It’s Never Exactly The Thing You Want

So, I passed 1,000 subscribers on my YouTube channel. Of course, it’s not the channel that I have been trying to grow for the past four years. It’s the channel that I started as a lark, as a joke, as a place to express my peeves about the city of Simi Valley – the town I live in… grudgingly.

Living Through A Demographic Shift

Simi Valley is a backward little suburb of Los Angeles that thinks it’s something that it’s not. Many of the people who live here have been here their whole lives. They still remember what it was like growing up here in the 1960s and 70s. I get that because I grew up in the adjacent city of Thousand Oaks in the 80s and 90s. The thing is, though, both cities have changed into unrecognizable versions of their former selves, but folks in Simi don’t want to accept that.

The whole area has changed. Both cities are located just outside the Los Angeles County line and were both rural through the 1960s. Less than a decade before I was born, sheep were still grazing in the hills across from my parent’s house. Just 15 years before I was born, my current house in Simi Valley was an orange grove. That’s the landscape most of the Genxers and Boomers in the area remember growing up in.

From Rural to Suburban

As Los Angeles grew, though – due in no small part to the aerospace industry that called Los Angeles home – the population spilled over the county line. The white-collars moved their families out of crowded and expensive Los Angeles and The San Fernando Valley to The Conejo Valley, while the blue-collars moved to Simi Valley. That socioeconomic divide would have a rippling effect through the area over the next half-century.

Thousand Oaks saw what was coming and planned for its growth. They created a master plan that reserved certain parts of the valley as open space. They restricted the height that buildings could be built to, and they imposed city-wide rules governing the appearance of the houses and neighborhoods in town, much the same way HOAs do in new developments.

Simi Valley, on the other hand, took a slightly different approach to the inevitable growth they were facing. They opposed it like a petulant child.

Don’t Let Simi Become The Valley

The community’s biggest fear is that Simi Valley will turn into “The Valley,” The San Fernando Valley, that is. To prevent such an awful fate, the city of Simi Valley enacted such measures as bitching whenever anyone wanted to build anything within the city limits and whining whenever they succeeded. The town viewed any growth as a one-way ticket to becoming The Valley. So, they opposed it all without acknowledging the reality that people needed a place to live, and Simi Valley had lots of cheap land in close proximity to Los Angeles.

The growth was going to happen whether they wanted it or not. Thousand Oaks knew that and made a plan. Simi Valley missed the writing on the wall, and while they were blindly opposing growth to avert a mini Valley from growing up around them, a mini Valley grew up around them. By just saying no, without offering up a better vision for the future of the city, the citizens of Simi Valley forfeited the opportunity to help direct the inevitable change. Without input from the people who live here, the developers changed the fabric of the city to suit their own best interests.

Simi Valley: Suburban Hell

What we’re left with is a car-centric, suburban nightmare. A mini, but inferior Valley. Simi Valley isn’t as crowded as The San Fernando Valley is yet, but it’s also not the idealized memory of what Simi’s residents think it used to be. It’s 41 square miles of poorly constructed tract housing and strip malls. The people who live in the ticky-tacky single-family homes all over town can’t afford them. As a consequence, maintenance is deferred indefinitely at best, perpetually at worst, giving the whole town a rundown, stagnate feel. Many in the city are delusional about what the city has become.

Meanwhile, our public schools continue to close, our public agencies continue to sell off their assets to private developers, and public transit in town is almost non-existent. What we have doesn’t go where you need it to or when, so owning a car is not optional. Bonnie and I tried going car-free for two years. It was difficult, but we made it work. The trick is to never be in a hurry to be anywhere and try not to leave town. Even before going car-free, we spent more time traversing Simi Valley outside of a car than most of Simi Valley’s residents. That experience has shown me that Simi Valley drivers are openly hostile to anyone and anything not inside their vehicle.

25 to Life in Simi Valley

I started 25 to Life in Simi Valley to vent my frustration with this city through editorial-style videos. I was busy trying to grow my other YouTube channels, though, so I put this one on the back burner. Then, one day, I was scrolling through Photos, looking for a video. I discovered that whenever I’m at a railroad crossing when a train passes by, I record it. I was aware that I had done this before, but I hadn’t realized that I did it every time. There were dozens of train videos on my phone, and they were all from Simi Valley. So, I decided I might as well upload them to my Simi Valley-themed YouTube channel.

September 12, 2024

And that’s pretty much all that was on the channel for almost two years. Then, a traffic light at a major intersection went out, and it took nearly three weeks for the city to repair it. I knew it was out from day one, but I didn’t pay much attention to it because I hadn’t been through the intersection that week. It wasn’t until I saw murmurings about it online and a notice from the city that it would be fixed that weekend, that I paid it any attention.

September 20, 2024

On day 8, I went out to the intersection to see how the trains were navigating the crossing and to get some video. My assumption was that with the light being out for so long, the crossing guard was out, too. One of the most viewed videos on my channel is of a train crossing Sycamore Drive while the crossing guard is malfunctioning. The conductor had to get out and stop traffic. The video has nearly 30,000 views, and I shot it from across the street. I thought if I could get a video of the conductor stopping traffic from a few feet away, I could make a video that would do even better.

So, I rode out to the intersection and waited for a train to come. While I waited, I pointed my camera at the intersection. I didn’t know what I would do with all of the footage. What I was really hoping for was to capture a car accident. It took about half an hour for a train to pass by, and I discovered that the crossing guard was absolutely unaffected by the malfunctioning traffic light. The train crossed the street as if there was nothing out of the ordinary going on at that intersection. I recorded one more train, and then I rode back home, deflated.

September 24, 2024

I didn’t give the traffic light any thought until the following Tuesday. That morning, a post on the city’s Instagram account basically said, Update: the light is still out. It was so on-brand for someone from the city of Simi Valley to have bothered to make that post. On Thursday, I rode through the intersection on my way home from running an errand. I sat on the northwest corner, recording the intersection, for over an hour. Then, I moved to the southwest corner for a while before moving to the southeast corner. I now had footage of the debacle at the intersection from all four corners. But what would I do with it all? I started thinking about making a video flaming the city for taking so long to fix this traffic light.

Now You Have My Attention, Simi Valley

Then, on Saturday, the 28th, I saw a small notice in the Simi Valley Acorn saying the light would be fixed that weekend. I rode out to the street to see if anyone was working out there, but there was no one.

I spent the weekend working on the video, and by Sunday night, I had the whole thing done. All I needed was an ending, and I wanted to record it at the intersection. I thought about going out that night, but I thought it would be better during the daytime when cars would actually be going through. (Simi Valley rolls up its sidewalks at 8 p.m.) So, I waited until the next morning.

A Surprise Twist

On Monday morning, I rode out to the intersection to record the ending of the video, and I was shocked to see crews working to fix the signal. I recorded the ending that I had written, anyway, and I ended up using most of it in the final edit. Then, I sat on the block wall on the southeast corner, setup my camera, and pointed it at the intersection.

My attention was divided between the intersection and the crew working in the signal controller cabinet. I guess I was freaking them out, so one of them came over to see what I was up to. I told him I was making a video for my YouTube channel. He asked me the name of it and I told him. He understood immediately that I was no threat. I asked him when he thought they would have the signal restored, but all he would say was that he hoped it would be fixed by the time he went home at 3:30 p.m. Then, they went to lunch.

And Now We Wait

When I saw them return from Presto Pasta with their lunches, I realized that I should have gone home when they left to get batteries, water, and something to eat, but I wanted to make sure I was there when the signal came back on. I had no idea how long it would take them, and I didn’t want to miss anything, so I just sat there. I didn’t get up, even to stretch or anything, for four and a half hours. As the late September sun slowly moved past Simi’s only skyscraper, I felt like Claudia at the end of Interview With The Vampire, but I didn’t move.

