issue #2 issue #2 issue #2 we love u <3 (unless you’re a bad person, fix it) CONTENTS Boundaries Saying No and Letting Go of Relationships that No Longer Serve Us by alexandra demarco, pg. 1 I Complain About Screwing Up My Internship by logan langlois, artwork by blake lannom, pg. 2 Culture and Cream Soda Elliston Place, TN by kelly fletcher, pg. 4 American Food Traditions by lake markham, pg. 6 The Time I Ate Maggots by logan langlois, artwork by blake lannom pg. 12 Penny Pincher’s Paradise by nash hamilton, pg. 15 Debbie’s Little Lemonade Stand by kahwit tela, pg. 19 Buried by joseph garabed, pg. 21 Every Landlord’s Favorite Band From Poughkeepsie An Interview With NY Band Spud Cannon by kahwit Tela, pg. 30 Musical Sampling in the Digital Age by sophia badalian, pg. 34 Eyes by claire forehand, pg. 37 click the title of the article you came here for! seriousness rant nashville news food food? short story short story short story MUSIC MUSIC CLAIRE 1 by alexandra demarco T he concept of boundaries seems simple: a per- son sets boundaries in their life to ensure that their relationships don’t break barriers which they aren’t comfortable with. However, learning to enforce these boundaries can be extremely difficult and, if you don’t enjoy confrontation, extremely unnerving. Boundaries are often discussed in terms of romantic relationships -- i.e. boundaries re- garding consent, monogamy, time spent apart, and finances, to name a few. The importance of establishing such boundaries in romantic re- lationships cannot be overstated. But, the need to set similar boundaries in friendships is discussed less often, yet just as important and something that I have personally struggled with. I’m not a mental health professional my- self, but I have picked up some words of advice in therapy throughout the years that I want to share and that I hope will benefit someone reading. So, what do boundaries look like in a friend- ship? For me, they include making time for people who are willing to do the same for me. They also include standing up for myself when a friend says something that upsets me. They include respecting that sometimes, friends are dealing with their own personal problems and can’t always be around to listen -- and knowing that they respect my mental wellbeing, too. And finally, they include knowing that I am allowed to let go of those whose friendship is no longer positively contributing to my life. Just like romantic relationships can turn tox- ic, so too can friendships when boundaries are not properly established or maintained. Additionally, enforcing boundaries can be more difficult when mental health problems are in- volved. According to the American Psychological Association, Generation Z suffers from some of the highest rates of mental illness ever record- ed, so the discussion around the intersection between mental health and boundaries is really just beginning. When a loved one is suffering with severe men- tal health problems, it can be easy to take on their load as if it was your own. Naturally, we want the people we love to be happy and healthy and aim to help them in any way that we can. However, there is an important distinction be- tween caring about someone and carrying their problems. When you care, you listen to your friend in times of need, help connect them with mental health resources and maybe even bring over a meal from time to time. You are around as a support system, but also as your own per- son with individual needs. When you carry your friend’s struggles, however, your own boundar- ies are not respected. Your individual needs, including those regarding space, are not met, and the line between caregiver and friend is blurred. Remember: care, don’t carry (that one is straight from my therapist). In addition to mental health in general, our generation is the loneliest yet, according to a study by Cigna, which can be, at least partial- ly, attributed to social media. This problem has been exacerbated by the pandemic and the lack of in-person interaction that most people have 2 And finally, remember that you do not have to apologize for setting boundaries. You do not have to apologize for deciding that someone is not adding value to your life. You do not have to apologize when you stand up for how you would like to be treated, and you do not owe those looking in at your life an explanation as to why someone is no longer a part of your world. You also do not have to apologize if you choose to unfollow someone on social media once they are no longer a part of your life. Personally, I find it strange and invasive that we so of- ten casually gaze at the lives of people we no longer like or speak to, simply because we fear offending them with the social faux pas of an unfollow. Never before have relationships been measured by their participants’ willingness to gaze in at each other’s lives from afar, and so- cial media creates arbitrary expectations that we check up on those who we may never speak to