the underground

hookers from the 1800's.  look closely one of them is a man

Last weekend while a friend from Los Angeles was visiting, we decided to go take the Seattle Underground tour.  It was not my first time taking the tour, I’d gone with my parents some twenty years earlier, which basically meant that it was my first time.

If you’re not familiar with the Seattle Underground, this is a very brief explanation:

Because Seattle had been built on the Duwamish river delta, it was originally mostly soggy marsh lands.  The early settlers had constant problems with flooding from the marshes and the Elliot Bay tides, which could swing as much as ten feet.  After the city burned down in the Great Seattle Fire of 1889, architects were given a unique chance to rebuild the city from scratch, addressing the previous flooding problems.  Their solution was to raise the city above the flood levels, about ten feet.  Long story short, this created an underground city that was eventually abandoned.

If you wish to know more I suggest you go down to Pioneer Square and take the tour yourself.

After the tour was finished everyone seemed a little... disappointed is the wrong word, but if you were expecting to see some kind of incredible underworld city full of pale and dirty mole people you would leave sorely disappointed.  If you’ve ever gone into the crawl space of a house then essentially you’ve seen the Seattle Underground.  Perhaps the main reason to go is for the history lesson, and the tour guides bad humor.  If nothing else it serves as a public safety announcement that all of the old Pioneer Square buildings are being held up by little more than 120 year old moldy wood.

The next day I realized that this tour is the heart of Seattle, odd, quirky, full of toilet humor, hookers, and poorly thought out city planning (a Seattle institution).  The Yuppies have tried and failed over the decades to yuppify the city.  In the last ten years that movement has been strong and the gentrification of places like South Lake Union, the University District, and Capital Hill has turned these oddballs into condos, Starbucks, and Whole foods.

I do have hope however that the Undergrounds of Seattle will prevail and that eventually these Yuppie strongholds will fall.  Soon people in those condos will find themselves living above a peepshow, an artists colony, and a store full of taxidermied animals or Mummies and gag gifts.

Everyone still seemed at a loss for words to rationalize the $15 they spent on the tour.  I, on the other hand got it completely.  People don’t come to Seattle for the EMP or the Spaceneedle.  They come to hear a struggling actor spend an hour and a half talking about “crappers” from the 1800’s and pointing out dirt covered corridors where 100 years before hookers propositioned the geniuses who decided to build a city here in the first place.

six pack abs

ripped pants (embarrassing)

For years I had been blessed with a metabolism that allowed me to eat an entire pack of fun size Snickers washed down with a liter of Dr. Pepper and feel perfectly normal afterwards.  Despite the warnings of my mother and father I continued to eat this way until about five years ago when I noticed that my six pack abs had become six fleshy stomach rolls.

Because I don’t believe in “fad” diets I knew that the only way to get rid of those hilly rolls of flesh was a proper balance of less snickers (much less) and more exercise (much more).  The problem here being that I love Snickers and I hate exercising.

Whatever that endorphin rush is that people claim to get while working out... I don’t get it.  I get no thrill from pushing myself to do fifty pushups and not ten, nor do I find it a stress reliever to run seven miles.  For me the act of working out is one big orgy of awkward uncomfortableness.

I have had a membership at Bally’s for two years now and have used it for less than a quarter of that time.  The main reason I have a hard time is that whenever I go there I am forced to execute my pathetic workout amongst dozens of men and women who would rather exercise than eat an entire pizza by themselves.  I can practically hear them whisper to one another as I pass by;

“Why is that guy running like that?”

“Should someone tell him he’s doing that wrong?”

“Why is he so sweaty?”

“He’s going to hurt himself on that machine.”

This makes it easy for me to put off working out in favor of the eight thousand other things that I would prefer to do with my time.

I recently noticed that since moving back to Seattle, I have stored a fair bit of fat for the winter, or at least that’s the excuse that I am using.  Unfortunately this is all in the stomach region.  It is difficult to button my hipster skinny jeans and t-shirts which had looked good were beginning to look like I stole them from a baby. 

Then, the other day while walking out to the mail box I dropped a letter on the ground, when I bent down to pick it up my pants ripped.  Not a tiny tare, a rip from ass crack to taint seam.  This was the last straw, I needed to do something before I really embarrassed myself.

I am not alone in this weight gain, my dog has been packing on the pound and she could stand to lose that as well.  So under my wife’s watchful eyes, we will be dropping our winter fat stores.  Not for a glistening six pack like I had when I was eighteen, but rather just enough to make my pants fit again and maybe to erode those hilly rolls of flesh.

daily observation # 002

I hate phones!
I hate that they exist and that I am expected to use them. I hate dialing phone numbers, I hate ringtones, I hate talking into receivers. Their very existence aggravates me on a daily basis.
I love email. I love text messages. Why can't all conversations that don't occur in person take place in texts or emails?
I love my iPhone. I love everything it does, I just wish I could remove the phone function from it. That basically makes it an iPod touch, so instead let's remove the phone function from every device including phones.
There may also be a future observation called "I hate small talk."

daily observation # 001

It seems that my local NPR station (KUOW) really needs my money.  I say this because in listening to their current pledge drive it sounds as if they are still using classic rotary phones, three of them in fact and they each have a different pitch and only ring once.
Please support your local NPR station; help them upgrade to new phones.

when it rains it pours

this is rain in LA. (Look closely.)

