Summer Bummer

An unlikely place within my grey matter beckons me to question if this really is a good idea?. . .Organized summer commitments that is, like summer school. But for every negative, crybaby why-me whinge as of late I must at least smile at the karmic reality recently sun-kissed upon my freckled forehead.

Just when you think ya have the summer (or life for that matter) figured out something flies in the face of fun, frolic, and full-on favored existence.

The current fly in the gin & tonic?  Summer school. The dreaded sound of those two words.
As kids we feared the threat. As parents we fear the commitment. Speaking for myself- apropos to nothing it's consistent with my lack of stay-on-track. Speaking theoretically summer should be a time for goof off hang time accompanied with a high SPF at least when one has children or free time at hand or both.

I do commit. Sun screen rituals need to be followed. Vain, fair haired and sun sensitive bitch that I am, but the morning hurry scurry continues. How's that for Karma: just when the nice weather and calls from beach seeking friends return in tandem..damn it.

What's a irresponsible person to do? Organize.

Not my life, that's sooo un-summer. Car pool. Carpool Carma Come save us from all things commitment, I mean commuter laden, (except southbound US Open traffic on Hwy1..fuck'.)

So it is, a wee bit of positive karmic lint left in my bellybutton to finagle such a feat for those of you who have the inside skinny this is no small gift. Summer drama aside, the sand is warm and the UV rays off the charts.

Northwest swell' been a bit too sloppy for any serious surfboard/boggieboard/wakeboard fun. So let's sing my latest song:"when in doubt parse it out, there's no need to hover when you can find cover... from friends. Large vehicle drivin friends. VehicularVengence has no place in this sacred summer space, seek out large vehicles acquaintance or summer school parent . Carpool to Chartwell. Carpool to Chartwell. Foe is friend as well as neighbor and let us remember that five kids can't be crammed into a convertible mini, even when utilizing the trunk space as a time out place." It's time to go! Heve Ho, let's go..oh good I don't drive today-hooray! It's Carpool Carma Carpool Carmaaaaa. "


My new summer survival sonnet is sung in B-flat and best chased by a beachside beer (best enjoyed on those non-driving days.)
I need to work on that last verse, or turn that into the chorus. Bob Dylan could twist it for me, but why bother him...he's hopefully enjoying his summer. Do the same won't you?

Dante's Inferno: My idea of a Playdate

The simple act of writing a simple letter of apology to a dear friend has turned into the drama-rama of my year
(or at least right up there with that other bone-head thing I keep f'ing up, but I digress.)

A couple of summers ago I had a very drunk, very irish, very- wait I am repeating myself here... I spit out some nasty-ass words in a very venomous way (man can I spew) to a friend(s) who meant the world too me.

Fast forward to two Full years later, and I have yet to make a proper Mea Culpa. Until five fabulous min ago.

Hooray for procrastination. Hooray for Guilt, and Therapy, and a glass of Vino Verde.   A hugely hopeful moon this evening that is blindingly beautiful over the Pacific Ocean at this very moment.

So I suppose the best gift (If she accepts the apology letter that I've just licked the stamp for to that far flung zipcode in the east.)

Please note:  a mental cost-investment breakdown. Thanks for letting me share.

THERAPY $  10,920.00
one year of weekly sessions - (not including the double sessions when I was super loquacious) Working towards the goal of mending an important relationship with a girl friend.    I.E. writing letter stating the above mentioned drama-rama.

WINE/LIQUOR  $ 1000.00
This amount is small...yes. yes. I know..You're thinking liar liar pants on fire- but wait.  I gave up drinking as a "sport" in December 09/Jan..2010. I personally liked myself better as the witty, dancing drunk, with her lovely red locks in the lou...but alas that is for another pissy post so stay tuned as I envision a post paired with PMS and a fine zinfandel.

Kleenex $ 100.00
Cry baby tendencies aside, I still buy the good stuff, that leaves a soothing yet healing trace of aloe on my sniffling boo-hooing wet-nosed moments of the past. ( A quick sneak to pander to friends and kind strangers- you know who you are, patient and detail seeking subway token taker in the Toronto subway who listened and said just write it girll.. Accolades to my home team Olympic medal winners in the pitty-party Olympics. A stellar list of mental giants with P.H.d's in un-fucking up things that are fucked beyond belief, this includes my tolerant hairstylist, Robo, Colleen, and Rob.)  Gold baby... Pure Gold.

Writing the Mea Culpa letter $ PRICELESS.
Mea Culpa letter scrawled in my chicken scratch to the very fabu-lous Hillary Steinau (upon the very paper stock that I scold my kids for using) is simply priceless.



H
Fang Island Baby, August.  I propose a summit meeting of epic proportions and maybe a little arm wrestling ( 'cause you can and will kick my ass.) that's what I love about those Mainers.

