Complaint Installment 2 of 1,000 in Reference to Southern Weather

First, a drive-by sighting of another great hair salon:

I don’t think Hair Efects is affiliated with the Detroit salon, Incisions.

And an exclusive feature of Memphis strip malls:

How cute! I know what goes in the blue boxes – but what or who is in the little space pod?

So, I am not used to this weather (yet). It is, as a few natives have told me, a bit hotter than usual, but it’s making my brain melt (current Memphis migraine count: two). I think it has to do with the strong upper level ridge of high pressure that weather.com has warned us about.

A HEAT ADVISORY MEANS THAT A PERIOD OF HOT TEMPERATURES IS EXPECTED. THE COMBINATION OF HOT TEMPERATURES AND HIGH HUMIDITY WILL COMBINE TO CREATE A SITUATION IN WHICH HEAT ILLNESSES ARE POSSIBLE.

   Weather by Memphis                         Straw sculpture by B. Mehr

I wish more people found it interesting to talk about the weather. I would make friends way faster here. As of right now, I know a sweaty lady from Arkansas and a teen at the Tiger Mart.

Hawthorne Logs

Aftermath of the downed killer tree. Chunks bigger than a small car. I think they shipped the midsection to the Log Ride (for Husky and Pretty Plus Riders) at a local amusement park.

We Are Back in Business

Our power was restored just moments after I sent a stern email to the mayor of Memphis! Coincidence? Hardly. It was Civic Power!!

Now I can get back to writing about my interesting life and ranting about quirky indie stuff and I can finally get down to business doing what I came here to do: complain about humidity.

Here is a photo of some flowers I saw today at The Dixon Gardens:

Admire them.

Blame It On The Rain

I have provided for you, dear reader, some video of possibly the exact moment when our power exploded. Don’t think for a second that it just went out. It exploded.

The sound got a lil wacked in the final cut but we can chalk it up to the bad storm or even the worthless quicktime 7.02.01 update:

I Would Wish This on My Worst Enemy for Sure.

B just asked me where I was and I responded with “at the end of my wits.” I meant to say “at the end of my rope” because my wits just never end. But on day four of this power outage, and two weeks into this new city, in this minibooth at Panera bread, I am indeed at the end of my rope. I’ve spent today going from one annoying place to another just to stay away from the sauna that was once known as our apartment. It is now owned by a pack of rotting bananas.

I stopped by today to try the light switches in case we just hadn’t been using them right. I pressed harder. I flipped them up and then down and then tried the “toggle” method I use sometimes when my ipod is f-ed up. Definitely no lights or power or anything that could make a fan or a fly move. So I sat at our little round table and addressed one envelope for something that I had meant to send out on Friday (before THE STORM) and removed the wrapper from one Band-Aid (name brand). Those two activities, plus flipping the light switches in the hallway, had generated so much sweat I had to change my shirt.

Our place is almost exactly human body temperature, but moister. It is like the inside of the Jade Steam Room at The Olympic Spa but without the naked ladies practicing yoga on slabs of therapeutic jade tile. None of that glamour - our windows have been painted shut and I left all of my hand fans at home. I have some great hand fans and I didn’t bring them when I moved to the south. I just wasn’t thinking. I wasn’t thinking then anyway. I’m thinking of a lot of stuff now.

Of course, things could always be worse. I’m just saying I don’t want to test that tiger, ya know.

Land of the Lost (Power)

Still.

Oh good. It will cool off to 95 by Tuesday.

Power Out, Sweatbox City

Hundred thousand people without power from a crazed storm on Friday night, including us – I mean – especially us. Golf outings were postponed. People provided pictures of storm damage. Some via god himself. These are from me and my internet connection is from the local DoubleTree Hotel. I cannot live without fans.

  

  

One Dollar Into Five

Mid-week summary: Nashville, scratch-offs, dead lawn empty stadium push-ups with no shirt, and a record store bathroom.

And one dum migraine.

Entitled

I slept in until noon. Nothing good happens before noon anyway.

That is a little play on what my dad used to say about my curfew --“Nothing good happens after midnight – you don’t need to be out with the riff-raff.” He was so wrong. Do you know how many “buyers” don’t get out of their dishwashing jobs until after midnight? Do you know how many fistfights I got to see after midnight (slightly more than I saw in daylight)? If I hadn’t been practicing my rebellion, I wouldn’t have seen D___ J____ punch out S____ H____n’s windshield in front of M___ H_______ house on that warm august evening in ‘91. Valuable lesson learned: you may not remember the reason for the fight but you always remember the damage.

