I am heading out tomorrow on a two-week journey, my usual January journey up the coast, the final stop being the Unified Grape Symposium in Sacramento, a trade show overrun with not only winemakers but also cellar rats and vineyard workers. One of the coolest thing about this show is, some of the seminars are presented in Spanish, because, hello, who do you think tends the vines in this great State?

First though, I am spending the weekend in Arcadia, and hitting the Santa Anita racetrack for two whole days with my friend Nancy. She has never been to the races before. I LOVE Santa Anita… it’s a world-class track. This weekend, it’ll be clear skies, we’ll be able to see the normally smog-obscured mountains, and drink some overpriced Pinot Grigio at the Uber-bar there. Someone won the pick-six today, so there is no carryover, but heck, who am I kidding? I’ll be lucky to win one race.

My grandparents saw Seabiscuit run on one of their first dates. My mom told Nancy, never bet on a sweaty horse. I will always bet on the horse with a foodie name. Learned my lesson at Del Mar last summer when a longshot, Habanero, came in and I didn’t bet on her. That was (in a long history of racing fuck-ups) the stupidest bet I didn’t make.

I am a little bummed I am not going to see the Arcade Fire in one of their many SoCal shows this weekend. Especially because I listen to their record constantly, and dream their music when I am asleep. But oh well. Nancy, the Golden Globes, and a take-out pizza will make me forget what I am missing (hopefully.)

It’s going to be a riotous weekend, and from there I hit the road and head to the Central Coast, working all day and then at 4:00, having a taste or two. Working up there doesn’t suck.

Next weekend, am taking a class with the famous Diva up in Sonoma. After that there will be a Slowtrav party, always a good time. I’m heading down to my hometown after, will chill with my brother Jay and his wife for a day, then start working again.

The weather is fantastic. I am hoping for no more rain. I am SICK OF RAIN. No more rain, please. For awhile there, it was reminding me of Venice, where in March 2001 it rained every single day. Only here, palm fronds might fall on your head, instead of decaying plaster.

I’ll try to write from the wine-soaked road.

I am totally exhausted. I think it is because in that other universe, the nighttime one, things are a little crazy. I think I am dreaming constantly. I woke up Sunday at 3:00 AM in a total cold sweat panic attack. I can’t remember what I was dreaming, but knowing me, it was something totally insane.

This morning, I dreamed about pain, because I was in pain. It?s a female thing. I was in pain all night and then was dreaming about the pain. Even though I am very good at self-medication, I hate to take painkillers. I don’t like aspirin or motrin because for some reason I think it is harmful to me. So I just suffer. But try to take away my wine and I will bite your hand off. I know, I am really weird.

So I had crazy dreams laced with pain.

In one dream there was a little girl of about seven, the fictional daughter of a mysterious friend, who had these crazy feet. Her feet were huge, and ugly. They looked like the feet of a fairy-tale witch. I said to her, “dang, you have big feet! What size are they?” And she said size 5, but they were way bigger than that.

J Lo was also in my dream, and she was upset about something so everyone was walking on tiptoes around her. She was having a conniption fit because she wanted some Pozole. In my dream J Lo’s current role was as a Mexican waitress, who always, after her shift, went to another Mexican restaurant to eat Pozole, still with her Mexican waitress costume on. Then she always complained about her meal. This was J Lo’s role, within a role, within my dream.

Later I think I was walking with J Lo, the girl with the crazy feet, and some other people really far to get a meal. For some reason we were walking five miles on a crappy road. And I was in major pain, so I was like, this is not cool. Then some dude hurt his leg and was leaning on me, and I was like GET OFF ME DUDE, IT FUCKING HURTS! Then a streetcar pulled up and we all got on, thanks god.

After that I woke up and took some Aleve.

But what does it all mean?

I’m having a little bit of a hard time, er, moving into the new year. It’s already January 4th and before we know it it will be Valentine’s Day and then Bastille Day and then Halloween and then, it will be this day again.

I don’t remember it being like this last year. I think it is this heaviness that is covering the whole world. I remember when Princess Di and Mother Teresa died like the same day or same week or something, and right after I was feeling uber-crappy, and my mom said it was because half the world was in mourning for those two women and that energy was affecting everyone. This feeling is like that feeling, times 800.

The ocean, eating people. I think the earth is really pissed off at us right now, and who can blame her?

