Pickling everything we can get our hands on

Despite the fact that I have so much I should be doing (top of the list: book-writing), I’ve been spending too much time lately doing what I love doing—organizing other people’s chaos, specifically, that of my parents.

What you all don’t know about me is that my motto is, “I hate stuff. Stuff is stupid. Stuff is just more stuff you have to dust off. Stuff is chaos. Down with stuff!” And my parents? Oh, boy. They have spent their 57 years of marriage collecting stuff like stuff was going out of style.

Being a person who donates stuff pretty much weekly in order to ensure that as much that comes into the house also goes out, I looked around their stuff-stuffed house a few weeks ago and declared, “I’m getting rid of all your stuff.” Naturally, they were horrified. But our stuff! they fretted. Your stuff is covered in dust so permanent I can’t even write my name in it. It is no longer dust; it is crust.

In just their family room where they spend a majority of time, I filled my Jeep to the brim with donation items. In what world, other than the climax of The Day After Tomorrow, would two elderly people need a basket with eight blankets, the bottom several of which hadn’t seen the light of day for about a decade?

I’d grab a random unidentifiable knickknack to place in a donation box. My mother would snatch it out of my hand and hold it tightly to her bosom as if cradling a shivering kitten. “No! You can’t take this! It was a gift!”

“It’s covered in dust-crust. Who gave it to you?”

[blink]

[clutch]

[blink]

Say goodbye to the porcelain tchotchke, Dottie.

After the pain of letting go of stuff in one room, they finally came fully onboard when they saw how nice it is to have a clean, relaxing space. As of this writing, I have taken 8 Jeep-fulls of stuff out of their home for donation including one massive plastic bin JUST OF EMPTY PHOTO FRAMES. They had 12 pairs of everyday scissors. I said, “Do you two regularly hold crafting parties with 10 of your closest friends?”

My dad had a stack of like 25 empty composition books, I said, “Is your English 101 teacher giving you lots of writing assignments in this your 80th year?”

I found expired Kohl’s Cash from 2018, a Lazarus card that expired in 1994, and about three dozen decks of playing cards. I said, “Are you guys running an underground poker ring in your basement?”

I’ve been to the thrift store to donate so many times, the employees there keep saying, “And you’re telling us no one died?”

I roll into Westmoreland Cleanways once a week with boxes of random electronics for recycling, and the employees keep saying, “No, seriously. Who died?”

After this past weekend when I spent six hours on their laundry room where I found cleaning products that haven’t been made since 1982, everything now has a place and all that’s left is their stuff-filled garage where I fully expect to find a defensive family of raccoons eyeing me menacingly all, “BUT OUR STUFF!”

Let’s talk.

My daughter once mused thoughtfully while riding in the car, “Pittsburgh is basically just clouds and pickles.”

That should be on a pillow somewhere, but a pillow is stuff and we do not do stuff.

I’ve dragged her along to Picklesburgh more than once, including that year it was still on the bridge during the pandemic era and people were packed in so tightly that I breathed in enough stranger-danger-pickle-breath (surprisingly NOT my band name this week) to know Covid was coming for my ass. Pickle ornament history. Pickle pin history. Pickle history exhibits. She’s heard it all and seen it all and learned it all. But, she, unlike her mother, does not enjoy pickles.

I love pickles like my father loves a good composition book and my mother loves an empty photo frame. I’ll pretty much eat pickle-flavored anything. If you’re selling pickles at a fair or market, you’ll be taking my money and I’ll eat those pickles within two days.

That said, maybe, just maybe, we’ve finally gone too far this year? First, Eat n’ Park is out with a Smiley Cookie with pickle-flavored icing.

I’m conflicted. Like maybe this would be delicious? Or maybe it would be a gustatory abomination? We won’t know until we try one.

Over at the Post-Gazette, food writer Gretchen McKay lost her whole mind and created a “Candied Pickle Sundae.” Here’s the last step of the instructions:

Scoop vanilla ice cream into a bowl and top with candied pickle pieces and pickle-infused hard candy. Serve immediately.

And here’s a screenshot of what it looks like if you did it right-wrong:

Is this rage-bait? It’s so beyond bonkers that even AI, which occasionally creates recipes calling for something like 42 cups of saffron, would be all, “That seems off. This isn’t a recipe. It’s a cry for help. And honestly? Gross.”

Other notables showing up this year that illustrate just how far Pittsburgh is willing to push the pickle envelope: pickle tacos, root-beer flavored pickles, gherkin martinis (would), and pickle cotton candy (absolutely would not).

Happy Picklesburgh and someone get that “Pittsburgh is basically just clouds and pickles” pillow made and send me a check. Just do NOT allow my mother to buy one.

She banned.

In today’s news, the same company, Namdar, that purchased Pittsburgh Mills and left it to rot until potholes started eating cars and then sinkholes started eating the potholes, racking up millions of dollars of still unpaid fines has declared bankru—

Oh, wait. I’ve just been handed this note in the newsroom informing me that, in fact, Namdar has not declared bankruptcy, but instead has [literally checks note in disbelief] has entered into an agreement to take over the mortgage of Gateway Center in downtown Pittsburgh. Let’s turn it over to our man in the field, Chase Chasington, who will surely be reporting on exactly where the hellmouth has opened on this first day of the apocalypse.

Reader, I, your humble correspondent, writer, author, historian, stuff-destroyer and math-denier do not at all understand business. In my head the math should go:

Bad at business = NO MORE BUSINESS FOR YOU!