again. Loose boundaries are, at their best, a discom- fort and, at their worst, a pathway to emotional abuse and gaslighting. We all deserve friend- ships that make us feel fulfilled, and learning to speak up for ourselves and set clear bound- aries is the first step in crafting joyful rela- tionships. You can part from someone -- whether they be a romantic partner or a friend -- with civili- ty, but you do not have to apologize for saying goodbye. Happy spring cleaning! P.S.: I recommend that you follow @the.holistic. psychologist on Instagram for more on this and other mental health topics. by Logan langlois artwork by blake lannom S amurai Champloo played in the background as my buddy Lucus loaded up another bowl. A spark lit on cue with the main character’s sword drawing out of its sheath. Moments later, Lu- cus exhaled over the dimly lit TV screen with a cough. The smoke collided with the image of several rolling anime heads squirting blood and the epic lofi samurai hip- hop softly played in the background. The room of half a dozen delin- quent young adults including myself carried on in conversation about music, art, skating and furious politics. Silently, I was having an in- ner crisis on how the hell I was going to turn watching cartoons on a couch into a story. *All names have been changed in order not to snitch* about the author: alexandra demarco I am a rising senior at the University of Tennessee studying journalism, environmental studies and French. I am interested in writing of all forms, from investigative journalism to entertainment coverage to science communication. 3 It was too cold to skate, which is pretty inconvenient when you promised your internship a skate story. Very few skaters in the local scene were going out because all the rails were frozen. Both of the skaters I had come to Chattanooga to follow had just hurt themselves in epic fashion. Naturally, this was before I had arrived with my camera, because they’re selfish bastards. I would have loved to get a wrist bent at the wrong angle and a nearly broken back on film, but some people just had to hurt them- selves before I was there ready to capture some spicy videos for “Hall of Meat” or “Wicked Slams.” No one would get on board with my last desperate idea of skateboard bumper cars due to my size. Apparently 195lbs is too big of a human to headbut against while barral- ling down opposite ramps for internet content. Like I said, they’re selfish bastards. Thankfully we got a couple of pretty cool shots earlier in the day, which naturally was when our camera batteries be- gan to die. Apparently, even if the camera is high quality, the batteries last about as long as a highschooler on prom night. Which left us all unsatisfied, angry and eager to repress our disappointment. We were plan- ning to go back out and try shooting the next day, but we still felt artistically blue balled. So what to do? I still had to write something for my internship lest they real- ize how big of a mistake they had just made in bringing me aboard. Do I just lie through my teeth? Make up a bunch of skateboard tricks that sound so impressive that it makes sense the common pleb hasn’t heard of them? No, that’s unheard of in the field of journalism!!! I could fabricate nonsense tricks such as the “690 Mo- lotov Dolphin”, “Independent Ireland Hill Bomb”, “The Nose Grind Chungus Hindenburg” or the “Oil Floats On Water, Cover Yourself And Your Board In Oil And Wait For It To Rain”. But I’m too lazy to follow through with a low hanging fruit fake news satirization, so my exis- tential crises shall continue through no fault of my own. A twenty- three year old, broke- writer trying to pull scraps together in order to sat- isfy the internship he lucked into. Shit my ex is right I am a stereotype. But at least I can take comfort in the fact that I seem to be a stereotype with- in a stereotypical world. We are exiting the presidency of a comic book villain. Our new cardboard cutout of a politi- cian is inheriting a political climate ripe with textbook, stereotypical fear mongering. The economy is in the same position it’s ALWAYS in during the beginning of a century’s second decade. Which is thanks to yet ANOTHER early century plague. Maybe it pays to be aimless. I got up from the couch with three of my friends. Some- one suggested that we skate down a hill while walking the dog, and I love time outside when my mind is malfunc- tioning. I hopped on my razor scooter and raced to catch up to my friends. The concrete rolled under the wheels so fast it sounded as if it was raining. For a moment I quit thinking all together and just listened to the sound, observed the beautiful mountains around me that I hadn’t noticed yet, and let the uneven concrete vibrate the scooter and mas- sage my feet. Suddenly, I was snapped out of my trance by a skater almost crashing into me. I tripped over my own feet and bailed off my scooter without letting go of the handle bars. Naturally, anyone who’s ever