Having recently attained my three month anniversary of freedom from the ranks of the overworked and underpaid, I have gained some perspective into the views of a large mass of people inhabiting this town. One, it's tough...but hey, it's tough all over right? Two, it can be fun if there is room for error (I'm a prime example, thanks amelia!). But the bottom line is that unemployment is not nearly as acceptable here as it is at home. Work here is a grind, a marathon of short weekends, long and/or normal hours backed up a measly few weeks vacation a year and the possibility of insurance. It seems eternal and I have no problem seeing the deeply grooved ruts people get into living this sort of life.
What i've come to realize over these months of idleness is that I'm not cut out for that type of rat race, that type of living, which I know is a direct result of living the peter pan lifestyle of the seasonal worker for the past twenty years. Yes, I did have the Cantina for five of those twenty years, but c'mon, if that wasnt fun and peterpan-ish no other job was. That place was like PeeWee's funhouse most of the time.
Looking for a job, scanning the want ads, craig's list, jobdango are all new activities for me, and ones that I have to say I dont like very much. I havent actually LOOKED for a job since I put an application in at Icicle Seafoods in the spring of 1989 to be a slimer! Part of the shrinking job market here has to do with so many people moving to the northwest out of the hellhole to the south that is California. Another is that the industry here is flooded with illegals. I speak from experience when I say this, and I have nothing against hiring illegals as they provide a valuable service to the industry that I have thrived in forever, but my wages at the job I just left were on par with what I made twelve years ago at Ray's Waterfront. There are more aliens willing to line cook, wash dishes, bus tables, bartend, janitor then there are jobs...hence the flooded market and depressed wages.
Guys on street corners, seasoned waiters working at TGIfriday's, chefs slinging pans for $9 an hour, resumes required for a moving company job (do you have experience moving a couch? nope, but I'm a fast learner.), it's all become a game as once you land a coveted $10/hour job, you hold onto it like your life depended on it. So I hold out in the hopes that I find what my heart desires and I try not to let it get to me. Many people wondered how I could leave my great job, working with my brother, running the show at a family style Italian restaurant where I liked the food and the people who worked there, without a safety net. Without some other job lined up already in these troubling economic times. It was easy. I didnt like it anymore and was done sacrificing for a paycheck.
Now that I have a commanding view of my economic landscape from the saddle of my high horse, I see that it's pretty bleak for guys like me who want out of the only industry they have ever really known but dont know where to turn next. The doors that opportunity knocks on are now weather beaten and worn down, maybe hanging from a broken hinge or two, but it's still knocking and as I sit in my proverbial easy chair with my ears cocked, I can faintly hear something happening outside.

November 19, 2009
Eight minutes
A full tank of gas…
Stared back at me from the lighted dashboard where the important nuts and bolts of my car’s information were. I had a car full of hopped up drunk concert goers who wanted a road trip. I fell into the driver’s seat by default, being the last one to find a seat and sat staring at the full tank wobbling in a watery black lake. The steering wheel slowly morphed into a knotted ring of roots with worms and ants prowling the edges. The mushrooms hadn’t yet worn off but driving couldn’t be that hard. There were only 5,000 of my closest friends in steel boxes also trying to navigate away from this place. Colors rang in my head and swam before my eyes as I turned the ignition. It worked! We were driving! Hand me a beer! Rolling down my window the night smelled good, fresh and willing to let us play in it. The wipers came on and someone said it wasn’t raining. Lets get this road on the show, some girl said, pounding my seatback. OK I think I thought and stepped on the accelerator hearing the escalating RPM’s ramp up in my eardrums. All the windows were now down and we were laughing, yelling, and having a gay old time. I never knew driving could be this easy.

