Nazario Scenario

The Oreo Dessert Pizza

I was walking on a wealthy side-street on the Upper East Side yesterday, I think it was 91st between Park and Lex, when I noticed that a mass coupon drop had been done there by Domino's. I snatched up a coupon right away, and not just because I knew most of them would be thrown out by housekeepers before the tenants got home. I took the coupon because it offered the most vulgar food item I've ever seen in my life: the Oreo Dessert Pizza.

Here is how Domino's describes it: "A new, dessert-style thin crust topped with vanilla sauce, OREO Cookie Crumbles and white icing." They don't say how big it is, nor do they answer what I consider a crucial question: Is it served hot?

When I was on RAGBRAI I saw plenty of Mexican pizzas and breakfast pizzas and fruit-salad pizzas, but I find this Oreo Dessert Pizza so much more intriguing. It's because of the brand name cookie (note the careful capitalization of "OREO Cookie Crumbles") and the inorganic black-and-white color scheme, which to me makes it look completely inedible. And it's expensive! For a limited time, if you purchase anything else at Domino's, they will sell you an Oreo Dessert Pizza for $3.99. For God's sake, how much is it otherwise? How much are people willing to pay for this thing? I don't want it for the discount price of $3.99, that's for sure. Isn't that the price of, like, a whole box of Oreos?

It occurs to me now that people who have TVs may have known about the ODP for quite some time. I guess here's another reason to be glad I don't watch TV anymore, then -- my TV ignorance makes me that much more alert to the flaws in our society.

What Bread Loaf Was Like

It was so cold at night that I slept with my socks on and the covers all the way over my head. There were all these buildings painted yellow and green. I could get coffee whenever I wanted it. The mountains were pretty. A fox hung around.

The most important thing, really the only important thing, about Bread Loaf was that I lived with about three hundred people who had a lot in common with me. I could sit down next to anyone I damn well pleased and have a fucking CONVERSATION about THE THINGS THAT INTEREST AND EXCITE ME and EVERYONE UNDERSTOOD WHAT THE FUDGE I WAS TALKING ABOUT. When you live in a big city it's too easy to forget how wonderful this feels, to be in a place where alienation simply does not exist. In an introductory remark before his reading, a faculty member beamed at everyone in the audience and said something to the tune of, "Isn't it lovely to be here with all these smart funny people, hanging around doing exciting work and talking about smart stuff?" Decades into a rich artistic career, he was just as delighted as I was. Since I've been back I have found myself hypersensitive to notions of quality -- I'll see a subway ad where the copy contains a word that's also in the tagline, for instance, and get unduly angry. Or, like, those awful T-shirts that say shit like, "I'm Single If You're Rich" and "I'm Not Mean, I Just Don't Like You." Why don't more people care? On the flipside, though, good things seem to mean more. I've been reading a book of stories called The Language of Elk, by a guy named Ben Percy who was at the conference, and really really loving them not just because they're good, but because I believe I could -- and everyone could -- create stuff that good if they tried hard enough. I expect I'll feel that way about the other books I picked up at the conference, too, so I can't wait to get into 'em.

I got mind-blowing advice from my funny, kind, sage workshop leader, who gave me permission to write the book I want to write, and let me see all my writerly "weaknesses" as strengths. I showed a magazine editor my comics and chatted with him for an hour about Doonesbury. A friend in my workshop compared me to friggin' Arthur Bradford! Most nights my roommate and I talked each other to sleep, but some nights I drank much beer and/or climbed to the top of a fire escape. Yeah it was fun. Yeah it was too brief.

Don't be surprised to see references in the future to friends of mine I met there, but that's all I'll say about the place itself. Picking apart the Bread Loaf experience, the nuts and bolts of it, feels wrong to me, because I think people should just go. If you're a writer who's serious at all about your work, work hard and apply and go. I'm sitting in an almost-empty diner right now writing this -- Edward Hopper would puke -- missing all the people and conversations and wishing I'd had more time, but the great part is I do have more time. All those people who shared that stuff with me are in the world and we'll never forget each other. This post-BL depression feels less like a heartbreak than like being in love from far away.

There, that's it. That's as sentimental as I get, ever.

Interlude: Exhaustifaction

Does anyone still want to read about RAGBRAI, really? Or would you rather I talk about Bread Loaf now?

I can tell you how the bike tour ended: I made it to the Mississippi on the last day, running on one slice of apple pie made by a school and one piece of carrot cake made by a girl scout troop. (Martha, I did eat a couple of ears of sweet corn, but yeah, you do sort of forget about sweet corn after awhile.)

