I Hate Breakfast

I hate breakfast—well, maybe hate falls short of expressing my true feelings. It might be more accurate to say that I absolutely despise breakfast. Actually, maybe I’d go as far as to say that breakfast foods might be my least favorite thing in the entire world. 

That sounds about right.

Allow me to introduce myself: my name is Ben Greenly. I am a connoisseur of lunch, a dinner buff, and the president of the unofficial Anti-Breakfast Committee of the Colorado College, or ABCCC for short. This is to say that I have not once, in my total of three and a half weeks as a student here, eaten breakfast on the Colorado College campus. And maybe there’s a number of first-years or even later-years that could say the same, but I just wanted to emphasize this as an act of intention, perhaps even defiance. I have choked down a Sunday brunch on more than one occasion, but only because the majority of its letters stem from the word lunch.

If you asked me what they serve in Rastall at breakfast time, I wouldn’t be able to answer. I have never set foot in any cafeteria earlier than noon. Some friends have told me that the food is the same as what they serve on a weekend brunch, but I’m hesitant to believe them based on the sole fact that they eat breakfast. I can’t help but harbor a high level of distrust. The few times that I have let breakfast foods enter my mouth, more of it has ended up on my shoes than in my stomach, which is all I’ll say on the matter.

Imagine the array of breakfast foods that one shovels down in their lifetime, imagine them in all of their attributes. Imagine yourself surrounded by this slop, and in the early hours of the day no less.

It’s difficult for me to conceptualize how someone could wake up thinking: “Oh yes, you know what I’m feeling today? I would like some nice burnt bacon strips, that are more like potato chips than slices of ham, some partially cooked precracked (liquid) eggs, and, of course, a burnt piece of bread, smothered in a thickened milk substance and the crushed, jellified remains of a grape. Also, please give me a nice glass of the same fruit remains, but juiced.”

And don’t get me started on pancakes.

I remember the first time I ate breakfast; I was a baby—an extraordinarily intelligent baby, I might add. My mother, kind as she is, placed in front of me a bowl of Cheerios drowning in milk. Immediately, I launched the bowl of cereal at the wall and demanded dry Cheerios.

I must confess, I don’t understand the concept of cereal and milk. This summer, I sat alone in my house, bored beyond measure. On a whim, I decided to relive my unfortunate childhood experience to see if I had changed my cereal-hating ways (just to clarify, this occurred during lunch). I began with a bowl of Cinnamon Toast Crunch, which I drenched in about a quart of milk. I guess it was about as good as one expects wet cereal to be. 

It’s a bit odd. My mother used to joke all the time about how I never ate a “traditional” breakfast. Instead, she’d give me a bottle of water with Crystal Light energy drink mix while my sisters ate. “Here, drink this, that’s good enough,” she would say.

Back in high school, I was on the swim team, and we would have morning practice every Tuesday. After the workout, our coach would bring us a box of Santiago's breakfast burritos and demand that we eat them—but my refusal to eat breakfast is a refusal to eat anything during breakfast hours. I would sit through my Tuesday first period with no energy, and then second period, when I decided it was no longer morning, I would ferociously devour the two burritos that I smuggled out of the pool area.

Almost every day, my college roommate berates me for not eating my breakfast. He insists that he will become “so strong” from eating ten hard-boiled eggs each morning that he will beat me up for not respecting his favorite meal. Almost every day, I throw my pillow at him and shout, “You couldn’t beat me up if you tried. I drink Muscle Milk every day!” 

I don’t know why I would ever eat breakfast—look at the incredible benefits one receives from skipping it! Most importantly, I have a couple of extra dollars on my Gold Card to spend on banana chips and salsa at the little store in Mathias (I don’t eat those together, by the way; I have regular chips for the salsa, which I also buy at that Mathias store). Surely, I must have saved my parents a fortune when I was at home.

I wasn’t always like this, though. I lied earlier about my inability to eat breakfast; I once ate breakfast every day. I used to eat buttered toast with cinnamon sugar, but then the taste of cinnamon sugar slowly became gritty and rough, and I ceased to derive joy from the crunch of toast.

In high school, I never had time to eat breakfast. I drove my sisters to school, and they would get mad if we were even a little late. Seeing as I preferred sleeping, I sacrificed breakfast for time in my bed. Now, I don’t have that problem since I’m not responsible for anyone other than myself. I complained on a daily basis that I didn’t have enough time in the mornings for my sisters, but now they’re gone.

On my first day of college, I tried to get breakfast at Rastall, but I couldn’t do it. There was just that feeling of something being different. I’m far away from my family, but when I don’t eat breakfast I somehow feel a little bit closer to them. Everything else in my life has changed considerably since college, making me want to hold on to at least one thing.

In reality, skipping breakfast just means that I have a little extra time, which I usually use to sleep. Sometimes, I also like to organize my backpack and make my Crystal Light energy drink, or I’ll snapchat my sisters, who go to school at 8:00 am, around the time I wake up. 

So yeah, all in all I guess breakfast isn’t that bad. I might have been overreacting a little bit.

 Mediocre Issue | October 2019

Lettitor

Dear Reader,

Beginnings are exciting, alluring: they offer the opportunity for one to start fresh. We create new life within ourselves with a new beginning, a new dawn, with the promise of a new horizon on the way. As the first issue of the year, this is a beginning for all of us. Some of us on this campus are just acclimating to the grandeur of Pikes Peak for the first time, having left all we’ve known in pursuit of creating a better self on this campus. Some of us are returning for our last beginning on this campus, having already spent years navigating this elevation and these mountains. None of us know exactly where this beginning will take us.

But breakfast is one beginning that we can count on: whether you walk out of your house spooning grits into your mouth on an early Monday morning or lazily crawl out of your bed on a Saturday afternoon, the first meal of the day is an offering. Breakfast can be a new beginning for all of us, every day, and this issue seeks to remind us that beginnings can be found anywhere. Callie Zucker’s “Okeechobee is No Place to be Beautiful” ruminates on love and beginnings, where vulnerability is found in early mornings, in “that predawn period that threatens daytime.” (18) Emma Olsen’s “Serving All People?” and Kat Snoddy’s “Impeccably Painted and Politically Tepid” both meditate on how Denver’s restaurant and street art scenes are transforming the area, reflecting on how these changes are offering new beginnings for some at the expense of others (32 and 8, respectively). Hannah G. Peak’s “Small Town Chronicles” takes readers through Phillipsburg County, Kansas, where people and community are celebrated year-long in the Third Street Bakery and beginnings manifest themselves in the tradition of old (22). Ben Greenly heatedly and satirically addresses breakfast and new beginnings in “I Hate Breakfast,” where his abhorrence of the most important meal of the day speaks to his transition into this new beginning of college (12). 

Whether you wake with the rising of the sun or roll out of bed when it’s already high in the sky, the decisions you make and the food you fuel yourself with set you up for the day ahead. The sun has set on Block 1 of this year, and regardless of whether it was your first First Block or your last First Block, the decisions you made, the relationships you developed, and the skills you honed have put you on course for the rest of the year. 

Here at CC, we have accustomed ourselves to constant beginnings: every three and a half weeks we begin a new class, with a new professor and a set of new faces. When the block ends, we begin Block Break, which offers an opportunity to reset for the next beginning—but weeks turn into blocks which turn into semesters and years and one day, we arrive at the breakfast table before the first day of the last Block 1. It is August, and Pikes Peak is bare above the treeline. Maybe you make eggs and bacon and toast in your kitchen an hour before class, or maybe you’re eating a bag of dry cereal outside the classroom door, but either way the decisions you make for yourself this year will bring you where you’re supposed to go. 

Cipher is excited to be on the journey with you. 

Megan and the rest of the Cipher    

Impeccably Painted and Politically Tepid

Over the last decade, Denver’s RiNo neighborhood has been transformed by street art: impeccably painted, forcefully colorful, with content bordering on the political but kept well within the boundaries of the widely acceptable. There’s the locally cherished Larimer Boy/Larimer Girl diptych, an optical illusion on a pleated wall that reveals a morose girl from one direction and a delighted boy from the other. Shepard Fairey, the artist who famously designed Barack Obama’s Hope posters, installed a mural of Angela Davis, whose afro dons the statement “Power & Equality.” With its empowering yet apolitical message, the mural tepidly dips its toes into activism without stirring controversy. Perhaps the most Instagrammable painting in a neighborhood full of picture-perfect art is the iconic “Love this City” mural, a lively geometric work which essentially serves as 20-foot-wide Denver postcard. These murals are fun—they let you know that you’re in a neighborhood that’s artsy, perhaps even edgy, and certainly not unsafe, since, after all, the paintings are just so pretty. 

The vast majority of RiNo’s street art is painted during the Crush Walls festival, an annual street art event sponsored by the city government and over 50 local and national companies. The content of the murals needs to be approved by these authorities before being painted. Since it’s legal, artists are able to work openly during the day and thus put more time and precision into their work than they could put into most illegal street art. But legality also subjects artists to censorship. Though Crush Walls claims it doesn’t censor work, it also explicitly forbids overt political statements—one artist was denied entrance into the festival because their proposed mural condemned Brett Kavanaugh around the time of his hearing. The artist proceeded to complete the mural illegally on a wall across the street from the festival, and the work has since been painted over.

