Jolt Country

Memorial Day Weekend has always been a close weekend to my heart, especially after I started working and came to the realization that unless I grabbed some cushy government job, the first authorized day off I was going to get in a given year was the last Monday in May. It was even longer this year, what with it being on the 31st. So special thanks go out to the Aztecs or Mayans or Gregans or whoever else designed this shit-for-2004. I just consider myself lucky that they didn't find a way to sneak a couple extra days in May while they were eating their chunks of dried rubble and redecorating the cave, thus making Memorial Day fall on May 33rd or something. Enough's enough!

Additionally! Clearly there needs to be more tragedy within the United States. We have made-up holidays like "President's Day" and "St. Patrick's Day" but the former would only work if the kids wore President masks and did wintertime trick-or-treating and the latter is sort of like EVERY day for some of us.

Like the man who stayed with me and Vitriola for a couple weeks, Benjamin "Pinback" Parrish. I can characterize his stay with this simple phrase: each day the three of us were either drinking way too much or not nearly enough. Luckily it's Longmont and we have a Safeway, Wine & Spirits Store, Subway and Electric Transformer all within frisbee distance. You have to dodge a little traffic, maybe, to get more discount grocery items, tequila, 6" roast beef on wheat and severe electrical burns, but most people out here will not hit you if given the chance.

But it was very pleasant to stay with Pinner. On the Sunday before the actual memorial "day" I went out and got one of those charred coal burning grills. It's the kind which stands on a little tripod and has an "exploding view" diagram with directions on how to just put it together and a federally-mandated and altogether snotty "explode this" statement coming while one's junk is tousled within the first five minutes of assembly. While Ben and Dayna quipped sarcastically at my attempts at getting the thing three dimensional, I was pleased to see that there was like 17 extra parts when I was finished. Oh, well! I figured I'd just grill them, too. Anything in the box that was left over got thrown onto the fire. The kielbasa, brats and unknown meat (seriously, I never determined the identity of the last bit) all fit though, and that's what was really important.

I managed to smoke out our neighbors a little in my first attempt, but it's OK because they've all got their little idiosynchrocies as well. There's one guy downstairs who never picks up his dog's crap. Yes! He's the one! A lot of you read about him and I assure you that he's just as exciting and "hollywood" and everything in person. I was a little excited to be meeting the one fucker who got permission from the Mayor of the Galaxy to not have to clean up the eight pounds of dog shit his animal grunts and wiggles out of itself every day, but at least I knew when I shook his hand that it would be feces-free. Seriously, it's the 21st Fucking Century already: who hasn't heard of this whole poop-scooping thing? The guy is literally five yards away from one of those dog manure bins, too. It's like he's protesting something. The only thing that would make it more obvious that he's a societal misanthrope would be if he threw out regular garbage in the dog bin -- while extending two middle fingers all the while, mostly towards the bin but also in part towards his neighbors.

So that guy hopefully got some of the cubic mile of smoke I generated in trying to grill stuff.

At one point I thought someone's alarm went off, but it was just some local thieves stealing somebody's car. Ah! Ah! Ah! That should be in a list of quotes welcoming people to Lovely Downtown Longmont.

I won't get weepy and start to mewl at how well the grilling process went, because I know that most of the readers and posters of this site lead empty, barren lives and the thought of three people having a good time, putting coal flavor into delicious cuts of cow, pig, sheep and for all I know, whatever the hell else is in basa like manticore and griffin, and consuming them and attempting to get to Pinback's home in Santa Monica in the game "True Crime: Streets of L.A." and shooting him and his little cat Frodo in the face would inspire suicide, or at least detailed and poetic thoughts about it. So none of that!

The down side is that I'll eventually get reported if I continue to turn building "L" into a Viet Nam chokeout brush party right after the mustard gas was dropped. But I don't want to be the guy by the side of the street grilling on his little microgrill like a chump, either. Oh, well! I haven't signed a lease for 2004/2005 yet, so at least if I have to find a new place to live I'll have mastered the requisite flame and burning touch required to drop the old place into an ashy mess.

