Archive for the ‘Ramen’ Category

The President of The United States of America was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace today.

Wow.

“By awarding you its most prestigious prize, the Committee is rewarding your determined commitment to human rights, justice and spreading peace across the world, in accordance with the will of its founder Alfred Nobel. It also does justice to your vision of tolerance and dialogue between States, cultures and civilizations.  Finally, it sets the seal on America’s return to the heart of all the world’s peoples.” -Nicolas Sarkozy

Nice.

Obama himself admitted to not being certain he deserved the honor and saw it as less of a tribute than a call to action.  I can’t help but admire his lack of pretentiousness.  He is serious and sincere and if they would just let him do what we elected him to do.  What he came to do.  It is so painful to watch, overt cockblocking every time he puts a foot forward.  Nasty, senseless, painfully obvious obstruction for the sake thereof instead of reason or logic or common fucking sense.

It is clear to me that the Nobel committee intended to send the message that it liked the talk, but eagerly anticipated and encouraged the walk.  I’m confident that about sums it up.  There is no mystery here.  They realize the potential power for good America holds in her fists and understand that we now have a leader of the caliber, intellect and compassion to loosen those fists into hands for helping and shaping and lifting.

Seems as though we’re always at a crossroads, a critical juncture.  This President presides over the most persistently precarious positions and potential shifts of paradigm of any President in my lifetime at least.  The ill conceived placement of a single toe, and we stare nuclear holocaust, collapse of the world economy, famine and pestilence in a face so proximate, it’s collective exhale will wither the young, the infirm and most of the worlds crops.

Understand we flirt with disaster by the hour.

Most Hostess and Armour products will endure.  I think I’ll bury some to be safe.  Oh, and some Ramen.  There’s always a silver lining.  Something to snack on while we rot will mitigate the circumstances somewhat.  I’m hoping for blankets and comics until we liquify or sublimate to gaseousness.

Our man literally has the weight of the world on his shoulders.  He bears it, along with the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, with grace, dignity and humility.  What’s in play here is not just mutually assured destruction, but racism and bigotry and people with rotting teeth because they don’t eat their vegetables or brush their teeth or read the goddamn paper.

I am proud.  I am firmly of the belief that what stands between Obama, the American people and true, legitimate meaningful progress towards peace, justice and equity, is fear, ignorance, racism and stupidity so bold and heedless as to be unable to define itself, it’s reasons or it’s intentions.  These people are fucking nuts.

Our President received the Nobel Prize for Peace today.  The world roots for us and him.  After the eight years long nightmare we visited on the world by either endorsing or acquiescing to the Dick-in-Bush antipathy and odium for the rest of the globe, the civilized nations are looking to us and hoping, praying, that we will turn the destructive behemoth around.

That’s what this means.  This is what they’re asking us to do.  It’s why they did it.  Don’t be stupid.

It was no phantasm.  It was real and horrible and what it wrought will take decades to repair.  So western civilization is asking, beseeching us, to get back in the game of righting things as opposed to ignoring or tearing them apart.  We are all human.  Humanity is both our lowest and highest common denominator.  Above and beyond country, ethnicity, religious provocation or social and ethical imperatives, we are all the same species.  We are humans.  We are people.  All of us bleed, most of us love.

Still, people don’t or refuse to understand the import of such a momentous occurrence.

“It is unfortunate that the president’s star power has outshined tireless advocates who have made real achievements working towards peace and human rights.’’ -RNC chair Michael Steele

Like who fuckhead?  Rush “The Human Shitsmear” Limbaugh?  Michele Bachmann?  Ann Coulter?  Hannity?  John Boehner?  Joe Wilson?  Cornyn?  Cheney?  Rove?  Hatch?  Rumsfeld?  Condi Rice?  Palin?

Oh, the list is sooooo much longer.  More than a gutter, more than a ditch.  A landfill littered with losers just like you.  Guilty and stupid.

Not exactly a roster of live and let live, compassion or peace, love and understanding.  Fuck you Michael Steele you ignorant, sycophantic, Uncle Tom piece of shit.  What we have here is a very good day for America and whomever pulls your strings is more sad and pathetic than even you.  You suck as a human being and a puppet.  How do you and yours sleep?

Drinks for my friends.

I’m a little weary of politics.  What say we do something a little different?

You have no choice you fucks.  Ha!

