Trans/plant/portation

I spend more time than I care to admit over at Twitter, posting less of the what-I’m-doing-right-now and more of the insipid insight variety of content. While the latest three posts are shared on this blog, I wanted to take a look to see what I’ve posted just over the last, oh, two weeks or so. Here is what I found.

Benny Goodman would have really loved Twitter.

even when she’s 98% asleep, my wife can have a regular conversation. I wonder what this means about all of our conversations.

I have yet to see a Hoarders episode where the homeowners utilized the Space Bag.

Walla2 Freecycle offered chickens last weekend. Today someone is asking for chicken feed on the list. COINCIDENCE?? I think not.

ahem, Tea Party people? are you listening? that US Government you hate? it’s all founded on that CONSTITUTION thingy you love. just saying.

every day, I have one search hit on my blog for the phrase “evrette maroon.” aw, that’s one faithful and inattentive reader right there!

Been spending a lotta time #blogging and not #writing. Going to conduct fun food interview in a couple hours, which should be fun.

Welcome to the Walla Walla freecycle list. Need a ferret? We gots ferrets!

I don’t know, I don’t really get the point of Wednesday. It’s just like, sausage filler for the week.

Roberta Flack’s entanglement with cabbing it in NYC: http://wp.me/pQHmS-oY

working on a blog for my unpublished #memoir. since it’s humorous, the whole site will be tongue-in-cheek. it’s either crazy or genius.

Jane Lynch is my hero. Erm, heroine. Whatever. She rocks.

I just realized that the guy who played Dracula in BtVS is the one who killed Kate on NCIS. Excellent…!

Hey, if a literaryagent says in a rejection letter that my work is “compelling and powerful,” can I still quote them on my blog?

Ooh, two rejections in one day! That’s a personal best for me.

working on 17 different blog posts. perhaps I should focus.

John Tesh and Oprah, sittin in a tree. . . http://www.nbcaugusta.com/news/local/90716434.html

wait, when did Kimora have another baby???

what would cause an otherwise regular-seeming young guy to wear tiger striped cycling pants? they’re really the worst things I’ve seen.

Sure, I’m a #writer in residence. My own residence, you got a problem with that? We’re really really selective.

George Lopez has got to be the happiest guy in latenight TV right now. I wonder if he wet himself when he heard the news about Conan.

watching Life, narrated by Oprah. after some of these statements, I wonder if she paused to say, “wow, really?” probably a lot.

someday I’ll break the 200 followers mark on Twitter and the 500 mark on Facebook. and then I’ll buy a balloon to celebrate.

I come here on Monday afternoons because my favorite coffee haunt is closed, but truth be told, they make a very good cup of coffee at this place, which I suppose one can achieve when one has roasted the beans that very morning. This place also has the benefit of sitting at the foothills of the Blue Mountains, so if one cares to say, type on one’s laptop outside, on say, an overcast day in which one can actually read one’s screen, one can take in the beauty of snowcapped moutains, even in July.

There is a downside, namely a professor from one of the town’s institutions of higher learning who tends to date his students. He does that lean in too close to gauge your reaction thing that pushy people do. I mean, this is never directed to me, of course, given that he seems to focus on people other than fat, nearing-middle-age men who wear wedding bands. I feel like I’ve dodged a bullet, I suppose. But he absolutely flees my presence whenever I show up. I’ve never said one word to him, though I’ve heard several of his conversations with coeds. One time, at the start of the fall semester, a newly minted alum sat across from him, at the table next to me.

“I’m so glad we waited,” she cooed, not nearly enough under her breath.

“I’m so glad you’re here.” He has, it goes without saying, unwavering eye contact. Their hands were mere inches from each other, teasing at touching.

“Summer took so long,” she said, and I felt a shudder of uncomfortableness go through me. “But it’s so worth it.”

“You packed everything,” he asked. My mind, against my will, flashed to a pill container of ecstasy, some bright pink rope, and a French maid’s outfit. I cursed myself for forgoing my iPod that day. I would have listened to anything to drown them out: metalhead, steampunk. Slam poetry. And I really detest slam poetry.

Before I was an unwilling witness to this grotesquery of a dating lead-in, he didn’t really notice me if we were in the same space. But since then, he has absolutely fled the room when I come in, or if I’m somewhere ahead of him, he doesn’t stay for long. I wonder if I’ve raised one too many eyebrows or if he realized I was disgusted by his machinations with the barely-legal set. I don’t speak to him, so I don’t know.