ridden a scooter before can tell you this method is amazing for destroying your ankles. This led to me yelling out several Australian level expletives in front of a Karen. However while walking off the pulverisation of what was once my ankles like the tough guy I pretend to be, my anger iron- ically faded. The two skate- boarding kids flew widley down the hill. Oblivious teenagers going out with their friends, embracing a community with- in counter culture that gave them a place in this world. The barely controlled youthful in- sanity reminded me of my home in the Nashville punk scene. My personal counter culture based in another city that gave me freedom, acceptance and permission to feel aimless. Just like these kids. That’s what I had been expe- riencing in Chattanooga, and maybe that’s why everything felt so familiar. The skaters I met felt like the kind of people I would meet at a house show back before COVID, when 4 by Kelly fletcher T here’s a street near the West End of Nashville known by the surrounding community as The Rock Block, a name inspired by the music venues on the strip. Elliston Place is sandwiched in between Music Row and Saint Thomas Hospital. If you take a left or right down Church Street too soon you might miss it, but if you keep go- ing, you’ll find a car-lined street with techni- colored awnings on both sides. Shops and restau- rants with neon signs and chalkboards out front invite you in for a cream soda or slice of pizza. Many of these shops have been on Elliston Place for decades, but some have been forced to close because of rezoning, new developers or the ris- ing price of having a business on the up-and- coming street. Linda Melton has been around to see this change. She’s helped manage Elliston Place Soda Shop for 28 years and bakes all their desserts. things felt normal. The people I had just met that day, and had been hanging out with all throughout the day, were treating me as one of their own. Just like real punks. Maybe that’s how the Chattanooga skate scene stays alive during the cold months. Maybe they just carry the culture on their backs until they can skate again. It may not be as flashy as a made up skate move, but I think it’s worth writing about. “The whole neighborhood’s a great place,” she says, “but they’re trying to change us around a little bit.” The Soda Shop was established in 1939 and has since become a neighborhood staple. “We’re downhome friendly. We care. We strive to serve the best food. It’s just been a great place to work. Everybody’s more like family than em- ployees,” Melton says. It’s the type of place where the staff will call you “sweetheart” as they bring you that extra slice of pie. To say the Soda Shop has the best grilled peanut butter and banana sandwich I’ve ever had would be an understatement. The restaurant was recently renovated, but the owner made it a point to restore the interior to what it was when the shop opened almost a cen- tury ago. Melton says the retro stools still line the bar, the floor tiles are still checkered black and white and they were even able to refurbish some old booths. However, the same preservation isn’t certain for the rest of Elliston Place. Hotel developer AJ Capital Partners recently ac- quired the building that holds what many locals have been calling “Nashville’s Soul.” what content are you looking for? We at T.W.W. pride ourselves with being a community magazine but in order to maintain that, we have to have community involvement. So, we’re asking you to help us better reflect our community! Is there an artist you want to learn more about? A societal trend that interests you? Or even someone you know that’s crazy enough to warrant an article: we are here to be your magazine. Help us make this a wonderful world. click here to email us 5 Exit/In is the music venue that earned Elliston Place the name The Rock Block in 1971. Alyson Estes is a concert promoter who has worked with Exit/In and The End, the venue across the street, for seven years. She says if Exit/In were gone the community would never be the same. “We help foster the local community. The End and Exit/In... it’s a rite of passage to play both of them. Without them there really wouldn’t be, I think, as big of a local and independent artist scene in Nashville.” The first time I visited Elliston Place was for a show at The End. The music venue was hidden behind Obie’s Pizza and took on the appearance of a seedy dive bar. Graffiti covered the exteri- or walls surrounding the wrought iron door and windows, but I quickly learned that it’s not as intimidating as it seemed. Inside the venue passed the sticker-covered bathroom and smoking area out back, you’ll often find the heart of Nashville’s DIY music scene. The black walls are covered with the names of iconic bands and artists who’ve graced The End’s stage. “There’s a different type of atmosphere and sense of community at independent venues, espe- cially in Nashville... It’s a whole different ex- perience than