The Last Open Road

Middle of nowhere, somewhere north-east of LA

I am back from what I hope is my last trip to Chico, CA for awhile. I went there to finish moving my stuff out and return to my home in Tucson. I won't go into a detailed comparison between California and Arizona.  Let's just say it probably all evens out.

It was an unplanned trip. I got a call from the property management company in Chico to tell me they found a renter and I could get out of my lease, so I moved a May trip up to March to expedite the process. Then I got an email as we were driving out of Arizona: the guy backed out. Don't repeat don't drive to Chico.  I did anyway, so now I'm out and if they find a new tenant to take the lease over, the place is ready and they can just let me know what they did. Apartment leases suck. I signed this 25 page document and only now am I finding out what all is in it.  It's all bad . . .

Now that I'm really in Arizona, and have my drivers license and car tag and everything, it is my fervent hope that I can start working on my book. I have two ideas now. All is well. Except I'm not feeling all that ambitious. In my defense, the last few months have been insane and I'm tired.

Still plugging away, though.

Note: Arizona does not require a front license plate, so now my white Ford has a big, basically useless, black plastic rectangle screwed down smack in the middle of the body work in the front of it.  (No, I wouldn't call it a bumper.  It's just sort of a front area that you can fix if it gets crushed by a bird or a Fiat 500 or something.)  I took the plate mount off to reveal three ragged holes where the screws had been attached, so I just shook my head and put the mount back on. Googled it. It's a thing, apparently. There are solutions, all of them either expensive or time consuming, laid out in excruciating detail by the Internet's obsessive/compulsive car community. I looked on Amazon for white duct tape and I'm really kind of amazed that there is no such thing. Home Depot has little white plastic snap on buttons I could use to cover the holes if I am willing to drill them out to a larger size and render them (the holes) useless for anything else.  Surewhynot.

Rush hour somewhere to the south
 of  Edwards Air Force Base

A Non-Food Article That Ends in a Review of a Restaurant That is No Longer in Business

The trouble is, sometimes I don't feel all that spiritual about food. For more or less a month I have been sort of thinking about what I could write about that could go inside a food magazine. I get nada. I don't know anything about cooking: stirring browned hamburger into the Kraft macaroni and cheese is getting sort of cutting-edge frisky. (Wow. Tastes like a little cheeseburger in each bite!) And I'm no restaurant critic; usually, I'm just tickled pink if I don't get food poisoning. If the coffee's bad, and it sadly sometimes is, I easily revert to outdoor camping standards and ask only that there are no little sticks floating around in it, or a dead fly.

To me, I'm afraid, there is seldom such thing as a memorable meal, and if it is, it usually has more to do with something that happened coincidentally at the same time as the meal, like a space station part landing in the chocolate mousse, or Uncle Ray falling off of his folding chair. What we ate, what it tasted like, what kind of presentation, that sort of thing, I'm afraid I seldom commit to long-term memory.

OK, I do remember the spaghetti races my sister and I had at the table at my Grandpa's house when we were little kids. Who can make their strand of spaghetti slide into their mouth the fastest?  It was  a process enhanced by a grownup twisting your ear, as I recall. In that case, I remember the food was spaghetti. I also remember the zucchini cake, even though I don't want to.

Perhaps the most memorable thing about those meals was actually just before the meal: Grandpa would pick up the salt and pepper shakers--little ceramic figurines made to look like a comical Italian married couple--and move them around and make them talk, like puppets, to each other in Italian. We always laughed at that, and the grownups laughed a little louder, and the grownups who also understood Italian laughed the loudest, until Grandma would playfully slap Grandpa and tell him to stop that.

Which brings me to the incident at Italian Gardens, sadly closed for business now, (how long?) in downtown Kansas City. One summer afternoon five or six of us wandered in off the sidewalk looking pretty hot and bedraggled, hardly dressed for eating out, loud, and hungry for something sweet. It was slow, and as the owner himself came to seat us, I said, jokingly, that he would probably want to put us far back in a dark corner because of the way we looked. He laughed, patted me on the shoulder and insisted on seating us at a table right in the front window.

