[Kzyxtalk] I say it's spinach, and I say the hell with it.

[Marco McClean]

Subject: I say it's spinach, and I say the hell with it.

Marco here. Here's the recording of last night's (Friday, 2025-02-14) 
eight-hour-long Memo of the Air: Good Night Radio show on 107.7fm 
KNYO-LP Fort Bragg (CA) and KNYO.org (and, for the first three hours of 
the show, also 89.3fm KAKX Mendocino). This time I was 
passive-aggressive-resentfully whisper-mumbling the whole time, the 
microphone practically inside my mouth, to please Juanita's sour elderly 
downstairs neighbor who bangs on her ceiling, Juanita's floor, hard 
enough to shake the building, complains to the property management 
people, and has Juanita terrorized into tiptoeing around in stocking 
feet and opening and closing her own drawers and cupboards with the 
worried precision of a cat-burglar. I made the mistake last night, 
during The Mysterious Traveler episode, of going into the kitchen to 
make ramen. BANG! Next week I'll be back in Albion, where I can even 
flush the toilet if I want to, as well as talk to myself, and you, in a 
normal indoor night-time voice like a person. Anyway, here:
https://tinyurl.com/KNYO-MOTA-0631

Coming shows can feature your story or dream or poem or essay or kvetch 
or announcement. Just email it to me. Or send me a link to your writing 
project and I'll take it from there and read it on the air.

Besides all that, at https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com you'll find a 
fresh batch of dozens of links to not-necessarily radio-useful but 
worthwhile items I set aside for you while gathering the show together, 
such as:

"I say it's spinach, and I say the hell with it." This cartoon has 
always had a special place in my mental gallery. Right next to the one 
where a small defiant boy is towered over by his enormous mother and 
father, also at the dinner table. The father, a coarse-looking working 
man in his undershirt, says maybe-gruffly maybe-puckishly, eyebrows 
arched up, "An' what's wrong wit' broccoli, if I ain't bein' too 
inquisitive?"
https://tywkiwdbi.blogspot.com/2025/02/i-say-its-spinach.html

I grew up in my grandparents' Italian restaurant. When I was eight my 
mother married Roland, who had two boys and a girl, all older than I, 
and we moved to Fresno, where Roland was a road circuit salesman in a 
Ford Galaxie 500 for Sunshine Biscuit company (Hydrox, Vienna Fingers, 
Golden Fruit Biscuits, Lemon Coolers), and the dinner food abruptly 
changed from spaghetti and meatballs and perfect hard garlic bread and 
crisp iceberg lettuce salad and real pizza, sausage sandwiches, 
sometimes pork chops, or veal, or ravioli, frozen blueberries in sugar 
sauce, and spumoni ice cream -all good, normal food- to weird single-dad 
food that Roland and his kids liked, that was normal to them, like, uh… 
My mother matter-of-factly put this runny bean soup on the table, that 
looked and tasted spoiled, like it was sewage. Everybody else ate. I 
tasted it, said, "What is this." It's beans. It's good. I said, "May I 
be excused?" My mother said, "There are children starving in India who 
would love to have dinner but they can't. You will sit there until you 
clean that plate." Okay, I understood. I would sit there forever. I 
said, "Can I get my book?" No. They all finished, got up, washed their 
dishes, went to the other room to watch teevee. I sat at the table for 
what I remember was three hours but it probably wasn't that long, 
listening to the teevee, counting things around me in the room, 
daydreaming, planning the conversations that would happen depending on 
who came back through here first. I tasted the soup again a few times. 
Equally vile every time. Eventually my mother came back in, looked at 
me, picked up the soup, said quietly, close to my ear, "You don't have 
to eat this," and spilled it down the drain in the sink, which surprised 
the heck out of me; it had been impressed upon me to /never waste food/ 
(another story, another time). Some kinds of beans are okay in salad or 
in a burrito or a chili dog, or just chili if you're really hungry and 
you have soda crackers to crumble on it, but even today almost sixty 
years later if I'm somewhere they have sludgy soup with that repulsive 
flesh-colored maggot-like kind of beans in it, I'm right back there in 
Fresno, in that dim house with so many people breathing in it at night. 
She was on my side about the food and in many other ways. It was a good 
kind of conspiracy whose internal benefits lasted all my life. It made 
me a better teacher. I say it's sewage and I say the hell with it. Damn 
straight.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JEDa1BnEF4

And how to trim a palm tree and not get killed. Save this information 
for when they change the name of Fort Bragg, California to The Palms and 
then plant palm trees up and down Main Street and change that also to 
the The Palms (not The Palms Blvd. or Ave. or St., but simply The 
Palms), making it the only north-south pavement in town named for a kind 
of tree (all the east-west streets are named for trees); unless they go 
with Lindy Petersville, which is leading in the polls again, and would 
be cheaper and safer.
https://tywkiwdbi.blogspot.com/2025/02/how-to-trim-palm-tree.html

Marco McClean, memo at mcn.org, https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com