I’m not one of those people who jumps on the diet and exercise bandwagon January 2nd and this year, I seem to have even gone in the other direction. I am stuffing my face with whatever is around, trying to drink all the wine and eat all the chocolate at once instead of saving some for tomorrow. If I don’t watch it I’m not going to get that mystery guitar player I’ve been wanting (it’s even a mystery to me, so don’t start guessing quite yet.)

Everything moves on though, so maybe I will finish all the candy tonight, and tomorrow the sun will come out and I can walk up the hill, and look down at the ocean and still love it. We’ll see.

I had to fight hard after work today, to stay away from The Vine. I fear I am becoming a Vine Addict. It’s fairly frightening – I used to be happy just sitting at home drinking wine. And I think it is because of The Vine that (horrors) I DID NOT HAVE ANY WHITE WINE IN THE HOUSE TODAY. This never, ever happens. It’s The Vine’s fault for having an endless supply of all the things I love white-wise – Pinot Gris, Riesling, Sauvignon Blanc. At around four P.M. I start to get itchy for white wine, and I used to be able to satisfy that itch at home. Those days are clearly gone.

I fought the urge instead of giving in (and god knows I am a major pushover when it comes to arguments with myself) because I am having a party on New Year’s Day, and tomorrow is New Year’s Eve. And I am getting over a cold, and I went to The Vine last night. One must take a break, if only for stamina’s sake.

My party, the second annual gathering for hangover relief, starts at 11:30 and I have bought insane amounts of liquids and solids – insane, because I have absolutely no idea how many people are coming. I think I can safely count on twelve people, but who knows, maybe forty will actually show up. The food has taken a bit of a white-trash turn, mostly because this is the stuff that tastes really good when you have a hangover. Check out the menu:

Clam Dip… Salsa and Chips…
Turkey Pot Pie, Spinach Enchilada Casserole Thingy,
Scalloped Potatoes with Ham. Hoppin’ John! Cocktail Weenies with Bourbon Slather.
My one nutritious menu item? Salad, but with candied pecans on it.
My over the top dessert? Bread Pudding Laced with Honey Grappa.

The warehouse manager at the main office was nice enough to inform me we have tomorrow off, otherwise I’d be sitting here working, instead of cooking, which I clearly need to start early on.

It’s almost 2005, who knew we would make it this far. Happy New Year to my faithful readers and all my buds and even you, Mr. Spammer.

Love,
Vinoaddictuspoptarticus.

I can’t stop thinking about the word Poptart. It all started on Thanksgiving when I went to my friend Cheryl’s friends house for dinner and the guy was of Ukrainian heritage and he made these apple turnover things and gave me some to take home. I was eating one late that night when I said to myself, it’s like a Ukrainian Poptart! This is how the whole Poptart thing was born.

I am sort of an obsessive person. For instance right now I am totally obsessed with this band The Arcade Fire. I can’t stop listening to their first record, Funeral, but since it is on a gazillion top ten lists I won’t even try to go there. Now, I am obsessed with seeing them live, partly because of this guy’s experience. (You must listen to Wake Up. You MUST.) Sadly they are playing a show at the Casbah on January 17, when I won’t be here. Rotten luck. They are playing not one, not two, but THREE shows in L.A. the weekend of January 15 & 16, and I may have to attempt one of those, even though they are all sold out and tickets being scalped on ebay and craigslist for way too much money. I want to go, bad. I am totally obsessed and can think of nothing else, except for the word Poptart.

So back to that then. It looks like I will soon have my very own website, and I am trying to name it. I immediately thought of Ukrainian Poptart but was shot down by webmaster Pauline. “I don’t like that,” she said. “Besides, you aren’t even Ukrainian!” Well, she’s got a point there. Plain old Poptart is already taken. So now I am thinking about Traveling Poptart.

We shall see.

So last night I was at the Vine Wine Bar (where indeed I am spending most of my time these days) drinking wine with one of the owners, Hannah. She gave me a glass of wine to sniff, and for the life of me I can’t remember what it was, since there were like fifteen different glasses in front of us. I smelled it and said, “smells like a Strawberry Poptart!” She smelled it and said “you are right! It does smell like a Strawberry Poptart!”

hmmm… Red Wine Poptart, anyone?

I think I spend too much time alone these days. There are so many great things about being alone, but if you spend too much time there, you sort of forget about other stuff. Like, speaking. I think I listen to music and the voices in my head too much and also, I spend too much time looking through my fuschia bangs, because when I look through them everything looks pink. If you have the right music on, it’s like you are on drugs even when you are not. It’s pretty cool, let me tell you, and absolutely worth the money and eventual hair-loss it costs you in the end.

