Anger Burger

I can’t believe it’s been over a week since I arrived in Olympia, I really can’t.  Each day has been a list of errands a dozen items long, and the overwhelming shadow of Thanksgiving approaches like a yeti while we hide in ice caves, our mouths covered with our mittens in an attempt to stifle our ragged breathing.

The other evening we grabbed a quick drink with Lady Sam, where I accidentally dropped a piece of cheese from Mike’s cheese fries into my shot of Jameson:

I thought this new drink should be called a Canadian¹ Roofie, but Mike and Lady Sam prefered the more brief and catchy Tuque.  I ate the whiskey-logged cheese to prove my womanhood, but I must warn you that it was more disgusting that eating the worm in the mezcal.

Olympia had changed a little since I lived here last.  It has become more… I don’t know.

I can’t quite put my finger on it.
¹ I am aware that Jameson is Irish, but I was drunk and now it seems appropriate.

Scene: Grocery Store

A woman and her toddler son are bagging vegetables.  An older woman needs to get to the same area and leans past the toddler while saying in a very kindly tone “Pardon me, babe.”

The mother smiles at the older woman and then says in a completely serious voice: “Just so you’re aware, some people don’t like the use of the word ‘babe’.”

“Oh, okay,” the older woman says, totally confused.  “Um, I’m sorry.”

“It’s alright, I just thought you’d like to be aware,” the mother says.

I want to say up front that everything could not have turned out better. It really couldn’t have.  Given all the things that could have gone terribly wrong, and given that nothing did, I’d be the first to admit that I should just shut my trap and accept that we’ve been incredibly lucky.    But I’m me and I like a good yarn, so grab a Big Gulp of 7-11 coffee, buckle up and take a ride with me.

I don’t have photos to share and I don’t want to talk about why not, but I will try and share with you the gibbering terror of moving 1,100 miles through bullet points:

• When you rent a moving truck, it turns out that when you ask for a specific size and they confirm it?  In the fine print it says that you will get that size or larger.  I reserved a 22-foot truck one month and advance thinking that the 22-foot was already ridiculously large, but that I could handle it.  When I went to the Penske place to pick it up the guy says to me “Oh, we give you free upgrade!”  I’m unclear what the fuck could be upgraded about a truck, but when they pulled a 26-foot moving truck around for me I basically shit my pants.  Seriously.  TWENTY-SIX FOOT TRUCK.  I realize that people drive those giant RVs and stuff all the time, but everyone I know who saw this truck said something along the lines of “They just let anybody drive off the lot with that thing?!”  Me being the highly suspect “anybody” of course.

• We again used the REAL RocknRoll Movers of Los Angeles, and once again their premium fees are totally justified.  We  hired two guys for just labor this time, but they arrived on time, were downright jovial and packed the truck in two hours flat.  I wanted to pack them in the truck and bring them with us so they could unload it on the other end, but I didn’t have enough Rohypnol on hand.

• We had the truck loaded two days before we intended to move and planned on cleaning and finishing up for one whole day, and man, was that even cutting it close.  We worked way too late, ended up all getting low blood sugar and being generally cranktastic and awful and then ate sad Subway sandwiches and passed out at 8 in the evening.  And then were woken by drunken partiers knocking on our front door at 1am, one of which who answered my dad’s gruff demand of “CAN I HELP YOU?” with the sort of peculiar and interesting response of “I was instructed to come here.”

• Did I mention that my dad flew down just to ride in the moving truck with me?  He did.  He’s a pretty amazing dad.  Mike the Viking’s dad offered too, and we briefly debated letting the two of them move our stuff north and we’d just fly up.

• It turns out the truck is so hugely massive in every way that Mike had to construct a wooden platform for me to place under the gas and brake pedals so that I could press on them while keeping the heel of my shoe on the floor.  I mean, I’m 5’6″ and have huge feet, so I feel like I have a pretty average body.  The brake pedal ended up being so hard that I had to literally stand on it to press it anyway, so that wasn’t fucking terrifying while driving through several major mountain ranges or anything.

• Also, in order to pull the parking brake I had to put my feet on the dashboard to brace myself while I pulled it up.  It was seriously at the limit of my physical ability, which seems vaguely dangerous.

