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Lately things have been wonderful for me. I've lost weight,when I ride my bicycle,I don't get tired so I can ride for miles now for I quit smoking and I don't miss it,I jogged for a half a mile the other day,my bills are all caught up,and the greatest news in the world for me came around. I won't lose my house when my balloon payment is up next year. The original owner of the house told me he don't want the house back and he will most definetly sign a loan with me so he can get his cash as early as next month. I fucking bawled for like thirty minutes when I hung up that phone. That was a huge load taken off of me,man.
But probably the greatest news of all is that Paris Hilton is in jail.
There is definetly a god.
In this world besides my wife who is my best friend,I have only two friends that I can call real friends.
When I was sick,one of them took in my client and took care of him. I fucking count on her whenever I may need emergency respite. I don't trust NOBODY else.
She calls me today telling me her carreer is over. She had two clients in a host home and worked at my agency in another department. They picked up her boys tonight at her house.
Suddenly she has absolutely no income.
It's no one's buisness the details of this misfortune. It happened. That's that.
No. Abuse was not involved. She took real good care of her boys. They were her family.
She's my closest friend next to my wife. She thinks of me as her best friend.
And here I am not knowing what the fuck I'm supposed to do for her now.
She tells me she'll be alright. She's gonna sell all her shit and move to New Mexico to be with her dad. Dad needs someone to take care of him anyway. Maybe it was meant to be.
But it's still all fucked up.
Like this world,man. This fucked up pathetic world.
You lose your career you lose everything and you gotta start over.
All that hard work for SHIT.
Things are going great for me. My close friend's world has crumbled to the ground.
It's not fair.
Balance.
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As usual, there's nothing particularly profound or new in these thoughts, it's just more of an online diary.
I was listening to some interesting things on NPR today. One was a story about how Citigroup, the enormous banking megalopothingamabob, had decided to devote $50 billion to reducing its own environmental footprint (via energy conservation, green building, etc), as well as through investments targeted at combatting global warming. The report (and citigroup) acknowledged that this was a profit-driven decision--they are a for profit company, and believe it's a good investment--and that's fine.
The other story was about how the advent of digital TV recorders is causing cable companies trouble, since most people who have them use them to skip commercials, and the people paying for advertisement (and thus the programs) aren't happy about that. The segment was about how the cable companies are trying to find new ways of dealing with the issue.
while I was listening, I found myself feeling pretty happy. I was enjoying watching the changes occurring. I find that I really like seeing how lots of smart, motivated people come up with innovative solutions to problems, and how businesses might actually decide that it might be in their best interest to try to deal with major incipient problems like climate change.
while I then filled my gas tank, I was musing on the cost of gasoline. Where I filled up, basic unleaded was $3.38 a gallon. And yet, when I think about it, that doesn't actually seem unreasonable. Gas probably should cost that, or more, because the long-term costs of driving my car by burning gasoline need to be accounted for. The more it costs, the more incentive I will have to find a different way of getting to work. They'll be putting in a local light rail later this year...
So I was just thinking about how the costs of things should reflect their real cost (no more subsidies!), and how nice it is to see people being smart and innovative, and realizing that as things change, we're actually pretty resourceful, especially when we might make a buck from it.
The unbridled love of money may well be the root of evil, but perhaps the desire to better one's position--at least when tempered by an awareness of the real costs and consequences of our decisions--might still produce a good outcome.Centralized, dispassionate decision-aking may be able to take long-term consequences into account better than unfettered markets (which seem fairly shortsighted, usually, to me), but the markets will produce more innovative solutions to problems more quickly.
In her Parable books, Octavia Butler creates a religion which sees God as Change--unconscious, amoral, ruthless change--and suggests that the goal of religious people should be to "shape God"--to act with forethought, in such a way as to make the consequences of inevitable change as endurable (or beneficient) as possible. I think there is a lot to be said for the idea, whether or not I agree with the concept of God. Change happens, but it can be directed.
So I'm feeling pretty positive about change today.
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So I just got in from a smoking cruise with ze German and Geoffoshua. While we were out I was driving to the gas station when I saw something in the road ahead. It appeared to be someone walking in my lane towards my car. I slowed down and stopped and he stumbled up to the window. He appeared to have been partaking heavily in the holiday's festivities and the following exchange took place:
Dude: I live down the street.
