I am full of food and wine with another dinner coming in only two hours, listening to Oasis in the internet bar by our apartment. It smells like incense in here. Wonder what they are smoking in the back. Two more days of this, then I retreat to calm and peaceful Venice.

Yesterday we went to the “must-see” city of Mdina. It is an old Norman walled town. It took us a gazillion years to get there. They have these crazy yellow buses all over Malta, and they go everywhere but you always have to change in Valletta. Like, every single bus goes to or leaves from Valletta. So it totally sucks unless you are staying in Valletta or you really like buses, which I do not. My philosophy is, life is too short to take a bus, unless it is faster than the train, or you have no other choice. In Malta you have no other choice. Unless you drive, but that is opening a whole ‘nother can of worms.

The buses are old here and have no spring in the seats any more. Was it worth two hours of butt-bruise to go to Mdina? Not really. I’ve been to a lot of walled towns. I’ve already seen a few Maltese churches. So I already did Mdina even before I’d done it. I was really happy to get back to the grime and neon of St. Julian’s – way more my scene.

We did have a really nice lunch in a restaurant called Bacchus, in a wine cellar. In fact, if you were to ask us our favorite things of the day:

Lisa: the architecture in Mdina
Colleen: the view from the back wall of Mdina
Shannon: Lunch in Mdina, except for that corn nut in my salad. That was weird.

After Mdina we walked over to Rabat. Rabat used to be where they buried the dead people from Mdina. Now Rabat is the working town, and Mdina is the tourist attraction. In Rabat we went to the Grotto where Saint Paul lived for a while after he got shipwrecked here and went all Jesus. Then we went to the catacombs, one of the burial places dug down into stone, little beds and big beds for dead people. Then back on the bus for another two-hour, butt-injuring bus ride home.

We were so exhausted last night (we could barely speak until the first glass of wine went down) that we stayed home and ate. Colleen and I had found some homemade frozen meat pies in the supermarket and bought them in case of emergency. They were awesome! Colleen had a salmon pie (mmm… salmony) and Lisa and I had beef pies. Then we watched part of a movie, dubbed in Italian, where Linda Fiorentino was ankle cuffed to a hot dog stand while Wesley Snipes talked to her in a microphone and shot a bunch of people. We had no idea what was really going on, but we were too full of pie to change the channel.

Yesterday I also ate some lamb and mint flavored potato chips from the U.K. The chips make up for the Oasis song that is playing right now.

Today Colleen and Lisa went off on their own (I am totally anti-bus, you won’t get me on another fucking bus for a while) and I went to the home of Angella and John for lunch. They are from San Francisco and moved here last August. I hooked up with Angella via the Chowhound message board. They are really cool and made me a fabulous lunch served up with some great Sicilian wines. We hung out and talked, ate and drank for almost three hours – that is why I am so full – and they are coming around to pick us up at 8:00 to take us to eat fish in the fishing village of Marsaxlokk. Damn! I am such a piggy.

Seriously though they are hella cool and I think they are going to take us around the island tomorrow, making it totally unnecessary to ever board a bus again, at least for a while.

Only two more days! Everything is going by so fast.

XOXOXOXOXOXO
XXannon

I have disabled the function that makes it so you have to register to comment here. No one could figure out the registering part. Except for one person, Southern France livin’, Scotch swillin’ Gulley Jimson. Or maybe no one like, uh, wanted to comment. Whatever. The only thing is I have to approve all comments now before they are posted so if you DO comment, give me some time (days, weeks) before you try to post the same comment again. In other words it is not instantaneous.

On the fuckU2 front, their fans are Really Pissed Off. I guess U2 management had some thingy where people paid $40 to join a fan club that would guarantee good tickets to their shows. So those poor fools were out $40 ON TOP OF the battering they took with the high ticket prices! Greed! It makes me want to like, totally vomit.

I watched “The Last Days of Pompeii” on the Discovery Channel tonight. Gotta love those Shakespearean accents of the Pompeiians. There was one dude, a slimy, moneygrubbing, slave-screwing guy who ran into his house yelling for his wife/slaves “FORTUNATA… RESTITUTIOUS…” were those really Roman names? Totally cracked me up. I did learn a little though, like how all those floating rocks came out of the sky. I didn’t know about the floating rocks before. But to be honest, there isn’t a whole lot I know about. Maybe I should watch the Discovery Channel more, then I can learn to imitate a Shakespearean-type British person. I am going to start practicing that one, right now.

It’s always the first sentence that is hardest to write.