I saw a woman today I haven’t seen for more than twenty years.  I remember her as being somewhat meek and a little mild.  She worked for me back in the day.  In my food service management period.  I was a teenage fast food restaurant manager Werewolf.  Pre-law.  Pre-med.  Pre famous record producer.  Post cartoon character.  Her husband worked for me as well.  He was always a sneaky little shit.  Slow eyed and devious.  I never trusted him and suspected him of abusing her.  Saw him at Costco the other day.  I have the absolute luxury of not being recognized in my hometown.  Looked right at him while he pushed his cart with same sociopathic countenance he always wore when he assumed he was anonymous.   The gift of anonymity works both ways.  I haven’t lived here for nearly a quarter century.

Nobody knows who I am.

Thank Zeus.

The Sunday afternoon dining at Costco is pretty goddamn something.  I’m not sure exactly what, but there were samples at the end of each and every isle.  Soups, pastas, pizzas and sausages.  Weird dumb people everywhere but the vittles were all up in my periphery.  I left satiated and thoroughly entertained.  Mother bought giant portions of things she required like double A batteries and Marie Calendar chicken Pot Pies.  I purchased six months at least of hair conditioner, thirty pounds of cat litter and some decent wine.

I see people I know all the time but choose not to talk to them.

I’ve been here in Nevada for too long but not long enough.  My father fell from a ladder, broke six ribs and a shoulder and is recovering slow but steady.  I’m back to pursuing the business I came to pursue.  Had a very good day today. The finance manager of the Washoe Indian Tribe returned my call to say he’s very interested in giving me a crack at the credit card processing for all four of their retail smoke shops.

I feel as though I’m in a state of suspended animation.  Time seems to pass so quickly here without a lot happening.  Carson City Nevada just may be the strangest place in the universe for me.  Despite any amount of anything, it’s indescribably weird.  People tend to be friendly but ugly.  Nice but dentally challenged.  The ugliest woman I’ve ever seen in my life works at the closest convenience store that carries American Spirit Ultra Lights.  Festooned with moles, blemishes, boils and a rather manly crop of whiskers, she is the most physically repulsive woman I’ve ever seen.

Ever.  Poor woman.  Sheezus she’s ugly.

We’ve spoken.  She’s very nice.  But holy shit, she may as well be the Elephant Woman.

The youth in this town are nearly invisible.  I never see the 16 to 25 crowd.  I don’t get out much because I’m still somewhat fiscally challenged and in lockdown mode.  Keeping my head down and working the phones.

I’ve gone two months without a haircut and pot and I’m rapidly advancing towards an early eighties Jew fro.  I’m not particularly susceptible to vanity but a man does not want to look an unkempt fool.  Keeping my nose and ear hair in check.

I wanted to look her in the eye.  Brenda.   She had no idea who I was.

Same woman has been cutting my hair in LA for almost a quarter century.  From short to half way to my waist and back again.  We grew up together.  Her name is Suzanne and I adore her.  We are very good friends.  She understands my misshapen head and unruly kinky, copious and curly prodigiousness.

So now it’s Brenda.  She worked for me.  She has blossomed.  The truth is, I fooled around with just about all the girls who worked for me.  I think actually, every single one of them.  A few of them, I wrote their high school papers and they brought me breakfast.  That was the deal.  I ended up with more than breakfast.   I crashed a car with one of them.  End over end off the side of a cliff.  We shared way more than breakfast too.  I loved them all in one way or another.

I wanted to look her in the eye.  Brenda.

I drove by the 70 x 24 foot trailer on the corner of Viking and Nye that I grew up in.  In my early teens we built a 25 x 40 foot addition on to it with a garage.  Property lines and zoning codes dictated that I’d lose my bedroom window but I gained a built in bookcase and my own bathroom.  We put a solid mahogany custom pool table and a wet bar in the giant room that was built “hell for stout” according to my father.  He constructed a massive two level deck behind it and sunk a twelve seat, kidney shaped hot tub in the middle of the lower level.

I could play my drums all night without disturbing my parents or sister.

No cable television but life was good.

The lot itself was a quarter acre and we all worked hard maintaining it.  My parents hated the weed choked portion that belonged to the city so we tore down the fences and cultivated lawn up to the road.  My mother had beautiful roses and desert shrubs.  Multiple trees including a crab apple front and center with a rock garden at it’s base.  Elaborate sidewalks all poured by my father with our infant foot prints and a front deck carpeted in astroturf, with an awning and siding to match the trailer that ran almost the entire seventy foot front built by my father.  Two driveways, one off either street, one leading to the garage.