Food Porn

What's not to like about this evening's dinner entree of reduced fat Ruffles potato chips and a bar of Scharffenberger dark chocolate? C'mon people, work with me here, unconventional works for dinner. Works very well indeed. Wash down dinner with a glass of French rose (because California Pinot based Rose' is just too damn sweet to wash down a nice potato chip of reduced fat and salt. )

The great part of being adult like is the ability to reason with ones' self that the reduced fat of the salty will underscore the antioxidants of the Scharffenberger.  To reduce dinner to such a mundane route requires a complete lack of planning. For a foodie, this lack of planning is really like rehab. Breaking the well planned route i.e. contemplating what might be a dinner option typically takes place after I have my coffee in the morning.  Lunch is typically a non sequitur, although pleasant surprises do indeed take place during mid day. Just not lately.

Friends just returned from a trip to Korea. In true foodie travel fashion, the mpeg video snippets are all of food. Travel should almost always be about the food experiences and the photo ops (typically of food, farmers markets or an edible delight.) These friends also jetted in for a visit to Shanghai once(pic @left) and although I thought the visit was to spend time with me, it was really about finding the best bowl of noodles (which we did indeed find as they were being made.) Jetting to exotic locals to "see" friends took on a very different meaning. Code for, you better get a handle on what's to eat in the 'hood because it's a real drag to disappoint a jet lagged lover of food.

A sort of food porn really, because the tease begins with the markets, prep and plating moving on to that final climax we all seek: enjoying the long sought after meal. My only question of course: where was the HD feature when one really needs it.
On the flip side, others may only experience a meal as a move along.
Glad I don't dine on that side of the table.

Time To Wean The 'Tween

The lay of the land has shifted when it comes to learning about the birds and bees. Gone are the days of stealing away to the garage with your dad's dog eared issues of Playboy. The G rated National Geographic always a giggle inducing page turner for the 4th grade and under crowd has been long over shadowed by the Internet.

When it comes to parental controls Apple has done a fine job, Thank-You Steve Jobs. Even the itouch gives you the ability to play stalag 13 quite literally as a parent. Initially I was against the lock-down And while I waved my ACLU card my tween aged consumers consumed media as if the itunes store were a colossal brain candy store.  I felt bad limiting my childrens' web exposure to pedestrian sites, knowing full well that curiosity can strike and the magic wand in reality is google.

Yesterday my rose colored glasses were smashed by a pair of size 5 Vans' as the reality took shape, it was just as I had been warned. Guess it takes one to know one, but when my uber IT muffin lectured the evils of unlimited bandwidth I could not would not listen. The beauty of the FireFox history is a savant like memory for key words. I was reading an Ipad history cache that reminded me of a Penthouse Forum column or a shopping list for a pervert (or in my case, a ten year old boy.)

Boobs, Pussy, Sex, Fuck, Fucking and the list goes on in that narrow vein of genre. As one can only imagine thousands of pages came back. Maybe this is where the idea of Santa and Magic cross over to reward the resourceful elementary school aged. Yes Virginia there Is a Santa and he likes to be spanked by a red-head sporting thigh high boots.

My parental tumble into the sexual abyss came long before I expected. I figured I had a few more years to parse the inevitable.. The stumble comes with the ipad. No flash ability means no club penguin, but no parental controls means that club penguin is no longer the fave stay for the after school elementary crowd. Think boobs.  Really big boobs.

Innocence is fleeting or in our case it's flown the coop, along with unlimited bandwidth.

Ride The Bling

Depending upon where one is in the Bay Area, one thing is certain bicycle enthusiasts are a different breed-At least in zip codes south of San Francisco, and north of Santa Cruz.  A recent bike dodge on Sandhill road would have left a brightly colored smudge upon my hood. It made me think about the recent trend of expensive bike enthusiasts peddling while angry, or with an anti-auto agenda.

 Don't peddle angry is the thought that typically radiates from my brain. An encounter from one's comfy car makes these colorful angst ridden riders offer up a game of vehicular chicken. Rhetorically one's brain says: enjoy the ride, in reality it's seems to be a reason to rumble with whatever crosses paths with these spandex wrappers of corporate logos.

Gotta admit that nothing can showcase the package like spandex bike shorts.

The detached aura of spandex clad bikers made me think about what riding a bike means to different people. Menlo park and Shallow Alto rider's seem to covet the expensive bike as bling where as Santa Cruz cycling seems nirvana like for true bike riding enthusiasts where cars share the road respectfully. Bikes are less of a wealth statement and more of transportation. In a place where funky is a statement, it's tough to even make it on to the radar screen with so much fantabulous funkyness.

This weekend IS different as those spandex packages make their way over the rivers, through the big basin woods and into sleepy Santa Cruz. Even that one ball wonder (you know the live strong one of yellow spandex fame) will grace our sun burnished beaches as locals glimpse the greatness of  sherbet colored swirls of testosterone  and platform toe shoes.

Ooh la la- bike seat envy from the cheap seats.