I’m organizing a fist-fight story zine – to commemorate the last, great generation of young people (mine) so holler at me. Things today aren’t nearly as exciting – maybe nothing good happens after 2012…

Last week the LA Times posted an article about the new trend in young, unemployed singles; enjoyment. Seems it’s blowing people’s mind that young people gladly take their unemployment checks and go golfing. Somewhere in the article they say it is part of the “entitlement” generation. I think they are misusing the term. When it comes to current issues of entitlement I think more of – AIG & Countrywide (and some of the banks that took a chunk of a trillion dollar bailout) and not so much some poor schmuks that got liberal arts degrees and are now only qualified to use Twitter. Who wouldn’t want to enjoy their unemployment?

French Cooking

I hope that I won’t have to post any more food rants (we all know what a telling sign of mental desperation they can be). I fear the last one might have isolated a few of my many readers. I think I was inspired by the preview for that Julia Childs/cooking blog movie that I saw before “Angels & Demons”. What happens when all new movies are unwatchable? Is it the end of cinema? Do people care? What will happen to us? Can you really write a script about a blogger chef? Did anyone see “No Reservations”?

Underwater and Undercooked Rant

I DECLARE: As of last night, I have eaten at my very last sushi restaurant. I don’t eat sushi. I don’t like the taste of almost all fish. It is gag-a-rif-ic to me for three major reasons: temperature, texture, and the haunting scent/taste of sea murder. It reminds me of being nearly drowned to death and emotionally abused at the Grosse Ile Yacht Club and also I am severely allergic. A few of these things are true. It doesn’t matter. I hate seaweed just as much. I can’t even smell the side of a toy boat without yacking and I don’t understand ingesting something that smells like the main ingredient of  phrase spoken when things turn bad (something is fishy here).

I have several friends that hate red meat and a couple that claim to have caught gluten intolerance in the past food-allergy-centric decade. Fine, fine. Different strokes. They too have a few blacklisted menu items, but I am certain that they don’t have to deal with the cultural backlash and social awkwardness that comes from not eating sushi. People (a term I use to cover – um – people of the eastern and western and southern United States) simply cannot get over it. I don’t know if it is their own self-doubt or WWII/Internment camp guilt (second mention this week) or what, but I have had an easier time smoking a cigarette outside of a Gilda’s club (true) than I have just ordering some soup at a Japanese restaurant while they order up their overpriced and undercooked chunks of shit-swimming fish flesh.

In the past I have gone along with my friends to sushi places because they were visiting from out-of-town or severely craving sushi or whatever, and I have said “I don’t eat sushi, I’ll just get soup or beer or some other kind of belly wash – you just enjoy yourself.” But it’s not going to happen anymore because the enjoyment never happens – it is certain that, after being seated, the topic of how I don’t eat sushi will be brought up – not by me, but by the sushi eater. And all it ever does is highlight our differences in taste and it makes everything suspect and unfun.

I can eat pepperoni pizza in front of a vegetarian, what is so hard about enjoying sushi without me eating it? I personally don’t wonder about things like, “how can you NOT like this?!!” (a common statement made by diners choking on seaweed). I know that like snowflakes and thumbprints, we all are different. And just like the fact that I can eat brussel sprouts and olives while you gag, I don’t eat or enjoy the same raw sea beasts that brighten your day. More importantly, I don’t equate your lack of taste for red meat with the typical self-loathing of guilty over-educated Americans (ok, maybe I do…)

What IS this thing about equating cuisine taste with culture? Why do we only selectively insist on false authenticity? If you can eat with chopsticks are you cultured? I remember a story about a friend of a friend that was appalled that a certain Thai restaurant didn’t provide chopsticks (even though forks are totally a-ok in Thailand). Last night I heard the table of polo-shirted southern men joke with the asian waitress (at the sushi restaurant) about how they were just going to order chicken fingers and honey mustard sauce – signifying that they were not typical low-brow uncultured customers. Later when the check came they joked with her that they would be paying with food stamps. How hilarious. I’ll take a quiet alcoholic or near-dead anorexic over an outspoken sushi eater* any day.

