The Ricochet Podcast - The Ramble: All the Trimmings

Episode Date: November 24, 2021

James Lileks reboots The Ramble, just in time for Thanksgiving (AKA a great time to start a diet). Subscribe to James Lileks’ The Ramble here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/james-lileks-the-ramble/id1073828132. Source

Hi, this is James Lilex. Sorry to drop into your podcast feed like this unannounced, like you don't have enough podcasts already, I know. Well, this is The Ramble, and what is that? Well, it's my new true crime podcast, where I essentially rephrase Wikipedia articles with ominous music underneath. No, no, it's not that. And it's not politics, and it's not punditry. We have enough of that. Essentially, basically, it's just me talking, rambling. I have a subject, oh believe me, and I never know exactly where it's going to take me. And it always takes me to a place where I say, you've said enough, shut up. And then I do. That's basically the ramble. So it's rebooted. We had season one, yarn and yarn Yarn Ago, and now here we are with more.

We'll be continuing every other week or so here on the Ricochet Podcast Network. And thanks for subscribing. Thanks for listening. Let's begin. Hey, you're just the guy I want to talk to. Where are you phoning from? Whoa, let me do the talking. Let me do the talking. Whoa. Let me do the talking. Whoa! Look, I understand him all right. He's a reactionary, a throwback to the 20th century.

Whoa! I'm James Lalix, and this is The Ramble. Thanksgiving, again. And we all know what that means, of course. Turkey with all the trimmings. Trimmings. Nobody ever uses that word except when they're describing those things which are adjacent to the bird, right? What's for dinner tonight?

Eh, we're just going to have some trimmings. No. Nobody says, more trimmings, please. No, you refer to them specifically. Or afterwards, you heap praise on them individually. Those were great sweet potatoes, man. Oh, that lefse? Hmm.

Those green beans with the crunchy little onions on top? Don't eat them myself. Personally, I find the whole thing revolting. But aesthetically, just it was really nice looking. Never had a bad Thanksgiving. I'm sure that's a lie. I'm sure I've had some which were remarkably substandard or fraught or disappointing or this, that, or the other. But who remembers?

Who wants to remember? I mean, if I wanted to dig deep down in my memory, I could find a place where there was some inter-family dispute or something that was said. But, you know, I'd rather just retcon it all and say it was happy. Because it was. It was. There have been about 18 of them here at the house. I think we've had, we went to my sister-in-law's. We went to Fargo a few times. Fargo to the Holiday Inn. Now you want an experience, you go to Thanksgiving at the Fargo Holiday Inn,

this big, huge ballroom. There's such a crowd that they have to pull back the partition, the dividers that separate the convention halls. And then there's two tables. There's two wait stations where they're carving it off. They have turkey, and of course, they have roast beef, which I don't know about that. I don't know. I don't know.

And then you can scoff if you like, but if you don't want to cook or you don't have a ton of money, or this is the greatest thing that your family's done all year, you peel off a couple of bills and you can feed everybody until they are bursting. And the bounty is extraordinary. It reminds me of going to Bonanza Steakhouse when I was a kid, because at the end, after you got your Texas toast and the rest of it, there'd be this big area of crushed ice with little glass dishes, and in the dishes were the desserts. Now, at Sizzlers or Bonanza, of course, you could take one, but at the Holiday Inn, all you can eat can take two, take three. It was wonderful, and the turkey, I have absolutely no memory of it whatsoever. I just remember being with my family and daughter being young

and probably still smelling of chlorine from the pool the night before and then going out in the absolute bitter cold with the snow drifting across the parking lot and making our way back across the plains to Minneapolis. Yeah, that's good. This year, nothing. It's anomalous. not crazy about it. Daughter's going to be away.

Things have combined so there are not going to be people over at the house. We won't be playing games, as we usually do after the turkey and the trimmings have been set aside. Games. Some of which I like, some of which I don't. It's fun to play Password, for example, with a non-native speaker, my brother-in-law being French. That was always fun. We would play charades. We would play just to keep the evening going until everybody eventually says,

Welp, it's time to go. In the Minnesota tradition, when you say, Welp, and you slap your legs and you get up, that indicates you're about 30 minutes from leaving the house because after that, you have to say some things. Then you move to the kitchen where the womenfolk all package up the leftovers and talk about who's going to get what. And then you have to move to the door, and then the men are standing there sort of tapping their toes and looking at their watches

while the womenfolk say something else. And God knows what there's left to talk about, but they do. And then if it's warm enough, you walk them out to the car, and eventually you get to the car, and you have a little conversation again at the door, and then they get into the car, and then they roll the window down, and they talk some more until eventually they go.

