As I read that title, I am a little wary of putting the word "porn" with "happy ending." And if you know why, well, you'll know why.
But still, it isn't about that kind of "happy ending." Just watched the movie "Chef" and yes, there are some nice food images that will make you hungry for a really good meal. It will make you want a Cubano sandwich in the worst way. It will make you happy.
All in all, a fine "feel good" movie and you know I am not usually a fan of that genre. But a good cast, (Dustin Hoffman as a jerk? Scarlett Johanssen with black hair, in a tight red dress?) good dialogue, some sentimentality, excellent music and, come on, all that food. It isn't a movie you need to see on the big screen but why not? Smuggle in some wine, a tasty snack in a Tupperware container and sit back and be entertained. Walk out with a smile on your face and a need for a good food truck. Do yourself a favor and see it. Tell me if you didn't like it. It's not great but it's good. Makes you want to get a little straw fedora.
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The schedule I currently have with my two jobs is bizarre at best. Monday and Tuesday mornings in Point Reyes, those same afternoons in Glen Ellen, then a random meandering through the rest of the week. All this means that my days off come as randomly as the meandering schedule allows. Sometimes I have a Friday off. Sometimes a Saturday. Once every two or three weeks I will actually get two days off in a row, which is shocking. (Those throw me for a loop, which I will pursue in another blog.) This week my day off was Wednesday.
It has been a very, very long time since I have had a Monday through Friday job with weekends off. To tell you the truth, I cannot remember when that was. Perhaps in the fabulous 80's but then drugs were involved, ever so slightly. (Scandalous!!!) And motorcycle clubs and gangs and Satan worship and ritualistic initiation practices. (HA! Gotcha!) So even those typical weekends have been relegated to the far reaches of my mind. Way, way back there. Ghosts of a memory of a scheduled Sat-Sun off, I can barely remember how that was. Seriously. Hospitality industry means weekend work. Grocery retail means weekend work. Oyster farm means weekend work. Service work means weekend work.
Sorry, off on a flashback there, I guess. Back to task: having a Wednesday off is odd. It's good because no one (almost) else has Wednesday off. But it's bad because it chunks up that DNA feeling that says "oh, cool, now it's the weekend" sort of thing and thus part of me wants to drink Margaritas like it's Friday night because, what the hell, I have Saturday to sleep it off! But, again alas, no. Not. Going. To. Happen.
However, it was the day I had off. Jenn and I (mostly Jenn because of my fucked up back) cleaned house, washed floors, cleaned the kitchen, went to the laundromat (that was me!) and the house is so, so clean and nice. But it still reminds me of Saturdays. When I was a kid, Saturday was the day we all had to stay home, didn't get to hang with our friends, and we had to clean the house. We all had chores: bathroom cleaning, mopping floors, vacuuming, stripping and remaking beds and on and on. So a day like today, when we cleaned everything, feels like a Saturday to me. I should have Sunday off, right? But no. Back to work.
It's just so odd that our bodies and our minds play those patterned, historic tricks on ourselves. As a kid, cleaning house meant tomorrow was a day off. As an adult, a real day off means you don't go to work and you can lounge around in your pajamas and eat chips and watch TV. But that rarely happens either. So this weird magnet in my mind and body that wants to draw me over to the 'traditional' weekend days off scenario is wrong. How can I re-program myself to accept a day off as just that? I don't yet know but am trying figure that out. I should be able to tame that feeling but at this point, I just have visions of another Margarita and no alarm in the morning. Fat chance of that!
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What was once a good idea is now laughable and sometimes pathetic. Years ago, years and years ago, in SF, when you had something of value that you no longer needed, you would put it on the street. Often it was gone in minutes. Chairs, tables, sofas, bookcases, TVs, stereos, posters. Not so much kitchen stuff or clothes or tools. But it was a nice way to pass on possessions that still had life, just a life that you no longer wanted to be part of.