In Los Angeles rain is rare, but when it does it comes like a waterfall.  Within minutes the streets become rushing rivers, parking lots become great lakes, and television channels are interrupted with warnings of flash floods.

Not long after our Vegas trip Jaime and I received a series of parking tickets from the ruthless iron fisted LA municipal parking police.  They can start out at $50 a pop and double when they go unpaid after the deadline.  Which makes sense because if you don’t have $50 today then it is much more likely that you’ll have $100 tomorrow, right?

Following the parking tickets Jaime discovered that LAMILL would be changing how employees collected tips.  Instead of individuals collecting tips on an individual basis, they would be pooling them and splitting them evenly.  For those of you who have not worked in the restaurant industry, for waiters who are less then stellar the pooling system is great.  For good waiters like Jaime who work hard and make their customers happy the pooling system can cause you to take a big hit in what you take home at night.

I was also having difficulties, struggling to scrape together at least thirty hours a week at Borders.  The writers strike had just ended in mid February and the hope was that there would be an exodus of guild writers going back to their jobs.  Unfortunately the four month strike turned out to be the death of many productions.  Shows that had been getting by on just the skin of their teeth got axed and there wasn’t an immediate need for tons of writers.

All of this was hardly enough to handle, but one morning while on break at work I got a call from Jaime.  I could tell from the worried tone of her voice that I was not going to like what she had to say.  She started with,

“You know how they say, ‘when it rains it pours?’”  To my knowledge no one has ever followed that sentence with, “well, I found $5 on the sidewalk then twenty minutes later I found a brief case with $5 million.”  Instead Jaime told me that she got a traffic ticket on her way home.

What happened was this:

After dropping me off at work Jaime was on her way back to the apartment when she stopped at a three way intersection outside a school.  If you’ve seen the Hangover you know what school I’m talking about.  It’s the one in the beginning, where we’re to believe that Bradley Cooper is a teacher.  What the movie doesn’t show you is that there is no parking lot for parents to wait and before and after school the place is an absolute mad house.

The intersection in question can easily be eight cars deep in all directions.  There are no crossing guards and kids stream into the crosswalk in a constant flow.  When it was Jaime’s turn to go, a pair of kids play fighting on the opposite side stumbled into the crosswalk.  They weren’t crossing and they weren’t near Jaime so she went.  About a block later a cop flipped on his lights and siren and pulled her over.

It was a bullshit ticket, for bullshit reasons, but the whole event was made worse by three factors.  The first was that we still had Washington plates, which as a resident you have two weeks to change.  The second was that she still had a Washington drivers license which also needs to be changed.  The third was that, while we had car insurance, our card was expired and we had no proof of current legitimate insurance.

He wrote Jaime up for not stopping for pedestrians in a crosswalk and expired car insurance.  He must have felt bad for her or could see the little back rain cloud following our car because he gave her a break on the license and the plates.  The ticket total was still nearly $1000, but he explained that it would be reduced significantly if she took her proof of insurance down to the court house.

By the time the ticket was due we had even more bad luck as our car broke down and had to be taken to the service shop to fix what ended up being five major problems that would occur immediately after moving to LA.  It felt like the cloud would never lift and we would wash away.

After it the rain LA’s dirt and dust covered wasteland begins to sprout green, the smog temporarily lifts and for a least a little while Angelinos appear to be happy and less self centered.

The ticket ended up costing us about $300, the parking tickets were paid and my parents generously paid for the car repairs.  While my situation a Borders would never get better, the tips situation at LAMILL did get better and soon Jaime was bringing home something resembling a livable wage.  It was a lesson to us, as long as you can sit back and wait out the rain the other side is always a bit greener.

tocophobia

this is a fetus 

I am a fearful person; I devote hours of my life to worrying about everything and then envisioning their worst case scenarios.  When I’ve sufficiently worried myself sick I move on to something else to worry about.

For about half my life there’s one phrase that tops that list of fears.

“I haven’t got my period yet.”

I am not alone in this, millions of men everywhere have the same fear.  That their wife or girlfriend or just some girl they met once at a party will come to them with the warning that her period has not yet come and that it is possible that she might be pregnant.

The other day Jaime uttered this phrase to me and my heart stopped, I got sick to my stomach and my mouth went bone dry.  This is my normal reaction, which I usually follow up with a question.

“Are you worried?”  I ask.

“No.” She replies.

Her answer doesn’t calm me because I wonder why she would mention that she hasn’t got her period if she wasn’t worried about it.  I will continue to worry and believe that surrounding me are signs of an impending pregnancy, at lease until I breathe a huge sigh of relief when she tells me that flow has come to town. (She’s never actually used that phrase before.)

At dinner that same night after nearly licking her plate clean and inquiring about more, I blurted out,

“Is this because you’re eating for two?”

“Do you want me to be pregnant?” She asked.

“No!”  I retorted without even thinking.  It wasn’t what I intended to say, it wasn’t what I meant, but that was the first word to reach my lips.  Jaime got up from the table and stormed out of the room.  As I sat there alone I asked myself, what is this fear and where did it come from?

It’s called Tocophobia, the fear of pregnancy or giving birth.  Not to be confused with Pedophobia which is the fear of babies.  I don’t have a fear of babies, I like babies and they usually like me back.  I will often catch them looking at me inquisitively and because of this I wonder if we share some sort of an unspoken kinship.  So it’s not babies I fear but pregnancy.