Dude: My wife just left me and I was hoping you would hit me with your car.
Me: Well I can't really do that but there's some cars coming in the other lane if you'd like to try again.
Dude: You're a good man.
He continued down the street in my lane and less than 5 seconds later a cop passed me and turned his lights on. They drove off presumably to the dude's house to sort things out.
An exciting night in my tiny town.
In other news, I just ate this.
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We have six dogs and we love them all. Ollie is my son's dog.
Sunday,shit,yesterday the family went out to chill out with other families and ate and stuff just for the hell of it...for St Patricks day I guess. We were out all day and kept the dogs inside for if left out the back they could get in trouble with the bigger dogs next door. They've all been left inside the home before. Lots of food and water. Hell. We weren't really gone all day. Just like 8 hours.
We came home yesterday and Ollie's back legs ain't moving.
Alright,John. It's ok. It's just a cist or something. We'll see the vet in the morning,he'll get some pills and he's gonna be just fine.
This morning my son and I drove downtown to the vet. This place is a low cost vet. Shit's like less than half of what the other's charge. For Denverites out there it's the place on Galapego street and 11th ave.
X-rays will cost you 120 dollars then we'll know for sure what's going on with the little guy. I cannot thank you all enough guys. There's just no way of showing this. Thanks to all of you I was able to say "let's do this".
X-rays came back and it looks grim. A vertabrea is showing some distress. "How much to operate?"
"We can't do that here. We're a low cost clinic and we don't have the resourses. It's gonna be very expensive and there's no guarantee. The spine is a sensitive thing."
"Is there anything you can do?"
" There is a chance. We can keep him here for 48 hours and do an IV drip of what's essentially adrenaline and it may help regenerate the spine. It's a chance but again no guarantee's."
How much?
The entire package including the X ray which costed the most of all will run you 278 dollars. That's everything.
"let's do this."
Do bad things come in three's? I've already counted three. My grandma,that other thing that happened that's too personal right now,my quintuple surgery.
That's three.
THAT'S THREE!
It's not fucking fair.
...he still has his balls though...but how the fuck he's gonna use them now....
I'll get him wheels if it's a no go. He's too good of a dog.
He can still pee and poop though. He can still live a good life.
Goddammit I should have stayed home.
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There was talk of isolated tornadoes today in southeast Nebraska. Most of the data I had seen today said "Isolated? More like none." I was right, but just for the hell of it I sent a text to my friend Tom to see if he wanted to chase. He didn't have anything going on, so the game was afoot. After a stop at his house so he could show me an image program he's writing to help us with photo management we took off for the Wilber/Claytonia area and would decide what to do from there.
While we were driving through Saline county we noticed this guy pulled off on a gravel road with the typical chaser gear on the back of his truck. Being that we weren't in any hurry we decided to talk to the guy. He was spotting for Saline county but lives in Iowa. What that was about, I'll never know. The guy asked us if we were chasing storms today and I said yes. He then launched into a lecture about how I need to be safe and not drive into storms. I was cordial about it with him, but it was kind of annoying. I've learned my lesson about driving into storms to the tune of a $600 repair bill. I told the guy that I know what I'm doing (which is mostly true) and that I was planning on staying away from the core of any storm. In fact, my plan was to sit miles away and view structure. No desire to get under the bases of these storms since it was likely a crapola day.
So we're walking back to my car when this white car pulls up behind me and this lady steps out. She asks us if we're out chasing tornadoes and I thought she was a fellow chaser. I get all coy and say "Oh us? Why, we'd never do such a thing." Turns out she was just some local yokel wondering what the fuss was all about with two vehicles pulled over on the side of the road. Now some lady probably has a poor impression of storm chasers and thinks I'm a glib asshole. Which I am, but I'm trying to HELP the image of chasers to the general public.
So while we were talking to Spotter Guy we noticed a nice lowering the storm Tom and I were trying to catch up with was devloping near the rain shaft. He calls it in to his net, but by then it was beginning to dissipate, which was a bummer. The storm started to develop another lowering closer to the flanking line. We said we were going to take off and said our goodbye. As an afterthought Tom asked what frequency the spotter net was broadcasting on so we could listen in with his scanner. Spotter Guy then launched into a lecture about how we can't broadcast without a license. No. Fucking. Duh. We assured him that we can't broadcast with out little handheld scanner and parted ways.
