The house that hot links built

In my life I have been middle class enough to know what semi "fancy" food should taste like, keeping in mind that the word fancy is being used in a mid eighties Oroville couple with a son would be making for dinner kind of way. Something that would go well with freshly blended homemade margaritas (mix and tequila) served in a wine glass. If it was my fathers choice (which was most nights) it would be some sort of steak, with a side of steak and steak juice to wash it all down with. If it was up to my mother perhaps something a bit more sophisticated like stir fry, you know something light before you sat down to summon the spirits haunting whichever house we lived in at the time with a Ouija board. You  just cant chase down those rascally spirits with a stomach full of pork-chops.  If I had a quarter for every time my mother was possessed by a ghost during a seance (add a little accent above the e) I would be well off enough to pay for therapy. I have also been poor. Poor enough that perhaps my cousins and I would put food coloring in water and pretend it was soda, the thing we wanted to be consuming at all times. So you could say that when I was 22 and moved back to San Diego with no job, 300 hundred dollars, and dreams of becoming a club kid, that I would be prepared to be poor again. I suppose there is no way to prepare yourself to be poor, except for smoking mass amounts of other peoples pot and having no aversion to a diet of jack in the box tacos. like I said...I know "fancy". I moved in with my friend Maurice and supposedly his mother Marion. Though she only stopped by to drop off boxes of Eagles paraphernalia. Not the group, the sports team. What they played I have no idea, but I am thankful for role they inadvertently played in my life in that house, which I'll get to. This house wasn't so terrible. It was located pretty much in the part of San diego that shares a border with Arizona. A good place for people to go to get away from the hustle and bustle that is San Diego proper. You might even have your second home here if you preferred crack heads as lawn ornaments instead of a bird bath or a garden gnome. It had its perks. At the end of my street was a deli housed inside of what was probably the carcass of a long dead taco bell. There was a 7-11 too. Which came in useful when my street was shut down by the cops because of a hostage situation. Time for a big gulp. We didn't complain cause Maurice and I didn't have to pay rent, turned out later that Marion felt that way too. So what money we did have obviously went to pot, booze, and clothes that we cut up and wore to electroclash clubs. No money for food. When your poor, you must prioritize. So we ate would we could find....in the house. not unlike raccoons or a pet hamster you lost and never found. Like that hamster, we got by. It was there that I learned that one could survive on a diet of frenchs' fried onions, bacon bits, and hot links. All of them being well aged. Once those things ran out, then it was time to start getting resourceful. We starting searching the other rooms as if we were the flowers that snuck out of the attic. In Marions' room we hit a jackpot.  One of those giant boxes of Eagles crap, was full of small bags of novelty potato chips. But these things were sacred. These things marion needed. She needed to specially order this box of chips, so at first we treated it like the ark of the covenant. You cant leave it alone but you dare not open it. But you get high enough and you'll do anything. We were careful, one bag here and there and no one notices. Then it got to the point where we had eaten over half the box and it was "fuck it, lets eat this shit" time. And we did. After that there was only one thing left. One thing that we kept in the back of the cupboard because it symbolized the end. The one thing we wanted to eat the whole time, but didn't because we knew that at some point we would run out of food, and wanted to go out in style. So we had to do it. We had to bust out the generic boxed cake mix. It was time. We had all the components because we had no other foods that required them. One egg, that stuck around because what are you gonna do with one egg, really? And water. Yah, one of those real decadent cake mixes. So we got high. We got so high that I swear I heard someone pounding on the door saying something about "rent" and "eviction". Wasted.  After we were good and high it was time to create a masterpiece. We set it all up, followed the extremely complicated directions, and got ready to pour it into a bunt pan, a nice touch we thought. But then I saw it. An old banana. It was like god pointed it out to me and said, "that brown thing, put that in your food." I being the professional chef I knew I was at that moment, listened to him. I chopped up the pudding like banana and threw it in the mix. Excited and proud of myself for realizing its potential. Into the oven and 30 minutes later its ready to be showcased. We took it out and let it cool, talking the whole time about"how good this shits gonna be". It cools and I pick it up, get a good grip, and with a smile flip it over onto a plate. I lift the pan away slowly with an expression of "Look what I did". It was rosemary's baby. What was on that plate looked like something out of the prop room of a USA channel horror movie. Something that would be left behind by the toxic avenger. It even moved. It quivered to the touch. Who knew that baking had to be precise even with a cake where the main ingredient is water. It needed a name, even the un-holy needs a name. We called it the High cake. We consumed it and buried the bones in hallowed ground. We got evicted soon after. Co-incidence? I don't think so. 

