Where the Hell is My Blog?

This is a test. I haven't been able to access Sneezy & Tacky for the last four days.

The Ghost of John Muir Cries

We went to Yosemite this weekend, this long Easter weekend. (Be like Mr. Bir Toujour and pronounce it "yoss-MITE.") I'd never been but always wanted to. In a proir incarnation, Lefty Bir was a rough-and-tumble nature gal who went on 26-mile day hikes, fueled on nothing but brackish water and pounds of GORP. Often the lack of a map or the misuse of a map was involved, but I always made it through. In such a manner I accomplished the summiting of Grand Teton, the physical feat I am most proud on in my life (and I don't think I'll ever top it with anything else, which is sad and comforting all at the same time).

Anyhow. Now I am soft, with a spongey tummy and a flabbier ass (my legs are still nice and shapely, but who knows how much longer that will last). I used to go on runs of multiple hours, traversing miles of trails, roads, and sidewalks across neighborhoods. Now I am happy when I run 3.4 miles in light spring rain at dusk, when I used to run in the snow in the dark. I am a wuss, but maybe I'm smarter now, too.

Hiking and camping, to me, is more enjoyable when it involves a lot of work--comfortable work, not work in snow or rain. And not ill-fitted backpacks. These criteria eliminate 3/4 of all camping and backpacking adventures right there (hence why I prefer day hikes).

On this trip, which was quite generously planned and executed by my bother and his girlfriend, we car camped in Yosemite Valley. It's almost April, but there's still snow blanketing much of Yosemite, so hiking and camping options are more limited. No matter--tons of folks had the bright idea to celebrate the rising of the Lord by invading the Valley over the weekend. TONS of FOLKS.

Yosemite is so beautiful--duh, it's a total given. Another given it the level of human traffic in and out of the Valley. Jesus, it's like a little Disneyworld down there. I think that the park's most impressive physical features are all visible in this one span of 15 driveable miles or so somewhat damned the land. Yellowstone has a similar nature/amusement park-ness to it, but it's a larger park and it's attractions--geysers, hot springs, peaks, waterfalls--are more spread-out, and thus not as much a cause for concentrated development and congestion.

Yosemite Valley is almost so amazing that it seems fake. And for every breathtaking mass of granite, there's a pile of litter, a cheesy gift shop, a shuttle bus burping fumes, overdressed tourist families arguing. These latter forces kept on overpowirng the former, the awesome geography of the place that will be there once we humans all kill each other off. It's like seeing a really great movie but having everyone in the theater talking the whole time.

Maybe we will go back some day, some day when the snow is melted and we can access the more remote, quiet parts of the park. Even with all of the people (and I am one of "those people", so I sould be quiet), it was a wonderful time. For now, here I am back in the Bay Area metropolis, feeling bad for John Muir, and eveyone else in the world who prefers things unspoiled.

Apple C

Bryan,

Yeah, I had fun on Saturday. Thanks to you and Maritza for playing host. I tried to trick Joe into thinking that the blue sweater Maritza gave me was actually for him, but I only fooled him for a minute.

The CD is good, maybe the best you have made me so far. Joe likes the Eno song, but he then said "why is there so much rap on this mix?"

I should have brought the CD to work today so I could listen to it. I'm dragging this morning. It's been an interesting week so far. We had a photo shoot in SF for an upcoming Scharffen Berger catalog. It was fun, but a lot of hard work. I was the assistant stylist. This meant I made a chocolate cake, heated up sauce and hot cocoa, rolled truffles...it sounds simple, but somehow it required a full day of standing and scrambling. Photo shoots are fun, I'd be into being a food stylist.

There were a bunch of us there: my manager, the in-house designer, the catalog designer, the photographer, his assistant, the stylist, and me. It was a long day because we had to take 7 complicated shots. 5 in a day is pushing it. But we got everything done without a glitch.

Once we got home from SF, plans were made to go out to Oliveto on the company 's dime. I was beat and really wanted to go home and eat leftover stir-fry and watch Netflix, but you'd have to be a lunatic to pass up a free dinner at Oliveto. I've always wanted to go, and this was my chance...for free! I went home in a fog, threw down my crap, undressed in the hallway, and took a very invigorating shower. Then I read the New Yorker in bed, then Joe came in fomr his walk. "There's a line of crap from the door to you," he said. I was still too tired to pick it up.

