than we imagined, which means more spots to hang pictures, based on the mirror-image apartment we walked through on the second floor of the building across from our new apartment, which showed us what we will have. The apartment complex is still under construction, with so many interiors still to be done, but ours should be ready by mid-July.<br />
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So much to do. So little time to return to our favorite haunts, including the Oaks mall in Thousand Oaks, which I consider the best mall in Southern California. But we want to try as soon as possible before things get really busy, before we move again, before we essentially start living a new life in which Mom has said that the only reason she'll move again is to the beach if we ever have that opportunity, most likely by winning the lottery. Otherwise, this is the place, not least because it's her castle, as she said, along with an apartment number that matches her birthday, the first time the number of an apartment is for her. It's always been for the rest of us.<br />
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Thus, at that counter, I thought about that calzone. It appealed to me since I love black olives, any kind of olives really, a genetic gift from my mother. I could go for that at Ojai Pizza Company. Or maybe not. We haven't been to Ojai since last October or November. It will be easy to cover ground at the Ojai Library again since I'll look at the new releases, which are better than what the E.P. Foster Library in downtown Ventura offers, and certainly better than what my local Hill Road Library has. I'll look at the expansive back wall of novels since there's always something there that pops out to me. But a pepperoni, pineapple, and black olive calzone? I've tried the pizza at Ojai Pizza Company, but I've grown attached to the vegetarian sandwich they have there, which is zucchini, mushroom, red onion, roasted bell pepper, black olive, and tomato. I don't ask for any extras. I love it just the way it is. So would it be worth trying that calzone, risking it being just ok, despite my love of calzones? Probably not, because of how long it's been since we were there. If we go to Ojai soon, and then again before the end of the year, <i>then</i> maybe I'll try the calzone. That would be the better plan.<br />
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It was the same at Ventura Harbor Village yesterday. The trial the past two times we were there is that the arcade hadn't fixed my beloved Galaga machine, only beloved because Galaga's on it, not necessarily the machine itself. The second-to-last time we were there, the image was all stretched out, and I couldn't even see the ship to determine where I was at the bottom of the screen, to try to dodge the aliens' weapons. I could see what I fired, but I was moving left to right and right to left blindly. Then the last time we went, the machine was off, out of order, and I left a note on an index card on the machine, from the perspective of the aliens and the fighter, imploring the arcade to fix it because, "Have you seen <i>Wreck-It Ralph</i>? Do you know what happens to arcade games that are out of order and are then not fixed? Help us!"<br />
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After eating at Andria's Seafood Restaurant, which my mom loves for their homemade tartar sauce and cocktail sauce (it was my parents' 36th wedding anniversary and Mom saw that as the best place to celebrate. She was right), Meridith and I stopped at the arcade on the way to Coastal Cone for ice cream to see if the Galaga machine was fixed. It was fixed as best as could be. I could see the fighter, although where you look to see how many lives you have left, you could only see the tip of the nose of the fighter. If this was the arcade at Sam's Town in Las Vegas, or at Sunset Station in Henderson, or the arcade at The Orleans in Vegas, I would have complained. But this is Ventura, a small town. I'm grateful just to have a working machine, although I haven't been back to Golf 'n Stuff on Walker Street near where we live lately to see if that Galaga machine is still there. Those are the only two that I know I have. That's good enough for me. But I need to know that they're working, that they're still there. And this one was, though I didn't go for it right away, not only because we were going to have ice cream, but I found three credits someone had left in the <i>Pirates of the Caribbean</i> pinball machine, and I wasn't going to give up that opportunity. <br />
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The errors came with what I had at Andria's and at Coastal Cone. I didn't have to think long and hard about what I was going to have at Andria's. Clam chowder. I love clam chowder and Andria's clam chowder is nice enough. Having fresh clams in it makes a wonderful difference of course. But the error in this latest visit was that I ordered a piece of Andria's fish, which they don't list specifically as they do their cod and halibut. The fish was fine, but it turns out I didn't need a piece of fried fish alongside my clam chowder. The clam chowder had been enough, and Meridith shared some of her fries with me. She likes their fries there, since she can dip them in tartar sauce to block out some of the potato taste (she doesn't like potatoes, but there are certain kinds of fries she likes), but gives me the more mealy ones. Of course, there are potatoes too in the chowder, but to me, the fries at Andria's are the best in Ventura, just like the fries at Raising Cane's were, and most likely still are, the best in the Las Vegas Valley. Next time, it's just clam chowder for me and if Meridith happens to order anything with fries again (this time it was calamari and it was much better calamari than the last time we went), I'll have a few. I don't need a big piece of fried fish alongside the sanctity of Andria's clam chowder.<br />
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Then there was the error at Coastal Cone. I had been looking at their menu online the two nights before we went, wondering what to order. On May 31st, we had gone to Baskin-Robbins in the 99 Cents Only shopping center on South Victoria for their $1.50 scoops, which they do every 31st in a month. I had a scoop of butter pecan there, and a scoop of Mom's Makin' Cookies, which turned out to be one of their best flavors. Brown sugar-flavored ice cream, chocolate chip cookie pieces, chocolate flavored chips and a cookie dough batter ribbon. The butter pecan there? I forgot how utterly bland it was and was forcefully reminded this time. I needed butter pecan back, especially the Thrifty version that's offered at Coastal Cone. To me, that's the best one.<br />
<br />
But then I saw on the menu on Coastal Cone's website that they had a 1950's Malt, which is vanilla ice cream, double malted milk, and Hershey's syrup. I love malts, and this sounded perfect. But vanilla? With how infrequently we visit Coastal Cone, I wasn't going to waste $8.50 on vanilla (the prices went up at Coastal Cone and at Andria's, likely because whoever owns the Ventura Harbor Village property raised the rents). And I've also returned to my love of brownies (not excessively, since I'm losing weight pretty well right now, not least because of all the stress I've been going through in the past year and a half, and Dad's latest hospital stay helped me drop a few pounds immediately), so there was also a chocolate walnut brownie ice cream flavor there. Perfect! I'd get more of a texture of something despite ice cream being blended into an almost-liquid. Some blended-up walnuts, brownie pieces. It sounded good! Yes!<br />
<br />
Of course it sounds good before you have it. The ice cream itself is good, when it's ice cream. And I got my malt, a double scoop, but walnut pieces kept getting stuck at the tip of the straw along with fake-tasting brownie pieces as it turned out, and I realized I had squandered my chance at Coastal Cone. I should have gotten two scoops of butter pecan in a cup (I'm not one for cones, unless the cone is something <i>really</i> special, and their fish-shaped waffle cones are smaller in person than they're shown online), and I would have been very happy with that.<br />
<br />
I've tried butter pecan in a malt at Coastal Cone before, and for me, it just doesn't work. I need the texture of the ice cream and the pecans located prominently throughout. If it was any other ice cream place, say somewhere in L.A. that basically requires a two-day drive from Ventura (everything is further away here than it was in Santa Clarita, and if we have to make such a drive, then I want the Getty Center or Philippe's French dip sandwiches in downtown L.A., or Langer's Deli well before some ice cream place), then I'll try a malt again at one of those places since I don't care about the ice cream as much as I do at Coastal Cone and also at Ojai Ice Cream, where those ice creams are homemade.<br />
<br />
Next time, it's only clam chowder at Andria's and only butter pecan ice cream at Coastal Cone. Galaga works, thankfully, and after Coastal Cone, I played it four times. I know that every kind of ideal one seeks is a process of trial and error. And I have it down at Pho & Tea at the Pacific View Mall, where I always get Vietnamese iced coffee and their pork sausage spring rolls. Next time, I might venture toward a Vietnamese grilled pork sandwich, but I know already that it's good, since I had it when I was first experimenting there, back when it was called Pholicious, when I was looking for what was right for me, besides the Vietnamese iced coffee, which I know is always right, and which is the only coffee I ever drink, to the exclusion of all other coffees. I suppose it's a good record, though, being that I've nearly hit upon what's right for me at Andria's within two years (the year before we moved, and nearly a year that we've lived here in Ventura) and at Coastal Cone. In this town, in this region, it's accessibility, based on how often you get to each place. In Vegas, it was easy. 99 Ranch Market on South Maryland Parkway was almost right there, for my Vietnamese iced coffee, and #1 Hawaiian Barbecue on the outskirts of the Walmart shopping center at the back of McCarran International on South East Avenue was almost right there, for my roast pork, and they could always be had. Here, you take time. You really think about things. After the interesting distractions to be had in Santa Clarita and moreso outside of it, and in Las Vegas, Ventura strips your life down to the bare essentials, and it's scary at times. But here, you really do figure out what matters and what to do next and where to go next. At this point in my life, it feels right, knowing what truly matters while looking for my place here.Rory L. Aronskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18173518202611695171noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2000154353586469196.post-86797409970017173052018-04-04T13:28:00.002-07:002018-04-04T13:47:22.662-07:00Tuesdays in LimboIf you ever visit Ventura, arrive on two different days, for contrast.<br />
<br />
I recommend mid-Friday afternoon, to start, because as the day goes on, the town gradually unwinds. By the time you get to 6 p.m. on, before the town begins to close down, there's an unhurried vibe that's especially lovely downtown amidst the restaurants, such as Dargan's Irish Pub and Restaurant, as well as the antique shops and the consignment stores, and certainly the bookstores, too, especially the Calico Cat Bookshop, which you should try before it closes at 5. It's nice just walking down Main Street, to California Street, where the Erle Stanley Gardner building stands stately on the corner. This is where Gardner hashed out the first few drafts for his first Perry Mason novel. Stand here at dusk, looking up at the building, and you feel a sense of history that lingers, which seems rare in Southern California. But it's here for you to look at, to think about, and not just by the plaque next to the side door of that giant concrete dignity.<br />
