Jolt Country

What are hatch?

I want you to tell you about the time in my life when I finally met somebody through Match.com to get excited about.

Pinback knows most of this already, because I would send the profiles of the interesting girls to him while we were both at work.

A couple months after getting back from Scotland, I realized it was time to roll up my sleeves and get serious about having some dates, and making a "connection" with a woman. That was the thing. A "connection" with someone new. That was the word of the moment, like how carbs used to be.

I didn't want to use eHarmony, because I felt that it was filled with super-religious wackos. I didn't want to use OK Cupid, because they are perfectly happy to have people around in committed relationships, which -- and I stress this -- didn't help me, since I was trying to meet single women.

It was all a disaster, of course, because no two people want the same thing, even on a dating site. I wasn't going to give up, because I sure as fuck wasn't meeting anyone through other channels at that point. I guess I could have "taken a class," "volunteered," or chatted someone up at the "grocery store," which is the most-repeated and laughably bad advice ever given about dating.

In late August, in whatever year this all went down, I went out on a date with a girl called Mandy. I believe I had dates with four girls named either Amanda or Mandy in my time on the site. This particular Mandy was a super-fun blonde with a bubbly personality and great sense of humor. We instantly hit it off (or so I thought) and ended our date by trying to rip the tongues out of each others' mouths for a good, solid twenty-five minutes against her car at two in the morning.

She was going to visit her family in New Mexico for Labor Day, so we squeezed in another date before she left. She had a horrible time and I never saw her again after that, receiving an e-mail saying that she could only be "friends" that I didn't bother to reply to, because Jesus Christ. I still don't know what happened, and as a socially aware person living in a World of Nerds, I have a very good idea why people do and do not like each other. She probably met someone she clicked better with, and that's totally fair.

Now, this all worked out for the best, because my girlfriend is the most amazingly beautiful soul I have ever met, and she's fucking scorching hot. However, right while all this dating site shit was going on, Pinback introduced me to the concept of hatch green chiles. You can get them on the side of the road in Colorado, as people bring them up from New Mexico and roast the shit out of them while you watch. Pinner and I in fact did that one warm summer day, and I got a half-bushel of them. It quickly became one of my favorite things, and it was as if I saw myself groping myself on the hood of an Expedition in the parking lot of a bar one night. The chiles quickly replaced the girls as a conversational topic for several weeks thereafter. (I'm guessing here. I'm just trying to say they are that good.)

I didn't get any chiles last summer because I still had some left. Pinback got me through a difficult winter when he moved, and gave me all his food. But I am down to my last two green chiles, and I expect them to be sold again here in Colorado any day now. Some asshole wrote that there will be fewer of them than normal, due to a drought in New Mexico or some shit, but I don't care, because they could double the price and I'd still be in.

We will use this thread to take pictures of our hatch green chiles, and the food we make with them. Now, god dammit!

I moved in with Susan (now my wife) in the fall of 1993, ostensibly as "roommates" at first (haw haw, joke's on me). Her dad passed away shortly before that, so by the time she and I moved in together her mother-in-law (MIL) was already sitting on a life insurance payment of half a million dollars. Susan had been given a debit card to use "in case of emergencies", and when you're poor and broke college students it's amazing how many "emergencies" you can have. ("We need some pizza. It's an emergency!")

We only got busted once. Despite having access to a swimming pool full of cash, the account had an ATM withdrawal limit of $200/day. Susan's mom never checked the balance, but one time she tried to withdrawal money and couldn't because we had already siphoned out $200 that day. We apologized profusely, and after that we made a new nightly ritual of going up to 7-11 and taking out money at 11:55pm, so as not to get caught.

Unsurprisingly by the spring of 1994 the two of us were doing horribly in college. We were each working 40 hours a week at shitty jobs (to this day, the smell of Long John Silver's makes me queasy), and, as it turns out, we both liked drinking booze and partying a lot more than we liked going to class. So, and this is true, after (literally) flipping a coin, we decided to quit our jobs, drop out of school, make off with the debit card, and go on a road trip ... Hollywood style.

With the debit card, a road map (no GPS back then) and the sunroof open on Susan's Saturn SC2, we hit I-40 and started driving west. I think we were only gone a week, but it seems longer than that. We went to the Grand Canyon, Carlsbad Caverns, Meteor Crater ... a lot of the same places we just visited on our recent family vacation, in fact. We didn't really have any destinations in mind. At one point we called my mom to check in and told her we were in Phoenix. She recommended we go visit my Great Aunt Eva. I didn't know I had a Great Aunt Eva, but we looked her up and visited her and stayed with her a couple of nights.