Eventually I rallied and made it to the restaurant. Most everyone had cocktails, but I had a nice glass of white wine (some blend of Sauvignon Blanc and Chardonny, odd-sounding but good) and then a bunch of food. My leg of lamb smelled like the spice blend in Kentucky Fried Chicken. I failed to share this observation with the rest of the table.

We ate tons of food. I had only one other glass of wine, but the kitchen sent out plates of very rich pasta (shrimp ravioli and some kind of bucatini with a game sauce) and eventually some desserts. Driving home, I had a very serious BM urge. It stayed with me stongly until I rushed through our apartment door and took a huge, messy, and really stinky poo.

I had awful gas all night long. Joe said my breath smelled awful, too, even though I'd brushed my teeth and rinsed with Cinnamon Act. The ghastly after-vapors of Oliveto were plaguing me from both ends. I had a hard time getting up today.

A Band I Like

We saw my favorite band play on Friday night. I had been looking forward to it for months; I hardly have any favorite bands anymore--at least the kind that are currently performing and recording music. It makes me feel like a snob, not liking 99% of all new music. (Well, that's an exaggeration--I am indifferent to 50% of all new music). I get so picky because everything sounds the same to me. Why listen to a band that sounds like Joy Division or Blondie when you can hear the real thing?

No band sounds like Oneida, though. I'm not sure if any band would want to sound like Oneida, actually. They've been around for ten years, but I only became aware of them when they opened for Kinski at Bottom of the Hill about two years ago. We were only there for the Kinski; I hadn't even paid attention to the opening bands. A bunch of us were sitting in the pool table area chatting it up and waiting for Kinski to start when this blaring, choppy organ drone started up...and didn't stop. It was all messed up, semi-tuneless shout-singing and spazzy bleats of guitar and keyboard. Plus it was LOUD, and that's always good. I'm constantly hoping I'll get smacked with a good wall of sound at a show.

Oneida is more like a billy club of sound, arty-druggy and, as Glenn Danzig would say, really HEAVY. I became obsessed with them that night, at how much noise they could wrangle up for a three-piece (drums, bass, guitar). They once had, like, five or six members, I think, and they used to be more straight-ahead blues/psychedelia with a hugely dorky overtones.

I have most of Oneida's recorded output, now. I don't listen to them as much as I do other stuff, because a little Oneida goes a long way. It's like the difference between prosecco and grappa.

The last time Oneida toured in California, I was in Mexico. Okay, I'd rather be in Mexico, but still. I was pissed. (hmm, I'm going to finish this later...)

Measured by Glass

(Note: I may be drunk, but I'm a shitty typist, drunk or sober, and in respite to my occupation, I don't proofread bloggy. It's all fuckin' STRAIGT UP hardcore typos.)

A few weeks ago, our my brother and his girlfriend and our friend Todd came over for dinner. Todd brought along two bottles of red wine, and I could tell they were good ones. "Good" wine to me is, like, a bottle that coasts over $20 bucks. Back when I was in cooking school, I was really into good wines. Kick-ass wines were part of our tuition, actually, so once I got into the real world and had to pony up the the cash at the register of the wine shop on the wadge of a part-time catering worker, my passion for fine wines cooled. There are plenty of drinkable wines out there for under$10 (2 Buck Chuck is always drinkable, rarely enjoyable), but I'm prettyy convinced that you gotta put down a 20-spot--at least--to have some of your socks knocked off.

After that dinner, there was still one bottle of wine left. *That* was the one I wanted to drink most, and I figured it made sense to save it (1999 Mount Veeder Cab, if that means anything to you--not like it does to me, but it was the older of the two wines Todd brought) for later in the meal...but we had a few beer and water drinkers with us, so the Mount Veeder was never cracked open. Todd very generously left it with us.

This bottle of wine had been hanging out with us for two weeks. Every night I considered cracking it open. "We're having meatloaf tonight, it'll be perfect" (no, it wouldn't)..."I'm going to write tonight, the wine will make it better" (no, it wont'; I'll fall asleep at 9:45 and write nothing).