These murals are, of course, not graffiti. As I’ll use it in this article, the word “graffiti” refers to any street art done illegally and without commission—picture loopy-lettered tags, small stencils, quick drawings. 

Graffiti is ubiquitous, popping up in pretty much any place inhabited by humans. It’s spontaneous and aggressively uncensored. Often, graffiti is intended as a form of communication within a very specific community of people who also make illegal street art. If you’ve ever seen a tag and found yourself unable to read it, it’s probably because the message just wasn’t meant for you. Legal murals, on the other hand, are aesthetic objects meant to be understood by anyone. 

Graffiti can function as a political weapon in ways that legal murals cannot—the work condemning Kavanaugh is a great example of political graffiti that couldn’t materialize through the bureaucracy of the legal art scene. The artist’s message would be prone to censorship even within the traditional art gallery circuit, making graffiti their only definite option. Crush Walls censors political messages in the works it exhibits because it doesn’t want to risk controversy; the festival is funded largely by the city of Denver, so curators avoid promoting work that could be disruptive to governmental power. 

When neighborhoods like RiNo are filled with art that supports the agenda of those in power, those groups continue to maintain control over the visual landscape. When an individual can express their own ideas or images within the public sphere through graffiti, they subvert this power and gain influence over the visual landscape.  

The “visual landscape” is the amalgamation of everything we experience visually and how that affects our understanding of our social and political surroundings—it shapes pretty much everything about how we perceive the world around us. The term “visual landscape” originally comes from urban planning and landscape architecture, but it can be thought of in a sociological way too. Every billboard, every subtlety of the buildings you pass by, the appearance of every person you see—all of these things comprise the visual landscape, coming together to produce your interpretation of the area you’re in. Every place is a palimpsest of everything that has happened within it, which people read constantly with or without their awareness.

Graffiti can function as anything from a political weapon to a method of communication—it serves as a tool that anyone, regardless of status, can use to gain power within the visual landscape. 

Large-scale murals like those in RiNo function in the opposite way. Because of the size of the projects, large-scale murals must almost always be done with the consent or commission of the person who owns the walls that the works are on. Because of this, these pieces are stripped of their political and social value and become purely aesthetic objects that function only as a fun foray for the upper classes into what they perceive as “edgy.” Their function in the visual landscape is like the function of a billboard, only more insidious; it’s there to trick you into believing the place you’re walking through is cool and artsy, a break from the rest of the yuppie realm. The murals exist for the sake of pandering to an audience gullible enough to think that this kind of street art delivers a genuine message.

 ———

Keith Haring: When street art costs money

Long before his paintings became ubiquitous in the form of t-shirts and tattoos, Keith Haring was a street artist. In the early 1980s, his distinctive bold-lined, energetic works filled every corner of the New York City subway, earning him fame (or notoriety) throughout the city. Haring saw the subway as a laboratory of sorts, a place where he could experiment with content and easily engage with a wide range of people. He was motivated by the breadth and diversity of his audience and thought that his work’s connection to daily life was vital to its meaning. He believed that the public had a right to be in contact with art. The fact that his work made such frequent contact with such a huge number of people allowed it to convey political messages efficiently, and Haring took advantage of that. As a gay man and a victim of the AIDS epidemic, he produced many works criticizing the public’s ignorance about the disease bearing statements like “Ignorance = Fear / Silence = Death / Fight AIDS, act up.”  Unlike Shepard Fairey’s tepid attempt to use his art for activism, Keith Haring was direct and forceful in his condemnation of the U.S. government’s failure to intervene in the AIDS crisis. 

Though he didn’t identify as a graffiti artist, Haring was arrested numerous times for vandalism—unsurprising, since he allegedly created up to 40 works a day, all of which were very public. 

After initially developing his recognizable style through graffitiing New York subways, Keith Haring took to painting on canvas and heightened the cheerfulness of his style even more through the use of vibrant colors. In 1981, not long after his transition to painting, Haring had his first solo show. Throughout the ‘80s, his work was exhibited widely throughout the world. 

The figures in Keith Haring’s work are oddly joyful in contrast with his powerful political messages. Radiant babies (as Haring referred to them), barking dogs, hovering angels, and flying saucers are frequent characters enacting his often bleak and urgent stories. They’re pared down, bold, a little surreal, and always pleasantly entertaining. Maybe that’s why he was able to traverse the gap between his early work and high art, finding a good deal of commercial success even within his short life: his art is fun. 

Keith Haring was likely the first person to monetize work that originated as street art. His ability to be successful both in the gallery and on the subway marked the beginning of a vital shift in which street art became something desirable to the upper classes. The exuberance of Haring’s work and the appealing hint of edgy transgressiveness present in its graffiti roots, in conjunction with his associations with other New York artists of his era, made Haring’s paintings desirable to a high-paying audience. This was the first time that anything with such a strong connection to street art was worth a high art amount of money. 

Despite his success within the wealthy world of museums and galleries, Haring continued to produce illegal street art. From his first piece of graffiti until his death, Haring’s work on the subway was the crux of his artistic practice.

——— 

The loop effect

By the early to mid-2000s, it was well established that graffiti could be worth money. People who would have fled any neighborhood contaminated with illegal street art 10 years earlier now stopped to pause and ask whether that stencil on the wall could be a Banksy. What before would have been a sure sign of seediness began to have potential as a harbinger of culture. This transition from graffiti signaling destitution to graffiti signaling artiness is called the loop effect.

The loop effect goes a bit like this: first, you have crowds of artists living and working in the neighborhoods they can afford, which are generally somewhat impoverished and thus dense with graffiti. Sometimes, the artists living in these neighborhoods achieve financial success by entering the artistic mainstream. Now that their work is monetarily valuable, they’re seen as valid by the upper classes; no longer grimy bohemians, they’re considered real, cultured artists. These neighborhoods are no longer perceived to be criminal, but rather sophisticated and artistic, and so they increase in value. Expensive businesses and wealthy homeowners fill the area. In many ways, this process is very similar to that of gentrification. The upper classes decide a neighborhood is cool because of its creative underbelly, so developers take advantage of the change in opinion and sterilize the area to sell it at a higher price, forcing the original, rightful residents out. 

Ironically, since around 2010, there’s been a trend of developers and city governments forcing the loop effect in order to increase neighborhoods’ monetary value. In these cases, the city hires artists to install murals on public walls. Though the artwork’s public placement refers to graffiti in all the fun ways, the city ensures that all of the art is immaculate in both content and execution, disassociating itself from graffiti’s sleaze and insurgence. Skipping over the “grimy bohemian,” low-property value phase entirely, cities can artificially raise property values. 

It’s clear that Denver has pulled this trick with its revitalization of RiNo. By subsidizing the Crush Walls festival, the city artificially injects the neighborhood with fiscally lucrative artiness. 

——— 

Ahol Sniffs Glue: Coming full circle

David Anasagasti, better known by his tag name Ahol Sniffs Glue, is a contemporary Miami-based graffiti artist. One of his unmistakable murals can be found in RiNo somewhere between Shepard Fairey’s “Power & Equality” woman and the oversized postcard.

Almost all of Anasagasti’s murals, which are spread throughout the country, share the same motif: tired, half-closed, heavy lidded eyes painted over and over in a repeating pattern covering a large area. The works are deceptively simple—the tired eyes are intended as a salute to the working class and a condemnation of the inhumane working conditions that these people are often subjected to. The eyes are hypnotic in their repetition.

Anasagasti’s murals are decidedly anti-corporate. That’s why he found it especially insulting when American Eagle used Anasagasti’s works as the background for an international advertising campaign without the artist’s permission. Angered at the brand’s intellectual property infringement and concerned that his anti-corporate message would be compromised, Anasagasti sued American Eagle. The lawsuit was settled amicably out of court (which implies that the artist thankfully got some sort of sizable compensation).

American Eagle’s use of Anasagasti’s graffiti sends a clear message: graffiti has become so far removed from its original political function that it can be used in the exact opposite way, becoming a billboard advertising exactly that which it denounces. Anasagasti has come into the same problems that Keith Haring did more than 30 years ago. Like Haring, Anasagasti’s work is colorful, recognizable, and aesthetically appealing regardless of how much thought the viewer puts into interpreting its message. 

Anasagasti’s attempt to gain control over the visual landscape and advocate for marginalized people clearly backfired due to American Eagle’s unethical use of his artwork. But the ensuing lawsuit brought attention to the issue and made street artists’ position clear: despite the ever-increasing commercialization of street art, they will continue to take control over the visual landscape and force people to hear their messages—Anasagasti’s mural in RiNo takes up as much room as the Denver postcard does, and they’re only a few blocks away from each other. His work speaking out for marginalized people does exactly what the best of graffiti does: it takes up space and makes its point. 

Mediocre Issue | October 2019

On Trolls, Shadows, and Sinners

Ava: So why are your books piled up on the floor instead of on a shelf?