But this is not what I meant to write about tonight.

Today I talked to the guy who manages my IRA and he said the bus is about to hit a wall, and everyone in the world is on that bus.

Today I saw on amazon.com that today is the last day to order, if you want that stuff by Christmas.

Today I couldn’t stop thinking about the liver of the guy in that movie Super Size Me.

Today I realized, I sometimes wish I didn’t have any communication with the world whatsoever.

Today I realized my current dream of traveling and blogging through Russia might be crazy, because they don’t make it easy for travelers there, and shake you down for cash and shit.

But I know in the end, everything will stay the same as before. Including the dream. So get ready Moscow muthas, for 2006.

I have a perfect Christmas Tree. I went out with the intention to buy one, and did, at Target, on a very warm and sunny day. Warm like 70 degrees warm, sucka.

I have a thing for Christmas Trees. I don’t really care about other Christmas stuff at all. I like presents, of course, the buying and receiving of. Also I have been known to be fond of alcohol-laced eggnog. But I am not a Christian (or anything anti-Christian, I just believe in the Great Spirit, dude) so I don’t get into the setting up of mangers and I am definitely not the type to put a giant Santa or Reindeer in my front yard. But a tree… I take care of a dying Christmas tree better than I take care of my one live plant. Why? I like to think it is because I have some crazy collective memory thing going on, that goes back to my days as a pagan many centuries ago. But it is probably a bit simpler than that.

When I was thirteen I watched my mom watch our Christmas tree. For some reason, this one year she was totally into that tree and she sat in front of it for hours, staring at it, totally happy. At least that’s the way I remember it. The overall feeling for me was, my mother is at peace. Everything is going just right at the moment. She is happy and she loves that Christmas Tree. She was younger than I am now and red and yellow Christmas tree lights picked up her happy energy and projected it back, towards me. I am not a painter but I could paint that, if you gave me the right paints.

Life goes in cycles though, and three years later I spent my first Christmas on my own. I was sixteen and had my very first tree, and bought my very first ornaments. My life was in total upheaval but I had my little tree, and it grounded me. I still have those first ornaments. Every year I buy a couple more. In Venice I bought some crazy disco earrings and made ornaments out of them, and I have a manger scene in a tiny coconut shell I bought in Budapest. (Yeah, I know, I am not into manger scenes but this thing is really cool, also it goes on a Tree.)

So I have my little tree, the one that called out to me at Target. It is only four feet tall so I put it on an empty box covered with pillowcases. It’s got the ornaments collected over twenty three years of my life on it’s branches and a little copper mesh heart I bought at a garage sale this morning crowns the top. Underneath is a little pink princess, and under that, the coconut shell manger. Jesus, I am such a girl sometimes. Shit, did I just say Jesus? Fuck.

The past few days I have been totally bombarded by spammers who post ?comments, which are really ads, on my blog. Man, they are fast. When one hits, if you can’t catch it (the asshole spammer) in time, there might be ten comments, in just a couple of minutes. I am pretty fast and I immediately delete the comment/ad and also, ban the ISP that it came from (I get an email notification every time someone posts a comment on my blog.) But these it-creatures seem to have a trillion ISP addresses.

These spammers have fake email addresses. YO, BOB DURRELL. Go fuck yourself and take your Texas Holdems with you! Hey Tom from cheapchristmas.com.uk – your awe-inspiring comments make me want to go shopping, on your site, even though I live on another continent! Yeah, right, you wanker.

But today I got hit with the worst ? spam from websites about rape and torture. I am almost too disgusted to even tell jlkkjkjkjljjl@jkfdsjfskljfdks.com to fuck off.

But here is a little message for all you dickhead spammers – you can post, but I will just delete. Go ahead and waste lots of time. I am way too anal to let even one of your nasty-ass comments remain on my blog. And just to let you know, rape, torture, and harassment are ALL Really Bad Karma.

I just got done reading David Sedaris’s “Me Talk Pretty One Day,” a collection of really funny essays about random shit and also, about living in Paris and learning to speak French. I don’t read so much anymore as I am way too addicted to the internet for that, and when I do I usually read travel stuff or stuff I know will put me to sleep. “Me Talk Pretty Some Day” is not boring and not about travel, and I loved it, which means I should probably start turning off my computer more, something I have known for some time, actually.