I returned from Bread Loaf elated on Sunday evening, but midday today I started feeling very sad and a little sick. It was the best ten days I think I've had in my life, certainly the most important ten-day stretch in my writing career. Every experience there felt accelerated -- there was an urgency to get things out in the open as soon, as much, as possible.  It was like five years of a writer's life (business connections, friendships, mentorships, ideas, loves/hates) compressed into a week and a half. So now I want to sit in a rocking chair for a week and let the great stuff I learned swirl around, hoping I never forget. Though I'd rather just get to work.

Seriously -- you get the idea about RAGBRAI, right? I don't have to keep describing it?

RAGBRAI diary: Day 2

We had to go from Spencer to Humboldt. This was the longest day on the route, as I kept snarling to myself. If I made it through today, I thought, I wouldn't have another day as hard for the rest of the ride. My self-coaching worked -- I made it to Humboldt intact and whizzed down a scenic hill into the fancy part of town, then past the fancy part of town into the gravel-and-grass fairgrounds, at around four. I realized later that both my tires had been low all day; if I'd filled them in a town I probably could have gotten there at three. Yes, an idiot.

The things I liked/remember about this day were:

1. Meeting a nice girl from Long Island, who now lived in Colorado, while waiting in line for a pork burger in the town of Marathon.
2. In Laurens, some puppies. They were Lab or hound mixes, brown and grey, and they were for sale. A beardy motorcycle-looking guy pedaled past me, asking, "You gonna ride off with one of those in your bike basket?" I told him those puppies were damn lucky I had just run out of cash.
3. Outside of Rolfe, getting very very tired. A nice man letting me draft behind him for a good five miles, then speeding away in frustration.
4. More puppies closer to camp, these English Bulldogs.
5. On the message board in Humboldt, Dan's hand-drawn map to our campsite -- the first in an increasingly detailed and angry series. 
6. The awfully pretty houses in Humboldt, some decked out with Christmas lights and Santas for the town's "Christmas in July" RAGBRAI theme.
7. A sumptuous chicken-and-noodles dinner at the Methodist church, where they made us wait and actually go to church for fifteen minutes before we ate.
8. A bag of potato chips with an inspirational message on the back, the fourteenth in a series of scenes from the chip magnate's whole life. (In this one, he meets his future wife on a bus.)
9. A bar called The Prowler, with a sign that featured a crouching panther, where karaoke night went wrong in too many different ways to count. Okay, just one of the ways: when the hostess read my request for a song by Joan Jett, she asked if "Joan" and "Jett" were in the house and ready to sing their duet.
10. The mom who entered the womens' showers with a six-year-old son who was just about vagina-height, and the naked women who probably disturbed the kid for life by urging him to remember this moment forever.

RAGBRAI Diary: Day 1

We wanted to get all the gear into the van by 6:30 so Dan could secure us a choice campsite at Spencer, the next overnight town. Round about 6:50, Dana, Cordy and Chad appeared with armloads of their stuff: tents, bedrolls, backpacks. Grimace got loaded. I brushed my teeth in the street with a bottle of Hy-Vee spring water. In hindsight, I could have helped them carry some of their stuff.

Dana, Cordy, Chad, and I waved goodbye to Dan and saddled up, falling into the steady stream of riders that had been passing us all morning on their way out of town. The low houses and tidy lawns of Rock Rapids gave way to an open highway under a pale sky, and there we were again. On my first day of my first ride four years ago, I was alert and nervous. Every day I've ridden since then has been pure pleasure: I know just what to expect, even what to be surprised by. Heading out of the start town Monday morning, I felt like last year's RAGBRAI had never ended.

The first pass-through town was George, whose RAGBRAI committee had done an admirable job of posting signs directing people to all the different types of food available. As I slowed down to read them, a sixtyish woman in a red bike jersey dismounted in front of me. "Cinnamon rolls!" she said over her shoulder to a teammate. "That's what I'm talkin' about!"

I considered a cinnamon roll of my own, but the line for them was long. As I crossed it to stand in line at the porta-potties (on RAGBRAI there are porta-potties everywhere, understandably) I noticed a guy standing with a plate of biscuits and gravy, devouring it happily. I asked him ohmigod where did he get that, he pointed toward a sandpit that had been converted to a beer garden, and we were in business.

"It's nine AM on Sunday morning," said the girl sitting next to me at the picnic table, where we were both munching plates of biscuits, white sausage gravy, and only a little sand. "If I was at home I'd be in church, but I'm in Iowa, so I'm in a beer garden."
The guy across from us was riding RAGBRAI for the fifth time. "I think this is going to be my last year for awhile," I confessed to him. "I use all my vacation days doing this and everyone at home thinks I'm crazy."
"Me too!" he laughed. "But it's five hundred miles every year! They're so impressed!"