That was cheesecake. It was very good.

Yeah Yeah Once Again . . .

If I'm going to pretend I have and maintain a blog, then I should probably post something here on the first day of 2019.  Right? So here we go.

Let me begin by saying 2018 was a long damn year. I spent most of it living where I didn't want to be--in the River Market section of downtown Kansas City, Missouri. Not that it's a bad place.  It's just that I wasn't a "good fit," as they say, just before they fire you. After that stint, I moved to California, where I am right at the moment, and right after that I decided I didn't really care for the situation here.

It was an honest mistake. It's a college town, so it's fairly interesting compared to the typical central valley agricultural town in northern California, but it's also just another agricultural town. It's also a little too small to be truly convenient. As I say, it's convenient enough, as long as you don't need anything. Turns out that it is often necessary to drive to either Redding (70 miles away) or Sacramento (85 miles away) if you want anything that the typical understocked Target or K-Mart doesn't have to offer. Or health care. 'Nother story. Add to all that a general, across the board increased cost of everything, including taxes, and other than that not a lot going on, and there you have it in a nutshell.

Over Thanksgiving I met a woman in Tucson, Arizona. I know that has a certain ominous ring, but she's actually wonderful. I'm just going with the flow.

Happy new year.

I went to Seattle over Christmas.

20 Questions, and Their Answers

As Paula suggested, I copied and pasted the twenty questions that she posted, and I answered all of them, right here! 

Begin the Paste:

what’s the most dangerous situation you have ever been in?

Probably involved driving, whether I was aware of it or not. Too many to catalog. I can think of a handful of incidents where I lived through them only because of my own reflexive actions--dangerous because in these situations, things unfolded so fast that I felt like big doses of luck were necessary, which is always dangerous since luck comes and goes as it will.

• what’s your favorite culture?

California Hippy c. 1968.  Based only on how I always felt comfortable around its adherents, even though I never felt like I really fit in.

• what do you dislike about your own culture?

Ridiculous technological bullshit that actually makes things more difficult instead of easier, or that seems to rub the wrong way against normal human nature. Specifically, the "call-tree" such as the ones you encounter when calling almost any large company or utility, nowadays, and all attempts by corporations to replace human beings with computers.

• your favorite type of travel?

Driving.  Road trips.

• do you feel understood?

Generally, with the exception of a few people and dogs/cats. Once, I was pretty sure this squirrel had my number.

• how do you feel about your body?

As I age, I realize why humanity has chosen to fantasize about an afterlife without bodies.

• what is your favorite film?

That's just too difficult to answer.

• are you adventurous with food?

No, except when making French toast, where I sometimes throw in extra nutmeg and vanilla.

• have you ever hated a place and wanted to come home?

Yes. I lived in Oklahoma City for two years.

• are you bothered about others seeing you naked?

I don't remember. Kidding!  Not much, unless, you know, I wake up walking down Main Street.

• Are you a good loser?

I don't remember. Again!  Kidding!  I'd say, yes, because I've had so much practice. OK, no. But I'm getting better at it as I came to realize that it happens much more often than I fool myself into thinking.

• what was the favorite time of your life?

When I was in college and brain was wide awake and I had lots of comrades, and then the years I was married, raising my kid when things were busy, yet simple at the same time so that I was always pretty sure I was doing what I was supposed to be doing and, in both cases, was very happy!

• Do you have a close family connection?

Not really.

• can you speak another language?

– No.

• will Trump be in for another term?

Good question.

• what are your thoughts on English people?

They don't always write proper English, but I can usually tell what they mean. (Do you know how many times I had to delete the "u" in "favourite" so far, while fixing this paste??)  Seriously I only actually knew one English person really well, and she was a beautiful, kind, empathetic, and strong person, so I'll go with that angle.

