Dispatch From A Roadtrip I'm Not On: Days 1 & 2

"There she is... Miss America." Honda ST1100. Don't remember the year.

Joosh is off. I am abandoned for a two-week venture with OMT* that will see them travel Easy Rider-style through several states, ending up in South Dakota (Wounded Knee, and no, he won't be burying any hearts, I already asked and he rolled his eyes mightily in my direction). About 200 - 250 miles a day. Sore bottoms will abound.

So that we may all enjoy the sights and sounds of this, our great nation, as they roll through, I offered something of a vicarious blogging situation wherein Joosh can send photos and some brief information, and I will in turn share it with you. I had hoped to speak with him at length in the evenings in order to fill out the narrative a bit, but since this is day two and that has not yet happened, I think that maybe I'll just go ahead and make up the stuff to fill in the gaps. Kidding. (Mostly).

Day 1 - Portland to Klamath Falls. 296 miles.
Joosh kept calling Klamath Falls "Clackamas" for some reason, which is only like 12 miles away. It was confusing. Also? I always thought there were two M's in "Klamath" but I guess I was terribly wrong. Huh.

He hit the road after a morning of dawdling and packing, around 1:30pm. Off to Clackamas Falls. I'd had a super hearty laugh when at one point he sat down and I noticed a seam looking a little precarious in the crotchal region of his jeans and said, "You want me to fix the hole in your dick... jeans?" He looked at me quizzically and said "Nooooooooo. Thanksssss." In my weakened state from all these days and days of being sick in bed, I have clearly lost my ability to communicate. But man I could not stop saying the word "dickjeans" (because oh yeah, that's a word now, people) and cracking up. Which was excellent for phlegm loosening, let me tell you.

There was some sort of big Washington/Oregon game in Eugene and rolling through was apparently quite trafficky and unfun. This photo was taken just south of there (if I'm not mistaken). I suppose we're to admire the bike and notice the long road ahead.










Salt Creek Falls.
You stay? You pay!
The Ranger would only let him stop for a minute to put on warmer gear (it was about 54 at this point). Otherwise he'd need to pony up the $5-a-day day use fee.





Odell Lake.
Just came over the pass.
It was cold.
Got down to 47.





This is my favorite dispatch from the road so far. Here, let me quote: "Sketchy rest stop 68 miles from klamath falls. Put on the rest of my warm gear. There was a really scuzzy looking old guy that kept asking me if I needed anything. He said he could make me a really good deal. He didn't say what he was selling and I wasn't gonna ask. Unfortunately he got really irritated when I tried to take his pic. He didn't seem to have a car so I don't know how he got there. He took off when some state troopers stopped to use the facilities."



Shall we wager whether this guy was selling drugs or a BJ? Hmmmm? If Joosh was wearing full leathers, I wouldn't even have to ask the question because Helloooooo, Papa Bear.

God, he's going to kill me if/when he reads this post.

Moving on.


Upper Klamath Lake.








About 7pm.








15 miles to the lovely hotel I had found on Hotels.com and booked for him. The Maverick Hotel. (Very timely, yes? What with the old coot choosing his unexpected running mate, proving he's just a jolly old independent spirit like always? Ugh.)






The hotel got some good reviews for being way cheap and shockingly clean and tidy for the degree of cheapness. I reserved a non-smoking room for the boy at $45 per night. Don't you wish your girlfriend was hot like me? I rock.





Then came the food finding:
What passes for Pra Ram in Klamath Falls (left).








And Mango with Sticky Rice. Hold the mango. So, um, sticky rice. With cream white goo sauce on it. And no mango. Even though he ordered mango. It happens. I guess. Right?







So listen. Vicarious blogging Day One while G-chatting with my brother about this ridiculous election and Tom & Jerry cartoons and other highly important matters (is Sarah Palin's Down Syndrome baby her daughter or her - gasp - GRANDDAUGHTER?!?!) has completely worn me out. We're gonna have to pick up this party again tomorrow.