When we got to the next town, Ashton, I told myself I wasn't going to stop -- I'd walk my bike through and look at stuff, then pedal away. (Some people like to stop at every town; I prefer to breeze by two a day and make what I call "the briefest of stops" at one more. Since there are usually five pass-through towns per day, this gives me big chunks of time at the two remaining towns, for breakfast and lunch, and allows me to pull into camp mid-afternoon.) But I had to use an ATM, and I found one in a bar called The Palms. Since I was already in there, I figured it wouldn't be terrible to drink a Miller Lite at the bar. It was 10 AM, after all. So I sat at the bar, paid two dollars for a Miller Lite, and set about drinking it. Four locals chatted me up, asking me where I was from and how long it took me to get to Iowa from there. The most interesting among them, the one who went to Daytona every year for NASCAR and who had been to 49 of the 50 states, bought me a second beer. He insisted. The guy didn't talk -- he had a hole in his throat and wrote in a notepad to answer my questions. "I'm late coming in," I told Dan later, "because I was drinking beer with a man who had no larynx." Not only had I come in late, I had wandered our camping lot forever looking at green Greatland tents from Target, identical to ours.
"You know," Dan said, "a man with no larynx can never say goodbye."

A few miles outside of Spencer, I was just about out of steam, riding to the far right and cursing everyone who passed me. Someone would say, "On your left!" and I'd reply, in the same cadence but under my breath, "Suck my dick!" So I was happy to encounter a food stand sponsored by a church group who called themselves the "Loony Lutherans," and advertised with Looney Toons-themed signs along the route. All I bought was a Coke, but the sugar and caffeine were all I needed to pull me forward. Plus, a nice older woman -- one of the Loony Lutherans -- told me I was welcome to sit on the quilt she had laid down under a tree beside the road. I sat on the quilt, and lay down on it, watching the riders pass by and the sun rise higher above the dark green cornfield in front of me. I remember thinking that the woman had brought that quilt from her own house for people she didn't know to sit on. Thousands of people could have sat on it, if they wanted to.

Spencer, IA was fun, but the fairgrounds was the only part of it we saw. Still, there were fireworks and little pizzas from a chain called the Tavern, and amazing chocolate malts that we got the last one of before the stand ran out. This was after Low Blood Sugar Meltdown #3, in which Dan and I stood in line for thirty minutes to hear an eight-year-old girl tell us the pasta buffet had run out of pasta. Luckily one more batch was scrounged up, and eaten. A lot of. By us.

A brief stop back at camp confirmed that the rest of Team SPF 50 had made it in and found us. Chad's first RAGBRAI day had been eye-opening: like an old hand, he had taken to yelling "Rumbles!" to warn other riders of rumble strips. He'd also learned how to say "Car up!" and "Little pansy motorcycle up!" to sound the alert to motor traffic.

Fireworks done, I walked back to our giant tent in the dark. All our tents were together in a hamlet now -- Dana and Chad in one, Cordy in a second, Dan asleep in the Greatland monster. Cordy emerged to hand me a gift from the town of Spencer: a tiny card with a Hershey's kiss and a message saying something like Spencer, IA would welcome me back whenever I wanted to return. "This is for you, from the city of Spencer," Cordy said.
"Spencer... loves me?" I mused, taking the card.

We were ready to turn in, and begin again tomorrow.

The RAGBRAI Diary: Day 0

RAGBRAI always takes place on the last full week in July, Sunday to Saturday. The Saturday morning before Day 1, then, is traditionally a time for last-minute bike maintenance, cramming the car with camping equipment, and locating the "start town" on a road atlas. Most participants like to get to the first campsite by noon; I have never arrived there earlier than six PM. As it was last year, and evermore shall be, the day began when Dan's mom in West Des Moines brought an almost endless supply of sleeping bags, tarps, bottled water, dried fruits, coolers, and flashlights from her basement and helped put them into Grimace, the purple van.

A Word On Grimace
Dan and his brother drove Grimace to California and back in the summer of 2003. He then made the trip from Iowa to Montana, then back again, and then from Iowa to New York, on the latter two legs carrying Toby the goldfish in a stainless steel mixing bowl. Our friends Spencer and Street Cred used Grimace as the RAGBRAI support vehicle last year, filling him with paper towels and empty peanut butter jars. Grimace is not air-conditioned.