As 3 p.m. approached, I was down to my last battery and starting to get nervous that I might miss the moment the signal came back on. I could tell that the crew was getting close, though, so I conserved the last of my juice. My camera was rolling when the signal came back on. I recorded the new ending to my video to the bemusement of the crew, and then I rode home to finish and upload the video.

A Race Against Irrelevance

My plan was to have it published by 5 p.m. An unrealistic goal, to be sure. Even if I had simply gone home and added in the ending without doing anything else, I don’t think I could have finished by 5 p.m.That was unfortunate because I didn’t see any point in uploading it any later than that. I wanted to publish the video before the light was fixed while people were still complaining about it online and in person. Now that the signal was restored, no one would be talking about it. Morning commuters would pass through the intersection, oblivious that the signal was ever out.

I sat down to finish the video anyway. Having spent an additional four hours recording the intersection, I had gigabytes of video footage to go through. I couldn’t scrub through the footage either because the cars moved so fast that I couldn’t tell what any of them were doing. So, I had to watch the footage in real-time. All of it. It was a worthwhile endeavor, though, because there were some great clips. The two cars who blew through the light from the south, both came from my time on the corner that day. The shot of the car half-filled with balloons also came from that last day.

I Wasn’t Even Going To Publish It!

About eleven hours after they fixed the signal, I finished the video. It was 3 a.m. on October 1st. What was the point of publishing the video now? Folks will be up in just a few hours, and the out-of-order traffic light will already have faded into a distant memory. The video was done, though, so I scheduled it to publish at 8 a.m., and I went to bed. I didn’t expect anyone to see it, and hardly anyone did—for almost two weeks.

It Resonated With The People of Simi Valley

Then, on Saturday, October 12, I started getting lots of notifications from YouTube alerting me that people were leaving comments on the video. I logged into my channel to see what was going on, and I was stunned to see that the video had been seen over 1,000 times in just the past hour. I couldn’t understand why. Was YouTube pushing it?

Then, it occurred to me that someone must have shared it somewhere. Nextdoor seemed like the most obvious place because it’s hyper-local, but I didn’t find anything, so I tried Facebook. I did a search for the name of the video: 18 Days of Chaos and Inconvenience in Simi Valley. I didn’t have to scroll far before I saw my face looking back at me in the video’s thumbnail. Someone had shared it to a local group called Simi360, and the video took off.

Life Resumes In Simi Valley

Two months after the City of Simi Valley restored the traffic signal, my video about it was still going strong. Because of it, my little YouTube side project now has over 1,000 subscribers. I don’t know if the lesson here is that I have no idea what people want or that the universe never gives you the thing you think you want. Either way, I won’t worry about it. I’ll keep making content that interests me, and maybe it will resonate with others from time to time. If you’re one of the thousand-plus people that has subscribed so far, I thank you for your support. Stay tuned!

#1kcreator

The post I Passed 1,000 Subscribers With A Video About Simi Valley appeared first on Retro Active Lifestyle.

Water For Elephants Is A Story About Sex

I had no idea what Water for Elephants was about when I cracked the spine of my 99¢ paperback. The previous owner had never even bothered to read it before donating it to my local Goodwill. Then, it sat on my own bookshelf for a year and a half before I got around to reading it. After seeing a copy of it at every thrift and junk store I had been in for the past month, I felt like the universe was urging me to finally read it. So, I decided it was time to find out what this book was all about.

I gleaned from the red and black stripes on the spine and the mention of “elephant” in the title that the story would have something to do with the circus. And while the story takes place against the backdrop of a depression-era train circus, it’s actually about a horny young man’s quest for his first nut despite a quick succession of life-altering tragedies.

A Not-So-Brief Synopsis Of Water For Elephants

The protagonist is 23-year-old college dropout and virgin, Jacob Jankowski. As the story begins, Jacob is filled with anxious anticipation. He is about to take his veterinary school final exam, but that’s not what he’s excited about. He’s excited because he is hopeful that after the exam, a beautiful and generous college co-ed named Catherine Hale will pop his cherry. She’s a cock-tease (my words), but he hopes things will be different this time. Oh, wait, I’m getting ahead of myself.

The story doesn’t actually begin there; it begins, ironically, in the middle of the story’s climax with a chapter titled “Prologue.” It was no doubt the publisher who added the ending of the story to the beginning of the book to stoke interest and hook the reader after the first chapter didn’t test well. I’m sure that choice helped to sell more copies of the book, but it makes it feel like the story starts over in each of the first three chapters. Why not just rewrite the opening?

So, after they spoiled the ending in the first four pages, this horny tale can finally begin. But not quite yet. We still have to endure a flash-forward or a flash present, or I suppose if you’re counting from the end of the book, it’s a flash-back, but not as far back as the flash-back the book opened with.

Not Another Notebook

Anyway, Chapter One begins in a nursing home in the present. It’s reminiscent of The Notebook, or rather, I should say derivative. I haven’t read many books from the ’90s and 00s, so I don’t know if starting stories in nursing homes was a trend at that time or if it’s just a coincidence that the two books I’ve read from that time period start off that way, but I don’t like it. Every instance I’ve seen is to add a twist to the end of the story: Noah and Allie dying at the same time, Rose tossing the rock back into the Atlantic, etc.

The twists are fun, I guess, but a nursing home as a backdrop is as uninspired, sterile, soulless, and boring as a cubicle in a late 90s movie. It’s sad in a pointless and irredeemable way, like a joke that goes on for too long. If these characters had anything in their lives worth writing about, then write about those things. I don’t need to know what happens after the curtain drops, especially if it’s just that they rotted away in a nursing home. Even the Water For Elephants movie adaptation nixes the whole nursing home subplot.

What Have We Learned So Far?

So, by this point, we’ve read the prologue and two pages of the first chapter, and all we know is that there was a stampede at a circus at some point in the distant past, an elderly person is in a nursing home, and we don’t know what, if anything, they have to do with the aforementioned circus. We don’t even know if the protagonist is a man or a woman, yet.

I know we’re not supposed to see gender anymore, anyone can be whatever sex or no sex they want to be, but the book was written in 2006, and we didn’t care about shit like that back then. Plus, regardless of sex, it’s just common courtesy to give me an image to keep in my mind as your story goes along. It takes until the top of page seven before we find out that the main character is a man, and his name is Jacob.

Jacob Is Mark

Jacob lives in a nursing home, and for whatever reason, he is unusually sensitive to people claiming to have worked in the circus. He’s gatekeeping the whole experience like it’s a zero-sum game that he thinks he can win if he can just outlive all the other carnies. We never really find out why. His disdain for a new resident who claimed to have carried water for elephants as a child isn’t explained, either. In fact, the title of the book, Water For Elephants, is never explained. I took the term to mean a job in the circus that didn’t actually exist. I think it was a rib, like how you might you might send someone on a snipe hunt.

All we learn about Jacob in the first chapter is that he’s 91 or 93 and that he has a major hard-on for the circus because he worked in it for seven years. I could understand his reverence and interest in the circus, as he entered middle age because it was a larger part of his life and not so long ago at that point. Seventy years on, however, his time in the circus amounts to 7.5% to 7.6% of his life, depending on whichever age he finally settles on. It’s hardly a significant enough part of one’s life to be affronted by someone claiming they carried water for elephants, whatever the fuck that means. That would be like me bragging about my first job as a paperboy when I was 11 and shouting down anyone else who said they also had a paper route.

His First Run At It

Like an old circus train, Water For Elephants starts slow and takes a while to build steam. Once it gets going, though, it chugs along relentlessly and doesn’t want to stop, not unlike a horny 23-year-old trying to get his first nut. In chapter two, the story finally begins. Jacob wants to get inside Catherine, but Catherine isn’t so easy, and good for her. Jacob’s about to be a homeless orphan, and classy women can sense these things.