Maya: Because then I can look at them. I keep them associated in groups. Like this is very heady, theoretical stuff. Then this is white man poetry. I'd say a lot of the books that I have here I acquired while I was in college. But the ones I brought from home are books that I have nostalgic feelings for. I was really into the Beats in high school. So I have “Howl” from home and then Gary Snyder. I was drawn to buying books when I started liking the Beats because they had really beautiful visuals on the covers, and I mostly collect books because they're really beautiful to me—the fonts, the drawings within them, especially poetry books and the covers. I don't know if this is cliché or pretentious, but I think of it as an art collection. The book is an art object. 

A: What about the Beats are you drawn to?

M: If I'm being completely honest, it's not so much the content that draws me as much as their aesthetic. They like black and white. The spacing is also very experimental. Before I had exposure to experimental poetry from marginalized people, I was drawn to the Beats. I feel like as I get older I find books that aren't Beat literature, maybe like avant-garde or works associated with the Beats, that mean more to me in terms of the content. As I got more mature, the content and what it looked like combined. 

A: So the way you found the Beat poets was by looking at the book itself first?

M: Yeah, and what they were talking about appealed to me: outlaws and mountains and being an outsider. I guess I started with the mainstream idea of "outsider," which was these well-off white men who appropriated the aesthetics of the outsider poets who now I've come to love. My best friend Sophie is a big reason why I collect books, they introduced me to "Howl." Sophie and I were both marginalized people who found poetry through these douchey white guys primarily because their aesthetic subconsciously spoke to us. And then we were able to articulate that and include ourselves within it through our own poetry and through discovering people like Danez Smith and Kenneth Patchen and Bob Kaufman and Amiri Baraka and Sonia Sanchez. We really feed off each other; we're both super visual people. 

[bringing out her sketchbook] I've always been very artistically inclined but not very technically trained. So bookmaking was a medium that made me feel comfortable in making art, because it's something I'm acquainted with. And I'm very influenced by the books I have when I make those things. I wanted to be an artist, but that didn't work out. I couldn't take critique.

Anyway, I think most of what I've been talking about thus far is my early stages of liking books and poetry. When I was in our Beginning Poetry Writing class, I was completely aesthetically focused. 

A: What changed that?

M: Getting older and thinking more, I guess. 

A: Not being such a douche bag.

M: Yeah... reevaluating my douchbagness, reevaluating my relation to the Beats, because as I got to college I realized how racist and sexist they are. And in high school I knew that—I always wondered how I would fit in with these people, like they would probably just sexualize me… but I wasn't presented with other alternatives. But now, for instance, one of my favorite books is Bob Kaufman’s “Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness." 

A: Were all of them writing at the same time as the Beats?

M: Yeah. But they're not really considered Beats. For instance, Amiri Baraka started with the Beats. He was friends with Allen Ginsberg and all of those people and then was disillusioned by it and left. And I don't know about Bob Kaufman, but Amiri Baraka and Sonia Sanchez are associated with the black arts movement. 

Kenneth Patchen is a huge person in my book collection. He’s the love of my life. He makes picture poetry, where you can't divorce the content from what it looks like. And he really experiments with book form. “Journal of Albion Moonlight” is the most nonsense thing you could ever read, but I love it. It looks like a book, but it's not a book. He's also someone who's associated with the Beats but was the child of factory workers and is known as a proletarian poet. 

A: Your sensibility and the book you made for Jane Hilberry's class looks a lot like Kenneth Patchen. 

M: Aw, thanks—I quoted Kenneth Patchen in that: "There are so many little dyings that it doesn't matter which one of them is death. We shall be there when death reaches out his sparkling hands." I think Diane [Diane Seuss, Advanced Poetry professor] quotes that too, in one of her poems. Which is another amazing thing about Diane: I feel like no one really talks about Kenneth Patchen anymore. She has this poem "Self Portrait with Double Helix" that references Patchen, which I read after Jane’s class. The poem says "The book Mikel gave me—” Mikel was one of her best friends—“my inheritance he said, / Kenneth Patchen. He’d read me a few lines before handing it over: / 'We shall not be there when death reaches out his sparkling hands…" It meant a lot to me (I emailed her about it) because my best friend Sophie was the one who introduced me to Kenneth Patchen and that made me love poetry. 

 ——— 

Another really special book is "Folktales of India," which is my mom's. It's mythology and folklore of regions in India. This is probably my most valuable resource for creative inspiration. I write the myths into my poetry and make it a kind of auto-mythography. I translate my life into a myth, so I like collecting myth books. 

A: Can you talk about a specific myth that has resonated with you or that you've worked with?

M: My grandma would always tell me the story of baby Krishna, who was playing in a sandbox and eating the sand and his mom got really fucking pissed, and she says, "What are you doing, spit that out" and he wouldn't spit it out and so she forced his mouth open and when she did that she saw the whole universe in his mouth. I've always related that to poetry and that's why in Beginning Poetry, I called my little chapbook "Dirt Songs" and used eating dirt as a metaphor for poetry. 

And then there's one called "The Porcupine Daughter," which is regional to Gujarat where my family is from. It's about a dad who wants land for farming, but it's owned by someone else, so he tries to do a trick where he digs a hole and puts his daughter in it and makes his daughter pretend that she's God and say to the farmers, "This is not your land." Then, when the father tries to retrieve the daughter after the trick worked, she turns into a porcupine. And that's why porcupines, when they make sounds, sound like crying children. And I don't know why, but I really related to that when I read it in the moment that I was in. It doesn't objectively have anything to do with my life; it just spoke to me. So in my poem, “The Porcupine Daughter,” I translated it into my relationship with my parents.

M: I also have a lot of theory books that mean a lot to me—like Fanon’s “Black Skin, White Masks.” “Archive Fever” by Derrida is a really beautiful book. I just got it.

A: Is it readable?

M: Not really, but I really like it. 

A: What draws you to Derrida?

M: This one particularly appeals to me because I'm interested in the concept of the archive in a race theory and postcolonial context. I guess my interest in books is super archival… storing and recording and having a personal archive of my intellectual and creative development. 

Dante's “Inferno” is another really important book to me. This is my favorite edition—favorite translation, favorite cover, favorite everything… Robert Pinsky does a very sound-y, musical translation of “Inferno,” which I love. 

A: Why do you love Dante?

M: I think similar to my folktales, it's a forever-applicable story that I draw a lot of creative inspiration from. Especially “Inferno”—I haven't read “Purgatory” or “Paradiso,” but I already know that “Inferno” is my favorite because it's about bodies; it’s super physical. And I feel like everyone loves shit about sinners.

A: I love the figure of Satan or Lucifer in literature.

M: Satan's so crazy in “Inferno.” He has three heads and is eternally gnawing and frozen in his own tears. “Inferno” has a super visceral image base, whereas I've heard “Paradiso” is super intangible. Sophie loves “Paradiso,” because they love intangible floaty things, and I love “Inferno” which has stuff like “the strumpet with shit-covered fingers.”

A: Haha. I feel like Satan is an outsider too, so that makes sense.

M: Yeah. And then this Lorca book is really special to me.

A: Can you talk about how you came to Lorca?

M: When Diane read my poetry she told me, "You need to learn about 'duende,'" which basically means "trickery." I still don't entirely understand it in a definition sense, but I feel like Johnny Cash has “duende,” and “Inferno” has duende. Duende is not an angel or a muse, it's like a trickster figure. Lorca’s whole thing is that the muse and the angel come from outside us, but the duende is in the blood. It’s very corporeal. Like "Dark shuddering descendant of the happy marble and salt demon of Socrates." Like a demon or Satan, but not as scary as a demon… like a troll maybe. Like disorder, human pain. But I feel like duende is in all of the books that I'm interested in: mythic body-centered things.

A: You love the devil card in tarot. 

M: Yeah, and tarot's very visual too. A lot of these books are kind of like the devil card. 

A: What's your favorite circle of hell in Dante’s “Inferno”?

M: The last one. Cocytus, where Satan is and where the people who’ve committed treachery are. They're all frozen in Satan's tears. They can't move. And that's where Uglino the cannibal is. I'm really interested in cannibalism.

A: Like cannibalism as a metaphor?

M: Yeah, like in a postcolonial sense. Aimé Césaire’s "Discourse on Colonialism" has a lot of cannibalism imagery because colonial subjects were thought of as cannibals, but Césaire subverts that and says, "Actually, colonialists are cannibals," because colonialism is a kind of zombification of the colonized body, draining its contents. I'm also really interested in the blurring of lines between self and other, in transcorporeality and bodily porosity. But in a racial postcolonial sense. 

A: That makes me think of the psychoanalytic literature on love and possession—love as a desire to merge completely with another and to just consume and ingest someone. Not explicitly race related but also kind of, especially if you're thinking about the relation between colonizer and colonized. 

M: And a love of other cultures as possession, consumption.

A: Also, there's a Brazilian poetic movement called Antropofagia, which is all about “eating the text.” It's literally about literary cannibalism. 

M: Woah!!

A: If you had your own manifesto, what would it say?

M: I've played around with the idea of making a manifesto about poems as bodies. If you're a marginalized person, for instance, you can think of poetry as a body you can scribble on top of the one you can't control—because a poem has rhythm and breath and sound and it's kind of sculpted into this body, like it has a pulse and a shape to it. My manifesto would probably include Bob Kaufman and Sonia Sanchez and Amiri Baraka, who are all super physical. I'd also probably put “Inferno” in there. “Inferno” is like reordering your world through poetry, reordering your body through poetry. That would be my manifesto. Rewriting your body through poetry.