A few months ago I decided to conduct a decidedly not scientific experiment to see if maybe we were just two ill-timed ships attempting to pass in the night, like the Andrea Doria and the Stockholm. Well, that didn’t go so well, I suppose. But, I thought, perhaps this was just a schedule conflict. And seeing as I have this amazingly flexible schedule, well, why not sneak a peek into some kind of insight?

I have thus showed up at the roastery at 11am, noon, 1pm, and 2pm. And each time I come in, if he’s here before me or comes in after, he stays an average of 14 minutes and then skeedaddles. Sometimes he’s had to gulp down his beverage, other times he seemed to be blithely carrying on, typing into his laptop or grading papers. But in each case, he was gone, usually less than a quarter hour later.

I’m not sure what this is about. I don’t think of myself as an intimidating figure, in my Merrel sneakers and comfortable hoodie that continually proclaims “Capitol Hill”, confusing anyone from that Seattle neighborhood. (It’s for the other Capitol Hill, FYI.) Maybe he’s embarrassed that I heard him that day, which means he knows what he’s doing is wrong. Or perhaps I’m just so handsome he figures he has no chance with a pretty girl if I’m even in his vicinty, and the idea that he’s cock-fighting with me nearly drives me into peals of hysterical laughter.

Anyway, he’s around so often when I’m writing that I’m a little concerned he’s going to make it into one of my stories, or that sexual predatory-ness will become some kind of unconscious theme in my work, and then people will be wondering about me, not him.

And then, at long last, the terrorists will have won. Damn it.

I have known the little baby Akio since he was six weeks old, no bigger than a loaf of bread and cute as the dickens. As his mother is another professor at the college here, I would take him while she had class, little babysitting increments of an hour or two. Longtime readers of this blog may remember a post last May in which after several incident-free babysitting appointments, he let loose with a firestorm of explosive poo. Nonetheless, our relationship continued, and he continued to grow and learn and bond with the village around him. At eleven months now, he is an expert crab-crawler, enjoys clapping, babbling, and long walks on the beach. Okay, scratch that last item. But I’m sure he’ll enjoy that some day.

While I was happy to help out Akio and his mother last spring, she hasn’t needed my support in many months. But we still see them on a regular basis. So she was apologetic when she emailed last week to see if I could sit him for just one hour while she went to a late afternoon meeting of the faculty. Oh, no problem, I said, and to help her feel better (and enjoy her company) I told her she and the little one should stay for supper. I could throw a chicken in the oven before assuming sitting duties, and then it would be ready when she came back home with Susanne.

In the meantime, since he’s now a mobile baby, I vacuumed the carpet in the living room, put the coffee table in front of the fireplace—he has previously shown an interest in logs that are alight—laid down a soft blanket on the floor, and spread out a variety of toys and plush animals so that we could have some quality time together. I do like to be on the level of an almost one-year-old when the opportunity presents itself, after all. We would have a giggling, drooling blast, I figured.

I forgot that eleven-month-olds have big time separation anxiety. It’s been a long time since I was eleven months old, see.

All went well as I opened the door. I got a big grin and saw that there are two more teeth to count. She gave him a last-minute bit of food, we checked his diaper, and found nothing notable. The three of us sat on the floor and Akio selected a green plastic Slinky as his first toy of choice. His mom quietly exited, stage front door. I asked him questions about why the Slinky. He answered me by babbling, and then turned to look to see where his mother had gone.

Four minutes. Four minutes had elapsed. And by elapsed, I mean, the child made it all of 240 seconds.

At second 241, he started sniffling and frowning. Second 243 brought on the wailing.

I put my hand in an Eeyore puppet and tried to renew his interest in either the Skinky technology or the Christopher Robin mythology. Neither of these made the cut for him. He began crab-crawling away, toward the front door.

“Okay, okay, Akio, I know it’s rough, but we have…53 minutes left, at least. What else could we do?”

He screeched in such a way as to communicate that I could go sit and spin for all he cared.

I had to think of something. I should be smarter than this, I thought. I picked him up and for one nanosecond, he relaxed a little, happy to cling onto my shirt. One nanosecond, by the way, is over before one knows it. He was back to wailing, this time much nearer my ear.  I tried bouncing him. No avail.