<br />
The same feeling is <i>almost</i> as prevalent at the Pacific View Mall, particularly in the food court. It feels muted, almost defeated, but there's a kind of quiet you'd be hard-pressed to find in very many other malls. Macerich, which also owns The Oaks mall in Thousand Oaks, which I consider the best mall in Southern California, seems to leave the Pacific View's second floor to the ravages of time, what with how they don't seem to make an effort to attract new tenants to empty storefronts up there. The Oaks has The Open Book, my favorite bookstore in this region, and for that reason, I was given a $25 gift card to it as one of my recent birthday presents. The Pacific View Mall could use a bookstore, too, because inasmuch as there is the beach in Ventura, and downtown Ventura with various interesting shops (and window displays! I love living in a town whose downtown area has window displays!), and Ventura Harbor with its attached Village, it doesn't take long to cover everything Ventura offers. I like having it that way, without the constant rush and hype of Greater Los Angeles. I lived with the tumult of Las Vegas for five years, and before that, nine years of living 30 minutes north of Los Angeles in Santa Clarita. While there were visits to Anaheim and Pasadena and Buena Park and Van Nuys and Woodland Hills and so on from that, I always flitted between towns. In here and then gone. To IKEA and then gone. To Downtown Disney and then gone. I never knew those towns for themselves, although Buena Park with its heavy ghosts of history continues to fascinate me, and I've recently become interested in Burbank, after going back to my palace temple that is Porto's Cuban Bakery after five years away. Not to live there, or in Buena Park, but just what it is. For example, I had no idea that Warner Bros. Studios is just down the street from Porto's, at least not until this visit. I thought it was further out.<br />
<br />
Every night, Ventura gives you space to think, to plan, to possibly even relax. I've never lived in any town before that allows it. But while it's a stringent space of time any other day of the week, Friday nights just gently unravel to whatever you want to do. You could even get the same feeling browsing the magazine racks at the Barnes & Noble on Telephone Road. Even just walking around Ventura Harbor Village before getting ice cream at Coastal Cone has the same effect.<br />
<br />
On the flip side, there's Tuesdays in Ventura. Markedly different from <i>Tuesdays with Morrie</i>, in that Morrie was more alive than Ventura is on a Tuesday. This is actually more fascinating to me than Friday nights in Ventura. There is <i>nothing</i> in Ventura on a Friday, and by that I mean that Ventura on a Tuesday is the physical manifestation of being in Limbo. This is where you go if you want a preview of what that might be like, if your religion insists that Limbo is part of the afterlife. <br />
<br />
The town is a total blank. There is absolutely no energy you can sense from the cars driving on Telephone, not in Ralphs, not in Walmart, not at the harbor, not at the mall, nowhere! I think of the ghosts that burst through the windows at the ceiling during "Once Upon a December" in the animated <i>Anastasia</i>, but without the dresses or anything else colorful. And this lasts all day! I don't know if this is the town's day for regrouping, but you could go from one end of it to the other and then on to State Route 126 to Santa Clarita without having a sense of what Ventura is. <br />
<br />
Maybe it's the town's way of insisting that residents and visitors alike take this one day to add their own spark to the town, to see that spark for themselves, unencumbered by what the town usually offers. You know, do your own thing, find your own bliss, and don't let us bother you. I like that possibility, but it gets disconcerting for those of us who live here. It feels like a possible <i>Twilight Zone</i> episode in which the town disappears beneath your feet.<br />
<br />
Ok, so I've gone on and on about that, but Ventura is reliable in that when Wednesday hits, it's back to business as usual. It rises again and covers everything. But I know why this consumes me. Adding to what I mentioned above about flitting in between towns, I've never known one town on its own terms. I've used a town, a city, for the resources it has for what I need, but I've never thought about it on its own. Never any reason to. But here I am, away from the noise of bigger cities, the demands, those expensive experiences that you must have that only benefit those who are selling them. I have my libraries, especially my beloved Ventura College library, and I know where to find my equally beloved Vietnamese iced coffee. That's all I need. And it's new to me to slow down like this, but I think I can get used to it. Rory L. Aronskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18173518202611695171noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2000154353586469196.post-1014834949156711222018-02-27T18:18:00.003-08:002018-02-27T23:04:00.980-08:00Life in PiecesI am not Minnesota like Garrison Keillor,<br />
nor Florida like Carl Hiaasen and Dave Barry,<br />
not even New Jersey like Richard Ford.<br />
<br />
I am pieces of all the places I lived in<br />
as different as the time zones<br />
in which they sit.<br />
<br />
I am the candle store at Old Town in Kissimmee, Florida,<br />
transfixed by one color being sensuously carved into many,<br />
from one long bulk of wax.<br />
<br />
I am Tomorrowland at Walt Disney World,<br />
my home whenever I was there all day,<br />
happily lost in the glitter of stars,<br />
and the promise of tomorrow.<br />
<br />
I am the view of the twinkling canyon in the night,<br />
from the hilltop parking lot of La Mesa Junior High<br />
in Canyon Country in Santa Clarita,<br />
during some event or recital held there,<br />
able to see it thanks to my father<br />
having to be there for whatever was held inside.<br />
<br />
I am The Cosmopolitan on the Las Vegas Strip,<br />
before it was stripped of its creativity and<br />
welcoming light and encouraging art, <br />
digital, music, and otherwise,<br />
when an investment group that did not understand<br />
its pulsing power,<br />
took over and gutted it.<br />
<br />
I am that cream-colored hallway to the hotel lobby at<br />
Green Valley Ranch,<br />
elegant, graceful, with music<br />
that made me think that whoever<br />
programmed The Cosmopolitan<br />
had fled there.<br />
I miss pretending to feel wealthy<br />
down that hallway,<br />
all its gently artistic touches<br />
mine. All mine.<br />
<br />
Lately I am the library at Ventura College,<br />
lost in the stacks,<br />
but not lost like that,<br />
overjoyed to discover books that I didn't know existed,<br />
that very few there today knows existed.<br />
I cannot easily find or know home<br />
with how many times we've moved,<br />
but the college library is a start<br />
like all the others.Rory L. Aronskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18173518202611695171noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2000154353586469196.post-20166221148000261422018-01-17T02:21:00.002-08:002018-01-17T02:21:32.854-08:00The Library for WanderingI have here two lists, written on ramen noodle sticky notes (yes, really. I got them for cheap at the Box Lunch store at The Oaks mall in Thousand Oaks). One is of three books I had intended to check out from the Ventura College library when I go there next, such as another academic analysis of Don Quixote titled <i>Don Quixote: The Knight of La Mancha</i>, and <i>Peanuts and Philosophy</i>, part of the publisher Open Court's series of pop culture and philosophy books.<br />
<br />
The other list takes up three and a quarter ramen sticky notes, and are other pop culture and philosophy titles from the same publisher available at the college library that I thought I might also be interested in, such as <i>The Princess Bride and Philosophy</i>, <i>Monty Python and Philosophy</i>, <i>Facebook and Philosophy</i>, and 12 others.<br />
<br />
I realized that this is all wrong.<br />
<br />
I checked out <i>Futurama and Philosophy</i> from that list, and couldn't get through it. Some of the essays were thin as it is, but I realized that this isn't the way I want to learn about various approaches to philosophy. I already have a stringent, though wide-ranging, list of books I want to read from the Ventura County public libraries. They're all holds that I pick up at the Hill Road Library, which is convenient for that, but not so much for browsing. I'd do that at the E.P. Foster library downtown, but despite being curious about their separate science fiction section, I haven't been there for a while because I know what I want to read at the moment.<br />
<br />
In my pursuit of science fiction, I thought I'd simply look it up in the Ventura College library catalog and go page by page, checking out every single book over time that has even the slightest whiff of science fiction. The first one was <i>The Three-Body Problem</i> by Cixin Liu, apparently an enormous presence in Chinese science fiction.<br />
<br />
Huge mistake.<br />
<br />
I can't dive in like this. I need to start small. I need short stories. I need anthologies. I need to find out what within science fiction interests me and pursue that, while occasionally stopping in for those that don't quite interest me, but might still be worth a read. I can't be going into (currently) heavy novels like that one and just expect to fall in easily. I need time to know what feels right for me. And I have two anthologies, one that I bought from The Open Book at The Oaks mall, and the other <i>Infinite Stars</i>, an anthology of space opera and military science fiction that I checked out from the Hill Road Library, a copy sent to me from the Ojai Library. I'll start with those, finish the latest issue of Asimov's that I bought at Ralph's last month, and go from there.<br />
<br />
Being that my Ventura County library stacks are already well-planned, I shouldn't be doing the same at the Ventura College library. I need at least one library that I can simply wander, and I should be taking advantage of this particular library being open again for a new semester, open to me. Yet, I did notice that there's a science fiction and fantasy essay collection from Ursula K. Le Guin called <i>The Language of the Night</i> in the college library that I want to seek out. And in the philosophy realm, I have been curious about Epicurus for a long time, and the college also has a few books about him. That's where I should be going.<br />
<br />
But as to the other three slots available on my card, I need to feel free. Just take it all in. Examine the stacks closely. Find out what I spark to that I may never have considered before. Yes, I want to read Robert A. Caro's epic biography series about Lyndon Baines Johnson, and I know that the college library has all the volumes available. I bought the first volume from Calico Cat Books before I was able to get a college library card, so I need to read that first. So maybe, just maybe, I'll be able to start on those soon enough. But I should be going in again without a plan, like it was the first time after I had plucked <i>The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane</i> by Lisa See off the top of the Leisure Reading stacks, after waiting for months to read it (I had it on hold at the Henderson Libraries, and then we moved). I had no idea what the rest of the library contained, no idea what else I wanted to read, and I simply wandered. I need to do more of that. This is one library that requires that kind of time, to tour my mind through these stacks and just be. Just let go and be carried by the books.<br />
