Psst...hey, LA, it's winter...?

I just talked to Marc the other day and we discussed many things, this winter's weather included.

He was saying that in Dobbs Ferry, and the City as well, it had been a very mild winter. "Just those few inches of snow that everyone saw on the news a few weeks back." He said the blanket came down on a Sunday and was gone by Friday at the latest.

I had thought it was a more dire season, but I don't too much of the news, and especially very little national weather news. I guess my sporadic visits to Facebook represent my "news" connection to the east coast.

I talked with Linda as well, and again the conversation came to weather. It had been in the sixties for an unusually high number of days this winter, she was saying. One? Is one an unusually high number of days in the sixties? How long has it been since we left...since we arrived...? (TEN YEARS!)

Anyway, it has been silly down here in the Southland during our strange current winter heat wave: the last two days have been over 90 degrees.

IT'S FEBRUARY! I know we live in what amounts to a movie, or a fever dream, or an romantic ideal to many Americans who will never visit the Los Angeles region (that's how most New Yorkers view all of California---as an idea more than a place), but am I really sitting and sweating in shorts and a tank-top in February?

Yes. Yes I am.

Lamentations usually reserved for May or June or August are coming from our gobs during this dark winter...

Have You Seen "eXistenZ"?

Woe is the sci-fi action film, made with sheer originality, that happened to come out in April of 1999 and also happened to not be named "The Matrix." Mainly I'm looking at you "Thirteenth Floor" and you, too, "eXistenZ."

This past weekend Corrie and I saw the bizarrely yellow poster-avatar to David Cronenberg's "eXistenZ" on Netflix. Holding what looks like a handgun is a very young Jude Law; he seems to be protecting Jennifer Jason Leigh. The title sparked memories, but fleeting. After doing some research I realized that it was because of when it was released that I whatever memories I had, or motivations to see it, were so fleeting.

It was basically released a week after "The Matrix", the live-action anime movie that changed the action-film vocabulary from that point forward. There are camera angles seen during yesterday's Super Bowl that exist because of "The Matrix."

Anyway, reading the synopsis was also when I learned that David Cronenberg was the director. You know you're in for something whacky with him involved.

That tidbit pushed us over the edge. We settled in and hit play.

Holy cow! I was not prepared for the gore and overt sexuality brought to the table. There is no gratuitous sex in the movie, but a whole lot of sexuality.

Jennifer Jason Leigh plays a virtual reality game designer who is sharing her hotly awaited game with an eager group of gamers. Okay, I said to myself, as they all seemed to be connected with umbilical cords and fingering what looked like hairless vaginas with nipples.

Have you seen this movie? That's what the controllers look like: weird vaginal lap-animals with tits and nipples. To "play" the game, players tweak the nipples and rub the pink, twitchy, "pod."

They call them pods; after a mishap with one, Ian Holm repairs it but it looks like an autopsy.

The controllers connect to the players using so-called umbys; you learn this as the movie unfolds. These umbys connect the vaginal-nipple-pod to the player's bio-port. The bio-port is a butthole sized hole about four inches above the belt line.

Besides the sexually rubbing of the pods, there are these awesome bio-ports, with lots of lubing and fingering and even some tonguing. Seriously.

The gore is equally explicit. At one point Jude Law's character, chocking up the desire to eat the specimen to "game logic", chows the meat off of some random animal carcass. By the looks of the bystanders, it is fetid at best. He uses the greasy and sinewy carcass to make an organic firearm, which is, upon closer examination, the handgun from the poster-avatar. It shoots teeth; Jude loads with a tooth bridge that his character in "real life" didn't have.

That was how you knew it was part of the game. This movie is a set of nested realities that never lets the viewers get too comfortable. "Inception" is a spiritual offspring.

It made over $2.5 million at the box office, against a budget of $30 million.