And so it began that “Uncle Ev” attempted a variety of tactics for trying to soothe the baby. Singing. Touring the downstairs. Flight simulation. Bottle time. Each was met with a look of complete disgust and a furtherance of crying. My heart began to melt to see him in such despair. I rechecked his diaper, burped him, and tried to tell him a story about a baby who must journey after the loss of his parents. No, wait. That’s not a good idea. And though I’d had this thought before, I started reviewing all of the little kid stories I know that involve parental death. Bambi, Cinderella, Finding Nemo, they’re all about death and grief. What’s up with that?

The baby was still crying, inconsolable. I had to do something. At this point he was a wet mess, so I grabbed a tissue and mopped up his face. He hated me for that, but really, I wasn’t sure what would happen if tears, snot, and drool all combined into one puddle. The universe could evaporate or something. It wasn’t me, I told the little one, it was for the good of the whole fabric of space-time. He continued screaming unabated. I only hoped he could channel this stamina later in life. I looked at the clock.

We were 8 minutes in. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, I needed something to distract him. Something interesting, compelling, that would be so riveting to him that the entire concept of “missing mommy” would evaporate like a fart in a stiff breeze. I didn’t have a stroller, though I wasn’t sure if I would have used it anyway, lest I annoy the entire neighborhood with his unhappiness.

I caved in and turned on the television. I knew it was wrong of me. Bad, bad uncle! This is how it starts, out of desperation. This is why that Baby Einstein crap took such hold in US households, even though it was scientifically shown to make babies stupider as a result. I flipped through the guide and found some kid’s show set in Africa, with lots of shots of lions and other safari animals.

He was entranced. I was guilty. He even let me wipe his face while he sat on my lap, mesmerized. I couldn’t believe it, and yet, I could.

I started watching the show, and then realized it had all sorts of messages I didn’t want him to see. No, no, this is too imperialist, my brain cried. It’s devoid of an understanding about race and post-colonial Africa, even as it’s preaching about conservation and wildlife protection! These issues aren’t this simple, and it’s not for Westerners to tell citizens of African nations how to balance an economic incentive with global warming and species protection concerns! No!

But oh, how he loved it. I was selling out for the price of twenty minutes of happiness.

He picked up the Slinky in my hand, starting to babble again and looking content and happy. And then I made a rookie mistake.

I put him back on the blanket so he could play. This reminded him, of course, of turning around and not seeing his mother, which made him realize, all over again, that she was GONE. G-O-N-E. Maybe forever. And here he was stuck with a stupid person, for the rest of his life, who clearly didn’t know the difference between African diaspora politics and children’s entertainment.

The wailing began anew. I tried the bottle again. He threw it back at me. I turned off the TV, figuring I’d done enough damage.

He looked a little bit like the Staypuff Marshmallow Man at the end of Ghostbusters when he realizes he is not among friends. His entire chubby face had twisted into a knot of anguish and anger. I picked him up again and showed him all the pictures of the little people we know. I put him in front of a mirror, since he likes to see himself and the room in reflection. This made him realize all the more how incredibly unhappy he was.

We went into the kitchen, and I attempted to see if tiny chunks of tofu would make his day. They did not.

Just then, the wagon man came into view, with a fresh batch of cardboard to recycle. Akio liked this. He started to settle down, crying only every few seconds, almost like a hiccup. I gave him some commentary to go along with the wagon man’s activity.

“Okay, and now he’ll throw this piece of cardboard over the fence. Ooh, look at it go, Akio. Uh, oh, he doesn’t like where it landed. I bet he squeezes behind the fence so he can pick it up and throw it again. Yup, there he goes, see? Now he’s behind the fence. Before, he was in front of the fence. In French, you say, ‘derriere la cloture,’ and ‘en face de la cloture.'”

He was tuning me out, I could tell. Heck, I wished I’d shut up, too.

He grew heavy in my arms, but I was afraid to shift him to my other side. My back began to groan, but as its version of complaining is noiseless, I ignored it.

The wagon man finished. I briefly considered throwing an egg carton and a cereal box out the window so he’d have a couple more things to throw at the recycling center. I figured I’d gone around the bend, all to keep the baby somewhat happy. We watched as once again a person important to Akio’s life left him behind. He cried.

I took him back to the couch and sat down with him, lower back pressure relieved. Ear drums, not so much. They should be home any minute, I thought, and then I worried that they’d stand around talking to all of the other 120 faculty or rather, the 75 faculty who’d gone to the meeting. I texted Susanne with my free hand.