<br />
Besides, this is the first time anywhere that I've lived that I've had access to a college library. Despite my feverish love for the formidable Lied Library at UNLV, we didn't live near enough to it to go all that often, and in fact, we didn't. The usual traffic from Henderson to Maryland Parkway, plus the seemingly permanent construction zones along the drive, as well as the campus charging for visitor parking, didn't make it worth it. This one just takes a short bus ride. That's it. And once off the bus, you face the library building dead on. Pure convenience.<br />
<br />
It's time to start truly living in these stacks. I can't wait to feel at home again by this.Rory L. Aronskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18173518202611695171noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2000154353586469196.post-81957505031208434542018-01-14T18:38:00.001-08:002018-01-15T00:16:48.811-08:00Sondheim Through TimeOn Sunday, January 26, 2014, my family and I, two years into living in Las Vegas, with three years to go, went to the Stratosphere for free admission to the Stratosphere Tower, being offered to Nevada residents for that day. We had gotten there in the early afternoon, bypassing the long, snaking line of tourists waiting to pay to get in, with the intent of staying at least through the early evening, to see a Las Vegas sunset from that vantage point and how everything begins to come alive from that point. Knowing that, I decided to bring along the biography <i>Stephen Sondheim: A Life</i> by Meryle Secrest, writing about one of my heroes.<br />
<br />
Today is Sunday, January 14, 2018, 12 days shy of it being four years since I started reading that biography (I remember this because my Goodreads account, on my <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/270540?shelf=currently-reading">Currently Reading shelf</a>, still has the listing for that biography all the way on the bottom, with that date, the oldest listing I have on that shelf). Not that the biography was bad from where I stopped (All told, I read about 30 pages while we were in the Stratosphere Tower, distracted by the 360-degree view), but since then, it's been for lack of trying, distracted by other books, wanting to stretch out what I don't know yet about Sondheim, watching <i>Six by Sondheim</i> countless times, as well as DVDs of two productions of <i>Company</i>, the original staging of <i>Into the Woods</i> as well as the movie, <i>Sondheim: The Birthday Concert</i> and a few others. It's a lot more fun to see his work in action, which has been the distraction. But still, I want to know how he came up with all those musical treasures. I've given this long weekend over to reading about some of my favorite people, and books by some of my favorite people: Phil Collins, through his memoir <i>Not Dead Yet</i>; this Sondheim biography (I have Sondheim's own two books, <i>Finishing the Hat</i> and <i>Look, I Made a Hat</i>, and I might delve into those afterward), Armistead Maupin's memoir <i>Logical Family</i>, and possibly <i>The Autobiography of Jean-Luc Picard</i> by David A. Goodman and <i>Uncommon Type: Some Stories</i>, Tom Hanks' first book, all short stories centered on typewriters.<br />
<br />
This particular Sunday is time travel in memory at its most head-snapping. I spent a good chunk of the afternoon today finishing <i>Not Dead Yet</i> on the patio of our apartment here in Ventura, in unseasonably warm weather. On weekends, when we're not out, Dad tends to watch marathons of <i>The Golden Girls</i> and while a great deal of it is well-written, I get sick of hearing it all the time. So to the patio I went, unfolding the sole brown lawn chair we have out there.<br />
<br />
And yet, on that Sunday in 2014, I had a jacket on, even inside the tower because we were planning to go outside, to where some of the tower's main attractions were, namely Insanity, which dangles riders out over the Strip while furiously spinning around, and X-Scream, which plummets riders to the edge of its tiny track, and then rises up and pushes them back, doing it a few times. Next to the exit of Insanity is the best view of some of the rundown apartment buildings surrounding the tower. By that time, we had moved twice already, from the Valley Vista All-Age Mobile Home Park on Cabana Drive in Las Vegas, to the Pacific Islands Apartment complex in Henderson, all the way in the back, blessedly removed from traffic noise, but cursed by heavy smokers in the apartments above us and next to us, which seeped into our apartment. The complex did nothing about it because "everyone has the right to do whatever they want to do in their own apartment." However, after the remodels they did of the apartments as they became vacant, which surely cost them a pretty penny, I wonder how they feel about that now.<br />
<br />
I started reading <i>Stephen Sondheim: A Life</i> when we had found seats in front of one section of this view, in the distance the screams of those bungee-jumping from the top of the tower (we got near to that area, too, and watched the process over and over and over. The ones who set up those were jumping were impressively precise. This wasn't a careless, cigar smoke-filled attraction. There were real lives involved in this and those employees were aware).<br />
<br />
The view was overlooking Dad's school then, Fremont Middle, and this is where we would be for a while. Because of the offer, and the visitors in that long line coming up here, the tower was crowded, so you get seats where you can find them. And this was good enough. I was paying attention to what I was reading about Sondheim's childhood, about the indeed separate lives of his parents, but not as attentive as a fawning fan should be. Of course, it was the view, one that's impossible to see anywhere else like this in Las Vegas. I didn't imagine myself as Godzilla, stomping all over the city. I hadn't gotten to that point yet, when living in that valley became harder. I was just amazed at how far the concrete horizon spread. It didn't feel <i>as</i> crowded as Los Angeles looks from a similar height, but it was insistent. Bring in the tourists, let them leave, but try to pen in at least some of the residents because a great deal of them will still get away. As it was for us.<br />
<br />
This Sunday, in 2018, I began rereading the beginning of the biography on our first patio, on the left side of our apartment (the one on the right side of our apartment gets too dirty too quickly, with pigeon feathers from those nesting in the crevices that the roof line of these apartments offers, as well as the pigeon shit that falls onto the patio from up there. This complex is none too quick to try to rectify the apparent health problem that could result from that), a corner view that faces part of Telephone Road, as well as a view of those walking on the sidewalk across the street, in front of the Peppertree Condominiums. When the temperature is as warm as it was today, and the wind is wispy and just a little bit talkative, it's perfect. Yesterday had the best weather we've had in five months of living here, and today was just a bonus.<br />
<br />
It's quite a distance from trying to grab seats wherever they became available in the Stratosphere Tower. This town is much quieter than Las Vegas could ever hope to be in certain parts, so besides why I started the Sondheim biography this weekend, it's also the perfect atmosphere for it. I can concentrate here. I'm not distracted by any such view, nor any potentially drunken souls (none of that either where I live), nor any constant clamor to buy souvenirs (I had my fair share even while living in Las Vegas. I had two t-shirts listing the names of all the casinos on and off the Strip, myriad sets of playing cards, and I still have my Cosmopolitan t-shirt from before the faceless new owner, the Blackstone Group, killed off its confident, artsy spirit). Sure, walking around the inside floor of the Tower and outside where those rides are is not exactly the best place to be reading a significant biography of Sondheim. I know that. But for that many hours, usually seeing what there is to see in less than an hour and then picking out what I like the most to spend more time with, it just seemed reasonable to bring a book in case there was a stretch of time that I wanted to say that I had read a little something in the Stratosphere Tower. I might well have been the first person to bring a book there, knowing the tourist value of the place. That always worked better at Siegfried & Roy's Secret Garden and Dolphin Habitat at the Mirage, where it became my tradition to bring <i>Paper Towns</i> by John Green with me to read (I wasn't <i>as</i> into the place as Meridith was because of the dolphins, but I loved that relaxed atmosphere that encouraged visitors to sit a while if they wanted and worry about nothing), but here, why not have the chance to sit in front of one of the windows offering that expansive view, read for a bit, and have that view to look at for a while. I think it could elevate a great many novels.<br />
<br />
I know that's not what Las Vegas is for, for pretty much everyone who comes to visit. In fact, it's not even what it's for for most of those residents. But for me, it was just to have a moment of artistic accomplishment in front of me in the way of that biography, to read about how someone else did it. I don't have the same ambitions as Sondheim, although I do want to write a few plays, but my admiration for him is boundless. <br />
<br />
And here, in Ventura, it feels like a universe away from Las Vegas, and that's how I like it. There's more time in this town to simply be, to explore whatever you feel like in books, in being on the beach, in strolling downtown, whatever you can think of. Vegas always threw everything at you, all at once. It wasn't as frenetic as Los Angeles, but if it wasn't work you were worrying about, it was the weather (it was frigid that January, hence the jacket), or when to go food shopping (especially in the summer at 110 degrees, when you had to go as late into the night as possible so the milk would last until you could get it home), or the cigarette-smoking neighbors on their patio whose smoke always drifted right to where you could walk out into the rest of the neighborhood, and so much else. This town is better for the rest of Sondheim. I can read about his life more seriously here.<br />
<br />
Perhaps one of the reasons I hadn't read much of the Sondheim biography that Sunday in 2014 is because it was the one time in what became five years in Las Vegas that the city felt completely calm to me. I could look at it from above and feel like maybe, just maybe, I could manage to live here. Of course, that was before the cigarette smoke in our apartment got worse, and before we moved a few more times within Henderson. But for that one day, it was possible, although I do think it was the first time I had seen any city from such a height, 1,149 feet up. It even made Las Vegas seem reasonable. Seem. The reality never matches it. It's at least better here.Rory L. Aronskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18173518202611695171noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2000154353586469196.post-88035450657923664372018-01-11T12:43:00.003-08:002018-01-12T11:25:51.909-08:00The Forge of Empires ConflictBeing in between jobs right now, I get on the computer every morning. I check my e-mail, log onto Facebook for a little bit (I don't fall into the Black Hole of Lost Time, though), check various job listings, apply for any that look possible (at this point, I don't look to have an overwhelmingly desirable feeling about them, but that there's something in each of the jobs that would interest me, such as doing back-office work at an Ethan Allen location, owing to an interest in interior design and wanting to see people have the home design they may have dreamed of for years), search the library catalog for any books I meant to search for the previous night, or that still remain in my bookmarks on Chrome that I still have to hock the Ventura Library District to buy. Oh, and of course my own writing, novels that I'm researching, picture book ideas I'm looking to expand, poems I'm trying (I don't know how much of an interest I have in poetry yet).<br />