A few days later (it was early April), Susan and I rolled out of bed in this horrible hotel. God, I have to describe this hotel. It was shaped like a castle and painted pink. It looked like an oversize obstacle at a mini-golf course. The balcony and upstairs sidewalk were so neglected that the concrete was falling off and you could see the internal metal structure. It was the first room I ever stayed in where you could actually hear the roaches scurrying around. Hungover, we rolled out of bed around 10:30am or so and decided to go eat breaklunch. We checked out of the hotel and found this Mexican place called Little Anita's, so we went there.

The two of us are standing around in the lobby of this restaurant waiting to be seated and I saw the headline on the newspaper and it said that Kurt Cobain had committed suicide. I remember getting really sick over the whole deal, but then again maybe that was just the tequila. Eventually we get seated and I'm kind of bummed/drunk and we order some food and the waitress is like, "did you want the green chile or the red chile?" And nobody had ever asked me that in life before, so I just said, "uh," and the waitress said, "why don't you try the green chile?"

So I did, and it was wonderful. Like, really, really good. I remember thinking I had never had anything that a Tecate really complimented before. Man, was that a good meal.

The meal was so good, in fact, that I've been talking about it for almost 20 years. Every time someone mentions Albuquerque I chime in with, "Maaaaaaan, there's this place called Little Anita's," and I tell that story. There's also a second story about that meal where ... well, I'll tell it later because it's not about green chile and I don't want to ruin the moment. But yeah, I've been talking about that single plate of food for 17 years now.

Two or three months ago when we took our "out west" vacation, we stopped in Albuquerque. And when we got off the Interstate I was like, "No, it can't be," but there it was: Little Anita's. We had actually just left the museum and were hitting the road and when we saw it I swerved across two lanes of traffic and announced, "we are eating dinner here, now." Who cares if it was only 4pm. Green chile waits for no man.

Turns out, in 17 years, the services has gone done at Little Anita's. I asked my friends about it and they confirmed that it doesn't have a great reputation for their service any more. But ... oooooooooh, Jesus ... I got to order the green chile tamales, and ... OH ... they were as good as I had remembered.

I should also mention that, as a gift, one of my friends gave us a loaf of green chile bread. The next morning at the hotel Mason brought the loaf with us to the hotel breakfast and we took turns stealing butter packets off the breakfast bar and eating chunks of green chile bread with our instant oatmeal and Frosted Flakes from the dispenser.

So there you go. I've had green chile 3 times in my life. All three times were in Albuquerque; twice in 2011, and once in 1994.

This is the thread in which nobody else is excited about HATCH.

Fine, you Internet jerks, you tell ME about the chicks you didn't bang for a change. This is what I get for trying to open up to you monsters.

I will now watch the video.

Fuck, that was no video.

Sorry, that was the hatch (later identified as "The Swan Station") from LOST.

I am sorry, as I clicked on it and couldn't understand why the video didn't start.

lol ICJ doesn't understand what's going on

Sorry, ICJ. In this pivotal scene from Lost, John Locke (who showed up to the island in a wheelchair, but can now magically walk) believes the island directed him to this point in time. He has spent days uncovering this discovered hatch, but has no way of opening it.

[youtube][/youtube]

One of the most important things inside The Swan (which is where "The Hatch" leads) is an Apple II computer. Every 108 minutes, "the numbers" must be entered into the computer or .... eh, watch Season 1, it'll make more sense. Actually it won't, until around Season 4.

The gayest thing I could possibly admit is that (when I first watched the episode) when that light went on, I started to tear up a little.

Things were going pretty good for me at that point, though, so I was a little better able to experience emotion. That shit would never happen now. I'd probably snort smugly and spit at the screen now.

Also Lost ended up raping me intellectually within an inch of my life, and this I do not forgive.

Flack wrote:Sorry, ICJ. In this pivotal scene from Lost, John Locke (who showed up to the island in a wheelchair, but can now magically walk) believes the island directed him to this point in time. He has spent days uncovering this discovered hatch, but has no way of opening it.

[youtube][/youtube]

One of the most important things inside The Swan (which is where "The Hatch" leads) is an Apple II computer. Every 108 minutes, "the numbers" must be entered into the computer or .... eh, watch Season 1, it'll make more sense. Actually it won't, until around Season 4.

Huh?? I don't see an Apple II in that still imag- ah fuck.

No no no.

The hatch was just the ... uh, hatch. It led to the Swan Station. The Apple II was inside the Swan Station.

http://lostpedia.wikia.com/wiki/Swan_computer

Ah, hell. Just watch the Swan Station orientation film.

[youtube][/youtube]

I recently found out that my pepper allergy only applies to bell, and NOT to chili peppers after I attempted a scratch curry paste. Chilis are now going to be put in every goddamn thing I cook for the rest of the season.