I'm from that culture, and I have none of those instincts in me. When I slap my thighs, welp, I'm going. That's it. I ain't hanging around anymore. I've said all I'm going to say. Anyway. Well, this year, of course, means no leftovers, probably.

That's probably not going to be a bad idea when it comes to the desserts because, oh, yeah, I've decided that I'm going to be cutting down on sugar. This is something that periodically happens. You may ask why. Well, because I've been just feeling a little, what's the word I'm looking for? Bulbous, inflated, grotesque. It's ridiculous. I'm not.

Pants still fit. I don't know. Ten years ago, I decided to drop about 10 pounds. I cut out all the carbs, and I ate meat. I ate meat. And I also ate meat. For snacks, I had meat. Breakfast?

Well, eggs and meat. And I've been doing this again, frankly, because I don't know the possibility of a winter cruise is possibly out there, and I would like to sit out on a deck chair and not feel like I've passed into hairy, late, middle-aged lumpiness. This also means hitting the weights, I suppose, and exercising, doing more walks downtown and the rest of it. But then I think about the cruise and the general population on a cruise ship. They're red and they're puffed and frosted with white chest hair,

tough to wish also come out of their ears, and they are absolutely indifferent to judgment. Why shouldn't I join them? It's easier. Why deny myself for three months and just eat nothing but bacon and meat so that I can walk around on a cruise ship and feel trim. Because I'm vain, that's why. It's pathetic. So far, so good. I used to start the day with a ration of

cereal and a little sausage with hot sauce. And about the hot sauce, oh, well, we'll get to that in a second. At the end of the cereal portion of my life, I was finishing up the pumpkin spice Cheerios. They were on sale and they were seasonally apt, so I decided to buy them. Nice break from the Raisin Bran. Oh, and the Raisin Bran, I have all of the permutations. Crunch, cranberry, plain, these shellacked little banana slices that are like poker chips. The hot sauces, it rotates through a whole little series that goes through the week. I got green cholula, which is good. Crybaby Craig's, which is exceptionally good. It's local. It's got a little garlic to it. Sriracha, of course, and I regret

this. There was a Sriracha panic a couple of years ago, I think, and people were saying, oh no, there's not going to be enough. What are we going to do? Oh no, there's lawsuits against the company because it smells. Who would live next to the plant that makes that stuff and complain about the smell? It's wonderful. But we were worried that there wasn't going to be sufficient sriracha because this was the hipster thing that you put on your spam and noodles at the Vietnamese pho place. I bought this enormous container, and I have not yet gotten through it., has turned a deep, dark brick red. It's still good, but Lord, it's just taken me a long time to move to that thing.

Also, some Byerly's hot pickle hot sauce, of which I bought four bottles. And unfortunately, it demands that it be refrigerated. They all want you to refrigerate them. No, I'm not going to do that. Cold hot sauce is just an internally inconsistent concept. I mean, it can be spicy and cold. I get it. But cold hot sauce, no, there's got to be enough vinegar and whatever there and stave off whatever rot happens to it. So no, it's like cold ketchup. No. You know, I'm sadly proud, I think, of the fact that I do not assign a particular hot sauce to a particular day.

Well, if it's Tuesday, must be Cholula. Cholula. So Wednesday must be Belgian hot sauce. Given that I kind of live my life in this life on rails, habitual arrangement of order, this day on this, this thing on that, it is entirely expected for me to arrange my hot sauces by the day. But no, no, no, no. I'm devil may care, caution to the wind, toss it all. Sometimes it's crybaby Craig's on a Tuesday and a Thursday.

I know, madness, sheer madness. This man's just lost all sense of propriety. So if we are serious about this de-carbing thing, though, that means that's going to crimp my experience of lobby pizza Wednesday. Yes, yes, I have the pizza every Wednesday. That's part of my routine. I'm sorry. That's just how it is.

It is. It's a midweek treat. I go to the office. I walk around downtown. I build up a good appetite. I go up to Lobby Pizza. And those guys, I mean, I remember during the dark days when there was nobody downtown. The only business that they had were the workers who were coming over from the public services construction building.