<br />
So why would I want to spend even more time on the computer? Why, when I have so many books I want to read, and one DVD binder with movies and TV series I haven't watched yet (I want to try the Canadian series <i>L.A. Complex</i> again, which aired in 2012 on The CW, and which seems appropriate now that I'm in Southern California again. I also have the entire run of <i>As Time Goes By</i>, because of Judi Dench, but I want to get beyond the third episode already, actually take time for it)? Besides that DVD binder, I also have a few DVDs scattered between my bedroom area (actually the dining room area of this apartment, but because the apartment smaller than what we came from, without a third bedroom, we converted it into my bedroom) and my bookcases that I want to watch, too.<br />
<br />
And then I stumbled onto Forge of Empires.<br />
<br />
No, this story isn't going to end the way you think it might.<br />
<br />
I haven't spent obsessive hours upon hours and days upon days playing it, starting from the Stone Age and working hard so I can travel through time this way. In fact, I haven't even signed up for an account yet. I just sit there at the front page, reading the information they have for potential new users, their blog announcing updates, and watching the citizens in the shadow of the castle on the front page go about their work. I've only done this since last weekend, the kid with his nose pressed against the window of the toy store, though I'm not wide-eyed, nor wishing for this or that, or that I could go inside and have everything that I want.<br />
<br />
I remember FarmVille and Mafia Wars on Facebook. I don't remember exactly why I started playing them, but I think a few Facebook friends were playing Mafia Wars and I traded with them on various items and whatever else was involved there. I've long since forgotten. But I remember that you had to wait for energy to be replenished, with a countdown clock indicating when you'd have more of it. As to FarmVille, my old farm is still active, right down to the 2010 New Year's ball drop pole I put on that farm. I still go in every now and then to play with it, when it all actually loads properly.<br />
<br />
So I imagine that Forge of Empires also has the same clocks there, that you have to wait before various things are replenished. I see also that it's a SimCity type of game, spanning the Stone Age, then the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, the Middle Ages, the Colonial Age, and the Industrial Age. I like that kind of historical bent. But still I sit in front of its homepage. Still no account created. Why?<br />
<br />
This morning, I realized why. Even while being attracted by the graphics, the possibility of seeing right in front of my eyes what these various ages might have looked like, and to build a city and make it work, I'm a writer. I'm working on creating my own worlds through novels I hope to see published some day. I'm already seeing to the lives of my characters, who are also seeing to my life in that sometimes I'm simply transcribing what they say, as it has happened to countless other writers.<br />
<br />
But it's not only that. Looking at the front page of Forge of Empires, and the graphics, and indeed some of the YouTube videos that have been posted about the game, such as the tutorials and the time-lapse footage, they only serve to strengthen my interest in reading historical novels. Just like watching <i>The Lion in Winter</i> recently made me seek out novels about the English monarchy, Forge of Empires does the same in other ages. I went looking for Steven Saylor's series of Roman novels featuring Gordianus the Finder. I'm thinking about novels set in the 1930s, my favorite historical period to study. I'm wondering about the 1890s. I remember the musical <i>1776</i>, and David McCullough's <i>1776</i> comes to mind, which I still haven't read.<br />
<br />
I think, for me, Forge of Empires is best as inspiration to seek out historical novels, biographies, and other non-fiction works so I can venture through those time periods that way. I can't keep staring at a screen more than I usually do in pursuit of what I need in my life (a job) and what I want (to write these novels and other books). Each day is already short enough. Rory L. Aronskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18173518202611695171noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2000154353586469196.post-19358912642901020182018-01-09T12:21:00.001-08:002018-01-10T12:20:14.456-08:00The Mandarin Orange LotteryEver since my family and I moved back to Southern California and felt we were settled enough in Ventura, Mom and Dad began playing the lottery again. Not to as great an extent as those slot machine players I'd see sitting for hours at the casinos we went to in Las Vegas, nor the poker players who looked like they had been there for days. The important things, like when the Powerball goes above $300 million. Same with Mega Millions. Of course, in response to this, Dad went a little overboard with tickets, playing six sets of numbers on one ticket and a few on another. Understandable, though, just for that slim chance. It's the usual assertion that all it takes is one. I suppose it's worth a try in that way. Thankfully, not all the time. <br />
<br />
When we lived in Santa Clarita, Mom loved the scratch-offs. Again, there was a limit. Just a certain amount for the month for scratchoffs, mainly the dollar ones, unless there was something that looked interesting in the slightly higher-priced ones. It's the same here again. Just a scant few dollars a month for scratch-offs, although with Dad's additional interest in it, we've bought a year of those Year of the Dog scratch-offs. In our house, it's been 27 years of the Year of the Dog. So it fits us.<br />
<br />
Myself, I only do a scratch-off if presented with one, such as it has been with Year of the Dog. One I did had two $888, but not a third. You need three to get the amount. The latest one netted me $2. Enough for two more of those scratch-offs, but I'm not going to chase down the $888. <br />
<br />
However, I will chase down the glory can of mandarin oranges. Sure you can get mandarin oranges anyway, especially canned, but I only like to get them at Ralphs because they're the only ones that are steeped in mandarin orange juice, not light syrup.<br />
<br />
I usually get four or so cans every time we go to Ralphs since I like to have it every day. But opening the cans is a gamble, my kind of gamble. Sometimes you get a few whole mandarin orange segments, along with mandarin oranges that look like they were shot to pieces by a gun from <i>Men in Black</i>. I had one can the other week that was nothing but that. Sometimes you'll get the mandarin orange massacre along with a few thinly-sliced pieces of mandarin orange, lopped off from a bigger mandarin orange segment. This is why I like to buy cans with different dates on it. All of them now expire in 2020, but there are some with one January date and others that are two days earlier. It might be different days of production for wherever this is packaged, so I want to see what different days have brought.<br />
<br />
The day before yesterday, I hit the jackpot. I opened the can, dumped the mandarin oranges into a small bowl, <i>and every single mandarin orange was plump and whole</i>! No ragged pieces! No thin slices! In the five months we've been there, that we've been shopping at Ralphs (we also go to Vons and Trader Joe's, especially for the latter's new tuna salad, which is a masterpiece, and reminds us of the slightly smoky tuna salad we used to get from Lox Haven in Margate, Florida), I've never gotten a can like this. It gives me hope that this particular Ralphs store, the only one we have in Ventura, will get more.<br />
<br />
Of course, I don't get canned mandarin oranges just for the hope of that. They're the only oranges I eat, and the only way I prefer them. The less work I have to do with peeling, the better. And it's always interesting to see the differences between cans. I prefer gambling with 89 cents a can.<br />
Rory L. Aronskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18173518202611695171noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2000154353586469196.post-47690844516925944512018-01-03T16:40:00.002-08:002018-01-04T11:38:25.839-08:00My Home in Space, Through Time, In the Future, and Within Alternate HistoriesI've been thinking about the meaning of home for a few months, ever since moving again. There are parts of Ventura that feel home-like to me, but at this point in my life, I don't think I'll find an overall home I can become attached to. Not that I want to move again, but I don't have the expectations anymore that I used to whenever we moved. I've learned. I'll take whatever comes here. So far it's good. It'll be better when I'm hired somewhere.<br />
<br />
However, within that thought process, about places I've been to, places I've lived in, favorite things in my life, I think I hit on something. <br />
<br />
The second movie I ever saw, when I was 5, was <i>Jetsons: The Movie</i>.<br />
<br />
My favorite childhood movie was <i>Flight of the Navigator</i>. <br />
<br />
I am hopelessly devoted to <i>Blade Runner</i>, <i>Tron: Legacy</i>, and <i>Oblivion</i>.<br />
<br />
<i>Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom</i> by Cory Doctorow occupies an important place in my permanent book collection.<br />
<br />
Every time my family and I went to Walt Disney World, to the Magic Kingdom, I always spent the day in Tomorrowland, circulating among Space Mountain, the then-Tomorrowland Transit Authority, and Walt Disney's Carousel of Progress, as well as the arcade adjacent to the exit of Space Mountain (from the inside) and the entrance (from the outside). <br />
<br />
I own nearly the entire run of <i>Red Dwarf</i> on DVD.<br />
<br />
There are other examples, like the Nerd Trivia page-a-day calendar I recently mentioned, especially seeking its sci-fi bent. I also realized, paging through one of my DVD binders, that I have the complete series of the cult hit <i>The Middleman</i>, which I loved when it aired on then-ABC Family, and practically wailed over its cancellation. <br />
<br />
But the earlier ones, those above, that's what factors into this: Science fiction, even in what some might consider some of these imperfect forms, has always been a beacon in my life, beckoning to me. But I've never really paid attention to it.<br />
<br />
Until now.<br />
<br />
In seeking a stable home for myself, I know now that it'll be science fiction. Specifically science fiction novels and short stories. My New Year's resolution is to immerse myself completely in them, not only to find my world(s) within them, but also find inspiration in the universes they conjure, hope for me that my own, comparatively earthbound writing, can be as good, as all-encompassing as these works are. <br />
<br />
As my past experience with science fiction indicates, I'm a geek nomad. I've never taken sides between the Jedi and Trekkies (or Trekkers, whatever you prefer). I do lean more toward <i>Star Trek</i> than <i>Star Wars</i>, but I will eventually see the new movie. I like going from, say, an issue of Asimov's Science Fiction to <i>Firefly</i>, and then from <i>Firefly</i> to whatever Kim Stanley Robinson has going on lately. To quote from my previous post about the Nerd Trivia calendar:<br />
<br />