some corporate venue,” Estes says. Estes says independently owned venues are an integral part of the growth of independent art- ists’ careers. For many of the local artists I know, The End and Exit/In were the first renowned venues they were allowed to play in. Despite also hosting well-known acts, the two venues create a real sense of belonging for lesser-known ones. “Our venues are always endangered by hotel de- velopers... I think if Exit/In was gone it would leave us a lot more vulnerable to having those developers come and knockdown The End as well... There would literally be no more rock on The Rock Block,” Estes says. According to Estes, that wouldn’t be the only loss. She says shops, restaurants and venues on Elliston Place have always worked together and created more business for one another. Melton says, “When they [Exit/In and The End] would have their Friday night, Saturday night shows we would get quite a bit of business from the people that come down for the shows... I’d like for it to stay the same. I don’t really wan- na see any more hotels and motels put up, yanno? Cause we have plenty of those in our area right now.” But Nashville won’t let The Rock Block go down without a fight. The community raised over $200,000 in donations for the previous owner Chris Cobb to buy Exit/In back. After which, AJ Capital Partners released a statement that said they would preserve the venue. However, Exit/In would no longer be inde- pendently owned. It is still undetermined what will happen to Exit/In and Elliston Place and if AJ Capital Partners will allow Cobb to buy the venue back or if they will preserve it, but at least for now The Rock Block remains a community that’s fos- tered so much creativity and the heart of Nash- ville’s DIY music scene. about the author: kelly fletcher Hi there! I’m Kelly and this is actually my first rodeo. I’m a writer and a wannabe journalist just trying to make sense of this silly little planet hurtling towards a fiery heat death. When I’m not writing, I’m a half-assed plant mom and full-time cat mom. My favorite pastimes include reading Japanese magical realism and laying in the sun like a lizard listening to Talking Heads. A fun fact about me is that I once accidentally set a feral cat loose in my boss’s office. 6 by Lake markham In 1886, the US government commissioned a series of 7,500 watercolor paint- ings of every known fruit in the world. Called the Pomological Watercolor Collection, about 65 American artists contributed to this vibrant, colorful, and incredibly detailed body of work, which even today feels much more significant than it does ornamental. But none of that began until about 70 years after the introduction of ‘pomology’ into the world, a word that means—now, as it did then—the science of growing fruit. As the United States’ farmers and government worked together to set up the orchards which would facilitate its emerging fruit markets, they needed a term to identify exact- ly what it was they were doing. Farmers who engaged in pomology had to be able to talk about it—both with one another, so that they could trade indus- try secrets, and with the government, so that they could report back on prog- ress. Both ways of talking about it meant making more money. But whether it I t’s the day of my 26th birthday—March 12th, 2020— and the pandemic is tipping over the precipice, the toilet paper is still starting to fly off the shelves, and it’s just about time for a drink. I get a phone call from one of my friends. “I’m thinking of driving out to the Kroger in the suburbs,” he says. He’s forgotten it’s my birthday, which is just fine with me. “They’ve got a bar, and I wanna watch rich people do all the shit they say poor people do.” He inevitably scoops me up in his Cherry Red Kia Soul, and we Google the Kroger bar to find out its phone number, z calling ahead to make sure it hasn’t already been turned into ruins. “Krobar,” the bartender answers. We’re pushing our carts around with draft beers in the cupholders not long after. The scene is so chaotic, the air so tense, you feel like dropping a match could send a ball of flames into the world. “I might get some spaghetti,” I say. My friend and I each grab some boxes of dried noodles, and then I put one or two back in its place. “I’ll be fine.” We’re both bartenders, and the money hasn’t been great lately. Neither one of us has a clue just how much of this will be gone soon—how much of our lives will be lived inside our homes, how many of our meals will be eaten out of boxes, how much of our ex- ceedingly social jobs will have to be re-imagined inside this new container called Novel Coronavirus-19. If we had, I might have had another beer. Alone in my house, nearly a full year later, I pull a box of Hamburger Helper from my pantry. I no- tice that I can see the back wall of the cupboard in the space it leaves behind. I’m reaching the last of my reserves. “I get so sad when my food’s coming to an end,” Kevin James says in an