Goodbye Sacto!

We have decided that living with the levee-flood thrill is just not exciting enough; so we are moving back to LA so that we can have the excitement of fires, traffic, smog and terrorist attacks. Well, actually, I've sent out over 2000 resumes to companies in Sac, and only one person has called me. So I think my big city NYC credentials are too impressive, or not impressive enough. Actually, the majority of the job growth in the Sac area has been in construction or warehouses, which are really not up my alley. Though it might be fun to drive one of those little truck things that lift pallets of stuff for about two hours or so.

Goose Gangland

We are dieting again, and as part of that we are going to McKinley Park after Cam picks me up from work and we're walking briskly, briskly, briskly around the park two or three times. One thing about walking briskly, it prevents the hounds from pulling. Amazing the dogs walk without pulling if you are walking so quickly that you are almost running. One problem solved. Anyway, McKinley park is where many of the good people of Sacramento go to walk around or bring their children to play. It's a lovely park with a fake lake and fountain element that attracts birds. Geese in fact. Violent aggressive geese. Packs and Gaggles of violent, aggressive geese. People bring their toddlers to the park to play and they get pecked by geese, must be some sort of right of passage here. However it's better than when Cam and I were having a fight and so we arranged to have a vacation via email and couldn't decide where to go and ended up going to the South -- to Alligator Island where all the people vacationing on the island were white breeders. It's weird to go someplace where there are only white people. I'm wrong, some of the "help" were black. They breed a lot down there. Which is why I guess you can vacation on a swampy island teeming with man-eating alligators. It doesn't matter if little Jimmy gets used as an alligator snack when you've got 8 other kids. In fact, leaving a few in the swamp would just decrease your cost of living.

So a few geese pecks don't seem so bad, but I always walk a little MORE briskly when we pass the gang of geese.

Who is Emily?

We watched the Doors movie by Oliver Stone, and if there was every a movie designed to give you an earworm, it's that one. (Okay, Walk the Line gave you an earworm too, I spent weeks with "Jackson" in my head, great song, love June) So I've got "Riders in The Storm" in my brain with it's repetitive little doo doo doo doo rhythm. And the words "Girl, you gotta love your man. doo doo doo doo" He repeats that twice, so I guess it was important to him. But anyway, aside from the drug induced, pseudo-shaman gestalt of the entire song, who is Emily and why does she have to die? "Sweet Emily will die." Jim sings. He sings it seriously and with belief, because he's got this non ironic pseudo shamanistic gestalt thing going down. So Emily is a goner.

Last Friday we drove into San Fran and had the iPod shuffling and it decided to play The Band. That song where the devil and Carmen are walking along, and then she has to go leaving you with the devil, and Fanny needs help so you have to take a load of Fanny and put the load on me. That song. Cassandra Wilson does a totally gorgeous version of it. Anyway, there's Emily again!!! Here she is "young Emily." Emily certainly was getting around the West Coast scene, and I imagine that she may have been sweet and young but by the time Jim Morrison got done with her apparently she was dead.

So who is Emily? I think she is some sort of Beth in Little Women type figure, a sweet young thing you have to kill off to provoke an excess of emotion in your audience. It's one thing to kill off the old codger living in the shed up the lonely rural road and another to kill off some sweet young blonde thing. As Oscar Wilde said, you have to have a heart of stone not to laugh at the death of Little Dorrit. I will ask my friend who is a Bob Dylan expert if Emily ever got to the East coast on her mission to be a tragic figure and report back.

And another thing I wonder, here in Sacto, all the homeless people have bicycles. Which is great for them, but they also have the child towing devices attached to the back of the bicycles. With no children in them. So where are the children? If you are riding your bike towing your tot and you pop off for a pee, when you come back is your bike there and your kid on the ground behind it?

Guns for Sale

This is a picture of the Sacramento Armory, a place where you can buy guns. It's on J street, across the street from a camera store, a florist, a yoga studio and a See's Candy store. J street is the main drag in Sacto, about 10 years or so the homos moved in and started making cute little boutiques and now it pretends to be a "Destination" in the same way that you'd pop down to SoHo to shop or hit the stores on Montana Ave in LA. But here in the state capitol we can also buy guns until 6:00 pm on Friday.

On Friday we drove down to San Francisco and the Freeway notice boards were flashing information about a CHP officer being shot to death by some guy in a Nissan Maxima and informed us that if we saw the Nissan Maxima we were to call 911. This is the 5th officer shot to death at a traffic stop in California this year.