<i>I think if I was to appear in space-based science fiction, I would be the cargo captain with the rundown, yet still reliable ship who's always ready to be sent anywhere in exchange for a sizable donation to the Help Keep Me Alive Fund. I wouldn't race headlong into danger, or seek out some potentially risky adventure. Just let me drift among the stars, taking in the universe at my own pace (save for when there's cargo to transport).</i><br />
<br />
I don't think it's only the sheer scope of science fiction which seizes me, though. It's not only the wonders that can emerge from thousands of words, making me wonder how someone did all this, made this world simply through words (it's never simple, of course). I realized that it's also the architecture in science fiction that I want to study closely.<br />
<br />
When I was a tyke, my parents and I (and then my sister) lived in Casselberry, Florida, so close to Orlando that we went to Walt Disney World every weekend. I was in a stroller and I guess then the castle itself and the buildings made to look like different lands made a deep impression on me, though I didn't know it then.<br />
<br />
While five years of living in Las Vegas was hard, there were those days when we went to The Cosmopolitan, the Wynn, the Mirage, the Bellagio, and other hotels, and I loved that elegant interior design and was curious about who had done it, how they planned it, what they enjoyed in their lives that inspired them to decorate as they did. Obviously under the edict of a Steve Wynn, of course, or even someone with lesser power than that, but it was still them. They were the ones who made it happen.<br />
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For me, in science fiction, it would be the size of staterooms in starships, how various captains decorate their own quarters, how much room there is for an overcrowded population to live in, say, a futuristic Los Angeles. How are such cities powered? What thought goes into what a starship will contain? Such questions as that will undoubtedly poke at me while I read.<br />
<br />
I don't think I'll write about science fiction novels and short stories extensively here. I already write reviews for <a href="https://www.bookbrowse.com/index.cfm?">BookBrowse</a>, and I don't want to do it that way. It'll probably be when the mood strikes me, when I spot a building or transport or some neon-filtered way of life in the far-off future that I want to write about, to wonder about it further.<br />
<br />
Whether this portends me one day writing science fiction, I don't know. I have two ideas for short stories, one which involves holograms in a supermarket, and the other an earthbound non-futuristic short story collection set in the outskirts of Las Vegas, in a rundown former motel-turned apartment complex that faces the back end of the McCarran International parking garage, which has got to be the biggest parking garage in Las Vegas. The rest of what I want to write, my ideas list, is not only resolutely earthbound, but doesn't involve science fiction at all. I think for the most part, I just want to absorb everything it offers and apply it to my own work. Just something for me, not always to try to push out to the world. I'll wander and then come in with what I've found that interests me. This blog won't be overtaken by such an adventure. It'll still be different things.<br />
<br />
(Postscript at 5:10 p.m.: This whole thing makes more sense now. I just remembered that when I was growing up, I always told my mom that I would build a time machine. In trying moments over the years, she's always asked me, "Where's your time machine?" No wonder the <i>Back to the Future</i> movies are among my favorites, the third one my favorite of the trilogy.)Rory L. Aronskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18173518202611695171noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2000154353586469196.post-72324046621536101012018-01-03T14:37:00.003-08:002018-01-04T11:30:12.104-08:00The Physical Manifestation of DaysSitting on the second shelf of my smaller bookcase on the left side, the first of three bookcases side-by-side (the biggest one is in the middle and the one on the right is the same size as that smaller bookcase) is the 2018 Zen Page-a-Day Calendar that I've had for three or four years in a row. I believe in everything that Zen represents, though my kind of meditation is reading. There's also a great deal of philosophy in it, which I've begun studying, but a more accessible philosophy that doesn't make you tear your hair out over how dense it is, and even when you try to chip away at it, it doesn't yield. Not the kind of philosophical thought that others write only to show how much they believe they've learned and how smart they think they look. I've also discovered many writers through it that have made it into my infinite reading list. Sometimes I pick them up right then and there and seek out their books, especially those from the Zen masters. Others I look up every once in a while and pick them up from there.<br />
<br />
Also, from this past December until just after Christmas, I was thinking about a second page-a-day calendar for my bookcases, namely the <i>365 Things to Love About Being Southern</i> Page-a-Day Calendar. I'm a Florida native, and I'm always interested in Southern culture, so I thought this would work for me. I remembered that it was at the Go! Calendars store at the Pacific View Mall, and the last time I went, when they were having a 50%-off-everything sale (it was a pop-up store, unfortunately, although with how many storefronts are empty on the second floor, they could use a permanent Go! Calendars store), there were still two calendars available.<br />
<br />
But I looked through it again that last time and there wasn't much there that I didn't already know. I appreciated their filmographies of Southern actors, particularly Renee Zellweger, but I already know all her movies. And what I didn't know, such as the famed restaurants in every state, didn't offer anything beyond the names of the restaurants. Not about what they served, not about the barbecue culture within each of those that are barbecue joints, just lists. I don't want just lists. I want to know what those places are like. And I know there's Yelp for that, but I'm not on a computer all the time, though I'm usually on one too much, to write, to look for work right now, to research, and to write. In that calendar, I would want to have the details of a place right in front of me, but on one square page, there's probably not much room for what compilers of that calendar could hope to achieve further.<br />
<br />
I wanted a calendar that would either give me something new every day or give me another angle to something I already knew. I needed a calendar that's close to me the way the Zen calendar is. And browsing those shelves of page-a-day calendars yet again in that store, I found one:<br />
<br />
A Year of Nerd Trivia, newly published. 2018 is the first year of it.<br />
<br />
I pulled it out of the box and randomly flipped through some of the pages. The back of the box had already intrigued me, what with a <i>Doctor Who</i> quiz and a quote from Neil DeGrasse Tyson about his 14-year-old daughter's emergent geekiness. In the calendar, I had flipped to a "Nerd Lit" page (book recommendations all) for <i>Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell</i>, which I'd heard about in passing, but never looked into it. The description didn't interest me a great deal, but times may change.<br />
<br />
I decided that this was the calendar for me. I'm more of a geek nomad. I wander between worlds, from <i>Firefly</i> to the Star Trek universe, tiptoeing through <i>Doctor Who</i> and nursing my obsessions with <i>Blade Runner</i>, <i>Tron: Legacy</i>, and <i>Oblivion</i>. I'm not a Jedi nor a Trekkie (or Trekker; whichever one you want). I think if I was to appear in space-based science fiction, I would be the cargo captain with the rundown, yet still reliable ship who's always ready to be sent anywhere in exchange for a sizable donation to the Help Keep Me Alive Fund. I wouldn't race headlong into danger, or seek out some potentially risky adventure. Just let me drift among the stars, taking in the universe at my own pace (save for when there's cargo to transport).<br />
<br />
So the Nerd Trivia calendar became my second one at the start of the New Year. The first day had a <i>Lord of the Rings</i> quiz, which I had to look at the answers that at the bottom, upside-down. I didn't know any of them. I'm not <i>against</i> fantasy works; I just have to find room for them. I not only once bought a copy of <i>Game of Thrones</i> from Walmart (giving it up when we moved from Las Vegas back to Southern California), and borrowed a paperback copy from the Ojai Library, but I still haven't read it. I guess maybe I wanted to see, based on the TV series (which I also haven't seen), what all the hype has been about. But that's probably not the best way to approach such a series. There has to be something within it that intrigues you enough to venture forth. I'll look into it again, of course. As to <i>Lord of the Rings</i>, the Goodwill in downtown Ventura had a 50%-off-everything sale two days after Christmas, and I found a shrink-wrapped, unopened set of the <i>Lord of the Rings</i> trilogy on DVD (the theatrical cuts) for $4.00. What better time to give it another try? It's not that I didn't like it the first time (I saw the <i>The Fellowship of the Ring</i> in theaters, and was impressed), but I still haven't seen <i>The Two Towers</i> and <i>The Return of the King</i>. <br />
<br />
The next day, January 2nd, was a Nerd Lit page for <i>I Am Legend</i> by Richard Matheson. Dystopian worldwide epidemics don't interest me, nor do vampires, so I could skip that. But today had trivia about <i>Star Trek: Generations</i>, that the budget for the movie was so tight, the Next Generation crew had to wear the <i>Deep Space Nine</i> uniforms. Jonathan Frakes was wearing Avery Brooks' uniform, and it was too big for him, which is why whenever Frakes is on camera, his sleeves are rolled up. <br />
<br />
So even if there's a day that doesn't interest me, like <i>I Am Legend</i>, I know that there'll be something coming up that will. To me, these calendars are the physical manifestation of days. The day ends, I tear off that day, crumple it up and throw it out. But before I do, I hope that I've spent that day well enough, accomplishing at least some of whatever I'm looking to do, be it writing or the currently ever-present job search, or like on New Year's Day night, watching <i>The Untold Tales of Armistead Maupin</i> on PBS, the documentary I waited months to see, ever since I heard about it when it was making the film festival circuit.<br />
<br />
One day gone, crumpled up. The next day here. I always hope that the Zen calendar will live up to my expectations of it each day, and it usually does. I can be casual with the Nerd Trivia calendar. I'm sure that something interesting will pop up. I'm just hoping that there'll be a Nerd Lit page every week. Only 52, then, sure (51 now), but I'm sure some of these recommendations will lead me to still other books, just by looking them up. Not that I need a calendar for book recommendations, with how much I read as it is, but there's always something I haven't noticed, even as I explore widely.Rory L. Aronskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18173518202611695171noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2000154353586469196.post-43902186142019352392017-12-26T00:24:00.001-08:002018-02-01T23:01:52.125-08:00The Important EdiblesAbout two weeks ago, we went to the Cheesecake Factory at The Oaks Mall in Thousand Oaks to pick up slices for each of us for what we thought would be a visit to the beach here in Ventura and having our cheesecake there. But the Thomas Fire and the subsequent smoke blanketing our region made that impossible. So we had our slices at home a day or two later.<br />
