she understood when she was just 5 years old
there was nothin’ happening at all
every time she puts on the radio
there was nothing going down at all, not at all
then one fine morning she turns on a New York station
she don’t believe what she heard at all
she started shakin’ to that fine fine music
you know her life was saved by rock ‘n’ roll
you know despite all the amputation
you could just dance to the rock ‘n’ roll station
and it was all right
This restaurant is part of my childhood. There’s no longer a cigarette machine, but not much else has changed. It’s “Mexican Food” as it was understood by Anglos in 1972 Costa Mesa. Hard shell tacos, refried beans with rice with every entrée, no surprises, and literally deadly quantities of cheese.
For adults there is a great emphasis on margaritas.
Mi Casa is not Mexican food. Most people who are aficionados of good food would not consider it to be worth considering at all. I like it. It’s my childhood, and there is nothing modern about it. No authentic cochinito en pibil, but no Chili’s waitresses with flair upselling me on the Chi-Chi-Tastic Balsamic Nacho Wrap, either.
They never lost the red leather booths or the hanging baskets at Mi Casa, or the sixty year old women in miniskirts and tights serving food, or even the original tables, which as you can see were from a Roy Rogers steakhouse circa 197… 1971, I bet.
Why yes, I would like another margarita, ma’am.
My shoulder is trashed. It really hurts, just about all the time. Doctor on Friday. I feel like an idiot for not going weeks ago when it wasn’t that bad. I hope I don’t have double secret rotator cuff explosion requiring Civil War surgery with a saw.
I have a bad habit of doing the boiled frog and making something like this normal until I suddenly realize that it’s very abnormal. In this case I was feeling a bit nauseated from pain and unable to find a comfortable position ever before I called the doctor. Doh.
Ow ow, OW.
It says something funny and sad about me that when I have a drink or two I get all excited about compiling new versions of my software.
My grocery store had a 5 kg bar of Callebout chocolate for sale: $78.00 USD
I visited nickjb at the B&N tonight. The muzak was playing quietly inoffensive xmas stuff for a while, and then went into some French cabaret music. Nice 40s-style song. And then that song stayed on repeat. I think I heard it 15 times before I left. Hideous bananaphone experience.
Something is fucked with my government check and I haven’t got one since Nov. 8. I had to borrow money from my family; thank goodness they’re there.
I haven’t been able to read or write anything of substance for a while due to some odd ADD-like symptoms. Oddly I can read the new Pynchon; it just kind of flows through me pleasantly.
I turn 42 this week. Not much of interest there except my mom’s taking me to dinner at Pescadou on Friday. Mmm, Pescadou.
Outside the market tonight a madman was saying to another madman: “It’s like a lot of things in my life. I have these gifts, things like seeing into the future. And I have visions and realizations of a sexual nature. These things are hard for the others to understand.”
I think most of my problems could be solved with a bathtub of melted semi-sweet chocolate containing salome_st_john and a manatee. Make it so.
Woke up somehow hung over without having consumed any alcohol.
Cat barf on carpet.
First attempt to make coffee unsuccessful because I did not use water.
Opened cat food can in wrong direction so that minute particles of wet cat food went in my eye. Eye care advice: do not put cat food in your eye.
Inexplicable communication from government agency regarding money.
Rushed shower to meet friends for lunch. Therefore had not completely removed soap from hands before putting in contact lenses. Eye care advice: do not put soap on a contact lens and then place it in your eye.
Lunch with friends was good!
Santa Ana wind gusts to 60 mph. High tension lines flailing in traffic with arcing and explosions. Trash cans bouncing down the street like Rover from The Prisoner. Big-ass brush fire up off Santiago with at least one severe burn victim.
Inability to clean house; spiral of shame.