Today, Thanksgiving 2004, I feel awfully lucky and thankful. No matter what kind of craziness is going on in the world, I, for one, have been totally blessed. That sounds like a mushy and lame cliche but it is true. Even the bad things that happened to me, shaped me into a person that good things came to.

I am thankful for having an incredible, strong mother who guided me and stood behind me and watched me grow and struggle and thrive, and who understands I will never be perfect and will always need my crutches, and will always be proud of me and love me. I am thankful for my brother Tom who is funny and smart and a drummer who doesn’t get the music I listen to but will always listen anyway, and my brother Jay who is the most giving and loving person I have ever met. I am thankful for my Grandma, who loves all of us more than anything and makes all the fattening foods I love and doesn’t like George Bush.

I am thankful for my friends. I really have been blessed here. I don’t have a ton of them, but the ones I do, I would take a bullet for. I always say I could never give up music but when I really think about it, if I didn’t have the friends I have, well, life would really suck. Mark, Colleen, Cheryl, Ruth, Ariane, Lisa, Laurie, Leigh, Nancy, Jody, Chad, Bryan, Pauline – I know you all might read this – thank you for making my life a way cool place to be.

I am thankful for my job and my boss who once told me “a job is not a jail sentence” and always lets me travel when my feet get itchy. I love my job, and it never bores me – it might irritate sometimes, but it is a great job and I know these are pretty rare. So what if I will never own a summer home in the Hamptons (or wherever.) Money isn’t everything and I am thankful that I know that.

I am oh, so thankful to have spent my lifetime living in some of the most beautiful places on earth – Half Moon Bay, San Francisco, Venice, and now Ocean Beach. It’s hard to be glum when there is so much beauty outside.

Then there is music. I am thankful for Wilco and Radiohead and the Delgados, Interpol and the Super Furries and all the other bands that make it so my life could never be boring. I could happily live on beans and tortillas, but please never take my CD player away.

I’m thankful that I get to travel. I’m thankful that I am a traveler through life. And finally, I am thankful that I am me and not somebody else. Even though I am a pain in the ass sometimes, I am happy I get to spend my life with me.

Friday night I got home from Venice. Sunday, I went to breakfast with my brother, came home, and got slammed with one of those wonderful “I must have caught it on the plane” bugs. The rest of Sunday, and all day Monday, I totally out of it. Weird how that always seems to happen when you get back, not when you go – as if your body has a built-in travel immunity. (Though I did get really sick in Chicago, in June. Maybe travel immunity doesn’t work for work. Though, the Venice trip was sort of work. Hmmm….)

Tuesday I felt better but of course the past two days I have had that end of the cold mega-mucous and hacking cough thing. How does the body produce all that stuff? Not to be gross, but I am really wondering. Nothing I learned in High School taught me about the human body and mucous.

Anyway, yesterday I had to go up to Huntington Beach for a Pinot Noir tasting and seminar, followed by lunch. I was there to sell a new book on North American Pinot Noir to the attendees, and of course I was invited to the seminar and the lunch. After that I had to drive back to Encinitas and work at the wine bar I work at when the owners are not around. So it was to be a long, long day.

All the way up to Huntington Beach I was coughing. I figured there would be no way for me to do the seminar and lunch, because I would be making a spectacle of myself. It’s the kind of cough where you cough so hard you feel like you are going to puke, the kind where mucous comes out of various orifices and you cannot help it. I’d just have to sell the books and try not to cough all over people’s credit cards. No amount of Halls cough drops was helping.

Then, during the seminar, which was going on in a room with a closed door, thankfully, one of the staff members brought me a glass of Pinot Noir. It was something really good from a small producer in Oregon – the kind of Pinot I never get to taste. And I am telling you – that shit cured my cough!!! It was gone! All of a sudden I felt way better, and I was able to go to the lunch, and drink more Pinot Noir with the people from the seminar who clearly had not been spitting and were all fairly buzzed at 1:00 P.M. No cough, until I got back in the car to go South. Then I was coughing a little again.

Went to the wine bar and opened. Really the cough doesn’t get to the “I am going to puke” stage until I have to speak, which, at the wine bar, I do. I take an order, then run back into the storeroom and cough. Get the wine, then run outside and cough. That is, until I POUR MYSELF A GLASS OF PINOT NOIR. Then, the coughing stops!

I swear this is a true story. I couldn’t sleep last night, because of the coughing. I was wishing I had a Pinot Noir cough drop. I think this could be a revolutionary new medicine for coughs. I want to develop, and market a product like this. Besides coughs, the Pinot Noir drops would be good for Pinot Noir junkies, they could pop one after their morning coffee, on the subway home, whatever.