The cops are in on it

Oroville is a place that holds true to many ideals of a small town. They make their own drugs. They walk to where they needs to get to cause they done lost their license, again. Dental insurance takes a backseat to lottery tickets. And everyone is ripe with concern about the man bumming their high. This was re-affirmed to me on my last trip to Oroville (which I plan to draw out into many witty and semi sobering blogs, so get to lovin it now). Now I'm not gonna say that my uncle Buzz has had run ins with the law, but I will say this...his name is Buzz. Good ol boy if there ever was one. I hated this man growing up. There is no place for a young homosexual who fancies himself sophisticated because he KNOWS he would just love caviar, even though he is drinking grape drink and eating saltines with taco bell hot sauce on them, and a man who always had car grease on his hands and some sort of scary skinny bug eyed loose toothed dude at his side talkin bout pussy while drinking natural ice. I know it seems like he would have gotten my lipsyncing renditions to dirty dancing, but they were lost on him. Anyhoo, on this last trip I took my boyfriend Auggie. He of course loves them and them him. thats not the point of this blog, later. So as you can imagine I was a little on edge, and my cousin Angel had already taken all of my grandmas vicoden so I had no way to take the edge off. But I did have the intelligence and foresight to stay in a hotel. Or so I thought. Whilst sitting at the kitchen table talking with my uncle, he asks us where we are staying. I said "the days in". He replies with "You know the cops got cameras all over that place". Sweet. At that moment, being the sound person I am with no tendencies towards paranoia at all I think "I can't believe I smoked pot in the bathroom with out checking under the fire alarm for a camera, I'm going to jail." 

"Yah, they own that place, they got cameras pointed at all the doors. Don't come walkin out there with a beer in your hand and then get into your car man, I tell ya, they'll bust your ass" he says.

This will interrupt my morning corona/drinking and driving spree surely. There is nothing more I want to do than to get wicked wasted and jump in my car and go cruise down the Oro dam highway. 

"yah, Mike Ramseys' in on that deal, you know it" he says.

Mike Ramsey is the Butte county D.A and always has been and will forevermore. I guess the hotel entrapment stings keeps him on the voters good side. He is also the father of a girl I went to school with who now goes to christian college. I know he shot the ceiling in his house once during a dispute with his wife. I choose him!

So we leave my grandmas and head back to the hotel, I buy a corona cause god knows I need it if I'm going to jail in a matter of hours. I hide it under my shirt as Auggie and I go up to our room. 

"those security lights look awful suspicious" I think to myself. 

I insist Auggie smokes out of the window in the bathroom with the door shut. I check for bits of pot after he is done. all clear.

Long story short, I wasn't arrested, it was fine and all that. 

But that corona woulda tasted better if it wasn't for all the breaches in my civil rights.....just a thought. 

So who's your carrier?

Today I saw a woman with a satchel, well really it was a sadle on her small dog. Let me preface this with the fact the I was at work, which is the bottom floor of IKEA. The part of the store where you find thirsty wandering jews fleeing persecution from the egyptians but took a wrong turn and are now eternally lost. The part where people get so lost, and so frustrated that, in the words of my manager Andrea "You can watch relationships disintegrate". So perhaps this was a service dog for this woman, who by my guess was maybe pushin 34, if that. She was bit overweight but not huge, and yes she wasn't gonna be winning any spelling bees in the near future if you catch my D-R-I-F-T. By the size and make of the satchel you could easily figure that that was the original purpose of it. However one look at the fuschia color might bring back memories of old trapper keepers or kit-n-kaboodles. What was the service this dog provided that she was walking on a leash through a store the size of many small villages? It carried her cell phone. It had a small pocket on one side....that carried her cell phone. I suppose thats just as good as your oxygen tank or emergency diabetic shock kit. Pushing a cart through a home furnishings store with a baby in it, and nothing more, totally constitutes having a small animal carry your cell phone. And you know that it was probably the newest I-phone or something. I assume she would need to keep up with her fellow Gresham ladies who lunch. Maybe one of those ladies keeps a parakeet on her shoulder who holds her blue-tooth, "I just like to have my hands free" she might say. This was obviously a woman who's time is valuable.