Ten minutes
I didn’t recognize you…
In all of the photos, in all of the letters, in all of my memories you didn’t look like this. We spent a week together in Burma, traipsing across the Irrawaddy river valleys, eating stunning guacamole at Inle lake, sharing lives as single travelers bound by the beauty of a far away country. Continuing our travels you went back to Thailand and I went north to Nepal but we stayed in touch through general delivery. Back in Savannah you wrote longwinded personal stories to me, opening up a world I had only briefly tasted. I sent back letters filled with the ramblings of a lost twenty something, letting ideas and thoughts spill onto the page like overturned coffee. We wrote back and forth over ten years. You got married, divorced. I proceeded through my twenties, and into my thirties refusing to grow up, with nothing to show for my life but experience and a few thousand in saved dollars. I was still working seasonally, still traveling four months out of the year while you started an ad agency, found yoga and herbal teas and the cosmic meaning to the universe. I loved coffee, booze, travel and women, but not necessarily in that order. Your sister found my address and most of my written letters in a box in your closet. I went to your funeral. That wasn’t how I remembered you but death is often the last impression we are given. I don’t go to funerals anymore.

Eight minutes
The old worn frame…
Was only one of many lining the walls of this venerated music hall. Everyone from Bo Diddly to Miles Davis to the Grateful Dead had played here, immortalized in signed prints and worn out photos. Pictures, and posters, black and white, color and etched drawings. Sitting directly above the lone water fountain was my favorite. In a peeling black frame not much bigger than an LP sleeve, was a flyer from 1970 advertising Jimi Hendrix, Cream, and Ten Years After. For five dollars. It was a summer show but inside the Fillmore seasons didn’t matter as it was always time for a party. I walked by that poster countless times, wishing that I could have been 20 in 1969. I imagined spending all my hard earned money in places like these, and now, I just wish the frames could talk, tell me stories about what it was like, how it smelled and , most of all, how it sounded! Every picture tells a story.

A windy guttural day with little to aspire to as the briskness of a walkabout brought revelatory thoughts about food. My good friend Erik, himself a chef and self described food snob, recently offered up this question...what cooking class, if any, would you most like to take?...and i was at a loss, because personally I wasn't sure I wanted a new cuisine in my repertoire. I would rather improve my skills in Italian, Pan Asian, Euro-influenced, Mexican...but new? Sushi, maybe. And traditional French (but I don't eat that way so what would be the point?). I know I want to bake better-breads, cakes, cookies, pies, pastries (ala Monica) and work on my Tapas resume. More improvement than anything new, and then I thought of barbecue. Not the beer belly hotdog slinging barbecue of yore, but the BBQ of the south-good old fashioned down on the farm, dukes of hazzard deliverance style BBQ where you take brisket, shoulder, ribs and slow cook it in an open pit, then slather it with secret sauce! That's what I'm talking about! So,yes, Erik, show me THE BBQ!
Having just been to Kansas City, home to fabulous BBQ and lousy baseball, I now consider myself an expert amateur on the eating of said culinary delights. Not an expert on process, but an expert in the way that eating at five different places in four days will give anyone an opinion on anything. We ate at a diner, at a wedding reception, at a swanky bar, and at a grease spot next to a racetrack and military base. The variety of establishments equalled the degree of quality we encountered and traveling with another couple gave us the opportunity to try multiple things on the menus. We ate pulled pork (sandwich and just the meat), beef brisket, pulled chicken, long and short ribs, beef ribs and pork ribs along with the requisite sides of cole slaw, potato salad, curly fries, tater tots and, my favorite, baked beans with carmelized bacon fat swimming in them (YES!). I managed to pass on eating the ribs because of my cannibalistic fear of gnawing meat off a bone, but did scrape some off of Brennan's plate that was fantastic. It was all terribly good, a whole new world of food had been opened to me that is almost entirely regional, reaching maybe to colorado but certainly into texas, tennessee and oklahoma. After four days of a nearly vegetable-less diet, my digestive system was on its knees begging for mercy.
There are as many ways to BBQ as there are BBQ joints, and in Kansas City there are over a hundred such places. There's different rubs, sauces, agings, smokes, methods, and everyone has their personal favorite and it's always the best. Much like Alaskans love of smoked salmon, mine is always better than yours and we could spend hours talking story about the methodology. Same as Olkahoma Joe's, Pat's Pig, The Smokehouse in KC all one up the other in the all important medium of bullshit.
It's not terribly creative but the difference between a moist tender melt in your mouth pulled pork sandwich and a tough stringy dry one is method and the folks at Oklahoma Joe's have nailed it. They've been in business over fifty years and I'm sure the 'pitmaster' has been there as long perfecting his art behind the scenes where no one watches. I applaud his talent and his drive to be the best but most of all his love for what he does because that first hung over day in kansas city, that succulent sandwich and beer that i had at his place was the best I've ever had.