Business was down 70%, 80%. Used to be you'd walk in there, and there would be a line out the door every day, and there'd be 20 pies waiting, massive selection. And then during the pandemic lockdown, when it was me and about five other people in the 52-story skyscraper, I would go down there and there would be about four or five pizzas and nobody in line and everyone in masks, all the tables up, all the chairs up because if you sat down and ate, of course, it was death. And there were no knives and forks, plastic to take because

that would be contamination of touch and the rest of it. And I would talk to them every day, every Wednesday, and we would talk about how things were and how things weren't. There was one day before I went back downtown for good, March or April,

when nobody was going anywhere. I was walking around downtown and I saw somebody walking out of my building with a white envelope that had the logo, the pizza logo on it. And it was, it was, that meant that it was open. Nothing was open. Everything was closed. Everything was gone. But the pizza was open. It's like being the last man on earth and picking up a radio signal when you turn the dial. So to this day, the guy who's the manager on Wednesdays, we always sort of towed up who's there now. Business is good. More pizza's out. More people. It's coming

back, we've been saying. It's been coming back for a long time. I don't know what makes your pizza so good. I really don't. It's not the sort of stuff that I usually like. I don't know what makes their pizza so good. I really don't. It's not the sort of stuff that I usually like. I don't like New York pizza, and this probably is kind of that. I think they maybe just take a little brush and paint grease on everything when people's backs are turned, perhaps. The slices have a significant amount, however, of unadorned bread near the edge. And you know what the term for that is when you order a pizza you go to a pizza restaurant and you eat everything except for the crusts the absolutely edge of it we used to call that the term is the bones so the bones bones don't have any sauce the

bones don't have any cheeses it's just bread's good but it's good now sometimes you know some pizza pies are going to top that thing that sucker baby right up to the margins if it's a deep dish they got that little ridge there to hold the lake of sauce. Other places will just have this sort of puffy hillock in the crust area. It's not really pizza at all, but it's enjoyably flavored bread, and it's connected to the pizza gestalt, let's say. Lately, I have been actually upending the whole experience so that I slice the pizza with my knife and fork.

Oh, I know. I said it. I admit it. I'm proud of it. There you go. And I've been sort of slicing off the crust and then having a little crust first so that the really good stuff with the meat and sauce

I can get to later rather than ending up with a crust, which is ending up with something that is, you know, insubstantial to the actual pizza experience. But I can't do that anymore. It's nothing but bread. It's nothing but carbs. Please, that bread-centric top portion, it's got to go. No, it's got to go. Anyway, that's the Wednesday way of doing things. So somehow I'm going to have to incorporate pizza into the new carb thing. Lunches, you know, I eat lunch. Yep, very simple. Pastrami or roast beef or sliced chicken sandwich on a half slice of bread or a slice of bread slice with a ration of chips, perhaps. Chips,

gone. Sorry. No, that's out of here. That's pure, pure, pure calories there. I used to eat a half a bag, which hold the spud input down to about 100 calories a day. Okay, two-thirds of the bag. I'll write the whole bag, okay? And then, dulce. Two pieces of licorice, this fine local licorice. That's 60 calories. So cut that in half, you got 30 calories. Get rid of the chips, get rid of that.

Boil it down, walk a little bit more. Who knows? You know, you can do that. You can do that. I'm looking cruise ready, baby. You know? When I think about it, though, I went from one piece to two because I'd bought some new jeans at my old size and they fit really well. I thought, wow, this is my college dimensions and they fit and they got a little room too. I can have two pieces of licorice.

What I didn't know, of course, was that somewhere in the pandemic, and I don't know if they were planning this as part of the pandemic and the rest of it, but they started adding a lot of give to Gap Pants. They started adding a lot of spandex. And so what you think would be your size is probably a very generous interpretation of your actual size in Abo DuPois. Anyway, so what else is there? Oh, there's the Halloween candy candy which is still sitting in my drawer at work and i gotta get rid of that somehow because that just sits there and taunts you it

just begs for you to eat it my wife had said put aside some butterfingers please so i put aside some butterfingers she's had like one eighth of a butterfinger she played four hours of tennis i think yesterday you know i mean she's my wife is active in the sense that a nuclear pile is warm. But she can't bring herself to have a full Butterfinger. I know why, because there's a certain feral emotion, at least that takes over me, when you have chocolate, when you eat chocolate, and it sends out this imperative of the brain

that's very simple. It says, eat more. More of that. If you have a little piece of chocolate and it's good, then you realize, well, I can have, that was pleasurable. What else do we have? Well, we have an eighth of a bar of fine 70% cocoa,

whatever the hell that means. In the freezer, it's going to be hardened. It's going to be flavored. Let's have a little bit of that, and then the whole thing's gone. It's all gone. It's all gone. Anyway.