<br />
At the Cheesecake Factory case, I spotted one called Chris' Outrageous Cheesecake and decided to try that without knowing anything that was in it. When my mom, my sister and I were at the Cheesecake Factory a few weeks before that for dinner, I tried the Adam's Peanut Butter Fudge Ripple Cheesecake, and that was more palatable than the monstrosity I subjected myself to: Chocolate cake, brownie, coconut-pecan frosting, and chocolate chip coconut cheesecake, to crib from the order that the layering is listed on the website. It made me wonder: Why does Chris hate people? What happened to shake that life so badly early on?<br />
<br />
Now, I've done bad to myself over the years. In my mid-20s, I devoured tubs of Extreme Moose Tracks ice cream from Ralphs <i>in the middle of the night</i>, while not going to bed until 5 a.m. Yeah, I was an idiot, both to myself and to my health. In that same time period (it may have been because Santa Clarita tended to feel isolating, and what are you supposed to connect with there besides going out of the valley in order to do anything interesting?), I also inhaled so many Dr. Peppers over a span of months, that I had a worrisome caffeine problem. Mainly too much of it. Try sleeping under that condition. No chance. I finally pulled myself out of it after realizing how truly awful all this was.<br />
<br />
But none of that was as bad as that slice of Chris's Outrageous Cheesecake. I sat at the dining room table, forking my way through it, appalled at how this one slice of cheesecake completely disrespected the sanctity of cheesecake, and decided right then and there that I need to taste again simply to enjoy it, not to just taste to shovel whatever into my mouth and go back for more and more, unthinking. In other, thinner words, I needed to get back on a diet and fast. Forget all the milk chocolate squares I had indulged in in weeks' and months' past. The worry of job hunting will do that to you. Never mind the one bag of pork rinds my mom, my sister and I shared in one shot back in early November (my love of all things pig knows no bounds, though). Forget the different root beers I had tried, and the egg nogs I had tasted in order to find the best one here (that was necessary, though, because having left Las Vegas, I no longer had the egg nog from Anderson Dairy, which, to me, was the best one there, and that's a local brand). I needed to partition my eating life once and for all. Keep it to more fruits and vegetables for my daily eating, and save the really important things for every now and then, but also know what those really important things are. Keep a list so there's never any doubt.<br />
<br />
That list, diet-motivated or not, has varied from place to place, everywhere I've lived. In my teens, living in South Florida, I loved the chicken nachos at Miller's Ale House in Pembroke Pines. Huge portion, and I cleared off the entire platter. Extra cheese and no jalapenos always helped. Come to think of it, I also loved them in Las Vegas because there was a Miller's Ale House at Town Square. It's the one restaurant I've been to where my order has never wavered, from then to now. But those days are done. There's no Miller's Ale House in Southern California. As to boba tea places, such as No. 1 Boba Tea in Las Vegas, I ordered a peanut butter and banana smoothie from the first time we went there, to the last time five years later, no matter if we went to the one in Chinatown in Las Vegas, the newer Galleria at Sunset location in Henderson on Mall Ring Circle, or the one on Eastern, in the massive Target shopping center, which was our go-to-location.<br />
<br />
But that's gone, too. I don't lament it because here I am, with so many new experiences, and still more to try. In Oxnard, which is one of the unhappiest cities I've ever been to, I was relieved to find that they have a Vallarta supermarket, so we don't have to schlep to Santa Clarita for one. They have two in Oxnard, and Mom and Dad had gone to the dingier one when they were visiting here, but we were lucky to bump into the much cleaner one last month when Dad was looking for a Fallas bargain clothing store. There, I discovered something that, when I have it, is better than books. Seriously. It's chicharrones which, in this case, are mainly pork fat. I'll have to get the name of this type right next time, but when I had it, I knew that this was paradise. That slice of Chris' Outrageous Cheesecake is what put me back on a diet, but those chicharrones are what keeps me on a diet because I want to be ready for the next time we go to Vallarta.<br />
<br />
With this in mind, I've come up with a list of those foods important to me. Not the daily essentials, like bananas. I already know those. But those which I most likely would go to great lengths for if I had to, but fortunately, I don't have to for most of these. Some may require adjustments, as will be noted. But all this is who I am in foodstuffs:<br />
<br />
Tillamook medium cheddar cheese.<br />
<br />
Kroger blended vanilla yogurt (especially in the large tub from Ralphs. I have given up other yogurts for this one).<br />
<br />
Grilled pork sausage spring rolls from Pholicious in the food court of the Pacific View Mall here in Ventura.<br />
<br />
Vietnamese iced coffee from Pholicious in the food court of the Pacific View Mall here in Ventura (Vietnamese iced coffee became my lifeblood after my sister introduced me to it at 99 Ranch Market on Maryland Parkway in Las Vegas at VeggiEAT Express in their little food court. The iced coffee at Pholicious isn't <i>as</i> good, but it's good enough. At The Oaks Mall in Thousand Oaks, they're opening a Vietnamese place in the food court and I must try the iced coffee there. I hope for it to be like the iced coffee at VeggiEAT Express, but considering my limited options in this part of Southern California, I'm not going to get <i>too</i> choosy).<br />
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The ham-and-cheese croissant at Master's Donuts that is not only generously filled, but is also the longest croissant out of all the donut shops I've been to thus far in Ventura.<br />
<br />
The carnitas quesadilla at Vallarta (the best quesadilla in the Ventura County area. The runner-up is the cheese quesadilla at La Salsa Fresh Mexican Grill in the food court at The Oaks Mall. My local quesadilla at La Mancha Mexican & Seafood in the food court at the Pacific View Mall is way too heavy, although the basic quesadilla at Snapper Jack's Taco Shack in downtown Ventura is acceptable).<br />
<br />
Peerless Coffee & Tea's black tea, from Oakland (I tried this tea at Ojai Pizza Company in downtown Ojai, and it was the first tea that made me want to search for teas that taste like they should be in libraries. This one tasted like a wood-paneled, gently-lived in reading room, like the Ojai Library is to me. However, the Thomas Fire caused the Ojai water supply to shut down entirely at one point, and Mom doesn't trust the water supply to get back to what it was before the fires, so advised me not to go for the tea next time when we're there. The next time we go, it'll have been a while since the fire passed through a section of Ojai, so they might have already settled the water issue, or at least set about making sure it doesn't go off again like that. Even so, after we go to WinCo next where Meridith told me that there's a tea strainer there that would be useful for me, I'm going to order the black tea sampler they have to find out if the other teas are just as good, and to pinpoint the one I loved at Ojai Pizza Company. Or I may just stroll on in next time and ask them the exact name of that particular tea. Based on what the Peerless website offers, I think it's the Peerless Royal Blend, which boasts a "smooth, fragrant aroma and flavor." And yet there's also the Assam, "a strong, dark flavor with a heavy body." Yet this was for iced tea, so it might well be their Organic Tropic Star Classic Black for iced tea. Either way, I know I've found my tea company).<br />
<br />
Lean Cuisine's Roasted Garlic White Bean Alfredo (This, with Great Northern beans, is what got me deep into beans. They'd always been on the periphery of my life, because of my mother's love of baked beans, and especially black beans and rice, so I guess the interest was just lying dormant. I love this because of the beans and have set out to see what other beans I might like. I'm not big on baked beans like Mom is, but give me beans as part of other dishes or flavored well enough on their own (even refried beans as it turns out), and I can be occupied for quite a while on this subject alone).<br />
<br />
A large order of angel hair pasta with pesto (basil, garlic, olive oil, cheese and nuts) and fresh basil from Presto Pasta in the Vons shopping center right down the street from our apartment (I'm actually starting to get tired of this combination, despite my love of basil, so I may try the pomodoro sauce again, or venture into marinara. I don't know yet).<br />
<br />
Producers Dairy Premium Egg Nog from Fresno (I can only find this at our sole Ventura Walmart, but it is the best one because not only is it thick enough like egg nog should be, but the nutmeg appears just enough to show that it's nutmeg, but not enough to start to taste like it was made in a homey arts and crafts store. Trader Joe's egg nog is too thin and tasteless, and Kroger's egg nog remains too expensive here, at $3.50 for a quart, but that one was just so-so).<br />
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Hershey's Symphony bar (the creamy milk chocolate kind, not the Hershey's standard that comes in Kisses and such. This is what makes me not have as much of Reese's anything as I have in the past, so I can have this every once in a while instead).<br />
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Veggie omelette from Busy Bee Cafe in downtown Ventura (The newest addition to my list. The first time Meridith and I went to the Busy Bee Cafe, it was so-so. Meridith's fried chicken was mostly dry, and the stuffed French toast I had of peanut butter, banana, and strawberries didn't taste all that worth coming back again. But this second time, along with Mom and Dad this time for their first time, this was the right time. Better cooks in the kitchen, for one, and I tried a veggie omelette that had carrots, broccoli, cauliflower, onions, and red and green peppers. It wasn't your typical omelet because they used pieces of all the vegetables, so you got basically a golden-brown sheen of eggs all over the vegetables, which was fine with me. Broccoli and cauliflower done like this is pretty much the only way I can eat them, and I loved how well-browned the cauliflower was, along with the sourdough toast and their home fries, with smaller cubed potatoes than I normally see in other home fries. I know I'll be getting this every time we go. It felt simple and unassuming, and I liked that, too).<br />
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It's not as urgent to me as all these, but I'm also looking for a decent chocolate malt (one in which I can <i>taste</i> the malt, too, rather than it being drowned out by overly sweet chocolate ice cream) and a patty melt. Busy Bee Cafe has a patty melt, but after that veggie omelette, it's going to be hard for me to consider anything else (witness the peanut butter and banana smoothie from No. 1 Boba Tea for five years, and the chicken nachos from Miller's Ale House for practically all of my life, though the gap begins now. But come to think of it, there was that gap for nine years in Santa Clarita, too). <br />