early episode of The King of Queens. He’s eating a Snack Pack on the couch. Leah Remini sits beside him wrapped in an afghan. A TV drones on in the background, a TV on the TV. “You start seeing the bottom of the container, and you know it’s almost over.” The studio audience laughs—a portrait of civilized life. A portrait of American life, anyway—a life surrounded by little deaths, things that wear out, the objects of mass production. It’s a portrait of a life in which “man is brought home to himself by an irresistible force,” as Alexis de Tocqueville puts it—we don’t deny the bottom of the container, but we do try to hide it somewhere else. Dying is a hot potato. As it does with so much else, Democracy in America pre- dicts that we will open another Snack Pack. It also tells us that that Snack Pack will have a bottom, too. 7 was you or someone else who was using the word, what gave ‘pomology’ its meaning was the context in which it was being used. “Do you know what a mart is?” Milo Minderbinder, the impossible mess officer, asks the main char- acter Yossarian in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. “It’s a place where you buy things, isn’t it?” “And sell things,” corrected Milo. “And sell things.” “All my life I’ve wanted a mart. You can do lots of things if you’ve got a mart. But you’ve got to have a mart.” Heller describes Milo as having an “unfortunate” mustache, and “disunited eyes”, which never settle on any one thing at a time. “Milo could see more things that most people, but he could see none of them too dis- tinctly.” Early on in the book, Milo gets a letter order- ing him to spare no expense, to give Yossarian as much of the mess hall’s fruit as he asks for, because Yossar- ian has a liver condition keeping him out of combat. Yossarian’s liver condition is that he doesn’t have a liver condition. But it looks a whole lot like he does, and that’s the only thing keeping him out of combat. It’s a condition that “isn’t easy to come by,” he explains, “and that’s why I never eat any fruit.” It turns out that Yossarian’s just been giving it all to his buddies. Milo doesn’t understand: “I have to give you as much as you ask for. Why, the letter doesn’t even say you have to eat all of it your- self.” “And it’s a good thing it doesn’t,” Yossarian told him, “because I never eat any of it.” At first confused, and then horrified, Milo quickly decides that he should be relieved instead. After all, it means Yossarian is the most trustworthy person he knows—“anyone who would not steal from the country he loved would not steal from anybody.” Since it’s been authorized by Doc Daneeka, Milo reasons, Yossarian’s not technically stealing the mess hall’s fruit. And once it’s Yossarian’s fruit, he can do whatever he likes with it, even if that means giving it away to be sold on the black market. Milo realizes that he could use a few favors himself, and it’s not long before he’s in Germany, fighting on both sides of the second World War. Just like ‘pomology’ offered a language for organizing fruit-growing ideas into a widely-recog- nized science, the watercolors of the Pomological Watercolor Collection visually represented the mastery we felt we’d developed over the fruit that grew all around us. That we could recreate it meant we’d seen it, had it, experienced it. Through their constellation of beautiful shapes and colors, the watercolors showed us how the fruit looked, how it could be taken apart, how it would decompose. But by also converting an encyclopedic amount of information into the visual format of writing, and then integrating that writing into a painting, the watercolors sought to bridge the gap between ideas—the things inside the mind—and objects—the things inside the world. The Collection was an anxious attempt to capture, in a single moment, the very existence of every fruit being grown, purveyed, bought or sold at any one time. It was trying to get a look at the real picture, to take inventory of the things we put inside ourselves. Eating can be a gateway drug. Having eaten is to have aligned things in both worlds, the internal 8 world and the external one. Everything is to be economized in a way that’s considered satisfactory. If we’re “peckish”, we “snack”; if we’re “starving”, we “feast”; if it’s a holiday, we gorge ourselves. In any case, we’re told that context is required about the eating, a standard must be referenced, ex- cuses must be made. Eating develops connections that didn’t exist before between things, moments, ingredients that certainly did. A permanent transformation occurs. But we’re never satisfied with the fullness of yesterday’s meal once we’re hungry again. The American manner of eating in this way is akin to the colonizer’s need to recontextualize ev- erything within themselves. This tendency is crystallized in the poetry of William Carlos Wil- liams, in whose “imagination” all kinds of oddities live, co-exist, are penetrated with one anoth- er—the imagination is where ideas cut