A bunch of guys – seven, if I remember correctly – in Jacob’s class each paid a co-ed 25¢ to fuck her in a pile of hay in a barn, so they wouldn’t have to leave college as virgins. Jacob abstained, and I have to give him credit. I know myself pretty well, so I can say with 100% certainty that if I were in that situation, I wouldn’t be the first one in the pool, and if I’m not the first one in, I’m out. It’s tantamount to the stories my dad tells about bath time when he was a kid.

Human Stew

He was the youngest of five boys, and Saturday night was bath night. His dad would go first, followed by each of his four brothers. One by one, the bathwater became darker and dirtier with each subsequent body. By the time it was my dad’s turn, 5 “baths” later, it was just a vat of lukewarm human stew.

I’m honestly not sure which of the two situations grosses me out more. If pressed, I would have to choose pushing my meat into some college slut’s cum-filled maw. I would rather abstain from either scenario if I could avoid it, though. The college whore made out like a bandit, though, didn’t she? $3,500 worth of buying power, adjusted for inflation, for, let’s be honest, under twenty minutes worth of work. Of course, she probably ended up with a baby, but if not, she’s got tuition covered this semester.

Jacob Becomes A Homeless Orphan

Jacob’s parents die in a car crash right before his final exam. Then, before their bodies are cold, the bank repossesses his house, leaving him a penniless, homeless orphan – but then, orphans tend to be penniless and homeless, don’t they? That’s kind of their whole deal. So, there’s nothing extraordinary about that.

The prudent thing to do, at this point, would be to take his final exam. A degree would ensure some stability for his future now that he’s on his own. Instead, he freaks out before touching pencil to paper, runs out of the testing room, and straight out of town. I get it. It was a huge shock, multiple tragedies all at once, and no grief counselors to help him make sense of any of it. Still, the best thing he could have done at that moment was get his college degree.

“You Want To Carry Water For Elephants, I Suppose”

Whatever. He did what he did: jumped on a circus train, endeared himself to an old carny with a heart of gold, and twenty-four hours later, he’s a bouncer in a circus coochy tent. This is seriously how this book goes. It just jumps from one sexual encounter to the next. Jacob had never seen a naked woman before, so seeing Barbara shaking her tits was a huge moment for him. Well, probably not huge. It was an average but perfectly adequate-sized moment for him.

After the show, Barbara turned five tricks for $2 each. It only took 45 minutes. That’s almost $15 an hour in 1931! I doubt she saw more than half of it, though, if any. She finds Jacob lurking around outside her tent as she shows her last John out. He doesn’t ask, but she informs him that she’s not doing any freebies that night. Bummer, but once again, he avoided contributing to the human stew; good on him.

Catherine Who?

Jacob quickly settles into circus life and finds himself a job as the circus’s vet. He meets Marlena, the star of the show, and falls in love. August, Marlena’s husband, is the circus’s paranoid schizophrenic animal superintendent, who also happens to be Jacob’s direct supervisor. Marlena reminds Jacob of his first lust, Catherine. So, naturally, Catherine, his parent’s death, the loss of his family home, and the fact that he flunked out of college all fly right out the window. His singular focus becomes fucking his boss’s wife. There are a great many obstacles between him and his conquest, though, just not parents, school, or housing.

Jacob Meets Kinko

His bunkmate is a horny dwarf with an attitude problem called Kinko. Kinko is not at all happy about having to share his quarters with anyone, especially a worker. (The dwarf is a performer, Jacob is a worker, and performers and workers are different classes.) One day, Jacob walks in on his roommate, pounding his pud – to use the parlance of their time.

Sitting on the edge of the bed, he had an 8-page in one hand and his cock in the other. It sounds like an awfully unpleasurable way to whack off. At first, I remembered that the author was a woman, so what would she know about how guys masturbate? But then, I quickly realized that I have no idea how other men jack it. As far as I know, they’re all sitting upright on the edge of the bed, phone in hand, blissfully unaware of how much better it could feel. What a thought to have while reading a book, but isn’t that what art is about?

Jacob Loses His Cookies Instead Of His Virginity

Embarrassed and angry, Kinko can’t let Jacob slide. His punishment for disturbing the little wanker came cold, as revenge is best served. Jacob drank himself into a stupor, and then Barbara, the whore, and her whore friend Ella tried to double up on him. While Barbara was going down on him, Ella moved in to kiss him; he puked in Ella’s whore face and then passed out. He woke up the next morning in a trunk, dressed in women’s clothing, with clown makeup on his face and his balls shaved clean. It’s a bit ambiguous who the culprit is until the midget confesses and apologizes for the shearing. Who does that? I’m all for a good revenge prank, but I’m not touching another man’s junk to do it.

So, I’m sure you could guess what happens after the ball shaving. Jacob and the midget become friends, obviously. A bunch of stuff happens: Jacob and August beat the hell out of each other, August gives Marlena the smackdown as well, and then Jacob takes Marlena to town to hide her from August in a hotel.

She Likes It Messy

At this point, Jacob’s face is unrecognizable from his fight with August; Marlena has just been beaten by her husband for the first time, and if August finds them, Jacob’s dead. Apparently, this is what gets that sexy little circus freak drippin’ because as soon as they’re alone in the hotel, she pops his cherry. He lasts seconds, as one would imagine, but they wake up the next morning and do it again. This time, there’s no rush, so they take their time, and she teaches him how to properly finger-blast a girl.

Not The Way I Would Have Watered The Elephants

I admit I don’t know anything about women. I married one 23 years ago, and I know less about women now than I ever have. So, I can’t help but wonder why the author chose this moment in the story for Marlena to deflower the virile and vulnerable Jacob. I just don’t think a woman would be DTF after having experienced so much trauma and violence earlier that same day. But, like I said, what the fuck do I know. A woman wrote this scene, after all, so she probably knows what she’s talking about, right? Or, perhaps she put plot over realism. Whatever the case, as a reader, I could have waited a few more chapters for them to finally hook up when they were in a better place, physically, mentally, and emotionally.

I would expect this sort of out-of-touch sexual fantasy from a male author like Gabriel García Márquez. He wrote a paragraph near the end of Love in the Time of Cholera that describes a woman pining for her rapist. She rejected the advance of the story’s protagonist saying, “I realized a long time ago that you are not the man I am looking for.”

We then learn that the man she is looking for was a stranger who raped her when she was younger, and “she had wanted that man to stay forever so that she could die of love in his arms.” She would say to anyone who would listen to her, “If you ever hear of a big, strong fellow who raped a poor black girl from the street on Drowned Man’s Jetty, one October fifteenth at about half-past eleven at night, tell him where he can find me.” As if.

I Suppose That’s Why It’s Called Fiction

But, like I said, I don’t know anything about women. Maybe they all secretly want to be raped. I think that is unlikely, but domination and rape fantasies are not uncommon among women, so who knows. Obviously, all women are different. They each have their own fantasies and desires, so it would not be appropriate to generalize. At the same time, everyone has their own capacity for discerning reality from fantasy. Some are better at it than others, and some stories are better at delineating the lines between the two.

When Harry Potter walks through a brick wall and magically appears in a parallel universe, it is apparent that we are watching a story in which the rules of our reality do not apply. Everything in the story is fantastic, and any adult with an average I.Q. would understand that. But what happens when the lines between real and make-believe are ambiguous? For instance, legal trials happen every day in courtrooms all across this country. In media, however, they become a caricature of reality. If you’ve never seen how a real courtroom operates, you might think the dramatization in movies and TV is real.