Love you, babe. Be safe out there on the wide open road. Watch out for hookers in Nevada and Mormons in Utah. And vice versa (I know they can sometimes be hard to tell apart - Katherine Heigl, I'm looking at you).

Day Two. Klamath Falls, OR to Reno, NV. To be continued.

*OMT is "Old Man Todd" - not to be confused with the much younger BabyDaddy Todd or BDT, who also lives in Ventura. BDT is a good long story for another time.

Why The Thought Of Becoming A Parent Scares The Ess-Aytch-Eye-Tee Out Of Me.

A writer here in Portland received the following message on his answering machine from his goddaughter/niece:

"Uncle Marc, it's Amy. I'm calling to find out why do bad things happen. Why do people get sick or have accidents? Or why do they fall in love with you when you don't love them back? And why is the oil on the ground rainbow-colored even when the sun doesn't hit it?"

I forgot to mention: the neice is six.

I. am. terrified.

If/when I can stomach the full leap into parenthood, I suppose I'll have to find some good godparent-types out in the world upon whom, along with Uncles Z and J, I can foist all the hard existential, metaphysical and otherwise unanswerable questions upon, as they inevitably come spilling forth from my child's mouth.

Until then, I quake in fear.*


*I suppose quake is a tiny bit melodramatic. I quiver, how about that? Tremble? Shudder?

Important Stuff To Know About Stuff That Like Fills Your Closets And Stuff.

El Jefe Goldstein recommended this video to me a while back. It's simple, and probably preaching to the choir with all of y'all in this audience, but still important stuff I think. Well done, anyway - everything is clear, concise and woven together thoughtfully.

THE STORY OF STUFF


So maybe you can pass it on to your non-Hippie, heads-in-the-sand consumer "I want/I need/Gimme" family members and friends. But in a less judgey tone than I seem to be able to muster.

Shnow!

We had the first flurry of snow last night. It was beautiful (as it will probably always be to a Californian living in a place that only occasionally sees the white stuff). Joosh and I drove up into the hills by the zoo and took turns throwing fresh, clean little snoballs at each other.

Pardon the blurry photo. It was taken with Joosh's new Crackberry, which has a tiny bright white LED that it uses as a flash in the dark when taking pics. It's not high quality, but it does do the trick.

The snow smelled really good - super clean, and mildly herbal, like babies and sweetgrass. I was impressed with nature for creating such a lovely nosegay on frozen water. Very nice.

It is supposed to snow again tonight after 10pm and there's a 60% chance on Saturday as well. Pretty crazy that snow used to be an every few years event around here, and yet we've had significant snowstorms each year that we've been here. Thank you global warming and your interestingly shifting weather patterns.

In other news, I'm in a ridiculously foul mood today due to the idiotic project that will not die (if you say "Timeshare" to me, you are going down, Sucker). It's the goddamn Energizer Bunny, with the whole 'keeps going and going and going." Never was a person more over something than I am of this little venture.

Strength, Camille.

Ketchup, part 2: Trip to California, subpart B.

And shortly the All Hallows Eve, full of sugar and expensively-suited small people running up your steps, was upon us.

Halloween-y at Joosh's mom's place. Nephew Liam, being the damn cutest giraffe you'll ever see. Except that his outfit was a tiny bit too tight and he kept trying to yank the crotch free. Technically he was a bit of a skeevy giraffe, I guess.



And still later in the week I drove through parts of LA previously unknown to me (Irvine, Santa Ana, godforsaken places one and all) to see El Jefe, with whom I'd been working on the aforementioned ridiculous project for the last few months. We were supposed to go the Oceanography center, but when I arrived at about 1, there was a police blockade, so we renegotiated our plan to involve mediocre pizza and a park for some fun times.

The kids were along for the ride, and if you know Jefferey and his lovely wife, you'll know at first glance that these two are literal chips off the old blocks. May I present Mini-JLG and Mini-CSH:


They are incredibly funny and absurdly smart. And it's probably a good thing they are home-schooled, because they are the kinds of adorable precocious who would get their hilarious butts kicked and their brains shrunk in public schools (yes, even the snotty la la schools in So. Cal!).