It might have began with that horrible movie For Keeps starring Molly Ringwald.  In the movie a young couple get pregnant and keep the baby.  What follows is 90 minutes of a house of horrors, frightening enough to keep young men everywhere from not having sex until they are well into their 30’s.  Having never seen the movie Fatal Attraction, I assumed for years that was the title of this movie.  Had I grown up today I wonder if I would feel different about the subject?  Juno, Knocked Up, and Away We Go all celebrate the joys of an unexpected pregnancy and how to deal with it.  They have conflicts, but lives are not ruined and the endings leave you with positive feelings.

Though Jaime and I have never had to make the decision, we’ve both acknowledged that abortion was on the table.  Not that it was definite but that there would be sincere consideration and many long discussions.  About at year ago during another such scare it occurred to me that the time for abortion had passed.  I was a mature adult, too old to resort to that choice.  I fully believe in the right to choose, but for me that was no longer an option.  I am old enough to handle and deal with the consequences of my actions.

I continued to sit and wonder further.  Were my reactions due to the fact that I have been so vocally against the idea of getting pregnant for so long that now I just didn’t know how to express any other feelings?  After all I want children, I want children with Jaime.  I look forward to raising them, teaching them, telling stories to them and everything else that goes along with their life.

I want to be able to embrace Jaime’s eventual pregnancy and ecstatically share the news with friends and family.  I want to go to ultrasounds with joyful tears in my eyes and support Jaime through Lamaze classes, and prepare the babies room with blissful anticipation.

Don’t get me wrong.  While I want to enjoy all those things, I’m still not ready.  I have places I want to go and things I want to do that babies just don’t factor into yet.  Selfishly I still enjoy being the baby around the house and I’m not sure I’m ready to give that up just yet.

Right now I want to get over this Tocophobia, so that next time Jaime utters that heart stopping phrase, I won’t cower in the corner like a scared little bitch.  Instead I will be a man about it, I’ll tell her that I’m there for her and ready for whatever happens.

slash and burn

this is what it looks like when i cut spending

There have been many occasions in which my wife and I found ourselves in a desperate financial situation.  Money was tight and our debt began to mount.  Before we found ourselves struggling to say afloat amid the rising tide of debt (that’s a whole lot of metaphor) we had to cut our spending.

We listed out everything we spent money on monthly and placed things in three columns.  The first are things we have to spend on; rent, electricity, gas, water.  The second are things that can be cut but at great inconvenience and risk of greater financial burden; car insurance, health insurance, cell phones, internet.  The third are those which are completely expendable; cable ($100 per month), Netflix ($8 per month), and gym memberships ($30 per month).  None of these are easy to cut but somethings go to go or we would find ourselves living on the street.  And unlike the US government I don’t have China to grant me a loan.

Our government is faced with the same problem as Jaime and I.  They spent too much money on too many things and have racked up a $14 Trillion deficit.  Let me begin by giving credit where credit it due

          George W. and his “fiscally conservative” Republicans took the national debt from 6 trillion to 8 trillion in just five years.  It took ten years to raise the debt the same amount from 1990 to 2000.  So all these Conservatives who stand around now complaining about the spend happy Democrats, have their blood in the national debt as well.  I’ll be partisan and admit that it was the fear rattled Democrats who blew the whole things out of the water nearly doubling the national debt in just five years.  Thus concludes my brief and incomplete history lesson.

Now the Congressional House of Representatives just like Jaime and I, have to sit down at their kitchen table with a stack of bills, a calculator, and a yellow lined notepad and begin to make cuts.  With a $14 trillion deficit there are sure to be many cuts and most if not all will end up hurting at least one group.  I will be focusing on three specific spending cuts.  Planned Parenthood, the NEA/NEH (National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities), and NPR (National Public Radio.)

The cutting of spending for these three organizations has consumed months of debate in the House.  Naturally I assumed that because they were debated so heatedly and for so long that they must be big expenditures for the government.  You can imagine how surprised I was to discover just how much was being spent on these three organizations annually.

NEA/NEH: share about $167 Million

Planned Parenthood: about $350 Million

NPR: about $430 Million

Total: about $947 Million 

Let’s be liberal and round the whole thing up to $1 Billion annually for all three combined.

According to different estimates the government is spending between 4 and 6 Billion every single day.  If Congress was to cut all spending to each of the afore mentioned organizations then no sooner would they have saved $1 billion would they turn around and spend $4 billion.

Sure, over time saving a billion will add up, but picture this.  If we didn’t spend a dime on Planned Parenthood, NEA/NEH, and NPR for the next twenty years, then we would have saved $20 billion.  Which sounds like and is a lot of money, but when you consider that we spend $20 billion every five days... over twenty years that’s... I’m horrible at math (Let’s cut more funding for public schools) it turns out my calculator doesn’t go high enough to represent that number.

These are tough times and with such an enormous deficit many are saying that you have to start cutting somewhere.  I completely agree, a billion saved is a billion earned.  What concerns me is that amid fears of a government shutdown and weekly votes to approve stopgaps to keep from said shutdown, what has taken priority over all other expenses are these three organizations.  In order to argue this point at all I have to censor myself and not go in detail about how I really believe that the Republicans looking to cut these Liberal organizations are hiding behind government overspending in desperate times.  But I digress, if they’re going to spend this much time and energy debating $1 Billion (less than a drop in the hat).  How long will it take them to cut spending on expenditures that cost real dollars.