Like, if you have millions of dollars of judgements against you here in Pittsburgh and have been accused of actual crimes in relation to a property you own, we should not hear your name again. You suck and you failed, so, bye. Go get a job.

Now, yes, they’ve only taken over the mortgage at this point, but Gateway is >this close< to defaulting, thus Namdar now has a very strong chance of controlling a major downtown property and they’ve already made clear that they do not care to invest in the improvement or maintenance of the buildings they own. They only care to make whatever money they can before the courts come after them, then they’ll engage in years of litigation. Meanwhile, they’ll do the same to another property and another and another until their entire portfolio is a rusted-out shell of “things that used to be.”

They are actual parasites and their lawyers are parasites and I want them all gone from Pittsburgh for good.

Someone make me a “Namdar can eat glass and die” pillow.

The famed journalist Ernie Pyle once wrote of Pittsburgh, “Physically, it is absolutely irrational. It must have been laid out by a mountain goat.” Recognizing just how irrational our topography is, National Geographic included one of our steepest streets on their recentl list of Wonders of America.

As you likely guessed, they went with our steepest street of them all, that nightmare called Canton Avenue, which some claim is the steepest street in America (it depends).

Like many of you, I’ve never had to drive on Canton because it’s pretty easy to avoid when you don’t live in that neighborhood. Therefore, it doesn’t strike fear in my heart like Rialto. When my GPS says, “Turn onto Rialto,” my immediate reaction is always to shout RIALTO? like …

Surely, you’re not serious, Google Maps? Rialto will give you a catastrophic nosebleed and a mild case of the bends on the way up and will smack you so hard on the way down, you’ll come to in the river. It should be a rail incline or a goat-grazing hillside, not a road. It should have a “Here be dragons and certain death” warning at both ends.

It’s too narrow, too hard to avoid because your GPS just wants you to die in the Allegheny, and it should be feared and respected more than Canton.

Somebody make me a RIALTO > CANTON shirt and then also send me a check when you sell 4 gazillion of them to Rialto Truthers like me who know where the real terror lives.

This absolutely killed me because I love it when local companies are good at social media. Please check out this series of photos from a recent Turner’s Instagram post.

It’s the chocolate milk pose for me. Brilliant marketing and give that boy a raise.

(Not an ad!)

In the last edition of the newsletter, I let you know that my next column at Pittsburgh Magazine is about the history of poets who have attempted to illustrate Pittsburgh through verse. I shared with you one of my favorites, Pittsburgh Gray by a former CMU professor. Now that the article is published (read it here for lots more poems), I wanted to share another full poem that I love. It was written in the early 1900s by John D. Kelly, a medical doctor and was published in the Medical Council in April 1918. I even reprinted it in the opening pages of my master’s thesis on how our smoke problem exacerbated our death rate during the 1918 pandemic.

Eat your heart out, Dr. Seuss. In fact, from the “I Have the Best Ideas” file, one of you illustrators should turn this poem into a vintage-looking children’s-type book. Its publication date puts it in the public domain, so have at it. It would be so interesting to see how a local artist envisions Pittsburgh in 1910 based on this work of poetry. I’m imagining a cute fuzzy animal romping through the city, getting dirtier and dirtier everywhere it goes until it gets home and takes a bath after stopping at the Pittsburgh Potty in the basement. I’m a whole genius.

Read my column here. I think the very last poem may be my favorite of them all.

Wink.

Big little things are here for your enjoyment!

• This one is for the nerds. The geeks. The dorks like me. My most recent silly little project is NextAbstract.com. A simple time waster I built for myself so that my time wasted would at least teach me something. I adore reading scholarly abstracts—those summaries that go in front of academic papers and articles. So I built Next Abstract to serve up one random abstract after another from a database of millions across centuries of scholarship. It’s like a rabbit hole, time-waster and accidental education all in one. Here are some of the abstracts it has fed me recently:

  

  Note that third one is from Niels Bohr in 1939! My goal was to make it feel like you’re walking through a nonfiction library full of knowledge from the past and present. It’s great fun though I still have some work to do on the algorithm as soon as I find time. I’ll keep you nerds posted!

• I love this. Commonwealth Press has a new keystone ice mold tray!

  

  Look at it! Some local restaurant better start serving these in my next mocktail real soon. Not an ad!

• Photographer Carla Cardello (City Life Adventures on Instagram) hunted for and found one of the little-seen dinosaur sculptures left over from DinoMite days (think Ketchupsaurus at PPG Place), and it’s Steelers-themed!

  She writes:

  First let’s talk about Splatasaurus. Inspired by Jack Lambert who was nicknamed Jack Splat, Splatasaurus is a Steelers inspired T. Rex with Jack’s jersey number. He’s even missing a few teeth! I chatted with the owner when I stopped by. He acquired the dino in 2022 and had it restored since it was in rough shape. You can find Splatasaurus at 116 S Oak Hill Rd in Fox Chapel. Please stay on the street for photos as it is a private residence. I had permission to take photos in the yard.

  How exciting. Check out her whole list and go see Splatasaurus. But if at any point your GPS says “turn right onto Rialto,” just turn around and go home. Ain’t nobody got time for that.

Have a great week! Get rid of your stuff! Be kind! Download PastFinders! Check out NextAbstract! Buy my book! Send me a check for all my good ideas! And be sure to get out this week and see my new band Gustatory Abomination.

We’re vomitously good.