Here I asked them to make their kookiest craziest grossiest faces. This is what they came up with:

With a smidge more prompting (grosser! crazier! C'mon!):



Ash conquers the rings:



Autum(nal) conquers the rock wall:















El Jefe conquers Dana Point (while rocking the ever-sweet 'Refugee Facial Hair' look, apparently grown during the wildfire evacuation the previous week):




The entire family (sans CSH who did not join, but was surely wearing them within a hundred miles of us all the same) wore Crocs. I found this funny.



Hipster parents and their hipster spawn, taking over the world one dress-over-jeans or punked-out-hoodie outfit at a time:

(Please note the evidence of California's real estate market shining on the hilltop in the background, just above jeans/dress girls head).

I didn't get a good shot of the possibly older women dressed youngisher (so of indeterminable age) in tight leopardy-slash militantish yoga wear who Jefe insisted were a lesbian couple. I had hoped you might weigh in on the subject. They were wearing Neimen Marcus versions of ghetto caszh, basically. And I disagreed about the couple thing. But Jefe also thinks that JK Rowling outed Dumbledore (who is CLEARLY not gay, not that there's anything wrong with that) in order to make the actress who plays Hermione feel better about the fact that she is, in fact, a total lesbian. So take his assessments with a grain (or several) of salt.


Prior to the arrival of the other kids in the photo above, I had a total "That kid is STILL on the ESCALATOR" moment with this aging skater punk dad and the daredevil egg-onment of his progeny.

It might be too small to see without enlarging the photo to full size, but man, I could practically hear the bones breaking, precognitive echoes playing over the voice of Brodyman in Mallrats in my head. A few minutes later they busted out a skateboard and went to town. No, no helmut. (God help me, I'm an old old old lady).

So that's about it. There were many other activities on the California trip, of which I did not manage to photo document any further. Visits with grandparents, brothers, mom, dad, step-brother and fam (where I broke the news about the fact that one of their Halloween pumpkins was covered in the recalled "Aqua Dots" beads, you know, the ones that turn into the frickin date rape drug when ingested? Thank you, China, you piece of shit, and thanks all you nutjob USA consumers so desperate for cheaper and cheaper crap that you don't give a rat's ass about where it comes from, how it gets here, what the impact is, etc, until your own spawn are threatened with immediate comas or a case of lead poisoning. Grrrrrr. Though I should offer the caveat that the Aqua Dots were not at all cheap, they are absurdly expensive, actually - I guess you have to pay extra for a drug in your toys that some people actually want and pay good money to procure on or before date night).

Hmmm, I seem to be getting bitter and crankypants. Perhaps I should leave off about now. I meant to end with a tribute to my love and yours, Mr. Ben Harper, who graced us in Portland with his harmonious presence last week, but my account of the lovefest, it will have to wait.

Congrats to Bexy on her last day of classes for the first semester!!! Crazy fast, this semester flew by. I've yet to try the New Year's Drink contender recipe yet, but I will do so soon. There's always the sweet Saphire nectar to fall back on come 29 December, right? Congrats, honey. You are totally rocking the school of law.

Ketchup, part 2: Trip to California, subpart A.

Trip to California: The Cemetery Visit.

My favorite Un-Niece, Hedrita. Joosh's older brother's daughter. She let's me call her "Cookie" just like the Jewish Tante I've always wanted to be.

She and my youngest brother are the same age, and went to the same High School and according to what I have gathered on Facebook (The MyFace, I call it), they refer to each other as cousins. But if Joosh and I actually did get married, she'd be my niece (by marriage, but still) and my brother would be... her uncle-in-law? My brother would be Joosh's Brother-in-Law, and Joosh is her uncle, so wouldn't that be it? Uncle-in-Law? Maybe they'll have to stick with cousins. It'll be much more fitting for the day when they get drunk at a party and make out and I have to tease them incessantly by calling them "Kissing Cousins". God, I hope they don't find this blog. They will kill me.



