Isn’t it weird when you meet people and it feels like you have known them forever?

This is Kasch and her daughter Antonia, my brother Tom’s new family from Berlin. I haven’t written too much about this because I wanted to make sure it was cool with them first. Basically, Tom met Kasch when he was on tour in Germany last summer, and now he is moving there!

Kasch and Antonia were here for a little over two weeks and now that they are gone there is a void. When my brother moves, there will be an even bigger void. Thankfully I myself am going to Berlin for two weeks in March, otherwise I would be hella bummed. I am sort of fantasizing about moving there myself, but of course I won’t. I don’t think. The problem is, I am an urban girl living in a beach town. I love my beach town, but I really get off on subways and outdoor cafes on big boulevards and bridges with statues on them and stuff. Though if I lived in a big city I would probably be fantasizing about sunsets and the smell of the sea and fried clams. Was it Hemingway that said, write about the summer in the winter, and the winter in the summer? That is the way I think, all the time. If you get my drift.

Anyway, I love Tom’s new family. They are both beautiful and, well, the epitome of cool. Kasch is already Cool Beyond Words and Antonia is The Coolest Chick In Town Waiting to Happen. For now though she is a Cool Little Girl. She loves, LOVES, my nephew Ryan. Here she is with Ryan and Ryan’s mama Carrie:

Speaking of Cool Little Girl Antonia last night was pretty funny. She hasn’t been speaking much to me since I can’t understand German, though I think she understands quite a bit of English. But last night, I went to Tom’s for dinner with Kasch and Antonia, Scottie Blinn (from the Mudsharks) and his wife Roxanne and kid Little Man Jackson. After dinner, the four other adults wanted to go down to Tony’s bar so I stayed with the kids. Little Man Jackson is basically a meteor trapped in a child’s body, and spent the first twenty minutes carreening off couches and walls like a pinball. It was some pretty intense energy expenditure, let me tell you. Antonia and I wanted to play Uno with the Hello Kitty Uno cards I got her for Christmas, so we kept asking Jackson but he was like, “no way, I ain’t playing with no Hello Kitty cards!” (Good boy, Scott would later say.) I finally talked him into it because you can’t play Uno with only two people so I was kind of desperate. Anyhow, I was like, “Jackson, you are CRAZY.”

Then, out of nowhere, Antonia says, completely deadpan, “Crazy Boy.” Then she proceeds to play Uno with us, SPEAKING ENGLISH THE WHOLE TIME. I was blown away, she just turned 10 but obviously has a mind like a steel trap.

Jackson continued cracking us both up, saying stuff like “I’m the weirdest!” and doing break-dancing moves on the floor when his energy got to be too much. Later, when his dad mentioned my blog Poptarticus, Jackson exclaimed “I’LL HAVE A BLOG TOO, AND I’M GONNA CALL IT FARTICUS!” Dude. I almost fell down laughing.

Antonia and Jackson got sick of Uno after three hands and started instant messaging each other on their little handheld Nintendos, drawing each other pictures and teaching each other words from their languages. It was really cool.

Kids. What a trip. FARTICUS. Too much. I wish I was that creative.

There’s a place I dream about from time to time, and I dreamt about it again last night. I used to think I had actually gone there once, when I was awake, but now I am not so sure. It’s possible that I did go there once, but also possible that I have dreamed about this place so many times that it is as real to me as Venice, or The Vine. It is kind of weird though, that I would dream so vividly about one place over and over in my life if I had never really been to a place like that.

It’s so beautiful there, it’s easy to see why it would make an impression on me, even if I have only been there in my dreams. To get there, you have to walk through a valley, and the only valley I can think of that resembles this valley is the valley at the ocean entance to Big Basin State Park in the Santa Cruz Mountains. I know that no one who reads this blog has ever been to this place – well, maybe one or two of you have – but let me just tell you there is a reason that California has a reputation for it’s beauty, and this valley, though not nearly well known as Yosemite or Death Valley or even a smattering of COUNTY parks in California, is one of the reasons. The coastal range meets the ocean here, and foothills covered with wildflowers flank you on each side as you walk east towards mountains covered with redwood and pine trees. There is no one there. I’ve had SEX there. Maybe that is why I like to make it part of my favorite dream locale.