So I have fun size stuff still at work. And at night, I've been having myself as a late night treat a fun size Reese's peanut butter cup. But these are not the regular size that you know, not just fun size, but Dionysian, riot size, you know, pleasure beyond all reason, mad eyes rolling up into the skull size. And when I find it, I'm just, you know, I have to have more, more, more, more, more, more. That's what happens when you don't eat chocolate, then you start up again.

So if I don't eat another fun-sized Reese's peanut butter, what do I have? Oh, I would get a little foil-wrapped bar of Crackle or Mr. Goodbar. I have no idea what the difference is. Mr. Goodbar always reminds me of Diane Keaton being murdered for having sex. I don't know how they got past that, but somehow they managed. Maybe they didn't, and that's why you just don't see a lot of Mr. Goodbars coming, of course, because the kids at Halloween, it's not like they put out a bowl of Mr. Goodbars, and of course, because the kids at Halloween, it's not like they hold, you know, you put out a bowl of Mr. Good bars and they say, ew, that was the name of a famous book that seemed to suggest that the promiscuity naturally comes to bad ends. Anyway, so I got that. So just throw them out. Throw them out. Throw them out.

Throw them out. Throw them out. I never do. Never do. In the past, you used to be able to take them to work, right? You would take them to work and drop them off on everybody else. And for some reason, if you have somebody else's candy at work, it doesn't count towards your own caloric intake. Now, if you eat the stuff that you bring, yes, it counts. But if somebody else brings Crackle or Mr. Goodbar or Zagnut or Zero, to mention some brands, of course, you never see anymore.

And you eat that, that doesn't count. It doesn't count. You didn't buy it, it doesn't count. But no more are there people at the office. So there's nobody to bring candy to. Well, I took some stuff that I really was looking for. There was a Milky Way, for example, that contained nothing but caramel, which definitely, definitionallyally cannot be a Milky

Way. Milky Way has to have nugget and that nugget by the way is Minneapolis nugget. That's what it was called. Minneapolis was a candy center. Milky Way got started here. Mr. Mars was here and as was you know J.R. Ryder the man who built my, and many others, Pearsons. We're a candy center of the world, practically. We invented the nugget, which you later find in your Three Musketeers. It's that whipped fluff stuff. So a Milky Way without Minneapolis Nugget is not that. It's just thick caramel. Now, that's delicious.

But man, you know that this is the epitome of indulgence right here. So I brought a few to work thinking that I would, you know, have them once in a while. Well, I was a co-worker at the office the other day, actually. It turned out, and we were talking, this was a while back, and we're talking Halloween. We're talking about the number of trick-or-treaters we get. And, you know, she hadn't got, she hadn't bought any candy, she said. I think she maybe just shut the door and turned off the lights or she was at somebody else's house or whatever.

She had no leftover candy. So I went back to my desk and I got the Milky Way, the all-caramel, sinful, insanely, insanely licentious candy. And I gave it to her. I just dropped it off because there you go. There you are. Here's a Milky Way. It's all caramel.

If you want, I can fill it with heroin and some bacon to make it even healthier. And the next day, she was at the office again. And, you know, tap it away. Big story, new story. She covers the courts. And I went back to my desk, and I got another piece of the candy.

And I walked over, and I set it on her desk and walked away. And I heard her say afterwards, as I passed, thank you, James, James. And I realized it had been a year since I'd heard my name spoken in the office. I went by the desk the next day and she wasn't there because the court case was over. And so she was done writing. It was writing from home, like everybody else is. And I put it on her keyboard. And every day I've been there since. There it is on the keyboard. When she gets back, one day I'll walk past the cubicle and it'll be gone, and I'll know that she came in and saw it and said perhaps, or thought, thank you, James.

She's one of my favorite people in the office. One day on Sunday, she was working and I took my dad up to the office to show him where I worked. I was proud of it and he was proud of me being there. So she was there tapping away

and they talked for a while and I could tell that she took the instant full measure of my old man, and she liked him. And she mentioned that once, a year or two later. She said, he was a cool dude. Not my terms, but yeah, he was. My dad used to say he was going to go on a diet.

I got to go on a diet and pad a stomach. I got to go on a diet. He was never less than active. I mean, this guy was just hauling barrels and picking up things. I mean, he was always into his 90s, was just, you know, walk five miles outside. I learned one day, he used to tell me he walked to the shopping center every day. He'd go to West Acres Mall and walk around like everybody else did. He walked outside.