On Sunday, the day after we arrived, I went with the not-in-laws to visit the family cemetery plots. Our friend ML here in Portland has been doing some Geneology research (she LOVES it, apparently - ask her about the Royal Family line, go ahead, I dare you), and Joosh's mom is in that sort of family reckoning stage of life, so armed with two notebooks and some vague plot numbers, off we went to the most beautiful, most glamorous, possibly the most would-be-expensive-land/ currently-occupied-only-by-dead-people-not-able-to-enjoy-the-million-dollar-view I have ever seen. Right on the bluffs at the edge of Santa Barbara, this no doubt used to be the outskirts of town. No longer. It is smack dab in the middle of Oprah territory, huge swaths of gravestone-dotted prime-ass real estate, totally gorgeous. Breathtaking.

First we went to the park where Jojo got married and had ourselves an old-fashioned picnic full of mayo and cookies and lunchmeat, etc. Char made fabulous hummus for her (shockingly) vegetarian brother (meat family, very very meat family) and the jackass refused to eat it. I found out later it was because he thought the roasted peppers were tomatoes, but that may or may not be the full truth of it, one never knows.

At the park, we totally annoyed some hippie dippie group of Food-Not-Bomb'ers having some sort of free-out in the center by the turtle pond. Apparently we sat down too close to their food collection area or something, and they kept looking at us with decidedly un-peaceful expressions. Peace and love kids, peace and love. Hopefully we redeemed ourselves when several homeless looking dudes came over and asked for food, saying they'd been told there was food to be had by the tree (all I saw were sacks of uncooked potatoes, by the way, and a fuck-off HUGE clear hefty sack of hard-tack looking bagels with a double knot at the top that people kept picking up and putting back down again). We gave them food, and they were excited.

Best moment by the tree: An adorably overeager college student came over and dropped a brown bag off on the other side of the tree (where the bagels and potatoes and oh oh, I forgot to mention the rotten looking bell peppers! were) and turned to us with a jaunty little informational sing song: "Butternut squash! From my garden! Organic! Tra la la!" Oh Peace and Conflict Studies peeps, how I miss you.

So up to the Ritz Carlton of cemeteries. It took us a while to find the right plots. In fact we had to flag down a groundskeeper. It was a Sunday, so the main office wasn't open, but there was a tour of some kind being led around the grounds. I was exceedingly annoyed by a super disrespectful woman wearing a green and black striped witches hat throughout the tour. Show some respect, lady, jesus. I seriously wanted to yell at her, but settled for sneering whenever she passed. I'm not sure if she noticed or not. It was sunny and there was lots of squinting, so I highly doubt it.

Here, for your amazement, are more cemetery photos (I'm obviously having trouble getting images to rotate, but it's too late at night for me to bother with it, so apologies for the neck cramp in case you care to turn sideways for viewing).











Bury me here please. Oh wait, I want to be cremated, or neptuned or something. So scatter me here, or in that beautiful sea off the bluffs from here. Or just think of me fondly when you pass by.

We managed to find both family plots, but there's a bit of a mystery about the Sprouls because there are 5 people listed on the records as buried in the plot, but only 3 names appear on the newer looking headstone, and the dates of birth and death appear to be off slightly. Hmmmmm.

At some point when I am feeling less "What am I going to do with the rest of my life" and more "Nancy Drew" I may attempt to get to the bottom of this like the super sleuth I know I can be in my heart of hearts. I suspect it will be a nice chunk of a novel one of these days, from all the stories I've heard so far. (And you thought YOUR family was bad?!?).

I bore me. Care to join?

It poured today (shocking for Portland, I know, alert the media).

I wore Birkenstocks, a skirt and a beer sweatshirt (the one with Rasputin's image, that gets me lots of guys staring at my chest and saying "That is an AWESOME beer" and lots of girls staring at same, trying to figure out what the hell they are seeing, as The Unkillable's head sort of gets crammed in the bra-fashioned concave between the twins - the girl-staring is usually followed by a sneer, by the way, and yeah, I totally get it). So after walking around for a few hours like this, I was both proud of, and disgusted by myself. And not a little bit uncold.