A: And that's so cool because it speaks to how poetry is magic. It's like a spell, like you're literally transfiguring reality through words.

M: I love that. You should read the thing on duende. That's Lorca. He's so magic, his poems don't make any sense:

“When the moon rises

the bells hang silent

and impenetrable footpaths

appear.

When the moon rises,

the sea covers the land

and the heart feels like

an island within infinity.

Nobody eats oranges

under the full moon.

One must eat fruit

that is green and cold.”

It's so elemental, it's just these archetypal magical images. He's really influenced by this Spanish Andalusian concept of "deepsong." All of his poems are structured in this Andalusian gypsy genre with repetition and these really primal images like the moon. There’s that one famous poem of his that goes like, “black pony, red moon, olives in my pocket." These really hardy images. So yeah I also love magic. Tee hee. 

 ———

M: I'm also really influenced by Japanese poetry. I have a haiku book that I think I left at home. And I’m at really influenced by the American imaginary of Zen Buddhism, in how it translates to an American context. For instance, Diane would talk about haiku and she instead uses something called the American sentence, which Allen Ginsberg created inspired by haiku. He says haiku doesn't work in English because we don't talk in haiku, like we don't talk in syllables, we talk in sentences. So he would do these seventeen syllable sentences. I prefer haiku to that, though. 

I also love shadows, and I feel like a lot of these books also have to do with shadows. Most obvious is "Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination" and "Invisible Man" which I don't have here for some reason. That's like my favorite book ever. Thinking of the marginalized person as a body without content or interiority, versus a white person who has both interiority and exteriority, like the Descartes idea [of the subject-object split]. Shadows as a shape that looks human but isn't human. People conceiving of marginalized people as nonhuman shadows, and also the idea of invisibility. Of not being seen but also being too seen. 

I'm interested in the idea of nothingness and emptiness and how that relates to shadows and formlessness and possibilities within that nothingness, like a freedom in it. Not just thinking of it as a depressing thing. And I think Zen Buddhism turns nothingness into a positive thing, whereas in American or Western thought (I'm not versed at all in philosophy so this may just be utter bullshit), when you think, "Oh, that person's invisible" or "That is not a person" it's a very negative thing. And it is a very negative and violent thing with physical repercussions, but there's a way to gain freedom by being formless and through trickery (duende)—which relates to “Kith” by Divya Victor, who came to CC.

It was very important for me to read Victor’s work and interact with it while she was here because she's Indian and experimental, which I haven't really seen before. I asked her what it's like to be working in a field where you don't see yourself—like that invisibility question—and she said, "There's such a freedom in accepting the fact that you're an orphaned poet. And in killing the audience and just writing for yourself." So I guess that connects to my interest in Zen Buddhism and invisibility in all of these books: a freedom in nothingness and being free by accepting the reality of your predicament. And it is violent and horrible, but there's at least creative freedom in it, that I feel like people who aren't women or people of color or queer don't understand.

A: That makes me think about Derrida's idea about the signifier liberated from the signified and language just becoming endless play, because it's not attached to any kind of origin.

M: Which is the trickster idea, and playing, and magic! I feel like, have you seen that meme from “It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia” with the guy with all these connected points behind him and he's like “ahhhhh!” That's how I feel right now. Magic, race, Satan, shadows, play, Zen Buddhism. All these connected themes.

Mediocre Issue | October 2019

Okeechobee is no Place to be Beautiful

Kath was not like me. She was a tableau of meekness; a whisper in a loud room; the transparency of glass. Her existence was not evident until, all at once, it was. If she was glass, then I was an oily handprint on the window, the thing that unfortunately revealed her as neither external nor internal, but the emissary between the two. When I think about her now, I try to remember the beautiful parts. My peach-pear woman, I cut out the soft spots and bruises from my recollection. I do not mourn her, or miss her, or feel much for her at all save a delicate and untouchable stirring in my chest. It’s something between love and fondness, poignancy and uneasiness, as if she were a particularly captivating character in a play I saw a long time ago.

 ———

I might not have noticed her at all if I hadn’t been searching so desperately for an escape that night from yet another rich, crusted old man. I was staying in a motel in Miami Beach then, scavenging for jobs and meals through men I met in hotel bars, ones who promised me things they could never truly give me. She was older than me by at least a few years, a barback at one of those grand Art Deco hotels I couldn’t dream of belonging in back then. The men bought me gorgeous dinners of fish I’d never seen before, wines older than me. But I was the meal, that particularly vulnerable age where my legality still seemed to remain a question: young enough to seem like jailbait but old enough to not land them in jail. Like so many young women, I’d left home in search of a better something, although I still remain unsure of what that something truly is. My proclivity for violence led me to men far older than me, the kind who call you precocious, tiptoe around you as you drip with shimmering youth. The ones who give you gold but leave you in a silver world, the ones who cease to tiptoe and begin to stomp far quicker than you’d hoped. I could never—and still can’t—hate them fully, not like Kath did, but I became skilled in the art of coquettish evasion. I’ve always been an expert at staying just out of reach, having learned from an early age that receiving the trophy is the least exciting part of the competition.

That night, I ordered a dirty martini simply for the olives; it’d been a while since my last meal and I went to sleep each night too empty even for the bedbugs to sink into my stinking flesh. The man I was drinking with was loud and rude; if Kath hadn’t intervened I might have stabbed him. She quietly told me that the manager needed to see me, and led me out through the narrow alleyway from the kitchen. Kath, Kath, her slender body and slowly blinking eyes suggested that what she knew best was how to disappear entirely. If she turned sideways, she was already half-gone.

You’ve saved me, I told her, eyebrows raised.

She told me it was no trouble at all, but before she ducked back inside I grabbed her wrist.

What time are you off? Do you want to go somewhere?

In truth, I needed something to shake off my encroaching sobriety; I suggested she nick a bottle of tequila and we could walk, maybe find something to eat. I had a few crumpled bills I’d stolen from the man inside and I suppose, on some level, I wanted someone to celebrate with, someone to wander the streets with to distract me from my bedbug bites and daybreak.

In thirty minutes, she said before sliding back through the door. It was neither a yes nor a no, but I waited anyway. I wasn’t ready to return to the dimly lit squalor of my room, face another reminder of my mothball life. I hadn’t gotten a modeling gig for weeks, nor had I found any expensive coattails to ride through my unemployment. I knew that my real success was to be found not in the modeling industry but in the profession of modeling itself, the state of being a model. I was the perfect toy, I made sure I was. It was my only real way up and eventually out.

I had known this since that day picking grits out of my bleeding knees, punishment for my mother’s boyfriend’s extended stares. I looked carefully in the mirror at my pale, bony body. I stole lipstick from my mother’s bathroom and slicked the brown over my lips, puckering and holding my hair at my crown to examine the sharp cheekbones, the hips hidden underneath sagging white underwear. Okeechobee was no place to be beautiful, I knew, so I left five years later, once I turned nineteen.

I learned about love from the movies, like I told Kath that night when she asked. Miami is a horribly romantic place despite itself, so easy to fall in love at every garbage heap marinating in the humid summer.

It doesn’t sound like you’ve ever been in love, then, Kath told me quietly. It was a statement that sounded more like a question, so I answered it like one:

I fall in love all the time.

A shadow of a smirk played on her face at this, her disbelief in my naiveté both condescending and enchanting. We were both right, as it turns out. I’d never been in love like how she meant it. It was not my fault that I fell so hard and so often in love—in and out, prone to disgust as much as lust, sometimes simultaneously.

We drank tequila cross-legged at the shore and spread our bodies across the sand, hair half-buried. She later told me she knew right then that she’d love me someday, but in the moment, I considered her just another somnambulist. The air was thick that night. We talked about hurricanes.

I’m terrified of drowning, she told me. I took this to mean she couldn’t swim, but she was an excellent swimmer, unlike me.

Why be scared then? I asked her, which she laughed at. She laughed at me quite often, and I hated it. She had a way of taking my lack of fear for immaturity, and I was too young to know whether or not she was right. I wasn’t frightened of the water like she was, I had no concept of being in too deep in anything at all. Sitting on the beach, we peeled our mangoes and ate them. I tried not to notice the juice running down her chin and hands, her skeletal fingers maneuvering the mango skin. She made me feel clumsy. This was her advantage at first, my reluctance to notice her; later, of course, it became mine.

There’s something so beautiful about a new moon, she said to me, sucking the last flesh away from the mango pit. I nodded, nervous.

Should we swim? I asked; it was a particularly hot night and my discomfort burnt my nerves, made me restless.

We stripped and got in the water, where I felt more at ease. The ocean is singularly comforting, the way I imagine space might be: a vastness you know is not empty, an unknown that is still somewhat known. I exhaled completely and floated underwater, like a half-rotten egg. I do not remember what it’s like to be in the womb but I imagine it felt like this. I don’t remember the womb, but I remember swimming in the ocean with Kath.

