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December 1, 2009 | 4 Comments

Walterberry pie

I had a bet with Susanne, over no amount of money, that after she neglected to see a dentist for 8 years she’d have at least one or two cavities in her mouth. She disagreed, which is how I suppose I came to the prospect of “betting” her on the issue. I’d been tardy in seeing a dentist for just a couple of years, and lo and behold, I had three cavities to fill. So come on, her mouth must have been worse, right?

Xrays were taken, results analyzed and nope, the good doctor was nary any issues with her enamel. She patted me on the back to show both comfort and a certain degree of smugness, which if our fortunes had been reversed, I would also have communicated nonverbally to her. And so I trudged into the dentist’s office, contrite and humbled.

Teeth for me have a checkerboard history. I wore braces from 5th to 8th grade, and while I’m glad I avoided having them when I was in high school, I’m not sure middle school kids are any better. Train tracks, silver streak, motor mouth, they had a litany of names that I dodged about as well as the red balls in gym class. Thank goodness my income has never been based on dodgeball capability. I was used to the repeated trips to the orthodontist, who had blanketed the walls with smiling, cartoonized teeth so that we’d have something to stare at while he twisted our train tracks to painful levels. I couldn’t even bite into a French fry for the next four hours, it was so excruciating. And still, I would return, driven by my mother who read Women’s World out in the lounge while she allowed a guy who looked like Telly Savalis to perform sadism on her child. At the end of three years of rubber bands shooting off like errant fireworks in the middle of World History, the retainers that came undone and jabbed me in the face while I was sleeping, and the lesson learned the hard way that eating salt water taffy was way off limits, he looked at me, my face in his hands and pronounced that well, I still had a little bit of a cross bite, but nobody would notice.

I sucked it up and thanked him. I THANKED him for making me the target of other people’s orthodontia-ism, because my 13-year-old self was a cowering wuss. My 39-year-old self, well, let’s just say that if he tried to leave me with anything less than utterly perfect dentition, I’d be doing my own “almost perfect” surgery on his Yul Brenner face.

So dentists and I aren’t exactly the best of friends, but the one I found in Walla Walla does a nice job and tries very hard to be as pain-free as possible. When Susanne and I were relocating to Walla Walla, I felt a filling fall out of one of my upper molars. Well, I didn’t feel it fall out so much as I felt it go crunch crunch as I was attempting to chew something. And we still had four days to go before we pulled into town. So my first phone call was to a dentist who had been recommended by one of Susanne’s colleagues. They didn’t seem to understand the urgency of my situation when I called them.

“She’s booked until late October,” said the receptionist, as dryly as the desert air outside.

“But I have a hole in my tooth,” I said. To me, this meant “what else can you do for me? Another dentist in your office? A recommendation for another practice?

To her, however, this meant, “I AM STUPID. PLEASE CONDESCEND TO ME.”

“She’s…booked…until late October. Do you want to make an appointment for then?”

And I thought people in the health care industry wanted to be helpful. Silly me. I made the appointment, even though it was August 22. In the meantime I’d look for another dentist.

Meantime didn’t happen. The next week, lazy about continuing to eat on only one side of my mouth, I broke the tooth in half. Pain soon followed. I held in my hand what had until only very recently been stuck in my head, and saw red. Not my blood, just red anger. I called the receptionist back.

“I need a dentist and I need one now! My tooth just fell out of my head!”

“Why don’t you try Dr. So-and-so?”

Really? Did I move to a higher level of reception service or was I just not saying the right password the last time around? I thought I heard giggling and the exchange of money on her end of the line.

I called the other dentist’s office expecting not much more than nothing. But when they heard of my plight they told me to come right in. Now. I hopped in the car and realized, for the first time of many, that nothing in Walla Walla is more than 5 minutes away from anywhere else in Walla Walla. This apparently is a tradeoff for the fact that Walla Walla itself is extremely far from anything else, except Milton-Freewater, across the Oregon border.

And so my relationship with this dentist began. She gave me a temporary crown, and a week later, a real one to replace the good chunk I’d lost.

Fast forward to this morning, to get two cavities fixed and filled. She stuck some anesthetic in between my teeth and gums, and I was reminded of the woman on Intervention last night who had a problem with fentanyl lollipops. Now that woman had some dental issues, sadly. The taste of this stuff was strange, kind of fruity, kind of like cheap bubble gum.

“Wha is that flava,” I asked, identifying that I sounded like a lush after a bender.

“It’s called Walterberry,” she said, smiling as she put on her magnifying glasses, “it’s the best of the worst flavors they make.”

I wanted to ask why not procure the best of the best flavors they made, but that required too much diction, so I let it go.

Thirty minutes later, I didn’t feel the lower half of my face. But heck, who needs to feel 100 percent of their face 100 percent of the time? I hadn’t eaten breakfast, and now it was after noon. Maybe I could deal with soft food or something to drink. The hygienist, after all, had sucked out a good portion of my saliva, so I was on my way to either a crisp headache or becoming a human-sized prune, neither of which seemed like a good option.

My favorite coffee house beckoned. It was, of course, only 5 minutes away. This turns out not to have been enough time for the numbing medication to wear off, so I wound up wearing most of my tea and only realized I still had food in my mouth by placing my hand in between my cheek and teeth, and moving it to the back of my tongue where I could then swallow it. It was like manual eating, and certainly the aesthetic appeal of this can not be underestimated. I may have just discovered the next diet. Eat all of one’s food with one’s hands deep in one’s own mouth and double check to make sure there aren’t big chunks just sitting on one’s tongue. Do all of this in public. I can see the book title: Redefining Eating.

November 29, 2009 | 1 Comment

Dinner of champions

I was finishing preparations for the big Thanksgiving meal when my cell phone rang, and I saw on the screen that it was one of my closest friends. So of course I answered it.