We drove a ways north and turned west on the road with the Saline Center and parked on top of a little hill. We were fairly close to the storm but far enough away that we weren't going to get rain, hail, or struck by an unlikely tornado. We were in a good position so that as the storms continued to back build we could sit and watch for a while before we would have to move. From our position we could look pretty much straight up and see the updrafts of the storms when they weren't being obscured by stratus. The storms had signs of weak rotation (some striation of the base and an obvious rounded look). It produced a decent (not great by any measure) wall cloud for a while. I spent too much time looking at the lowering, so by the time I decided to take a picture it was dying. So this is a picture of a dying wall cloud. You can kinda make out a little RFD knotch just to the right of it.
Click me!
After watching the storm for a few minutes I figured I should get a shot of the updraft.
Click me!
I messed with camera settings beforehand, which I probably shouldn't have done. Everything came out much darker than it was. I played with the brightness on the updraft pic:
Click me!
We then drove north a ways, decided it was going linear in a hurry, and drove home.
So I wouldn't call it a bust. The storms did try to do their thing, but the environment was just too hostile. I'll call it a draw.
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A few days ago, a good friend of mine called me up and said, "I'm 8 days late!" She sounded frantic, excited and scared all at the same time. So what would first pop up in your mind? She got knocked up. Impossible! Mind you I had the impression she was still a virgin. And apparently her first time was a couple of weeks back. Which may have gotten her into trouble now.
"What do you think could be the problem," I asked her. She was more eager to tell me that she'd 'lost it' than actually facing the real thruth here. Her first words were, "Don't you want to hear about it first? And who I'd done it with!!"
Seriously, girl you're out of your mind. She's only 22 still in college, and has been aspiring to be a fashion designer forever. And throughout the years I've known her, she is one extremely talented woman. I was more worried for her condition than she was. Obviously to her it didn't mean anything. Or perhaps she was convinced that she hadn't gotten pregnant.
So once she told me the entire details of her 'wild sex' story, with this dude she met ONLINE and has known for a little under 5 months, she bawled her eyes out, and this time I heard real fear and worry in her voice. I told her to calm down, and tried assuring her that perhaps it's just imballanced hormones or something. She carried on sobbing for the next 40 minuets. I stayed quiet on the phone. I honestly did not know what to say. I mean, what would I do if I were in her situation? Marry a man you hardly know? Have the child? Consider this, where I come from unwed mothers are shun away from the society and cursed by your religion. (She's a hindu). On the other hand, the guy is chinese, which makes matters worst for her. So what's the next move? Abortion perhaps? Which is going to cost thousands of dollars, and not only is it illegal and the sort of penalty she might face, this will leave a permanent scar in her life. What happens to her dreams and hopes two years down the road? I wept for her, I wept along with her. I really felt for her. Yet I was lost for words. She hung up five minuets later. I was in shock silent mode for a while.
The next morning, on my way to work, she called again. She said she did the right thing by telling her parents what happened. Surprisingly enough they were very understanding about the situation, and wanted to meet the guy. She sounded better, and felt better too. HOWEVER, she's not done any tests yet. For all we know, she's probably clear. Though I suppose her parents would put a lock and chain on her now, and keep a watchfull eye.
I've still to hear from her. I am also afraid to call her, somehow the results of her 'fear' seem to fear me more. Most of all, I'm not sure why I keep thinking if we will still be friends now. Which is extremely selfish of me.
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Did You Know?
Rice is the staple food of a large part of the world and is attended with many superstitions and has many powers attributed to it. Did you know that:
In Bali rice grains are believed to have a soul and it is customary to address them as "Mother rice", " grandmother rice" or whatever soul you believe inhabits the rice grains you are addressing. You do talk to your rice don't you?
I must tell my own personal Bali story. The first time I was in Bali I was attending a pre bid conference at the famous Bali Hai Hotel and on the first morning I was there I arose very early and went outside for a walk just after sunrise. I noticed that a little Balinese girl about six years old was putting small bits of rice from a bowl in her hand into a small niche Hindu shrine in a rock garden wall. Almost as fast as she was putting it in there the birds would swoop down and eat the rice and the little girl who had backed off from the wall would return and put another hand full of rice in the niche. About the time she did this the second time I saw our driver that we had hired coming down the walk and I knew that he spoke excellent English. I asked him if he would ask the little Balinese girl what she was doing. He talked to her then turned to me and said, "She says that she is feeding the Gods and does this every morning with half of her breakfast rice." I made a remark that she ought to shoot the birds then because they were stealing all of the rice and the driver told the little girl what I said. The little girl replied through him "Oh no, the birds carry the rice to the gods". I like that. I have a slide picture of that little girl and her niche shrine somewhere.
