self-help books make me nauseous,
but that might also be because
i don’t know how to help myself,
without tearing things down first,
though it’s not as destructive as it sounds,
since it’s mostly me in a dark room
on my laptop writing mean things to strangers
half-way across the world, or maybe down the street,
i don’t know,
in the glow a neutral blue light burning
my corneas out of their socket
i had the opportunity
to sit down with titan
and ask him to stop eating his kids,
to which he said,
'alright, but only because i'm full',
which made me realize,
that even though i don't plan on ever having kids,
i'd at least be better at raising them
than a god
For all the wrong reasons: canned asparagus. It will forever be engraved into the part of the brain that controls sensory memories. To be perfectly honest, I haven’t actually had canned asparagus since I turned 15. But it was very much a part of my childhood culinary misadventures.
The smell of it is absolutely putrid. It was vomit-inducing with a mushy texture and the aroma of diarrhea fermenting in formaldehyde. I really, truly detest whoever thought canning asparagus would be a good idea. In fact, a majority of canned vegetables are quite disgusting. Though I suppose my biggest issue with canned asparagus is that it prevented me from discovering the true delight and deliciousness of fresh asparagus.
When my wife and I got together in college, within the first couple of months of us dating we had gone through the list of likes and dislikes in our awkward attempt to get to know one another, and obviously one of the main categories that we had covered was food likes and dislikes. When I let her know that I had a bad experience with asparagus as a child and thus did like it, she was perplexed. She couldn’t understand how someone could not like her favorite vegetable.
So, I told her about the canned asparagus. I told her about how my parents would make me eat it, and I would not be excused from the table until I ate every single vegetable, which for the most part was not a problem until it came to canned asparagus. The canned asparagus, I recalled, was horrid, putrid, and just the worst vegetable one could imagine. And so, I had assumed that all asparagus tasted like canned asparagus without ever questioning my assumption.
That is until my wife, who at the time was just my girlfriend because we had only been dating a couple of months and it would have been weird if we married in our early twenties, put me on to the fresh stuff. The real asparagus. We waited until asparagus went on sale at Kroger because we were still broke college kids, and fresh asparagus is rather pricey, all things considered. And we bought some fresh asparagus when it went on sale for 30% off, and she taught me how to cook the asparagus in both an oven and on the stove. She showed me how to properly season them, because that’s the thing, canned asparagus has absolutely no seasoning. It’s just mushy gunk.
By the end of the night, I had nearly eaten my weight in asparagus; it was that good. It helped the fact that I was incredibly thin in my early twenties. Some might even say slightly malnourished due to my poor overall dietary habits. But my girlfriend at the time turned me on to fresh asparagus, so it felt like I was starting to make some good decisions for once in my life…at least when it came to food.
Now, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that my college girlfriend introducing me to fresh asparagus made me want to marry her, because again, we had barely been dating one another and that would have been kinda weird. But after a few years, and with us both having graduated college, the fresh asparagus aspect certainly helped in my decision making to get down on one knee after taking her to a fancy restaurant and asking her to spend the rest of her life with me. It’s a plus knowing that I will get to have fresh asparagus rather than that mushy canned crap until the day I die. Or at least until the day in which climate change decimates most crops and possibly takes out asparagus altogehter.
Aside from canned asparagus, there’s also hotdogs. Unlike canned asparagus, I absolutely loved hotdogs as a child. To be honest, from the age of four to about seven, I probably overdid it on eating my share on eating the world’s supply of hotdogs. I ate so many hotdogs in such a short period of my young life that I ended up getting sick of them and couldn’t stand the sight or smell of them for the next fifteen or so years later.
Still to this day, I’d probably say I eat my one, possibly two, hotdogs per year. Far fewer as many that I ate before I had all my permanent teeth in. So, I guess what I’m trying to say is, it’s kinda odd that I grew up thinking that I might eat hotdogs for the rest of my life, breakfast, lunch and dinner, but then ended up not really enjoying them as much; and on the flip side, I thought I would never have to touch a single asparagus, canned or otherwise, for the remainder of my life once I had the agency to choose, but now I’m having fresh asparagus at least two or three times a month.
I don’t know if these foods necessarily transport me to childhood, but they both remind me of aspects of my childhood and the sensations of being young and how I went about making culinary decisions that seem very emblematic of my childhood, I suppose you could say.
Fred Aiken Writing 