Kéan Coffee: Good coffee. Ibuprofen and ranitidine. LA Times food section full of inexcusably bad writing, particularly from S. Irene Virbila. I maintain that she is one of the Andy Kaufman clones or possibly a tulpa manifestation of the narrator of The Debt to Pleasure. Examples today:
A fresh spirit is blowing through the Paris dining scene… …A friend who loves wine told me about Le Villaret, a small bistro with stone and half-timbered walls in the the 11th arrondissement, Paris’ equivalent to Silver Lake.
Also, a recipe for Blanquette de Veaux (HOW MANY VEALS ARE TO BE USED?)
Another writer suggests fancying-up mac ‘n’ cheese: My personal cheese advisor Steven Jenkins, who wrote the definitive guide “Cheese Primer,” suggests bringing the dish up to 2006 cheese-aisle standards by using a fresh goat’s milk cheese, mascarpone, Gorgonzola dolce and a sheep’s milk cheese from Spain (manchego, Idiazábal, Roncal) or from France (Ossau-Iraty). The combination is almost other-worldly, much more nuanced than the predictable original.
Start the reactor.
Back to cleaning; spiral of shame deepens. Fortunately, maternal flight delayed from 7 until 10:30 pm. Then, flight delayed further. Uh oh, I know where this is going. Yep! The flight will now miss the curfew for SNA and be diverted to LAX.
Folks I’m going to drive into L.A. to meet a flight at LAX at 1 am now. I wonder what I’ll put in my eye first?
I didn’t go to klikitak‘s thing tonight, partly because I am a social anxiety poster child lately and partly because I didn’t want to get extruded through my own car by drunk people going to L.A. and back. Instead I ended up at realitylost‘s where she and Craig stuffed me with really great food and their dogs sat on me. One of the many reasons to like Craig is that he is serious about food. O garlic bread, O cobbler.
I meant to go over and hang with burntcurtis for a few later but a quick trip across the boulevard revealed that his entire neighborhood had been parked upon by partiers. Tonight is official Adult Halloween Party Night, and everyone was getting smashed, with pumpkins. A couple of his neighbors were incompetently necking in the condo complex and I nearly ran them down. She was wearing a slutty noun costume and he was in a rapist costume (pirate, soldier, Haidl, dunno). He was trying to paw her while simultaneously bracing a 24 pack of beer on his hip and she was trying to do the coy push-away-only-not but instead stumbling in front of my car. Two cheers for Halloween; it’s now Daterapemas!
Part of the time at Susie & Craig’s tonight the TV was on. I hadn’t seen the History Channel in a long time. Wow is it dumb! The supposed academic guy referred to the “Cape of Africa” (?) and they spelled Gibraltar wrong, and the show about the history of dragons spent a full segment talking to a couple of lunatics who believed that dragons existed and waved broadswords while saying they were druids.
One of their neighbors has a license plate holder that says “Foamer Forever.” Anyone know what that means?
This is a series of random observations or questions. They’re short because my ADD-like symptoms are bad and I can’t comprehend big ideas right now. Which pisses me off to no end! But anyway:
Nick and I keep discussing that action-movie shot in which our heroes run or jump in slow motion away from a big fiery explosion. They almost always jump while running in the air and extend their arms, and are silhouetted against a wall of flame. Is there a name for this shot? There must be, because almost every action movie has one. We think it originated with the Lethal Weapon movies but we’re not sure. Anyone know?
I was at the grocery store late last night. It being Friday night, there were a number of couples there picking up items after a date and before going home: beer, ice cream, snacks, wine. The couple behind me in line seemed like nice people and were alternately looking a little annoyed and then laughing about something. The guy kept leaving and coming back as we waited. The line was long. I caught her eye and said “What, can’t he find the goldfish crackers?” Turns out he was trying to get condoms, which were in a locked case near the back of the store. There were only a couple of employees in the whole place so it was difficult. I looked at the line behind her, all couples with snacks and beer. “You’d think they’d know better…” she said and then started cracking up again. He returned and we all decided that instead of a lock, there should be a happy bell clang and circus music whenever anyone got a condom, or maybe a booming CONGRATULATIONS ON YOUR SEX! announcement.
burntcurtis is a great date. We IHOP’d it last night and had a good long chat, after I introduced him to Andy A and they nerded out about circuit boards and other electronic hardware items and their manufacture. The IHOP people were using an unusually sexual advertising technique to sell French Toast. Is “leave happy” like “happy ending” but with breakfast food?