“Have I got news for you,” she said.

My mind immediately computed all of the possibilities it could find in the 0.02 seconds before I began responding to her statement, which included, in approximate order, the following:

someone was pregnant

someone was pregnant with an alien fetus

I’m behind in watching V episodes

wow, DVR has changed my life

I’m sad Monk is ending

“What’s your news,” I asked innocently.

“Those people who crashed the White House party,” she said, in a hushed tone, “those were the people who own Oasis wine where I got married.” She spat out the last six words so quickly I needed an extra moment to parse them out and find the spaces between them. And then the memory section of my brain filled in everything I needed to recall about the Oasis Vineyard in Virginia. As it happens, there is not much good in those memory stores. A Hummer outfitted with the Oasis logo that camps out at the annual Vintage Virginia wine festival, with “club” members that are condescending toward everyone else. Stories from old coworkers about visiting the vineyard only to be snubbed as “too local” or not wealthy-looking enough to get decent service. When my friend told me she was looking at wedding venues and that those included Oasis, I told her I’d never heard anything good about the place. They took that under advisement but booked there anyway. It sounded so easy—they had caterers on hand, knew several good florists, and would cordon off the premises just for their event. Once the contract was signed, it was a different story. The events manager wouldn’t let them talk to any of the vendors directly, kept changing things that they’d requested, opting, for example, for the most expensive flowers the florist listed, so that my friends had to redo the order at the last minute, and worst, started billing charges to their credit cards without telling them what any of the charges were for. When the third $1,500 charge showed up on their statement, they had the account number changed. The next charge the vineyard tried to put through failed. They had a screaming phone message waiting for them when they got home from work. The whole thing reeked of some kind of badly orchestrated con game, and though the wedding went on as scheduled, they’re still paying off the credit card debt and are left with sour memories infecting what was otherwise a wonderful October afternoon.

So I wasn’t surprised to hear that these people had crashed the White House party. Not surprised in the least. They were probably wearing clothes paid for by fiancees all over the DC Metropolitan area. Without spending much energy on why they’d do such a thing, I’ll write them off as narcissistic or sick. The incident with my friends was only one example of the many people who have sued them over the years for breach of contract and so forth.

What really bothers me about this trespass into the White House is that it happened at all. You can show up without an invitation, without being on the list, and get past the Secret Service? Really? Aren’t they trained for like, spies and crap? How could anyone simply smooth talk their way into the room?

“I hope they get arrested,” said my friend.

“Sheesh, I hope so too,” I said, pulling the turkey out of the oven. “We can’t have people think they can just break security like that.”

“I know! Isn’t that nuts?”

“I guess you’ve never bought anymore of their wine, huh, even though you got a lifetime 20 percent discount for having your wedding there?”

“Guess what,” she said, sounding somewhere between bitter and smiling, “I’m never buying their wine again. Besides, they’re selling the winery, so I don’t think anyone will honor that agreement anyway.”

“Well, Happy Thanksgiving!”

“Happy Thanksgiving to you, Ev,” she said, and I turned back to the bird, which I had named Norbert.

It’s okay not to be wealthy, of course, especially if it means your soul is intact.

New developments from the media say that Michaela and Tariq Salahi, the crashers in question, are now seeking a high-paying interview with whoever winds up top bidder. They misunderstand how broadcast journalism works, then. Reputable media sources don’t pay people to be interviewed. What they really need to do is find a ghostwriter to come up with a book like, “My Crazy Pictures with Famous People,” and then they can get a book deal from some crazy publisher out there, like whoever was going to print OJ’s fakeish confessional, or the folks who printed The Turner Diaries. Of course, they won’t be able to make any money bragging about their trespassing if the Federal Government decides to prosecute them.

So for the sake of all of us who want absolutely no more primetime on the Salahis, or the balloon boy’s parents, or Jon and Kate, or the freaking Duggers, PLEASE, I beg of you, oh Federal Government. Arrest them.

As quietly as you can.

November 19, 2009 | 0 Comments

Eugenology

artichokesEvery 6 weeks or so, it seems, we take a weekend or trip outside the confines of Walla Walla—this time it was to Eugene, Oregon, where one of Susanne’s oldest friends lives. We were ready for fun, good conversation, and even the potential of hunting in the woods for chanterelles.

I’ve never mentioned it before, but there’s a part of I-84 that weirds me out a little. A miles-long tree farm. It’s not that I don’t support the tree growth—I definitely do. It’s not that it take 10 minutes, at 70 miles an hour, to get past all of the trees, since I’ve driven by thousand acre woods many times before. It’s the regularity of the planting, the perfect squared distance between each tree, so that they’re plotted out on a grid, should you have the opportunity to see them from above. They look like alien-planted trees. As a person who grew up near several wooded areas, it seems weird to me that to ride my bike through these woods, I’d have to go in a straight line. That’s just . . . somehow harrowing. Driving past, the trees all start to drag on my peripheral vision. Row after row after row after row, they all point at the sky in brown-gray lines that start to resemble actual aliens. And then my head turns, just a little, because now I’m half-sucked into my deciduous voyeurism, and I notice that every so often, the space between rows is marred by one or a few fallen trees. Imperfection in the grid! Whew! And then I can get back to driving.

It’s possible I’ve lost my mind.

Anyway, we made it past the mindtrap of I-84 and continued on into first Portland, turning left to pass the state capitol, and then tucked into Eugene about an hour after dusk. It was difficult, in the dark, to get a sense of Eugene, especially from the highway, but it seemed to be the same splayed out street and residential design of Portland. Heck, it has a Trader Joe’s. Any city with a Trader Joe’s is A-OK in my book.