Anyhow. Keep walking – in the dream, not Big Basin – and eventually you’ll get to a small mountain range that is more like the high desert than the coastal range. Keep walking (this is where I start to think this is only a dream, and never really happened in my waking life, because that’s a long way to walk without hitting a bar for some refreshments) and you get to a military base of sorts. That’s right, a military base – and this is where you think, well, maybe it IS real. Or maybe, there is NO WAY it is real.

At the military base you have to get on a bus and they take you to yet another mountain range, and from there you hike to the top and have a little picnic. At the top, you have a view of the other range, which is always tan and pink with the sun going down, and everything glows.

That’s it. That’s the place and I don’t know why I dream of it so much but I do and it is always the same. The only thing I can think of, is that somehow it has taken the shape of the hills behind where I grew up in El Granada, California. In the end, I guess it comes down to this: after several months I got this email from classmates.com that I had a message from someone I used to know, which got me on the website, and I started checking out all the other people on there. One of them was this guy I used to know when I was seventeen or so and living in a dark apartment with an alcoholic boyfriend and no electricity or hot water. Life was pretty dismal, so I used to go up in the hills with this guy Matt and talk. Our relationship was very easy and almost quiet, really. I’d never hung out with anyone I could just be silent with before. We were the same age, just two kids with some bad circumstances, and then we planned to run away and work at the World’s Fair in Knoxville, Tennesse. We never did anything but talk – we were both too scared of my boyfriend for that – but we wanted to.

We never made it to Knoxville but sometimes I think of what my life would be like now if I had, because at that age I was already a wanderer, even though it would take me several years to become myself. And I don’t even know if it is the memory of those hills, or Matt’s name on a website, or the approaching end of this speeding bullet that was 2006 that brought the dream on again. Maybe the dream brings me back to something I know, even if I don’t know what it’s from. Maybe, it’s been in my waking life all along, but I just haven’t gotten there yet.

Is to pinch my nephew’s cheeks.

Happy holidays, everyone.

This morning I had another crazy dream. I always have crazy dreams, so when I have one that is really over the top, it makes an impression on me. I think that this one came to me so that I would write something, and I haven’t been writing anything, because I haven’t had anything to write about. I feel like I am drifting in a sort of sludge, and also when I haven’t written, then I start to resent writing. And when I start to resent writing, it really is all over until something intense smacks me in the face and makes me do it. Writing is sort of like a lover that way.

Also, it has been very cold here in San Diego. I fear that people from the far corners of my reality will be like are you fucking crazy? Do you REALLY think it is cold there? And I can only counter with – no, it is not REALLY cold here. But when it is fifty degrees it seems like twenty because a) we are simply not used to it and b) neither are our houses. My little beach shack is freezing inside. No matter how long I run the heat it never warms up. All of a sudden I am aware of the fact that I am aging, because in this little cold spell we have had, the joints in my fingers and toes got all swollen and hard to move. It is really, really, REALLY scary. Aging I mean. For a good forty years you look all baby faced and shit and then all of a sudden, Rheumatoid fucking arthritis. These changes are scary, also humbling. Maybe I am not so invincible as I thought I was.

So, then, the dream. I was on a plane, a big 7trillion7, going from here to Europe or something like that. There was a long time in the dream where I was on the plane, walking to and fro and watching movies and stuff like that, but then all of a sudden I was outside, and the top of the plane had no top. It was like a cruise ship plane. So I was hanging out up there for a while and then all of a sudden George Bush Senior was there and he was like, GET DOWN! I looked over the edge and there were little planes shooting at each other and also, at some targets on the ground. I bent over and kept walking and as I walked, I felt a bullet graze my back. George Bush Senior saved my life! But, in the end our 7trillion7 got shot down, but went down slowly and landed easily, as plane crashes in dreams do.