When I moved from Inverness in 2010, I did the same thing. Not that Inverness is a city like SF (god forbid!) but there are still people there that appreciate good castoffs. A printer, a small funky table (it had to be pretty funky for me to give a funky table away because I like funky tables) and a lamp and a mirror. Those are the main things I remember putting at the end of the driveway with a "FREE" sign. They went out one by one and they were taken one by one, quickly. I wanted to see who stopped, backed up and furtively dashed out of their car and grabbed the item, put it in the car and drove quickly away. Come on, it's Inverness, the land of "oh, we don't need more possessions" and yet, they did!
But this concept has devolved into something tawdry. We have all seen it: a bunch of really bad stuff sitting sadly on the side of the road with a "FREE" sign. Broken toys, bent window frames, warped particle board desks, televisions that are too heavy to lift and too old to want. The owners would be better off putting a sign on these things that reads "Dump run? Please help!" Because most of the stuff is dump material. Who would want a picture frame with just three sides? Or a table with three legs? A bed headboard that looks like it has knife slashes through it? "Oh, yes, honey, let's stop and pick that up because Junior likes things that look..... distressed? Evil? Mean?"
Most of us have had yard sales and in the end we are sort of embarrassed about the detritus of our lives that we want to make money from. (bad sentence structure there) Sometimes, yes, there is a good piece of furniture, or some good dishes. The last yard sale I had, in Inverness, my neighbor came over and snatched up a very expensive suitcase (without wheels) and paid the price I was asking without blinking an eye. She knew it was worth it. In my momentary greed, of course, I thought "Damn, I should have charged more" but that thought was immediately replaced by "fifty bucks, excellent, and we're both happy!"
But I digress.
Whatever. Those piles of junk by the side of the road with the "FREE" sign on them? It's a sign of the times. I just hope the owners make a buck and then clear it all away, so there is space for the next person to parlay their junk into a buck.
Hope you have had a good Memorial Day holiday weekend. Remember something memorable.
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Last spring I watched an elderly man, probably in his 80's, work on pruning his tree. His house is on a busy street in my neighborhood and his tree was at the sidewalk. He had a long-handled pruning saw and over a few days he sawed off several branches. He was doing all the work by himself and eventually he had it pruned the way he wanted it.
Yesterday I passed by him early in the morning when I was on my way to work. All the branches of the tree had been removed. There was only the trunk, about 8 feet tall. The man was on his hands and knees, on the sidewalk, with a short-handled pruning saw. He had already cut through half of the tree trunk and was, from what I could tell in the few seconds of passing him, trying make sure it was leveraged correctly so it would fall down in the appropriate spot. If he miscalulated, it could hit the front of the house and probably do some damage.
I wanted to drive around the block and watch him. I wanted to help. It's a big job, taking out a tree trunk. What would he do with it after it fell? He wasn't strong enough to carry it away all alone. Would he have to saw it into pieces? Would someone come and lend a hand? Why was he cutting it down in the first place? He's an old man, on his hands and knees, on the concrete at 7:15 in the morning, trying to move a tree. It made me incredibly sad.
Today the tree is gone; there's just a little stump a few inches above dirt level. The job got done. I still wished I had stopped.
That's going to be the title of my new book that will be hitting bookstores sometime this century. Or it could be called "Whiskey. Bacon. Dogs." because who doesn't like any of those things and they are all hot in the book selling business right now. Probably doesn't even matter what the book is about, if you put whiskey or dogs or bacon or pig in the title, people pick it up.
But my book will not have a talking dog, no worries. As much as I enjoyed "The Art of Racing in the Rain" with the dog as the narrator, one of those books is all anyone will tolerate. But I might have a talking pig, see the world through a pig's eyes: trotters and pig ears and bacon and pork belly and tenderloin and chops and salt pork just to name a few of the indignities a pig must contemplate while mulling over its life options. At least people don't have to think in those terms. But we have other mulling-over subjects that pigs don't have like taxes and depression and rent and prison and speeding tickets and diarrhea. (Maybe pigs have that last one, I am not sure.) So it's a draw, I guess.
Gabe told me that when he was in Bali he saw a sign in a restaurant that said Eat. Pay. Leave. So much for Eat. Pray. Love. Which is fine, because it was a pretty lame book, so the pay and leave sign is a little better, at least in my opinion.
