Chowder and Chowders in Southern Illinois

As I scraped the autumn's first frost from my windshield this morning, I quietly mourned the end of chowder season here in Southern Illinois (say it with me: "NOT Chicago!"). Why a warm bowl of chowder is relegated to the months *before* the onset of cold weather is anyone's guess, yet here we are.

"But what kind of chowder?!?," you may be asking. Corn chowder? Clam chowder?

No, Southern Illinois ("NOT Chicago!") chowder has no corn, no clams. And no thickening agents, either. It's just stew. Stew made in BIG batches. A coworker of mine spent several days of vacation time to return to his hometown and make *800 GALLONS* of chowder. As is custom, those 800 gallons were divvied up into 30ish-gallon batches (a far more reasonable number, to be certain), cooked over an open flame, and stirred continuously with "The Paddle" for fear of charring.

Behold The Paddle. Credit: Herb Meeker

Those looking to partake are to arrive with a container in hand, be it a Mason jar, a Tupperware, or a five-gallon bucket. That my coworker sold out within a few hours is testament to chowder's stranglehold on the region. That's 160 five-gallon buckets of stew sold within hours!!!

I want to turn now to two chowder-adjacent "sister" stews, namely the Kentuckian burgoo and the Minnesotan booyah. Like chowder, they are amalgamations of mystery meats and vegetable medleys, their original recipes dumbed down by rising health standards; what were once the fruits of hunting and gardening are now bought in bulk at Walmart. Both burgoo and booyah are rumored to possess actual heritage—the former (purportedly) hailing from Scottish sailors and the latter (purportedly) a mispronunciation of the French "bouillon"—but their respective family trees may as well be drawn with crayon.

In mild contrast, the origins of chowder are murky. Most Southern Illinoisans ("NOT from Chicago!") just shrug when probed about chowder's origins, indifferent to the 'how' and 'why.' And that's because chowder as a dish is widely uncelebrated. I asked dozens of locals for their opinions on chowder, and very few were enthusiastic defenders. After all, it's nigh-impossible to effectively season a 30ish-gallon batch of anything. Instead, it's chowder as an event that riles up regional fervor. Chowders are held in municipalities of all sizes, often with the goal of reinvesting in the local community; the proceeds from my coworker's chowder sabbatical, for example, went to maintaining his hometown's cemetery.

BROADLY* speaking, the Midwest is ethnically ambiguous. Sure, there are more individuals with Polish ancestry in Illinois ("Chicago!"), German ancestry in Kentucky, and Scandinavian ancestry in Minnesota, but for many** of them that heritage is insignificant, a factoid from a 23andMe fling and nothing more. And in that spirit, Southern Illinois ("NOT Chicago!") chowder isn't about connecting with your roots, but about planting new ones. It's about sacrificing PTO to fundraise for your community. It's about sitting in a lawn chair for ten hours, your butt numb, tending to the chowder all the while. It's about filling your five-gallon bucket with mediocre, underseasoned stew because that's the neighborly thing to do.

That chowders continue to be held each year, in spite of an obscure heritage and a general disinterest in the dish itself, cements the tradition as something ethnically ambiguous and community-forward—as something quintessentially Midwestern. Now if only the weather would warm up again...

*I'm painting with a broad, broad brush.

**Look! It's that behemoth of a brush again!

Remembering Venue Cinemas

I wasn't surprised to learn that Venue Cinemas in Lynchburg, VA, will be closing at the end of the month. It was, after all, one of the city's last bastions of no-frills entertainment, replete with an "outdated" business model. There wasn't an app or a rewards program. There weren't high-fidelity speakers or faux-leather recliners. It was unabashedly a movie theater: a distraction-free environment with cheap seats, good popcorn, and friendly staff.

While not surprised, I will miss Venue all the same.

Please forgive the crooked picture.

I will miss taking the time to ferret out the few seats that didn't creak. I will miss the erratic emergency light in theater six, and the hand-sized stain on the screen in theater eight. I will miss the stringent, ACTUALLY ENFORCED cell phone policy.

And perhaps most of all, I will miss the paper towels. They were of a rare and dying breed—you could dry your hands with a single sheet(!)—, and they always struck me as an expensive outlier in an otherwise (seemingly) low-overhead operation.

I saw 30 movies there across four semesters, the first being 2022's Vengeance and the last being 2025's Drop. Again, the theater's shuttering is not shocking—I had the place to myself for 14 of those screenings.

This is your reminder to watch Marcel the Shell with Shoes On.

As a transient college student, I never really plugged into the Lynchburg community. I never learned my way around town ("Going off campus means spending money"), curated a list of must-try restaurants ("I'm already paying for a meal plan"), or even meaningfully engaged with a local ("They probably resent college students, anyways"). I was selfish, stingy, and a little depressed. Maybe Venue—which for three dollars gave me two-ish hours alone in a dark room—enabled that behavior. I don't know. But I *do* know that those two-ish hours off campus often felt like coming up for air after a suffocating week at school (the foremost of first world problems, I'm aware).