Later the same day about four of us were riding around in the car and our driver took us to a beach on the extreme eastern end of the island. There was a crew of about twenty old men down there building two shacks or cabanas on the beach made of bamboo and resembling a US Indian teepee except maybe a bit bigger. Our driver said "We are in luck. This is the day for the washing of the gods. It is done once a year and will happen here in a few minutes. It is quite colorful ,would you like to stay and see it.?" We opined that we would.. In a moment a gang of about twenty Balinese teenagers came down to the beach dressed in normal Indonesian garb and carrying a mound of clothes in their arms. The bamboo houses were complete and all of the boys gathered around one and the girls around the other and one at a time went into these houses and changed into very colorful long robes or maybe sarongs and just filled their hair with flowers. Our driver explained that the Hindu gods would arrive soon and that some would be female gods and some male gods and that the two sexes of idols would be on separate platforms and that the female idols should be bathed only by female virgins and the male idols should be bathed only by male virgins. About this time the idols did arrive on two huge platforms laden with flowers and carried on the shoulders of four men for each ---big burly mean looking men. There were about four idols on each platform and they were all basically representations of men or women from about the waist up and were carved very beautifully from grey limestone, or at least it looked like that. The men carrying the idols walked into the sea until they were about waist deep in the water and then lowered the platforms off their shoulders until it just reached the surface of the ocean. The girls all ran out into the sea in their fine clothes and gathered around one platform and began scrubbing the idols with what appeared to be large sponges. The boys did likewise around the other platform. One very old frail man went out in front of the two platforms and was busy waving his arms and talking while the laundry activity was in process. Then the burly characters carrying the platforms raised them back up on their shoulders and started marching off into the little village nearby. Our driver had told us that once the idols were on the beach we should remain silent and that we should not drink or smoke until they had left.
One more Bali story. It also happened on the same day. We were driving through a Balinese park when a huge crowd appeared with two guys in the lead each carrying a kris. A kris is a long wavy dagger about the size of a bayonet. These two men were obviously very angry with each other. We asked our driver what was up. He said that one of the men —the older one–was married to a very pretty girl and that the younger man had been caught in a compromising position with the older man’s wife and that they were going to have a duel and one was going to kill the other. I asked if we could watch and he said "Of course" so we left the car and we tagged along with the crowd.. They came to a little clearing in the forest and each contestant wrapped a towel around their left arm from the elbow to the wrist and used this wrapped arm as a shield and began thrusting at each other with obvious murderous intent. This went on for maybe five minutes which is a long time when someone is trying to stab you with a wavy dagger. Then the younger man made a slash and caught the older man off guard and cut a slash across his left biceps—not deep enough to require stitches but deep enough to cause an adequate flow of blood.. The two men threw down their daggers and the younger man brought out a clean handkerchief and was binding up his opponents wound. I asked the driver "Is he going to kill him now." The driver replied "He just did. Didn’t you see the blood?" "But he is still alive", I remonstrated. "Of course he is", the driver said "We don’t kill people in Bali in duels, we just make them bleed. Actually they are good friends" I asked if the younger man was going to stay away from the older man’s wife now". The driver shrugged and said "Who knows?"
I also had some adventures at the cock fight in Bali but I’ll save that for another time. Also my entrance into the deserted Hindu temple in the jungle.
Bali is an absolutely gorgeous place and the people are gentle and friendly and attractive. It has been thirty three years since I was there last. I hope that it hasn’t changed too much. I wish all of you could spend a week there.
Love
Dad, Granmjpa, ami
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Today....let's start with yesterday.