The Bad Guys Don’t Need Our Help

Likewise, a young, naive woman/girl might think that a passage about a woman who longs to be reunited with her rapist, not in a galaxy far, far away, or in the magical land of Oz, but in the real world where she lives, might be a natural reaction to non-consensual sex. She might think that giving herself to the man who took her is romantic and, dare I say, normal. Similarly, a young man might get the idea that women secretly want you to force yourself upon them.

Your eyes are rolling right now. No one is that stupid, right? Believe me, some among us actually are. Granted, they’re probably not reading books like Love in the Time of Cholera or Water for Elephants. They are definitely, however, watching movies and TV shows based on those books and others like them. Watching porn also distorts people’s perception of sex, but you don’t even have to go to that extreme.

Meet Jenny

My family hosted a foreign exchange student for three years. Every notion and idea she had about love, sex, and relationships came from movies and TV shows. She expected to be treated like Bella from Twilight. She expected grand gestures of love and intention and was disillusioned when boys fell short, which they did every time. It was pathetic to watch, knowing how disappointed she was going to be in life. Of course, people like her adjust their delusions to avoid facing reality, so they always evade true disappointment.

Holy Water For Elephants

She is just one example. The Bible has blurred the lines between fantasy and history for millions of Christians around the world. The only real difference between books like Water for Elephants and The Holy Bible is historical context and time. So, I wonder, what is an author’s responsibility to the truth? Presumably, Water for Elephants will still exist long after the collective memory of train circuses has faded into ancient history. Today, we understand it’s a work of fiction set in a time and place that actually existed. What happens in the distant future when all context has been lost?

One day, archaeologists will find our works of literature. When they piece together the meanings of the words and context, they will read a book like Water for Elephants and think that every time a man was faced with a grievous tragedy, he dropped everything to try to get off.

Will they understand the story was crafted by a woman who may not have had the most accurate perspective to write for a male character? Will they understand Gabriel García Márquez wasn’t a young black girl and John Greene wasn’t a teenage girl with cancer?

Should We Stay In Our Own Lanes?

That’s not to say that authors shouldn’t write characters whose experiences they haven’t lived. On the contrary, writing about a character as different from you as a person can be could be an enlightening and even therapeutic exercise for the author and could potentially lend a perspective to the reader they might never have seen otherwise. I just wonder about the potential ramifications of the author getting it wildly wrong, though. Could writing a character through the lens of the opposite sex distort the reader’s reality of their own experience? Would a woman have written a scene like the one I highlighted from Love in the Time of Cholera? And if so, would that validate the character’s experience?

Similarly, does a female author falling back on the trope of young men being horny to the exclusion of all else invalidate the character’s experience? Would a 23-year-old man really be so horny and emotionally stunted that he could forget all of his very recent hardships at the mere sight of a woman? Now, I’ll grant you, as I write this, 23 is literally half a lifetime ago for me, so my memory of that time is a little fuzzy. Still, as horny as I might have been at 23, I don’t think that I would have been so easily distracted, even by pussy, in the face of so much tragedy. Maybe a normal 23 year old would be, I don’t know.

The Ballad Of Chip

In 1997, I worked with a man who definitely would be. He was in his early 40s, but he was still living in his 20s. All he ever talked about was how much sex he had in Reno in the 70s. He had a van with a bed in the back and spent his free time looking for girls to bang. Then, he’d bang them once they’re on the van. Occasionally, he would change it up and talk about how much he regretted getting married, too. He seemed to think the pussy parade would have kept up with his advancing age had he remained a bachelor.

The story he repeated most often was the time he bagged three chicks in one night. Not at the same time, but one after the other. I believe that was his record. He reveled in how before he fucked them, they had each sucked his dick. That meant that lucky ladies two and three had to suck the essence of his previous conquest off his dick. I’ll admit that initially, I was impressed. As the months dragged on, though, and the topic of conversation never varied from how he scored four touchdowns in one game at Polk High, he became more and more pathetic, living in the memories of his youth. Having not had even .0001% of the sexual experiences that he claimed to have had, I have a hard time imagining that that level of promiscuity is normal.

Sex In The 90s

I came of age in the shadow of the AIDS crisis. Sex ed in the 90s largely revolved around the idea that having sex, even once, would invariably lead to a long and painful death. If it didn’t lead to death, it led to pregnancy. So, I grew up scared of sex, which dovetailed nicely with my fear of girls generally. That’s probably why instead of fucking my way through the circus at 23, I got married.

So, I think I can safely say that even if I had somehow found myself in Jacob’s shoes at 23 – in a hotel room with a married woman with a black eye, my face looking like a busted tomato, my life in danger, etc., and she started to initiate sex – I don’t think I would have gone through with it. Call me a prude; call me a gentleman; call me gay; I just don’t think I could switch off everything else I was feeling just to get off. Am I the outlier? Or did Sara Gruen miss the mark the way she wrote Jacob Jankowski and shoe-horned so much sex into a story about a circus? Even Love in the Time of Cholera didn’t have as much sex in it as Water For Elephants did, and that was an actual story about sex.

Water For Elephants and Sex for Veterinarians

I don’t think the average person encounters sexual activity as often as Jacob did, whether they engage in it or not. There was sexual activity happening all around him, not just in the circus but back in college, too, and the whole story takes place in less than a year.

Sex In The Wild

Once, back in 2012, I saw a couple having sex in a car in a gas station car wash. And then, on a camping at Carpinteria State Beach in 2013, everyone in the campgrounds got laid. First, it was the couple in the tent next door. Then, a woman got the shit railed out of her in the bathrooms; she could be heard for miles around. And I’m pretty sure there was a whole orgy at the far end of the campground. That’s it, though. That’s 46 years of random sexual encounters in the wild. I don’t think real life is as sexual for most people as it was for Jacob Jankowski in those few brief months when he was 23. If the rest of his life continued that way, he would have more stories than Penthouse Forum.

Edward Plays Jacob

But as I said before, Water For Elephants is not a story about a depression-era train circus. It is a story about sex. It’s a story about a young man’s blind pursuit to lose his virginity. The sex is the story. If it wasn’t, then you could remove the sex without changing the story. Don’t believe me? Watch the film adaptation. They left out almost all of the sex, and the movie was the poorer for it. In fact, I would go so far as to say that removing all of Jacob’s sexual encounters shifted the focus of the story to the elephant, which made the film flat, boring, and interminable, not unlike a life lived without sex.

So, I guess Mrs. Gruen has the male of our species pegged, if not the whole human race. Sex is the point of life, or life is the point of sex. Either way, sex is the point of Water for Elephants, and the story would suffer without it.

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I make no apologies.

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To be referenced in TV shows and movies, I imagined that it must be on par with the oft-referenced In-N-Out. Of course, I realize now that there is absolutely no basis in reality for such an idea. Any brand, quality or not, can pay to be mentioned on TV. Still, the references were made by adults, not kids, so I dissociated Shack Shake from McDonald’s and its ilk. Again, I realize my naivete in thinking that only children like McDonald’s; however, that was my bias at the time, so if ever I had the chance to try the fare at Shake Shack, I was game.

I assumed I would have to wait until I made my way back east at some point in the distant future before I ever had that opportunity. So, you can imagine my surprise when I got off the 405 at Western and saw a brand new Shack Shack right across the street from the hotel where I would be staying. I made a plan for lunch the following day.

The Good

I don’t mind admitting that I am a little apprehensive about blindly venturing into new businesses. Particularly restaurants. There was a time, not so long ago, when you didn’t need instructions to place an order at a fast-food restaurant. Now, every fast food restaurant is a variation of Subway’s bespoke sandwich model, but less intuitive. I feel like Michael Keaton ordering at McDonald’s for the first time in The Founder every time I walk into a restaurant I’ve never tried before.