Last week's Sunday NYTimes reported that there has been an increase in homicides in certain, mid sized cities. So while overall, the national crime rate has gone down in the past ten years, homicides by gun shot are going up, particularly in places like Washington DC, Detroit and Philly. Meanwhile, gun laws have been relaxed. IN fact the number of licensed gun owners in Philly has gone up enormously in the past twenty years, from something like 700 to something like 200,000. People are getting shot for "looking at me the wrong way," "disrespecting me," "looking at my girlfriend." Stuff that used to just get you in a fist fight.

Not to mention the complete assholes in the world. Recently a group of men paid a 14 year old to shoot one of their pregnant wives by giving the kid a gun and promising him 500 bucks.

Dick Chenney's recent "accident" points out how easy it is, even for experienced gun owners to make mistakes. I'm reminded of the scene in "His Girl Friday" where Roz Russell says "What's a gun for, but to use? You had the gun in your hand, what's it for but to use?"

If everyone's got a gun, then they're going to be used. You can't tell me that more police officers wouldn't be alive today if guns were harder to beg, borrow or steal.

News Flash!!!!

Someone* informed me that those quails were in Al Queda!

No wonder Chenney didn't hold fire!!!!



*Scooter Libby, he's the best source.

Signs: Tower

This is the original Tower of Tower records. Now that you've seen it, you don't have to make a pilgrimage to Sacramento to see the lowly beginnings of a multinational conglomerate. Several years ago, I was forced to go to Vermont and so, as long as I was there, a pilgrimage must be made to ice cream Valhalla - Ben and Jerry Land. This was before they were bought out by some multinational conglomerate that produces toilet paper and genetically engineered soy beans. There were cows. They were on hills. So imagine green rolling hills artistically speckled with black and white cows. Very pretty. Very soothing. Very, very I've had too much THC so give me some butterfat with my sugar. This is what America is all about, two entrepreneurial pot heads making butterfat sugar for other pot heads, making an entire empire of cold cream cash, and then getting bought out by a multinational conglomerate that opposes all you value.

Signs: Dancing

Aren't these people having fun?

Quality Quail Hunting

Dick Chenney shoots "fellow hunter."
Accidentally.
Doesn't it sound like he shot a "fellow traveler"?
What were they doing on that remote ranch "shooting quail"?
With an ambulance "on call" no less.
Sounds like a typical administration PLAN for a FELLOW TRAVELER, if you ask me.

Spring

Not to sound like a snotty Californian, but we've been having a warm spell and so the magnolias and plum blossoms are out. While we have news of record snows in that Noreaster on the east coast. Snow was always fun in the city, everything got very quiet until things were dug out.

In Cold Blood

I recently read Capote's "In Cold Blood," which I had never read before and I was totally blown away. The language is so beautifully crafted, the story so intimately told. It was as if you had an angel in your ear, whispering the inner thoughts of those around you, always in stunning language.

At one point, Capote is writing about the friends of Herb Clutter, who perform the solemn task of cleaning the house where the family was murdered. They drag the bloodied mattresses and artifacts out into a back wheat field and start a bonfire. And the friends watch the flames and smoke and think of their friend and their mortality. Here's a quote:

How was it possible that such effort, such plain virtue, could overnight be reduced to this -- smoke, thinning as it rose and was received by the big, annihilating sky?

Just imagine standing in a wintry Kansas field and how the sky streaches above you as you stand on the plain, grey and ominous, for as far as you can see, unbroken by anything except the occasional tree that only points out what a spec you are.

I was so overwhelmed by the sky when I first went to Iowa that I felt naked and uncovered and quite panicky driving from the airport to Iowa City. The sky on the plains is a weighty thing.

These birch trees are so beautiful with their white branches against the sky.