Susanne’s friend and her husband were happy to see us, but this moment of welcome was quickly supplanted by the greeting from their kitten, Ruby, who cantered over to us and began thoroughly sniffing our feet, ankles, and baggage. I half-wondered if she wasn’t one of the new covert drug-sniffing cats of the National Security Agency. Okay, okay, there are no such drug-sniffing cats. But heck, there could be. So she rubbed herself on us as we sat down to relax, which made me wonder: after 6.5 hours of sitting down driving, why am I sitting down to relax?

It was great to catch up; we discussed dining options and agreed to venture to Ratatouille for dinner. I kept waiting for a cute animated mouse to bring me soup, but it never happened. The all-vegetarian fare was enjoyed by all of us, 3 of whom are ex-vegetarians. I was annoyed at their idea of hummus, however. Just because chick peas are pureed and in a bowl doesn’t mean you can call it hummus—while these were supposed to be takes on the traditional preparation, they were a bit too far gone for me to hold them in the same category as hummus anymore. Or perhaps merging cilantro and garbanzo beans is good in its own right, but when I think hummus, I don’t think, “let’s have some cilantro!”

Dinner was tasty, and I appreciated that anyone would focus on creative vegetable dishes without a ton of accompanying pretense. What I was going to find out shortly, in fact, was that Eugene really doesn’t have much pretension, if it has any at all. We went next to Off the Waffle, a fairly new establishment that was just voted Eugene’s Best New Restaurant. Once again, category names don’t mean much, as Off the Waffle is a restaurant like one’s neighborhood chocolate shop is a restaurant, but I recognized I need to adopt more of the west coast laid back attitude. And I’m certainly not saying they weren’t the most ridiculously tasty waffles I’ve ever eaten. It was a quirky little storefront on the ground floor of a house, with a variety of savory and sweet versions of the Belgian liege waffle, a yeasted batter that they make with pearl sugar so they come out of the press puffy and caramelized. We sat on an old leather sectional sofa and ate out of our 100% recycled paper containers like jackals over a fresh kill. On all sides of us were the brown bags the owners use for the plain waffles—people walk in and out all day, ordering plain waffles to take home or to work, clutching the warm waffles and crinkling the bags in joy. But the bags on the wall are for decoration, each with the scribblings of some customer who was pleased enough to leave a happy, if not idiosynratic, note on the wall. It was like sitting in a room of non sequitors.

At that point, we were stuffed, so we trundled back to Susanne’s friends’ home, where the kitten was extremely pleased to see the return of her four scratching posts. And then there was Saturday.

November 13, 2009 | 0 Comments

Ballots other than butterfly

Election Day came and went, and the Walla Walla County’s Web site put up the results of the vote the next day. After looking at the statewide referendum and initiative results, I skimmed down to the city council tallies, and as expected, I did not win the Position 3 race. Technically unopposed, each of the three people running for the open slots on the council won by more than 95 percent of the votes cast. But I did note something interesting: Positions 1 and 2 received more than 97 percent, but Position 3 only got 96.35 percent. What was going on here? Were people getting fatigued—after all, they’d voted for two statewide contests, a state representative, a school board member, port commissioner, and depending on the ballot, other local offices, before getting to the city council seats. I could infer that some of the lost votes. Surely there wasn’t something qualitatively different about the guy running for the third slot, was there? Or did I really get 1 percent of the vote with my 3-week-long Facebook-focused write in campaign?

Seriously?

I had to know.

I emailed the county elections board, not without a fair amount of irony, because several months ago I’d applied for the job of county elections supervisor (hey, I’m grasping at the employment straws here, what can I say). I figured they wouldn’t remember me, or even if they did, that they’d respond to me anyway. I presume the conversation would go something like this:

County Employee #1: Hey Glenda, get a load of this?

Glenda: What, Ralph?

Ralph: That nutjob Everett guy wants to know how many votes he got yesterday.

Glenda: Isn’t that the guy who tried to get your job, Ralph?

Ralph: Sure is. Apparently he had some jerky write-in thing going.

Glenda: Wow, he really is crazy. I bet he named himself after the city of Everett.

Ralph: If he did, he should have stayed west side, then. What a loser!

After having such a conversation, they collected themselves and replied to my email, saying that the county is only required to tally write-in votes if the person on the ticket didn’t get a majority of the votes. Since we can go ahead and say that 96.35 percent is a majority of the votes cast, I don’t think I’ll ever know how many votes I really got, but I’m betting it was more than 20, and certainly more than Mickey Mouse and Yoda combined. I am a little reminded of Richard Pryor’s “None of the Above” campaign in Brewster’s Millions, which, when I first saw it, made absolutely no sense to my 12-year-old brain. Why on earth would anyone cast a vote for no one?

But I’m glad that I started a dialogue, at least among some Walla Wallans, about their local government and how it seems to work (or not, as the case may be). Nobody I talked to seemed to know what these councilmen-elect stand for, what their goals are, how they feel about things like repairing the 25 percent defective water infrastructure in the city.

Along the way, the woman running to retain her seat in the state legislature, Laura Grant, intimated to me that should I want to run “for real” next time, I should let her know. So I think I’ll try to put my toes in the water and see how things really work around here. And sheesh, find some stimulus money for the pipe and road rebuilding, people. That’s got to be better than raising water rates by 50 percent.

In the meantime, I’ve been working of putting several recipes into a cookbook for some holiday presents to our family. This started out as a small idea and has grown rapidly, the point that many more people want a copy of the cookbook than we can afford to produce. So starting next week, I’m going to open a new page on this blog dedicated to our cooking and baking, and links to other foodie blogs we like. I hope you all enjoy it.

