LAS VEGAS, NV-

The Girls of Bromidrosis

The first night I arrived in Vegas I ate fried-chicken and drank beer. Under normal circumstances this is not a good combination. Hell, it doesn’t even sound good. Fried-chicken and beer. But these weren’t normal circumstances. I had just arrived home after living over three years in the South where nothing - and hardly anyone - made sense to me.

So, I wasn’t looking for harmony. I was looking to gorge myself and get drunk.

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DENVER, CO-

Rejection letters are always a drag; whether they are negative responses from job opportunities, university admissions boards or literary journals. However, there is nothing quite as spirit-crushing as a rejection letter received after submitting a poem. A short-story rejection slip is depressing, but not devastating. You manufacture a story in your head, create some characters and make them talk. Fine. So you didn’t like my characters. Their dialogue is unrealistic. Their motives are questionable. Fine. They aren’t me. But a rejection letter from a poem is, for me, the equivalent of standing out on a street corner naked and having passers-by hand you terse little notes reading, “Your penis is unconvincing,” or “You call those nipples?” or maybe, “You have an affected buttocks.” And that kind of stuff just breaks my heart. You pour it all into a poem: your skeleton, your bile, your oozing primordial remnant—your private parts. To be told that the fundamental you is not up to snuff—that’s hard murder.

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LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA-

Late afternoon, Hanalei Bay.
Lying around.
Reading Oprah. For the articles. Judge all you want.
Mark was surfing, off in the distance.

I was going through the book reviews, keeping an open mind.
There was an excerpt from a novel called The Secret Scripture: “We measure the importance of our days by those few angels we spy among us.”
It struck me. I couldn’t argue that it wouldn’t be a swell way to measure the importance of our days.

I was unexpectedly jarred from my O meditation.
“Excuse me,” I heard from behind me.
A young boy, of eleven or so, stood pointing in the direction just ahead, to an area in the sand between me and the ocean.
I followed the trajectory of his finger.
He continued, “Do you know who left that cake there?”

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I’ve just moved.

Not just houses, but cities and entire lives. It’s exciting and new, a bit like the theme song from the Love Boat, but with no Gopher, no dancing girls and no stopover in Rio.

Bummer!

For posterity’s sake I kept a bit of a journal of my first week in San Francisco and have decided to share it as a peek into the inner sanctum of my life. I’d call you all voyeurs for reading, but in actuality I’m just a hideous narcissist who wants to show you photos of my closet.

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ST. AUGUSTINE, FL-

I’ve spent most of my life in big cities. Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco. And for some reason, I’ve always felt safe. I’m not sure why, because I’ve lived in some unsavory places. I’ve rented apartments in neighborhoods that people with college educations tend to avoid - neighborhoods populated by surly hookers who won’t take no for an answer and guys with swastikas carved into their necks and elderly women suffering from night terrors and a seething hatred of “negrahs”. But I never felt like any of them would ever kick down my door or accost me as I waited for the bus. They were just local color, and if you caught them at their creative peaks, pretty damn entertaining. Spend a leisurely Sunday morning at your local slum diner, munching on a rubbery omelet and listening to a man with an eyepatch explain to his waitress how the mayor is spending our tax dollars to create a doomsday laser, and you suddenly remember why you never bothered to get cable.

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BIRMINGHAM, AL -

And hello GRUEL WORLD!!!

That’s right, call me a sell out, but I’ve once again succumbed to the siren song of corporate monies. First it was the Jumex Corporation, along with the Obtuse Angle Corporation, and now ladies and gentlemen, I’m pleased to announce my unquestioning servitude to:

Have you tried this stuff yet? Talk about stick-to-your-ribs goodness for the whole family!

The old Old World Corn Gruel is really good, don’t get me wrong, but the new and improved Old World Corn Gruel is, well, out of this world! See, the R and D geniuses at the Old World Corn Gruel Corporation were obviously in a pickle — because how do you improve upon perfection, right — but then, after what I hear was over three months of round-the-clock tinkering, they did it!

