Author: abendelow
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Memoir: something that went bump in my night, or my first time with the Violent Femmes (1983)
Finks is a second-floor music club on Normal’s Front Street, where they have Augsberger (Light and Dark) on tap. I am 22, a grad student at ISU, and the unappointed taste maker and music critic of my Central Illinois metropolis. I am qualified, having read books by Griel Marcus, listened to old blues recordings, subscribed…
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Book review: Just Breathe, by Dan Brulé
Do you need a lesson to perform what happens naturally? I’ve read two books that got me to see my basic functions differently, and as a consequence, behave differently. The first was Zen Macrobiotics by George Ohsawa. I read it as a 24-year-old and it forever disenthralled me from the standard American diet. I read…
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Reflection: on having left the Ed-Tech party too soon
This morning I was helping my neighbor, a recently immigrated Spanish-speaking man, prepare for an upcoming licensing exam. To find specific information about his job site, I suggested he call a colleague. He kept the phone on speaker and I heard her advice: “Just Google it,” she told him, explaining that Chat GPT had gotten…
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Memoir: Mother (1961-71)
Oblivious to the presence of my sisters, my mother sighs wistfully to me. She recounts how, with each of her previous three pregnancies, her goal of a male baby had been cruelly deferred. But as a Christian woman, she kept faithfully praying and then–this blessed night at West Suburban Hospital when the nurse handed her…
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Memoir: Eclipse (1973)
Then he picked up a pair of chunky Koss headphones. “And you really should prepare your head for these phones!”
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Standing room for one
Since I’d already eaten, I sit down in a booth with the two other employees over 50. They’re eating the free sandwiches the General Manager laid out near the door. These sandwiches are being added to our menu in April, which is what tonight’s meeting is for. For weeks we’ve seen the notice: “Team Huddle…
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Memoir: Mom’s racist heritage (1990)
When I was 12, Mom had been pretty incapacitated for the last decade. We younger kids didn’t learn her prejudices until she got sober, her personality melting out of a frozen block of vodka. Turns out, she harbored some downright racist ideas. She held un-generous feelings towards African-Americans, sorting them all into two camps–the uneducated,…
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Memoir: A lineage of male violence (1976-77)
I wake profoundly shaken by this dream, cast down by its revelation, stumbling into the sudden nightmare of day dawning, and I, a virtual parricide.
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Memoir: Where babies come from (1968)
Even dogs, the noblest of creatures in my mind, were stained with the same mammalian taint of bestial inter-penetration. Oh, it was hard for a while to look at dogs, even my beloved Carin Terrier Marilyn, with respect.
The Wikiness 