HE REALLY MISSES MOMMY, I typed, and sent the message.

I heard Susanne’s cell phone joyfully receive the message from its location in the dining room.

I wiped his face with the 27th tissue of the afternoon.

“I’m sorry I’m teaching you to hate tissues,” I said to him. “They really are your friends.”

He was not buying any of my shit.

Finally the door opened, and my utter lack of success at entertaining Akio was made plain to his mother and my wife. She wrapped him up in her arms and began bouncing him, as only she could.

“Don’t I always come back,” she asked him. “Mommy always comes back. It’s okay.”

Behind my shoulder, Susanne petted me.

I slept like a rock that night.

Last year I was still somewhat out of commission after knee surgery when Susanne’s birthday rolled around, and by “out of commission,” I really mean, “still taking sponge baths.” This year I’m mostly back to my old form—I’ve returned to a bowling league, have kept up my routine at the gym, and can squat again when I need something from a low cabinet, which is pretty much the only time I squat—so I figured cake making would go easier this time around.

I should know by now not to make assumptions regarding the ease of anything. And still, I persist in my idiocy.

For her part, Susanne had requested a Schwartzwald Kirschtorte (say that 10 times fast), a.k.a. a Black Forest cake, but she’d thrown in a couple of twists: she wanted a layer of chocolate ganache in the middle of the cake layers, instead of the usual whipped cream and cherries, and she wanted, on advice from her mother, the cherries that go atop the cake to be dipped in chocolate. In the spirit of the upcoming Vancouver Olympics, I’ll explain the level of difficulty this entailed. Now your standard Black Forest cake, with its spongy chocolate cake layers, has a rating, under the old figure skating scale, of 3.2 out of 6 total, but because it also calls for whipped cream and systematic pricking with a fork so that it will uptake the kirschwasser liquor, has a final technical difficulty of 4.1, or in the new International Judging System, 8,237 points. Because I also had to make a ganache, dip cherries previously cured in liquor, and use that liquor as the base for a homemade liquored syrup, my new difficulty rating was a 5.8, or in the IJS, let’s see. . . carry the one . . . computing . . . 13,482 points.

But I was up to the task. I was certain of this.

While the recipe called for 7″ cake pans, presumably because the Germans enjoy smaller-sized desserts, I only had one 8″ cake pan and 3 9″ pans. What was a baker to do? I went for the 9-inchers, because 9, being a greater integer than 7, must be better. I whipped up 6 eggs, my arteries screaming no at me, blending in sugar and cocoa, and arrived at a splendidly smooth batter, which, upon pouring into the pans I could see rose to a withering height of . . . three-quarters of an inch. Hmm. I crossed my fingers and hoped that the cakes would rise in the oven.

After dutifully rotating the cake pans at the halfway mark of baking, I answered the timer’s bell and saw that indeed, they had risen. They were now one inch tall. I considered marking their progress on the kitchen wall, but instead I grabbed my car keys, wallet, and phone, and headed to the grocery store, as I was now out of eggs. And I figured I should pick up some extra whipping cream just in case.

Twenty minutes later I was the proud owner of assorted dairy products, and ready for round two of cake madness. I quickly washed out the cake pans, re-buttering and flouring them, in something like double speed for this redux. I started cracking eggs again and was dismayed that I’d bought some kind of weird-shelled eggs—each insisted on leaving a little bit of itself in the bowl, so I had to fish out chips every single time.

One mixer made a new batch of chocolate cake, the other started the cream whipping process, while I melted 72 percent dark chocolate in a double boiler and made a simple syrup on another burner. Pant, pant! I was a whirlwind of confectionery! A force of baking nature!

Two more cakes popped into the oven. Chocolate was melted carefully, while the syrup boiled and oh no, started to smoke. The kitchen quickly filled with the acrid, eye-stinging fog, so I tossed the offending concoction and started again. Again. Opening the back door helped a bit, though it was mighty chilly outside.

Okay, the chocolate was ready, so I dipped cherries in the double boiler, thinking to myself that since we picked these cherries ourselves last summer, this cake was officially six months in the making. They looked cute lined up on the wax paper, drying slowly as if there weren’t a flurry of activity just a few inches away from them. I added some cream to the rest of the melted chocolate, to start the ganache portion of the program.