Whether you do or do not support these three organizations, you can’t argue that Congress has been wasting our time in this matter.  Time for which we spend $176,000 per year per Legislator.  For 435 voting members we pay approximately $77 Million per year, not to mention all the other expenses that get added on to that.  Such as healthcare, we pay for their government run healthcare, not that they feel we deserve the same in kind.  Amazingly (or perhaps not so) I’ve not heard anyone stand up and say that Congress should take a pay cut or even slash their health care all together.  After all every little bit helps, you have to start somewhere.

Jaime and I looked long and hard at our expenses.  I didn’t want to cut anything, I wanted to simply find the money elsewhere.  But just as the Republicans don’t believe in raising taxes, I had no one to raise taxes on.

The gym membership could not be cut because I was under contract.  Everything else had direct negative impact or legal ramifications.  Had the government been in charge of my budget they would have cut Netflix, it was the easiest to cancel.  We chose not to because of the importance of entertainment in our lives, and at only $8 per month the savings would be too minimal to make a significant difference.

In the end we chose to cut health insurance and cable.  They were painful cuts but they were the biggest expenses that we could actually get rid of.  They had real impact on our budget and without them we were able to keep out apartment, internet, and Netflix.  I knew that if we could be responsible and stay out of unnecessary trouble (wars) things would turn around and we would be able to get those back again.

When things did finally make that turn around we chose not to purchase cable.  As it turns out we didn’t really need it all that much.  Maybe if the government looked at themselves and made cuts that impacted their interests, they would discover that they were unnecessary as well.

my digital immortality

does this calm you? not if you have allergies

If you could write one last email that would be released after your death, what would you say?  What would it say about you?  This was the question I was asking myself while starring at the blank text box on the website deathswitch.com.

About a year ago while listening to an episode of Radiolab on NPR I heard about a website named deathswitch.  The creator was a neuroscientist, David Eagleman.  My first experience with him came in the form of something much less scientific.  Sum: Forty tales from the afterlives, was a collection of short fiction.  The book is exactly as titled, forty different stories about possible afterlives, some funny, some sad, some thought provoking, and some down right creepy.  While the afterlife is not exactly a scientific study, many of the stories rely heavily on Eagleman’s research as a neuroscientist.  It was one of the best books I’d read in a very long time and I cannot recommend it strongly enough.

Deathswitch as he described it, was a kind of digital immortality where you never truly die because through their system of email releases written by you, your digital form will continue exist.

In my continuing quest to experience more in real life and in my cyber life I decided to join deathswitch.com and reflect on the feeling of knowing that I was now digitally immortal.

So what is deathswitch?  Put simply it is a website that allows you to store encrypted emails that would be dispatched at the time of your death.  The trigger for determining this is by a non response to a “prompt” which is sent to your email address at predetermined intervals.  The information contained in the message is entirely up to you.  Their suggestions are: bank account numbers, passwords, unspoken secrets, final words, or the last line of an argument.

I have spent my whole life dealing with and trying to accept my own mortality.  All the plays and stories I have ever written deal almost exclusively with death or afterlives and fictional versions of myself dealing with them.  How it is that some people find themselves able to accept without fear their mortality has always been a mystery to me.  I wish that I could feel the same way because then perhaps I could occupy my time with experiences other than my eventual death, perhaps enjoy life more, or even find pleasure in daredevil activities.  Joining this website was a direct acknowledgement of the fact that I will eventually die and the words that I write in the message would be the last that anyone would ever read.

When I mentioned this to Jaime she asked me not to join, claiming that I was inviting death by doing so.  If I am afraid of death than Jaime is mortified (no pun intended) by it.  For her just to even think about the idea of a website like this was upsetting.  I was finding my experience therapeutic, looking right into the face of death, in a way.  I also found the exercise of writing my final words to be intriguing.

*                                                                                                   *                                                                                                       *

The first image you find on the website is of a field full of golden sun flowers, I took special note of the image because an open field of flowers so often in popular culture is representative of the afterlife.  The other image you find is of a grass covered hillside with a trio of trees  looking out over clouds and more grassy hills.  There are no people, animals, or technology present, only nature.  It could lead one to believe (including me) that the afterlife is a lonely but beautiful and calming place.

I proceeded to sign up using the normal method of email, password, etc.  I was then asked if I would like a basic or premium account.  The premium offers you the opportunity to create multiple messages to send to various email addresses at a cost of $19.95 per year.  I had no need for the premium account but could understand why someone would want one.  I ended up going with the basic account that allows one message to a single recipient.

Once logged in you need to create a schedule for how often Deathswitch will “prompt” you in an email to determine that you are still among the living.  I chose the default; every 15 days with 5 days to respond.  If you do not respond to their prompt your account will go into “worry mode” which is a cute motherly term for the site re-prompting you to respond.  I set my worry mode to re-prompt me 10 times separated by 1 day.  Should I fail to respond my deathswitch will be activated and my final message will be dispatched.  There is also a “vacation” setting which allows you to ignore the prompts for a time without placing deathswitch into worry mode.