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AUVERGNE, FR.—

I am not from a Jell-O family.

We just didn’t develop the custom.

Never once have I uttered any of the following phrases, “I would have made Jell-O, but I didn’t have any mini-marshmallows,” “Can you please pass me the turkey- shaped Jell-O” or “It’s not a party without Jell-O.” (more…)

PARIS-

Go to any movie theater in France right now, and the longest line will be for a fish-out-of-water comedy called Bienvenue Chez les Ch’tis (Welcome to the Land of the Ch’tis).

The movie tells the story of Philippe, a post office manager who gets reassigned from a sunny town in Provence to cold Bergues, a small village in Nord Pas-de-Calais, in the extreme north of France, home to a weird people who call themselves Ch’tis.

Philippe’s new friend Antoine, along with a cast of wacky locals, welcome the newbie, teaching him how to speak Ch’ti (which to my American ears sounds like drunk French, the ‘s’ sound becoming ‘sh’, the end of each sentence punctuated with a sound somewhat like an angry duck’s quack).

Philippe, at first utterly aghast at the prospect of having to spend two years in this strange land where torrential rains start at the border and the residents breakfast on bread first slathered in pungent cheese, then dipped in chicory-flavored coffee, eventually learns to speak Ch’ti like a local and ends up loving the place.

When it’s time for Philippe to return home to the south of France, he is predictably sad to go.

Antoine explains to him the local adage that “People only cry twice in Nord Pas-de-Calais. When they arrive, and when they leave.” (more…)

ATLANTA, GA-

In college I worked one summer as a line cook in a 120-seat restaurant of a small hotel in Florida.

Although I had no formal training as a cook, I was able to bypass the usual progression from dishwasher to busboy to line cook, going straight into cooking because my friend Tony Spagnolo worked on the line.

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SEVILLA, SPAIN-

That’s a picture of a window in the Alhambra, which means “the Red Palace” in Spanish-ized Arabic.  Even though I am writing from Sevilla, I have yet to take a picture, so that’s all you get, a picture of something from Granada.

There is a saying in Spain that goes: “si no has visto Graná, no has visto ná” which translates to “If you ain’t seen Granada, you ain’t seen nothin.”  And I realize, now that I have seen Graná, that they weren’t fucking lying. (more…)

BAKERSFIELD, CA-

I scrambled across the country in a beat car. How often have you heard such words?

But I really did.

The car was gigantic and hardly ran. The muffler fell off on a freeway. Yet, myself, the girl I was dating at the time, and my kid Jordan, he was 6 and she was about 6-feet tall, all set out from Ohio with a final destination of Bakersfield in mind. (more…)

BAKERSFIELD, CA-

I don’t mean to toot my own horn, but I’m the only person I know without a journalism background who has gone from blogger to getting news stories on CNN within just a few weeks time. But then, maybe it’s not that I have some kind of miracle journalistic skills. Maybe it’s all about where I live… (more…)

NEW YORK CITY-

I was a late bloomer.  Drinking never appealed to me in high school.  Maybe it was because I was shyand/or depressed.  I was always filled with contempt for people around me who were loud, horsing around, unaware of the circumference of their waving limbs, bumping into me, stepping on my toes, totally unapologetic about having more fun than I was having- right in front of me. 

However, after a long, calculated process of overcoming my shyness through various personal tests that I created for myself (I’ll go into these shortly), having settled upon and embraced Welbutrin as (more…)

AUVERGNE, FR.—

Being an American is about more than knowing how to sing the national anthem–even if we can’t hit that high note). 

More than being able to defend baseball as a game worth watching–even though not much happens.

It’s about knowing how to hold a taco–even if we don’t know how we do it. (more…)

CHARLOTTE, NC-

Note:

Here are some more vacation stories. In Part 1 there are stories about places like Nashville and Okemah. And Vegas. Part 2 is more of the same.

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