Tonight I gave in. Mr. Bir Toujour is at band practice, leaving me on my own to stew in created juices. Or get potted, or both. Even though I went to the grocry store just yesterday, we have no food. I wound up cooking 1/2 pound of linguine and tossing it with tinned marinara sauce, diced pepperoni, bell peppers, onion, and mushrooms. The whole works was dumped into the cast-iron skillet, piled with the remaining contents of a bag of pre-shredded mozerella cheese, and baked at, like, 450 degrees for 10 minutes. "This calls for red wine!" Pasta, whatever. What an escuse.

Anyhoo, this wine rocks. I'm going to drink as much as I can until I pass out. Usually I dont care for Cabernet Sauvignon, but this is nice. Good, real good, a big berry punch followed by tannic grip, a quick burst of acid, and...ahh, I dunno. There's an arc of wine. Mine lasts about three glasses. If I'm drinking good wine, the third glass is the glass of clarity, where all of its charecteristics reveal themselves so clearly. The third glass makes you feel smart, perceptive, classy. The fourth glass...well, at that point, good wine tastes good. Mediocre wine tastes fine. "Woo-hoo, bring on more wine!" That's the prevailing thought.

In my cooking school days, I drank a lot--for me. I bought Tanqueray in the big bottle with the handle because it was cheaper. If I was drinking wine, it meant a *bottle * of wine. Probably 50% of my petty expenses were devoted to alcohol. I miss those days, days of Lillet on ice with an orange slice in the middle of the day. Always a bottle of Lillet in the mini-refrigerator in the dorm room. It's like the snobby version of a frat boy and his Bud Lite. I smoked, too, rolled my own Drum tobacco. Smoked and drank. All during cooking school, I lived off of coffee, cigarettes, beer, wine, gin, and butter. I probably burned 5,000 calories a day, too, which I sure as hell don't do now. I also banged out some pretty shitty drunk meanderings on my Royal typewriter. For a while, I tried to master the art of drinking, smoking, and typing simultaniosly. It didn't work--soggy cigarettes, sloppy dribbles of red wine or gin & tonics all over the tying paper, drunken poseur crap porose about being horny and pissed--but it was fun.

I have a laptop now. That and a bottle of red wine 3/4 empty. About half an hour ago, I tried to pour myself another glass, and I wound up pouring it into the cobalt blue water goblet. Realizing the mistake, I dumped the whole backwash-tainted mess intoy wine glass. Tonight, it's just me, the wine, the laptop, OMD, and bloggy. Criminy, how life has changed.

The Missing Sleeper

I slept in the middle of the bed last night. Mr. Bir Toujour was gone, and I was trying to fill up the space. I made a cascade of extra pillows to prop up my head and I stayed up until after midnight, reading. It was heavenly.

But I realized once the lights were out that I always sleep in the middle of the bed--or at least it ends up that way. It's cold in our room. I like to be close to Mr. Bir Toujour, who is so soft and warm. He's pointy, too, with bony knees, elbows, and ankles, and I miss his unintentional little pokes.

Before we moved in together--and way before that, before we even dated--I slept in my own double bed. I filled the extra space up with pillows, blankets, and the same stuffed dog and bear I've had since I was seven. Somehow, all of that stuff only made the bed seem bigger, more empty. I used to spend a lot of time sleeping in, imagining how nice it would be to have someone else there next to me.

That all seems so far away now. I can't imagine what it's like for someone if their spouse dies, or they get a divorce after years of marriage. I think humans were made to sleep together (well, at least I think that in the winter, when it's cold and too expensive to turn on the heat).

I sleep in the middle of the bed because as the night progresses, I edge closer and closer to Mr. Bir Toujour. Sometimes I wish I could crawl inside of him and float, be inside of him like he's a jacket. But instead I keep on edging over, until he only had a few inches left on his side.

Mr. Bir Toujur comes back today; he was only gone overnight. He's been gone longer, and so have I. Tonight I won't be as comfortable reading in bed, and I won't have that happy sadness of him being gone. I'll still sleep in the middle of the bed, though.