My son has moved out to be roomies with his friends. Sweet deal. Single wide three bedrooms,$500.00 a month all utilities paid. His share is like $165.00 a month. So anyway,he calls me for a ride to work for one of his roomies lost the keys to his car and it's parked in front of my son's truck so he can't pull out. So I go pick him up,drop him off of work and I'm just staring at him. I see my baby boy but I'm also seeing a soon to be grown man. We get into conversation and he tells me he wants me to go with him to the tatoo parlor for his next tatoo. So I ask him why and he says that he wants to copy my hand print cause he wants that on his shoulder.
.....wow. The power of a tatoo. This is joy,yo. Proud is not the word. I must have done right.
Well anyway,like all dads do or at least should do,coming back from picking him up from work,I'm asking if he has enough money,groceries and such and he says it's alright but I know it's not. So I slip him a twenty and we stop at a grocery store and bought him some groceries before I took him to his place.
That night,man I had a dream that he was just bawling. Like he's unhappy or some shit. It was a strange cry; something I never heard come out of him.
I call him in the morning and he's ok,except that roomie still hasn't found her keys so I go take him to work again. I tell him his great grandma is dying of cancer and he hasn't seen him in a while so when he get's off of work,were all going over there. He's cool with it.
So we go there tonight and she's in an awful state. She ain't gonna last the weekend. Everyone's there from all over,each taking turns visiting her from her bedroom.She's already had that visit with the priest.
A few hours later,we start leaving,but I left first to start up the car to warm it up. My son was the next one to come out. He steps in the car and starts bawling.
The same exact sound in my dream.
What The Fuck,man. What The Fuck?
There's something going on here. My wife's grandma really REALLY made me feel like part of the family. She thought of me as a grand son instead of an in law.
This dream. HOW THE HELL...
The joy of knowing my son wants a reprentation of his father...me..in permanent ink on his body. The pain of the dying of someone I truly love,man.
The almost spiritual karma or what the fuck is going on?
All within 24 hours.
We all took my son home and we checked out how he's living. Looking good. I told his roomate she can go to the dealer and with her vin number and title they can cut a key for her.
I'll probably do this for them tomorrow...
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Sadie Morrow didn't give a shit that I was queer; she wouldn't have given a shit if I'd have had a third eye in the middle of my forehead as long as I'd make her feel desirable from time to time by fucking her and letting her buy the beer. She would bring me offerings of broken men in the same way that my cat would bring me a half-eaten horny toad if only I would pull her up against my naked, sweaty body and give her my finest sloppy sugar and then cover her face with the glaze that left her looking like a day-old Southern Maid doughnut. Sadie bestowed upon me the best that her feminine charms could offer. I was happy that she was so solicitous of my physical comfort, but I honestly felt rather put upon and objectified from time to time by that slut-in-the-headlights look she gave up at me from below my belt. Striving after the pleasures of the flesh was a way of life for me then, however, so I sucked it up and made the best of a dubious blessing. I've always been adaptable that way, I suppose. And she gave the most hateful, hot-bubblin' skull I ever got from a woman. That counts for a lot in my book.
I met Sadie in an AA meeting. I was killing time in the back row of one of those midnight candlelight gatherings where the unemployed and the unemployable sit about and try to outdo one another by speaking in hushed tones and secreting spiritual goo all over the room. I always felt as if self-support and right living were about the most spiritual things a man can do towards his fellows, no matter that I often fell a tad short of that mark, and I usually attended these funereal pow-wows to simply lord it over those who were somehow less aware of truths I considered to be axiomatic. Besides, once I'd been wired up past about day three, I tired of staying around the house once the sun had gone down. I knew that such a group of misfits and heathens weren't going to be too terribly discriminating about the company they kept.
I saw her sitting with her back to me and recognized her as a familiar face to whom I had never been introduced. As the group formed up at the close and was about the task of joining hands to ask for their Pat on the Head I slipped up behind her and whispered, "I can lick my eyebrows'n breathe through my ears, princess. Can I taste what you had fer lunch?"
She was trembling all through the Lord's Prayer trying to contain herself. I never considered that line terribly witty, but I suppose that it did come as a surprise under the circumstances. She turned and fell into my arms as the lights came up, and we had a little moment. She looked up at me biting her lower lip a bit and pressed her tits hard against my chest. I determined right then that conforming her to my will was a biological imperative in my life. I wanted to drag her outside and fuck her in the parking lot, and I found the awareness of that rather disconcerting to me. I am, after all, queer. There have been a few women in my life who have had that effect upon me, but they are so few and far between that I don't take them into account when it comes to assessing my orientation.