I started writing these "prompt" essays a while back, it was part of this workshop i am still participating in, where the facilitator gives you a prompt...say, the street i grew up on...and you have a given amount of minutes to tell your story. it's pretty fun, and it loosens the joints and sets the creative mojo loose without having to really say anything. It's actually my favorite part of the workshop because the topics are endless and the direction you can take any topic is limitless as well.
This workshop is only once a month, but I'm signed up for an intensive one in february, that is if I'm not going to work in some far off exotic locale. Anyway, the results of my own prompt writing I will post occasionally, Sam has generally been my muse when it comes to picking topics, so i dont know what they are before i start writing.
As some of you know, we just recently went to kansas for our initial foray into america's heartland, and for the most part we had a good time. granted, it was spent mostly eating and drinking, but we did see some history (where custer napped before getting his ass handed to him at little big horn), and ate my largest (and first) chicken fried steak. I also managed to donate nearly 200 dollars to the local casino in kansas city, they were so nice there, granting us the privilege to lay our money down on nice green felt and making us feel like we were long lost friends...i felt so good about their charity that i had to visit the ATM and retrieve MORE cash to leave on the tables there. such nice people, midwesterners.
we did eat tremendous amounts of BBQ and i plan on reviewing a few of those places, namely Oklahoma Joe's and Pat's Pig...both fabulous in their own ways, so be on the lookout for those.

December 17, 2009
Fifteen minutes
When I escaped…
It was one of those clear crisp bluebird days that you never want to end. The mountains stood out in stark white contrast to the deep blue of the midmorning sky, the frozen trees covered in snow sparkled like diamonds, wood smoke curled from the stove pipes in Camelot as she finished packing the car. Breathing hard and starting to sweat from too much too early, she plopped down in the driver’s seat and turned the key. Sadie had her bed in the passenger seat with Felipe the stuffed koala on the floor, waiting anxiously for this next adventure. As labs do, her head lolled on the window ledge sniffing madly. They were ready to leave twenty years behind and start over 3,000 miles away. It was something she had thought about often, driving away from this town at the end of the road and now crunching down the dirt of her subdivision she mentally waved to her neighbors, to the tall spruce trees, D-O-G the corner husky, the wood guy living powerless down King Arthur’s court, and Ginger the busybody town gossip who knew everyone’s business up here. Out past Salmon creek and the junk yard and the conflicting smells that that area always produced in the summer. Turning onto the highway she paused for just a second, wondering if this was the right thing to do. Looking south she saw the bay, the rising mountains, the love and hope she had felt twenty years ago seeing it for the first time. A tear slid down her cheek. Sadie smiled. Heading north she had one last obstacle to climb over before freedom…the Showcase. The bar that was her home away from home, that saw her at her best and her worst, carrying her through good times and bad. She had to stop. And then she had to leave. Leave it behind.

Fifteen minutes
I wanted to…
Leave. I needed to escape from where I was from. To push it to the back of my mind and tidy it up into a neat little package and bury it with my past. As hard as I tried though the knot on my package kept coming undone and something or someone would slip out and bite me in the ass. Last week it was a girl. Last month it was an old job. And for the past two years it has been cocaine. Slipping through the cracks, that nasty white powder would infiltrate my nights, fill my waking dreams and tear down my carefully constructed walls. Five days without would strengthen me. Two weeks without would drive my hunger for it through the roof. Once I made it a month and felt the bricks of my clean foundation start to solidify, to become something I could rely on. And the, almost by accident I found myself in a bathroom in a seedy bar with one of my old seedy friends I hadn’t seen in a long time and he offered me a blast. It wasn’t a big deal, I told myself at the time, but then I needed more and the sleeping animal inside me woke and started its incessant demand to be fed. That’s the trouble with addiction; it is insatiable, undeniable and ruthless. It will consume me in the end unless I can beat it into submission with a shovel and a spade. Bury cocaine like I’m trying to bury my past, pushing it back into its box and underground. Leaving this town, these friends, those bars is what I want to do.


