I’m temporarily engaged in manual labor. It’s an interesting return. My delicate fingers are getting filthy with soil.
Maybe they aren’t quite so delicate, after all. But I have been getting some nice landscaping done, even as the freezing winds of Granada Hills blow straight up the back of my shirt and make me think of Admiral Byrd.
Not that I miss this, but every once in a while, it’s good to do something physical for your money. I expect my karmic bank account to increase a bit for this, if it exists.
I finally remembered this thing was in my parents’ neighborhood, and we drove over just after Christmas to check it out. I know it was a decade ago and all, but it was still disappointing that the house had been repainted the same bland neutral as the rest of its fellows on the street.
And I know it’d be a stretch to have the street named “Evergreen Terrace,” but was it impossible to get the lot for 742? 712 is just close enough to be insulting.
Grass & trees are gone, but it is the desert, after all.
I spent New Year’s Eve in West Hollywood, tired of staying home every year. I called up a friend who said he had no plans, and three of us trooped out to festive it up. First stop, Fiesta Cantina, and a giant-sized Corona. We walked up the road to Fubar, admittedly longer than it should have been. Next time, maybe a cab.
I continued to drink, which helped, because the place was dead until after 10:00. Switched to greyhounds, my fave. Unfortunately, it was way too dark for flashless photos.
There were lots more revelers by countdown time.
The music was way too loud, but it was nice to be in a crowd for the turn of the year. I finished with a shot of bourbon, which was probably a bit much. You know that line you try to keep on the other side of, when you cast all restraint aside and just keep drinking? I was so close.
Awoke to a bit of snow still on the ground and 34 degrees. I got yer White Christmas …
It was a terrific haul, though. Plenty of goodies to go around, and I think the pragmatism prize went to my lovely sister-in-law, who probably got a bit more “need” than “want.” Not that they’re mutually exclusive.
My brother began dreaming of next year’s revelry almost immediately.
His friend, Tom, and wife’s cousin, April, joined in.
I, looking like I’d been ridden hard and put away wet, then rolled up and left in a drawer somewhere, hypnotically goofed with my iPhone when we needed answers to trivia, wondered what the weather was going to be like, and as the Xmas text messages rolled in, en masse.
Even Moxie got a present, from the softies at the local coffee shop. She unwrapped it herself, the little shredder.
It was a pile, and chaos once again reined supreme among the torn paper and sealed boxes. Oh yeah, that is indeed a PS3 on that stack, bitches.
Night brought the most beautiful cityscape I’ve seen from the house. The Luxor Pyramid light blasted up through the clouds, which reflected back the glorious excess of The Strip.
You can see the top of Kevin, my cashier’s head. The lady ahead of me in line had a cart piled with stuff, and as Kevin handed her the mile long receipt he joked, “here’s your novel.” She didn’t get it. I felt a bit sorry for him.
I forgot how relaxing and comfy it is to be at my folks’ house for Christmas.
Did I mention the time I almost destroyed my family’s livelihood with one careless match? We were living in Safford, Arizona. My grandfather started a fish farm, and my mom, one uncle, and their families joined him in the venture. I didn’t yet hate Safford. It was still new, I was 13, and we’d moved around enough that my only friends were family members.
There were cattails dotted around the 40-acre property where the artesian water flowed. If you’ve ever seen these things in the fall, they burst into a shower of fluffy white fuzz at the slightest touch. We used to cut off stalks, throw them in the air, and watch them explode like mortars when they hit the ground. I discovered that if you broke open one of the heads and spread the fuzz out, they’d burn in a flash, like gunpowder, almost. One evening in late fall, like an idiot, I broke a cattail open amongst the stalks and lit it. The ensuing flames spread further into the swampy pond, and started to burn some of the reedy stalks that were dry at the onset of the cold weather. I panicked, and tried to stomp it out, pushing over more stalks against the low flame. Instead of smothering the fire, I had fed it more fuel, and it jumped up, hungrily. I tried to throw a few pathetic handfuls of dirt on the growing fire, but it was already out of hand. I ran to get my grandfather, and he notified the rest of the adults. Everyone spent a harrowing couple of hours fighting the blaze.
After the fire was under control again, my uncle confronted me.
“Are you responsible for this?” he asked. I had a lump in my throat and couldn’t speak, but I nodded my assent. His eyes narrowed.
“Come with me,” he said, crooking his finger at me, and strode away. I followed. He led me to the big pipe that channeled fresh water into the fish tanks. It was charred and swollen along the bottom where the fire had touched it.
“You see this? If this thing had burst, we’d have no way to repair it. We would have lost all the fish,” he said.
He didn’t have to explain further. The system depended on a constant flow of water as it drained out of the middle of the tanks. I knew that would have made me responsible for tens of thousands of dollars in losses, not to mention no prospect of viable future income for a long time. My uncle watched this notion sink deep into my brain and nodded.
“You got lucky,” he said. I was too scared and ashamed to say anything, and too afraid to look anywhere but my shoes.
After that, I was never quite so careless with fire. But that’s not to say I didn’t play with it. Hey, our little eastern Arizona town bored the bejeezus out of us. My brother, cousins, and I still did plenty of dumb stunts now and again. But I stopped well short of endangering anything other than us. Remind me someday and I’ll tell you how my cousin Adam gave himself a virtual leg wax with a bicycle and a flaming gallon milk jug.
But watching others’ stupidity and laughing over it kept Jackass on the air for quite a while, and I couldn’t do anything but howl with laughter at the following fiasco:
Following the fiasco of the mall, I decided to fall back on the time honored tradition of internet shopping. It didn’t save me any time, of course, even though we decided to keep the list small, just buying stuff for the family members who would be with us in Henderson for the actual face-to-face exchange. I spent all Saturday and a good bit of Sunday combing Amazon and Think Geek for gifts. I love Think Geek, but this close to the holiday, they run out of the best stuff. It took ages to plow through one disappointment after another, as laser-guided scissors and various shiny, flashing gadgets were successively unavailable.
After several hours of staring at products gridded across the screen, it didn’t exactly lift my spirits to check my shopping cart to find I’d filled about a third of it with personal gifts. I pared it down to one, and forged on.
Amazon makes it easy with the Wish Lists, but that seemed lazy, so I was still stuck trying to find the right things for the right price, having established a per-person budget. It’s all so complicated, but the only choice that saves time, gift certificates, makes me feel like a tool.
Next year, however, it’s tool time. Being a thoughtful Santa is too much work.
And he made me laugh, even though I’m still seething over my $45 parking ticket.
I was so close to not getting it, too. I walked out of the coffee shop and the meter jerk was slinking away. I’m not exaggerating, the man was slinking, sneaking, skulking away from the scene to his metermobile. He glanced at me a couple of times, but I decided to not react. I’m not sure what the most irritating thing to do in return is, though. Should I curse, or say nothing? Or maybe just go, “no, no, no, no no nononooo!” on a rising scale.
Zach Galifianakis got me laughing, though, and made me feel a bit better when I saw this.