Sadie was not a fat girl by any stretch. But she had a comfortable fleshiness about her that I found very attractive. She was not any taller than I was. She also had that innocent look of a girl who blew her brother on his wedding day…but only because he guilted her into it. She had platinum-blonde hair, sky-blue eyes, fair-sized perky tits, and that look on her face that said the lights were on and anybody was home who happened to be passing through. She trembled a lot, it seemed, and I felt sometimes as if I were in the company of one of those little dogs who roll over and piss themselves when approached too quickly. She also had a giggly whimper that said she'd just been caught being naughty, and she knew what she had to do now to get a pat on the noggin.
I was well known among the creatures who took up residence in those smoke-filled rooms with the bad coffee and worse furniture. There had been times when I had honestly wanted to make the attempt and offer my base metal into that alchemical chamber to see what sort of gold issued forth at the other end. I had more often witnessed the effects in my life and the lives of others who tip-toed around the periphery of that process without ever giving themselves completely into it. For us it was a spiritual sausage grinder, combining all the more unpalatable elements into an inert puree that, while safe to eat, had none of that spice that makes life worth living. I'd just go to get the heat off periodically and spend my time auditing the course and hanging with other like-minded folk who were in and out of the doors and occasionally drunk in meetings, pitching pennies at speakers from the front rows and being escorted out when we were too disruptive.
Sadie wanted something better. But anything was better than the cold plate of circumstance she brought to the table when she arrived. She went through all the requisite motions in her own way. While I sat in the living room of my grandmother's house smoking speed off a piece of foil, she would scribble nervously at the kitchen table in a stenographer's pad, working on another of her moral inventories. She carried that process with her as she sought relief in the immediacy of one more anonymous coupling on my shag carpet.
I had somewhat of a crush on Brian, a guy who rented a room in the back of my house and sold coke on the strip in Dallas where he tended bar. Okay, so it wasn't exactly a crush; I just wanted to suck his dick and do his dope. His dope was pretty painful stuff. He was selling coke for Claudio, who owned a restaurant and bar over on Fitzhugh. The bar was called La Mariposa and was located next door to where the old Eighth Day had been just a few years previous. Brian and I would spend afternoons there doing shots of Grand Marnier and snorting eighty-cent lines off the bar. There was something not quite right about the coke. It felt like ground glass in my nose, though it was powerful enough. We had to continually use various nose sprays and other medicaments to alleviate our suffering. Brian would send me across the street to get hot dogs with mayonnaise, a taste I acquired at the time but to which I never fully adjusted, and then we would chase them with shots of "Grandmar" and a thick line of coke that almost brought the entire mix right back up. Then we would stand around for a few minutes holding our noses and wincing and trying to swallow.
Brian held forth in such a way that he wasn't really queer. I mean, he was queer, but the boys he was attracted to were either illegally young or so effeminate that he might as well have been straight. And I knew he was good to go if I had a girl that was worth fucking. I was a bit of a chicken-hawk and always had been, but I wasn't in the same category as he was and wasn't willing to venture down that road for any reason no matter how skewed my perceptions became. Sadie provided an easy avenue of compromise for my tastes, since I was willing to fuck her in any case if nothing else was available.
It was a hot time and memorable, and it only happened once. I reckon it's appropriately unfortunate that my principle visual memory of Sadie is the three of us scooting along my living room floor, Brian's pelvic thrusts the engine of our progress and Sadie's blissful grin upon my cock affixed until her head was bent near double against that old console television that used to blare out Soul Train on Saturday afternoons while my grandfather sat a few feet away rolling cigarettes and running the electric shaver over his face and laughing as the sun streamed in through the big picture window.
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This is the most boring blog yet posted by anyone on the asylum. Turn back now. You have been warned.
Some of you from outside of Dallas, and certainly everyone outside of Texas is probably wondering what the hell an El Fenix is. Or more accurately, you first wondered why you bothered visiting this blog, then wondered what an El Fenix is.
El Fenix is a Tex-Mex restaurant within walking distance of my office. It really isn't very good. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that El Fenix is to Tex-Mex what McDonalds is to barbecue. It's one of those places you go to when Subway, 7-11, and Walgreens don't have anything appealing on the menu.