So thank you to the friends who, at one point or another, accompanied me and tolerated my effusive paper towel praise. And thank you, of course, to both the people and the place that comprise(d) Venue Cinemas. I wish you all the best in your future endeavors. Thank you for not muddying the moviegoing experience with recliners or booze, and instead for letting the movies speak for themselves. Your theater's existence was a noble one.

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MaYBe nOw mY T-sHirt wIll bECoMe a coLlEcTor's ItEm!!!

Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy – Marinating in My Attic

"I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose... It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent... It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones."

- Sherlock Holmes, A Study in Scarlet

I love this analogy, and the introspection that it prompted in thirteen-year-old me cannot be overstated. What was filling up my attic? What had the conveniences of the 21st century cleared out, and what had the clamor of the internet crammed in?

These questions still resurface, on occasion, their answers ever in flux as practical knowledge inevitably loses ground to memes and media. Why must I check the back of the pasta box for cooking instructions EVERY SINGLE TIME? Why do I represent 20% of the viewership on a "How to Tie a Tie" video? And why, then, with these glaring gaps in knowledge, did I remember Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy so thoroughly?

I didn't even beat the game, only playing for a brief stint in March of 2024 before throwing in the towel. No ill will, no broken mouse—just a waning interest and a resolve to come back later.

For the unaware (¡hola, hermana!), Getting Over It is commonly referred to as "ragebait." Purposefully opaque and proudly obtuse, ragebait not only challenges the player, but heckles them while doing so.

In the case of Getting Over It you play as Pot Boy, armed with your trusty hammer. You wave your mouse around, and Pot Boy waves back, hammer in hand.

Hello, Pot Boy!

You must climb the mountain. The narrator, Bennett Foddy, tauntingly instructs you to do so. He thinks you can't. So you climb. You climb to rub your eventual triumph in Bennett Foddy's smug, stupid face. You climb to become Pot Man.

But then you discover that climbing is hard?!?

In all seriousness, Getting Over It is tough. Muscle memory, swole from years of homogenous control schemes, knows not what to do with the hammer that is your mouse. So you flail and you fumble your way past the initial obstacles as Foddy waxes eloquent about the softness of the modern gamer. It stings.

I flailed and fumbled for about three hours, stopping just shy of halfway to the summit. I think I was grinning the whole time. Grinning at my stupid monkey brain for spending three hours of limited existence on something designed to chafe and abrade.

And now I sit grinning at my stupid monkey brain once again, this time for preserving in the attic that is itself a tiny space for Bennett Foddy and his incensingly beautiful game. After more than 18 months, I retained the three hours of "skill" (I use the term loosely) I developed with Getting Over It. The once hours-long section was now behind me in a matter of minutes.

I remembered the control scheme. I remembered the obstacles and their sequence. Even Foddy's narration was dusted off in my brain-attic. Such clutter to have persisted those long 18 months!

This, dubbed "orange hell," is as far as I progressed my first time around.

Getting Over It has a lot to say about clutter, about trash. The game itself is an homage to 2002's Sexy Hiking, a B-game of middling renown. In Sexy Hiking you likewise climb a mountain with a hammer. Foddy relates that he was enamored by this piece of trash (his words), that yet another piece of cultural clutter had a spot reserved in his brain-attic (my words).

He later narrates:

"Things are made to be consumed in a certain context, and once the moment is gone they transform into garbage. In the context of technology those moments pass by in seconds… Maybe this is what digital culture is. A monstrous mountain of trash, the ash-heap of creativity's fountain. A landfill with everything we ever thought of in it… Grand, infinite, and unsorted."

And then, a poem:

Everything's fresh for about six seconds

until some newer thing beckons

and we hit refresh.

And there's years of persevering

Disappearing into the pile

Out of style

Out of sight.

Per Foddy, everything is not (necessarily) trash because of its quality, but because it is consumed and discarded so fleetingly. That's a convicting sentiment in a you-are-what-you-buy society, and moreover one that Getting Over It combats simply by existing—Foddy took a dismissible game, Sexy Hiking, and gave it the time and attention he thought appropriate. His homage kept and continues to keep it from "disappearing into the pile."

This commentary on trash is appropriately shared as you traverse a landfill of level geometry.

I am not Sherlock Holmes. Instead of the ideal cooking time for al dente noodles or the proper steps for an immaculate Windsor knot, my brain-attic is, in and of itself, a receptacle for a fraction of the digital culture's overall trash. But while everything may start as trash, it doesn't have to remain as such.

To me, one of Getting Over Its most prominent messages is that marinating in and sitting with trash is what gives it value—that we ought to slow down, wait to hit refresh, and really, truly contemplate that which we somehow lapped up from the fire hydrant of culture. That we ought to keep a game, a book, or whatever tucked away in our brain-attics for months, years, and chip away at it, reflect on it, or come back to it later. Only then can the clutter in our brain-attics transcend from, as Sherlock says, "useless" to "useful." From cultural trash to personal treasure. From Sexy Hiking to Getting Over It.