I could step in the same river twice.
RIP to Heraclitus but I'm built different. (It's Friday, and I've got MIDWEST FOOD, SEASONED?, a theme-park-worthy cocktail, great music and more!)
There is no better way to make yourself feel absolutely ancient than to set foot back on a college campus you once attended.
In concept, it should be revivifying—you’re going back to the old stompin’ grounds! The glory days! Where all the magic happened, where it all started!
In reality, you set one foot across the boundary of your alma mater and realize that everyone there is apparently twelve years old and you are an unfrozen caveman. You may try to suppress this feeling, but it won’t last for long—within moments, you’ll find yourself bewildered by a demolished or renovated or newly-built building, and you’ll think, “hey, isn’t that where [____] used to b—”
You will not finish the thought before you turn to dust and blow away on the wind, unnoticed by grad students who do not look old enough to sit in the front seat of a car.
Tomorrow, as I have many Saturdays in the past, I am going to tie up a not-insignificant part of my emotional well-being in the exploits of a football team that is, to put it nicely, not terribly good.
My beloved Cincinnati Bearcats, only a few years removed from great glories—
—are coming off a 3-9 season that alternated between saddening and enraging me.
There’s a chance they’ll be better this year—who’s to say?—but I’m certainly not holding my breath for a bowl game, let alone conference or playoff contention. They will likely be lousy again this year, and I will surely find myself getting mad at each of the losses and probably some of the wins.
I know this, and I accept it. This is my river, and I am coming to stand in it.
You know the saying, right? Heraclitus, the Greek philosopher?
“No man ever steps in the same river twice—for it is not the same river and he is not the same man.”
That’s never more evident than when I step back on campus, a place where I spent some of the most formative years of my early adulthood. Everything has changed—the ugly old dorms gut-renovated into shiny, happy towers, a giant new business school in the middle of campus, a totally-revamped surrounding neighborhood.
In the time since I first set foot on campus, the Bearcats have gone from Conference USA to the Big East to the American Conference to the Big XII, and from bad to good to bad to good to bad again. Nothing is the same, and I will feel like Methuselah amongst the current student body.
But what a gift that is.
I cherish the memories of my college years, and there’s certainly things I would love to have back—my early-20s hairline, waistline and free time among them—but I was an incomplete person then. I was anxious, unfulfilled, unsure of my place in the world and where I was going, filled with an unfocused enthusiasm that could power me through all-nighters in studio or manifest in stupid, self-destructive behavior.
It’s easy to forget how far I am from that person now—sure, my college classmates on Facebook have aged, but I don’t see myself change from day to day, save for a stray hair on the shower drain. I am moving forward, too busy to look around.
The return of football each fall offers the perfect excuse to come back to my river and see just how much we both have changed. Each year, it changes—the players and coaches, the uniforms and opponents, every bit of it changes.
It’s still flowing, though, right where I’d expect it to be.
I’m ready to stand in it again.
Friends, it is once again Friday at The Action Cookbook Newsletter.
Football season is upon us, and I’m ready to kick things off right.
Today, I’m embracing a Midwestern delicacy while asking the possibly-heretical question “what if we seasoned this?” I’m also mixing up a theme-park-worthy cocktail-slash-dessert, putting on some super-fun power pop, reading a good book, talking about an all-time Sports Weirdo, and more!
Blow the whistle. It’s game time.
Runza Dang Ball
I am, as you surely know by now, a great appreciator of America’s esoteric regional foods—and the more Midwestern they are, the better, I say.
I keep a big, messy Google Sheet full of ideas for future Friday newsletters, including various foods that I’d like to experiment with. Some of them happen within days of entry; others have lingered for years.
One entry that’s been on there for literally years simply reads “Runzas?”
If you’re not familiar, the runza is a Nebraskan specialty that consists of (per Wikipedia) “a yeast dough bread pocket with a filling consisting of ground beef, cabbage or sauerkraut, onions, and seasonings”.
There’s nothing that I don’t love about that sentence.
Runzas had a moment in the spotlight last week, when Minnesota Governor and Democratic Vice-Presidential nominee Tim Walz—a Nebraskan by birth—stopped by a Runza restaurant (Runza is also the name of a fast-food chain that serves their namesake items) and picked up a bunch of the delicacies for his campaign staff.
We’re arriving at tailgate season, and I was already mulling what sort of parking-lot-ready delights I might take on for this week, and that moment was a perfectly-timed reminder: it was time to runza dang ball.
Of course, I can’t just do anything the normal way—I had to spice things up.