I was beginning to imagine that deathswitch was a series of physical beings.  That it was a real person on the other end of the internet connection, one who was assigned to me alone, who would send out those prompts and check in on me.  I imagined that they would honestly worry about my well being and try with all the means necessary to them to find me.  When I didn’t respond they would sit anxiously by the computer waiting for me to reach back and assure them that I was okay.  When it was clear that I was gone they would pause and reflect on my life though they hardly knew it.  Then with all the gravity the action deserved they would send out my message and move on, occasionally on lonely night remembering what it had been like being the caretaker of my last thoughts.

I knew this wasn’t the case, it was just an emotionless computer with built in triggers that we simulated to care about me.  When my deathswitch message was finally sent it would be done immediately and without feeling.

There were only two steps left before the process was complete, to decide who my deathswitch message would be sent to and what exactly that message would contain.  Who it would be going to was easy, Jaime would be my intended recipient, though I imagine she would eventually share it with my family, I wanted her to see it first.  As for the message, I had no idea what to write.

I have no important passwords or account numbers, no unspoken secrets, and at least as of this moment I have no last lines of an ongoing argument.

The text box sat there empty and white waiting patiently for me to fill it with some kind of thoughtful long lasting wisdom.  What would the words I chose to use say about me?  If they were too funny, would it seem that I didn’t understand the gravity of the situation and was inconsiderate of the readers feelings?  If they were too serious would my final words be dishonest, since I am a man who often prefers to make light of dark situations?  This was a rare opportunity to design the last words that anyone will ever read by you and the pressure to make them count was great.

I let that message box sit empty for nearly a week, straining to think about what should fill it before I understood what was causing me to have such difficulty.

While joining deathswitch was a direct acknowledgement of my mortality, I was not looking death in the face.  I feel perfectly healthy and expect to live a long full life, trying to boil my everything down into a simply message box is almost hopeless to do right now.  I imagined that I would need to be writing this from my death bed or having just experienced a near death situation.

My original intention was to blog about the experience of joining the website and then present my final message to you.  Once that message was written I realized that to publish it here for everyone to see would diminish the quality of its impact completely.  It would become just another thing I wrote in my life and was simply forgotten until my death.  So I will not be presenting it here for all to read, I will say that the message is simply an extension of my life as it currently is without fear or sadness, it doesn’t tell a sob story about my life or death.  Instead it reaches out to you after my physical body has become ashes and says simply,

“I’m not gone, I’m still here.  Not visible, but here.”

a giant slab of meat

this is when she stopped

When you live in a city like Los Angeles or perhaps any city, you can only be there for so long before an uncontrollable urge to flee takes hold of you.  Before you know it you find yourself in the drivers seat tightly gripping the steering wheel, barreling down the highway with the city disappearing over the horizon behind you.

By February 2008 that is exactly where Jaime and I were.  Now that both of us had jobs and we’d begun to develop routines, the day to day life of Los Angeles was getting to us.  We’d been in Los Angeles four months and didn’t feel any closer to achieving out dreams that we had been in Seattle.  The weight of the pressure to get this done was weighing heavily on us and it was time for a break from this life.

On a Sunday morning in January Jaime and I jumped in the car and headed off to Las Vegas for the day.  Our plan was to return late that evening but we ended up driving in the wrong direction for nearly an hour.  We decided instead to turn around and go back home.

This time we had reservations at the Mirage and printed out directions on google maps.  We were going up on a Sunday and returning the following Monday, because that was when the rooms were the cheapest and we both had Monday off.  This was the weekend after Chinese New Year and the week before Valentines, so this was our treat to one another.  We made reservations at Kokomo’s a restaurant in the Mirage that specialized in seafood. According to the website the average check was $65 and that sounded reasonable enough to us.

The previous year Jaime and I took our first vacation together.  We went all out and spent a week in Vegas at the Bellagio.  For our big night out we had dinner at Prime, one of the premier steak houses in the city.  The price was steep but the steaks were delectable.  This time however we were on a tighter budget and Kokomo’s seemed like a decent alternative.

It’s 4 1/2 hours from LA to Vegas, Jaime and do it in 3 1/2 without getting a ticket.  We arrived early afternoon on Sunday and checked in.  Vegas is like a night club it looks good at night, dark, sexy, mysterious with flashing lights.  When you turn on those lights the illusion is broken, the floor is covered with spilt drinks, sweat, spit and garbage.  The walls become visible and all the mystery vanishes.

We walked the strip for a while, checking out all the changes that had occurred in the previous year.  By late afternoon we decided to hop in the pool for a quick dip before dinner.  In the winter most of the pools close early and we were too late.  We decided instead to throw a few dollars away in the black jack machine before dinner.

Kokomo’s had seemed like a nice place that wasn’t too expensive but right away the atmosphere failed to live up to expectations.  Located just off the lobby it boasted a multitude of plastic plants and a pathetic dribbling waterfall.  A far cry from the secluded 1950’s nightclub feel of Prime.

The waiter brought us our menus and there were plenty of options, from crab to clams, halibut, prawns, steaks, and lobster.  The only problem was that there were no prices on most of the menu, instead in small print next to the description of the entree it said MP (market price).

When Jaime asked the price of the lobster,I nearly crapped my pants when he answered, $150.  Similarly the crab was $115 and the prawns and clams were about $100.  That left a couple of steak and fish dishes under $50.  I found some overpriced salmon for $25 but Jaime was struggling.  We came for the seafood and it was way out of our price range.  We wanted to just get up and leave, find another restaurant.  There was one just around the corner we’d been to before and loved.  We should have just left but I was concerned about getting into another restaurant without reservations and we ended up staying.