I was telling a customer about the Pinot Noir cure last night. She said, “do you think Zinfandel would work? Merlot?” I’m not so sure but I have to work at the wine bar again tonight so I will check it out. But it was Pinot Noir that saved me, all day and all night, yesterday.

I dreamed about my ex-boyfriend Chris this morning. It’s been a trillion years since we were together, and I don’t think of him too often any more. I’m not sure why I dreamed of him, but maybe it was because I am going to Hawaii soon and I spent alot of time in Hawaii, with Chris. A trillion years ago.

OK, so maybe Hawaii is not the reason. Whatever. Just the dreaming of him takes me back to the time I knew him, and how that time empowered, and at the same time, wrecked me. There is nothing so heady as being nineteen and tan and also, somewhat intelligent. My pink running shorts and blue Vuarnets and Chris’s faded blue jeans and weird East Coast sports jacket, Chardonnay and cocaine and Steely Dan and Prince and, well, puking up crab dinners. These are what the early eighties were made of.

Seriously though, I learned to cook because of Chris. He nurtured that part of me which had been totally neglected, mostly by me. I hated to cook before I met him. He loved to eat though, and I was a young girl in love. I cooked Dungeness crab in a sea of butter, whole cauliflowers drenched in olive oil, and within months, Thanksgiving for 35 people. We drank martinis by the bucket. I was 19 and in that space where a pound of chocolate had no affect on my body. Chris was eight years older than me and between the butter, the wine, and the cocaine, he got sort of fat and unhealthy. I got skinnier and sniffeled alot. It was the eighties, after all. Though I think maybe I got older, but the times stayed the same.

I started up with Chris just hours after I turned 18 and ended just after I turned 21. He made a huge impact on my life. He taught me about things I never would have even thought twice about at that point – jazz music, for instance, and it was he that brought me to San Francisco and made me fall in love with it and eventually, I would leave the man for the city. By way of a Chilean waiter named Luis. Who was very short-lived, I might add.

Between the meeting and the leaving, though, there were a couple of trips to Hawaii. Chris and I liked it there, the tropical hedonism of it all. Strange things happened there, like one day, we met Joe Zawinul at snack bar in Kauai. Chris was a musician, and knew alot of people, but snarfing fishburgers with one of the guys from Weather Report made a fairly big impression on him.

It’s strange to think that this all happened 20 years ago. While it doesn’t seem like yesterday, it also doesn’t seem like a trillion years, either. I am going back to that place on Wednesday. Probably I have changed, but the place has not. No, the place has changed, but I have not. Whatever. The importance of those Chris years will never change. Creativity, and destruction – I wish I could go back, but my body would never let me.

It’s been a few days since I have written anything. Inevitably, in this situation, my mind swims. What should I write about? I can’t just write, well, whatever. It has to be at least sort of interesting. Here is what my blog would look like if I wrote about WHATEVER.

Today I got up at 8:00. I was tired since my asshole neighbor came home at 1:45 A.M. and woke me up, AGAIN. Must that bitch laugh like a hyena? Someone should teach her how to laugh in a way that she won’t chase people off within five minutes of talking to her, especially guys, which are rare in her realm. To get even for the sleep interruption, I blast the Avalanches “Frontier Psychiatry” on my stereo. Take that bass, you fat hyena. It’s the most insane bass, one note, the kind of sound that makes you feel either really happy, or sick to your stomach. It makes me happy. I turn the bass level up. A good way to wake up, I must say. Like being in a cavernous club full of sweaty bodies, instead of in my little bungalow about to go to work. Yeah, right. Like I really hang out in clubs anymore! Shit. I turn up the volume all the way to infinity just to pretend I still hang out in sweaty dance clubs, and to really make my point to my neighbor, the hyena.

After deliberately trying to make my neighbor’s hangover much, much worse, I go for my morning walk. I walk and walk. I walk up the hill, which is always hard, and then back down which is really great because I can look at the ocean then, plus, of course, it is downhill. My neighborhood is full of cool and interesting houses. Sometimes they are for sale, and I stop and grab a brochure out of the box attached to the For Sale sign. Then I choke and keep walking. I’ll never be able to buy a house here. It’s pretty frightening. Cottages with no foundations for 450K. Sheesh, I’ll move to, I don’t know, Malta? Romania? These thoughts accompany me down the hill.

After my walk I come home and make my coffee and get to work, if I am at home for the day, which, is most of the time, unless I am on the road, (which happens occasionally) run on sentences suck, don’t they?