I know what a sandwich is and what I want on it. I don’t know what the fuck a Poke is, so when I walk into a Poke shop and see a cryptic menu board with pictures of every item they sell and instructions that say, “Pick your protein” and “Build Your Bowl,” I’m going to turn around and walk back out the door, and I have. A tip to restauranteurs at every level of the game: Wow us with your recipes, not with your gimmicky, experimental ordering processes.

Be Careful What You Wish For

If I wanted to pick every ingredient that goes into my meal, I would eat at home. That’s the beauty of going out to eat. Someone else went to the trouble of finding recipes that work and taste good, and all I have to do is pick the one that looks the most appetizing.

Many years ago, I went to a new “Build Your Own Burger” restaurant. The place was ahead of its time, and that’s probably why it went under. They used tablets to order instead of people. It would be another decade and a half before I would see that technology in use again.

On the tablet, you selected how many patties you wanted and what kind of bun, and then you scrolled down a list of every possible ingredient you could think of to add to a hamburger. At first glance, I thought I had finally found the perfect burger. I built one with all of the toppings I love on a burger: cheese, onion rings, a fried egg, pickles, bacon, and god only knows what else — it was fifteen years ago. I realize now that getting everything you ever wanted never works out the way you think it will.

Ordering a pizza with every meat the pizzeria offers sounds good, but it just ends up tasting like spicy grease. Likewise, a burger with a bunch of things you like to eat separately does not mean they will complement each other on a piece of meat between two buns. Ever since then, I have gladly allowed the professionals in the test kitchen to create my meals for me.

With all of that in mind and not knowing what to expect when I walked into my first Shake Shack experience, I decided to peruse the menu in the car before I went inside. I was elated to discover the menu is not only totally normal but that you can order online and walk inside to pick up your food. When I went inside ten minutes later to pick up my order, I learned that that’s how you order inside the restaurant as well. An island in the middle of the lobby area of the dining room had three tablets mounted to one side and two condiment stations on the other.

The Bad

It was a curious design choice, considering there was no other way to order a meal inside the restaurant. There were no cash registers where you could place an order with a live person. There was, however, a long counter that would conventionally have had cash registers on it. Why build the long cash register counter if you’re not going to use cash registers? Is it just in case they change their mind down the road? Is ordering via app an experiment and the results aren’t in yet?

Why do certain vestiges survive innovation? Last year, I rented a Hyundai Ionic 5 because Hertz was all out of Teslas. I hated everything about that car, especially the mélange of chargers that, despite the brand or network they belonged to, never had a fully functioning charging station. I had a problem every time I tried to charge that stupid car. What I couldn’t understand about its design, though, was why it looks like just another conventional gas-powered car. Conventional car designs work around the necessities of the drive train and fuel system. Electric cars have none of that, so they don’t have to look like conventional cars. The Cyber truck is a(n) great example of that.

Innovate Or Don’t

Telsa replaced every knob, dial, and gauge with a screen. I know many people don’t like that, but those people are Luddites, and their opinions are irrelevant. We’re living in a strange transition period where automakers have to make cars with one wheel in the future and one in the past to ease people out of their comfort zones. Or, they could be like Tesla and say fuck it and build a great car and show people what the future could be.

All that is to say, if you’re going to go to the trouble of building a brand new restaurant from the ground up with revolutionary new processes for ordering and delivering products to the customer, why would you leave irrelevant vestiges in the design? Especially space-consuming ones. Why build a single square foot more than you need?

I have been back since my initial visit, and they have two cash registers at the end of the counter, now.

The other thing I didn’t understand was why there were so damn many employees. There were as many or more than I have seen working at any In-N-Out or Five Guys. So many of them didn’t seem to have anything to do either. They were sort of wandering around, like Mii’s on the Wii home screen, trying to look busy. The result was a chaotic and congested dining room. Employees were constantly bumping into customers as they came around the corner from the kitchen area.

She Brings The Shake to The Shack

In every business, there is always one employee keeping the whole operation going. At this Shake Shack, it was a heavy-set woman with a headset. She took orders from the drive-through, poured all of the drinks, and took a meeting with the douchey, thirty-something blonde man that I assume was the franchisee. He looked like a “bro” whose daddy got tired of financing his Spring Break lifestyle, so he bought him a Shake Shack franchise. Now, he shows up once a week in an untucked polo, Vans, and a trucker cap. He sets up his computer in a booth – during the lunch rush – and gets in the way of his employees as they scramble around the store, trying to look busy—all except that one dutiful employee, who handled being pulled in three different directions with perfunctory grace.

Rack ‘Em Up

Just outside the kitchen area, against the wall on the opposite side of the passthrough from the useless counter, was a metal baker’s rack. Another curious choice. They went to the expense of building a ten-foot long, totally useless countertop, only to bring in a piece of furniture to place completed orders on. Did someone just wake up one morning and decide to play restaurant?

Again, since my initial visit, they replaced the rolling baker’s rack with a permanent one.

Occasionally, an employee would place a bag on the metal rack for customers to pick up. While I sat at a table across from the rack, I watched two different employees place two orders there. Another employee placed a bag on the long, useless counter, and it sat there for several minutes, transferring the heat from the contents inside to the surrounding air, before yet another employee came from somewhere behind me, possibly outside, and put the bag on the rack.

I’m Not Rich

The receipt stuck to the outside of the bag had “Rich” printed on it in bold lettering. That annoyed me. I didn’t consent to any nicknames. I immediately got up to grab my food. The employee had barely set it down when I reached for it. I startled him. He apologized to me but didn’t specify for what. It perturbed me that they called me “Rich,” but there’s no way he knew that. I supposed it was for abandoning my lunch to cool for several minutes on the useless counter. I soon came to realize it was for the overpriced abomination in the bottom of an awkwardly large paper bag.

The Burger

As I pulled my burger out of the bag, it occurred to me that I made a mistake. Occasionally, while enjoying a dipped cone, Oreo Twister, or Sundae from Foster’s Freeze or Dairy Queen, I would notice hamburgers and other non-dessert items on the menu and wonder who would order a hamburger at an ice cream shop. Apparently, I would.

That’s not to say that an ice cream shop can’t make a good burger, but what are the odds that they do? I don’t know anyone who has eaten a hamburger from Dairy Queen. In fact, I’ve never heard anything, good or bad, about a Dairy Queen hamburger because that’s not what Dairy Queen is known for, hence the name. Baskin-Robins isn’t out there trying to win back the slice of the market Wendy’s stole from them with her Frostees. Likewise, Wendy’s isn’t trying to expand on her dessert selection by offering 31 flavors of Frostees.

You Can’t Be Everything to Everyone

If a business can’t make it with the thing they’re known for, they’re not going to cement their place in the market by offering mediocre versions of what other businesses are known for. It’s like when the menu at a restaurant is thick enough to beat the rats in the kitchen to death with, you know, everything in that thing arrived frozen, and they don’t do any of it well.

So, when I saw my burger from Shake Shack, I realized that my unfamiliarity with the franchise had led me astray. I had become the freak who orders a burger at a dessert shop. A dessert shop, I should point out, that started as a hot dog stand. Shake Shack is the culinary equivalent of a 22-year-old college dropout trying to find herself.

My cheeseburger was so small that it had to be a joke or a mistake. It was something in between a McDonald’s cheeseburger and a slider on a Hawai’ian roll. I’m not really sure what the point of it was. It wasn’t made to fill you up, at least not if you’re a grown man like me. And, I don’t think it was meant to be bought in multiples, like tacos, because it cost seven fucking dollars.

Remember, back in the late 90s or early oughts, Carl’s Jr. introduced the Six-Dollar Burger. It was a massive burger that was supposed to rival expensive steakhouse hamburgers, I guess. I’m not sure; I don’t remember the propaganda. Anyway, back then, this burger would have cost 79¢ and come in a special six-pack cardboard carrier.