Norm and I saw "The Matrix" at least three times in the theater, with Norm possibly closer to five times. The redefinition of the terms of action movies and the creation of a whole set of cliches that the Wachowski siblings augured swept movies like "eXistenZ" and "Thirteenth Floor" away from the collective consciousness.

The conversation had changed.

The "Thirteenth Floor" is up next...

Under the Drill for Ninety Minutes

Saturday is one of the few days I am able to get stuff done. This Saturday was for the dentist.

After having a scary meeting with a dentist (my second in twelve years) in Texas back in 2010, I found a very agreeable dentist right around the corner from us here in Long Beach. What the office in Texas told me would cost in upwards of fifteen grand (!!!!!!)(seriously), the fine crew around the corner did for two-hundred bucks after my new and better insurance picked up their end.

Now I have even newer and even better insurance and, apparently, a continuing and rather personal battle with my own teeth. Did I start smoking crack or letting my life be taken over by meth?

Math maybe, but not meth. Pretty sure anyway.

Somewhere in November or December a filling in my upper left bicuspid, an amalgam deal put in while I was a kid, came out. From then until the end of January I was getting crud stuck into the gaping hole in my tooth. Dental floss was my close homey.

I had the tooth filled and a bunch of coral chiseled off my teeth, and another appointment set for a week later---this past Saturday---to finish the last of the fillings they never got to back at the place around the corner. (This new and better insurance has me driving across town rather than walking down the alley.)

This past Saturday it was dead at the dentist. The previous Saturday it was busy as hell all day, and I waited in one of those chairs for over an hour. They had a television on the wall in the operating nook, which seemed too opulent before I stared at it for an hour.

This past Saturday they found new cavities they needed to fill. That brought my total to either five or six---the details are a bit fuzzy, as I had hands in my face for a full hour and a half.

It turns out the lower jaw is harder to numb than the upper, and it took four shots to numb it just enough that I could handle the drill. That side of my face felt invisible for hours afterwards

After I was all done and ready to get a few X-rays of this most recent work, it turns out they had forgotten a tiny cavity in the front and, hey, since you're already numb, we should just get it done now.

Are my teeth are more filling than tooth at this point?

The List Continues...

Some vices are hard to verbalize.

I found myself on a work-holiday today and saw a series of notes I had scribbled about either blog posts or trips---trips like OKC in September and SD last month, trips that would make for some fun, light reading...

I have an example of what I want from my journalistic wards floating around.

Maybe this is a vice...

I'm heading in the direction of "poorly-xeroxed-socialist-newsletter-available-from-smoky-dude-on-the-corner" for my journalism wards. It shall be fun.

Other things are happening as well, and my writing, and posting, lags...

Still OVERthinking our camping trip down the coast from June...

Still lagging on a long(ish) soccer post about my own heritage (the Gerries, but on me da's side...).

The march of time waits for no one.

The Simple Pleasures of Simple Lives

Jimmy B is getting married! He and his lady have decided to make it official in early April, and he's asked me to be a groomsman. The last weekend of my winter's vacation was spent in San Diego at a bachelor's party.

It was an all-timer lineup: Jimmy, Ryan, Steve, Eric and Ken made it down from San Luis Obispo, Sam made it down from Albany, Jimmy's brother-in-law made it down from the peninsular Bay Area, and Tony, visiting from Louisiana, rode with me from Long Beach.

Many of the shenanigans that occurred were, of course, meant to be left is San Diego county.

Upon returning to our apartment, the relief I felt was a tiny bit surprising. As Tony relaxed into an early evening post-dinner nap in our CAPS chair, I cuddled with Corrie on the couch. We were watching the Test Kitchen or Jacques Pepin.

It was then, sitting on the couch as the furnace blew hot air, that I replayed the many conversations I listened to and participated in over the previous two days. It was interesting to hear what life is like for people to whom I feel very close. Maybe that should be Life, with the capital "L."