November 6, 2009 | 0 Comments

Happy Hallo-weenies

If one weekend night’s costume party was about mysteries, food, and fun, the next was its near-direct opposite. We took to creating our costumes a couple of hours before the faculty party, Susanne donning a personification of her office building’s reconstruction, and me going as the carpet a couple of offices down from hers. When this construction—a 30-foot addition to the end of the building—began at the start of last summer, several emails went out with a slew of mixed messages. This construction will be completed quickly. We didn’t expect anyone would need their offices in the summer. The noise should be minimal. We’ve discovered we need to remove asbestos. And so on.

When the jack hammering got too loud, Susanne went to work in the library, or came home. At some point the psychology lab upstairs was getting its facelift, and lo and behold, a waste pipe burst, spilling pigeon crap all over the carpet in one of Susanne’s colleagues offices. This was not the “minimal intrusion” he’d been promised. One day, while I was in the Bi-Mart, looking at canning equipment, I came across some carpet remnants. I typed into my phone:

TELL BRUCE CARPET’S ON SALE AT BIMART.

I’m sure he was pleased with my helpful suggestion, though I haven’t stopped by to see if he took me up on the idea.

I needed to figure out how to replicate bird poop without using any actual excrement. So I turned to the most logical place—our kitchen. It is with my own trial and error process that I now reveal my bird poop recipe.

Recipe for pigeon-like poop

4 packages of regular flavor instant oatmeal

1/4 cup of corn starch

6–8 drops of yellow food coloring

1/2 cup of raisins

1 T flour, unbleached if possible

1/2 to 3/4 a cup of water

Grind up the oatmeal and the raisins in a food processor. Turn out into a metal bowl and add the corn starch and flour, mixing with a fork or whisk. Add in 1/2 cup of water and stir, adding more water as desired. Add drops of food coloring, enough to give a sick-looking hue. Drop by the spoonful from about 4–6 feet away for desired splatter effect, and let dry.

Yes folks, my bird shit was completely edible, although it didn’t taste particularly good. But it could have been helpful for a Renfield imitation, I suppose. What else is Halloween for?

I dropped the whole mess on a piece of carpet we had in the basement and let it sit for a good while, and was happy when it stayed put once I hoisted the carpet up on string so it was wearable.

I looked mostly like I was planning to jump over Niagara Falls in a dirty carpet-turned-barrel, but whatever. It was in this way that Susanne declared that we were protest art. I was my own art installation! Nifty.

We drove over to the festivities with a couple of other professors in tow, a cowgirl and a witch. Susanne had looked up the directions before we left, and then we were off into the night. The spooky night. We jumped on the highway, made a right, went over some railroad tracks, and then.

Then we drove up to the big house. Hmm. That couldn’t be right. That looked like a maximum security prison where the state of Washington executes prisoners, not a Halloween party for the local liberal arts college.

Susanne tapped her foot impatiently. I was not listening to her, clearly. I turned the car around.

And then we made it, our lives still intact from our brush with death row. Crossroads Steakhouse and Lounge overlooked a high school football game and the rest of the city. We walked in, looked around at the coworkers who were, in their costumes, one scraggly, intentionally creepy bunch, and . . .

were immediately and rudely asked to step aside for a waiter who was trying to fetch drinks from the bar. “Seriously?,” we wondered. The rest of the waitstaff were just as rude.

“Please, people, make a path here,” a woman in a white shirt and black skirt said, walking through the space and waving her arms. I thought of waving my own and saying, “Danger, Danger, Dr. Smith,” but I actually wasn’t that mobile wearing 30 pounds of carpet. In fact, I would have had a hard time making a path for the President, much less for these inconsiderate people.

Now then, I’m used to rude service, given that I lived in DC for 11 years. I’ve encountered several rude people in that town over the years. But at least they had something to back it up—terrific sushi (yes, that’s a swipe at you, Cafe Asia), comfortable seating in the cinema (Hoffman 22), or posh hotel accommodations. This place was as far from quality as a local ExxonMobile TigerMart is for quality dining fare. Yes, there was a dance floor, and yes, it was not the smallest dance floor I’ve ever seen, but it was one of the most barren. The DJ was so bad (“how bad WAS he?”), the DJ was so bad he’d start a new song, see nobody was coming to the dance floor and would then put on a new song, screech-skidilidatting the old one off the first turntable. My dead grandmother turns better tunes.

Susanne went and found the drinks, meaning, she stood at the bar, waited for a bartender, then walked to the register in our part of the building, where she was admonished for standing in the “path” the waiters needed. Several minutes later she came up to me with a martini and a beer, sighing.

There were several other twosome, coordinated costumes at the party—the usual pirate and piratess, a bloody bride and her bloody bridesmaids, a fork and a spoon, and so forth. I wondered if there wasn’t some kind of violence influencing chemical in the water around these parts, as there were a lot of murdered and murdering characters there. A “cereal” killer, with a bleeding box of Honey Nut Cheerios strapped to his back. A man killed by a shark. Maybe there’s a fake blood factory around here I don’t know about, or the K-Mart had a sale.

At any rate, it was inevitable that Susanne and I would be asked to show our costumes to the college president. Two minutes of explaining and he didn’t look like he really understood what we were trying to represent, Susanne wearing a trash bag with “Warning: Asbestos” signs taped to her, and me in a moldy, pukey-looking carpet. We were saved by the bell, also known as Beyonce’s Single Ladies song, and it was off to the dance floor to try to replicate the choreography from Glee.

Back to our spot at one of the tables, the waitstaff had cleared away Susanne’s martini, though she’d only drunk half of it. And about this time I noticed that some people who weren’t a part of the party had come into the room, taken a long table, and were watching us. A couple even got up and danced. Apparently it was also the bar’s karaoke night. No wonder they were clearing drinks, the asses. Hadn’t the college paid for this space? Were they planning on kicking us out at a certain hour?

My carpet was cutting into my shoulders, so I made a move to take it off. I set down my beer glass on the table. In two nanoseconds (or so; I wasn’t counting) a waitress was there, next to me.