Not A Bad Burger, But A Meh Burger

Apart from its disappointing size (Now I know how my wife feels), I can’t even say anything particularly bad about the burger. It was just unmemorable. If you pulled into a side-of-the-road, non-descript, off-brand mini-golf course and fun center and walked up to the snack bar, this is the burger you would expect to get. It was the sort of burger you would get from the food trailer at the Little League fields. It wasn’t bad, but there’s not a chance in hell you would pay $7 for it if you knew what you were getting.

Just a few hours after my first Shake Shack experience, I saw this Tweet from a guy whining about the prices at Five Guys. I’ve never understood the ire people have about Five Guy’s prices or restaurant prices generally. You don’t have to eat out. At Five Guys, though, you get a decent-sized burger and half a lunch bag full of fries. For just $5 more than I paid at Shake Shack, I could have gone to Five Guys and been full. Also, who tips at a fast food restaurant?

The Fries

The fries were crinkle-cut, which I loved about Carl’s Jr. when I was a kid. By the time I was in high school, though, they had switched to plain old straight fries. Crinkle-cut fries aren’t as special now that I can buy a gross of them from Smart & Final anytime I want. There was a period about ten years ago when we were eating so many crinkle-cut fires that it made good financial sense for us to buy a case of them from Smart & Final, so we did. Evidently, Shake Shack ran the numbers and decided it made sense for them too. Do I need to elaborate here? The fries were fucking frozen. They weren’t frozen by the time they reached me, but they were on their way back after sitting on the useless counter for so long.

The Shake

I suspect that’s what happened to the ice cream that went into my milkshake. Shake Shack uses custard in their shakes instead of ice cream, so that may have been the issue. I don’t know what custard is, why it’s substituted for ice cream, or why so many burger joints put it on the menu, but I don’t like it.

I tried it on its own at Freddy’s, but I wasn’t a fan. Adding milk to it did nothing to improve either ingredient. Actually, it would be more appropriate to say that adding the custard to the milk didn’t improve either one because it looked like someone dropped a glob of thawed and refrozen ice cream into a cup of milk, slapped a lid on it, and quietly said to themself, “Good job, man, you’re doing the Lord’s work out here.”

They’re not, obviously. The gastric hornswoggle that is Shake Shack is the reason the bible forbids the mixing of meat and dairy. Get one right, and the Lord might look the other way. Deal strictly in mediocrity, however, and you deserve to be smote.

Bonnie told a coworker Shake Shack hadn’t impressed me. Her coworker replied with genuine shock. “Everyone loves Shake Shack. I’ve never heard anyone say they didn’t like it,” she said in disbelief. “His milkshake was icy like the ice cream had been thawed and refrozen,” my wife elaborated. Her coworker responded, “Oh, I’ve never had one of their shakes,” as though that cleared up a misunderstanding.

I don’t trust the opinion of someone who hasn’t tried the thing a brand is known for. Shake Shack is the name. The implication is that they do shakes really well; otherwise, they would call themselves something else.

There’s Lots Of Blame To Go Around

It’s hard to tell exactly what I took away from my first Shake Shack experience. Admittedly, it could be argued that my expectations, and not Shake Shack, let me down. Still, it’s on the Shake Shack marketing team for not having set my expectations in advance. There’s a Shake Shack 14 miles from my house, and I had no idea until just now.

I’m not calloused enough to assume all Shake Shacks are like this one. It had only been open for a couple of weeks, after all. That wouldn’t explain the poor design choices, but it would explain some of the other issues.

My experience with chains, however, has been consistent. That’s why people like them. There isn’t much reason to think that any other Shake Shack is better than this one. I will reserve judgment of the whole franchise, though, until I am able to try one in Manhattan. If this Shake Shack is representative of the East Coast palate, however, then my first trip to New York is going to be woefully disappointing.

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My two Insta360 One X cameras, however, were not. They saw significant action over the next five years. I often mounted a GoPro to my bike. Even with its wide-angle lens, however, I still had to point it at whatever I wanted to capture. That meant that it often missed things that would happen around me when I was riding. More often, I missed things because I simply wasn’t recording, so naturally, that’s when things happen. Bonnie and I joke that the best way to make sure nothing exciting happens is to hit record. 

The ability to record in all directions simultaneously made the Insta360 One X perfect for bike rides. The one thing I didn’t like about it, though, was that, mounted to my handlebar, it recorded me from a very low angle, which is never a good look. When used with the Insta360 selfie stick, however, it brought the camera up to the level of my face for a more natural image.

Mounting it to the bike was a challenge, though, or at least I made it a challenge. For some reason, I had the idea to weld a 1/4 – 20 screw to my bike frame. Then, I screwed the selfie stick straight onto it. It worked well enough until it didn’t. Without warning, the screw broke off, sending the Insa360 One X crashing to the ground. One lens was badly scratched on the hard concrete just a few months after I bought it.

There Were No DIY Insta360 One X Repairs Back in 2019

Back then, parts for Insta360 cameras were non-existent, so I had little choice but to send it out for repair. With shipping, it was about half the price of buying a new Insta360 One X to have the lens replaced. I wasn’t happy, but I learned a lesson. 

I’m An Insta360’s Worst Nightmare

Unfortunately, I still had other lessons to learn. I generally only used one camera at a time, and I liked to use it with a selfie stick. It doesn’t fit easily into a pocket, but I found a clever way to carry it when I wasn’t recording. My pants had hammer loops on each leg. I know a lot of people don’t like hammer loops, but I do. When I was a carpet cleaner, I found them invaluable. I always had a towel tucked into one of them, and they were great for hanging spray bottles.

They were also a great place to tuck an Insta360 One X on a selfie stick. Not all hammer loops are equal, though, and I discovered the hard way twice that some are bigger than others. I had one of my cameras tucked into my hammer loop as I walked with my family to the park. It was in its protective pouch, but it slipped right out of both the pouch and the loop.

The damage was far less significant than the last time, but one of the lenses was still scratched. Incredibly, I didn’t learn my lesson, and the same thing happened a short time later. I guess it took me two times to learn that lesson, but I still had one more lesson to learn.

The Big One

Bonnie and I were running to catch a bus. We were going to miss it if we didn’t hurry. My Insta360 One X was tucked into a pocket on the shoulder strap of my backpack because I had discovered that I could record from the forward-facing lens when I was out in public, and no one seemed to notice and, therefore, were not bothered by the camera.

It worked fine when I was walking, but running jostled it too much, and it was ejected onto the sidewalk, where it bounced, flipped, and skidded along the concrete driveway outside the QuikStop. This was by far the most violent and destructive drop yet. Now, both of my Insta360 One Xs were damaged. 

To Fix or Not To Fix?

In another time, I might have just bought a new 360º camera, but this was in the middle of the COVID pandemic, and nobody was coming out with new cameras. GoPro, DJI, Canon, Nikon, and Sony were all stuck in a pre-COVID freeze frame. The newest Insta360 camera I could buy was two years old. I figured new models would be released once all of this pandemic nonsense was over, but who knew when that was going to be? I saw a YouTube video that showed how to fix a crack in an Insta360 One X lens using epoxy, so I tried it, but it didn’t work.

Finally DIY Insta360 One X Repair Is Possible

So, I did some research and discovered that lenses were now available, and for significantly less than the last time I sent one of these out for repair and for a fraction of the cost of a new camera, so I ordered four new lenses from eBay for about $25 each.

I was hesitant to dive into this repair, but once I got the first camera open, it was much less daunting. Getting the camera open took some figuring out, but it wasn’t hard.

So, now I have one working camera and one non-working camera, and I’m okay with that… for now.