It was a beautiful blooming yard in the summer.  Flowers, roses and trees all celebrating.  Often a race car being wrenched on in the driveway without a garage.  Men drinking Olympia or Hamm’s beer, thick and muscular tanned arms waving arc welder torches and spark spraying grinders while the sun made rainbows in pools of water and petroleum collecting on the sun baked asphalt.  The women sitting on the front deck smoking long feminine cigarettes wearing beehives and hornrims , flipping through Avon catalogs sipping mixed drinks and moving in and out while tending to the inevitably late Sunday supper.  Us kids playing and running in sprinklers, away from bees, perfecting a makeshift slip and slide fashioned from construction site visqueen.  Craigmont grape, black cherry and cream Soda, barbecued potato chips and the constant sound of a sliding screen door smacking closed and sliding open.

Watermelons and cantaloupe…………tater tots and ketchup……….

Flies in the hot kitchen despite collective effort.  Corn on the cob and potato salad.  Jello concoctions and vinegary bean dishes with awful flavor and texture.  I will never comprehend “three bean salad”.  It is vomit.  I’ll bet it’s worse going down than coming up.  Who eats that shit?  Old people with atrophied taste buds and dumb hicks who can’t know better.

Seriously, fuck me.  I’d rather sip from a bedpan.  Nastiness.

Moving right along.

Steaks, hamburgers and hot dogs.  Fruit salads with throat blocking coconut shreds, Cool Whip and mandarin orange slices tasting of tin.  Delicious homemade cobblers, pies and ice cream.  Yes, homemade ice cream.  Huckleberry and lemon-vanilla  you bitches.

Alive and thriving.  A real neighborhood with real neighbors.  A community.  A village.  Safety and security.

Winter holidays were just as festive, somewhat more decorous and far more elaborately decorated.  At one time my mother had an entire outside structure devoted exclusively and extensively to storage of holiday decorations.  She was raised with ten brothers and sisters.  Birthdays were never a big deal but holidays, Christmas in particular, were huge, in her childhood and mine.  She made sure.

I think what I’m doing here, is writing a love letter to my mother.  Everyday for the past week, she’s been in the 38 foot home away from home, cleaning.  I’ve watched her clean every wheel, every window, apply wood wax to every wooden surface and take clean rags to every blind.  She’s dusted, mopped, vacuumed and wiped every surface accessible.  Her plan is to rent an industrial shampooer tomorrow for the carpets.  She is a house on fire.

She then comes in every single night and prepares a balanced meal for my father and I.

I help as much as I can.

She is a fart in a whirlwind.

She sets things for the meal in motion and then we sit outside and play with the the black canine tripod, throw her toys across the lawn, giver her treats, have a smoke and a drink or two and eagerly talk about nothing or things very important.  I find myself getting impatient for her to join me on the patio.  I’ve learned to make our drinks and just wait until she’s ready.

My mother always has something else to do.

I help with cleanup in the kitchen every night.  I wipe up and dry and put away and collect and wrap and stash.

Then I stun her with my prowess at Jeopardy.  We seriously discuss my appearing as a contestant.  “Goddamn you” she tells me because I’m good at it.  I’m really thinking I should look into it.

I wonder, wonder, wonder.  My mother is so bright and perceptive.  Such an active and adroit mind.  What does she think about while keeping herself so busy?  It can’t be the singular curse of an overactive mind because mine never stops and I’m a relatively lazy bastard.  She’s a thinker.  I know she is.  I know she’s churning.  I’m going to ask her about it.

So anyway, I found myself over on that side of town the other day, my spirits were buoyed a little by the beauty of the day.  A high desert Indian summer.  I’d been warned but wasn’t prepared for what I saw.  No lawn.  No growth.  No greenery.  Grey and black.  Decay and rot.  The slow and insidious violence of absolute neglect.  Like beauty and spirit and air had been sucked out.  Trees angry and twisted and dying.  Rotting crab apples littering where lushness used to be.  A sagging roof, curtains askew and windows like blank crazy eyes.  Like a horror movie.  I still dream there.  I hope what I saw does not go that far into my twilight.

It hurt my soul.  It took my breath.  I thought about me and my sister’s impressions in the sidewalk my father made.  I intend to save those.  I will get them.  I will knock on that door and pay the man whatever he wants to lose that part of his sidewalk.  I will do this before I leave this town.  All the magic is gone.  All that we did and built has been erased by apathy.  Everything is still intact in our hearts and minds and spirits.  What we did and who we are is still complete and golden and thriving.

Lonely is the night.

Drinks for my friends.