“I need you to pick that up,” she said to me.

“Excuse me?”

“I need to clear this table.”

“I’m using this table.” I sound like I’m arguing in the retelling, but I really wasn’t understanding her.

“I need to clear this table.”

“I just need to put this down FOR A SECOND.” With all the music, maybe she didn’t understand what I was trying to accomplish, but I also didn’t understand why it mattered to her. Was the ghost of Princess Di going to need this crepe-covered surface?

I picked up my drink. She walked away. I put down my drink and took off the carpet. A colleague of Susanne’s had overheard the exchange.

“Better watch it, Everett, or you’re gonna get kicked out of here.”

“God, no kidding!” Hey, that’s fine, I figured, I’m ready to take on the white water of Niagara in this thing.

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October 28, 2009 | 3 Comments

Boo.

On the ever-growing list of Things that Make DC and Walla Walla Different, let’s add Halloween.

Halloween in DC is hit or miss. You may get three very young trick-or-treaters in half homemade costumes with helicopter parents standing behind them, looking nervous to be out after dark with their precious ones. One gets the impression that they badgered their otherwise overprotective caretakers to let them out of the house for the promise of bite-sized waxy chocolate, and that only the most vocal, pushy kids and the most pushover adults are the ones making the trek. Or one may get no knocks at the door, even if the light is on outside, and there’s a fake ghost on the foot-wide lawn, looking especially scary next to two broken 40 ounces and one used condom—because of course context is everything. The last possibility in DC is that one will get gaggles of middle school and high school kids, all dressed in white t-shirts and torn jeans in a far reach for “zombie.” And then one has to drop the candy into their pillowcases or they’ll grab three and four bars each, causing one to run out of candy all too quickly and leaving one to cower in the corner of the kitchen, far from the front door, pretending not to be home. And that gets old fast.

In Walla Walla, trick or treating is limited to the arranged rendezvous with candy. Kids are orchestrated by well meaning adults in some central location, like a dorm on the Whitman campus, which is then decorated to communicate that for this night only, ghosts are on the prowl in the dorm that would surely, on any other day, fire up the college students’ parents to demand at least partial refunds of their room and board payments. There are also trick and treat events in some of the nursing homes in town, on a two-block strip of Main Street, etc. But house-to-house soliciting, as far as I can tell, is limited to Mormons, Seventh Day Adventists, and Jehovah’s Witnesses, and they’re not seeking confections so much as offering eternal life.

To sum it up, Susanne and I got stuck with a boatload of candy last year, and she brought it to her office in hopes of limiting the damage to our pancreases and transferring the potential dental issues to the students and staff.

We bought no candy this year, expecting that once again, only two kids will show up at our house. At that rate, I can rummage through the kitchen and come up with some Orbit gum and an old Peppermint Patty from that Thai restaurant on 9th Avenue, no worries.

In the list of differences, I went to one and only one costume party in DC, but out here in Walla Walla, they seem to be a dime a dozen. However little the children dress up to gather candy from strangers, the adults go nuts pretending to be someone else. I can’t blame them—I’d like to be someone else out here, too, other than an unemployed, has-few-prospects, wanna be novelist who is tongue in cheek running for City Council, but that’s beside the point. The point is, they like a good costume party in this town.

We went to one last Saturday and have another to attend next Saturday. Last year I wore my Eeyore costume that I had purchased in 2002 for the one and only costume party I attended in DC. It is head to toe blue fleece, complete with floppy ears, depressed looking mane, and tail held on by a few strands of string. It also includes a little press pad in the top left paw (paw!) that says alternately, “Hello, I’m Eeyore,” and “Thanks for noticing me.” The thing gets so hot that I can’t wear anything underneath it other than some boxer shorts and a tank top. We’re talking stifling—the kind of heat surrounding one’s body that gives one the urge to run outside into a blizzard or make snow angels for 3o minutes, whilst banging the paws against the ground, to the beat of “Hello, I’m Eeyore,” and “Thanks for noticing me.”

I’d agreed to lend out this costume for the party this next Saturday, not realizing that I myself was obligated to attend. I’m a little bemused that anyone else would want to dress up as Eeyore, even knowing that the costume has been worn some number of times by a sweaty man in just his boxers, but whatever. What is life without risks, anyway?

This led Susanne and me to go to the K-Mart—which we affectionately call the “Sad Mart,” because it’s so dilapidated, with few customers actually shopping (as opposed to standing in front of a sales fixture, staring mindlessly, as if the nursing home dropped them off for a few hours so they could go “outside”). We looked through the costumes that they had for sale, knowing we couldn’t repeat the Magnum, P.I. and Perry Mason outfits of last weekend. It would be like wearing the same dress to two inauguration balls!

The costume perusing quickly devolved into shock as we saw what they had stocked on the shelves. An inflatable ballerina costume, because everyone loves obese ballerinas. An inflatable ninja costume, because why not mix in a little Orientalism while we’re being fat-phobic? And then, I gasped, and Susanne rushed over to look at what I was seeing.Woman/Man costume

The Woman/Man costume. Split right down the middle. Someone had watched too much Victor/Victoria. But seriously? Who would wear that, and why?

Please notice that the Woman/Man wig is sold separately. Since it can be worn for so many other occasions. If you don’t buy the wig, what else do you wear with this albatross?

“That says a lot about something,” I said.

We moved on, giggling at the human-sized whoopi cushion costume. Alas, it did not actually make a farting noise, probably because there is no left paw for a small speaker. I suppose the idea of whoopi cushions with paws is too frightening to deal with anyway.