In Jaime’s frustration she settled on a 32 ounce prime rib steak for about $45.  After she placed the order I thought about the size of the steak, 32 ounces?

“Don’t you normally order 8 or 12 ounces?” I asked.  Her eyes grew big and she began to giggle.

My salmon was brought out on a dish served atop asparagus and rice, then they wheeled out Jaime’s steak on a stretcher and slapped it on the table.  It was a behemoth slab of rare prime rib steak, no sides just a tiny cup of ajus.  At this point all we could do was laugh about the entire situation.  The table next to us was occupied by a group of cougars who were already drunk and growling and howing looking for some young studs.  The dinner had been a complete bust but there was nothing short of good entertainment to keep us occupied.  Jaime ate less than a third of the steak before declaring that she was full.

We had the waiter pack up the meat in a box for... later?  It wasn’t until the elevator ride back up to our room that I realized where we’d gone wrong.  The website had said, “average check” they were talking about average check per person.  Who goes to a $65 meal and eats alone?  Back at the room I placed the steak in the bathroom sink and covered it with ice, hoping to salvage it.

The remainder of the evening when exponentially better than dinner, we stayed out till 2 a.m. dancing and drinking.  The next morning we got up early and had our dip in the pool then walked the strip until it was checkout time.  Sadly I had no way of keeping the steak cold on the drive home and ended up throwing out $45 worth of meat in the hotel trash.

I drove us home so the trip took closer to five hours through the desert back into LA.  When we walked through the door of our apartment I felt refreshed.  It had been a brief vacation, hardly even worth noting, but what I remember now, is that even a $45 slab of meat couldn’t ruin a chance to get out of the city even if only for a night.

1/2 irish

stock photo of less lucky three leaf clovers

Today is St. Patricks day, and as I write this thousands if not millions of people are going wild in a bar and claiming to be Irish.  On March 17th everyone is Irish just in the same way that when you learn about the Native Americans in elementary school every kid in the class is at least 1/32 Native American.

For years I “celebrated” St. Patricks day knowing that I was half Irish.  Both of my Grandfathers were Irish, the Stuart’s and the Ghormley’s.  I insisted that I always wore green and let everyone know that I was Irish and proud.

Both of my Grandmothers were German, so after watching the Godfather I was proud to say that I was German/Irish “just like Tom Hagen in the Godfather.”  It wasn’t anything exciting and no one ever asked to know more about my heritage and honestly if they did I couldn’t have told them.  Neither German nor Irish culture was present in my family growing up, and I didn’t have any family member who was directly from either country.

My Grandpa on my Mom’s side and my Grandma on my Dad’s side were both Canadian and retained dual citizenship until their death.  In a way one could say that I am half Canadian which means about as much as saying your Irish on St. Patricks day, when your not actually from Ireland.

A few weeks ago while having dinner at my Mom’s house she told me about some exciting news she’d learned from a family member who was doing some genealogy.  She told me that while we had always thought that my Grandmothers family the Kuhlmen’s had been from Germany a discovery was made that this was not true.

She left me hanging for a moment and I imagined that I had something truly interesting in my blood, something exotic, spicy, swarthy, or romantic.  As it turns out it was none of those, because the Kuhlman’s were from Switzerland.

Just when I thought that I couldn’t get any whiter, I did.  I wanted to believe that there was something less white in me so that I could say that I was one sixth Greek, or Spanish, or Italian.  Now I’m just 1/4 Swiss.

I’m still 1/2 Irish and on a day that I’m reminded of my heritage no matter how far removed from me it is, I am also reminded of the 1/4 Swiss in me.  So you know what?  Who cares if your not Irish, drink up to that widely accepted racist stereotype!  All Irish are drunks!

emotional letdown

i love change

I don’t like change, I resist until it is literally forced upon me.  Even when that change is a positive one, it can be both time consuming and laborious, I, am lazy and sentimental, and am known to spend long hours thinking about the way things were.  This probably explains why I spent long hours recently reminiscing about life in Los Angeles.

Before Jaime and I moved to LA we lived in the University District in Seattle.  The U-District is the area surrounding the University of Washington and we loved living there.  Everything was within walking distance, there were dozens of great restaurants, three bookstores, two grocery stores, a farmers market across the street from us, and best of all the rent was cheap.  The upsides to the area made it possible to deal with the annoying downsides; the drunk college students, drunk homeless people, and the Ave Rats (drunk high school students who pretended to be homeless).

Then we moved to LA and missed our neighborhood, I spent long hours reminiscing about our life in Seattle.  When we returned to the U-District three years later it was like returning to a war ravaged Bosnia, only instead of bombed out buildings we found that everything had been gentrified by the Yuppie army.  Many of our favorite restaurants had been forced out of business by the rising costs doing business in a developing neighborhood.  What hit Jaime and I the hardest was finding out that our favorite restaurant had moved.

Mamma Melina’s was a little Italian family restaurant on Roosevelt and 50th just beneath the 7 Gables theater.  The first time we ate there Jaime and I fell deeply in love.    The building was old with authentic cracked walls, antique tables and chairs complete with the red and white checked table cloths.  It was like a dark little hole, perfect for a romantic evening lit almost only by candle light.  This was the kind of place where you could find pictures of the owner and his sons posing with the restaurants most famous patrons, Paul Sorvino, Jack Nicholson, Detlef Schrempf.