Finally, the layering and stacking and glazing and frosting were finished. I looked at the creation. Four hours, a dozen eggs, 20 tablespoons of butter, 3 cups of cream, 4 cakes layers, 12 ounces of dark chocolate, and many cherries later, I had this:

I was so tired and hungry from all of the cooking, I almost dropped my face into the thing and ate it all, but figured it wasn’t worth the effort to make it all over again. A few hours later, several of Susanne’s friends came over to share cake and wine in front of the fire. We oohed and ahhed over the creation and by the end of the evening, it had disappeared into our collective stomachs. Susanne enjoyed the cake but noted twice to various people, including my mother-in-law, that she only got one piece of cake out of the whole thing. So it looks like I’ll be performing again, but this time it will be the short program. A tasty, short little program.

Dear Person Who Searched for “KY His and Hers Jelly,” and got my blog instead:

My apologies. It must have been frustrating to think that you were about to get vital information on lubricant for sex, only to arrive at this blog instead. Especially frustrating because I really don’t even mention it anywhere, in all 100+ posts. I do speak briefly, however, on the “his and hers” concept, from a humorist perspective. Perhaps that will suffice for your needs? Best of luck in your endeavors!

Dear Person Who Searched for “Fat Man on Cruise,” and got this blog:

I don’t think I like the comparison between your search entry and my personal life, but I blame Google, not you. Perhaps you should narrow your search a bit. Meanwhile, it’s my right to take a cruise if I want to. I generally stayed away from the endless salad bar, because I generally don’t like eating under the scowls and frowns of other people. Hey, maybe that could be turned into a dieting strategy.

Dear Person Who Searched for “man/woman costume,”:

I actually wrote a scathing commentary about the offensiveness of such a costume, and as I don’t actually sell anything on this site, you won’t actually find one to purchase here. And if I were going to sell anything, the top of my inventory list wouldn’t include this crap. Nor would the bottom. Thanks and have a nice day.

Dear Multiple People Who Search for “MRI ACL tear,” and get my blog by mistake:

I feel your pain. Or rather, I felt it, in all of its popping glory. I limped around for a while, got a bad diagnosis, then an accurate one (which somehow cost less), had my surgery, did my rehab, and graduated. Now it’s over. So I’d like to move on. You are stopping me from moving on. I can appreciate the motivation behind searching for other people’s MRI images, especially ones with helpful arrows, since really, we’re all staring at something that’s not there, which is tough to do. But you’re messing with my sense of closure now, so please, tell Google they’re mis-directing you. Because all this dwelling on my knee is depressing.

Dear Hundreds of People Searching for “Mao Ze Dong,” “Maozetong,” “Mao Te Zong,” and “Maotetong,” who come to this blog daily:

My apologies that you came seeking information on the famous leader and instead got a story about my friend’s toddler’s dearly departed fish. But thank you for making that blog post my all-time top-read post. If you actually read it, that is. And hey, I’m mildly impressed with Google’s thesaurus ability, because people practically type in “masfjkdsfiasdfk” and it manages to be read as a search for him. There’s just a little hiccup with the actual destination link, so perhaps Google should put some of their thesaurus developers over on the content-finding side of the operation.

Dear People Who Searched for “Everette Maroon blog,”:

Close, but no cigar [sic]. I have no cigar, either, so there’s no love lost. But my first name isn’t like “barrette,” okay?

Dear People Who Searched for “Everett Maroon blog,”:

Yippee!!! You win! Prize to be awarded in the form of blog content. Sit back and enjoy the fruits of your labor!

Dear People Who Will Search for “Glee” and “Google” tomorrow and get this blog instead:

My apologies in advance. But thanks for stopping by!

On this anniversary of my first date with Susanne, I thought I’d post an excerpt from my memoir here, of said date, which as you’ll see, I wasn’t sure was a date.

I’d set up the date at my favorite fire-baked pizzeria, a sleepy restaurant until it was featured in a local foodies blog, and then it was always packed to the seams, bursting with young, drunk patrons from the lobbying district, the non-profit set, and Capitol Hill. On the day after New Year’s, however, the place was empty except for one other table.

Susanne met me at the bar, taking off her winter hat and unwrapping a scarf the length of an adult boa constrictor. It took her 30 seconds to remove all of her outerwear. She’d emailed me from her parents’ house in Michigan, saying she was stuck with dialup and had just gotten my message. A quick cheery email exchange, and we’d set up this date.

