1. Liz posts a lot of great stuff on her Facebook page and she came through again by presenting the poem, "Desiderata".
The poem immediately brought to my mind the National Lampoon parody entitled, "Deteriorata".
Two Kellogg guys, Robert Larsen and Bruce Alldredge, rented an apartment in a wobbly building close to the North Idaho College campus, a place they nicknamed Cockroach Castle.
In the spring term of 1973, I hung out a lot with Bruce and Robert and before long was also hanging out with Liz and Jane in and around the Castle along with other friends.
The Castle was my cultural hub that semester. We listened to all kinds of music, read (Bruce and Robert also wrote) poetry, pontificated freely with one another about Richard Nixon, religion, and a wide range of other topics we had passionate and ill-informed (ha ha -- so what!) opinions about.
We also read National Lampoon.
And it was by way of Bruce and Robert that I first heard "Deteriorata" read aloud and it completely killed me off and contained lines that we quoted to one another (Rotate your tires) and that never failed to make us laugh.
So, when I saw Liz's post of "Desiderata", I messaged Liz and Jane and wondered if they remembered the parody poem.
They did.
And that led to all three of us being transported back 53 years and taking some time to revel in how much we loved the Castle, Bruce's van, The Purple Pig, and the wonderful times we had together for those few months until the semester ended.
As a nineteen year old, being with these friends at the Cockroach Castle was the first time in my, albeit, young life that I felt absolutely uninhibited with peers.
These were the most accepting and open people I'd ever known and I thrived on our times together, whether at the apartment, shooting stick at the Fort Ground Tavern, dancing to Free's "All Right Now" as we closed down the Steinhaus, or buying a dollar pitcher of Lucky Lager beer for each hand at the Rathskeller to celebrate the Knicks' NBA Championship victory over the Lakers.
I know now that I came out of high school feeling confused and insecure and it was great to pontificate, party, read poems, and be someone I'd never been before and revel in the accepting embrace of my friends at the Castle.
2. I spent much of today doing my best not only to understand, but to absorb all that Professor Greenberg had to say over the course of four lectures about opera, oratorio, and the cantata. I can't even being to write it all out in this blog post, but I will say that learning more about the oratorio and then listening to a thrilling excerpt from Handel's Messiah and finding out the role of the cantata in Lutheran worship and hearing excerpts from Bach's Cantata 140 moved me, made my belly shake like a bowl full of jelly.
3. I returned to two foods I love today by preparing a tofu and eggplant stir fry over white rice and seasoned with soy sauce and Sichuan chili crisp It worked. The sodium of the soy sauce and the heat of the chili crisp played off of each other just the way I hoped they would. And I have more of this simple food in a container to eat again in the next day or two.
Yeah == I know you probably can't imagine eating tofu and eggplant. All I can say is that they float my boat......
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