Then we were on the ground, in a green, lush, and I guess, war-torn country. Someone else from the plane was there with me, and we knew we had to save everyone else on the plane, but they had all turned into kernels of corn. Only coach though – first and business had been wiped out – vaporized. Only the people in coach were left and they were now corn. I had to rescue the kernels from ziplock bags that they had somehow ended up in after the crash, and put them into piles so they could breathe. At one point my associate said, how do we know if they are still alive? And I said YO! CORN! GIVE US A SIGN! At which point all the kernals started to shimmy and then we knew that we had saved them all.

It’s the end of the year and I feel that big changes are coming, and that is possibly why I am dreaming about saving corn, and also about the possibility that Bush Sr could save ME. Well, who knows what it all really means. It could be, most simply, that I am a creative person and I am doing fuck all with that. But I am thinking, thinking, thinking… about how to make the most of the years I have left before the really bad stuff sets in. I am thinking. Fight or flight… and the flight sounds better about now. So where should I go?

Look closely at this picture (which I stole from Lee Anne Wong’s blog.) Note the wine glass full of water in Marcel’s wine glass. Water? Water? Eh… maybe NOT water. Maybe, SMIRNOFF VODKA. Since Smirnoff seemed to be product placement #3 on Wednesday’s Top Chef (after Bailey’s and Parrot Bay whatever Rum) Marcel must have figured he deserved to pour a half fifth straight down his throat.

I guess it COULD be water. When I watched it, I was like what the hell are they all drinking water out of wine glasses for? Then it dawned on me – oh, no wine at this “holiday party.”

One wonders if the copious vodka swallowing had anything to do with Mia’s transformation into crazy black mama who’s gonna kick yous ass. But before we get into that…

This was a good episode of Top Chef with a real humdinger of a finale and for that, I am very grateful. They had a team challenge, and the challenge was a good one – make a spread of cocktail snacks for 200 people at a “holiday” party. Only, it wasn’t a holiday when they filmed – it was friggen August. Still, all through the episode everyone goes on about the HOLIDAYS. And pretends that it REALLY IS CHRISTMAS. Over and over, on and on, to the point where I found myself screaming at the TV “do you think we are FUCKING MORONS? We know it is NOT REALLY CHRISTMAS, PEOPLE.”

At any rate. There are two teams – one that works together (Betty, her hormones seemingly in check; Sam, boring as ever and with his hair getting way too bunnified; good ol’ steady Ilan; and Crazy Little Brother Marcel) and one that pretends to get along but really doesn’t (boring old Cliff who all of a sudden seems like Dr. Evil; Elia who doesn’t realize Dr. Evil is planning some, um, evilness; Mike who should just go ahead and get B for Baffled tattooed on his forehead; and Mia, who could have maybe combated Dr. Evil and saved a sinking ship.)

BSIM kicks ass with lots of food (thirteen dishes!) that looks cool and I guess, tastes pretty good. CEMM makes FOUR dishes and their table is a paltry, sad affair. It is an embarrassment. Poor Mia had been concerned that her rep as a caterer would be hindered if they couldn’t pull it off. And not only did they NOT pull it off, but they couldn’t even do that very well. To see Elia wandering around completely clueless as to how bad they were doing, and Mikey skulking back and forth with an empty tray… well, at least, THROW something at each other to make the lameness more palatable. This IS reality TV, after all.

Meanwhile, Dr. Evil, he of the Mr. Clean bald head and earrings and a squished, nasty looking turtle neck (is your head too heavy, dude?) stands around with his arms crossed watching the carnage. I didn’t even think of it, it took someone else to point it out to me (thanks Kim) but Cliff planned the disaster… to get rid of Elia.

