Pour Me A Story, Vol. 44
getting old, Guy Fieri, and crying doves
greetings friends, and welcome to the first edition of Pour Me A Story written by me as a 36-year-old.
that’s right, my birthday fell on Wednesday this week, and I hit the completely unmemorable, non-milestone age you see above. it’s very surreal to think about 36 as a number — I’m now closer to 40 than I am to 30, and I’ve been of legal drinking age in this country for a whole 15 years, which is intensely confronting.
(what’s more confronting, of course, is the idea that I’ve been of legal drinking age in my home country for literally half of my life. where the hell did all the years go?)
I had a terrific first Cincinnati birthday, for the record. I had too much work to do to take the day off, but I still got to take a nice morning walk with the baby and open some presents after eating one of Alex’s signature breakfast feasts. I also broke out a pair of sneakers that hadn’t been worn since they came home in the spring, and we ate at the best (gentrified) fried chicken joint in Cincinnati for dinner, almost necessitating a wheelbarrow to take me home.
of course, as time marches relentlessly forward, I get to thinking about what the younger editions of me would think if they knew where 36-year-old Adrian ended up. in lieu of having an actual guest this week (my disorganized fault as usual), I was going to do a real hacky interview with my 21-year-old self, but I’m vaguely aware of having done that before somewhere in these pages. instead I’ll just wax a little lyrical about aging, I guess.
The More Things Change, Etc
after 28 years in my hometown, I’ve now lived in four cities in very different regions of this vast nation over the past eight (haha holy shit!) years. while this of course means I’ve seen and experienced a lot of different things, there have certainly been some constants through it all. the ones I’m thinking of presently are both therapy, both physical and the other type.
this is on the brain partly because I had a terrific and constructive brain-therapy session last week and really shone some sunlight onto some shit that had been eating away at me for a few weeks. my therapist is someone I’ve been seeing fairly regularly since I moved to Denver in 2017, and she’s been along for the ride through the post-Florida years to parenthood and career agonies and beyond.
obviously I didn’t want to throw that all away and start again with someone new (or potentially not find a new someone that was as good of a fit) when we moved to Cincinnati, but the beauty of the ongoing state of the world is that so many healthcare professionals now offer telehealth options, so we just hit FaceTime once every couple of weeks in lieu of me going to her office. it’s not perfect, but it’s doing the trick.
a more easily replaceable therapy option in a new city is that of the physical type. I’ve been dabbling with physical therapy on and off since I was 25 or so, given that I’ve seemingly inherited the Crawford Short Hamstrings as well as spending the past 15 years sitting at a desk for 40+ hours a week, which puts my back in all kinds of difficult and painful positions.
by nothing short of a miracle, considering the amount of heavy lifting and truck-unloading we do, I was able to get through this year’s seafood festival without injuring myself at all, but ever since I’ve been back home from Providence, my sciatic nerve has been screaming at me. truth be told, I’ve been carrying noticeable back pain since we moved to Cincinnati in early July, and frankly I’m just tired of being in discomfort all day long. so I finally swallowed my pride and booked myself back in for physical therapy, and was swiftly diagnosed with a probably herniated disk, which feels just about as fucked up as it sounds!
and as much as I loathe the feeling of having stretches assigned as “homework,” I’m begrudgingly committing to seeing it through this time. because the past couple months have been physically miserable, I’ve been entirely unable to run or work out comfortably, and with that comes the classic “lack of endorphins” and weight gain that just bring my mood down to around my ankles.
suffice it to say, I want my 37th year on this planet to be a more physically comfortable and rewarding one, where I’m able to keep up with the ever-quickening toddler in my home as well as maybe a race or two thrown into the mix? I guess we’ll see, but I gotta start doing a better job of listening to my body and managing it, because it ain’t getting any younger.
Worthy Consumables
in the 44 editions of this newsletter, I’ve mentioned my online friend Scott Hines (a.k.a. @actioncookbook) approximately 20 times in one context or another. he writes a terrific newsletter himself and, every Monday, Wednesday and Friday when they arrive in my inbox, I feel a little exhausted just thinking about what it must take to have a full-time job, two kids and also three new dispatches a week.
anyway, a couple weeks ago he referenced one of his more relatable tweets, a brief piece of prose that could’ve been transcribed directly from my own brain.
for as long as Alex and I have lived together, this scenario has played out probably 200 times. it happens marginally less frequently now, given there are fewer opportunities for Alex to go out, but when she does? oh man I’m definitely ordering something absurd.
I’ve managed to mostly avoid the food delivery apps since we moved to Cincinnati, more out of vague intentions to save money than anything, but occasions like these call for some exploring. the problem is most of the restaurants available are unfamiliar, so it’s a real gamble.
this time, though, I had a twisted idea of what I wanted to try. as the baby was splashing around in the tub, I idly pulled up Postmates and there it was, right in front of me in the middle of the home screen: Guy Fieri’s Flavortown Kitchen. now you may be thinking what I thought initially: “there’s absolutely no way Cincinnati is big enough to support a Guy Fieri restaurant, given there’s one in fuckin’ Times Square.”
when I first saw the restaurant pop up, I thought exactly that. but a little more research led me to the realization that it’s a ghost kitchen, a type of delivery-only restaurant that appears to have really come into its own during the ongoing pandemic. basically it’s a commercial kitchen set up in an unassuming way, churning out relatively generic menu items to service multiple “restaurants” that then populate the delivery apps. it’s some morbidly fascinating shit, and you should read that Eater link above. here it is again.
anyway, Guy Fieri’s Flavortown Kitchen is exactly that, and they're evidently everywhere. I ordered a cheeseburger and some wings, and long before they arrived I already knew exactly what it was going to be like. you know what I mean, too — everyone knows what a cheeseburger and wings tastes like, on a subconscious level. but I knew without a shadow of a doubt how it would be presented, how it would taste, what it would be lacking, everything.
and when it arrived, I was dead right. it was exactly what you would expect from a Guy Fieri-branded, delivery-only commercial kitchen. the burger was solid if unremarkable, and incredibly messy. the wings were small, breaded and fried, well sauced without being overwhelming. the “blue-sabi” dip (blue cheese with wasabi, presumably) was absent, as was the Sprite, which got subbed for Diet Mt. Dew, an intense disappointment if there ever was one. overall it was…a meal. it was fine, nothing to write home about. although in saying that, I wrote to you guys about it. sorry!
now that I think about it, I don’t think my Consumables have been all that Worthy, of late? I gotta try harder.
what do you guys think happened to Quindon Tarver? this shit was one of the biggest hits of 1996 or 1997, probably the latter in Australia at least, and the kid had PIPES. I say this because I’ve had Romeo + Juliet on in the background tonight. I’m afraid to look up his Wikipedia page though, just in case the news is bad, y’know? I think I’ll just enjoy his very serviceable cover of Prince’s When Doves Cry.
thanks for hanging with me (and me alone) again this week, friends. I’ll be more productive next week and get a real live guest to join us. but until then!
— adrian ✌🏻
So, I was gonna write something “humorous” about Quindon and then curiosity got the better of me… and, well, this is fuckin’ sad 😢
“Tarver was killed in an auto accident in Dallas, Texas, on April 1, 2021. The crash occurred on the President George Bush Turnpike. According to the Texas Department of Public Safety, a 2003 Lexus struck the center barrier and struck another guardrail. Tarver later died at a nearby hospital.”