Wrong

(So the "enter" button is not functioning on my new laptop. Smashing! Please just go with the, ahem, *flow* here. Pretend you're reading Kerouak.)...I had a dream this morning that a friend of mine wrote an article about me. The article was an interview with totally fabricated "quotes" about my career of and passion for growing organic heirloom tomatoes, and it was published in a science or natural foods journal...In the dream, the article was bemusing to me. I guess fallacies about me growing tomatoes don't really matter to me, since I don't have any tomato-growing reputation to uphold...I've probably written about 1000 factual errors into my articles n the real world, though. I know this because I didn't go to journalism school or anything, and so no ethos of fact-cheking was drilled into my skull. I just turned my artilces in, assuming everything was right. That's what I've come to realize is the cause of almost all printed mistakes--assumptions. I simply does not occurr to the writers or editors that a given fact could be either inaccurate or just plain wrong...I still write for an alternative weekly (the North Bay Bohemian, check it out, www.bohemian.com). For a while I was staff writer there, and I churned out copy like a Chinese factory. At the time, we were of fairly limited rescources (I was THE staff writer, as in the only writer on staff--it's still that way, too, only there's a new staff writer). We had a part-time copy editor/fact-checker, and then a freelance proofreader who came in oncwe a week. The copy editor did his best, and he caught many a potentially horrendous mistake...But he couldn't catch them all. I shudder to think of some of the crap that's gotten into that paper on my account. It's not malicious, just the combined result of laziness and/or oblivousness. Even the alt-weeklies with the best reputations in the country have to print tons of corrections. (This, I think, is partially because of limited resourcves, and partially because they take on material that's more contraversial, and also in greater depth, than mainstream papers.)...But now that I work at the chocolate maker, I see the other side of the story. For a company that does not actively chase it, we get tons of media exposure--glossy magazines, TV mornign news programs, nationally sydicated newspaper services. Last week we got a huge-ass box of press clipping from our PR service (who, I'll admit, don't otherwise lift a finger). Two small children could have fit into this box. I waded through its contents, sorting them out across our massive conference-room table. Most of the articles were duplicates from syndicates, and I threw them away...Dude, though, these articles suck. They just don't get it. Half of them have headlines like "For the Love of Chocolate" of "Passion of Chocolate"--banal crap that any idiot could vomit up. The gist of these articles is always something like "gee, chocolate is great, and now, chocolate is even greater! Isn't that sweet? Har har!"...Yick. It serves as a good reminder of why I'll only pitch or accept stories that are of deep interest to me, because I don't want to disserveice my readers, my subject, or myself by sounding like some dippy hack...You would not belive the errors in these stories. Chocolate and cacao growing is such a complex subject--it practically begs for error, in fact. So it's hard to gloss over 3,000 years of history and do a decent job. I've seen few writers do it right. There's this dude, Mort Rosenblum, who jusr came out with a book called "Chocolate: A Bittersweet Saga", and it's peppered with stuff that's just plain wrong. (Speaking of wrong, his name my not be Rosenblum, so *I* might be the wrong one, too). This dude used to edit some big fancy international paper, so you'd think he'd know the importants of getting the facts right. And I bet his heart is in the right place, but perhaps Rosenblum's head is too big a match for it. The dude straight-up makes shit up, just for the sake of appearing clever...It's good for me to be exposed to all of this. Every time I write an article, I owe it to the world for it to be a correct as I can make it. The sting of messing up the details of someone's life still pricks me now and then, even if it's been several years since the offending article appeared. It's a crappy way to learn, and it's only mildly effective (how soon we forget! oh, the terrible cycle!)...And I'm sure I'll be wrong 1000 more times this ear. But at least I'm prepared for it.

The Kind of Pretend I Don't Play

It’s Friday afternoon. Friday afternoon after lunch. Half of the office went out to this taqueria today. The scope of lunch-breaking was unprecedented. We were gone forever. It seemed like hours…maybe it wasn’t, but geez! This is the third day in a row that I’ve gone out for lunch with co-workers and have some tipple (if you can call wine or beer tipple).

