by Adrian Daniel Schramm | Nov 29, 2017 | Food Writing
Many things I make for myself to eat at home I would never serve to anyone else. Many of the things I’ve made are strange but I eat them anyway. When the kitchen cupboards and refrigerator and counters are at my disposal then it is time to experiment, cooking what is available and hope that it turns out. And if it doesn’t, I eat it anyway. Usually. Especially when funds were low and the cupboards, refrigerator, counter were mostly barren. It was an episode of “Chopped” just to get dinner made and on the table. Okay, chefs. Here are your four ingredients. Because there were only four ingredients left in the kitchen before we had money again to go grocery shopping. Always rice – a big bag of it in the corner. Often potatoes. Canned black beans. Tomatoes if we were lucky, though they never lasted long. Sometimes pasta from the back cooked in an old bottle of red wine turned to vinegar, with those leftover pine nuts and some long-gone basil in a drawer. Ample amounts of salt and black pepper. And always, always some sort of hot sauce. And when it got worse than that we stole loaves of bread and peanut butter from the gas station. The friend with the largest Carhartt jacket slipping a 6-pack of shit domestic beer out the door because the buzz would help us forget our situation. I was caught once with a deli sandwich stuffed into my armpit. Turkey and cheese with mayonnaise. I pushed the man who grabbed my arm and dropped the sandwich. He let go. I ran. I’ve...
by Adrian Daniel Schramm | Nov 27, 2017 | Nonfiction
In what some people call the “Age of Narcissism,” we have to be bigger than the universe. We have to be most important. And we have no time for other people who don’t add value to our lives. We have already moved away from traditional “meet-cute” love, i.e. we’ve digitalized love through apps like Tinder, Bumble, Grindr, etc. And with the advent of “sex robots” (soon to be without such a clumsy description – “sex robot” seems how we might have thought of android love in the 1950’s), it will only be a matter of time before the accessibility and readily-available nature of artificially-intelligent partners will supersede the time and effort it takes to impress a real one. Watch the trailer for “The Sex Robots are Coming” below for an illustrative example. Humans, for being such social creatures, have been struggling to meet and maintain romantic partners, and maintain especially in the long-term. Why, then, wouldn’t we just buy the copy? Why wouldn’t you just go to the store to get the latest model which takes no work on your part (besides spending a set dollar amount, and probably dignity amount as well) to woo? And then, consequently, having a real, warm-to-the-touch partner would become an “artisan” experience; the organic alternative to those made in a factory. The future of sex Let’s back up for a moment; this relationship is already moving too fast. When we talk about the future of love, we’re really talking about the future of sex. One precedes the other; the idea that people will come to prefer the company of artificially-intelligent humans over the...
by Adrian Daniel Schramm | Nov 21, 2017 | Fiction
They kicked the family out of the apartment upstairs and I saw them with their things on the side of the street. A mother and she has two kids – a girl and a boy probably who are 8 and 9 years old. I would hear her yelling almost every night and she hit them more than once. But that’s not the reason they were kicked out. She couldn’t pay the rent either. She couldn’t keep her temper and she couldn’t work enough hours at the car wash down the street to come up with $750 every month. It’s hard to be a single mother, mom says, but she still has pop so I don’t know how she knows that. I feel like everyone around me is made of thick fudge vanilla and butterscotch: all brown and beige and nondescript. I’m in a glass box in the middle where they can’t get in. They press against the glass, always pushing and trying to get in. Except it’s not really a cage. It’s a fortress. Like a glass pyramid. I can see the world around me, but I’m not a part of it. I’m safe in here, and separated. I tell Gogo, “I keep trying to bring you in, but those beige hands keep pulling you back out. They come in through the door when I try to bring you inside. I want to bring you in with me so you can be safe with me and forever.” Gogo laughs quick, like an incredulous laugh and she pushes the hair out of her eyes. “That’s so chauvinist of you. That’s...
by Adrian Daniel Schramm | Nov 16, 2017 | Nonfiction
“The point of civilization is to be civilized; the purpose of action is to perpetuate society, for only in society can philosophy truly take place.” – Iain Pears, from The Dream of Scipio As a German-American raised in Minnesota after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, my relationship to the Cold War, to a divided Germany, and to the war that led to it, was very tangential. Talked about in abstracts, pointed out in black-and-white photos, running together with all the other great and important and terrible events in history for which – I was taught – there is no place in the world today. It wasn’t never discussed in “Remember when…” terms, because it was before, what seemed like a long, long time before, my time. Grandparents who had lived through it, one set in the United States, and one set in Germany, were my only true connection to this time in American history. But Germany has treated history very differently than we have here: It’s 2017 now, and long has America ignored its responsibility to the past. We have parades, yes, where we wave flags and sing songs of patriotism. And we have museums. Museums dedicated to the past and everything that the country was/is built upon so we can look at them, nod our heads in deep understanding, and then leave it all behind. We have the History Center here in Minnesota. There’s the National Museum of African American History and Culture in D.C., which only opened in 2003. And we have monuments, which some people have trouble differentiating from the...