——— 

I had never been involved with a woman before, at least that’s what I told myself. The sleepover fumblings of my preteen years were catalogued in my memory as simply experimentation, my introduction into the world of sex and grime. I thought of her often; Joanna was her name. We lay belly-down on her basement floor, elbows crooked to hold up our chins as we flipped through Jo’s father’s dirty magazines. We’d stolen them from their hiding spot beneath the old newspapers in the garage and giggled at the models’ revealing poses and sultry stares. It was late, our reading lit by a halogen bulb in the corner of the damp room. Jo propped herself up to show me a page:

Maybe I’ll look like this when I’m older?

Fat chance! I teased. You’ll never get tits.

Screw you! Will too. I bet I’ll have tits just like… these!

She had flipped to another page where a woman held up her breasts by the nipples, cupid’s bow lips parted in a gasp as if she couldn’t believe she’d been caught on camera. We exploded into giggles and I threw a pillow at her; she threw it back. We began to wrestle lightly; I took the pillow and pinned her down with my knees on her thighs and held the cushion over her head in a mock suffocation. But I couldn’t resist the power, held it down harder over her. Jo started to cry beneath the pillow and I stopped; ashamed of and confused about taking it far too far.

Jo, Jo, I’m sorry. I began to cry too, grabbing her cheeks and kissing them and hugging her tight.

I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I pushed her snot and tear soaked baby hair off of her face and kissed her again quick.

It’s okay, I’m just being a dumb baby, she sniffled, and put her hands around my neck as well.

I bet we’ll both look like the Penthouse girls by high school, I told her earnestly, and she laughed shakily. Her laugh flooded me with relief from my confused guilt and I smiled. We sniffed back the last of our mucusy tears and I realized, for the first time, that we were very close. We were always touching and wrestling, but in the June heat something electric carried through the night and I truly felt how close to her I was. We looked at one another and in a fit of nervousness I crossed my eyes; the childish action made us both erupt into soft giggles again, heads bowing forward. She pulled us to the ground, as if to start wrestling again, but our tangled arms just twisted us together, her stringy brown hair dusting the tip of my nose and temples. I felt the light sweat on her stomach against mine, and this time we kissed slowly, Jo’s soft thin lips mashing into mine.

Let’s practice with tongue, I said, and she nodded solemnly. I felt something move in me both terrible and great, something blurry in me that held still for Jo, like a hummingbird at rest.

After hours of trembling in the ecstasy of what we had stopped calling practice, we fell asleep curled into one another on the ground, sweaty hair sticking to our necks and lamplight assaulting the stucco walls.

I left wordlessly upon waking. Jo and I never spoke of that night again, and eventually we grew apart. By the time I’d left Okeechobee she was engaged, fully prepared to be ensconced in the homey life I couldn’t resign myself to. But the memory of her and the hunger she awoke in me always lurked somewhere in the shadowed corners of my mind.

 ———

When I woke before morning with Kath by my side, I crept silently away like I had done with Jo. I realized I had nowhere to go; I could go anywhere. It was about to be light, that predawn period that threatens daytime, but I found I didn’t dread the idea of sunrise. It had rained hours ago, and the wind still carried that memory. Near the beach, muddy footsteps revealed the days and nights of strangers. Women on their way home from the cars of scarred old men held their arms close to them, circumnavigated the crowds of hungry mosquitoes and kept their eyes cast downward when they passed me.

I couldn’t help but feel that I stood in the eye of an invisible storm where, for the moment, I was safe. I walked the length of the beach towards the city, where the sights and sounds of the emerging day assaulted my senses. I turned towards the beach again and saw the horizon opening itself to me with a fiery vulnerability—I was bathed in incandescence from every direction, and I wondered what it was to be unafraid of the light.

 Mediocre Issue | October 2019

Small Town Chronicles

Beaming at us with her trademark smile, Arliss would take my family’s doughnut orders. Then, eyes darting hesitantly between me and my sister, she would ask, “Now, which one of you is Hannah?” For years, this sweet lady has been consistently smiling out from behind the counter at the Third Street Bakery in the small town of Phillipsburg, Kansas. With kind eyes and warm greetings, she takes the orders of every early bird customer in the morning hours. 

My family actually lives in an even smaller town fifteen miles away, so the occasional trip to Phillipsburg during our childhood marked quite the special event in my and my siblings’ world, thus rendering our memories of visiting Arliss all the more vivid. For the most part, we refer to Phillipsburg as “Town”: it’s home to almost everything, including our lone coffee shop, the grocery store, and the only stoplight in the county.

The Third Street Bakery first opened in 1995 and has grown to become an epicenter of the Phillips County community ever since. Throughout the twenty-one years I’ve called Phillips County my home, nothing at the bakery has changed: the same well-worn carpeted aisle leads you past the same customers sitting at the same tables draped with bold cherry and loud golden floral tablecloths. You’ll never make it through to the counter without stopping at least two or three times to exchange the usual how-do-you-do’s with other customers. The bakers begin preparing the homemade doughnuts, bread, and pies as early as two or three in the morning daily, except for on Sundays. Third Street Bakery’s dedication to quality has not gone unnoticed by those outside Phillips County: the bakery has even been recognized in Kansas! tourism magazine for its decadent cherry and coconut cream pies. 

Aptly named for its location on Third Street, the family-owned and family-run bakery is located in one of the buildings along the original brick roads in downtown Phillipsburg, a small town with big spirit: picture Kansas’ Biggest Rodeo (yes, that’s it’s real name) in a town of 2,500 people. It happens every year, ninety years running. The annual event began in 1929 in a farmer’s field north of town and has since developed into one of the busiest seasons of the year for the county as rodeo fans and competitors pile in from neighboring states.

Now, it’s impossible to picture Kansas’ Biggest Rodeo or the county fair without considering the bakery as well. Every year the county fair takes place during the last or second-to-last weekend of July, and it gives Phillipsburg youth a huge role. 4-H is a youth development program which helps kids ages 7-18 develop leadership and life skills ranging from animal care to volunteer work to arts and crafts. At the fair, 4-H kids get the chance to proudly showcase their myriad of projects—think baked goods, photography, fiber arts, horticulture, woodworking, entomology, and geology. The list goes on. 

4-H kids also raise a variety of animals, including rabbits, poultry, sheep, goats, pigs, dogs, cats, handpets, horses, bucket calves, and market cows, all of which make appearances at the fair. This work does not go unrecognized: over the past three years, the two alpacas owned and adored by a young 4-H member have emerged as new fan favorites among fair-goers. Other anticipated events throughout the fair weekend include the greased pig contest, the livestock show and auction, barrel train rides, cornhole tournaments, mechanical bull rides, bingo, and classic kids’ games like balloon darts and cake walks hosted by local businesses. Entertainment varies consistently, with some years bringing a beer garden and others a petting zoo or dutch oven cook-off. Regardless of the projects, animals, and events each year, you can always count on finding the Third Street Bakery’s finest pies on display at the food stand. 

These pies aren’t the only thing notable about the county fair, however. Our town’s version of bingo isn’t your average game of bingo. Instead, we play what’s known as Cow Chip Bingo—and if you know what cow chips are, this is exactly what it sounds like. In June, before the county fair takes place, the Cow Chip Bingo board is displayed on an easel in a downtown Phillipsburg business. For a mere $10, you can sign your name on a square and enter yourself in the contest for a $500 prize. How is the winner decided? Well, on a chosen day at the county fair, the bingo board is drawn up in the arena and a nice full cow is released to do his or her business. The lucky square where the cow chip lands decides which competitor receives the cash prize.

In a small county with few events throughout the year, the Phillips county fair stirs up quite a bit of excitement for those in and around the community. The county fair gives us somewhere to go, things to do, and people to see—even if this just means going out to the fairgrounds to meet friends for the Friday taco lunch special. The spirit of fair time is all-encompassing enough that there’s room for even the Third Street Bakery to take part in the festivities. Each of the six 4-H clubs in Phillips County are asked to contribute a certain number of pies to the public fair food stand. Luckily, as a 4-H alumni I have an inside perspective to the behind-the-scenes motions that take place for the fair food stand to come together. The county’s 4-H clubs are asked to bring a certain number of crème and fruit pies to help the head cook, Sandi, with the food preparation. After the club votes on and approves the motion, most clubs order their catered pies from Third Street Bakery. It’s unimaginable to escape the fair without caving to a slice of their oreo crème! For some of the loyal daily customers, it’s hard to leave even the bakery itself without giving in to the mouth-watering temptations of crisp and flaky fruit pies topped with a smattering of sugar crystals, or the whipped meringue peaks atop a classic cream pie.

My own involvement with the Third Street Bakery and the fair stretches into the months preceding the fair and rodeo weekends. My old 4-H club takes care of the annual selling, painting, and cleaning of rodeo window advertisements for local businesses. What’s a rodeo window advertisement, you ask? I’ll give you an example: a rodeo-themed picture, sold by a 4-H member and selected by the business owner, painted onto the business window with the caption, “Welcome Phillips Co. Fair\ July [dates] \ Kansas’ Biggest Rodeo Aug [dates].” The pictures range from cute cartoon horses and lasso spinning cowboys to more intricate bronco riders and cowgirls bearing American flags. 