• was life better without mobile phones?

There are so many things about the cell phone culture that are annoying, it's tempting to say, yes. But we are now more connected-- so we are safer? More efficient?  Happier? -- though it seems like life was a little better when we weren't so damned connected all the time.

• what has been the biggest change in your life?

Lately, it has been the death of my wife and my becoming suddenly alone for the first time since the 80s. Before that, it was retirement, which is taking a remarkably long time for me to process as well.

• is climate change real?

Duh, is the correct response. Why is this a question?

• why do you like answering questions?

Usually no one cares what I think, and here, there is no one to interrupt me. 

Santa Cruz

I went to Santa Cruz this week, and stayed a couple days. I want to live there, but I don't have a million dollars.

Here is a picture I took of a friend's old '49 GMC fire truck. He lives in the mountains just north of Santa Cruz, partly in a small two room house he built, and partly in a school bus that is parked right up against the house, which serves as his living room.

1949 GMC fire truck

Still Here

It is time I tapped out another blog entry.

(Not "penned," as I am actually tapping on a keyboard. It's not even Clickety-click-click-click-clickety, like Hemingway's typewriter because I have one of those "chicklet" keyboards because it's the only bluetooth keyboard I could find--as I got tired of all those wires snaking across my computer table--and it has those little square slightly raised, flat-topped pads with the rounded corners--like a chicklet!--and with each keystroke makes a little dull tapping sound accompanied by the slightest bit of tactile feedback, a little tactile *pop* for my fingers to tell my brain that, yes, I believe that letter has been sent on to the highly technical, silently whirring guts of the computer at my feet.)

I have been in California for awhile now. Weeks, not months, having just recently completed the move, and at some unidentified point, really, became a California resident. Again. I'm being careful, because I have just a few days to get my driver's license and register my car, once I am a resident, even if it is difficult to do in one quantum step and imagine that you could point to the calendar and say, here, here is where I became a Californian. And of course as we all know, it is more a state of mind, and so a kind of sloppy, analog process accompanied by an imperceptible but relentless shift of perspective.

I have been thinking about the cultural differences between the Midwest and the West Coast, between Mizzerruh and NorCal. There are some. For example, the downtown hipster haven of River Market in Kansas City is probably more liberal than the agricultural parts of the central valley in California. This sort of surprised me, sort of didn't. I'm in a college town now, still, so I don't feel much difference anyway.

There are greater differences in the way people drive. Since I'm not in a big metro area, really, I guess people here can afford the luxury of being courteous. They are. It's kind of strange, but for the most part, the Californians I have seen are more courteous, less aggressive and competitive than drivers in Kansas City. That may just be the difference between city (Kansas City) and rural (Butte County, CA) but I think it has to do with the heightened awareness of the pedestrian and the bicyclist. As a pedestrian a lot of the time, I have had to adjust to this.  I'm used to standing on a street corner in Kansas City with one foot on the roadway, waiting for a break in traffic so I can cross as drivers, you know, whooosh by either not looking at me at all, or throwing me withering glances, if not the universal phalangial salute. Here, in California, if I get within a couple feet of the curb, drivers from all directions may (may) slam on the brakes so as to let me safely cross in front of them.  And as for driving, I've always been pretty courteous but I worry that my normal idea of yielding to pedestrians is more like, I see you're in the crosswalk but you won't get over to MY side of the street for several seconds, giving me plenty of time to make my right turn (or whatever,) and yet I think that is seen as being rude and reckless around here. So, I am adapting slowly.

The other weird thing, I have found, is the pace and rhythm of speech. I never thought this before--didn't notice it when I moved from California to Missouri--but people talk faster in California. Just a little.  Enough to throw me off as I listen and try to track what people are saying. I'm older, and my hearing is truly shitty, so that has a lot to do with it, and when you add that to the unexpected speech pattern, I'm not tracking. I'm adapting to that, also, though. I mean, I have. It took several days of talking to people--clerks, food servers, etc. but I'm past that. Good thing I didn't move to Brooklyn.