Does anyone know where one goes to shoot rifles around here? Yeah yeah I know, lol clocktower. I mean for real, for learning. I want to get a .22 and poke little holes in things at a distance.
The orange cat who guards my street 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, approached me this morning as I stood on my doorstep, pointed its paw at me, and said “Gnaaaaarp.”
This has been a good weekend, full of unexpected social delights and fatty foods.
I have had totally heterosexual man-dates two nights in a row. Friday, burntcurtis took me for Chinese (and I hardly look it) at China Palace, where I ate round-eye delights like orange spicy chicken. Great conversation with him in a romantic booth. Last night threepunchstuff spirited me off to a G(r)eek restaurant where we ate flaming cheese, etc. Thanks to both of you for being wonderfuli and totally heterosexual man-friends!
I also got to see all sorts of people I never see, and purely by chance, including the reclusive handstil and godforesaken who are rarely observed since their natural habitat is fifty feet underground.
And! Other people had sent me books recently so I read a pile of them, including two graphic novels about hellholes. Guy Delisle’s Pyongyang details his time in North Korea working on animation projects, and Ted Rall’s half-graphic Silk Road To Ruin is a combination “comic book” about his travels there and history/backgrounder on Central Asia. Both good. Rall’s is particularly useful and full of the sort of black humor that only places like Turkmenistan provide.
I’m enjoying the Halloween season this year for the first time in forever. I managed to recapture that childhood sensation of anticipation about costumes and haunted houses and candy skulls. I was never big into candy, although acquisition itself was a huge high on the actual night, but I loved the way neighbors did up their houses into “scary” haunts. People around here really get into that, and there are some dark and creepy strobed-out houses with hands reaching out the windows, etc. already. I like that way better than the adult beer-bash version.
Speaking of which, the costumes for kids are turning me into Old Conservative Guy. Nick and Nicole found a set of wrist-and-ankle bondage cuffs in the Halloween store, complete with unambiguous drawing of bound hussy, that included the instruction they were not for children under six. Meanwhile, a young teenager was being urged into a Slutty Nurse Outfit by her mother, as Junior complained “Mom, they won’t allow this at school!” No.
The Santa Ana winds make my eyes and throat dry and are kind of a pain in the ass, but it’s so BEAUTIFUL here right now with that very clear light we never get. I took a load of pics in Santa Ana yesterday and maybe some of of them are salvageable. The “camera out the window at 40 mph” style isn’t conducive to great art.
Maybe I’ll drive out to the desert tomorrow.
yoscott arrived in the middle of his massive road trip and stayed a couple days. It was great to see him. Went down to the beach today, ate Ruby’s, people-watched, and took the ferry to the Island, inadvertedly triggering a minor phobia. Sorry, Scott! Ate sushi. Went to Ruba. Somehow managed to introduce him to half the people I know mostly by accident.
The night before was a meatsplosion and gluttonfest including Leah and my mom as well as Scott. That was great too. Leah is a great friend, not least for bringing the horseradish.
There was a strange party of cigar Republicans, soccer moms, and slack-jawed kids at Ruba. Boy they sure didn’t fit in.
A guy at Tower was desperately trying to return a CD he had purchased in error while trying to get a Spice Girls CD for some 12 year old girl’s birthday (?!). She was in a limo outside (?!?!?) and he was sliding into full consumer rage as we departed. I still can’t find anything at their going out of business sale worth actual U.S. dollar moneys.
I managed to introduce Scott to stand-up guys and beautiful women, solely. How’d I do that?
I am convinced that burntcurtis somehow knows every interesting person on the planet.
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