So, I don’t have a costume for Saturday. Maybe I’ll go as a zombie councilman. Or affix several tumbleweeds to my clothing and give people small scrapes all evening. Or I could just wear a tank top and boxers and tell people I’m wearing an invisible Eeyore costume. I’m sure any of those ideas will work.

Happy Halloween, everyone!

October 27, 2009 | 0 Comments

Come see our Furr Ball on Saturday

In DC, amusement was going to the National Portrait Gallery just to see Steven Colbert’s picture hanging over a water fountain next to the men’s room. In Walla Walla, anything goes. Such it is that driving by the Elks Lodge in September bestowed upon our eyeballs the following notice:

WED CHIC AND DUMP

Instructions for a short-lived marriage a la Britney Spears? What to do immediately after exchanging vows so as not to die of embarrassment after drinking too much the night before?

No. The sign is shorthand for Wednesday, Chicken and Dumplings. Such is the flavor of titillating humor in these parts.

To be sure, there are other notes of hilarity. The man who works at the muffler shop on 9th Avenue is also a folk artist, crafting human-sized and -like statues from the leftover car parts. As Drew Bledsoe of former NFL quarterbacking fame is from Walla Walla, there’s a muffler man to his honor, as well as a guy reading whilst perched on a toilet. The toilet itself is the standard porcelain contraption, and not comprised of rusty metal. And the proximity of the two is not a statement on the artist’s opinion of Bledsoe. The New York Store, which used to be downtown on Main Street and is now in “Eastgate” near the edge of town, sells western ware, an intentional misdirection known to make at least one native New Yorker burst into tears upon reading the sign. But for Walla Wallans, it’s a hoot, if not popular enough to sustain sales that can make the rent payments in the more expensive part of town.

A chiropractor in town also changes up his black-lettered sign every so often as well. These are more existential in nature, the humor only coming into play if one is already equipped with the sort of wit that would allow for a good snort after reading whatever he’s put up there.

WE’LL SCRATCH YOUR BACK SINCE YOU CAN’T SCRATCH OURS is something I would write, if I’d lost my mind and was a mad scientist chiro guy.

A colleague of Susanne’s nodded in my direction at a cocktail hour last Friday, “cocktail hour” meant in all seriousness and not as a joke, for the purposes of this blog. I greeted her with a smile.

“You’ll have to check out the Elks Lodge before Saturday,” she told me, in the same kind of tone as “Mick has some really good shit on the street right now and you better get there before it sells out.” I asked if it was camera-worthy and was assured that yes, it was.

What could surpass WED CHIC AND DUMP?

Furr Ball sign

“The furries are coming to town,” said the colleague, with fake astonishment.

“It’s like that CSI episode,” I said.

The Furr Ball, as it turns out, was a fundraiser for the local Humane Society. Paintings and other art were auctioned off at the event. One of the pieces was done by the as-yet-still-small child of a friend, and sold for $300. It must have been like something by that child prodigy that nobody believed could really paint, although now that I look at it, her work sold for $24,000. That’s probably one dollar for every homeless dog and cat in the city confines.

However, this child is better, for many reasons, I’m sure, but one of those reasons is this—she made a lawn sign for my write-in campaign for city council. She also managed, in 5 or 6 places, to include the greeting “HI” to whomever paused to read the sign, and for this, I decree that I’m glad my supporters have taken a stand against mud-slinging. Such a scourge on our democracy, those negative campaigners. Let it never be said that Everett Maroon slung any mud toward his opponents, even if he did refer to them as “jackasses” a couple of blog posts ago. That was only meant for incumbents who left the 30 inches of snow in Walla Walla unplowed last winter.

So, I suppose we try to take everything with a dash or pinch of dry humor. As opposed to wet humor. Since you know, it’s a desert.

October 21, 2009 | 2 Comments

Writing a giggle at a time

I had a very bad case of senioritis in college. All I could see was my world ending, collapsing around me like a crumbling plaster ceiling (which did, incidently, attempt to cascade on my head a couple of years later, as it turns out). What was I to do? The US was in a recession, and nobody held dual major psych/English graduates in any kind of esteem, especially for entry-level jobs. I wondered what it was all for.

But graduate school glowed in the darkness like a beacon, since it’s the job of beacons to uh, glow, in low or no lighting. I loved writing and talking about literature and writing, after all, and so hey, becoming a professor sounded like a way to keep doing just that, with the added bonus of a three-month vacation.  So off applying I went. For two full summers I read every piece of “literature” listed in the front of my GRE Subject study guide—250 books, poems, essays, and plays. This was on top of my regular reading, and in addition to the thousands of books I’d already consumed up to that point.

The morning of the GRE rolled around, and I was up before dawn, because I had to make the 90-minute trip to Ithaca from Syracuse (New York loves its Greek town names), as I had only been able to get a seat for the test all the way over at Cornell. For those of you keeping score, Cornell’s campus is about three times the size of Syracuse’s, and I knew it like I know how to navigate through Dhaka. Add to this a very up-and-down terrain with few outdoor campus directories, and I wandered around the grounds like a psycho Roomba. I was sweating so much by the time I found the classroom I had a hard time holding on to my two number 2 recommended to bring pencils. I sat down at 7:54, six minutes to get my glasses fog-free before the test began.

So I must really love reading and writing. I approached my studies with love and appreciation that someone cared to spell out a series of words enough to make a story. I had my preferences and interests. I greatly enjoyed some novels, eschewed others, felt the range of emotions that they wanted me to feel as a reader, or that they never intended, “death of the author” what it is.

But let’s get real here. There are a lot of books out there that suck. We read them anyway. Or we pretend to read them. For every person who has read Ulysses, there are 16.4 who didn’t make it past page 30. And while I’m not saying anything qualitative about Ulysses (I actually have read it twice), I think it’s fascinating to see how many literary agents and editors write and blog about the terrible manuscripts that come across their desks. I wonder, “how bad can they be?” I think I may already know the answer, from direct experience, even.