other ideas like a knife. “Having eaten to the full, we must acknowledge our insufficiency since we have not annihilated all food,” he says in Spring and All, which I’m reading at a bar. “However we have annihilated all eating : quite plainly we have no ap- petite.” “What do you think?” an older guy beside me asks. He gestures toward the book. I’m new here, but somehow I can tell he’s a regular. “I like it so far,” I say. He nods. “It’s a handful. A slow meal. But you’ll be glad you read it.” I’ll never forget that. It’s the imagi- nation that saves us from the banality of bursting ourselves, Williams says. I’ll go on to become a regular at this bar—a container—by the end of 2020—another container. Back in the present, I rummage through the freezer, producing a Ziploc container of ground tur- key for the Hamburger Helper I’ve pulled from my pantry. I bought an oversized package of turkey sometime in the last year for $1.99 a pound. I don’t know when it was, but I remember seeing the price on a sign. If only I’d looked at a calendar while I was at it. “You were right about the sales on meat,” I text my father. “You can freeze bread, English muffins, and tortillas,” he texts back. He gives me a call. “I’ve been eating a lot of Hamburger Helper,” I tell him over the phone. We’re having a beer togeth- er. “You can buy the Kroger brand for a third of the price,” he says. “The kids don’t even notice the difference. We tested.” My father is talking about my brother, who’s ten years younger than me, and my sister, who’s two years younger than him. He’s not talking about me, from the other marriage, who—somehow, overnight—isn’t a kid anymore. I can feel beers in the morning. When we hang up, I start to make the food I’ve been talking about for the last hour. I look at the anthropomorphized, bleach-white glove on the bright red box—the “Helping Hand”, as he was origi- nally called, or “Lefty” as he was eventually christened. I recognize him as a sign of my childhood, somehow still here after all these years. Lefty’s lived longer than some of my friends. Suddenly I’m considering the weight of my memory. He’s been here all along. Was I thinking about Lefty? Was I thinking about my father? Both had managed to endure somehow, despite all odds. In my early 20s, my father’s declining health was often a topic of concern. In the early 2000s, Hamburger Helper implemented quick decisions to stay ahead of a market on trucker speed. In both cases, the terms of life were renegotiated by exploiting the sign of an animal product—my father went to the Mayo Clinic, Hamburger Helper dropped the word ‘Hamburger’ from its name. But both have exactly the same flaw: nei- ther man nor beast can stop the inevitable. “SPEED IS NOT THE NEW NORMAL,” a digital sign screams over a Ten- nessee state highway. I can no longer be convinced. It’s all speeding up. Now that I’ve arrived in the second quarter-century of my life, my thoughts turn increasingly to the last one, yet I somehow keep 9 On August 4th, 2020, media did it again. This time it was a show called What’s it Worth? Hosted by Jeff Foxworthy—himself a relic of a celebrity class now suspended in time, as though “uploaded” into the oughts—the show was about the secret trea- sures that lurk within our homes, how much we could sell them for if we had to. It was a painkiller for a depleted American audience. On September 1st, the ninth episode of What’s It Worth? featured the original Lefty muppet from the Hamburger Help- er commercials of the 70s and 80s. It was shown from inside the home of the Amazing Azens, who were also shown inside of it. It was the moment the Azens had been waiting for: they were seen on national television, watching Lefty’s authenticity get veri- fied, then watching Lefty get appraised by a professional auc- tioneer. Whether or not they cashed in, the Amazing Azens had let everyone know that they’d put a price on the Helping Hand. The ephemeral quality of the knick-knack was made concrete in a pop media spectacle—and Jeff Foxworthy was the one showing it to us. If you’re lucky, you might be a redneck, even after all these years. “Sadder than destitution, sadder than a beggar is the man who eats alone in public,” says Jean Baudrillard in America, his book about America, “for animals always do each other the honor of sharing or disputing each other’s food.” Keith Ferrazzi, on the other hand, author of Never Eat Alone, tells us to “[i]dentify the people in your industries who always seem to be out in front,” and then to “[t]ake them to lunch. Read their newsletters. In fact, read everything you can.” In both cases, for very different reasons, we’re told that we must eat in order to belong. It’s a matter of consuming ourselves in our food, in our information, in our work. Meanwhile, I brown the tur- key. In 1979, veterans of camp Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell created a short film called “Attack of the Helping Hand”. The scene is simple: a young woman, alone in