A Fish out of Water

I wandered into the Mission-style terminal at Santa Barbara International and took a seat, waiting for an old associate to appear from the crowd of disembarking passengers. He stood out like a sore thumb. Looking nothing like the almost-uniform mass of fahionistas and faux-jetsetters, Clyde emerged from the scrum wearing a grease-stained Ditch Witch trucker’s hat and a faded green shirt with “Rapelje Rockets” emblazoned across it.

Clyde was quite possibly the walking antithesis of Santa Barbara. A six-foot-five walking, talking beanpole, he was a rough-around-the-edges-Jesus Freak-gun-nut-type, raised in a rural hovel on the outskirts of nowhere in Eastern Montana, and this was his first trip anywhere west of Spokane.

He walked up to me looking paranoid, and without so much as a hand-shake, he started rambling. “Got-damn, it’s good to see a familiar face. Let’s go get something to drink.”

We wandered out to my vehicle while he filled me in on his trip. This marked the first time he’d been on a plane before. He was of a man of means now. Clyde had recently taken up work in the Bakken formation of North Dakota and made “assloads of money,” as he so eloquently put it. It was a definite step-up from the previous position he’d held with the Stillwater County Sheriff’s Office. When he worked there he had told me he was “in the posse”, but I think he was really mopping bathrooms.

Now that he had “assloads of money”, he was getting serious about his bowling game. “I’m gonna make it big in Reno this year,” he said. In fact, the whole point of this trip was so he could come to Santa Barbara and test his mettle against the best Zodo Lanes had to offer.

“I’m gonna show ‘em howwits done in Big Sky Country!” He enthusiastically told me prior to his visit.

I drove us out of airport parking. Clyde rolled his window down and hung his arm out the side. He lit up a Camel and took in the scenery. This peace didn’t last long, as he soon grew agitated by the traffic.

“Where in the hell are all these cars from? Where do they all come from!?”

Before I could explain to him that we were on the edge of one of the world’s great metropolitan areas, he became near-psychotic.  He looked like an out-of-water Garibaldi flopping about the sand. He began screaming wildly while he hid his head under the glove box, cupping his ears.  

“I can’t take all these cars! They’re everywhere, EV-REE-WARE!” He rambled on, becoming despondent and increasingly incoherent.

Why was he acting like this? I guess he probably hadn’t been in a city that had more than one stoplight in a long time, but man-alive, he was going stark-raving mad. It must be the lack of alcohol, I figured. He had mentioned that “they wouldn’t take my good money” when he tried to buy a cocktail en-route from Denver.

I turned off into the lot at Calle Real and swung into a remote parking spot. Inside, the place was a total zoo. It looked like the frenzied floor of a stock exchange. We stood in line waiting to see about getting a lane. 

Clyde looked like a bitter refugee.

“I’m not good around people,” he said, clearly agitated. “I don’t like ‘em.”

Before he could totally snap, we made our way to the front of the line.

“What’s it gonna be?” A starry-eyed brunette behind the counter asked us.

“We need a lane,” I said.

“Yeah,” Clyde added. “I’m gonna whup some ass! Woo Boy!” No longer feeble from traffic apparently, he let out a little yelp and strutted around as if he were the proudest man at the nudist colony.

“Um, ok,” the cashier said. “Well, you’re going to have to wait.”

“How long?” I asked.

“About 90 minutes. There’s some kind of Jr. High party going on tonight.”

I looked around. The place did have a certain awkward teenage bend to it.

“Well shit,” Clyde said. “Let’s go get somethin’ to drink. I’m gonna lose it soon with all these bastard kids runnin’ around.”

I obliged. We went over to The Nugget. If there’s one thing that can make a homesick Montanan lost in the wilds of the American Riviera feel comforted, it’s mounted animal heads.

We headed in and took a seat. Clyde eased up for a change. The killer tension he’d been holding in finally seemed to subside. While I maintained an even pace, he began guzzling drinks like a madman. He started flashing his “oil money” and ranting about Class C Basketball, and before I knew it, he was totally smoked.

“Clyde,” I told him, “you’re going to be too drunk to roll.”

“Nonsense,” he said, taking a drag off yet-another Whiskey Sour. “I’m just gettin’ where I wanna be. You’ll see.”

We paid the tab and left, staggering back into the bowling lanes, still thronged with adolescents. Our lane was ready.