Target
On our way out of town Dan and I made the ceremonial Last Trip To Target To Buy Stuff We Forgot. The stuff we forgot this year included a tent. Luckily Target's camping section is pimp. For ten dollars more than the cost of a basic tent, it furnished us with a two-room job that was over six feet tall. We also bought spray-on deodorant and spray-on sunscreen, for Dan's gimpitude.

The Rest of the Stores
I freaked out because I couldn't find the power cord for my laptop. We failed to find a replacement cord at either Best Buy or J&R Computer World. So we said fuck it. Then we ate a burger and chocolate malt from the drive-thru at Be-Bop's, one of the only businesses in Des Moines I have patronized that weren't part of a mall or strip mall. The others are: Cafe Su Chinese restaurant, the VFW bar, Prairie Meadows casino, and the airport.

Drivin' Out
When we finally got on the highway to the start town, Rock Rapids, it was 3 PM. We stopped once to get gas, once more so Dan could take his contacts out because the tree pollen in his eyeballs was making it hard to see the road. You probably didn't know that Iowa is the most allergenic state in the country.

The Start Town
Rock Rapids, at the far Northwest corner of the Iowa rectangle, was a pretty little place-- wood-paneled garages and green lawns in an area where July grass tends to scorch. As we rolled in we looked for the rest of Team SPF 50, but Dana's tent was impossible to find even after hearing her clear voicemail directions. Inside Rock Rapids high school we found the RAGBRAI bulletin board-- a valuable resource in all the overnight towns, cell phone reception in rural Iowa being spotty. On it were posted the same directions Dana had left in her voicemail to me: on the field, between the track and the bike expo. So we looked again. We still couldn't find the team. It was ridiculous. Overheated and hungry, we went back to Grimace and unloaded our enormous green tent: if we couldn't camp with our team, we could at least camp near the car. Soon, the tent and rain fly lay spread out flat before us, but the tent poles and stakes were nowhere in sight. Dan and I looked at the ground, at each other, and back at the ground.

Low Blood Sugar Tantrum #1
"Where are the poles?" I asked.
"If this thing didn't come with poles..." Dan said.
"The poles must be somewhere," I said. "They can't have just disappeared."
"They could have packed this thing with a part missing," said Dan.
"Let's read the manual," said I, unfolding the manual. "Step One: Before pitching your Greatland tent, ensure no equipment is missing."
Dan said, "THERE'S NO FUCKING POLES."
I said, "Wait." We lifted a corner of the rain fly where it lay on the grass. The bag of tent poles and stakes was underneath it.
"Oh Jesus, I was ready to drive home," said Dan, relieved.
We put the tent up. Dan found out why his doctor had told him not to lift his left arm. On our way to the bike expo, we noticed that someone else had the same tent as ours, camping five hundred feet away.

Low Blood Sugar Tantrum #2
I dropped my bicycle off at the Letsche's Bike Shop tent, to have them take the pedals off and put them on the proper sides. (The bike had to be taken apart for shipping, and in our haste to reassemble it the day before, we hadn't realized we had put the right pedal on the left pedal crank and vice versa.) Then we finally found Dana's tent. Then Dan and I returned to the message board to post our whereabouts for the rest of the team. My note included a crude map. "Here, this should do it," I told Dan, drawing our tent on one side of a little rectangle labeled The Track, and their tent on the other side. "Is this map accurate?"
Silence for three seconds while Dan looked at the map. Finally, laughing: "No. No, that's completely wrong."
I started to cry. It took several minutes for Dan to convince me he wasn't ready to break up with me. He suggested we eat, because it would make us both feel better.
"One more thing," I said. "Do I still teach you interesting things about the world, even though I'm not very smart?"
Don't have conversations when you're hungry. Do as I say, not as I do.

Food Shortage/RAGBRAI jams
On RAGBRAI you have to get to food stands and church dinners early. Many of the small towns have never seen ten thousand people before and have no idea how much ten thousand people eat, exercise-ravenous or not. By the time of the tantrums it was already sundown, and all that was left were burgers and hot dogs. We ate them at a picnic table in the high school parking lot, watching people in bike jerseys and spandex pass by everywhere we looked. Classic rock anthems blasted from car stereos and tents as we braced ourselves for what we knew would be a solid week of "Sweet Home Alabama" and "Slow Ride." The RAGBRAI soundtrack is a necessary evil -- party music, or, as Dan calls it, "music for people who don't like music." It's worth it, and after a couple of days riding your bike until you're almost dead, you even enjoy it, sort of.

