A Movable Feast

Don't mind me sweetie, I'm cooking, Thanksgiving dinner to be precise, and you know how slightly psycho I get when in my hash-slinging modus. It's true, the total kitchen bitch. Fortunately I am here all alone so no one has to put up with my shrieking and cursing. Even Saki has been exiled to one of the bedrooms upstairs, aka Cat Jail.

We're leaving tomorrow to drive down the coast to Big Sur for a few days and since I suspect the kitchen in the cabin we've rented is rudimentary, I thought it would be smart to get the cooking out of the way. Plus I don't want to share my madness with the friends I'm going with.

So now I've roasted a boneless turkey breast with a French garnish under the skin

My recreation of my grandmother's cornbread dressing, because I am as big a Southern girl at heart as Paula Dean.

Speaking of the Queen of Grease Refinement, I also have gravy. But of course. Smooth as silk, but much, much tastier.

The beautiful, beautiful Cranberry Apricot Ginger Chutney.

And Vicodin.

The vicodin is especially handy since I clumsily tangled with the handle of the roasting pan while getting it out of the oven. Ouchywow.

We had a planning meeting last weekend for this trip and I have to say, I'm looking forward to it immensely. Food, hanging around, card games, maybe hiking, if I'm not too lazy, woo to the hoo, in short, even if we aren't able to share it with Diane von Austinburg. Rats.

Although we will technicaly be at the beach, I do not expect any of this.

Tragic, I know.

Cat Tales

I named our adorable and evil cat "Saki" after the writer H.H. Munro, who used that as his pen name. However, I'm pretty sure the cat thinks his name is "Goddam It, Get Off My Nuts," since that's what he hears the most.

All of the cats I have lived with have been lap kittehs. That's part of the appeal, ten feline pounds curled up purring and keeping you warm. But all of them have always stepped squarely on my testicles when climbing on board. What's with that? Are they asserting dominance? Saying hello? And while it's been annoying with past holders of the Cat of the House title, Saki is the one who moves with the least amount of cat-like grace. When he pounds his lead-foot way across the boys, there is no ignoring it.

Lucky for him he's adorable.

Diane-less

OK, you can consider me officially bummed out. Man. Our beloved Diane von Austinburg was scheduled to come out for Thanksgiving and we were going to go down the coast to Big Sur to hang out for the annual celebration of carbohydrates. Then last month, Diane broke her tail bone. Sitting is very painful, so a four hour plane ride and then a three hour drive down the thrilling but zig zaggy coastal highway is just such a dumb idea not even I can endorse it, despite my astonishing powers of being delusional.

Let me make clear I really am disappointed and feel awful about the poor thing's on-going pain. That said, because I have the sense of humor of a sixth grader, I cannot let go of the inherent sniggering in a bone named "coccyx" and commonly referred to as the "tail bone." I am ashamed. I am a bad friend. And yet, I snigger.

I'm not alone in this. Our friend Super Agent Fred asked her if she cracked it practicing her triple axle lutz. John, another pal, suggested the break had obviously come about during a skateboarding spree. I favor a simpler and more broad reaching conclusion: shenanigans. She can blame tripping over her cat all she wants, there is still a free floating implication of sexual gymnastics gone bad, terribly, terribly bad.

So, now that I have that more or less out of my system, let me reiterate how sorry I am for her. Poor thing.

Houseboy Jinx Nocturnus demonstrates a functional coccyx:

Sweet Dreams

I understand other, lesser mortals regularly have dreams about being faced with an exam or class they have not prepared for, Anxiety Dreams they're called. I can't remember ever having one, which probably says less about my anxiety level and more about my casual attitude towards education.

The only dreams I ever have that fit into a category are the walking-around-Kmart-in-my-underwear ones and ones where I have some task to do that starts off simple and gets more and more complicated and less accomplishable. Sort of the OCD of the unconscious.

Last night I had a lovely one wherein I was chopping up lines of cocaine. Let me point out I have done no coke since George Bush the First was in office and yet my sleeping mind decided it was time to revisit ancient history. I was always a very tidy drug abuser and meticulous about the preparation of coke rails. They had to be evenly spaced and the same size and no messy debris between them. Okay, so maybe my OCD is not restricted to my dream state.

Anyway, in this dream I had an enormous mound of nose candy to deal with and it kept getting bigger and then I realized there were multiple piles. Oh, the burden. Plus someone in the next room was playing Living La Vida Loca and I was annoyed, which sounds much more realistic than an excess of cocaine does.

All the while I was busily railing up, I was anticipating not actually snorting it, but tidying up the leftovers with my index finger and then rubbing it on my teeth and gums. That is actually another element of reality since that was a step I always included when I did coke. I loved the way it tasted.

Anyway, I never did get it all lined out in the dream, but when I woke up I immediately remembered the time I took a bunch of cocaine to a friend's wedding to help celebrate the nuptials and how, more than thirty years later, she's still mad she didn't get to indulge cause she was busy getting married. Set your priorities girl, that's what I say.

You know what goes good with cocaine?

Muscley partly naked young men and Bordeaux cookies.

Chez peenee

Dinner last night? Get real, it was Chez Panisse, of course it was delicious. Even the first course, pickled mackerel, was plenty tasty. I had tried to explain my tepid enthusiasm for the dish when I saw it on the menu (Pickles? Yes. Fish? Yes. Pickled fish? Not so much.) but I'm glad I went with it, trusting in the genius of the Chez. Even more genius were the fabulous quail. Mmm. Baby.

30 Years

Today is the thirtieth anniversary of my meeting R Man in the back room of a sleazy bar in New Orleans called Jewels. Thirty years. I wasn't even thirty when I met him. While the moment is poignant, I'm trying not to be all mopey and stuff and I seem to be doing ok. Still, when he was cremated and I got the ashes back (doesn't the funeral industry's preferred term, "cremains" seem creepier than something as straightforward and accurate as "ashes"?) I couldn't face scattering them, so I decided to wait for this anniversary instead. In April it was plenty far off enough to be safe somehow. Now that it's here, I still dread the whole sad idea, so I'm putting it off indefinitely. My plan is to stand at the top of our backyard, where there is almost always a breeze and toss them down into the yard, someday. Turns out that is illegal in San Francisco which adds a tiny frisson to it, but not much.

To mark our anniversary, I'm going out to dinner tonight with a gang who also loved R Man. We're headed over to Berkeley to the reliably fabulous Chez Panisse. I'm taking Vicodin and a camera with me. Details to follow.

In the meantime, here's some houseboy pussy, complete with Stupid Hair, the bane of cute boys everywhere.

Something Wrong with Strippin?

So many, many people ask me "mrpeenee, what is your favorite big muscial about a psychotic mother pimping her daughter out into a life of quasi-prostitution?" I laugh tinklingly and reply "Oh, that would be Gypsy."

Take it away Miss Mazeppa:

Once I was a schleppah....

Fun with Blogs

Those of you who dropped by over the last few days may have noticed I went all crazy and stuff and replaced the tasteful background I had been using here with one that was a picture of me and R Man that had been run through a warholizer.

I decided it had to go cause it was giving me a headache, but by then I had lost the picture of the fern frond and since I was too lazy to go all the way out in the yard and take another one, we are now featuring our lovely, lovely Datura Brugmansia. Revel in it, because I am also too lazy to change it for a while.

That's just how it goes in Gaylandia. Leave a mo to his own devices long enough and redecorating is bound to happen.