Clyde swaggered over to the juke box in the bar and put on the Allman Brothers’ “Midnight Rider”. His juices flowing from “his jam”, he taunted the incandescent adolescents savagely. After each strike, he’d let out a war cry and dance a little jig. The kids surrounding us looked at him as if he were Attila the Hun reincarnated.

He levied a savage crusade on the lanes that night, the likes of which I’d previously not thought possible in the game of bowling.

Not a day after that, he had me drive him back to the airport, and he rebooked himself on the first flight back to Montana. He didn’t even want to partake in Nisei Open League Night, or College Wednesday. As we sat on Sands Beach, he, in an unusually rattled tone told me “it was all too much” for him, and that if I wanted to kick it again, I was going to have to go to a real city, like Billings. 

Christmas Ain't What it Used to Be

I’ve never liked the holidays at all but I loathe them now more than ever. And it’s not as if I’m some militant Volcano worshipper angry at the fact that Jesus’ birthday is a public holiday either. I’ve just never been a fan because the holidays usually have meant for me at least, trips to awkward family gatherings. Most years my family would make a pilgrimage to a soiree produced by a pretentious and condescending red buffalo in an abode off Canon Perdido,

This meant encountering a cavalcade of obscure non-relatives who also happened to be celebrating at the same locale. Running into these characters was as traditional as the CBS “Frosty the Snowman” special.

There was Jiminy who would always put on a slideshow about his recurring trips to Nauru.

And Rodger, a stocky aloof type who would annually enthrall the crowd with tales of gambling trips to Elko. His demeanor suggested he’d been permastoned on Quaaludes since the Johnson Administration, his face looked as if it were composed of White Castle hamburger patties, his pompadour caked by mountainous gobs of grease; all cobbled together to resemble a sun-dried version of Lenin’s corpse.

And Maggie, she of the strong, silent androgynous type, the offspring of a cackling hyena and a Canadian janitor.

There was also always what resembled a revolving door Model United Nations of hipsters, wannabe jocks, failed record executives, roid-ragin’ MMA washouts, and rowdy, Black Country leprechauns. Too numerous, too fleeting to name.

One year, I broke tradition and went to a relative’s house in a far corner of rural Montana where I encountered a mob of Rummy-playing troglodytes who had consumed too much Animal beer. My lasting memory of that particular solstice was a drunken yahoo starting an impromptu firework show, the other sauced revelers whooping it up, cheering him on. In the midst of this drunken sky-show, he managed to knock the tube over that was firing the blazing bulbs into the sky, sending a bright mortar exploding mere inches from my head.

The best Christmas I ever had was barhopping around Santa Cruz with a couple of miscreant pals of mine one year when I was nearly broke; I ended up sleeping overnight in a gas station parking lot. It was the essence of the “Holiday Spirit”; quality experiences with close friends.

I feel the meaning of the Holidays has been adulterated in recent years. In fact, I think Santa set up shop in La Cumbre Plaza this year the day after the Back-to-School sale ended.

This time of the year no longer comes to mean a time of togetherness and of too much eggnog. No, anymore it’s all about buying, with no iota of care given to seeing loved ones or even having depraved reunions with obscure souls.

Just the other day I saw a vivacious, intensely wild-eyed girl of about ten ranting to her youthful and attractive, but increasingly disinterested mother her thoughts on the Christmas holiday. I didn’t get the entire gist of her views, but they sounded a bit like “Money! Buy! Buy! Presents? Presents! Buy! Buy! Buy!” And it’s not just this Jr. Wall Streeter; I’ve seen countless others maintaining a similar view, from twenty-something airheads mindlessly rambling in vain at their permatanned, plastic-looking, phone-stoned mothers, to middle-aged balding men leaning on their leased Porsches, bragging to their broods of batchildren about the new Titleist their old lady is getting them.

Stores are now opening on Thanksgiving Day. And it’s getting crazy out there. A near-stampede occurred at the Paseo Victoria’s Secret, perpetrated by patrons that resembled greedy, bucket-trapped crustaceans clawing over and suffocating one another in a violent lust for cheap panties.

Will stores in coming years start offering to host holiday gatherings at their outlets, promising priority access to all the sales?

Probably. But I won’t be there. I’ll still be driving around trying to find someone with a slideshow about their sojourn to the Peshawar Smuggler’s Bazaar. 