(Edit: just re-read that last paragraph--don't want you to think I was absolutely dumb-struck and just stood in front of people with my head tilted in befuddlement, just that I noticed that lag, in my own head, while listening to people talk. OK.)

I need to go get some breakfast, so even though I'm not finished here, I'm done. (Or is that the other way 'round?) I will say the weather here is beautiful. I missed out on the super hot summer, though I caught of bit of it, just not the 105 degree stuff, but so far I've seen seven weeks of perfect, warm, sunny weather. It rained a couple days ago, and now it's back to super nice.

Tuesday

Tuesday morning:

Several interesting things going on in the new Reality here in Chico. The first point I would touch on is the way I totally dropped the ball when viewing this apartment. I am not complaining--but when I first viewed the place, I didn’t notice that there was no closet space. By “no closet space,” I mean, there are no closets.  Anywhere. Except two, I guess.  One is a good place to put brooms and mops, while the other one is another good place to put additional brooms and mops. Unfortunately, it turns out that so far, at least, I have no brooms nor mops to prop against the walls in either of my two closets. Then there is the absence of a dishwasher. The kitchen is BRAND NEW and beautiful, and I guess I just assumed there was a dishwasher. I even bought some dishwasher type soap for it. But no. OK, I can live with that. And the fact that now that I must wash dishes in the sink, there is no spray hose dealie-bob in the sink. OK.  Oh, there is no garbage disposal. OK, no problemo. I hasten to add that the sink is beautiful despite these deficits. It is shiny stainless steel and when I turn on the overhead track lighting it is blindingly spectacular. 

There is a real neat electronic digital thermostat to control the furnace and central air. It had dead batteries in it, so I put some new ones in it and everything flashed to life. The weather here has been hot, and the temperature in the apartment was 78, so the first think I did was turn on the A/C.  Nice. It’s quiet, something I’ve learned to appreciate, and I waited for the cool down. Which never came. Three hours later, the temperature in the apartment had risen to 79. I walked outside and looked at the compressor.  It was running, quietly, fan turning, and all that, even though it looked like it might be perhaps 80 years old, like maybe Fred Flintstone had one and inside it there were two pterodactyls, one breaking up a block of ice and the other waving a fan over it. Anyway, apparently there is no freon in this thing. It was, at the time, the Holiday Weekend, so after two hot nights, I now prepare to to talk to the property manager about this. 

I have no Internet. I am typing this on a word processor and plan to zap it onto my blog whenever I find myself in a wi-fi zone. I guess I could carry the laptop to a coffee shop. It is an interesting experience doing it this way as for some odd reason I feel more relaxed and more wordy. I guess because I know I could sit here all day typing.  Maybe I shouldn’t even get Internet--though that would drive me crazy. But, maybe if I wait, by the time I am able to stream Netflix again, there will be some new episodes I haven’t seen yet. 

I’m in my living room. I have the little table sitting in the middle, but facing the direction of the bay windows. I set up my stereo, but so far, with my three feet of antenna wire, I can only get one station, and it is not NPR. To my right is the front door, opened onto the porch. I have this door, and all the windows, open in an attempt to cool the place down (it is 8:00 a.m.) before shutting it all up to keep the afternoon heat out.  I do have three awesome fans that are electronically controlled with wall switches that have, you know, 14 speeds and LED lights and which alternately whistle Dixie and the Star Spangled Banner. 

For all that, I love the location.  It takes me 15 minutes to walk to downtown Chico and the nearest coffee shop, and of course nothing around here is very far by car. 

That is all for now from the Big Valley.

Edit (Thursday morning): A/C is working now!  However, the Internet will be delayed until Comcast can return as I get access to the basement for them. It’s always somethin’.