In high school, I was a judge for our literary magazine. I still recall one poem that stood out from all the rest, for the worst reason: because it stunk up the room. It went something like this:

I love you

But you hate me

But

I still love you.

I theorized that they’d been inspired in the girls’ locker room, which was known to hold all sorts of miserable sentiment upon the insides of the actual locker doors. As if opening up some random metal lever could expose someone to the awfulness of a very short relationship’s terminus.

So for me, bad high school poems are the ground floor of poor writing. I don’t have a lot of other experience with terrible prose, although there was one potential hire who included in his cover letter that he was the author of The Emerald Throne, which was, get this, a fantasy novel. One wonders why someone would reference an unpublished novel that smacks of bowel movements when looking for an office job, but the title alone conveyed a kind of unintentional hilarity that I was sure would have me in stitches by page 5.

I understood that I was a literary snob. Even so, I am exhausted from the monotonous chastisement of would-be writers. “Just Because Your Mom Loved It Doesn’t Mean It’s Good,” or some such, is the number one message coming out from the myriad of agents, editors, and publishers who blog about their lives online. Okay, I get it. There are as many bad writers out there as there are screechers filling up the Falcon’s stadium in Atlanta for a chance to be the next American Idol. But given that I’ve heard this message about coming to terms with one’s own literary suckiness for 20-plus years, I’m starting to wonder if relaying the message isn’t working. Anyone egotistical enough to think that because their dog likes the book makes them a prodigy, well, they may not give a fig what Agent X thinks about their rationale. As long as people think writing is a way to make easy money and/or be famous, misoverestimated authors are going to add to the slush piles of publishing houses everywhere (but mostly New York City).

In fact, it seems like there’s a narrow range of egotism that’s acceptable in the publishing world: one must be stubborn enough to keep writing, even in the face of repeated rejection, because any writer worth her or his salt understands that of course, nobody gets their first book published (except ZZ Packer). But you also don’t want to be the crazy person who keeps peddling a bad idea, written into 13 different novels. At some point the insistence turns into delusion, and there’s no blood test to indicate when one has crossed the threshold. The first Harry Potter book, after all, was rejected a dozen times by agents, but Gone with the Wind was rejected 133 times. I can’t imagine how many people told Ms. Mitchell it was a fantastic book. If she’d written it now, would she have self-published it?

Speaking of mixed messages, agent blogs go on and on about the traits of hard-to-work-with writers. They make sense, generally. I mean, I wouldn’t want to work with someone who missed deadlines, who screamed about any criticism received, who was a petty thinker, or unreliable sort. But we’ve screened out most of the sensible people, haven’t we, by making the writing the number one criterion for entry into the club, with the high bar filtering through people with a large sense of themselves. How many team players are left in that scenario?

Anyway, I’m writing. I’ve written stories since my Mom put a steel Royal typewriter into the freezing front room of the house, and I would type—well, bang, actually—out stories wrapped in four layers of clothing, a scarf, and a wool cap, since Mr. Wizard had said that humans radiate 90 percent of their body heat through their heads. I had some corrective tape, but mistakes mostly just got written in. At Powell’s Block of Books in Portland last week, I came upon another Royal. This one had two spools of ribbon: one, the mainstay black, and one red. Wow. How different would my world have been? It was nice to have my moment of nostalgia, my arms sagging from 7 or 8 books I’d claimed for purchase.

You know what? I am a writer. A good writer, if I say so myself. Not the best, because I’m not that stuck on myself. But I like the things I write, or frankly, I wouldn’t devote such energy to them. I’ve parsed my writing in workshops with some really alcoholic, published authors. I’ve submitted myself to the whims and folly of the fearsome writing contest, like an ant taking on a flaming red dragon. I’ve done peer swaps for critique, sat through writers groups that never got anywhere near to writing anything, even if they were decent places to vent. I’ve come up with 67 Ineffective Methods to Prosper over Writer’s Block. I think I’ve earned some street cred here.

I’m not all that good at navigating the publishing world, but I’ll get there. And I think there’s an audience for my work. Hopefully I’ve hit the sweet spot for writers—energetic, focused, self-deprecating, persistent without being blind to my own limitations.

Oh, and I’m also nice, even if I get lost on the Cornell University campus.

October 19, 2009 | 3 Comments

Running for difference

Walla Walla has a City Council. This I knew before we moved here. The Mayor position is filled on a rotating basis with someone from the Council, voted on by members of the Council themselves. So the good citizens of Walla Walla don’t directly vote for a mayor. Representative government at its best?

Possibly not. I received my ballot in the mail on Friday, which I still find unsettling as a process, this whole vote by mail thing, and looked at what was on it. The Referendum 71, to keep or ditch domestic partner benefits for Washington State, and the Initiative 1033, to gut funding for programming from libraries to nursing homes, I already knew about. There are signs all over for the state representative job, so I knew I’d see that on the ballot. I’d heard a peep about the two men running for the commissioner of the Port of Walla Walla, but not much, and I’d heard absolutely nothing about the three people running unopposed for the open slots on the Council. Unopposed. All three of them.

What was this about? Were they all shoo-ins? Or did no one care who sat on the Council?

I ran to the Internet—okay, I didn’t run, seeing as my laptop was a few feet away—and looked up information on the races. Well, when I say “looked up,” I typed in a few keywords (namely, walla walla election city council 2009), and then voila, I got bupkus. Maybe on page 2. Nope. One article on the contested Port Commissioner job, and nothing else. Apparently “Walla Walla” is a link at the bottom of many pages on Washington State politics, skewing my results. Three pages into my search I gave up.

On the Walla Walla city Web site it lists the current members, and with five minutes more of digging, I found the name of the mayor, Dominic Elia. Sheesh, no need to put your names out there, folks, you’re only running the city.