I sit at my computer and do my thing until about 1:00 when it is time to go walk again, mostly to stretch. Then I come home and take a shower and eat a tortilla with lettuce and cheese in it. (Oh, also, during the day there is always music. Today it was P.J. Harvey, the Beta Band, and some burned CDs that someone gave me of bands that sound just like the Strokes, which makes me want to kill somebody. WHY, oh WHY, does everything good have to be copied and run into the ground? It makes me want to weep.)

As the afternoon goes on, it gets hotter, at least right now, since it is Summer, dummy. I might walk to the post office. Yesterday when I walked to the post office, some guy in an old VW asked me out! Just pulled up, and asked me out. I told him I had a boyfriend, of course. Then I saw a guy getting a ticket for skateboarding! It was one weird day, let me tell you.

Finally it is 5:00. Since I work at home, it might seem odd that I would make note of this, since at headquarters they really know fuck-all about what is going on down here. But, these people (my employers) have been very good to me, and since I am a hard worker and also Good at Guilt, I make sure to spend my allotted time in the spot they are paying me to be in.

Many, many things can happen at 5:00. Going to the cliffs and watching the sunset? spending too much time in front of my computer? but today I go and play Bocce Ball with my boyfriend. I play badly, and I know the reason why. On Sunday we have to go to his Family Reunion/Bocce Tournament. I am not a bad Bocce player, in fact I am pretty good. But the fact that I have to go to the Reunion is freaking me out. I’m always fine once I get there, it’s the thinking about going that bugs. At any rate I have a couple of moments of brilliance but mostly, I suck. Thank gosh I bring a bottle of Albarino. Let’s face it, it’s the wine that makes life liveable. The sun goes down, and I come home to face my blog.

WHATEVER.

I am not one of those people whose name or number is always drawn out of the hat. I mean, raffles, bingo, the California State Lottery. I am OK at games of skill like video poker and betting on the ponies, but if it has anything to do with randomness, my number won’t be pulled.

On the first Wednesday of every month, there is a raffle at my local farmers market, with giveaways of gourmet salsa and smoked fish, and every time I say “why do I want to stand there and be cheated, once again, out of that bag of blood oranges.” Still, every time, I go. I never win. There is one woman there every week, who drives around the neighborhood in a pink dune buggy thing with her bouffant white hair-do blowing in the wind. She always wins. Always! She is one of those people whose number always gets picked out of the hat.

OK, I did win once, on a rainy day when no one else was there. I won a bratwurst on the very day I had started a diet.

Sometimes the not winning is a big fat plus. Like today. My number did not get pulled out of the hat. But today, I had jury duty, and walked away from that lottery with a big smile on my face.

Jury duty is weird. You are stuck with all these people in a big room for most of the day, and once in a while someone gets on the loudspeaker and calls off names and you can see everyone get nervous. After the third or so calling-of-the-names, all the people left waiting look at each other uncomfortably, because the chance of getting selected out of the sixty remaining people is a lot higher than it was in the morning when there were 200 people there.

It’s also so trippy to watch people, hour after hour. For instance, the cell phone people. These are the people who really can’t stop talking, ever. Why is it that people who talk constantly on cell phones are more obnoxious than most? Is it because they talk louder, or what they talk about (nothing?) When I talk on my cell phone, I hide my face and lower my voice and am furtive, if not slightly embarrassed. To me, talking on a cell phone is right up there with getting caught with a Rick Steves book somewhere.

Anyway, today at jury duty, there was a woman who, I swear, called eighty people while in the Juror’s Lounge, one after the other. Occasionally she’d get through. Mostly, she left a lot of messages. I was trying to read my “Story of Spain” book. So this is the scenario. I am reading:

After about 40,000 BC or so something profound was happening to human culture, not only in things like tool-making but the probable invention of language, which allowed cultural transmission on an unprecedented scale. INTERRUPTION. “HELLO. Gail? This is JOANIE! I’m at JURY DUTY! Can you BELIEVE? I’m REALLY bored! Oh? You’re at WORK? You can’t TALK? OK then, BYE!”

I take a breath, read some more:

In contrast to the painfully slow development of the Old Stone Age- INTERRUPTION. “Hi Brandi! This is JOANIE! I’m at JURY DUTY! Where are YOU? I’m SO BORED!” the innovations of the new era arrived at breakneck speed “COURTNEEEYYY! This is JOAAANNIIEEE! I’m at JURY DUTTEEE!!!!” within the span of three millennia, the blink of “AMY!” an “DEBBIE!” eye in prehistoric “LINDIE!!!” time.