Tucked away in a secluded corner was a small piano and on many evenings an Elvis Costello look alike could be found pounding away at the keys. On one occasion I remember an accordion player who squeezed out requested songs while dancing between the tables.

To describe the atmosphere alone is to sell Mamma Melina’s severely short.  Their food was spectacular, like a hearty home cooked meal made by the Italian grandmother I never had.  My favorite dishes were the Veal Saltimbocca and the Ricotta Cheese Gnocchi, both were an explosion of flavor and texture.  The bread was truly unique and absolutely unmatched, Jaime and I would have to insist the waiter not bring us another warm basket.  Their wine selection was wonderful and poured with such delicate grace it made me feel like I was eating at a five star restaurant.

The prices were so reasonable that there was no need for it to be a special occasion restaurant, soon we were eating dinner there once a week.  Jaime and I both had our twenty-third  birthdays there, our third and fifth anniversaries, on Valentines Day and New Years Eve they had a fixed four course dinner.  Jaime and her girlfriends met there on Wednesdays for food and bottle after bottle of wine.  When they began serving lunch I could often be found sitting in the window enjoying pasta and writing in my notebook.

After a while the son who ran the restaurant began to recognize us and always made a point of stopping by our table and chatting, before we moved he told us how much we would be missed.  It was a wonderful feeling to be able to go some place we already loved so dearly and be treated like a family member.  The week of our wedding Jamie and I made reservations for a date night (our last as a non-married couple) we ended up inviting my parents and brother, it felt right to have my real family there.  Had I known this would be the last meal I would enjoy at that location I would have given the whole meal more appropriate reverence.

This last November we drove by saying to ourselves, “I can’t wait to go back,” only to find the windows covered with yellowed newspaper.  Later we were told they’d moved a few miles away, in a newly constructed building.  While people tried to convince us they were still the same great restaurant just in a new location, we were skeptical.  I wanted to believe them but just like the latest Star Wars trilogy or the Disney channel version of Doug, the original was better.

For five months I resisted the change not wanting to eat there wishing to remember it as it was.  Until this past Saturday when Jaime mentioned it as a dinner choice.  Neither of us were truly ready, we talked about Mamma Melina’s like she was an ex-girlfriend we hadn’t seen in public since the break up.  Not wanting to see her new sexy body or her new lovers who knew nothing of the incredible evenings we’d spent with her.

We bit the bullet, knowing that we couldn’t avoid it forever, knowing that she was still out there without having partaken in what she had to offer would just fill us with sadness.

Driving by her new location the changes were already appearing exceptionally dramatic.  Jaime leaned over and asked me if I was sure I was ready, she asked me but she was also asking herself.  I wasn’t, but truth be told, I would never be ready.

It was hard not to notice first how large she was, you could fit a dozen of the old location inside and still have room for the kitchen.  She was also sexier, with big white classic looking chandeliers, modern tables and chairs, and sterile gray walls.  It could have been one of a million restaurants anywhere in the country.  The only hint of her former self was the big Italian paintings which were now strapped to the ceiling tiles.

We sat down and I could literally feel my heart breaking.  Jaime who was trying to be positive about the whole situation could see my discomfort and asked if I wanted to just get a glass of wine and go.  I was determined to show that I could be accepting of change and go with the flow and declined her offer.

The menu had changed and fittingly my two favorite dishes got the axe.  Perhaps the most sacrilegious change was the bread which was generic and unremarkable.  I could almost feel tears welling up in my eyes, I expected and was prepared for change, just not this much of it.  The staff wore matching uniforms and moved about like well oiled machines, a far cry from the chaotic dance required to serve food in the old location.

Jaime and I reminisced about the old Mamma Melina’s, the wonderful times we’d had there and how absolutely nothing was the same, when a thought crossed my mind.  After we got to LA we missed our Seattle restaurants and left most places saying, “it was good, but no Mamma Melina’s.”  Over our three years there we found a new group of restaurants we frequented and began to love as much as those in Seattle.  Upon returning home we discovered that the world had changed around us, our old favorites now gone and ironically I was sitting in what once was my favorite restaurant missing places in LA like Birds, the Kitchen, Il Capriccio, and the Mustard Seed.

After the food arrived and we got some wine in us, my heart began to hurt a little less.  The dishes were still excellent, the service was very good and if I could separate the old location from the new, I found the atmosphere, while different, to be enjoyable.

When we’d finished eating Jaime and I agreed that while this new place could never be the same to us emotionally, I still could not think of better Italian food with better prices or service.

On our way out we ran into the son who runs the restaurant, he still recognized us and immediately I began to forgive the restaurant for all the disappointing changes.  I knew I needed to get over my feelings of loss and accept things as they were.  Our girlfriend had moved on, but that didn’t mean we couldn’t enjoy this new restaurant she’d become, build new experiences and enjoy her for what she was.  It seemed that the heart beating in this body was still the same.

the first year is the hardest part iv

all those presents are from my mom

Our first Christmas in Los Angeles away from family was bittersweet.  Christmas for Jaime and I had always been a marathon, she would wake me up at 5 am to open presents.  At 9 am we would go to my dad’s house for breakfast.  Around noon we would head off to Jaime’s Grandparents, for Lunch with her family, our visit there would be shorter because Christmas eve was also spent with her family.  By 3 or 4 we would head off to my parents where we would finish our evening with dinner before going back to our own home.  The day was exhausting and often difficult to enjoy without worrying about when and where we were going next.