I need to stop such shenanigans. If I’m going to slack at work, it’s going to be slacking that’s constructive to my own personal pursuits—like writing freelance articles, checking my email, planning my honeymoon. I’m a bad socializer, especially on the clock. I like to keep my slacking to myself.

Today’s lunch was too much. After eating about half of the world’s most oversized tostada, I wasn’t in the mood to yuck it up with flaccid work chat. It’s gorgeous outside today, like a summer preview in March, and I was feeling way too full and especially restless.

No one would get up. I walked around the block twice, and then I walked about six blocks back to work before everyone finally left the restaurant and picked my up. I guess I’m rude. But I’m not into jerking off just for the sake of filling in those 40 blank hours of the work week. I’d rather just go home and use the time in my own way. That’s not the kind of pretend I like to play.

Poison Oak (on My Face)

This weekend Mr. Bir Toujour and I went on a lovely little walkabout over the Marin Headlands: rolling grassy bluffs, breathtaking beach cliffs, and the corroded, collapsing abandoned batteries of Fort Cronkite. Omega Man meets John Muir.

So that was all well and good. But here I am, four days later, and I have poison oak on my forehead. The Headlands are not a very wooded area; there are grasses, weeds, shrubs. And, apparently, a little bit of poison oak. I have come to find that if there is poison oak or poison ivy in a 100-mile area, I will somehow track it down and not leave the premessis without making physical contact.

Last night an itch in the crook of my elbow woke me up, and I picked at it on and off in the ignorance of my slumber. Only in waking up did I inspect the botchy red pinpricks and realize "oh, shit." THEN I looked in the mirror and saw my lovely face, a cruel acne-like smear of poison oak marring my forehead.

It's been worse--not the extent of the rash, I mean, but its placement. Shortly after moving to California I got a very concentrated case of poison oak on my upper lip. It was a seeping mess of amber sap, right between my nose and lip. It broke reallly badly in the airport as I was waiting for a flight to San Diego to visit my aunt.

We had fun: eating fish tacos, drinking beer at a cheesy beer festival, walking on the beach. But the highlight was meeting Julia Child, who was touring to support her latest book, "Jaques and Julia Cooking at Home." We stood in line at a bookstore with a hundred dedicated fans. The woman directly in front of us had written this long love letter to Julia, saying how much her shows and books meant to her, how much they had changed her life.

Well, duh--everyone loves Juila Child. She's changed everone's life. Still a towering presence (even while seated and stooped over with age), Julia was a model of generosity and professionalism, gracefully personable but in always control. The bookstore staff had told us how she signed books for hours, and that the book tour had been going for days without a break for Julia. "Younger, way less famous writers don't have the stamina that she does," they told us.

Aunt Sharon was more excited than I was. I wanted to be a hassle-free fan for Julia, to walk up, look right at her and smile, let her know my name, patiently wait while she signed my book, and then efficiently move on so that the next guest could get their Juila Time. Aunt Sahron loves me a lot, though: she's really proud of me, and she wasn't about to let me meet Julia Child without having her fair share of boasting.

"Sara graduated from the CIA!" she said as I sat down. "She wants to be a food writer!"

Oh, jeez, I thought, embarassed. But Julia sat me down, all business. "Oh! Well, well, that's wonderful. Are you a member of the IACP?" (You must, of course, imagine this in the proper Julia Child voice.)

"IACP?" I said. "Um, no."

"What you've got to do is...oh, does anyone have a piece of paper?" In about three seconds, a dozen Julia groupies had produced scraps of paper. She took one and began writing. "IACP--the International Association of Food Professionals. They have a website, look at it. What you've got to do is join the IACP. And most importantly, just do it! Write and write and don't stop."

Whoa. Julia Child, who didn't know me at all, just gave me great advide that I didn't even ask for. She was totally sincere. Julia Child cared about my future! This could be one of the defining moments of my life.

But what was I thinking? My mind was on....my upper lip! My gross, drippy, blotchy red yellow-scabbed upper lip. "Oh, Christ, Julia Child must be so grossed out by my upper lip," I thought. I was not in the moment at all.

I never did join the IACP, but I guess that I can be considered a food writer now, especially since I work in the marketing department on America's premier artisinal chocolate maker (Julia always was a fan of Scharffen Berger). The poison oak on my forehead isn't as bad now as my upper lip was then, and I'm not set to meet anyone famous anytime soon. But I could be.