Anyhow there is one essay in this book where David Sedaris is on the Paris Metro and some American starts telling his wife/date/fuck/whatever about how they needed to watch out, because David Sedaris is a PICKPOCKET. In English, on a train, loudly, the guy goes on to talk about how a pickpocket got him here or there and how you had to watch “them” every minute. So David Sedaris just stands there going “wha tha fa” and doesn’t say anything because he doesn’t want it to turn into a “handshake moment.”

So after I read this I start thinking about something I read on the slowtalk message board, how a regular poster had been on the bus in Florence with her two nieces, and some loud America pointed at the children and screamed to his companions, “WATCH OUT, THEY’RE PICKPOCKETS!.” Clueless and crew, wandering cities around the world, so stupid they call EVERYONE a pickpocket. Like no one else speaks English.

This kind of shit gets my panties all in a twist. So I started thinking, hey, the next time I go to Europe I am going to become a Silent American Non-Pickpocketer Who Fucks With Stupid Americans. I will go from metro to metro, piazza to piazza, holding onto the poles of subways menacingly and eyeing giant video cameras with slitted, knowing eyes. I will walk behind people a little too close, and when they turn around I will smile and shrug. When they call me a pickpocket I will just glare at someone else like I don’t understand anything, not my own language even.

But really this won’t cure the problem of people fearful of pickpocketers, and in the long run (I know myself) I would want to do something more, like SAY something. Especially if I’ve had a glass of wine or two. I’d end up saying something like I was on the streetcar in San Francisco, if someone like this happened to board and started spouting off about someone in front of them being a pickpocketer. Like “ARE YOU A FUCKING MORON? HAVE YOU NEVER BEEN ANYWHERE BEFORE? NEVER RIDDEN ON THE SUBWAY OR BUS? DO YOU NOT HAVE EARS? EYES? WHY IS IT, YOU ONLY HAVE A BIG, FAT, LOUD MOUTH?”

I’m not sure what good any of this would do, but it would be fun to hassle some scared-of-pickpocketers-to-the-point-of-making-them-even-stupider tourists.
And maybe I could write about it, and then write the whole thing off.

There are some things that have been puzzling me lately, like how come people go Christmas shopping on the day after Thanksgiving? I mean, why would someone put themselves through that hell?

Also, why do people buy crap for each other? By crap I mean, crappy presents. Like bad scarves and cheap calendars. It is a science, buying good presents. Good scientists don’t shop at crappy malls.

When I was living in San Francisco, I used to go down to Union Square around Christmas, to look at the big tree in Union Square and have a Gibson at Scala or Champagne at the Rotunda at Neiman Marcus. Shopping didn’t get me down there – the drinks did. I love the Rotunda at Neiman Marcus. The big tree almost hitting the fantastic ceiling, the children dressed up in outfits that cost more than my whole wardrobe, the bartenders who are just regular guys and who are nice to everybody, even people with safety-pin piercings in their eyebrows. To get up to the Rotunda though, you have to (unless you know the secret trick) walk across the ground floor to the escalator. And on the way, even in this most expensive of stores, they have tables and tables of the most hideous and bizarre crap, only priced at $69.95 instead of $19.95. Same ugly scarf, only it’s cashmere instead of polyester. Something like that.

It’s one of the only things I miss about San Francisco, along with the Thai House and my old roommates and friends – barhopping in Union Square at a great cost once a year at Christmastime. Well maybe not only at Christmastime – there were also those afternoons after getting my teeth cleaned at 450 Suffer Street. Whateves, those days are gone.

I’ve already done all my shopping and I did it in Venice so everyone will be happy, just to get an item from Venice. Everything seems better when you hauled it from a foriegn country, even slippers. But I am not the gift genius in my family – that would be my brother Jay. He always goes crazy and spends too much money, but he manages to pick out the best stuff. Last year he got me a set of regulation Bocce Balls and Jeff Buckley Live at Sine, among other things. That’s pretty good, eh? My brother Tom gave me a juicer and I haven’t even used it in almost a year, because it takes up half my kitchen. Maybe I’ll wrap it up and give it back to him, heh heh.

Onward. Only three more shopping weeks ’till Christmas, but you won’t find moi anywhere near a store. Unless there is a cool place to have a Gibson inside.

And if I told you, it wouldn’t be a secret anymore, but have a look around and you’ll figure it out on your own.