One day, I might replace the bad lens module, but I think I would rather spend that money on a camera made in this decade.

You can watch a video of the whole process here:

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Now, look at toilet paper’s status: From precious commodity to unceremoniously discarded without use. I’m sure the toilet paper probably prefers this way, though, dumped in the street without being dragged across a filthy asshole first.

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Well, I guess you can just walk into the store and buy a box of shit now.

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The Original Original Pizza Cookery

In those days, we used any excuse to stop by The Pizza Cookery. Friends visiting from out of town? Let’s take them to The Pizza Cookery. Need something from Fry’s? Let’s stop by the Pizza Cookery. Driving through The Valley for any reason at all? Let’s stop by The Pizza Cookery.

The Original Pizza Cookery, back then, was a vibe. Tucked into the corner of a shitty strip mall on Topanga Canyon Blvd., it was exactly what you would expect when you walked in the door. Sawddust sprinkled on the floor, Christmas lights strung around every inch of the walls, and complimentary peanuts at your table. 

The pizza wasn’t the best I’ve ever had, but the complimentary rolls were to die for, the quantity of food was unrivaled, and the atmosphere was unlike anyplace else. Even the Northwoods Inn – the only other restaurant I’m aware of with sawdust on the floor – couldn’t compare to the vibe that was The Original Pizza Cookery. The anticipation of going to The Original Pizza Cookery back then was palpable.

Have A Baby They Said…

Sadly, we didn’t get to go to The Original Pizza Cookery that day. At the appointment, the doctor dropped a bomb on us, “We’re going to have a baby today,” he said. I’m sorry. What? I’m afraid there’s been some sort of misunderstanding. We’re here for a checkup, not to have a baby. The baby isn’t due for another couple of weeks, not to mention the fact that we have plans for lunch!. Our plans, however, were not to be. 

We were ushered upstairs, where Bonnie was put into a hospital gown, needles and tubes were shoved into her skin, and we were left to wait in a severely decorated room with a TV mounted to the wall that only played public service announcements about raising children. One of them was a warning about the dangers of shaking a baby. It was so silly and melodramatic that any message would surely be lost in its absurdity, but it had exactly the opposite effect. To this day, we still quote the deep, booming voice warning us to “Never shake a baby.”

We spent eighteen-odd hours in that room, listening to that TV. I’m not sure what the harm would have been in letting us duck out for an hour to grab a bite to eat before settling into that drab little room until the sun came up the next day. We really began to regret having skipped breakfast that morning. Bonnie especially. She hadn’t eaten since the night before, and she wouldn’t get to eat again for three days. 

The New Original Pizza Cookery

We would eventually eat at The Pizza Cookery again and with our children. I don’t, however, remember the last time I ate at the Woodland Hills location. I hadn’t been in years, though, when it moved to the Thousand Oaks Inn in Thousand Oaks. It seemed out of place there. The Thousand Oaks Inn had always had a coffee shop called Dupar’s on the first floor, next to the lobby. A coffee shop is more appropriate for a hotel than a pizzeria. Coffee shops serve breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and while I understand that many people enjoy cold pizza for breakfast, I don’t think anyone is willing to pay for it at a hotel. 

Nevertheless, overcome by hunger and nostalgia, I couldn’t resist popping in for lunch as I passed by. I walked into the main entrance, though there was nothing to indicate that it was the main entrance. The single, unmarked, non-descript, darkly tinted glass door looked more like the side entrance to the bowling alley that used to be next door than the main entrance to a reputable and shockingly expensive restaurant.

The little door opened up like Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory to a spacious but poorly utilized foyer. There was a podium to the left that held menus, so I knew I was in the right spot. An assortment of shit cluttered the wall to my right. I wasn’t sure if it was tat for sale or tchotchkes for ambiance, which tells you that neither was working. Straight ahead, a young, average-looking blonde woman and an older man were having a discussion about Jesus. I stood patiently if not awkwardly, waiting for someone to acknowledge my presence. 

Will Customer Service Ever Recover From COVID?

Eventually, after what I felt was an inappropriately long time to have to wait during an obviously slow period in the day, the blonde girl approached me and asked in an almost offensively patronizing tone if there was something that she could do for me today. Taken aback that my purpose for being there wasn’t blatantly obvious, I was momentarily dumbstruck. I stuttered and stammered, waving my arms in a way that she correctly interpreted as “I want a fucking table.” She said, “Oh. Dining in today?” As though everyone she encounters at that little podium has a different agenda. Then, she pulled a menu out of the podium and led me to the first table in a series of five comically tall booths that ran the length of the front of the restaurant. 

The booth sat against the wall, so it was very dark and sad. The hostess was either adept at reading people’s faces and body language or she frequently had customers requesting to be seated somewhere other than the dungeon because, without me saying a word, she asked if I would rather have a table by a window. Of course, I didn’t want to sit alone in the dark. I wanted to be able to look out the window while I waited for my lunch. She led me past the next table, where a father and daughter were already seated, and sat me at the table on the other side of them, next to a window.

Who Was This Booth Made For?

I laughed when I saw the window. The majority of it was frosted, and what little of the glass wasn’t frosted had hearts painted on it. Little did it matter because the window faced a stone wall ten feet away, so there was nothing to look at anyway. Perhaps that’s why the window was frosted in the first place. I climbed up onto the booth as the hostess laid my menu on the table. As she was walking away, she said that she would get me some rolls. I quickly replied, “No rolls.” She seemed a bit surprised but didn’t say anything more. She just returned to her bible study. 

The Original Pizza Cookery At The Top Of Jack’s Bean Stalk

I didn’t pick up my menu straight away because I was distracted by the height of the booth. It was so tall that my feet didn’t come anywhere near touching the floor. I’m 5’11’ with a 32” inseam, and my feet didn’t even reach the bar around the base of the table. As the edge of the booth cut into the back of my thighs, cutting off circulation, I couldn’t help but wonder who exactly these booths were made for. Did they find some 7’ tall carpenter on Craigslist to build these things? I cannot overstate how uncomfortable the booth was. My legs were all pins and needles when I finally left the restaurant. I’m happy to report, though, that since my visit, they have lowered the booths and tables to a human height.

The Gluten-Free Game Is Strong At The Original Pizza Cookery

I was so preoccupied with the absurdity of everything about this table that I completely forgot to look at the menu before my server came by to take my order. I already knew that all I wanted was a salad – The Original Pizza Cookery is sort of known for their generously sized salads – so it was just a matter of skimming the salad selection for the one that I wanted. Still, I wish I had taken the time to peruse the menu because then I would have found the gluten-free section, which I only found later on their website.

They have the largest selection of gluten-free options of any restaurant I’ve ever been to. I wouldn’t count on all of their offerings to be 100% gluten-free, though. For example, they have fries on their gluten-free menu but breaded mushrooms and mozzarella sticks on their regular menu, so the chance for cross-contamination is high. I was, however, impressed that they have two different sizes of gluten-free pizza, something I’ve never seen before. I ordered the Italian house Salad with blue cheese dressing and confirmed with her that it didn’t come with croutons. Before walking away, she confirmed that I didn’t want rolls, and I again said that I didn’t.

Italian and Gluten-Free Aren’t So Compatible

I seldom feel the need to explain to anyone that I can’t tolerate gluten, but I have learned that it’s best to make sure it stays out of my food. One day last week, I was eating lunch at Presto Pasta, and I forgot to ask if the salad came with croutons and, consequently, it arrived at my table covered with croutons. I picked them off, but the cucumbers, tomatoes, and carrots also had crumbs stuck to them. So, I picked off all of the visibly contaminated components and placed them on a napkin next to my plate. An employee came by later to check on me and clear my dirty dishes, and I saw her check out the random pile of vegetables, croutons and the slice of bread accumulated on the table with an inquisitive look on her face.