a dark home, pulls a box of Ham- burger Helper from her cupboard. In the short film, just like on TV, Lefty appears. “Hi! I’m Hamburger Helper’s Helping Hand, here to help you out with your meal!” “You’re cute!” laughs one young, patient, Linda Quiroz. Suddenly, she’s defending herself from the left-hand glove clutching at her pearls. She tries drowning him in the sink, and when that doesn’t work, she leaves the kitchen instead. A gloved left hand grabs her by the shoulder in a pitch-black corridor—but as she twirls around, throwing a human body to the floor, we see that it’s only the Milkman. “Jesus Murphy, lady!” the Milkman cries. “You must have rocks in your gourd or some damn thing!” Despite the fact that no explicit rationale is presented, we’re led to believe that this is the home of an unseen nuclear family. Lefty certainly represents an intrusion of that home, as he assaults the woman in the kitchen of the very lifestyle he advertises. Representing the second intrusion, however, is the Milkman from decades before, who somehow still seems to have more in common with the woman than Lefty does. The woman breathes a deep sigh of relief. The Milkman is only human, after all. Maybe he can take care of that terrible thing lurking around the corner. But just a moment ago, it didn’t matter who he was—the Milkman was as unwelcome as Lefty in the inner dwelling of her home. The Milkman even has the nerve to tell her, “You scared the bejeezus out of me!” Among other things, this short horror signals a deep and domineering change in the way that brands were taking hold of American lives in the late 70s. By then, the Milkman was dead—but the Milkman was only the beginning. When the young woman finally throws Lefty through a food 10 processor, the Pillsbury DoughBoy springs to life right in his place. These things are inside the home now, they’re connected to the things we put inside our bodies, and it feels too late to escape. I pull the empty box of Hamburger Helper from the trash can so that I can read the in- structions on the back: 1. BROWN. Brown beef in 10-inch skillet over medium-high heat 6-7 minutes, breaking up and stirring. Drain; return cooked beef to skillet. 2. STIR. Stir in hot water, milk, Sauce Mix and Pasta. Heat to boiling. 3. SIMMER. Reduce heat. Cover; simmer about 12 minutes, stirring occasionally, until pasta is tender. If necessary, uncover and cook, while stirring, and additional 1 to 3 minutes to desired consistency. 4. ADD YOUR OWN TWIST! Add some zip and zest; stir in chopped dill pickles and shredded Cheddar cheese just before serving. Serve with hot sauce. I was enamored by the idea of adding in Cheddar cheese, and the dill pickles were a kind of alluring oddity. But I didn’t have either of those onhand. Should I drive back to the store? Should Hamburger Helper cost as much as a meal made from scratch? “People face trade-offs,” Greg Mankiew lists as the first principle of economics in Principles of Economics. Greg Mankiew was the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President George W. Bush. Some edition of Principles of Economics is perhaps the most seminal text in the American undergraduate Economics 101 classroom. The original edition was published in 1997, and it can still be found for one-third of the price of the newest edition on the internet. Even cheaper still is Principles of Economics, another book altogether, written by a man named Alfred Marshall in 1890. 17 years after the publication of Marshall’s own economic principles, Henry Adams recalls that, as he had understood it up until now, science itself meant the “economy of forces.” On the other hand, standing in sheer awe at the combating forces of the World’s Fair in 1900, Adams “ knew neither the formula nor the forces.” Where the eager drive toward scientific understanding had seemed to root out the very question of the unknown, it had also made the understanding it- self impenetrable—every discernable quality of the human experience had already been raised to the level of the un- derstanding. Now people did science experiments on science experiments, created energy out of energy. What happened when you stopped being able to tell what identified this thing from that one? What did you eat when you couldn’t sink your teeth into anything? Did you become Yossari- an, who couldn’t eat fruit, or did you turn into Milo, who couldn’t eat fruit? In the middle of the twentieth century, home brands like Ball Jars published pocket-sized recipe pamphlets which encouraged consumers to buy their products. The brightly illustrated pamphlets came packed full of tips and oppor- tunities to economize the home, which would, in turn, econ- omize the country. “Can More in ‘44!” reads one slogan. The publications created a vast mythos of gelatin salads, float- ing islands, jelly braids, hotdishes, bar desserts. One Cana- dian pamphlet from 1952 called “Family Meals” tells their reader, “You want your children, your husband, and yourself