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I <i>would</i> also like to find great grits that don't come from the Quaker Oats packets I use all the time, besides the crock of it that I liked at Bonnie Lu's Country Cafe in downtown Ojai. However, I suspect that that'll be the ultimate for me. They're not easily found here like that. By the way, the quesadilla at Bonnie Lu's places third on my list, with the exception of their pico de gallo, which is the <i>best</i> I've had <i>anywhere</i>! There are idle nights when I get lost in the reverie of the memory of that pico de gallo! To have tomatoes and onions and cilantro as fresh as what's in there, besides whoever makes it having the power of God to make it like that, I think they must have the Shangri-La of gardens hidden somewhere in Ojai. <br />
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So, with the exception of that Lean Cuisine alfredo, all this is why I'm sticking a diet for good. I don't know when we'll go back to the Red Brick Pizza right near our apartment complex, but that California Club salad I had there could surely help me stick to my diet. Despite what it sounds like, the calorie count isn't so bad on that one. They've got salad artists over there who know how to layer salads so that you're not left with a heap of romaine lettuce as you get further into the bowl. I can't wait to have that again.<br />
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I don't think I'll be adding to this list as quickly as I would have when I lived in Santa Clarita and Las Vegas (with L.A. being closer to Santa Clarita, as well as Anaheim, Burbank, and Buena Park, and Las Vegas being, well, Las Vegas, with doing things like coming up with a list like this as a distraction against the hard living there), but I know that I can look at this list for here, and be sure that I'll be getting something good every time.Rory L. Aronskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18173518202611695171noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2000154353586469196.post-61394067904527635862017-12-18T01:54:00.001-08:002017-12-25T22:37:29.653-08:00Southern California, Part IINow I know that I can split my years in Southern California into two parts. It wasn't enough to find out on Bing that to get from where I live in Ventura to Downtown Disney in Anaheim is close to and a little above two hours, depending on the route. I needed to see it on a map, even a partial map, as the case was with postcards I bought as bookmarks at a cozy gift shop at Ventura Harbor Village yesterday, one of them a map of Southern California.<br />
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There's Anaheim, with Buena Park just slightly north of it. Let eyes wander past Carson, Montebello, through Los Angeles, up to Simi Valley, and diagonally to the top left where Santa Paula is, and Ventura doesn't show up. But we're up there. Going from that Highway 150 marker at the top left, back down to Anaheim? Yeah, that's a distance. So the Southern California I knew from 2003-2012, from when I was 19 up until I was 28, is practically no more for me. It's true, anyway, because the Po Folks restaurant my family and I loved so much in Buena Park closed years ago, a staple for us when we lived in Florida, where I grew up. I can't pine for what's no longer there. I can imagine that it might be interesting to visit Pasadena again at the time of the Rose Parade floats being on display the day after the parade, but would it really be worth that drive? Certainly, with how long it would take to get there, the expectations would be even higher than they ever were before. Sure, the distance is less at only an hour and 13 minutes to an hour and 26 minutes, but on one January 2nd, when we were living in Santa Clarita, we left at 5 in the morning to get there by 7 so we could get in early to see the Rose Parade floats before the crowds built up. I don't think we'd try to do the same thing from here in Ventura, because from Santa Clarita, it was closer. <br />
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I don't mind perhaps not seeing that again, nor not going to Universal CityWalk either, or even visiting the Getty Center as often as I might like. In fact, we didn't do it that often when we lived in Santa Clarita, but it was a revelation every time, of the heart, mind and soul. Even so, we are here in Ventura, I'm now 33, and things change. Life changes. <br />
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To that end, this is indeed Southern California, Part II, smaller and more focused on what I want and need in my life, what's important to me, rather than the ephemera that was Universal CityWalk and other attractions. I'm still young enough, certainly, but I'm getting older. What do I want to do? Where do I want to be? What matters?<br />
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Here, it's having an actual downtown area, which I've never had accessible anywhere we've lived. Downtown Henderson was a drive that took us past the Fiesta Henderson casino, in an area that felt like a no-man's land, and while it was pleasant enough with City Hall there and a few smaller casinos, it wasn't enough to sustain an extensive amount of time. In Florida, at least when I was there, I don't remember there being such a thing as downtown Pembroke Pines, for example. In Ventura, all I have to do is take the 6 bus, and there's the Foster library, there's the movie theater, there's many different places to eat, many of which we still have to try. There's the Bank of Books bookstore, with no air conditioning, which the library also boasts, along with the Calico Cat Bookshop, which is sweatier than Bank of Books. And set further back from the library, up the hill, are two houses I adore, one built in a Queen Anne Style just after 1900 and historically preserved (a construction company called McCarthy is headquartered there), and a two-story house for sale by Berkshire Hathaway with a half-wraparound porch. If I could hit the lottery early enough for a few hundred million, I would buy that house and the old church diagonal from it that was a bed and breakfast before it closed. That would be my piece of Ventura.<br />
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In Ventura, it's also having three local libraries now, as opposed to two just a few months ago. It's the E.P. Foster Library downtown, the Ventura College library which is closed now from two days ago until January 7th, and then it opens on January 8 for the start of the spring semester. That disappointed me because I had hoped to check out the 1998 anthology <i>A Southern Christmas</i> for something to read to lead up to Christmas, but with the wildfires and the campus being closed due first to the fires and then to the pervasive smoke, that didn't happen. However, I may check it out when the library reopens, because I don't think I feel like waiting until Christmas starts to come around again.<br />
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Now there's also the Hill Road Library, just up the street from where I live on the east side of Ventura, past the Government Center where I took a test to qualify to be considered for a library page position, and where I'll go again early tomorrow morning to take a test in order to qualify for a librarian technician position (essentially the people behind the counter who help with searching for books and setting up library cards for new patrons). The size makes it more of an express library, something small for the community to come in, browse, and go, for the sake of convenience. If they have a little more time, they can certainly stay. It was also the first grand opening of a library we had ever been to, and I already had two books in mind even before we went, that I knew the new branch had: <i>The Cooking Gene</i> by Michael Twitty and <i>Strays: A Lost Cat, A Homeless Man, and Their Journey Across America</i> by Britt Collins. We got into the library before the festivities began, so I made a beeline for where those books were and I got both of them. Brand-new copies. In fact, that's one of the happy things about this new library: Most of the books there are brand-new, and there's still more to come. What I couldn't find readily from other branches is well-stocked here. Plus, I can walk to this branch whenever I want, though not ignoring the Foster library not only because of my love of the downtown area, but also because they have extensive stacks, with nonfiction books dating back decades even, novels, too. I like browsing through history like that. I hope they keep that going.<br />
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Let's see what else. There's my grilled pork sausage spring rolls and Vietnamese iced coffee at Pholicious in the food court at the Pacific View Mall, halfway to downtown. The mall is considered Midtown Ventura. There's the generous ham-and-cheese croissant at Master's Donuts at the start of the Walmart shopping center on South Victoria Avenue. I've tried a few other ham-and-cheese croissants at other donut places and this is the only one that really stuffs it well. There's the donut place a few doors down from Discount Grocery Outlet far down on Telephone Road, where they automatically cut the croissant in half for me (not that I want it that way, but I like learning about the different styles of donut places in Ventura), but I prefer Master's Donuts' croissant.<br />
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Oh yes, and if you turn off of Main Street downtown onto Thompson, there's the beach right in front of you. I can't forget that part because it's pretty much the main reason I was impatient to move to Ventura when it became possible: I was born and raised in Florida, therefore born to ocean breezes, and I needed ocean breezes back, desperately so after five years in the Mojave Desert. I'm not the sort like my sister and my dad to walk in the sand or get close to the waves. I like just sitting on a bench looking out at the ocean, simply in awe. To have it whenever I want now is still a little unreal to me. I'm still getting used to such pleasure close at hand.<br />
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There's still more to come, I'm sure. I haven't yet been to the Regency Buenaventura 6, Ventura's second-run movie theater, in the same shopping center as WinCo. This, despite them still showing <i>Only the Brave</i>, which came from Joseph Kosinski, one of my favorite directors. Job hunting is just slightly more important at the moment. <br />
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Reading that back, I feel like I have covered everything here. I've been to every part of Ventura, I've seen all of downtown, though I still want to walk through Mission San Buenaventura at nearly the end of downtown. Yet it doesn't make me wish for Downtown Disney or Universal CityWalk, or even Buena Park, which I liked because of its heavy ghosts of history that hang there. Even knowing as much of Ventura as I do now, there's still the history to learn. That continued yesterday in that gift shop with one of the postcards I bought. When I looked at this aerial photo of Downtown Ventura, I noticed that what's now the Crowne Plaza hotel used to be a Holiday Inn. I'm not sure yet how many years back that goes, but I want to know. That reminds me that there's also the Museum of Ventura County I haven't visited yet, where I'd hope for some room for me to work in their research library. I need to call the director of that library to find out how often a position might open there because they work within the same budget that's also for the Ventura County libraries. I'd like to be steeped in that history.<br />