Drink. Swear. Tolerate. I do those things all the time so the book I will be writing will be non-fiction, unless I change it into a story about my imaginary friends, of which I have several. Then it will be fiction with a non-fiction title. And even if I have that title, there will be a picture of a cute dog or a cute pig on the cover. Or maybe a picture of bacon. Scratch-and-sniff bacon. Everyone would buy that book.
Time to tolerate my drinking with some swearing. Later....
Mother's Day has always made me feel a little uncomfortable, at least 90% of the time. When my kids were little and made me hand-written cards on folded typing paper, I liked it. But it was because I loved those cards and my kids still loved me at that point. (They still do, now and then.) As a kid myself, I always felt it was for someone elses mom, ours never seemed the kind you would buy a card for. Hallmark didn't make cards that said "Happy Mother's Day. I hope your evil twin is not in residence today, I hope it's the nice doppelganger." Or "Dear Mom, we all hope that just for today we are not the disappointments we always seem to be to you." You get the drift. As I got older, it was difficult to find a card that didn't wax poetic about how great the Mom was. I simply wasn't a fan of pretending I had a happy childhood and there weren't too many greeting cards that addressed that issue.
Now my kids are grown and unfortunately they no longer make little hand-written cards on folded typing paper. But they do call and that's a good thing. To all mothers out there (if any of them ever read this) I hope you had a happy day.
Onward.
Money: I am a frugal person, I don't spend a lot of money on what I would call frivolous things. I don't buy a lot of clothes, furniture, gadgets, books, jewelry, fancy food.... my spending habits are pretty boring. But lately I am spending money like I actually had some! Oh, sure, let's buy six bottles of that delicious Grenache because it's the last year this winery is making it! Of course I should buy some warm weather shirts because the warm weather is upon us! Why not stop at the Last Record Store here in Santa Rosa and pick up a couple of CD's I have wanted for a few weeks? Sure, the dogs could use some new squeaky dog toys that will last about 10 minutes before being ripped apart, let's buy those! Groceries, there goes $60 dollars. Pedicure, why not! ACK! I need to stop! It's like the less money I feel I have the more stuff I need to purchase. Take a deep breath and put the credit card away, only to be taken out for gas for the car. Everything else, cash. No cash? No purchase! That simple. God knows I could eat out of the pantry for a few weeks, or the freezer, or skip a few meals. OK. Good. Got that settled.
Work: I don't write much about work here because blogs are a kind of social media and I have no idea if the people I work with (or for) ever read blogs and if they do, might they ever read mine? The odds of that seem so ridiculously small that I am breaking my rule right now and spilling some beans about work. Can we say Drama? I swear, lesbians have nothing in the drama department compared to my fellow hotel workers. (Well, that's an overstatement. Lesbian Drama tops all drama, especially since I live with one and she was a drama queen way before she was a lesbian, so there's a double whammy right there! Thank goodness she NEVER reads this blog!) But seriously, all the whining and the complaining and the niggling little back-biting that is going on at work right now makes me want to shake my fists and scream "STOP IT! SHUT THE FUCK UP!" It's like working with a class of fourth graders: this one doesn't like that one because the other one likes the first one and the third one feels left out and she was mean to him and he didn't like that and on and on. It will all fade away, of course, and some other silliness will replace this pre-adolescent preoccupation with perceived personal slights. I just hope that happens pretty soon before I have to slap some people.
Finally, it's a beautiful day. The weather is suppose to heat up this week (which is why I had to buy some new shirts, right?) but at this moment, it's lovely. I am alone tonight (happily) and have a nice rib eye steak that I will grill and there is a delicious bottle of red wine waiting to be opened (perhaps one of the afore mentioned Grenache!) and some random thing to watch on TV. Then tomorrow it's up at 5:45 and the week begins again. I don't usually have weekends off, it never matters to me to have my weekend on Saturday and Sunday, but that's how it worked out this time. So Happy Weekend, Happy Day of Mom's and Happy Monday to you all. Thanks for reading.