Nothing out of the ordinary EVER happens at El Fenix. You sit down, they take your order, they take your pre-prepared order out of the fridge and microwave it, you eat your food, swear you'll never come back, fart, pay, and leave. It is ALWAYS this way. I suppose that is why this place draws the clientele that it does.
The particular El Fenix I go to (it's a chain, amazingly) is patronized for the most part by the chronologically endowed and soccer moms. The old have been coming here so long that not even Alzheimer's can derail their dining experience. The soccer moms come because mexicans are used to kids running all over the place with no supervision.
Today was different for some reason.
Thing 1
I sat at a table next to two females who looked to be around 19, maybe 20. They were discussing ancient religious beliefs and reached the conclusion, one civilization at a time, that each civilization had believed in certain gods because they didn't have the education to explain the things that were happening around them. My food arrived and I paid less attention to the females than I had been. When I looked up from my plate of carbs, grease, and cumin, I noticed the blonde one was bawling her eyes out.
"How?!" she wailed, "How could my Gawd let my friends (pronounced "free yundz") turn away from Him? For some reason he just won't reveal Himself to my free yundz. Every one of the people I know that have gone off to college has turned away from the Lord. How can they live in today's world without His comfort?"
She then noticed that I was listening intently to everything she said. I'm sure I had a dumbfounded look on my face (seeing as how that's how I look anyway) and she asked across the distance if I felt the same way.
"Yes," I said. "The world would be a terribly different place if it weren't for the guiding hand of the Great Space Monster."
She didn't speak to me anymore. I'm not sure if I should thank Simon or the Troll for that.
Thing 2
As I looked away from the distorted face of this emotionally desperate female, I noticed that a man and his retarded son had sat down a few booths over. Normally this wouldn't have bothered me a bit, and I'm not sure why it did today, but I found it very difficult to eat. I picked at the food on my plate, but it was turning my stomach for that kid to be over there. He wasn't facing me. He wasn't being loud. He wasn't terribly malformed. He was just rubbing hot sauce in his eyes. Amazingly, all he did was make the OK sign, bend his wrist, and rub his nose with the back of his wrist while blowing as hard as he could through his nostrils.
Even that wasn't so bad until the coke he had in his mouth came out through his nose.
I was pretty much through eating at that point.
Thing 3
As I looked around for my waiter, I heard a sound off in the distance.
Clink. Scootscoot. Clink. Scootscoot.
Panning around the room, I saw it come into view. On the floor were two tennis balls, each with a brushed aluminum tube projecting from its top. The tubes curved upward toward each other and met neatly between a pair of old, wisened hands. He was shaking wildly, like Michael J Fox on speed, but he was moving about 3 inches each step. His mouth gaping open like he was expecting the mother penguin to feed him, regurgitatively. His face covered with blue-green hoses
Mother penguin was following behind with an oxygen tank on a 2 wheeler. She was most displeased with his progress.
Clink. Scootscoot. Clink. Scootscoot.
I asked my waiter for my bill and he left to retrieve it.
Clink. Scootscoot. Clink. Scootscoot.
My waiter came back with my bill. I left a tip on the table and went to pay.
Clink. Scootscoot. Clink. Scootscoot.
I paid for my meal and a praline and turned to leave. As I was turning, I noticed that Mother penguin was now in front of the old man pulling him along by his sleeve. And she had given him the 2 wheeler to keep up with.
So here is this old man with a walker dragging a 2 wheeler of oxygen behind him trying to keep from being pulled headlong from the restaurant by a woman who obviously despised his existence.
I was just about to leave, when it happened. He had let go of the 2 wheeler so he could advance his walker, and as he turned, the 2 wheeler fell forward, hit him in the back and knocked him to the floor. So, here is this poor old guy laying in the floor on top of his walker, his shirt pulled out of his pants (she never let go), with the tubes hanging out of his nose pulling his head back at a rather uncomfortable looking angle.
Without missing a beat, the old wench yells "Goddamnit, Albert! This happens everywhere we go!” Her tirade never ended that I saw.
Since everyone else seemed too afraid of the old lady to help him, I picked him up off the floor, made sure his O2 connections were OK, placed his walker upright in front of him, and told him I'd walk the 2 wheeler out to his car for him.
He said thanks and asked if I was married. I told him I was.
He said, "You're a damned idiot."
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