Sun came out for a bit. Second rainbow in as many days. Nawwwww.

There was some sort of weirdo streetside snowboarding-in-October event today in what I did not previously know is known as "one of Portland's most famous alleys" (due to its location off the backdoor of a well-known strip-club), at the top of the North Park Blocks. I couldn't get a super good look at the action due to the throng of parka-ed and knit-capped young people standing around drinking the Redbull, Rockstar and other energy drinks being thrown at them by the "savvy" flash marketing teams crowded around the busy block in their slick marketing vehicles, but from what I could gather, there was essentially a fake-snow covered skate ramp and lots of daredevil youngins jumpin around and hollering and cheering for apparently amazing feats of snowboardery. I thought about trying to get a closer look, and perhaps a camera phone snap or two, but the weed smoke started to make my eyes burn (were that it were not true, but yes, I am obviously settling into utter old ladyness without even the hope of trying to fight the inevitability) and I was crankypants hungry (see above), so we kept moving on to the always-reliable if not funnily named Thai Peacock for late lunch/early dinner.

While enjoying veggie Pad See You and Pra Ram (listed on the menu with the words "It so good" after the description, and truly it is so), and watching the Red Bull Mini parked outside get mobbed by Trustafarians in dirty ripped pants and super expensive looking, Ready-for-Aspen-Mimsy? snow gear, I suddenly understood the context for something that I'd witnessed earlier while standing in Peet's, waiting impatiently for the condiment station to clear:

Four early-teen boys in what appeared to be coordinated down snow jackets (not rain jackets, mind you, but the fluffy puffy and totally unwaterproof fancy jackets that always make me think of Coco Chanel because of the cross-stitching) and ski hats (one boy in yellow jacket/yellow cap, another in purple jacket/purple cap, etc) crowded around the condiment cart trying to docter their beverages. Their ensembles troubled me, but as I had not yet had a drop of coffee, I didn't possess the powers of concentration needed to focus on the troublesome bits, nor the brain power needed to try to resolve it by coming up with plausible explanations for who they were or why they were there. Rich kids staying in the Marriot above, fully unclear on the concept of Portland as wet but not freezing, is the best I could come up with before forgetting the question altogther in my utter annoyance at how long the little pishers were taking to pour milk and sugar into their drinks. How hard is it to put some shit your cup and move along, hmmm?

I heard one of them say "No no, she said she likes it 'Light and Sweet' so put more cream in it" as he tossed three more sugar packets to the one pouring the milk (Whole milk, by the way, not cream or half and half). Purple Cap said "What does that even mean, anyway?" and Orange Cap repeated it "Light and sweet, you know, Light. And. Sweet." as if Purple Cap would get it if repeated to him several times in rapid succession. I involuntarily snickered, but I swear it was not about teen boy stupidity, but rather the fact that I so badly had to fight the urge to say something to the effect of "She likes it light and sweet, like her men!" At the slight snicker, Yellow Cap realized I'd been standing there waiting and seemed to get a bit desperate to move on. He poured more milk in, then more sugar, then more milk (and again with the Whole milk, which if you know Peet's coffee, you know is about as likely to lighten the cup as my pointing to it and saying "light and sweet, light and sweet" over and over again). Finally I couldn't take it anymore and stepped up with some elbows between the boys and grabbed the half and half jug to tip into my cup so I could get the hell out of the strange universe into which I had inadvertently stumbled. Orange took notice of my choice and totally punched Yellow in the arm and said "That's not even cream, you idiot, gawd" and rolled his eyes in an exaggerated manner in my (or maybe Rasputin's) general direction as he grabbed the cup and poured a bunch of coffee into the trashbin next to the counter. "Yeah, but why is it called 'Light and Sweet?" said Purple again.

Let's hope it was the gange, yo, because otherwise I continue to live in fear for the future of this once great nation.