So where were these people who were campaigning for positions 1, 2, and 3? What were their ideas about making the city a great place to live and work? Where did they think we need improvement? How are they prepared to handle the tax revenue issues in these difficult times? And my biggest question of all:

Why didn’t you jackasses move the snow off the streets last year?

Feeling frustrated and fanciful after inking in oval after oval on my ballot, I wrote in my own name on Position 3. Too bad for you, Daniel Johnson, who I’m sure will be elected anyway. I sealed up the envelope, avoiding the paper cut of last year, and put my poll tax—I mean, stamp—on the front.

Later that day, a friend who’d just lost her grandmother came over for some apple crisp and tea. As we were chatting, I mentioned I’d audaciously written myself in to the council, figuring I’d be right down there with Mickey Mouse and Yoda. Her reaction surprised me.

“I’m voting for you!”

“Oh, really, you don’t need to do that,” I said, waving my hands in front of me like they’d save me against her 18-wheeler of a response.

“No, I’m writing you in, and I’m telling all my friends to do it, too!”

Oh my God. How . . . how, fantastic. I mean, there’s no way I could win, what with 30,000 registered voters in the county and me knowing exactly 138 people here. So they would be throwing away a vote for one seat in an unopposed race. Low stakes. So why not tell her to shout from the Blue Mountain range if she wanted to?

I’m up to 12 votes at this point, and kind of tickled pink. Maybe I should have a motto, but everything I come up with seems to have a serious drawback:

Vote for Everett Maroon, Because Maroon Means Mayor in Arabic

Because Someone on the Council Should Be Able to Rock a Bejeweled Blitz Game

Putting Walla Walla’s Nondriscrimination Clause to Work!

He’s Even Named After a City in Washington

Because Who Cares, Really?

I may even take a picture of myself mailing in my ballot.

October 6, 2009 | 3 Comments

Swine-ing about nothing

This week the new swine flu shot is available for health care workers. For people on the front lines of what is likely to be an intense fall and winter of virus-laden illness, some people are happy for the quick availability of the vaccine, but others are chafing at the compulsory nature of the shots. I’ve seen no fewer than five articles just today on—

Excuse us, Mr. Maroon.

Yes? Who are you? I’m trying to blog here.

Hi, we’re the USDA.

Uh, hi. I need to get back to—

Yeah, um, about that blog thing you’re doing. We have a request.

Okay. What’s up?

We’d really like it if you and everyone else could please stop calling it the “swine flu.” It’s the H1N1 virus.

Well, I understand that’s the flu strain we’re talking about, but I think more people understand it as swine flu.

Sure, sure, maybe they do right now, but it’s really harming the pork industry right now.

The what?

The pork industry. People are afraid to eat pork. In these tough times, it’s making it tough for pig farmers.

I’m sorry, just so I get this straight: you, the USDA, want me and other bloggers to call it only the H1N1 virus?

That’s right.

But that actually communicates a lot less about the thing than “swine flu” does. Can you show me one pig farmer who’s gone out of business because of the phrase swine flu?

Well, no, but, that’s not the point.

But you said it was.

Well, see, it’s only part from a swine flu strain. There are also avian flu and human flu strains in the H1N1 virus.

I see.

It’s a lot more like the 1918 influenza than any swine flu.

Oh, so should we call it pandemic flu, then?

Well, no. That sounds—

Fear-instilling?

Yes.

Well, I’m glad we’re in agreement on that. But I have a question.

Yes?

Didn’t this flu originate on a pig farm?

That’s not the point.

Oh. Not the point. I see. Okay, I’m lying, I don’t see why that’s not the point.

Because it’s not just swine flu.

Can I call it Swine Flu Plus? Or Swine Flu +?

Please don’t.

Okay, okay. I’ll call it H1N1, even though I have a right to free speech. Can I get back to blogging now?

Sure, sure. Thanks for your help.

Okay, bye.

Sheesh. Okay, so anyway, while some health care workers are complaining that they’re being required to receive this vaccine, even though there’s a long history of required vaccines out there, there is a point to be made about how the H1N1 flu vaccine was rushed to market. Of course it was rushed, having only come into existence last spring. Here in Washington State, our limits on the amount of mercury makers can put into a vaccine were suspended so that producers could get them out to the public in time for flu season. H1N1 was excepted from the limit even though the vaccine is recommended for pregnant and breastfeeding mothers. This must mean that the mercury in these shots knows not to wreak any of the havoc it normally would on fetuses and newborn children. I suppose, more seriously, that they think the risks of the disease are greater than the potential effects of mercury poison, but it calls into question for me what the calculus is for what must be a high-stakes cost/benefit analysis.

For our part as general citizenry, here in Walla Walla I now see antibacterial gel everywhere: next to cash registers, in the weight room at my gym, next to the shopping carts at the grocery store, even at the concessions counter of the cinema. We are a germ-killing, germ-fearing populace, all the while as we isolate and grow the strongest germs by using these products.

Walla Wallans consider themselves an enduring lot, and happily isolated from population centers. Perhaps this gives us a sense that swine flu won’t hit us here, but we forget the global nature of everything around us. Eighteen wheelers  roll into the city everyday, visitors from Seattle and Portland come out here on the weekends to taste our wine, and people fly out of here all the time to see that civilization that exists elsewhere, picking up who knows what along the way. Can’t there be a balance between vigilance of our health and hygiene, and ignorance of the genetic makeup of the H1N1 virus? Do we need to expose our children to mercury, obfuscate what to call this virus or that, turn away from vaccines altogether because a blog somewhere on the Web insists they cause autism? Where is the voice of reason in the midst of all these conflicting messages?

All that writing made me hungry. I’m gonna go grill up some pork chops.

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