Fred Aiken Writing

Tag: fiction

December 18, 2024

fattish dog

my dog is fat,
and doesn't understand what i'm saying
about eating right or living healthy or dieting;
and i don't understand what he's doing half the time,
like eating feces from other animals
or barking at his own reflection,
which seems odd since i too will sometimes
stare at myself for hours at a time
wondering if i'm good or bad,
contemplating whether i need a suit, or should i shave,
while my dog goes around in circles,
pacing, as he is thinking very intensely and can't make up his mind
on where to go, before suddenly squating and oozing
out what appears to be a some sort of gelatin coming from his backside,
which is then proceeded by my dog flapping his ears,
wagging his tail, 
all in the hope that i will reward him with a treat
for his transgression,
and though i've tried to cut back on how many treats i feed my dog
because he's so damn fat,
i still can't help but stare into those deep amber orbs
attached to those chubby cheeks
in which a hurried pant and pink tongue hang from his slack jaw,
and it is in those moments that i no longer
care about those admonishing stares from neighbors that mean mug 
me and my dog as we walk down the street,
judging us for our weird body shapes, respectively,
so i feed my fat dog another treat that he doesn't need
because i don't care if we're a blight on society's perception
of what a dog and a dog owner should look like,
and while this might not
be how i thought my life would be like,
i go to the pantry and grab a oreo treat for myself,
while thinking, i hope my dog doesn't have diabetes
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December 17, 2024

i asked a nightmare a question

pleading with a nightmare is like politely asking the bubonic plague to leave
through the front door;
it's simply not within its nature,
it permeates and deepens and makes mincemeat out of marrow,
until the nightmare becomes a reality
that stays with you wherever you go,
a little memento
to remember,
like a piece of chewing gum stuck to the side of your head
to cover up a bullet hole leaking all over the desk
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November 8, 2024

How to Brew Coffee with an Aeropress

  • Pick a coffee. Any coffee will do. Most industry professionals will tell you that it needs to be whole bean, and freshly roasted, and naturally processed, and ethically sourced, and single origin, and have had no impact whatsoever on the environment lest that coffee be part of the problem rather than the solution. But I guess if those sorts of coffees aren’t available, then choose whatever is most convenient.
  • Grind the coffee. Unless it’s already pre-ground, in which case you can skip this step because while you’re coffee is a little more stale, you saved that extra five seconds of grinding it with an electric grinder or five minutes with a hand grinder, so you can take that extra time you saved and lord it over the plebeians that are stuck with having to grind their own damn coffee beans.
  • Invert the aeropress with the plunger level on the tabletop and put the ground coffee in the brewing chamber.
  • Heat up some water. You probably should have started with this as the first step. But it’s too early to remember the most efficient way to brew your coffee, and you just want the early-morning voices to shut up by drowning them out with as much caffeine as possible, but you can’t do that yet because you haven’t brewed the coffee. Begin to think this entire process is taking to long, and contemplate just buying a keurig. Yeah, sure, they’re really bad for the environment, and those little pods are outrageously marked up. But all it takes is pressing that little button in the morning and the damn thing spits out some pod coffee. And while pod-people coffee might taste like toilet-water sludge, it at least takes little to no effort, and you wouldn’t even be questioning your life choices at this moment. You’d be sipping on your shit pod coffee!
  • But hey, the water finishes heating up, so you no longer have to worry about killing the environment and, by extension, yourself because now you can pour the water into the brew chamber of your aeropress to the very tippy-top. Some coffee professionals measure out this whole process by using x amount of grams of coffee and y amount of grams of water. But your scale’s batteries died a month ago, and it always sucks buying batteries, and for some reason they’re always the most difficult things to remember to buy. And even when you remember to put batteries on the list to buy at the store, they’re never in a convenient place. It always feels like you’re on a scavenger hunt, and none of the employees at the store want to help in your quest to find some little lithium tube that looks suspiciously like a sex toy for gadgets, so instead you decide to go the easy route and just let all of your electronics that run on single-use batteries to die until your parents or sister gift you batteries for xmas or your birthday, though neither of those things are any time soon, so it’s best to just go without batteries. Go without measuring your coffee and water ratio properly. Like a maniac.
  • Wait!
  • Continue to wait. But less aggressively this time. Maybe pick up a book. Like one of those books that you keep on the shelf in the living room to impress guests that swing on by, even though none of those guests really care about the books that you pretend to have read because they’re too busy waiting in line for the new apple and orange product, or some such nonsense. Either that or your guests are too busy tweeting more so than being. But either way, after contemplating how things used to be and how much better everything was back when you were a kid, it will be time to filter the coffee so that you can get on with your day and stop reminiscing and/or romanticizing the past that never was or will be. Perhaps use a timer next time. That’s what all the cool coffee professionals do. But buying a timer does also mean you have to keep track of yet another material object—one that requires a battery of all things!
  • Drink black coffee! No matter how good or bad the coffee is, always drink it black. It’s not so much because of the purity of the matter, but rather because it’s better to taste the coffee rather than some saccharine abomination drowned out by too much milk, plant, moo-moo, or otherwise, and all those things keep adding up, like pennies weighing down your pockets without a thought. Before you know it, you’re pantless with a cup of milked-up luggernaught sludge sauce careening carelessly through your veins at top speeds, no brakes, until the thump of plague tears down your arteries from all that milky-way-out-there-too-far-out-there coffee you keep on drinking. No, no, no, my good sir or madam, tis better to bark up at the black moon of a cup of joe screaming to the testament of pure caffeine.
  • While thinking about how much money you saved, realize that this whole process might have been significantly easier if you had just gone to the cafe a couple blocks down the street. Sure, the markup would have been a couple hundred percentage points. But at least you wouldn’t have spent all this time grumbling and mumbling about this or that. Though if you’re being honest with yourself, and I sure hope you are, then it probably doesn’t matter one way or the other. You would have complained about your coffee no matter what, whether you made it yourself if you had some undergrad working to pay for their degree and cheerios made your coffee.
  • So, I dunno, maybe come to some realization that, sure, coffee might be an art form, but it’s kinda one of those plebeian art forms that everyone can do, and everyone can mess up, like royally mess it the f— up. So maybe don’t be so harsh, cause it’s kinda bringing down the mood on society’s buzz.
  • Rinse. Repeat. Coffee on.
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