Signs: Bee Building

Here's a bee building. You can buy bee keeping supplies here. It is next to underneath the freeway so I hadn't noticed it before. In Manhattan I never saw a bee keeping supply store, but that didn't mean that there weren't insects. I saw fireflies in the garden in Brooklyn occasionally. But the nature thing that freaked me out was the park I lived next to. It had no squirrels. No squirrels. I didn't notice that it had no squirrels till I got a scent hound that focused on squirrels. And then I realized that the local park was a mono-culture of trees. They only had this one type of tree planted and it apparently didn't have anything a squirrel would want to eat, so they didn't hang out in columbus park with the manly, virile statue of good ole Chris Columbus. That statue man, it rankled me. It portrayed Chris as this well built handsome guy and you just know that with all that sailing he did that he was short and had scurvy and was malnourished. Plus people associate beauty with goodness, and we know that Chris wanted to enslave native people. So I don't get it. Why have a statue of him, why name parks after him? It's not like he discovered America for christ's sake. The people who lived here did. And if you want to be Eurocentric about it all, the Vikings were here first, specifically the Greenland Norse who were coming over here to get wood because trees don't grow in Greenland. They wrote SAGAS about it. Yes the Norse were drunk, but so was Columbus and have you ever read about how much ale and wine was on the Mayflower???

Signs: Jim Dennys

I don't eat hamburgers, but if I did, I would eat at this spot.

Ask Me For A Condom Day

I realized that I was remiss in putting photos of the peebs up.



I had originally written that I was "amiss" - which means out of proper order. Which was not what I meant. I meant that I had to scroll down to see pictures of the hounds and I needed to put more pics up top, which would be "remiss" of me - lax in attending to one's duty.

I heard on the radio that today is "Ask Me For A Condom Day" at U.C. Davis. Davis is a big agri school so I figure that they know all about the birds and the bees, the cows and the goats and the difference between a donkey and an ass. You can learn how to artifically inseminate a cow at U.C. Davis, so I figure that they really don't need the interactive condom demonstrations.

Signs: Flame Club

Oh, the immortal FLAME CLUB! What sophsiticated excesses went on here??? Can you feel the smoke, the glamour, the pain in your liver?

There goes the neighborhood

This morning while feeding the hounds, a kibble fell and rolled under the stove. Now we'll have to move, or just cede the kitchen to the dogs.

nun shoes

There's something about hitting 40, everything starts going south, so as you look down to watch how far south it goes, you see something down there. Your feet. And you say, "Maybe I should get some killer shoes."

I mean, in the 90's I had some great biker chick boots and I was doing Carmen Miranda Biker Chick and the Jolly Plump Tap Dancing Dominatrix, you know, styles that have a certain cachet, something sexy and dangerous and in the case of tap dancing, loud. And then in the Aughts (what else do we call this decade?) I had a pair of really comfortable orange clogs, I wore them all the time and I looked like Donald Duck. And that's what a decade can do for you, you go from Carmen Miranda Biker Chick to Donald Duck. But while I lived in New York and could wear groovy shoes, I was faced here in Sacto with a need to get a pair of shoes that went with a suit skirt. And so I got these ones with buttons. They remind me of nun shoes. I hate them. I was going on the first of about nine thousand fruitless job interviews and I knew I couldn't wear dirty old orange clogs with a 400 dollar aubergine suit. So I bought these nun shoes.

I can hear you, you are saying "they're not bad."

But I FEEL constrained in them, I feel they are not groovy. I FEEL that nuns could mug me for them. And everything has gone south now and the only thing I have left is my feet. When I was in my 20s and 30s I wore comfortable shoes and eschewed silly high heeled pumps. And dangerous frosty platforms. But I had cleavage then.

But now? I could do with a bit of heel and some danger. So on my last interview, I was wearing a lovely blue grey suit and the dreaded nun shoes. But I popped into a shoe store downtown and bought these blue ostrich cowboy boots. They look great with my pant suit, but here in this photo they are paired with my jeans.

Wouldn't you rather hire a woman wearing blue cowboy boots rather than nun shoes? I mean this is Sacramento, there are actual COWS, I'm just blending into the crowd.

Signs: Vics

This is not the best sign in town, but I saw it while walking the hounds this weekend. Have I mentioned that the hounds are Petit Basset Griffon Vendeens? Yep. This is all you need to know about me. I have fancy french hound dogs that look like muts. Anyhow, Vics, I ate ice cream there once, it was good. There aren't that many places to get good ice cream here. Not like New York where there's a gelato stand every block. An entire city running on caffeine and butterfat.

King\Alito

Is it just me? Doesn't anyone find it heartbreaking that Coretta Scott King died the same day the Senate voted to confirm Samuel (never met a woman who didn't need the option of dying from a backroom abortion for her wicked ways) Alito?

Sad, sad, sad day for America.