So that's what Memorial Day Weekend means to me, anyway. How did it go for you guys?

Mine was same old, same old.

So wait, Pinback has left already? That's the lamest thing ever.

Was shitty. Worked all week. About to go on the road. Will be much better soon.

Roody_Yogurt wrote:Mine was same old, same old.

So wait, Pinback has left already? That's the lamest thing ever.

I assure you that it was not, indeed, lame, but rather for the best. I never thought when I signed the lease for apartment L201 that there would be two other adults living with me at one point. I was thinking just me and maybe a fish. And the fish would be a minnow or a microgold or something. Something tiny.

So the fish gets the couch? Geez.

I dare any of you to live in L201 and make it the full two weeks like I did. Any of you. To wit, before I could sleep on the couch, I had to first clear out the rotting, bloody corpses of previous guests who had either purposefully burnt their skulls off with the little grill lighter thing, or had been eaten by Newton, the Giant, Voracious, Maniacal Homicidal Cat From Hell.

You talk about your WWII. Your Vietnam. Your Korea. That's all well and good. Once you grow a set of BBs, come see me about a tour in L201.

Were my hosts anything less than perfectly hospitable and kind? Of course not. How could you suggest such a thing? They were the consummate welcoming party.

Did I not enjoy the nightly confabs and friendly repartee? It is to laugh! Certainly the highlights of my day were the arrivals of the couple du maison from their long, tiring workdays!

The soirees into Longmont to alternately TEAR IT UP, and also lose to me at various sporting/gaming activities were also none less than fully appreciated. To this second, I find my mind wandering fondly over the memories.

Heck, I even enjoyed tending to the various cat-like animals wandering all over the place, given that they were not in the act of shitting all over the carpet and sending up giant green odor-clouds which clogged the Playstation 2 memory card ports, requiring a reset of my NASCAR 2004 progress log.

But every night, I'd hear that fateful request: HEY PINBACK! YOU SHOULD COOK SOMETHING!!

I hemmed, I hawed, I dillied and dallied, and otherwise put off the inevitable, because goddammit, I was gonna figure out how to change my lines in NHL 2002 if it killed me, and I don't care if everyone had to starve for me to do it.

Memorial Day arrived, though, the last full day, in fact, for me in the L201 Experience. Alright. I'll cook something. Nothing special, nothing spectacular, but I will take knife to board and oil to pan and do something to brighten the culinary world of my nascent caretakers.

Indeed, while Robb was out struggling to heat up already-cooked meat on his new grill, I would kick it up a notch, and...

COOK SOME ONIONS!!!

Cooking onions is, to be sure, the first thing any novice cook learns to do, but I was going to do it up special, for this special occasion, to top these special brats, and special kielbasi, and all the other special meat-like substances that were being brought in off the grill.

I started my quest at the Safeway-brand "Safeway" across the way, searching for the perfect white bulb, which would yield the very finest, sweetest, most pungent and delicious onions ever known to man.

I took up my Henckel chef knife and, with an eye never before more careful about technique, slices the onion with the precision of a veteran surgeon, getting each slice uniform to within a half millimeter. A finer onion, I say with all modesty, had never been sliced.

The finest olive oil went into the pan, followed shortly by the satisfying sizzle of the onion releasing its moisture and even then beginning the caramelization process. A more self-realizing moment, I daresay a chef cannot have.

Carefully monitoring the heat level and bringing the babies along like prized poodle pups, I painted a mosaic, an onion tapestry, there in my 12 inch stainless steel, copper-bottomed pan, driven over 5000 miles from its origin to rest on the front burner of the rightful lessors of L201.

The meat came in from the grill.

Even the cats were salivating.

They (Robb & Dayna) piled their sausages onto their buns or plates of choice.