“Hi there,” she said, smiling.

“Hi, thanks for meeting me,” I said, trying to keep my smile out of the goofy nerdy range.

We got a table and were checked on often by the waitress who both had not much else to do, and who seemed to find us amusing. Our pizzas arrived, hers a sausage and extra cheese, and mine, a mushroom lover’s that I know Michael would have hissed at, given his abhorrence of fungi.

She looked at me and my pizza. “So are you a vegetarian,” she asked casually.

“Oh, no. I just like the mushroom pizza here.” One potential spoiler averted.

“Thank God,” was her response, and I laughed.

We talked about our love of Kitchen Aid mixers, and that we’d each named ours. We’d also both previously bought mixers for other people’s weddings and then wondered, independently of course, why we hadn’t bought one for ourselves.

“I love baking,” I said. “I enjoy it so much I want to retire early and start my own bakery someday.”

“Shut up,” said Susanne, laughing, “that’s what I want to do!”

“No kidding. That’s great.”

Things were going so well I decided to take a risk and just let her know everything about my gender goings on. As soon as I started talking, I wanted to erase the decision and start over with any other topic of conversation. Hummingbirds. The state of the economy in Guam. Bloomsday parties. Monkey rectums.

“So I’ve been transitioning, taking it really slowly,” I said, feeling exposed. “Many of my friends still only know me as Jenifer, but for more and more people I’m Everett now. So you could call me either, really.” Stop talking!

The voice in my head was powerless to stop me.

“Well, that sounds like it can be hard at times,” she said.

I fought to stay on my seat and not fall onto the floor. “Yes, it can be. I’m taking things at my own pace. It’s been interesting, I guess.”

“You’re not the first person I’ve met with complicated gender,” Susanne said, looking at me. She wasn’t backing away. I didn’t know what to make of this. Maybe she was a psychopath, collecting people with gender issues in her basement in little cages so she could have her own private transsexual zoo. Or maybe it was just okay.

The waitress stopped by our table, looking at us with a sly grin, and giving us boxes for the rest of our pizzas.

We stepped outside and saw that it was raining, and each opened our umbrellas. With pizza boxes in one hand and the umbrellas in the other, our departing hug was more like a clumpfest. She thanked me for the good conversation and sprinted across the street to get to the Metro before it rained any harder.

The lack of proximity between purchasing airline tickets and actually getting onto an airplane has not served us well this year. Susanne, in early October, had her face buried in her laptop screen. “What do you think about this flight,” she asked, her eyes mere inches from the glowing pixels, “it’s a really good price.”

“How good,” I asked, leaning over. “Oh, that is good.”

“But it’s a red eye,” she said.

“But the price,” I said.

Abstractly, I understood that it was a middle-of-the-night flight. I do, after all, have a very successful track record with surviving the middle of the night, even if I’m usually asleep for it.

“It’s three legs,” she said, sounding less confident.

I responded by ignoring her fears. “It’s always at least two, hon,” I said, a little too cheerfully. She should have understood right then that I was just blinded by my thriftiness and rethought our approach. But perhaps Susanne was seeing little stars of savings, too.

We sent our credit card numbers through the information superhighway and were rewarded with an email confirming we had just purchased our way to visiting friends and family for the holidays. And then went about our daily routine, forgetting all about it.

And then we were driving, in late December, to the airport. We had an 8 o’clock fight to Seattle, a multi-hour layover, and then a midnight flight to Minneapolis, followed by another couple of hours in that airport, and then a morning flight to Detroit.

What a horrible itinerary! Who had done this to us?

We had. We had done this to ourselves.

We drove by the bad broccoli plant, which for its part sent us an intense putrid odor as a parting shot for departing Walla Walla. Every time we’ve left before, the city has done some kind of stick-its-tendrils-into-us to slow us down. What would it be this time, I wondered, trying not to breathe as I drove past the paper mill. It just loved us so much it wanted to stay in our nostrils.

On the first plane, the flight attendant told us happily that we’d be making a stop in Yakima on our way to Seattle. This meant we were splitting the trip into two 25-minute segments. Never going about 15,000 feet, we stopped like a bus at the Yakima airport and five people joined our flight. About ten minutes away from Seattle, the worst stench of gastrointestinal distress invaded my olfactory nerves. I looked at Susanne and mouthed, “was that you?”