* Tested truth: Soy Chai Latte drinkers are actually the most obnoxious people in the western hemisphere. I worked at starbucks. I can confirm this. People that like caramel are generally nice.

Powdery Magnolias

Enjoyed today:

• Moist, grey movable pre-storm Tennessee sky
• Plastic-like magnolia blossoms
• Yoga instructions given by instructor with southern accent, “dawn dawg”
• Fight about Tarantino
• La Croix canned water and two cans of canned sparkling wine
• Pear shaped kitchen timer

The Longest Yard

Favorite ruinenlust sighting yesterday was at Shelby Farms Lucius Burch Jr National Area:

A special place in my heart is reserved for dusty, abandoned, or overgrown ball fields and decaying stands. My old favorite is at Manzanar (visited 06-2006):

Zombieball later?

Thus

Memphis so far:

• Pork eaten:  (est.) 4oz.
• Giant slabs of wood from ill-constructed new table dropped on feet:  (est.) 1 – not my feet though
• Boxes emptied: 2
• Space Bags that re-inflated within 24 hours: 3 (of 5)
• Italian festivals: 1
• Text messages asking “How’s Memphis?!”: 20
• Cheery responses given: 10

These are a few things that would make my life easier in the coming weeks:

1. More hangers
2. A little less humidity on the uptake – outside
3. Have the Lakers win the NBA Championship (not because I am really rooting for them but because the aliens will then leave my new home and life can get back to business)
4. A debutant ball so I could be introduced to southern society and maybe be lucky enough to get featured here
5. A job producing the “Quit Your Job Advice Show”

On The Move.

I just sent my better half a phone pic of a mini mustard bottle. It is the international (maybe even intergalatical) symbol of room service. He hasn’t messaged me back and I can only assume that he is jealous.

TNT keeps going out on my TV but I can still hear the desperation of the Cavs. I got some pop and apples at a grocer called Harris Teeter and my checker-outer guy had a limey accent. It was ok with me but the frazzled momish lady holding three gallons of ice cream was so confused that when he told her he was waiting on a price check that she said, “I’m sorry, you are confusing me.”

Today reminded me that we are conditioned from birth to anticipate a transformational moment with consumerist fervor. I think of a transformational moment as a defining event that says, “I was this, and now I am that.” Today I woke up a Michigan resident and by nightfall I am (shopping at Harris Teeter) claiming Tennessee as my home.

I blame movies or fairy tales or new country or old punch lines or Casey Kasem – who knows really - but whatever it is – It seems like we expect a lot from these namable/giftable moments, but rarely is it a moment that makes things happen. A decision maybe, an eight hour car ride maybe, but not one thing.

More to the point, it seems we try to commemorate events like graduation and moving and births and weddings and suicides with gifts “so you will remember the day forever.”

For example: the untimely gift of a flower in a glass vase (full of water) given to me by my mother when I was loading my car this morning.

She told me it was so I would have something to hold flowers in my new home. A sweet and unpractical gesture since I wasn’t even able to pack a tootsie roll piggy bank and a certain bottle of shampoo because it was too breakable – this move is a 700-mile move light. So I had to leave the flower and the water and the vase and drive away with the horrible guilt that you can only get from being home and getting odd gifts from your family. 

Believe me, save your gifts – or make them edible - I will never forget these moments.

“You can never run away, never. The only way out is in.” - Lola in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (audiobook I just finished on my ride)

Packed.

Up Against an Old Giant

 

I’m moving again and I feel less like packing than last time and last time ended with me calling a St. Vincent De Paul truck to pick up everything that wouldn’t fit in my sedan just so K and I could make our reservation at Mandalay Bay.

Comforting prickly plant facts:

 

The Saguaro Cactus don’t even get their wings – I mean arms - until they have been around for 200 years.

Cactus need very little water to survive.

Cactus look good in direct sunlight.

Tune In

To the Vistas Video Vimeo Channel for more great, brief, and confusing Vistas Videos like this one:

I added several more. I am always looking for submissions and people with steady hands.

Dirty Lensed Look At Death Valley

New in the Vistas Video Channel:

Desert Attack

Jamie is clueless as Bethany runs to save Kelly from certain demolition. A ghost mounts a bicycle. It is sunny.