While most businesses leave the painting decisions in the hands of the 4-H members, each year a handful make special requests or ask for specific colors—we’ve even branched out so far as to paint detailed rodeo horse trailers’ windows. One year as we prepared to paint the window at the furniture store downtown, the owner rushed out to meet us, apologizing and asking, “Could you maybe come back tomorrow? My daughters will be with me and I said they could choose the colors for the advertisement this year.” The next day, after some serious deliberation on behalf of the seven and nine year olds, I painted the first purple and turquoise horse that the rodeo advertising business had ever seen. 

But whether the requests are simple or extravagant, none of them are quite like that of the Third Street Bakery. Every year, they choose the same image of a Charolois bull from the neck up, and every year, they ask us if we can paint doughnuts on its horns—some with frosting, one with sprinkles, one with sugar. How can we refuse? 

As surprising as it is, the bakery succeeds in spreading its warmth even farther than the rodeo fans from neighboring states. The proof is in the little index cards they keep set up on the doughnut display case, each card filled out by a visitor. They’re asked to write where they’re from and answer the prompt, “My favorite thing about the Third Street Bakery is…” To pass time in line, I love to skim through the different countries and states that are listed by visitors whom the bakery welcomed into the community with open arms: our foreign exchange student studying abroad from Japan, a distant family member visiting from South Carolina, a random couple passing through from Washington state. The lines on every card are scrawled with various styles of handwritten compliments and praises for the Third Street Bakery. Somehow, the lone bakery in small-town Kansas managed to find its way into the lives of strangers, who in turn left a small piece of themselves with the bakery to remember.

In fact, whenever I have a friend visit from out of town, the bakery is a top place on my list of must-sees. When my friend and her brother from Louisiana were passing through, we spent the last hour of their only morning in Phillipsburg sharing three different doughnuts between us, just to get a small taste of them all; we settled on the maple bacon Long John, a classic cinnamon bun drizzled in a sticky glaze, and the pretzel drizzled with peanut butter and chocolate. No other place in the county would have given them such an accurate and full taste of my town and my community.

Mornings at the bakery are defined by well-known elderly faces of the community, all gathering with the rising sun for a strong cup of coffee, a hot breakfast, and a good conversation. As the town awakens and assembles for lunch, the atmosphere shifts from the underlying murmur of peaceful morning patrons to a lively noon chatter that swells and falls in time with the harsh jangle of the old bells attached to the top of the restaurant door. By this time, my late pastor’s husband Larry slowly rolls up on his golf cart and comes in with his walker for the daily special. 

I can’t remember exactly when I met Larry because there was never a time I didn’t know him. All I know is that during my childhood, he was always there in church on Sundays in the second pew from the front on the left-hand side. On days my family would end up sitting beside or behind him, he would turn to me during the service with his rumbling baritone voice, encouraging me not only to sing, but also to smile. Now, on the occasion that we bump into one another in line to buy doughnuts, he still turns to me with a wink and jokes, “We have to stop meeting like this.” 

Another pair of familiar faces amongst the lunch tables are the farming brothers from Agra, a 250-person town ten miles due east from Phillipsburg. Without fail, Mark, the younger and more boisterous of the two will catch my eye as I stroll by and, with a teasing grin, make some smartass remark: “Don’t you ever work?” or “Staying out of trouble?” Yet, no matter how much he loves to give me a hard time, he always follows up by asking about any of my recent or upcoming travels and wishing me well before I leave town again. Since starting college 3 years ago, my time in my home county has become limited, and these occasional run-ins are all the more valuable.

Mr. Rahjes, a carpenter who has lived his entire life in Phillips County, is another person the bakery wouldn’t be the same without. When I first met Mr. Rahjes, he was working a remodeling job for my family. On his last day, as I helped carry his tools to the trailer, I asked if he would ever let a girl work for him—imagine my excitement when he said that he had employed female assistants in the past! Two years later, when I found myself in need of a steady job, I called him up out of the blue and asked if his offer still stood—he not only gave me an affirmative, but also the address of the place where he’d be working the next day. That was the fall of 2013, and ever since, I’ve worked the job during summers and school breaks, seeing him as both my friend and mentor. 

Throughout the summer work week, we normally head home during the noon hour before returning to work in the early afternoon, with the crucial exception of Thursdays. The Thursday daily lunch special at the bakery is your choice of fried white or dark meat chicken, a wallop of mashed potatoes with gravy, a pile of baked beans, and a freshly buttered roll. Thankfully, this comes in half orders. Whenever we’re working a site in Phillipsburg, this meal is a tradition I can rely on: every working Thursday at noon (or 11:30, if you really “want to get the good chicken,” according to Mr. Rahjes), we’ll load into his truck and he’ll drive us up to the town square. 

Mr. Rahjes will pay for both our meals, and afterwards he’ll return to the counter for an ice refill to chew on back at work; until this spring when the machine broke down, everyone agreed that the bakery had the best munching ice in town. Despite the unfortunate change in ice quality, Mr. Rahjes remains a man of habit, never leaving the bakery without his to-go cup in hand.

Through late August into September, the square across from the bakery teems with locals selling or buying homegrown fresh fruits and vegetables on tables beneath tents; my favorites are the tender peaches that practically drip with juice and the succulent sweet corn that reminds you why we have butter. My interaction with the community travels beyond the square, floating through my social media timelines in the form of pictures of freshly baked pies or stacked jars of appealing canned goods—and, of course, a post could never be complete without tagging one of the local producers. 

Another lunch option that is unique to the area is the Phillipsburger. Who is Phillip, and why does he have a burger, you ask? The Phillipsburger, actually named after the town of Phillipsburg itself (sorry, Phillip), is the town equivalent of a McDonald’s Big Mac, but with its own secret specialty sauce. Nearly every dining place in town has its own version of the Phillipsburger, composed of a cheeseburger, tomato, lettuce, onion, and its own variation of the specialty sauce that distinguishes it from its couterparts. Because the specific ingredients of the sauce are kept a secret, the Phillipsburger maintains its air of mystery. 

Bierocks, another local favorite, are available only at Third Street Bakery. A German recipe, bierocks are small pastry pockets with savory fillings. While they occasionally have bierocks on hand, the bakery only takes orders for these rolls twice a year, and offers three different varieties from which to choose: mushroom and swiss, meat lovers, and the traditional beef and cheddar cheese. Due to the lengthy process of making these rolls and the high demand from local families, fulfilling the bierock orders can quickly become overwhelming for the few hands that bake them all—hence the small window to order! 

On the sweeter side of their menu, two of the bakery’s noteworthy creations are the sundae doughnut and what we lovingly refer to as “the honker.” The sundae comes in two sugar-loaded options: stuffed with strawberry and cream cheese with a splash of strawberry frosting, or chock-full of chocolate and Bavarian cream with a layer of chocolate frosting. Both flavors are topped with a dollop of whipped cream. The honker, on the other hand, is almost the size of a dinner plate, consisting of nearly four regular doughnuts put together with a creamy chocolate frosting slathered across the top. This doughnut makes the perfect breakfast to split with a friend or to save for later. One of the best things about the honker is getting to see the way kids’ eyes light up and widen with incredulous awe when they see it.

The Third Street Bakery plays a role in the lives of the older members of the community, but it’s also important to some of the youngest members as well. Every year in June, the Phillips county high school dance team helps organize the Little Mr. and Ms. Panther contest. Any parent can enter their child between ages two and seven to be voted upon as a potential crown bearer for the Homecoming King and Queen during the high school football season. Around three or four businesses display poster boards with small photographs of the candidates and their names. In front of the poster on the table are small glass jars with each of the children’s names where you can place your vote with pocket change. At the end of the voting season, the change is counted up and goes to the dance team as a fundraising benefit: the boy and girl with the most votes are given the title of Little Mr. and Ms. Panther and have the chance to star in the homecoming parade before the football game that evening.

Whether it’s an unexpected run-in with a friend you haven’t seen in weeks or months, filling your time in line with hugs and well wishes, a catered family reunion, or even a free glass of ice water while painting rodeo ads, the Third Street Bakery is woven into the threads of our community. Although the bakery wins over hearts and tastebuds from far and wide, it still remains nearest and dearest to those of us who live or grew up in Phillips County. Even now, there’s no other way I’d prefer to be greeted while ordering a doughnut than with sweet Arliss’s friendly smile and, “Good morning! It’s Hannah … right?” 

Mediocre Issue | October 2019

The Value of the Fast

In 1998, a group of Colorado College students decided to protest possible U.S. involvement in Iraq by refusing to eat for one day. They hung up posters encouraging students to join them in their fast. Angered and disturbed by this approach, one student took to the pages of the Catalyst to protest the protest. The student argued that such an invitation to abstain from eating was detrimental to both physical and mental health. Far from being a positive gesture of goodwill and solidarity, she said, the fast contributed to the destructive notion that eating is negative and not eating is positive. For this student, putting value on self-denial—especially denial of food—was evidently harmful. As proof, she referenced an article that had appeared in the Catalyst the previous month that discussed the widespread epidemic of eating disorders among college students, particularly female college students. According to the writer, a protest encouraging students to fast was not only insensitive to students struggling with eating disorders, but in fact condoned and encouraged unhealthy eating habits. The student urged those planning the protest to call off the fast.