Five minutes
The paper machine…
Everyday I get splashed. Everyday I get fed. Everyday I get kicked or slapped or jostled. I get changed, emptied, and refilled, cursed, blessed and muttered to. I stand alone sometimes, chained to a bus stop pole, guarding disposable information. I look out my clear window and see cars passing or people walking and wish I could walk to a busier or slower spot depending on my mood. I get hungriest and most bloated at the end of the week.

Eight minutes
The gas station…
In the middle of the desert sat swathed in fluorescent light, buzzing with the electricity of nothing. Stars sprinkled across the fabric of velvety night lay outside the glowing station’s reach. A lonely man wearing flannel and oiled overalls with “harv” printed on the breast pocket smoked a cigarette behind the dusty window. We could see him plainly but wondered if he was alive. Smoke curled from his hanging rudi as we stepped out of our crusty Dodge to stretch, fill up and beat it. I wondered if the gas here was good, if this was a twilight zone setting, if Harv was dead or just waiting to kill. Nothing moved, not even the still summer air that hung cleanly but limply over us. After the pump broke the deafening silence by its movement, we looked at each other, then back at Harv’s window to see him gone…no sign. No sound. No smoke. And no Harv. Again the quiet engulfed us until the pump shut off with a loud click and 32.60 on the meter. Nobody wanted our money as we stood waiting, afraid of the station and what was behind its doors.

Ten minutes
Sleeping it off…
Was more of a task than he had thought, given the past three days that he had been up driving from Chapel Hill west to Santa Cruz. He had pushed through the bluegrass mountains with only coffee, swaggered into Louisiana and Texas with the last bit of speed he had, stumbled through the desert and traffic of Arizona and caught himself from drowning in the Pacific by attaching himself to his trusty comrade in arms, Blue the dipsy heeler he had adopted from the pound a few winters back. The water had slapped freshness into his eyes and rejuvenated his brain, keeping it from crossing wires for the last twelve hours up the coast. Along East Cliff drive stood his girl’s house, a beat up surf shack inhabited by artists and musicians, which nobody actually lived in but in which everybody lived. He collapsed on the old leather couch, speeding along on adrenaline and insomnia, staring wildly at the TV and feeling his nerves twitch and jangle with every movement. If he shut his eyes his head was assaulted with colors, sounds, images from nowhere in particular but from everywhere all at once. He was not comfortable and sleeping it off was not an option.

December 21, 2009
Seven minutes
It happened one night…
The entire floor was quiet except for Mr. Burnaby’s TV two doors down and the persistent hum of ICU machinery. The nurse’s station was dull, past changeover and into the monotony of the lonely hours before sunrise. I was lying awake listening to my own machines, feeling the IV pressure in my forearm and the pain in my back. A morphine drip is a great thing if it allows you to sleep but if it is too regulated, all it does is gently numb you and send your mind spinning out of control. I could hear the Home Shopping Network trying to sell Burnaby some carpet cleaner that he would never use. Then I heard a gargle and a cough, then a loud gasp. Nothing happened immediately but it was nighttime and you never know who’s going to make it through the night and who’s not.


Twelve minutes
The rain slick road…
Meandered lightless deeper and deeper into the country, away from her urban comfort zone. Her hands on the wheel were as white as her headlights shining two piercing holes into the darkness. Who in the hell would want to live out here? No lights anywhere, no people, no fluorescent metropolis to feel significant, no other cars…only ominous forest bordering a black ribbon that seemed to continue on and on. She was supposed to meet him at his family’s fishing cabin at MP 317, about a two and a half hour drive but was that at 80 miles per hour, or 60 or 50? She’d been driving nearly three hours and hadn’t seen a mile marker in forever. The gas tank had a quarter left so at least she could stay warm and dry while continuing to drive. All roads end in a town somewhere, right? Somewhere with a hotel and a restaurant? She was afraid to stop and pee for fear of losing herself to the night. How irrational but when one is born and bred to love the city there is no reason to leave it, not the least of which is driving alone into nothingness and getting lost. No Starbucks, no street lights, no cabs, just far out darkness. A mile marker ahead says MP338. Great, she passed it 20 minutes ago and didn’t even notice a driveway let alone the marker. He had better be there, she thought, or she would just keep on driving back to the city as fast and as far as she could.