• So, the morning that I leave I decide to take the 170 freeway north that connects to the I-5 – it doesn’t matter if you don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about, just keep reading.  Anyway, I’ve driven this way a dozen times or whatever, no big deal.  But at 6am (yes, 6am) when we departed, in the black of pre-dawn, I missed the merge onto I-5 and realized the exact second that it happened that I was now driving toward Palmdale instead of north.  Why did I do this?  Because there is major construction and only a sign that read “PALMDALE – RIGHT LANES ONLY”  I figured at some point I’d get better instructions on when to merge for I-5, but nope.  While near tears and shaking with fear (remember: 26″ truck, basically no backing up allowed) I made a 15-minute detour around the middle of the Antelope Valley while trying to get back to where I was supposed to be.

• I’d forgotten that I have a secret affection for the McDonald’s Filet-o-Fish sandwich.  After 11 hours of driving a giant wall of a truck at 60mph, it was the most delicious thing I’ve ever eaten.

• At some point in Oregon, the fuel tank gauge got stuck.  It was like fucking Apollo 13 up in that shit, doing math to figure out what our miles per gallon was, how far we’d gone and how much was left in the tank.

• And then the anti-lock brake warning light came on.  The truck manual said that if it wasn’t blinking, to not freak out.  So I just freaked out a little.

• My dad and I called in a drunk driver after we passed into Washington State.  First time either of us has done that, but the guy was seriously terrifying us and when I passed him on the left to just get away from him, we both saw that he had his hoodie pulled up over his head and was blearily rubbing his face while swerving over the lane markers, so we called 911.

• We rolled into Olympia about 5:30 in the evening, I made Mike assemble our bed frame which was like those exhaustion tests the military does where they limit your oxygen and make you play patty-cake and stuff¹.  It took him about 500x longer than normal to do it, but he did it.

• I had my friends John and Nathan come and help me unload the truck today and they totally busted ass and are my heroes for ever and ever.  I also gave them some money.  Not as much as it was worth to me, but it is what it is.

• The morning was so bright and crisp and sunny and fall-y that it was breathtaking.  I even passed a friend while walking back from downtown after getting a coffee before unloading, and even though we haven’t seen each other in months the first thing he exclaimed was “This day is amazing!”  And it was.

• And now that we’re done it’s pouring down rain; like I said, everything that could have wrong?  Didn’t.  Imma go eat now.

¹ Everything I know about the military I learned from An Officer and a Gentleman.

Under normal circumstances I’d never let anyone see this.  Mike the Viking doesn’t even know about them, though I’m not sure he’d care as long as I keep his axe polished.  That also wasn’t a metaphor, but he does like it when I do things with his penis as well.

So, what should I call them?  Humiliation Bites?  Spinster Nibbles?  Shame Snax?  All I know is that Jezebel.com is going to declare a shehad¹ against me for damaging the respectability of women everywhere, and I don’t give a shit.

Just this one image should give you an idea of the horrific, Lovecraftian direction I’m going with this:

That’s pickled jalapenos, cream cheese and fake crab.  Normally I get the crab nuggets because then I don’t have to cut the crab, but only “leg style” was available the other day.  That’s how fucking awful and great this is.

I feel a compulsion toward honesty in my sharing this at all, but if I’m being true with myself I have to admit that I normally put more cream cheese on them.  So that was my humiliation line in the sand.

And behold the wretchedness and tremble in its might:

I’d like to defend myself by pointing out that if this were wrapped in rice it would be the special of the day in a college town’s most cut-rate sushi restaurant, but now that I read it all written out like that I’m not certain that’s a defense I want to make.

¹ Like a jihad, but way judgy-er.

I’m going to cut straight to the chase here and tell you that I won a basket of food as a part of a promotional campaign for Wales.  I have since come to two conclusions:

• As a matter of fact, yes I do want to visit Wales
• Wales’ basket-assembling people need some educating on how to pack gift baskets

First I’d like to thank Su-Lin at Tamarind and Thyme for hosting the contest.  I’m not entirely proud that this was my winning entry:

As an American, Wales means one thing: Sean Connery. Except that I just looked it up on Wikipedia and Connery isn’t from Wales at all, and I’ve been telling people that he is for some years now — it is genuinely one of my favorite pointless facts to bandy about at parties. It just won’t be the same when I inform them that smugly that Ioan Gruffudd is from Wales.

Additionally, it appears that what my boyfriend’s Norwegian/Swedish grandmother called “pikelets” are actually Welsh cakes, and that the word “pikelet” is not Norwegian, Swedish or Welsh at all. It is with a deepening sense of dread that I realize I know nothing at all about Wales other than that they seem to enjoy the letter ‘y’ to an exceptional degree.