Then Mia stepped in and said, “oh no Dr. Evil, you aren’t going to ruin the chances of this young genius who hopefully some day will have her own restaurant!”

Actually she didn’t say it quite like that. What she really said was stuff like “put your dick away, dude!” and “send my black ass home, I don’t give a shit!” She got all ghetto and shit, it was crazy. Then she went on for a while about homelessness and crack, among other things.

But whateves, regardless of the ghetto-ization of situation, the fact remains that Mia stepped down and let Elia stay, thereby foiling the nastyassness of Cliff, which makes me happy. Also, I am sure I will be using Miaisms far into the future (“I don’t give a black bone” even though I have white bones, and so does she) because they were sparkling nuggets of goodness on a bland palate. Fueled by Smirnoff? Quite possibly.

I have many tortures in mind for icky old Cliff. Tortilla press. Sausage Attachment. Meat Thermometer. But I think the damage has been done, and we can thank Mia for that.

Wha the fa is that thing on her head?

More on Mia later. Misused, ex-homeless, crack-sellin, apron-on-her-head-wearin, Mia.

In the meantime, you all try to keep your big black dick in your pants. Oh, Mia!

Well, I am a little late here, but what a fine episode of Top Chef we had on Wednesday. Finally! I was sort of getting to the point of not caring anymore.

Cooking on the beach over grills, for surfers: now that is a creative challenge. I loved all the “bro” and “bra” and the frolicking in the waves – it reminded me of how lucky I am to live at the beach. Everyone was so happy to be at the beach. Guess we can’t all live here though.

Anyhow it was awesome and there is an incredibly humorous and well-written blog about Top Chef HERE so go check it out. I have spit out my wine on more than one occasion reading Amuse-Biatch and even though I don’t much like spitting out good wine, I still head over there something like eight times a day.

Whatever. In other Top Chef news, Colleen and I went to TGI Friday’s in the Dallas airport last Friday and tried Betty Fraser’s winning dish.

The portobello mushroom grilled cheese sandwich was pretty good. There was not much to it – it wasn’t exactly heaving volume-wise, but it tasted good, all four bites of it. The soup was cloyingly sweet. I know it’s sweet pepper but whatever – it tasted like a hot popsicle. Or something like that. I don’t imagine the dish hanging around the Friday’s menu for eternity or anything. Not when there are jalepeno popper sandwiches to be had.

I am in love with the new Sparklehorse record. I think I can safely say this is the best thing I have bought this year. It’s lush and beautiful and exactly what I need. Check it out.

In this months Food and Wine Magazine there is an article about Top Chef and a little contest between four of the chefs – Sam, Cliff, Betty and Elia.

I pray these aren’t the final four. Betty and Elia? Yick.

If they are the final four, then this season is not just Beyond Lame, it is Uber Beyond Lame, also Pukealicios.

I guess tonight it might be Mike that gets the boot, despite Anthony Bourdain’s homeboy handshake last week. But I oh, so wish it will be Betty or Elia. Next time I go to Lodi (and yes, I DO go to Lodi) I want to stop by Wine and Roses or wherever he is currently working and buy Michael a beer. And I’ll also buy hometown boy Frankie the Bull a beer, if he ever writes to me again (he did write once to tell me that he drinks Miller Lite and that he is not a dork.)

Those guys probably won’t make it. And neither will Marcel, who probably should have won last week. I wonder if Elia’s winning mushroom soup makes green bean casserole even better? Cutting edge. Yeah, right.

Let’s hope it gets better.