SofaCycle

The sofa sat on the sidewalk under a bright blue cloudless sky, a butcher-paper sign reading FREE pinned to its back cushions. The young couple walking by can't belive their luck: such good condition! The arms so firm, the seats so broad, the flower-embroidered upholsterly so clean. The couple scurries to claim the sofa before it vanishes. They load it into the back of a friend's truck and haul it across town, fenagle it into the tight hallways and acute angled doorways of their apartment.

But once inside and positioned exactly in the center of the living room, the sofa emits a pungent aroma, whisps of potpourri mingled with basement mildew, perfumed talcum powder, and rest-home decay. The smell rises up, invisible but undeniable. It wakes the couple in the midlde of the night, and by dawn the next day, there is a sofa on the sidewalk under a just-blossoming sky, a butcher-paper sign reading FREE pinned to its back cushions. The man walking by can't belive his luck, and he becomes the next link in an eternal chain of a sofa that will never find a home.

Yup, Rain Still Sucks

(Note: The folowing notes are for an article I'm working on wherein I cook nothing but recipes from Betty Crocker's 1962 "Good and Easy" cookbook for one week. Every night after dinner I've been recording observations and reactions...but last night I was too sleepy. Today I's going to be my blog entry.)

Day 4: Sweet Lemon Spareribs, Creamy Coleslaw, Hurry-Up Potatoes

Sweet Lemon Spareribs were attractive because of the shock value, in that the main ingredient (other than pork ribs) was a can of frozen lemonade concentrate. This has been done before: cocktail meatballs in a sauce of grape jelly, cakes made with tomato soup, ham braised in Coca-Cola. The latter I am especially fond, of, though, so repeating the pork-prepared beverage concept held promise.

The method called for simmering the ribs in water for an hour, draining them, and adding the can of lemonade concentrate plus two cans of water, along with assorted tablespoons of catsup, soy sauce, and vinegar. Then simmer for an hour.

Looking into the pool of thinnish orange-red liquid bubbling away, it seemed a little...watery. A little investigation reveled that I had used a 12-ounce can of frozen lemonade concentrate, not the perscribed 6-ounce can. Hmm. I figured I'd just double the sauce ingredients so that instead of winding up with a sauce that was twice as sweet, I'd wind up with twice as much sauce.

Meanwhile, I made the coleslaw. It was like normal Mom-stlye coleslaw, very reassuring and comforting. Hurry-Up Potatoes I was much more skeptical of. The recipe called for paring potatoes, slicing them thinly, brushing them with melted shortenng, and broiling them for about 6 minutes a side. This, to me, sounded like a shortcut to bland, semi-raw potatoes. So I par-baked them (whole, as imagining the crispy potoato skin to come), *then* sliced them thinly, and then brushed them not with melted shortening, but butter (shortening is good for some things, but melting and brushing across potatoes is not one of them).

Not long into the broiling process, glowing red embers of potato skin proved the need for paring the potatoes. A few open windows, though, and the smoke was remidied.
The Verdict: Our dinner guests were much pleased by all items on the menu, but the Sweet Lemon Spare Ribs were clearly the hit. "These taste like lemonade" was a common sentiment. Another good reference point is lemon chicken, that gooey yelow favorite of Chinese take-out menus. The slow-cooked, melt-in-mouth porky richness really came through, though. Hurry-Up Potaotes I was vastly pleased with as well, despite the flaming bits of skin: their surfaces were a wonderfully crisp goldren brwon, and thier interiors had a hint of that fluffy, flourey baked potato flavor. Creamy Cole Slaw: tasted like cole slaw. We all had seconds.

Day 5: I am in the early stages of meat fatigue.

Clothing of the Past, Lost Forever

The other day, my friend Gabe we wearing these denim painter's pants. He roasts cacao beans here at the chocolate factory, and it's a very brown, dusty job. Usually he wears all black, and he's a brown-and-black smudge by the end of the day.

"Why aren't you wearing black today?" I asked him.

"Tonight's laundy night," he said. "These are the only clean clothes I have."