"Duck Dynasty": Serious Business

The other day I was at the Shark Bar assuaging a gut full of fish tacos with a Bloody Mary. Though the establishment seemed a bit dead, there was a strange buzz about the dark atmosphere. People were livid.

“Did you see that Phil from Duck Dynasty got kicked off the show?” An unkempt, bearded, and garrulous drunk shouted incredulously while smacking his fist on the bar’s smooth surface. “It ain’t right I tell ya! Used to be something called Freedom of Speech in this country!”

“He had it coming!” A half-buzzed, horn-rimmed haranguer interrupted from a table away, looking around, smiling smugly at his clique of friends who were undoubtedly hanging out here before it was cool to do so. “You can’t trash a whole community and expect to keep your job!”

This was all in reference to reality TV “star” Phil Robertson getting fired from his show, “Duck Dynasty” for making some decidedly un-PC remarks in a recent GQ interview.

“You insolent little douchebag!” The drunk shouted. “This is America, go back to Cuba or wherever you’re from if you don’t like it.” He threw a cup of ice in protest.

 His bespectacled adversary let out a high-pitched yelp of some kind and lunged at him, clawing at his face. The drunk retaliated by unleashing a few guttural shrieks of his own and running wildly into battle as if he were some kind of peyote-mad Aztec shaman. Before things could get too out of hand, though, the two reality TV critics were separated.

“Phil’s a hero you son-of-a-bitch!” The drunk thrashed wildly about, struggling to be restrained. He resembled an orangutan who’d just mainlined a speedball.

The two combatants were excommunicated after little struggle and a smattering of profanities. Things went back to normal in a pretty quick-like fashion. I ordered another cocktail and pondered the weirdness.

There were two actual people, outraged to the point of a physical altercation, over the goings-on of a low-end Reality TV show.

I’m not sure what’s worse, the fact that such a show exists, or the fact that someone would actually watch it. But it is a smash hit, and this wasn’t even the first example of outrage over this I’d experienced. Earlier in the day I had visited Facebook, where I found my entire newsfeed ablaze with anger. I counted at least two dozen “Boycott A&E” posts, and a dozen or so more indicating a person’s desire to “#standwithphil”.

People came across as if they were personally affected by this turn of events. Like they were haunted by this monstrous move. It’s as if one’s father just got laid off at the steel mill, his job outsourced to Turkmenistan. The lasting image of your old man becomes a fist shaking and a voice quaking, “Goddamn you Niyazov!”

I didn’t quite understand it. Shouldn’t I be pissed too, at least a little bit, if these blustering blowhards were on the verge of killing each other over the whole thing? Maybe, but I wasn’t. I must’ve had it all wrong, I figured. Here, I’d been outraged over the wrong things, like the NSA spying on us like a latter-day KGB, or the fact that the streets of this seaside hamlet rivaled Bogota, rife with hit and runs. I was missing the big picture, I was missing the big issue that haunted everything. The fact that Phil got fired. A move so huge that it had potential to become a modern day JFK moment. “Where were you when you found out Phil got fired?”

I finished my beverage and stepped outside, walking past a straw-haired beach hag wrapped in a rug as I headed down State Street nowhere in particular that clear and mild night. A bluehair nearly ran me over as I crossed the street, grazing my leg and speeding away. I found a cop to voice my complaint to, but he told me there was more important business at hand than erratic seniors, like Phil getting fired from Duck Dynasty, before telling me to “move along,” for there was “nothing to see here.”

Of Relationships and Fast Food

Not long ago, on a cold and windswept evening, I staggered into a fast food outlet in a haze of inebriation. This wasn’t anything out of the ordinary; most times I find myself in this sort of establishment, I’m impaired in some fashion or another. They go hand in hand together, really, fast food and being smashed. A marriage of lust; hunger pangs often cravings to the point of madness. A lust for 99 cent breakfast sandwiches can’t fill itself, you know.  On this evening, I found myself in a state of euphoria, brought on by the combination by both a heater blowing at full boar and the aroma of greasy food stuffs being cooked.

As I stood at the counter in amazement pondering the rainbow of possibilities, I was overcome with a sensory overload; there was definitely too much good stuff going on. Did I want the promotional over-the-top burger special? A greasy breakfast concoction? Some sort of sourdough delicacy? I couldn’t decide.

Eventually, I settled on about four burgers and a mountain of French fries with several cups of Buffalo sauce on the side. As I greedily wolfed down the contents of my nocturnal feast, I wondered why I didn’t do this more often. It was so ridiculously good. After consuming the last of my scrumptious morsels, I managed to wander back home with a gut satisfaction about me, visions of similar encounters dancing through my head.