Today was one of those days where I ask myself: doesn’t Christmas suck? This is my busiest month and it is crazy and I make good money and everything but damn if it doesn’t just totally burn me out. I get sick of talking to people. Some lowly sales clerk at one of my accounts was a little short with me today (“what do you think of this book?” My contact asked him. “I don’t think there is much there.” Lowly sales clerk said. “Yeah, but they are SELLING.” I say.) Upended back-hairs and borderline dirty looks ensued. Tis the season. I can’t blame the guy for acting like a dickhead, as he has been having to explain why young, expensive Cabernet Sauvignon might not be the best choice to go with turkey and stuffing or oyster stew or whatever to way too many people in the past couple of weeks. And I can’t blame myself either, because I have been working this account for fifteen years. Fifteen Fucking Years! I know what sells there, believe me. I have gone through the first three weeks of December – AKA Hell – for fifteen years straight, except for when I took a break to start my own catering company but then also moonlighted at another kind of hell, the Williams-Sonoma call center. Even when I lived in Italy I came home just before Christmas and went to work packing orders for the rep who was handling my territory while I was gone.

It’s so exhausting. Also I think I might need glasses. Everytime I drive for more than an hour or so I get a headache. Does that mean I need glasses? At first I thought it was from playing Sonic Youth or Spoon too loud but today I was listening to a learn-German tape so that can’t be it. Unless both loud music AND German gives me a headache. Today I learned some cool stuff, like how to go to a pharmacy and ask for some toe plaster in German. I kid you not. There is a plaster you can buy should you get a stubbed toe.

I do have something remotely interesting to write and that is this (especially for my readers who know her): I got an email from Lisa Doucette and she is living in NEW ZEALAND! Lisa is one of my best friends ever but she moved to Vancouver a few years ago with her husband and kid and we lost touch. I wrote to her a week or so ago and her email got bounced back – because they are in friggen New Zealand! Now with two kids. Thankfully she got a bee in her bonnet to write me just after I unsuccessfully wrote her. Her husband Andy is working for… OK this is how exhausted I am, I can’t even think of the name of that Hobbit director dude. Anyhow. Lisa and Andy are blogging about their new life in New Zealand and it is hella cool. I’ve always wanted to go there, and now I HAVE to! Check it out.

New Zealand sure is lucky.

First things first – today is the second anniverary of The OB Vine! Crazy to think that exactly two years ago, I managed to wander in to be the second customer (who was the first one? Can we cancel him out?) after many months of waiting. And now, the whole crew and the bar itself has become such a part of my life. It is remarkable, really. One day you are in a one place (in my case, a very solitary one), the next day you are in a totally different place, a better one. And that is because of The Vine and the people I have met there.

Second thing – Happy Thanksgiving. This is an American holiday, but with a sentiment I try to acheive every day. I am incredibly lucky and truly thankful every day. Regardless of the fucked-upness of the world in general, things and events I see daily remind me that there is a lot of beauty, love and compassion in the world. Maybe I am an optimist, maybe I am just blind, or stupid. But if you can take that love, even if it is blind, and spread it, well.. maybe you can shift everything from bad, to good.

I love my family and want to tell Jay, Carrie, Ryan, Tom, and my mom, Connie, that if it weren’t for you I wouldn’t be writing this mushy stuff right now. You are the best family ever. Kasch and Antonia, I can’t wait for you to come here and hang out with us and I am oh, so happy that you will be here.

And then there are my friends. I have SUCH AWESOME FRIENDS. Colleen, you fucking rock and I would take a bullet for you. If there are things to be thankful for, it is friends like you. Leigh and Laurie, Chad, Ariane, Lisa, Prentiss… you are all family to me even though you don’t live close to me anymore. No matter what though, you will be family forever.

My friends at home, my new home: well let’s just say life in OB is good, but wouldn’t be quite so good without you. Mark, Andy, Cheryl, Brian and Hannah, Margaret and Bob, the cast and crew of The Vine…

And then there my internet family from slowtalk. Who aren’t really an internet family since I have met and partied with quite a few of them. It’s a pretty awesome group – one that was enriched my life immensely.

It’s so crazy. I am living alone and have been for some time but to be totally honest, I feel totally surrounded by people and energy all the time. I am lucky. I am thankful. Happy Thanksgiving everyone.