Over the years Corrie and I have adventured around this rock a few times, and maybe the lives we live would not seem Simple to some people. While our vacation decisions differ greatly from many Americans, and we cook at home more than most (it turns out), we do like the simple pleasures.

And, when all is said and done, it turns out we like a quiet night on the couch watching PBS.

Pretty boring. No Tuesday nights at the bar, no fighting kids, no revolution-building talks at the cafe...

I need to get back to the book I'm writing...

Hot Soup; Easy Grub

I had been meaning to make this for a while, and finally got around to it. So easy, so rich and tasty...

We had a piece of meat that had been purchased on a "Manager's Special" discount, which means it had to be either eaten or frozen within a day. A few days later I saw it, noticed the sticker, saw it had oxidized (turned gray) and that it may have developed a tiny layer of slime (started to turn). Since dinner was already done, I threw it in the freezer.

I mention all this because a week went by, maybe ten days, and I noticed I had three-quarters of a large onion waiting to be used. As vacation had already set in, and the Decemberween trip to Santa Monica coming up soon, I knew that all the groceries would need to be eaten. 

Finally the opportunity presented itself.

I sliced the onion thin, put it into one of my sauce pots with some oil and bit of butter, hit it with some salt, turned the heat on low, and let it go. I came by every fifteen minutes to give it a stir, but really all you want to do is slowly caramelize the onion.

I was making French Onion Soup.

Typically, all you do is caramelize onion and add beef stock, but water will do just fine if you have no stock. On this day, I had no stock, but we did have that funky beef from earlier. I pulled it out of the freezer, used a cleaver to cut it into thirds while still frozen, and started boiling it to make broth.

Note: broth is made with meat, while stock is made with bones. I'm not sure what the distinction between veg broth and veg stock is...

After the broth had been going for a while, and the onions were nicely caramelized, I added the broth to the onions, let it simmer for a while, then started to add the real French touch: the bread and cheese.

The French like to add bread to the top of the pot, cover that bread with cheese, and broil the whole deal until the cheese is melted and bubbly.

Here's a picture before it went into the broiler:

Here it is five to seven minutes later:

It was so rich and delicious.

Onions, water (or broth/stock), and time. Cheese and bread optional. So easy and so tasty.

For a special French secret twist try this: As the soup finishes in the broiler, take one egg yolk and beat it with one or two teaspoons of dry sherry in a bowl. Once the soup comes out and the cheese and bread are all crusty, break open some space in the middle and pour in the yolk mixture. Stir gently. When it's cool enough to eat, it will be even more rich and awesome, and the yolk will be pasteurized, so nothing to worry about there. Oh...the French...

Hot Soup!

New Year Under a Pile of Cats

Someday I may relay an anecdote about New Year's Eve and Day, about walking with Victor over to the scene of some party-carnage, but not now.

Anyway, Happy 2016! For some reason, here's a link collection for the "New Year" declaration from this blog over the years:

2010: From Texas, we'd just moved out.
2011: Also from Texas, we'd just returned from California and the interview that lead to the return.
2012: Still working in Costa Mesa...
2013: Excited about the release of Robot Crickets.
2014: Just returned from Asia and post isn't so much about "Happy New Year."
2015: Talking about parties and weather situations down ere in Southern California.

I compiled this list mostly because I wanted to focus on the change over the years that I've been keeping this forum. A solid portion of those posts really don't say much, as I had plans on the days they were written to work out a handful of things and needed to start somewhere.

2016 marks the 8th calendar year that I've been at this, which is wild when I think about it. I have some plans to release tiny collections of material from the Caliboy Network, but we'll see how that works---I've only been trying to get everything ready for twenty months by now.

I'll be trying to get to some more stuff today.

This morning it took a matter of minutes for me to get inundated after I had a seat on the couch. Corrie brought me coffee because I couldn't get up, I was under a pile of cats.

Happy New Year! Here's to everyone being safe and happy and finding what they're looking for!