I turned to present them with what I truly believed at the time was my crowning achievement in both cooking, and also, more importantly, in just giving. Giving back, if you will, to those who had given me so much.

And what did I hear?

"Oh, we don't like onions."

.

They don't like onions.

They don't fucking like onions???

WHO DOESN'T FUCKING LIKE ONIONS?!?!? YOU SICK FUCKING FREAKS!!!!!! THAT'S LIKE NOT LIKING AIR, or a goddamn WARM SUMMER FUCKING DAY!!!!!!!

Seriously, that is some sick-ass shit. Never move to Colorado, that's all I can tell you people.

pinback wrote: "Oh, we don't like onions."

One of the benefits of this little eternal soiree is that she and I hate similar foods. Hate onions. Hate the people who make them even more. I'm just not good at small talk you prick.

She hates them as well. Bingo!

Hey, another food I can't stand: the pepper. Everyone who claims to enjoy them is just lying. They're not even food. They're poison in a mushy form. Everyone who does claim to like them just thinks they're so cool. "Oh ha ha watch me put fiery SHIT into my mouth, haw haw haw." Fuck that. Evolution exists because people AVOID garbage like that.

She is allergic to them. Fantastic!

Anyway, Pinner, you made a great lasagna. I just wish both of my attempts at angel food cake weren't disasterous.

It was even longer this year, what with it being on the 31st. So special thanks go out to the Aztecs or Mayans or Gregans or whoever else designed this shit-for-2004

Believe it or not I calculated that if we add another 10 seconds to each hour in a day we could have 13 months each year with EXACTLY 28 days each. Thats it. No leap year, no 'is it four weeks or five paychecks this month' stuff. I think George Eastman did something like this 100 years ago..

the eight pounds of dog shit his animal grunts and wiggles out of itself every day

The visual I got from that sentence was in full Cinemascope ,3D, High definition, surround sound.

The down side is that I'll eventually get reported if I continue to turn building "L" into a Viet Nam chokeout brush party right after the mustard gas was dropped.

Don't use your living room for grilling. Go outside and do it.


THE
WEEKEND UPDATE
AARDVARK

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote:Anyway, Pinner, you made a great lasagna. I just wish both of my attempts at angel food cake weren't disasterous.

I did *not* make that lasagna. That lasagna was good.

You will know if you eat a lasagna that I made, because it will make you want to build a time machine and go back to all the other times you've eaten lasagna, and go to a local Kinko's, get some poster board and construct little "RANCID PILE OF SHIT" signs to stick into the middle of the lasagna instead of eating it, for you will have tasted the finest lasagna that you have ever, and will ever, taste.

Hope you like onions!

pinback wrote: . . .

What a poorly executed rebirth, pinback. You took the time to write numerous posts regarding killing yourself, but then didn't even bother to create a new username for new posts.

Oh, leave the poor guy alone. He just got over a bad case of death. Nobody fragged Jesus on easter Sunday uno when he logged back into humanity.



THE
NOW GO LOOK FOR CHOCOLATE EGGS
YOU LONG HAIRED UNDEAD HIPPIE
AARDVARK

Aardvark wrote:Believe it or not I calculated that if we add another 10 seconds to each hour in a day we could have 13 months each year with EXACTLY 28 days each. Thats it. No leap year, no 'is it four weeks or five paychecks this month' stuff. I think George Eastman did something like this 100 years ago...

Thats amazing. Why didn't they do that instead? It seems like the smart thing to do.

Because theres all this EGO tripping amongst those roman emporers who decided that not only should the year have 12 months instead of ten (which you notice that July and August have the best summer weather) but the months should be different sets of days. More than that I couldn't say because of laziness on my part to research the subject more thouroughly.


THE
LETS ALL SWITCH TO
INCA TIME
AARDVARK

I figure it's the same reason we don't use the damn metric system here. The same reason we have this god awful daylight savings time. Such a widescale change is too much when people in this fine land of prosperity are starving to death, not that most care that they are. That's just the excuse you'll get.