It'd be 10 above, and he would walk outside. It was him. His eyes moving, but over the years, you know, the gut, bulky hey i gotta gotta go on a diet i may be because he just did what he wanted and he ate what he ate he lived life right right right to the edge of the crust there and beyond whenever we you know would go out and he would remark that he shouldn't have this but then he would then really who cares who cares well we cleaned out his house after remark that he shouldn't have this, but then he would. And really, who cares? Who cares? Well, we cleaned out his house after he died.

There wasn't any candy. There was a scround of, that's the technical term, ice cream comes in scrounds. It's a scround of the ice cream that I have on weekends. And there was a pizza of the brand that I have on weekends. We'd never talked about that. Well, ice cream didn't do him in.

Bread didn't do him in. Smoking killed my grandfather, I suppose, in as much as he was going downstairs for his cigarettes and he fell. 88, I think. Going to get his old gold. He loved his old gold. And, you know, my father tripped when he was getting up to freshen what he was drinking. Sometimes it's not the thing itself that you die from, but it's what you do to go get it, I guess.

Huh. My grandfather was always skinny, by the way, as I remember. And the more I look in the mirror, the more I see his ghost emerging, which is why I always keep my cigars downstairs and upstairs, so I don't fall down.

But I remember Thanksgiving at Grandpa's place. At some point, it's place at some point it shifted at some point they came to our house in Fargo because they were getting old and it was daughter's duty and my wife would

my mom paging Dr. Freud to the courtesy my mother would get this plate of relish it was the relish plate. And it had radishes, which were just incredibly spicy. I mean, take your top off,

the top of your head off those things. It had, of course, celery, in case you wanted to really do something with your mouth. It was a lot of work. Produced its own floss and had no taste. And a couple other things like that, olives. Dreadful stuff. I never had any of it,

but you could not have Thanksgiving without the relish. The relish is distinct from the trimmings, just so we know. You got your relish plate, which is cold, and you got your trimmings, which are hot. And so I remember that Grandma and Grandpa came to our house, and then the next year they came to our house as well. But before that, we'd gone out to the farm, and Grandma had made the turkey, and she'd made the stuffing and the potatoes and everything else in the farmhouse kitchen.

And my Grandma had enjoyed it, and he had a beer, a grain belt, gave me a sip of it. Awful stuff. Grandpa, what are you thinking? And then he would have a cigarette, and we would go out to the car, and 30 minutes later, leave. And I remember, as every other time that we drove away, my grandfather standing in the window of the kitchen, waving as we left. One of the true things about growing up as I did was that it was over the river and through the woods to grandmother and grandpa's house.

It was literally that. And it was over the river and through the woods to grandmother and grandpa's house. It was literally that. And it was over the river and through the woods to get home as well. And in the early days, there was an enormous drive-in theater at the edge of Fargo. And I don't know how late it stayed open. I don't know how long into the season.

But every time we were coming back from grandma and grandpa's on a Sunday night and I was tired and sleeping perhaps, I would drift off. And then the car would make this turn because it had to turn 90 degrees to make this curve to get into Fargo. And if that woke me up, I don't know. But if I did, that's when I would be able to look up and I would see these great big faces up on the screen silently laughing,

talking, doing something. The outside world where I'd go, this big, enormous, glowing portal of people and action and the rest of it. So yeah, it was always comforting to go over the river and through the woods to grandmother's house for Thanksgiving. And to go over the river and through the woods to go home. To the place where... Where... home to the place where, where right now that I think about it, there's somebody else who's having Thanksgiving there. We were the first family to live in that house. There's been one other family since. I have records exactly of what Thanksgiving was like here, thanks to the man

who grew up here and left an account. And so we have our Thanksgiving where they did. House is a little different, a couple more additions to it. But that door, that swinging door, that's where the servants came through. This table right here is where their table was. Those beams that we see above, those light fixtures, those are original. That's what they turned on at the end of the evening when they played whist or whatever it was they did after the turkey and the trimmings were done. And so there's somebody in Fargo, North Dakota who will be having Thanksgiving this year at the same place where we did with no knowledge whatsoever of all the things that we did and

all the things that elapsed. But does it matter? No. There will be a spirit of Thanksgiving left over. There will be turkey. There will be relish. There will be trimmings. And then, and then, There will be turkey. There will be relish. There will be trimmings. And then, and then,

there will be pie. And if somebody waves it off and says, no, I'm on a diet. I got a diet. I got to cut down. Everyone will laugh because you can't be serious. Here, have two pieces.

And you know what? I will. That's it. This has been The Ramble. I'm James Lawless.