In the next week’s Catalyst, the protesters defended their choice to fast. They pointed out that fasting has been practiced by a variety of religions and political groups. Fasting, in their view, was meant as an affirmation of the importance of food, not a condemnation of food or bodily appetites. By giving up food, they were exercising self-control to make a statement about an important problem. Rather than being detrimental, they said, fasting both “makes space in our lives for larger issues” and “informs thinking and action in our lives.” They acknowledged the concerns of the angered student but insisted that fasting could be a powerful and beneficial act when practiced by the mentally and physically healthy.

I was immediately drawn to these articles when I came across them while doing research with old Catalysts. Reflecting on this event two decades later, it seems to me that the questions they raised are as unsettled as ever. So much more than a necessity of life, food challenges us to consider an array of issues like social justice, mental and physical health, religion, morality, and the environment, to name a few. This particular disagreement over the practice of fasting led me to consider why people fast and what implications it has for our contemporary secular culture.

Growing up Catholic, I had some exposure to fasting, though it was relatively mild compared to some other religious traditions. During Lent—the 40 days leading up to Easter—Catholics generally make a commitment (not unlike a New Year’s resolution) to better themselves by giving something up or taking up a good habit. Furthermore, they don’t eat meat on Fridays, though fish is fair game. They are also supposed to eat lightly (small breakfast, small lunch, and nothing between meals) on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday.

As a kid, this could be a drag, but it wasn’t really a big deal. I knew that fasting and giving something up was an important part of my faith, and it certainly made my parents happy. In high school, even though I was a bit more skeptical about the theological significance of Lent, I still felt that it had some kind of value. Lent became an opportunity for mindfulness and personal betterment. The no-meat-on-Fridays rule encouraged me to pause and think about what I was eating. It was both a time to challenge myself and to work on good habits while cutting back on unhealthy ones. I haven’t observed the Lenten fast for several years now, but I still hold on to some of the values it engendered.

At first glance, it might seem that I align more closely with the perspective of the students who believe that fasting is not really about punishing the body or demonizing food. However, I do think that the concerned student had a point. Earlier in history—for example, in medieval Christianity—fasting was practiced as a way to punish the body and subdue the “passions of the flesh.” Natural impulses, considered base and corrupt, were something to be resisted. In his autobiographical “Confessions,” early Christian philosopher St. Augustine wrote about the need to resist carnal temptation: “[f]or the body which is corrupted presses down the soul, and the earthly dwelling weighs down the mind.” For someone like St. Augustine, the body had to be overcome for the sake of knowing the divine.

This sentiment is rooted in a dualistic spirit-matter, mind-body binary dating back at least to Plato. He argued that in order to know the Good and the Beautiful, human beings must turn away from the distractions of the material world and focus on the spiritual Truth that these distractions concealed. Similarly, the canons of Taoism, Buddhism, and Islam traditionally see fasting as a way to purify the body and focus the mind, though they don’t share the same open hostility towards the body.  

That being said, it would be wrong to suggest that all instances of religious fasting are attempts to reject or punish the body. People fast for a variety of reasons, such as promoting mindfulness, occasioning mystical experiences, atoning for sins, or building community. Yet, based on my personal experiences, conversations with professors, and readings in various encyclopedias of religion, it seems to me that in many cases, fasting boils down to the values of discipline and self-control. Fasting often rests on a belief in the benefit of self-denial which extends far beyond the practice of fasting itself. Discipline in this sense may not seem very different from Augustine’s asceticism, but, like the student protestors, I would argue that they are distinct. Clearly the protestors did not have anything divine in mind when they claimed that fasting “makes space in our lives for larger issues.” They were simply recognizing that at times it is good to forego certain desires for the sake of other more meaningful goals.

It would seem that everyday experiences, at a basic level, support this belief. There are times when it would seem beneficial to refrain from doing something in the interest of an end—spiritual or otherwise—deemed more desirable. That could mean saving money instead of buying a new phone, eating an apple instead of a twinkie, taking a train instead of a plane, or writing that paper instead of watching more Netflix. All of these choices rely on our freedom to evaluate our various desires and prioritize some over others. 

There may have been a time when the merit of self-control and discipline was widely agreed upon. Today, however, as I think the 1998 debate at CC shows, that is surely not the case. Today, we are justifiably concerned with the mental health implications of self-denial. These days, the idea of discipline conjures up in many of us associations with Freudian superegos and Foucauldian panopticons. Self-control has become synonymous with repression and discipline with internalized guilt. 

In an essay titled “Dignity and Restraint,” the American Buddhist monk Thanissaro Bhikkhu observes that words like temptation, dignity, and restraint have all but disappeared from the contemporary vernacular. He laments this fact and argues that these concepts are necessary for true happiness. Why is this so? First, he says, without restraint we don’t have control over our own lives. If we only regard our impulses, we have no priorities or goals; our lives lack meaning. Second, he argues, without self-control we cannot even identify our impulses. It is impossible to know ourselves and these inner drives unless we try to reign them in. Restraint allows us to make judgements about our competing desires and forestall immediate gratification for a more desirable goal. And third, he says, restraint allows us to recognize both our own dignity and that of others. Values like mindfulness and generosity are only possible when we are able to say no to some thoughts and desires and say yes to nobler ones. Bhikkhu observes that consumer culture has tried to erase this value system and urges us to consider the consequences:

The lessons our culture teaches us—to go out and buy, buy, buy; be greedy, be greedy; give in, give in—are all over the place. And what kind of dignity comes from following those messages? The dignity of a fish gobbling down bait. We’ve got to unlearn those habits, unlearn those messages, if we want to revive words like dignity and restraint, and to reap the rewards that the realities of dignity and restraint have to offer our minds.

Many of us are not used to thinking in terms of dignity and restraint and may find this kind of sentiment jarring. “Who are you to make such claims about goodness, happiness, and human nature?” we might ask. “How could we possibly benefit from doing without?” However, at least to me, some of the sentiment behind Bhikkhu’s words rings true. 

After reading his essay, I could not help but relate it to the issue that plagues my thoughts more than any other these days: climate change. The threat of climate change has forced me to evaluate the consequences of my own behaviors like little else has. It has made me think about the effects of my material consumption in a way that Lent or Marx never could. 

I would say it is well established at this point (just skim any IPCC report from the last thirty years), that addressing the rampant consumption in wealthy countries, the United States in particular, is critical to mitigating climate change. In his 2005 paper titled “Living Better by Consuming Less” professor Tim Jackson takes the environmental impact of consumption as a given. From there he explores the question of “whether or to what extent consumption can be taken as ‘good for us.’” While some views assume that increased consumption is synonymous with improved well-being, others argue that “the scale of consumption in modern society is both environmentally and psychologically damaging.” Although it may sound grim, the latter viewpoint opens the possibility of what Jackson calls a “double dividend,” in which reducing consumption could both fight climate change and increase personal well-being. 

This win-win situation might seem a little too good to be true. Could it be possible that using less energy, flying less, using less water, buying fewer things, driving less, eating less meat, and producing less waste could really be good for us? Sure, these actions are constructive in the long run if we actually manage to curb global warming, but it’s less clear that they are personally beneficial right now. France’s “Yellow Vest” protests of last year against new petrol taxes show the difficulty in convincing people that some ineffable goal of reducing carbon emissions down the line is worth their sacrifices in the present. This example seems to show that even if the “double dividend” is possible, it is hardly obvious or straightforward. 

Nevertheless, Jackson dives into the research on consumption to understand whether the “double dividend” is realistic or merely a pipe dream. He points out that there is no shortage of literature (from Karl Marx to Tibor Scitovsky to Wendell Berry) criticizing the capitalistic belief in the inherent goodness of consumption. Though some of these critiques are more empirical than others, they all assert that material consumption does not equal happiness (I think we could safely place Bhikkhu in this category). This assertion is supported by the fact that the U.S. consumes more energy per capita than any other country, but is ranked nineteenth in happiness by the World Happiness Report. 

But if consumption fails to satisfy our needs, Jackson asks, why do we seem so driven to consume? One response, he says, is that consumption is an evolutionary adaptation and that we are directed to consume by some biological imperative. As some have argued, it may be that our consumption is driven by an urge to secure the means of survival, display our sexual availability, and establish ourselves in status hierarchies. 

Jackson also looks at the causes of “inconspicuous” or “ordinary” consumption that are less easily explained through evolution alone. He argues that much of our consumption—a heating bill or a car for example—occurs without very much choice at all, rational or irrational. Many times, we are locked into unsustainable patterns of consumption “either by social norms … or by constraints of the institutional context.” This, for Jackson, shows that the “double dividend” cannot be met merely through “simplistic appeals to the good nature of individuals” (Sorry Bhikkhu). Change will have to occur at the societal level. This could explain the resistance to the French petrol taxes: lawmakers had failed to anticipate how hard it would be for rural and working-class communities to adapt to the new law. 

Finally, and, I would argue, most importantly, Jackson presents research showing just how important material objects are to both our personal and social identities. Not simply greedy or status hungry, “we consume in order to identify ourselves with a social group … to communicate allegiance to certain ideals, and to differentiate ourselves from certain other ideals.” Consumption has become a part of how we see ourselves and make meaning in the world. Our consumption is linked to things that truly matter: friendship, identity, community, and purpose. 