News at 11:Neanderthal Discovered in Dio Deka Hotel Bar

Sometimes the most fun to be had is sans alcohol. This is a new found skill set for me, and certainly not one that comes naturally as an Irish-Catholic spawn of naturally effervescent drunks.

In a past life working in radio, the afternoon cocktail was akin to what a yoga class is today. So as my liver says thank-you and takes a well deserved rest, I continue to play fly on the wall in situations never before imagined. The first step in any bar/pub/nightclub journey is always deciding which direction to head when entering a boozy circle of friends, this important piece lately is to find the drunkest of the bunch and chat about mind bending antics like "wow did I ever door ding the shit of this 7 series in the valet lot" then watch four or five of the group run out to look around.

My most recent outing this past week could have been a sociological study on that suburban trifecta: money, boredom and booze. The place: the ever busy Dio Deka bar in the ritzy burb of Los Gatos.
As hotel bars go, it's got a bit of antiseptic charm mixed with sparkly spandex clad ladies. Eye candy in various shades of large to extra large plasticized cleavage. Beautiful Barbie wanna bees to even out the gaggle of Y chromosome that seemed to be Neanderthal in origin. This is where the real fun of nursing a glass of wine while secretly making fun of mental midgets parading as the big swinging dicks of the valley.

This isn't the only enclave that is as inbred as it seems. Conversations with the well-heeled hotel bar patrons excitedly describing recent travels to exotic hotspots like Cabo and the ever popular and culturally deep seek out the yearly Magic Kingdom trek, which makes the pedestrian nature of this hotel bar even more surprising, as most of the wine list would make for an interesting pub quiz.
Think geographically challenged.

If this is shoal ground mentally speaking, Thursday night I ran aground.

Surveying the wreckage became less amusing and more like work as Mr. Neanderthal and his cave man club members came to rest wrists and empty beer bottles on our table ala a frat party with french cuffs. A few simple "can you please set your empty glasses and beer bottles upon the bar, as I'm not your barmaid" garnered curious sideways looks and stares. Maybe I used large words, or perhaps the request should have been delivered as a series of grunts and hand gestures.

The lack of manners combined with the lack of simple social graces painted the picture of the simple life, sans the whipet-esque Paris Hilton. I can't write about the who-said what's, who hooked up, or why I was even there. Suffice to say I would rather eat roadkill than return to the 95030 zip code anytime soon.

Theater Of The Mind

One of my favorite sports heroes Ernie Harwell, has past. Ernie was the voice of Tiger baseball.

I have such a profound sense of sadness even though I have not attended or streamed a broadcast of the Detroit Tigers in many moons.  My introduction to baseball attributable to the magic of AM radio.

As a ten year-old Mideastern mutt of a tom boy my window to the world was my mono ear plug. A life-line to the world loomed just after dark as many local radio stations powered down, and the clear booming 50,000 w channel big stick Am stations came booming into my bedroom and transporting me to another place and space. WJR was the "local" station over 400 miles away and home to the Detroit Tigers and the voice of Ernie Harwell. Imprints from big city powerhouse stations like WGN  and WLS to the south west in Chicago, KMOX mixed jazz and baseball from St.Louis where even the call letters were exotically spelled with K's, being west of the Mississippi.

Connected to a tiny transistor radio that I hid under my pillow, that plug of a mono ear piece opened my world and helped focus my sights on the greener grass of the city, any city. Theater of the mind.

Twelve years later I found myself sitting in a posh mahogany board room in the Fisher Building home to WJR-760.
Sports autographs and smiling athletes adorned the walls of the GM's offices at WJR. Pitching my love of radio, pitching for a job, I shared the story of my beloved transistor radio whispering baseball games into my ear on sultry summer evenings. Many a bedtime came and went while the last batters made the final push for runs. Theater of the mind: the lost art of A.M radio.

Later that same year I spent time with a then newbie superstar from the Japanese leagues, Cecil Fielder. I drank iced tea in the heat of the dugout, hobnobbing with Ernie Harwell himself at a WJR fantasy camp in Lake land Florida. He told me to be careful in the sun, my freckles might burn. Fantasy Camp  was a day spent with deep pocketed advertising agencies and clients flown down to that sleepy Orlando swamp of a suburb.

Fantasy baseball camp cost big bucks, and the wait list was always longer that the open slots. Many a middle-aged man longed to sport a real Tigers uniform, hang with Allan Trammel and swing bats with the old timers who also tagged along for added color. Denny McClain made a brief, but ham fisted appearance shunning autographs.

Harwell was the star  even in the heat of the day, making friends with everyone. Refilling Iced tea glasses.

Radio has always been my favorite medium. Nothing can fill the shoes of radio as the backdrop for quintessential summertime afternoons. Listening to Ernie Harwell spew factoids about Americas' sport always left me with walk around knowledge that I could apply like currency to real-life boys club sports radio, and for that I thank him.