It isn’t often that I find myself at a total loss regarding an entire country’s cuisine, and yet here I am. The internet tells me of laverbread, which sounds like something I’d be eating alone and cockles, which I’m pretty sure are made up.

There is little in this world that titillates my ocelot more than boxes full of pantry goods, I tell you what.  DHL on the other hand needs to invest in some sign-reading skills, because this looks all the world like a box that was dropped on it’s damn end, am I right?

I opened it up and was greeted with an ominously sour odor.  But more on that in a minute.  First, look at this!  It’s like a wicker Christmas morning.

Need the tiniest spoon in the world?  Just ask, I’ll loan you mine.

So, let’s talk about that odor.  I’ve tried to think of how to word this, and I even temporarily decided I wasn’t going to talk about it because you know, this is a gift, but also I think that Wales is in all likelihood an awesome place.  But I think we’re all adult enough to understand that this basket does not represent the country of Wales.  That being said: this is exactly how it came “packed”.  It was a mix of paper boxed goods and glass jars loose inside a basket with a thin layer of shredded paper on the bottom.  More than one thing was quite effectively smashed to pieces.

Most sadly – and I’m dead serious here, I was actually depressed for the better part of an hour – the three jars of peculiar pickled things – PICKLED THINGS!  – were ruined.  All three jars’ seals were popped, and two of the jars had leaked juice all over the basket.  It was with a deeply heavy heart that I dropped them into the trash, untasted.

It is possible that this was all cleverly set up to lure me to Wales with promises of condiments, and if so, it’s working.  Or as the Welsh call them, cyndymynts.  Meanwhile a lot of tasty bites survived the journey, but more on that later.  I need a moment of silence for the plum conserve, ginger chutney and farmhouse piccalilli.

My favorite thing about The Pioneer Woman being on Paula Deen’s Best Dishes was when she swept a cluttered chopping board clean of its loose garbage, dumped it on top of her dish of canned-sauce enchiladas and said (and I’m paraphrasing here, but only barely) “That’s what’s nice about cooking Mexican, you can just dump everything in!”

Guess what’s for dinner?

Beef (flavored) vegetarian meat substitute.  From a coffee can.  Pull up a chair and grab a fork!  Or possibly a straw! Later, when you’re stinking up the chemical toilet, light one of these candles:

I’m not a grilling enthusiast, so perhaps I’m missing something here:

My friends and family know that I am obsessed with the idea of eating a grape the size of a watermelon.  Since I was a child, this imagined sensory experience has haunted me like a paraplegic imagines running.  I’m so close to it I can smell it: the green astringency of the skin and I slice through it with my biggest chef’s knife, the watery crunch of the jelly-like meat inside. Mashing a slice into my face.  Can’t you feel the juice running down your cheeks?

In later years, I’d wonder the same thing of peanuts.  What would it be like to bite into a giant peanut like you’d bite into an apple?  What would the texture be like?  Would you be able to take a teeth-shaped cut out if it, or would you have to break it off with toothy leverage like a particularly crisp granny smith?

What I never wondered about is a giant marshmallow.

I should make it clear that I am a real asshole when it comes to roasting marshmallows.  I’m personally offended when people light their marshmallows on fire, I consider it to be the height of carelessness.  I’ll spend 10 minutes banking a special marshmallow-roasting coal bed, over which I will then lovingly roast a perfectly tan, perfectly melty specimen by which all others should be judged.  Then I will eat the toasted exterior off the marshmallow, and then re-roast the naked core.  Which means that while my first reaction to the Mega Bonfire marshmallow is horror (how will the interior get melty before the outside burns?!) my second thought was, but wait – when you re-roast the core, it won’t be tiny, it’ll be like the size of a regular marshmallow.  Might I achieve three roastings from a single marshmallow?  CAN YOU HEAR THE RUSTY SOUND OF MY GEARS TURNING?

Speaking of watermelon, here’s Tank eating a slice:

We cackled like potheads for probably 15 minutes watching her poofy lips maneuver around the rind.

She’s such a stuffed animal sometimes, it kills me.

Nose crinkle!  I tell you what, some animals evolve to be predators, this dog has evolved to be entertaining.  Which is fortuitous considering she was abandoned at a kennel and has negative attributes that include but are not limited to: eating hair, sleep biting and needing her anal glands manually expressed on a monthly basis.