This was the start of a beautiful thing.

The next day, after braving a stormy morning hangover, I went back to the site of the previous evening’s spread. If it made me feel that awesome the night before, I thought, it’d do the same trick today as well. I wandered in and ordered a double bacon cheeseburger that looked impeccable going by the picture behind the counter. My number was soon called and I retreated to a corner booth to scarf this grub down. This was going to be great!

The whole event was a letdown. The bacon cheeseburger was greasy and sloppy; one of the patties even had a green twinge about it, and the fries tasted as if the batter was composed of ninety-five percent pure salt. I left the place as dejected as I was excited previously. I guess I should just be stoned on something all the time.

In many ways, the whole narrative about a fast food experience is analogous to something seemingly unrelated; ill-fated relationships. On the surface, these topics seem totally estranged from one another, polar opposites. But digging a little deeper, the two are closer than one might first think.

Because it seems that bad relationships between people are as ubiquitous as fast-food eateries in any civilized society. And like fast food, some relationships are best enjoyed whilst being totally and utterly fucked up.

We all know one. We may have even been in them ourselves; they’re everywhere after all. Studies show that over half of all marriages end in divorce. Let’s face it, fast food style relationships are more American than obese, paranoid Jesus Freak gun nuts.

Certainly I’m not immune from this phenomenon. I once found myself totally engrossed in a girl whose common interest was chasing dragons. And it was fun for a while. But it also was corrosive. I withdrew from my obligations and did things I normally wouldn’t have done. My partner in crime was no better off, and became increasingly dependent on the Pamiri delicacy, in progress becoming increasingly erratic and unpredictable. I would wake up some nights with her, wild-eyed and topless, lording over me clutching a Bedouin dagger in one hand, staring into my soul like a Great White Shark. I was a bit freaked out, I admit, but it felt so good. 

Of course, if one were to have looked at us from outside our cocoon and dug a little under the surface, they’d have seen how utterly depraved everything was in actuality. It was a bad deal, but when you’re flying, you don’t think that. All you think about is the next high, whatever it may be, and the sweet goodness you are wolfing down in the midst of it. Very similar, I might add, to a fast food outlet while under the influence.

Fast food, like lusty Eskimo goddesses with a proclivity for painkillers, possesses its own set of perils. For one, you’re never quite sure where the food comes from. So God knows where that burger you’re about to chow down originated from. That’s a higher class item too, what about staples like chicken nuggets? No doubt rejects from the Chicken Head factory. Not to mention all the vermin and bugs that have taken residence in the annals of the eatery you’re in, and the galaxy of chemicals, hormones, and other gnarly items that they load your meal up with during production to ensure maximum profits.

But when you’re riding high and swaggering into one of the many outlets that dot the landscape, you’re not thinking about that. You’re thinking about how great that Sausage Biscuit looks. Or how insatiable that double burger with secret sauce appears. Or how those nachos are calling out to you, like a personal message from Allah, Shiva, Yahweh, God, or whatever other deity you worship. No matter how bad for you the foodstuffs are, no matter how nasty the conditions of the place you’re eating them in is, no matter how filthy the production of the food is, none of that matters. All that matters is satisfying the undying lust in your inebriated state that opines for this toxic elixir.

So no matter the toxicity, you carry on, health and sanity be damned, because you’re hooked. You love it. You lust for it. You crave it. And if someone else is telling you it’s bad for you, well, fuck them. They’re just jealous of the righteous wave you’re carving down right now.

And it’s not until something bad happens that you call your motives and situation into question. Maybe it’s catching e.coli from too many late night fast food runs. It could be sitting and listening to your significant other ramble incoherently about a conspiracy that ties together Captain Crunch, a couple of obscure bagmen from Overtown, and the Iranian Quds Force. Perhaps your arteries have become clogged and hard, or you’ve started growing female breasts.  It could be waking up with your stereo system gone, stolen, sold in the smuggler’s bazaar of the dope world.

In any case, something traumatic almost has to happen before you realize that it’s time to change your ways. Maybe you won’t; there’s certainly a sizeable subset of the population that continues to chase fast food and bad relationships even though they are bombarded with problems, either out of just not caring or acceptance. But if it’s unhealthy now, chances are, it’ll be unhealthy going forward.