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Two years ago I read "The Expats" by Chris Pavone, his first novel. I may have written about it on this blog. It was good: some seemingly everyday people who were actually operatives in a CIA-like organization that took time away from their ordinary lives raising kids, buying groceries, etc, to kill people when the need arose. The premise was incredibly far-fetched but Pavone made it work and the result was a fast-paced thriller that tossed surprises at the reader like lighted matches at a pile of paper.
Now Pavone's second novel has arrived: "The Accident." It's even more of an off-beat, page-turning thriller with a cast of characters that grows until you can't remember who is important but it doesn't matter because a lot of them get killed off along the way. (Don't worry, no spoiler alert there.) A manuscript that will ruin a prominent media mogul (think Ted Turner times 100) falls into the hands of a book publisher/agent and the fun begins. Someone wants the book published, many people want it to vanish. Powerful people will do anything to keep it quiet, including murdering anyone who has seen or read even a part of it.
Give up remembering who is who; there are maybe four characters that stay the course and are the backbone of the book. Seriously, it's like popcorn, you can't stop reading it. You'll get through it in two days if there is nothing good on TV to watch. Don't buy it, once you read it you'll never read it again, so borrow it from the library (or from some fool who did actually purchase it) and enjoy it like you would enjoy a pint of Ben and Jerry's Cherry Garcia, late at night, with one spoon. It's that delicious and that wrong. All calories, no substance but so enjoyable while it lasts. It's how I spent my Friday evening and Saturday afternoon and it was much, much better than a date, blind or otherwise.
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When I read the reviews of this book, I initially thought "No way!" It's about teenagers (sullen, unappealing) who have cancer (teary, Kleenex, maudlin) and who fall in love (oh, great, Hallmark cards, death and all that.) Who would want to read a book about sick teenagers in love who probably die? Not me.
Thus, I am uncertain how this book ended up in my hands. It's from the library but I don't remember putting it on my request list but I must have read at least one review that got past all the above and touted it's virtues regardless of subject matter. And I am glad I read it. Yes, it's about the love-sick, cancer-and-angst-ridden teenagers who might die, but it avoids most of the cliches and rises above what it could have been.
Smart kids, smart dialogue, witty, some plot contrivance that is acceptable, a not-altogether happy ending but hey, in a book about cancer kids, someone's gotta die, right? It's a quick read and worth checking out. Some truths about life, some quirkiness about dying, basically a simple and good story. "You don't get to chose if you get hurt in this world but you do have a say in who hurts you."
And wait, I was looking up where the title comes from (it's from Shakespeare) and it turns out they are making a movie out of it! Oh, that will be all the above: weepy, Hallmark Card, maudlin and no doubt sad. Read the book instead.
OK, you are in an Argentine restaurant and they put that small bowl of green stuff on your table and .. WAIT, you say! What Argentine restaurant? What small bowl of green stuff? WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?
OK, calm down. Chimichurri. That's what it is, and if you have never been to an Argentine restaurant or have had a small bowl of green stuff on your table, you have led a sheltered life. Get out there! Be adventurous in your food choices. Eat outside of your comfort zone.
Or not, I don't care, but you should really know about chimichurri sauce and most of you already do. It's very simple. Chopped flat leaf parsley, about a cup. A big clove of garlic, minced. A squeeze of a lemon, which would be a couple of tablespoons, about a half cup good olive oil, some salt. And the best: about a teaspoon of dried red chili flakes. Stir up. Taste. Let set for about a half hour. Taste again. It should be bold, hot with the red pepper flakes and the garlic.
Today was hot here in Santa Rosa, I grilled a long piece of flat iron steak that I had simply rubbed with a dry rub and let set for an hour or so. Grilled for 3 minutes on a side over a hot fire, let it set for 10 minutes. With the chimichurri drizzled over, it was perfect. And no vampires will bother me tonight. I breathed on the dogs, in their faces, and they both turned away. That's when you know you have hit that garlic mark, when even the dogs are appalled. It's a good thing.
Seriously, the chimichurri is good on any protein. Make it spicy. The serenity of the parsley evens it all out. Trust me. The Argentinians invented the tango. And Chimichurri. They are correct on both counts.
Grill away.
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