Encountering The Team
As night fell over Rock Rapids and people began crawling into their tents to sleep, I picked up my re-pedaled bike at Letsche's (the young man who served me was over-exuberant due to nerves, but very nice). Dan said, "Hey, is that Dana?" and there she was, with her beau Chad, both with bikes, walking their bikes around. We reunited with Cordy, our team was complete, and we were all set to head out the following morning for the official start of RAGBRAI 2007. Hooray!

One More Thing
Before turning in, I stopped at a stand in the high school where two girls were selling bars. A "bar" is a sweet thing baked in a pan, like a brownie. All brownies are bars but not all bars are brownies. The bar I ate, near's I could tell, was comprised of some Rice Krispies, a Milky Way, a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup, and some marshmallows.   

RAGBRAI: A Retelling

I did RAGBRAI four years in a row, and never said much about it in this blog. I alluded to it plenty -- there are lots of posts about getting in shape, riding my bike a lot to train, and loving Iowa so damn much -- but I've said precious little about the ride itself. This is because before the ride there's a lot to do to prepare, and after the ride I'm so exhausted I don't want to ride, look at, or think about a bicycle for at least seven months. But it's time to break the silence. RAGBRAI is one of the greatest things I have ever done, and I may not do it next year, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't know about it, because maybe you want to do it next year. And if you do it, you can probably convince me to do it again. Then maybe I'll keep doing it every blessed year, until I die of one of the following: skin cancer, congestive heart failure, Miller Lite poisoning, a cow stepped on my head.

RAGBRAI is an organized bike ride sponsored by the Des Moines Register. It stands for "Register's Annual Great Bike Ride Across Iowa." Each year, between 10,000 and 20,000 riders (no one ever knows for sure, because a lot of people ride without having signed up) participate in the trek, which winds across the state in a serpentine fashion but basically goes lengthwise from West to East. The cyclists ride about seventy miles a day and sleep at campsites. The route is different every time, exposing returning riders to new little farm towns, and vice versa, every time they ride. Each year six Iowan cities host the riders overnight, and along the route there are also about forty "pass-through" towns-- places to rest, eat lunch prepared by the Elks Club, chug a Gatorade at a pop stand staffed by the girl scouts, or sit in a beer garden getting drunk. The money from RAGBRAI provides many of these towns with stuff like new swimming pools and uniforms for the high school band; their hospitality is often overwhelming. I'd be hard-pressed to identify what I like most about the ride, but I think I keep coming back because the ride provides a nice reality check for a snooty Easterner like me. It's by turns hokey, quaint, beautiful, rough around the edges, and defiantly American, like Iowa itself.

I'm writing a travelogue of this year's ride. I have a lot to say, so I'm going to serialize it, starting tomorrow. Until then, a dramatis personae of Team SPF 50:

ME, a biking and sunburning machine. Cannot drive a car. Very, very angry if not fed.
DAN, support driver. In spare time writes about the Nixon administration, reads Sartre, and recovers from shoulder surgery.
CORDY, Frisbee enthusiast, century rider, Stanfordite Gibson girl. Mastermind behind T-shirt with nerd glasses and the legend "Talk Nerdy To Me."
CHAD, RAGBRAI virgin, fond of shouting "Rumbles!" and being ejected from Wapsipinicon River by police.
DANA, Ames, IA native and five-time RAGBRAIer. Her personal photos from the ride here, to tide you over.

Vision Miser

I'm only now on my last pair of contact lenses from a box I ordered almost two years ago. I am the frugalest MF in the galaxy and you know it's true.

Screeds To Watch

Last weekend I was having dinner at a Japanese restaurant called "Dan," with my companion of the same name, when a five-year-old girl walked in and said, "Mom, look! There's a scary man!" Dan looked around the room and confirmed that he was the only man in sight, then began to get progressively glummer as the little girl mentioned the "scary man" again and again. What was most interesting was that she wasn't scared at all, she had clearly just learned somewhere that Dan's physiognomy (or okay, more likely, the combo of glasses + arm in a sling) was meant to inspire fear. I'm not one to argue with a five-year-old girl, as you know. What's more, I think you should take a look at Dan's new blog, The Brooks Caliphate, whether or not you've been seeking a scariness model of your own.

Mandate

I know it's daunting, but if you are to grow facial hair it MUST cover your upper lip as well as your chin. Unless you are Amish. A beard without a mustache is unacceptable on a non-Amish man. And the soul patch is plain silly. Worst, this morning on the subway I saw a dude with hair only on the very tip of his chin and two little brackets descending from the sides of his mouth. He looked like a Dr. Seuss drawing.