In LA our day was significantly less eventful.  Jaime still got up around 5 am to open presents but then we went back to sleep.   We woke up later to eat breakfast and watch television and call our families to wish them a merry Christmas followed by snacks and more television.  We started cooking dinner around 4, ate by 6 and finished our evening by falling asleep in front of Survivorman.  

For me work was going fine, I was working at developing a routine and had started taking the bus home.  Jaime on the other hand was barely clinging to her sanity.  Her interview with LAMILL coffee, an LA based roasting company had gone well.  Up till that point LAMILL had exclusively sold their beans to upscale restaurants like Spago and now were opening their own cafe in Silverlake, a nieghborhood bordering Los Feliz and Echo Park.  The interview went well enough that they hired her which was good news except that they weren’t scheduled to open to the public until February, she would start training in mid January.  This was all good news she just needed it to come sooner, before she lost her mind.

On New Years eve our friends Joel and Annika invited us to the Archlight where they would be having an adult only showing of Bad Santa, they allowed you to take drinks into the theater.  I’d never seen the movie before and can’t really stand to watch Billy Bob Thornton do anything, but after two rum and Cokes I found it to be humorous.  Afterwards we bought a frozen pizza from Von’s and took it back to our apartment.

It was hard to believe but due to family issues our general stress concerning jobs we’d not seen the only two people we knew in LA until this evening.  We ate pizza and caught up and drank until Joel heard about a work party that was taking place at a house on Winona Avenue, about a mile and a half from our apartment.

We decided to walk their and avoid the need for a designated driver.  When sober the mile and a half walk seed easy and reasonable.

The party wasn’t terribly lively, the highlight was playing Wii bowling.  Midnight was a non event I don’t remember counting down the seconds or if we watched anything on television.  It might simply have been that one person looked down and noticed that it was after midnight and we all shouted a pathetic “happy new year!”  What I do clearly remember was catching Jaime in the kitchen chugging a bottle of Champagne. 

I had work the next morning which meant that I needed to leave the house no later than 5:20 am.  The party wan’t getting any livelier and Jaime and I headed out back home.  At first everything seemed fine, we were a little tipsy and it was unusually cold outside for an LA evening, but as soon as we turned the street corner onto Franklin Avenue Jaime went berserk.  (I should preface the next portion of the blog by saying that Jaime has told the following story on stage numerous times and so I tell it heree with her consent.)

It was a major shit storm, as if Jaime walked through an invisible wall that brought out all the absolute crazy in her.  She began screaming at me, crying, falling to the ground, flailing all around.  She screamed nonsense at the top of her lungs and I begged to be quiet.  I literally dragged her for a mile and a half, while cars slowed down as they passed us trying for a closer look.  I was lucky no one called the Police, the whole scene looked terribly suspicious and I had no idea how I was going to convince them that I wasn’t taking her home to rape her.

me: Oh hello officers.

officers: Is there a problem here?

me: oh, no... everything’s fine.  She’s just drunk... I’m... it’s not fine... I’m trying to get her home.  I’m her boyfriend... we live together.  I need to get her to bed... just to sleep.

I could just see the scene with a dozen cop cars blocking the street, Jaime and I in hand cuffs and separate cars and me talking a mile a minute telling the Police that really everything was fine and that in the morning it would all be worked out.

I had to carry Jaime the last block before we got home at 2:30 am.  I put her to bed and she wasn’t there but two minutes when she sat up and vomited all over everything.  I took her to the bathroom and propped her up against the toilet and began cleaning up.  By 3:30 I was finished and found Jaime passed out on the bathroom floor.  I should have let her stay there but instead felt that she should come back to bed.  After tucking her in she immediately sat up and vomited again.

I didn’t get to bed until 4:00 am and with an hour of sleep I awoke and headed off to work.

It was one of the lowest points in our three years in Los Angeles and about as low as I could imagine starting 2008.  I didn’t blame Jaime, I don’t know what either of us really expected our of our first two months but I know we both expected things to be different than this.  I felt for her and knew one thing for sure; we’d just set the bar so low that things had to get better.

*               *              *

Things did get better, within a few weeks Jaime started training and by February the restaurant opened.  She would be busy with work and getting to know her coworkers who were a truly a great group of people Molly, Viv, Nick, Matt, Andy, Grace and so on.  We got to know them well and they were able to help Jaime began to get a foothold in the industry.

I would like to say that this was the end of our job hunt, that now we had steady pay checks and we were able to spend our free time chasing the dream.  I would eventually quit Borders without notice, sending only an email to the GM that I would be in Saturday  to pick up my paycheck.  Following a series of accusations against her coworkers by the company Jaime and her coworkers began weekly drinking sessions at dive bars called “Fight Club” and eventually Jaime had no choice but to quit.  There would be other jobs and better times, we were never settled but if you dedicate yourself enough you can find those jobs in LA.

There is no doubt that the first year is the hardest, in just two short months that saying had been proven true.  Unfortunately there were still ten months to go before we could call it a year and get the second year underway.