See those little pirate faces? Don't mean that pirates on board that truck. A nice way to pimp a ride for toxic gas tanks that came to visit our house yesterday! On the 20th of April. Also known as Four Twenty, the national holiday where everyone sits around and smokes pot at 4:20pm. Do I look like I have time to celebrate all these holidays? I have toxic gas to deal with here.
Before you pump your house full of gas, you have to be like Dexter and totally plastic wrap all your body parts. Dexter, way neater. Does plastic wrapping for sport. Much of my weekend, spent either dragging worldly posessions to live outside, where there is no toxic gas, or wrapping them in double layers of special toxic gas bags which seal with special toxic gas duct tape. While you all, decorating with whatever it is you string in the trees for your holiday. Have I mentioned this whole thing of the toxic gas?
I am entrusting a man named Jose wearing an African explorer cap, to pump hosefuls of toxic gas through my house. And garage. And various outbuildings. As we tour the grounds, he's all, "You seem nervous?"
"Yeah," I reply. "Maybe because you're pumping my house full of DEADLY TOXIC GAS?"
He agreed. Nerve wracking. And yes. Sometimes they kill cats. We speak a mix of english and spanish. Then goes back to work with the festivities. Looks like there's a circus happening on Walk Circle today, Circque de Terrible Muerte de Termite, and I'm so sorry. We double and triple checked for cats and I went door to door on Sunday, warning the neighbors of the toxic gas. Everyone sympathized. We all have old wooden houses, all in various stages of decay and termite ruin and sometimes, you gotta do it.
So (insert complexities in this mission that involve simultaneously housesitting 25 minutes away on top of a hill where cel phones don't work), I have an hour or so to kill while Jose, African Explorer and the rest of the Death Squad outfits my house in circus wear. It's my day off. And it's lunch time. I have no house right now. Don't normal people go to cafes? There's this cafe, like 2 blocks from my house, I never go to.
Because this is what normal people do. They sit under bright umbrellas and eat salads with fancy cheese. Not walk around with cold pizza wedged between their teeth, wolfing it down while giving shots to horses or dragging things around in dirt. They use forks! And have napkins and sit on benches from Design Within Reach. So I try for like 5 minutes to think this is a nice thing to do, sit in a cafe while all these moms with cute tattoos and babies in gigantic strollers and guys with short haircuts and linen shirts and ladies in bohemian inspired, high thread count outfits chit chat around me and eat their $9 sandwiches.
I could have brought dogs in with me, but hello, Team Small Dog. Otterpop doesn't like people to look at her. So not her scene. Ruby, possibly would implode due to the food, the food, the food, the food of it all. Gustavo, mayhem of joy and to keep still would have to have him hypnotized in a down stay the whole time.
It's so crowded. The hair, so flowing and organic yet avante garde, in a crunchy kind of way. The outfits, so deconstructed. It's a Monday afternoon, and I have toxic gas about to be pumped through hoses into my house and I am sitting next to 2 ladies, one of whom is wearing a vintage apron, trying to speak Portuguese to eachother? Oh yeah. Because it's a holiday. They are celebrating. Soon it will be 4:20 on 4/20. I guess you're supposed to have lunch first.
I wrap up $4.50 worth of sandwich in a napkin, and do what the poodle recommends. We hit the beach.
I'm sorry termites. Not what you were expecting, I guess. Because at 4:20 at my house, oh man. I don't even want to think about it.
2 comments:
There's nothing normal about *****'s French Bakery. It's where the "ladies who lunch" lunch together on the West Side. They don't wear white gloves and blue hats anymore -- they wear, as you say, densely-woven, expensive casual clothing, have a personal Pilates trainer, travel abroad, and can afford to stay home and raise 2.5 perfect children without working. And I left out the well-financed grad students from Southern California.
Not the world that most of us live in.
Nice beach photos. Wow, I don't ever remember seeing a slope that steep covered with sand anywhere in santa cruz--nice to know that ruby's antigrav vest didn't need determiting.
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