to eat all the foods needed for good health. You must keep within your budget as well. All this takes skill and care- ful planning.” if you made it this far, you get a cookie. email us to collect at info@thiswonderfulworld.org 11 Much like the Adams story, in the recipe pamphlets, there was an implied sense that natu- ral forces could be balanced, as well as a deep anxiety over finding that balance. Also like in the Adams, the individual needed a translator if they wanted to tap into it. Henry Adams had Samuel Langley. The homemaker, in turn, had the home economist. But whereas the distance between Adams and Langley had been the space between their bodies, the distance between the home economist and the homemakers was exactly that of a publication. This allowed the home economist to be fiction- alized, as in the case of Edith Adams, so that the person telling us about our homes, and by exten- sion about ourselves, was actually a rotating cast of multiple people, a myriad of personalities represented as one single image. If the homemaker was going to be just like Edith Adams, they had some big shoes to fill. Meanwhile, on the other side of the pamphlets, there was the same degree of madness. There were company test kitchens, inside of which there were home economists. And inside the home economists was the immutable drive to put their foodstuffs inside the family home, no longer fragmented by a World War. One day in 1955, inside of a Campbell Soup Company test kitchen, Dorcas Reilly invented the green bean casserole. Formally stylized as Green Bean Casserole, it had come to Reilly suddenly, as though from the heavens above, after countless experiments. Green Bean Casserole contained just three main ingredients: green beans, fried onions, and Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom Soup. Invented in 1939, Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom Soup had col- loquially taken on the nickname of “Lutheran binder”. It provided the specific agency that con- gealed church dinner casseroles, which in turn binded countless Midwestern bodies together in fellowship within church walls. Not once in recorded history had it occurred to anyone to invite frozen green beans to the party—until one day, when it finally occurred to Dorcas Reilly. In a 2005 interview with the Alternative Press, exactly one half-century later, Dorcas Reilly famously said that she didn’t remember doing that. “Frozen air...had some scale of measurement, no doubt, if somebody could invent a thermometer adequate to the purpose,” Henry Adams says as he grasps for the index of his own soul. “[B]ut X-rays had played no part whatever in a man’s consciousness, and the atom itself had figured only as a fiction of thought.” It seemed conceptually required that an atom couldn’t be inside the imagination, and yet, somehow, we seemed to have proof that it had been there before. Henry Adams stood in puzzlement at the World’s Fair, his “historical neck broken by the sudden irruption of forces totally new.” When I dump the Hamburger Helper into four separate bowls, a little bit splashes on the stovetop. I’ll clean that up tomorrow. As for tonight, I’m “meal-prepping”—rationing out exact quan- tities of the food I’ve prepared in order to satisfy my budget, schedule, and dietary requirements. Three of these bowls will live covered up in the fridge, unless I decide to eat seconds. Seconds, reciprocity, duplicity: I made two Green Bean Casseroles in 2020. One was for Thanksgiving, and one was for Christmas. Both times, I was quarantining away from my family. Both times, I used the recipe on a jug of French’s fried onions instead of a can of Campbell’s soup. And both times, I cel- ebrated with a friend who’d contracted COVID-19 right around the same time as I did. Since his job went remote last March instead of disappearing like mine, the two of us have just endured very different years. But somehow we’ve been preserved, and here we are, awaiting the bottom of another container. 12 by logan langlois artwork by blake lannom M y eyes opened ever so slightly in the moist, heavy summer heat. They were heavy after an- other night of youthful debauchery. Fueled by Jack Daniels, Coca- Cola, self hatred and a need to prove oneself. The all encompassing and ever blinding ball of hell fire that we call our sun immediately blinded me. Which caused me in turn to react like a big dumb animal and suck- er punched myself in the jaw while attempting to shield my eyes. I rolled on my stomach and buried my face into the couch. My unearthly hangover had reverted me back to a child, attempting to avoid the bed- room light being turned on for school. A child with a severe headache, no money and a very empty stomach. I raised my head up from the pillow ever so slowly in order to inspect my environment. The first thirty seconds of waking up with a hang- over can determine your entire morning. When you’re a broke nineteen year old living on the couch of a party house gone wro