Thankfully, my number did not get called and then at 11:30 they let us out for a two hour lunch. Upon returning, we sat for one half hour and then were let go. Joanie did not get on her phone again (perhaps the battery was dead, or she was out of time). As much as I say I’d be willing to sit on a jury, I am always glad for the escape, and it is at these times I am happy not to be a winner of the lottery.

I saw a bumper sticker today, that said “The Older I Get, the Better I Was.”

Better? Maybe not. But after seeing that, I tried to sort out all the things I once was. What was I before, and what am I now?

Getting older really sucks when you start to think about this shit. Lots of people say, “oh, I am so much happier now that I am older.” OK, sure, but what do you lose, and what do you gain, beyond the losing of the looks/figure and gaining the experience/resume? I, for one, am sorely pissed about the one-chocolate-candy-adding-a-pound-to-my-tummy-problem. But I am way, way more upset, even to the point of tears sometimes, about the loss of my wide-eyedness. The loss of my innocence, if there ever was such a thing.

I sometimes talk myself into that “I am so much happier” thing. So yeah, age can cure you of anxiety and desperation (according to some people.) Maybe, you just stop caring about being emotional all the time. But the bottom line is, there is no such thing as happiness. There are only temporary cures for unhappiness.

Mi dio, how did this all come from a stupid bumper sticker? To be totally honest, this (the there is no such thing as happiness thing) is something I have believed all along. I was never wide-eyed or innocent – I was always old. It all comes down to less stamina and more hangovers. That is the root of the real problem. I’ve got to face that, and move on. Still asking the question, what was I before, and what am I now?

I’m feeling sort of sad today, sort of out-of-sorts. For one thing, June Gloom is here and it is foggy where I live. Another, I had to have some dental work done and it hurts now that the shots have worn off. But the main reason I am sort of sad, actually more like grumpy and pissy, is that the stash of wine I brought home from my big work tasting in late April is now history.

This is the worst part of my job. Because of my job, I can’t drink Charles Shaw, I can’t drink jug wine, I can barely swallow anything that costs less than $10.00, unless, of course, I am at a party and there is nothing else to drink.

When I first got my job it was almost 20 years ago, I was just 21 and drinking Glen Ellen by the gallon. I was in college, I lived with three other students and our crazy, freeloading boyfriends, and we lived on something like 50 cents a day. In those days, I had absolutely no problem drinking that swill. It was easy with eight people in a three bedroom flat.

Damn the palate. It keeps progressing even if your brain (or your income) stays in one place. If you drink good wine, even once in a while, it leaves an impression that is hard to forget, and then it is even harder to go back to swill. So, you drink a little better wine, like maybe Forest Glen or Mondavi Woodbridge. The palate, after a few more good-wine-teasers, says f*** you the next time you try to drink Forest Glen. And on and on it goes. Before you know it you are looking at the top shelf in the grocery store, where all the wines are over $20 and if you are lucky, some are on sale.

For the past month I have been drinking $35 Zinfandels and $50 Meritages on a nightly basis. My palate, now, is like THANK YOU, I LOVE YOU, YOU ARE MY HERO. Just now though, I had to pull a $10.99 Chianti on my palate. Now, The Palate is saying GO TO THE STORE HONEY, AND BRING YOUR CHARGE CARD.

My palate embarrasses me sometimes, like when it makes me smuggle wine into a baseball game or a concert, because I can’t drink what they’ve got there. Sometimes people snicker behind my palate’s back, when I bring moderately priced Gewurztraminers to the beach, instead of Miller Lite. But I stand behind my palate, and ignore the stares and giggles, because I know that we have together forged ahead and somehow, built something.

It’s too bad that what we have built is so expensive. Also, that if I was, say, suddenly unemployed, everything would tumble down around us and I would be drinking stuff I find on sale at the canned foods store. The Palate would not be happy with this situation.

Onward, back into the land of the $10.99 bottle with occasional attack on the cellar. It’s only eleven months until I am in Nirvana again.

In Italy, there is a show on late at night called Super Sexy Blob. Or at least there was – I’m not sure if it is on anymore. It is a crazy show with these quick images flashed on screen – girls in a hot tub, Monster Trucks crushing things, Strongman contests, more girls, more boobs, Motocross races… stuff that would appeal to a 17 year old guy with a very limited attention span. I loved it.

Friday night, random thought #157 – Super Sexy Blob, Super Sexy BLOG!!! Doy, what took me so long to figure that one out? I immediately went home and emailed Pauline to make sure she was cool with the new title. Queen Pauline was cool with it.

So here we go… more random flashes of weirdness. Here’s hoping it’ll be as entertaining as Super Sexy Blob.