On the one hand, this last point shows why consumption is so deeply rooted in our culture. On the other, I think it gives us reason for hope. While consumption may have become one way through which we find community and construct meaning in the world, it is surely not the only way. Although it will not be easy, Jackson has faith in our ability to devise a “more successful and less ecologically damaging strategy for pursuing personal and cultural meaning.”

But what would this look like? Jackson leaves us to consider how such a strategy could be put into place. Perhaps restraint and self-control could play a role in all of this. In order to find meaning outside of consumption, we may have to revisit some older values that have fallen out of vogue. As Bhikkhu argues, personal discipline may be one such value. After all, fasting is practiced all over the world, and human beings have believed for millennia in the simple “double dividend” that there can be value in resisting some desires for the sake of higher ends. While today’s secular culture may not equate “higher” with the spiritual, I think combating climate change certainly constitutes such a higher end. 

Individual self-discipline clearly will not be enough to solve the climate crisis. Ambitious policy change is necessary for large-scale consumption and emission reductions. But policy, at least in functioning democracies, is born from the values of the people. Restrictions on consumption such as a carbon tax require the exercise of restraint on a societal level, a collective willingness to give up short term convenience for the higher end of a healthy planet. Given this context, maybe we can learn from the students who saw self-denial not as destructive or meaningless but as productive and meaningful. Perhaps in our concern with the mental health consequences of denial, we have forgotten its value. Self-control can be freedom. For the student protestors, that meant freedom to advocate for peace. In this case, it means freedom to save our species and quite possibly become happier in the process. 

 Mediocre Issue | October 2019

Serving All People?

City o’ City, a vegan and vegetarian restaurant in Denver’s Capitol Hill district, seems to be dedicated to inclusivity, at least in theory. Their website proudly states that they “serve all needs to all people,” and the strictly lowercase type on their site comes across as welcoming and familiar. In an interview with a local news source, City o’City founder Dan Landes says his mission is very simply to “[express] love for humanity… by the use of hospitality.” Marissa Oves, Colorado College grad and City o’ City aficionado, says that the restaurant is inclusive of people with or without dietary restrictions. In her potentially punny words, “It’s super digestible for people—there’s food there for everyone.” 

When I walked into City o’ City for the first time last May, I wondered if my dad, who was born and raised in Denver, would find it quite so digestible. In his (albeit very narrow) view, dietary restrictions are for people who can afford to have them. Growing up, there was no “special food”—tofu, milk alternatives, fake meat—allowed in our house. He also laments the fact that today’s Denver is overrun by hipsters and greedy developers who knocked down his middle school and filled his neighborhood creek with concrete. 

Because of these inherited chips on my shoulder, I was suspicious of City o’ City’s hours-long wait time, plant-based menu, younger staff and clientele, and hip aesthetic. I immediately assumed that the restaurant played a part in Denver’s gentrification, and that it profited from pandering to the trendier aspects of veganism. And while there is some truth to the forces behind these snap judgements, City o’ City’s role in Denver’s food world is far more nuanced than I originally thought.

City o’ City’s support of local businesses is integral to their proposed ethic of care and community. The vast majority of their produce is locally sourced, much of it from their own urban micro-farm nearby. This not only ensures that the food is fresh and seasonal, but that money goes to small Colorado farmers rather than to large corporations. Advocates for the farm-to-table concept also argue that when restaurants buy locally, they help reduce greenhouse gas emissions produced by transporting food across long distances. City o’ City’s community focus extends beyond produce—their website proudly proclaims that they buy everything “from coffee to beer to cheese” from local vendors. Much of the edgy furniture and decor is upcycled, and the restaurant space serves doubly as a gallery that features a different Denver artist monthly. 

It’s likely that Denver’s two-dollar-sign-on-Yelp health food restaurants like City o’ City have benefitted from the gentrification of the city as a whole. When Dan Landes announced in 2018 that he was selling his restaurants and moving away from Denver, he published a goodbye letter in which he identifies a clear distinction between “Old Denver” and “New Denver.” Nostalgically, he notes that “Old Denver” had less people, more crime, and more snow. In “Old Denver,” he could open WaterCourse Foods, his first vegetarian restaurant, for $30,000—“no permits, no problem.” Today, he says, “$30,000 will get you a crop-dusting from a passing developer and a scale drawing of what you can’t afford.” His observations (as a white, successful business owner) point to a much larger and more detrimental trend in Denver’s gentrification. Between 2010 and 2017, rent prices in Denver increased by almost 50%, the fourth highest leap out of all major cities in America, and the highest outside of California. Alongside this has come the steamrolling of racially and ethnically diverse communities and the mass displacement of people of color. As of 2019, more Latinx individuals have been displaced from Denver’s most rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods than in any other city in the U.S. 

Capitol Hill, the neighborhood where City o’ City is located, is home to two major new development projects: Ogden Flatts and Nine Hundred Penn. When completed, both will have units available for upwards of $1 million. A local artist known as Billy the Poet, quoted in an article by Confluence Denver, remarked that “it used to be a lot more young, broke people and artists and whatnot…[now] it’s harder to live here if you’re a starving artist.” In the same article, business owner John Donahoe noted, “It used to be gayer than it is. Now it's more young, upscale, heterosexual couples with pets and kids.”

As an enormously popular Denver institution for more than 20 years, City o’ City is situated within this changing context. Located just blocks from the capitol building, it is positioned to serve a diverse and shifting clientele, from artists to families to million-dollar renters to members of Colorado’s government. 

Marissa is one of those customers, and identifies the restaurant’s busyness as an indicator of its inclusivity. “I think a lot of people associate vegan restaurants with a quiet ambiance,” she says, but at City o’ City, she found that the music and bustling atmosphere made plant-based food more approachable to her “friends and meat-loving dad.” It feels like a restaurant, not a Vegan Restaurant. 

Nonetheless, the fact that a plant-based restaurant would feel the need to make efforts to present itself in a way that is “digestible” to everyone highlights stereotypical perceptions of veganism and vegetarianism as trends followed exclusively by crunchy, wealthy white people. My dad, with his vendetta against soy milk and veggie burgers, clearly subscribed to this belief. Marissa points out that, “anyone can be vegan,” and that there is a plethora of cheap options for people who may not be able to afford City o’ City’s double-digit menu, but who are willing and able to cook for themselves. 

Vegan diets can certainly be affordable and accessible, but this isn’t always accounted for in common perceptions of plant-based diets. Advocacy groups such as Vegan Voices of Color call mainstream veganism “white veganism.” People of color are often completely erased from discourse surrounding dietary diversity. According to Khushbu Shah in her article, “The Vegan Race Wars: How the Mainstream Ignores Vegans of Color,” vegetarian and cruelty-free eating practices have been a part of non-Western religions such as Hinduism, Buddhism, and Rastafarianism for centuries, long before the British “father of veganism” Donald Watson coined the term in 1944. 

Shah goes on to state that many trendy “superfoods”—think jackfruit, chia seeds, collard greens—are merely rebrandings of centuries-old staples of communities of color. These foods are not new, but, as Shah says, “When anything gets sucked up into the current of what’s trendy, the price goes up, making it harder for the communities that have long depended on these ingredients to afford them,” not to mention harder on the people whose labor is often exploited to keep up with rising demand. The most famous example of this phenomenon is quinoa: the price of quinoa tripled between 2006 and 2013, making the grain too expensive for many of the Bolivian and Peruvian farmers who depend on it. 

In the face of misrepresentations and appropriations of veganism, many people of color see their dietary choices as resistive. Quoted by Shah, PETA producer Jackie Tolliver says, “I've heard other black vegans talk about living this way as a revolutionary act, and I totally agree.” If their idealistic mission statement rings true, City o’ City and the plant-based practices it promotes could serve as one small site of this revolutionary act. That is, for anyone who can afford to eat there, and who feels welcome doing so. 

Food, in this context, is much more than food, and City o’ City is more than a restaurant. It is a site of cultural, economic, and personal identification, connection, and division. Marissa identifies her personal relationship with City o’ City as the reason she chose to permanently mark her body with a tattoo honoring the establishment—the stylized “o” from its sign. City o’ City is the place where, in her words, “my whole family had dinner for the first time in Colorado, where I showed my mom my tattoos, the place where my sister told us she was pregnant.” She describes a memory of spontaneously driving up to City o’ City from Colorado Springs with her friend instead of going on a hike. Another time, after a concert (the restaurant is open 7 am to 2am daily), Marissa and her friends asked their waiter, “Party Pat,” to strip for them, as part of an ongoing experiment with “rejection therapy”—asking ridiculous questions to get used to hearing “no.” 

When I interviewed Marissa, I didn’t ask her about the gentrification of the Capitol Hill neighborhood, or the racism of mainstream veganism. The positivity of her experiences, or how much I enjoyed the cauliflower chicken and waffles I ate there last May, don’t negate City o’ City’s broader role in a complex and complicit Denver restaurant industry. Rather, all of these realities operate at the same time, in the same space, on the corner of 13th and Sherman. The question then remains, especially for a restaurant which makes such lofty claims to inclusivity: who occupies that space? Who is eating at City o’ City, waiting hours for a table or attending their 3-6 happy hour? Who is profiting off of it, and how, and why? And what can a restaurant like City o’ City do to truly become a place which serves “all needs to all people?”

Mediocre Issue | October 2019