Ten minutes
Once upon a time…
In a little boy’s bedroom postered with the baseball gods of the day, a dream took place that was to be as unshakeable as the boys faith that the sun would rise in the morning, giving one more chance to better himself, take one more step toward finding his dream. In the morning, before school started, he would dress in a worn out pair of jeans and slip on his favorite Griffey Jr. jersey, grab his glove and a ball and race outside before his mother could stop him. There was a six foot high wall at the end of his block that acted as both a barrier holding Mr. Mason’s garden up and as an automatic grounder machine for Petey. Petey would throw the ball at the bricks and field it coming back. Sometimes it would hit a corner of a brick and shoot the ball out at an angle so he would have to range deep in the hole like Ozzie, backhand the tattered ball and, depending on if there was one out or two, flip to the wall for the start of a double play, or turn, plant, and fire to first for the out. Petey was tireless. Coming in for breakfast not by choice he would be flushed and out of breath but staunch in his belief that he would be a big leaguer some day. His mother sent him to school with a smile and a curious shake of her head wondering what it was that boys dreamed about.


Fifteen minutes
Two lanes…
Is all that was opened in rush hour Friday, on a holiday weekend. Who the fuck comes up with these rules, Charles screams to himself in his airtight Lexus stuck in first gear with a glass of scotch on the middle console. Two goddamned weeks of shitty days stacked one atop the other like cordwood, his wife cheating on him and his high school boy arrested for possession on school grounds, grade school grounds no less. Charles needed louder, edgier music so Eddie Vedder and Pearl Jam let it go with a scathing ‘Rearview Mirror’. Looking in his, he saw a couple, silently staring straight ahead, probably not at him but through him and he could imagine the stagnant air between them, commuting home together to their 2,000 square foot loft with emptiness to keep them company upon arrival. He dreaded his house right now, an angry, hurt but well fucked (apparently) soon to be ex-wife on her third martini and second xanax while his boy was in his room probably weighing up bags and his other child, a nine year old beauty with innocence in her eyes and joyful curls around her face, watched TV or quietly sat reading her book. If she was the only normal one, then they had done well. Up ahead he was the telltale red and blue lights of emergency lighting up the ceiling of the tunnel he was about to enter. Swallowing his scotch, curiosity swept down on him like the warm afterglow of his commuter toddy. Inching into the tunnel, flares lit the walls and splintered glass littered the pavement along with broken pieces of the auto industry. Two ambulances had their rear door open, waiting for death to be inserted. Bags on stretchers. Blood on the pavement. Lives short and ended too quickly.
Maybe home wasn’t such a bad place to be going after all..

The Beach 2

Gardner atoll lies as close to the middle of nowhere as I have ever been. From ten miles out it is a speck of nothing, and any farther out it becomes the horizon. With palm trees, coconut crabs, boobies, terns and huge spiders, it lacks any semblance of humanity. During World War II it was briefly inhabited first by the british, then the U.S. and finally the Kiribatis only to be abandoned within a few short years due to the paucity of any fresh water.

We were steaming home to American Samoa after 50 days of mapping the pacific ocean floor and the captain decided a little exploratory mission to Gardner would alleviate some of the tension that being cooped up on a 200 foot ship had borne.

Surrounded by breakers thundering against ancient coral, the waters were too deep off the reef to anchor and too shallow close in, so the skiff was launched and ten of us went ashore. Swimming over the breakers and being tossed absently by the ocean onto a dulled rock ledge, we then waded the remaining 150 yards to shore.

The sun was unbelievably hot and only ten am high while the water was 88degrees ten feet down, and upwards of 92 ankle deep. And yet, the bleached white coral, the empty lobster carapaces, the swaying palms, the racing mare’s tails in the sky all ignored the heat and offered a tropical eden that traced its way back to time immemorial.

I sat on the old coral, white and bony looking, my tan toes scraggling the calcified relics and looked up and down the most beautiful stretch of deserted beach in the world.