Tag Archives: aaron ritchey

Food: My Teacher, My Mother, My Secret Lover

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Okay, I borrowed the line above from The Simpsons. Homer was referring to television, but at this stage, I think it applies to food for me. I’ve been bouncing on and off a vegan diet and I’ve watched how important food is in my life. Food is important. Yeah, frakkin’ newflash for me. But I’m slow. Very, very, very, very slow.

Eating, essential, is about refueling. At the most basic level, food is just fuel for our muscles. Now, I’ve met people who have used Coors Light and Marlboro Menthols as fuel, but it just doesn’t work in the long run. Gotta eat at some point. Even Tracy Gold. Or should I say Karen Carpenter. Ugh, I can’t go there. Eating disorders are rough. I’ve known heroin addicts straight outta San Quentin who’ve had an easier time of it than those with eating disorders. So God bless Karen Carpenter, where ever she is. My prayers are with ye.

I’ve spent months at a time in the food-as-fuel mode. I eat. I exercise. I sleep. Wanna donut, Aaron? Nope. That ain’t fuel. That’s poison. Want the best fuel around? Nuts, berries, green leafy vegetables, and quinoa. Mix liberally. And then go bike up Mount Evans, 10,000 feet of climbing. Yee-haw.

I’ve been there, food-as-fuel. Ain’t there now. I want a donut. Yes, a donut is eating death with a hole in it. I feel the death in my blood stream. I’m dying, I’m dying, help me. Somebody give me some kale, quick. Donuts are so good. They are deep-fried joy. Like funnel cakes. Funnel cakes are donuts unleashed. Funnel cakes are the next logical progression in human evolution. Whoever invented the funnel cake needs to win a Nobel Peace Prize.

So there is the pleasure of eating. And there is camaraderie. Lemme tell ya, you go out to dinner with a bunch of carnivores and you’re a vegan, well, it ain’t happy and pretty. I once read a story about a teetotaler in the 1800’s who wandered into a camp of whiskey-slurping cowboys, and guess what? Yeah, they got the proverbial rope and strung him up for not drinking. Like in the Pace Picante commercials. Which is a vegan product. Hmm, vegan cowboys on Mars free cattle and duke it out with the local carnivore law enforcement. Ian Healey, there’s a book for you to write.

And this all leads us to food as comfort food. I was alone at college, ostracized because I ostracized myself. Ain’t gonna let nobody reject me first. I suck, and let me tell you how much, right away. Anyhow, I was far from home, I was eating ice cream alone , and thinking about my mom, and I got weepy. Food as mother, comforting us when life is cruel.

So for us crazy humans, food ain’t just fuel. Maybe the trick is to learn how to balance the different faces of food. So on a busy day, when food is just fuel, you eat like that. And when you go out with friends, you celebrate. And when you need some chocolate, you eat chocolate.

But my problem is that every day I want to comfort myself with food and run away from life with food and eat and eat and eat. Or I flip the switch and get all monkish. I’ll have the brown rice and mineral water, please.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’ve had some wonderful, healthy meals that were divine. It’s not either\or. I think in those terms, because I have black and white thinking. But it doesn’t have to be like that. You can eat healthy and eat deliciously, but it does take some creativity and time and open-mindedness. Hamburgers are easier in the short term. In the long term, it’s death between two buns. The name of my next book. DEATH BETWEEN TWO BUNS. It’s gonna be a romance. Oh, snap!

Ideally, I’d love for us to celebrate the vegan, the vegetarian, the healthy eater. That when I order the salad, with oil and vinegar on the side, the beefy, bearded biker dude says, “Right on, Aaron. You go, boy.” Instead, he generally ties me to his hog and does donuts around the parking lot while I lose skin. Donuts in the parking lot. Yum. Donuts.

You’ll Want To Read What I Can’t Write

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I’m trapped inside a novel that pitches well, but writes hard. That’s how I roll, yo. The ideas I can pitch well I can’t write. But the stories I love don’t pitch well. Irony has made me her bitch.