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I've gone all this way and I almost forgot the Salzer's Music and Salzer's Video stores, across the street from each other on Valentine Road. I've bought DVDs from both places already, while searching each time for a copy of <i>Employee of the Month</i>, the one with Dane Cook and Jessica Simpson. Before, it was a frantic search because I had seen a few minutes of it on Comedy Central when we were staying at the La Quinta Inn on Valentine, waiting for our new apartment to be ready to sign for, and then for the movers to finally show up from Las Vegas, and I thought it was funny as hell. Last month, I saw it in full on Comedy Central and yeah, it was still funny, but the plot was labored, and the search isn't <i>as</i> urgent now, but I still want to listen to the audio commentaries for it. Each Salzer's store is great to browse and get lost in for a little while, not just to search for a specific DVD.<br />
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I actually don't miss the tumult of getting to downtown Los Angeles, even for a french dip sandwich at Philippe's. I don't miss us trying to find a space in the parking lot at Downtown Disney. But I do miss Porto's Bakery and Cafe, a Cuban paradise in Burbank, and if we ever get back there, I'm not only starting with my beloved mango mousse before moving on to my standard Cubano sandwich, but I might just try their roasted pork sandwich too (owing to my deep love of roast pork, started by #1 Hawaiian Barbecue near McCarran International in Las Vegas in that Walmart shopping center), then go on to another mango mousse, and take home <i>at least</i> two trays of mango mousses. I'm dead serious about that.<br />
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While I don't like what we had to go through in five years in Las Vegas and Henderson, it's interesting to have a clean break between Southern California lives and for each one to be completely different. Even with still looking for a job, I think I'm more content with Part II because we're not landlocked (including our nine years in Santa Clarita, we were landlocked for 14 years, all told), we can breathe better here (except for the smoke from the Thomas Fire lately, which has lessened, but it's still worrisome for our part of this region. It hasn't come back, but it still affects all of us), and there's a slightly slower pace to life here. I still have to adjust to that, but I'm getting there. This feels like it could be the right kind of life.Rory L. Aronskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18173518202611695171noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2000154353586469196.post-83914478109361873502017-11-19T16:22:00.001-08:002018-01-05T00:52:11.214-08:00Thanksgiving at the Ventura College LibraryIn just two months, from last September (I needed to have proper ID first, through my driver's license), I've gone from having only the Green Valley Library on N. Green Valley Parkway in Henderson, Nevada, to reveling in having regular access to two libraries: The E.P. Foster library in downtown Ventura (part of the Ventura County library system), and the Ventura College Library, formally known as the Evelyn and Howard Boroughs Library. The latter library is the object of my most current fervent desire.<br />
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My sister and I went there last Tuesday, walking up to an enormous, grayish structure, the outside of which always reminds me of the Thomas & Mack Center in Las Vegas. Just the way one part of the building curves around in gray and red. The Ventura College Library has almost the same feature, except that curving features long windows, and what looks like criss-crossing pipes.<br />
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At the automatic double doors that open onto the <i>HUGE</i> computer lab at the left, and in front of the stairs that go to the library on the second floor, there was a notice on the window next to the doors that said the library would be open on Monday, November 20 from 7:30 a.m. to 8 p.m., and on Tuesday, November 21 from 7:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., both days without a librarian available. I'd say that's ok as long as someone's there to check out books that anyone might want. I don't have to go again for a while anyway since I have my five, which is the limit not only for "community members" like me, as stated in the policies, but also for students, which I was surprised to learn because I figured that they would have unlimited access during the academic year. Go figure.<br />
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Under those hours on the notice was the announcement that the library would be closed from Wednesday through Sunday (it's normally closed on Sundays anyway, except for during the summer, when it's closed from Friday through Sunday). <br />
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After I read that, I needed a minute before we walked in to go up the stairs. I had never felt such envy in a long time. If only I could have access to the library then, which I know is impossible since I don't have any association with the people who could make it happen, and even then I don't think it would happen.<br />
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I'm just thinking about it in my imagination: The entire campus empty (it's an unassuming, small campus that isn't concerned with much on a given day), and the library completely empty except me and all those books.<br />
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When you walk in, there's the librarian's desk, big and round and can easily be at home on any starship. To the immediate right is the leisure reading sections, which are good for being surprising once in a while. Back in September, when I could finally get my Ventura College library card after we had gotten our driver's licenses in Santa Paula (with the same numbers that we had left behind after we moved to Las Vegas), I knew that the library had a copy of <i>The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane</i> by Lisa See, which I had wanted to read since it was published in March, but was stymied by there being so many holds on the copies the Henderson Libraries had. Finally, I would have my chance. And I did, thanks to that leisure reading section.<br />
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Lately, my sister wanted to read <i>Endurance</i>, the memoir by astronaut Scott Kelly, and she was waiting, and waiting, and waiting for a copy to reach her in the Ventura County library system. Still waiting, when we went to the college library. After we returned the books, we went to the leisure reading section, as we always do, and while she was looking on those shelves to see if there was anything really new, I found a copy of <i>Endurance</i> sitting on top of the stacks. She was overjoyed when I showed it to her.<br />
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But generally, having been with this library in the past two months, the leisure reading section is generally anemic. Not that I expect them to get every single new title that comes out that I want to read, but you'll find much of the same stuff sitting atop the stacks, soon after moved to the shelves below, but not much there that could be exciting to have found or bumped into. Granted, Lied Library at the University of Nevada Las Vegas always had a phenomenal leisure reading section, but it's in that memory that I have to be aware: That was a university library. University. Seemingly endless budget. Ventura College is a community college in a small town. Much smaller. The population is smaller. The college has to scrape and snarl and growl for a bigger budget from the legislature in Sacramento. Not everything is going to be so readily available or so immediately fascinating as it was at Lied Library. However, beyond wishing for a few more intriguing titles in the leisure reading section, Lied Library's selections didn't make a difference to me anyway because I never went to that library often. Yes, I could have gotten there if it was one of my family's weekend errands, but the <i>traffic</i> to get to Maryland Parkway every time usually wasn't worth it. And then, I would have had to keep close watch on when the books were due, knowing that there would be a three-week limit and only two renewals allowed. Then it would always have been on a weekend because Dad worked during the week, and so did me and my sister for that matter. But yes, I do wish that the Ventura College Library had all five volumes of the Collected Works of William Howard Taft, like Lied Library has. Nevertheless, it's ok that it doesn't.<br />
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But now, I can get to the college library whenever I want. All it takes is a ride on the 6 bus across from the Government Center (or the 10 or 21 if they show up before the 6. I'm only ever concerned about getting on the 6 if I'm going to the Foster library in downtown Ventura) and it pulls right up at the corner, across from the library. All I have to do is get up and walk a few yards to the entrance. There it is, all for me. It's a fair trade-off from Lied Library, which, until that final farewell visit before we moved back to Southern California, I hadn't been to in months anyway.<br />
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On the right side of the library is the reference stacks, and there are a few culinary history volumes I'd want to read a bit of if I had the library all to myself during those Thanksgiving-fueled days. I know I can't possibly read all the books the library has, not with 63,529 books, nor would I expect to. But just to be among them, to be able to feel free to wander as I wish. <br />
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Right now, I've decided to dig into philosophy, and instead of one of those overview books that profiles the major philosophers, and even not-so-major but still notable for one thing or another, I'm picking at the philosophy section in the college library at random, whatever catches my eye.<br />
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On Tuesday, it was the Second Series of Jiddu Krishnamurti's <i>Commentaries on Living</i>, since the library doesn't have the first volume. It's him talking with people from all walks of life, and it looked interesting enough to me. Depending on how it is, I may go back next time for the third volume (I know exactly what it is), or go at random again and see what I come up with. <br />
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I can't stand that I can't be in that library during those days, but I will definitely be there in my imagination. There are World War II books I haven't even touched yet, as well as Stephen Ambrose's biography <i>The Supreme Commander: The War Years of General Dwight D. Eisenhower</i>. There are the Civil War books I might dip into, as well as some general books on the American presidency that I just found on my last visit. <br />
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And that's not even getting into the literature sections, with all their attendant letters, short stories, and so many novels that I guarantee are truly discoveries, a lot of obscurities on those shelves. You won't find any hype on those shelves, and that's how I like it for my own browsing.<br />
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It's just the thought that here I am, educating myself, on a college campus but without having to be of a college campus. I love college and university campuses anyway, and lived for Fridays at 3:50 p.m. when I was a student at College of the Canyons in Valencia, California. That time marked the end of my cinema class for the week and the campus was very nearly empty, so I could walk its lengths for a little while, feeling like I owned it. <br />
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To have the Ventura college library to myself for those days would be paradise. And I know exactly where my next books are, starting from those and moving on to whatever captivates me next. Pure bliss.Rory L. Aronskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18173518202611695171noreply@blogger.com0