I don’t expect people to read my mind, but if I were in their shoes, I like to think that I could and would pick up on little clues, make deductions, and extrapolate the information before me. If a man were to order his chicken piccata with the only gluten-free pasta on the menu, for example, I would assume that it wasn’t a preference but a dietary restriction because nobody prefers anything to be gluten-free. So, I would confirm with him that he has an allergy, and then I would be sure to send out his salad without croutons and his entree without a giant slab of stale garlic bread sitting right on top of his gluten-free pasta. But, hey, that’s just me.

We Just Lived Through A Pandemic, People!

Before she left me, the waitress took my drink order. I asked for a Pellegrino, and she asked if I wanted lime with it, which impressed me because rarely does anyone think to ask that, let alone proactively bring limes out with the drink. My impression turned to disgust when she set my glass down on the table by the rim. Why don’t you just stir the lime in my water with your fingers while you’re at it? She didn’t only carry my glass that way, either. I saw her place other glasses on other tables that way, too.

Imagine what she’s spreading from glass to glass by handling the rim of the glass that way. Someone has a cold sore; she picks up their glass by the rim to refill it, returns it to the table, picks up a glass from the next table by the rim, refills it, returns it, and before her shift ends, everyone in the place has herpes. Of course, I realize I’m in the minority of people who disdain straws and choose to drink from a glass like a proper adult, but it doesn’t make the way she handles glasses any less gross. I even saw her set down a mug by the rim. A mug! It had a fucking handle for fucks sake!

While I waited for my salad to arrive – which, by the way, took significantly longer than I felt it should have, considering it was just one whole head of lettuce, a handful of mozzarella, half a can of garbanzo beans, and one slice of nasty looking very unripe tomato –  I took in the scene that is the new and improved yet, somehow, Original Pizza Cookery.

Pizza Shouldn’t Be Political

The word that came to mind as I looked around the dining room was WASPY. Perhaps it was the Jesus talk when I walked in the door that tinted my perspective or that everyone in the joint was white and conservative. Whatever it was, I simultaneously felt at home and behind enemy lines. Later that night, Bonnie reminded me that during the lockdown, the owner of The Original Pizza Cookery, refused to shut down. Their disregard for public safety would explain the server’s filthy fingers all over the rim of my glass.

The More Things Change…

There were two tables off to my left, occupied by old ladies who could have easily been the same old ladies who sat in coffee shops and restaurants in Thousand Oaks when I was a kid. There’s something about old ladies in Thousand Oaks that I’ve never seen anywhere else. They share the aesthetic that comes with aging comfortably in relative affluence. They all look like they walked out of a brochure for an assisted living community, and they always have. For all I know, these were the same old ladies eating lunch here thirty years ago when this was Dupar’s. Someone periodically comes out of the back and updates their clothes like the animatronic characters at Disneyland.

Daddy Daughter Day

Since there was nothing particularly interesting going on in the dining room, and since they were sitting directly in front of me, I found myself drawn into the conversation between the father and daughter seated at the next table. The father was sitting with his back to me. He was probably in his early fifties, and what remained of his hair was gray, almost white. He had the familiar horseshoe of male pattern baldness, but his was fine stubble that had grown back since his last shave two or three days earlier.

When I was a kid, guys with the horseshoe hairline carried on like they had a full head of hair. They didn’t shave it. They grew it out like they did when they had hair. It was never a flattering look, but when more than half of the men you know all look that way, you only have the men blessed with a full head of hair to compare yourself with. Then Bruce Willis went bald and started shaving his head, and balding men everywhere followed suit. Even men with odd-shaped heads looked better without the weird furry ring, which, before long, became a novelty of old pictures and home movies, like wood paneling and bell bottoms. 

He would have looked like a nerdy software engineer if he grew his hair out. Not the young hipster software engineers of today’s Silicon Valley but the kind with Coke bottle glasses and pocket protectors that created the industry those young nerds occupy today. The daughter was pretty but in a forced, artificial way. Beauty didn’t seem to come naturally to her, but she was at an age and socioeconomic level that afforded her access to the progress of the feminine beauty industry.

Hot Tea At The Pizza Cookery

She explained to her dad that her man was traveling to Chicago for business. I didn’t catch if they were married or just living in sin. The way she spoke about him, though, it didn’t sound like she was married to the love of her life. It sounded more like a legal partnership or a marriage of convenience. He is an investor, she explained, with a firm based in Chicago and has found that showing up to certain events in person has benefits of some sort or another. It sounded to me like she was making excuses for him and that she didn’t really believe them herself.

The Service Begins To Slip

As I finished my lunch, I began to get impatient. My server had fucked off somewhere after bringing me my salad and never came back to check on me. I would have liked another Pellegrino, but now that I was done eating, I just wanted my check. I saw her stopping by every other table but mine. She finally came by my table and asked me if I wanted anything else. I told her I just wanted the check, and she said she would be right back with it. But she wasn’t right back with it. She went back to waiting on every other table in the place. 

While I was waiting, the conversation between father and daughter turned to grandchildren. It seems there was trouble with the ol’ baby makin’ factory. A year ago, they thought that they would be pregnant by now, but it’s just not happening for them. She and her man were checked out, and they’re both working properly. I got the sense that her man was more disappointed that they weren’t pregnant than she was. Even her dad seemed to be a little more disappointed than her. It sounded like she was more disappointed about letting him down than disappointed that she wasn’t pregnant. 

It surprised me to hear that she was trying to have a baby because the way she was talking about what her man does for a living sounded more like first-date recap information than I-share-a house-with-a-man-who-I’m-also-allowing-to-drop-loads-in-me information. I also thought it was strange that she was sharing so much personal information with her dad. They must be really close. I wonder what it’s like to be that close to a parent. 

I Live Here Now

My waitress finally brought my check, but I wasn’t quick enough with my card. She just dropped the tray and ran. I feared it would be another twenty minutes before she came back to pick it up again and who knows how long before she brought it back. Pride of The Original Pizza Cookery she was. I was beginning to fear that this booth was my new home, and I was never again going to know the feeling of my feet touching the floor. Little difference it would make. With the booth cutting off circulation to my legs I wouldn’t be able to feel my feet before long anyway.

This Woman Will Give Birth Before I’m Able To Leave

Meanwhile, the daughter started talking about how difficult it had been to get pregnant. “There’s a 10% chance every month,” she lamented, as though the odds of getting pregnant are so long that it’s a miracle anyone has managed it thus far. I realize that it’s harder for some people to conceive than others, but there are so many millions of people who have a harder time avoiding conception that blaming your struggle to get pregnant on “the odds” seems a bit self-absorbed. It’s like when Bonnie complains that it’s too hot at 75º or too cold at 73º, and I remind her that it’s not too hot or cold; you’re too hot or cold. 

My waitress came right back with the check which was equally surprising and welcomed as the restaurant was starting to get busy, so I was glad to be on my way. As I was signing the receipt, I heard the daughter say, “It would just be nice for me to be the first not to have any medical intervention.” Apparently, getting pregnant doesn’t come easily for anyone in her family. Ironic, I thought, as I walked past her on my way to the door, my feet tingling with each step. Twenty-two years earlier, without even trying, Bonnie and I conceived our first son just upstairs, in this very hotel that is now home to The Original Pizza Cookery. What are the odds?

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No one is talking about this mutant blue frog’s pompadour, so I will. His name is The Big Hopper. It was either that or Buddy Polly-wog. It’s true that it has blue skin, but I want to know if anyone is working on a matching pair of suede shoes for him.

He could wear them to the hop.

And sing Blue Moon with his band, The Crickets.

And then eat his band.

Something about a lily pad.

Ok, I’m done.

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