She shook her head no emphatically. We tried to breathe as little as we could, having just practiced this outside the paper mill. The flight attendant empathized with us, as she was also stuck at the very back of the plane with us and the killer fart. As we rolled into the gate, they put two staircases up to the fuselage, and the flight attendant, knowing our plight, told us we could just take the one in the back, two feet behind our seats. We walked the length of the terminal toward our next gate. Having cleared our heads, our stomachs started rumbling, and we decided to get dinner.

The waiter asked what we wanted. As we were in a tap house and pub, we each ordered a wheat beer. He plunked them down on the table, announcing last call.

“When do you close,” I asked.

“In 30 minutes,” he said.

We drank our beers and ate our greasy food quickly, rushing off to the shuttle train to our next terminal and departure gate. I could feel the reuben sloshing around in my tipsy stomach, but we had some time to relax before the red eye. The Seattle airport has free wifi, which seems nice until one notices that it has next to no power outlets. What teases. We wandered around looking for a free outlet, to no avail. And the people who had already juiced up weren’t offering to unplug, even for a little while. This made me wonder if:

1. everyone had terrible laptop batteries that wouldn’t hold a charge

2. they hated Christmas and were hogging the electricity just to be nasty

3. they were inattentive, oblivious Northwesterners

So we booted up my laptop, sharing it between us and hoping to model good behavior for all of the manners-impaired strangers in the terminal. Somehow I think it didn’t make any difference.

We piled on to the red eye, hoping for a smooth enough, unoffensively smelling enough flight that we could catch some sleep before getting into the Twin Cities. Susanne conked out on my shoulder quickly, but I have trouble staying asleep while sitting up, so I watched the people around me slumber instead, some snoring, some with their jaws hanging open while doing so. And I realized that it’s no wonder why people eat a good number of bugs over the years.

Landing after the red eye, we were somewhat dismayed to discover we still weren’t there yet.

Our next gate was a little ways down from a Caribou Coffee. A family of three each had a drink from there, and they looked so happy, like a live advertisement for the wonderful things coffee can do for you, too. Have an impressive blonde son and snappily dressed trophy wife! Enjoy endless energy and increase your income potential with our frozen vanilla frappuccinos!

“I’m going to get some coffee,” said Susanne, standing up. “Would you like anything?”

I stared at the happy people. Happy people. I wanted to go to there. I nodded at her.

“Okay, what would you like?”

My voice, exhausted, came out in a whisper.

“A frosty mcfrosterson,” I said.

“A what?”

I pointed at the 4-year-old toe head. “Mocha,” I squeaked.

“Is there anything else you want, like some caramel flavor or hazelnut?”

Why was she making this so difficult? I said frosty mcfrosterson! Just understand what I want! I’m perfectly clear!

That was what I thought. But what I said was:

“Mocha!”

“Okay,” she said, now talking to me as if I were only 4. “Do you want anything to eat?”

I shook my head no.

She came back a really long time later that equaled something like 7 minutes, and I sucked back my frozen mocha in a few gulps. The caffeine hit me like a Boxing Day tsunami. Maybe that’s exaggerating and trivializing. Okay, it hit me like really bad flatulence, except it was so good. And not odiferous in any way. I was suddenly, powerfully awake.

I typed things, I texted people. I was online and sending status updates to anyone who cared. In the very narrow band of things that could be remotely productive while sitting in an airport waiting to catch one’s third flight in 12 hours, I was a king of getting shit done.

Susanne seemed to be buzzing, too. She asked if she should get us a bagel and cream cheese. That sounded like a terrific idea! Sure! Get us 14 bagels!

She found some organic-pretends-to-be-French bakery and got us a hemp bagel. I had no idea people ate hemp. Wasn’t it reserved for scratchy rope and reusable shopping bags? Would we get high from eating this?

We did not get high, which was good, given that we were already loopy. But I did discover that hemp seeds can get caught pretty easily between one’s teeth. Good life experience to note, I guess.

Finally, at long last, we were on our last flight. Only two hours and forty-eight minutes to Detroit. The flight was uneventful.

Our bags were not on the belt. I lined up in a long queue for lost luggage, not confident that I could explain what had happened with any degree of clarity, or words, even. Probably I would just wave my arms a lot and point to my claim tag bar codes, and hope that would suffice for them. I was a raving mad man, a very tired raving mad man. So maybe I wasn’t raving. I was a raved, farted on, ear-drum deafened, sleep-deprived, over-caffeinated, hemp-eating mad man.