I used to have a pair of Osk Kosh B'Gosh denim painter's pants. I think I got them at a clothing outlet for $8 back when I was stillliving in da Marighetto, maybe about...oh, shit...*nine* years ago. They were good pants, sturdy but comfortable, and even though they were kinda baggy, they fit pretty well. I remember wearing them to work at the donut shop in Bexley, and having them in Yellowstone and wearing them on my day off. My old boyfriend Daniel gave me a "Marietta River Race Days" patch, which I sewed onto the back pocket.

I know I had those pants when I moved out here, but at some point I got rid of them. Maybe I thought they were too baggy, or too trashy. At that point I didn't like them anymore, I guess. I didn't think I needed them.

Seeing Gabe's pants made me remember my denim painter's pants, my denim Osk Kosh B'Gosh painter's pants. I missed them. If I still had those pants, I'd probably wear them around the house on the weekends while I was cleaning and baking and crap like that. I always wear unfeminine pants on the weekends.

I'm not a pack rat. I do save things, yeah, but I also like to get rid of stuff--especially clothing. Sometimes I go a little overboard. I only have one trading shirt from my old crew team days in high school, and I easily had over a dozen at one point. I want those shirts back. That and the red thermal weave Sear's kid-size long underwear top I wore under t-shirts in high school all of the time...my Fishbone shirt, the one Brown gave me...that stretchy fitted Esprit top with the pattern of unidentifiable fruit all over it...my black and red low-top Chuck Taylor All-Stars that Mom got at Odd Lots...the red calico dress that Mom made for me when I was five...Grandpa Bir's floppy green felt hat, the one I sold to the consignment shop for $5...

All of those clothes are way cooler than the ones I wear now. I wish I had them back, the skinny-as-a-bone version of me from back then with my gross long hair and bad sense of outfit coordination. Where are those clothes now? In landfills, on the back of some South American way up in the mountains, shredded up and made into stuffing for cheap throw pillows? You have to learn to say goodbye to things. They are just clothes in real life, but in my mind they are markers where different memories begin and meld into other memories.

Last night Mr. Bir Toujour told me that Brent from Continental had died. I didn't know Brent very well--just in passing, really--but he was always chatty, the kind of guy who could talk to anyone about anything. We knew him from Continental, this band that's good pals with Mr. Bir Toujour's band. I liked Continental a lot. Brent played bass most of the time. He was a big guy--tall and big--and his bass kind of sat on the top of his belly when he played. Continental was a great band, and I always enjoyed seeing them live; I've probably seen them about ten times, in fact. Without Brent, there's no more Continental. He had heart failure. When he was 17 he'd had a heart transplant, and then he had another one when he was 23. I never knew any of this. I'm going to miss seeing Brent play bass. Now he's in that land of things lost to the tangible world, and he's floating around with Grandpa Bir's green felt hat and my five zillion crew trading shirts. I think everything's too small for him, except for the hat. He's kind of like my Grandpa Bir was; maybe he'll like the hat. I did.

Redheads Have the Softest Skin

It must be redhead season. I've been noticing more and more every day. They are out walking down the sidewalks, riding in the passenger seats of cars, sitting at the tables of cafes. You can spot them right away, of course, and I spot them faster than anyone.

Redheads, as a collective race, are my muse. They fascinate me. It's beyind any kind of preference, like "I like blondes" or "I like dark hair." True redheads are so rare, so different. I think most people--redheads included--don't properly appreciate these differences. But my redhead streak runs so deep that even quasi-redheads catch my eye. Even if the person is ugly--I just stare, stare at their hair (and, if applicable, freckles).

A few times a year, I seem to notice more redheads out and about. It's heavenly. Red hair is so amazing. Today I saw two and a half redheads (two true redheads and one quasi). Oh! It's pretty gross and fetishistic, I know. Creepy, maybe shallow--it's what is on the inside that counts, right? Well, yeah. But perhaps being a redheads runs more than skin deep, maybe.

Mr. Bir Toujour is a quasi-redhead. He has brownish-red hair and lots of freckles. He hates them. I wonder if he knows that every night when we go to bed, I am so happy to lay next to the zillion freckes on his arms and face.