So, let me give you, the world, an example. Hello world. Hello Aaron. Nice to meet you. I wish I could say the same. Damn you, Irony. Queue Alanis Morissette.

So, I just finished the second draft of a wonderful book about a shy, withdrawn teenage girl whose grandmother has been comatose for fourteen years. The grandmother wakes up, calls the girl and says she needs to get to France before midnight on Halloween night to meet a prince she loved from another world. See! You’re glazing over. You’re thinking, who cares? Grandmother? Shy girl? Prince from another world? Who cares? My pitch blows. The book glows. It rhymes, so it has to be true.

Now, the other book I’m working on, I can pitch in two words: magic addicts. Hmm, you think. Magic addiction. Fresh, cool, intriguing. How does that work?
Gets better. A magic addict wants to recover, but giving up his magic will destroy the world.

Stakes. Good. You don’t want the world destroyed, but you don’t want some addict running around miserable or stealing your lunch money. Which book would you want to read? The Magic Addicts. Which book am I having trouble writing? The Magic Addicts.

So then the voice of reason rings out! Work on only one book at a time and you’ll figure out how to pitch it. Yeah, well, in my writing life, reason is like Ally Sheedy in The Breakfast Club: in the back of the room, not quite there, shaking her dandruff over a picture. I have destroyed reason and now I flit around, flitting. Uncertain, knowing that I’m blowing it.
However. Take note. I do have a book I love, and that is a wonderful thing. I’ve spent time on books I don’t love, and it’s blood work. If the secret to life is doing what you love, why angst over what you don’t?

But it pitches well, damn you. It pitches well.

Happy Days Destroyed My Soul

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I watched a buttload of T.V. growing up. Funny, that. Buttload. How much is that anyway? In kilograms? I don’t know. But I would watch around seven hours of T.V. a day growing up. My parents were absentee. I was neglected. Poor me.

A quick google, and it seems people watch around 5 hours of T.V. a day. Ha, I had that beat when I was ten years old and we didn’t have no new-fangled streaming Netflix streaming, or cable, or satellite, or video files on smart phones, none of that. I had four channels. Four. Ha. I dare any of you to watch the same four channels from 3 p.m. to 10 p.m. day in, day out, for years on end. And no remote control, so changing channels required a commitment.

So yeah, I’m old.

And my grip on reality? Tentative. I was raised , not by parents, but by situation comedies, and they ruined me forever. Basically, I want my life, every part of my life, to have a nice solid story that takes about 23 minutes to complete and where I always get the girl, figure out the problem, get closure. This, of course, led me to despise the messy, unclosure of real life. I am not the Fonz. Oh, the Fonz, how I long to be the Fonz, in my leather jacket, slicked back hair, tough as nails, easy on the eyes, hard on the ladies.

Alas, I was not the Fonz. When I did venture out into the sunlight of real life, real girls would look right through me. I would snap my fingers. Nothing would happen. Seriously. Nothing. And I would slink back into the basement, turn on the T.V., and get lost in 23 minute chunks of funny dreamland. This lasted through college. Seriously, through college.

Again, googling, how I love to google, in the average 65 year life span, people spend a full nine years of their life watching T.V. Watching things happen to other people. Life lived as a voyeur.
I was not created to be a voyeur. I was created to live, to seize the day, carpe diem, boys, seize the day. But real life is scary, messy; snapping your fingers rarely results in magic. It can be disappointing. On the other hand, the raw realness of it is what makes it so wonderful.

Holding a trembling girl, dancing to music, smelling the trees in the morning, these require a full body, a full reality, to enjoy. And it’s up to me to seek closure, to make sense of the mess, and to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

And really, the Fonz lost his cool when Richie Cunningham left. Such is life. Me? Every year, I might lose more hair, but I get a little cooler because the essence of cool is to believe in your own divinity. To live as if at any moment, a finger snap will turn on the juke box, and you’re favorite song will come blasting through, because it does happen. Of course it does.