Three people before I reached the front of the line Susanne tapped me on the shoulder and told me she’d found her bag on one random luggage belt and mine on another. I trudged out to the car, brought thankfully by her cousin and husband, who came with the car as part of a package driving deal, and didn’t ask how our bags wound up on the opposite end of the baggage claim area. I didn’t care anymore.

We rode 90 minutes to Susanne’s parents’ house, had a cup of tea, and took a 3-hour nap. We had crossed 17 hours, three flights, four airports, one train, two commutes, one really bad cheese cutting incident, two bad meals, one hurried pint of hefeweisen, and three increasingly inarticulate conversations. We woke up at 5:30pm Eastern time, which felt like 2:30 to us, kind of, since I think I never actually saw the sun the whole day, and really, I didn’t even know what day it was anymore.

But hell, it only cost us $525 a ticket.

Back at the beginning of the year, I posted 5 predictions for 2009. I’ll just note that I was unequivocally correct on numbers 1 and 5. Number 4 is kind of right, in that I think Mrs. Obama has been putting herself out there as a champion for children, especially children of color and in the working class. She’s not sticking to uncontroversial events like book expos on the Mall (much as I appreciated having the chance to get my Sandman #1 signed by Neil Gaiman himself, so thank you, Laura). I still think Jon Stewart might leave the Daily Show, since there are other big gaps in the late night time slots now—can anyone argue that 5 nights of Jay Leno at 10 o’clock aren’t 5 nights too many? As for number 3, well, I think the health care bill in Congress is testimony to the forces against abortion, but I wouldn’t call them quiet, and I wouldn’t say they rise—yet—to the level of vitriol we’ve seen against getting gay married.

What I absolutely failed to understand last January was how ridiculously insane and ludicrous everything would get. It was one thing to blame sub-prime borrowers for the housing market failure. Who doesn’t like to pick on people with bad credit, after all? But really, death panels? “You lie!” shouted in the chamber during the freaking State of the Nation address? The entire Fox News staff schlocking gold as an investment for the masses? Hannity’s time-lapse magic to exaggerate the tea baggers’ crowds at a rally in DC? And hell, the Tea Baggers? I couldn’t dream this crap up!

Or could I? Okay, I’ll take a stab at it. I’ll try and springboard off of some of the more outlandish headlines from 2009. Feel free to chime in with your own flash forwarding stories for next year.

1. Glenn Beck, Tom O’Reilly, and Rush Limbaugh officially begin a new third political party, called the Gold Fox Party getting Sarah Palin and Mitt Romney to agree to run again in 2012. All kinds of donations come in, most in the form of gold, which drives the Federal Election Commission nuts as the price of gold keeps climbing and putting donors over the maximum donation limit. After 6 months, the party collapses when Glenn and Rush are discovered receiving kickbacks and prescription painkillers from a laid-off worker of ACORN.

2. Sarah Palin’s own political career is finally dismantled when the public learns that Trig is the offspring of her and Levi Johnson, Bristol’s now-ex-boyfriend.

3. The US media goes crazy with tons of stories about the new “green economy,” even though the GDP is only up 0.4 percent and there’s only one new factory for producing solar panels that because of NAFTA, has opened in Mexico. The Mexican government is dismayed to find out that all of the physical barriers we’ve erected in the last 5 years aren’t any good at keeping illegal US citizens out of Mexico.

4. An independent study comes out revealing that 72.4 percent of people previously detained at Gitmo know nothing about al Qaeda’s operations from 2001, much less anything that could help counter-terrorism officials now. They have, however, secretly formed a support group with tips on making their prison lives better, including  how to make a lovely bisque from ephemera, though they can’t find any in the middle of Illinois. They turn to Martha Stewart for advice on working with dandelion greens.

5. The CEOs of AIG, JPMorgan, Lehman Brothers, and Countrywide Mortgage take their latest year salaries, pool them together, and buy an island in the Carribean, setting up a new government with so many tax shelters for the rich that they make a fortune in taking other people’s money at their new banks. They also send out a message to Roman Polanski that he should find a way to get out of Switzerland and come to Moneytopia so that he can direct a film about their story. It wins 8 Golden Globes and 2 Academy Awards and is hailed by critics as an “opus of epochal storytelling, delivered by the master storyteller himself.”

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.

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?

“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.