Episode 86: How to Get Something for Nothing

Once upon a time, a long time ago, in a land far away - well, Virginia, anyway - my parents discovered that they were going to move to back to our ancestral homeland, North Carolina. Well, one of them discovered it anyway - Mom. Dad had orchestrated the whole thing! I think the exact announcement was "la la la, get off your ass and pack everything up, lady! We're moving!" Yes, I'm pretty sure that is an exact quotation but then again, I'm no stenographer.

Anyway, in their Virginia dining room, they had this cheap-ass polyester Oriental rug bought from whatever the equivalent of Target was at the time. It was a burnt orange and brown sort of thing with frizzy fringe. Not meant to be a family heirloom of any kind, just intended to be a bit of warmth on the feet. And now I digress because the rug was on a slate floor in the dining room...the very slate floor where people were murdered during a killing spree where some malfeasants busted in the sliding glass door and killed the previous occupants while their children cowered in a closet and then everything ended in a hail of gunfire further up the mountain and I discovered all this while watching the year-end wrap-up on the local news but, oh, maybe I should save the rest of that story for another episode, like maybe How to Get Your Parents to Tell You They Bought the Polanski/Tate House For a Song.

What was I saying? OH YEAH, the rug. So in anticipation of the move, Mom sent the rug off to a rug cleaner, who came and picked it up and then right before the move returned it all rolled up in brown paper. Mom had it loaded onto the Bekins van and then upon arrival in North Carolina, unloaded and placed in the dining room.

The North Carolina house required a lot of work so it took a few months and my good Christian grandmother Margie came down to help out occasionally. So it was finally time to deal with the dining room and Mom and Margie unwrapped and unrolled not a brown and orange polyester rug from a discount warehouse, but....a gorgeous black and lavender wool rug that was so handmade it practically had the fingernails of Persian children embedded in it. There was an awkward silence. Obviously the rug cleaners back in Virginia had accidentally switched the rugs all those months ago. Mom panicked. "What do I do? This is someone else's family heirloom! OHMYGOD." And then Grandma Margie settled deep into a bargello-covered wingback chair, took a long, deep toke of her Winston, exhaled, and said "I don't see the problem. Keep the rug."

And it's a Strong Family heirloom to this day.

Episode 85: How to Act Like an Adult

Okay okay, so a month in between posts. That's because I've been busy trying to officially Get. A. Life. Still no luck on that front but I did have a funny conversation recently with my world-famous friend Melanie! I saw her at a party and it was a very Nashville kind of party - you know, "come over to my house and listen to my friends sing!" And frankly, I've lived here twenty years and have tried every single day to avoid going to this very sort of thing but it was actually fun and good-hearted and the singers were really crazy-talented and there were, well, sausage balls and crockpot Swedish meatballs.

ANYWAY, there was funny Melanie, all bosomy and pleated in the dress department. And we were talking about how you go from being a not-adult to being an adult. And I was saying blah blah blah about how I think it's when you wake up and don't want IKEA furniture anymore, that what you really want is a four poster bed that looks like it was slept in by Andrew Jackson. And another friend chirped that for her it was not eating peanut butter crackers for dinner, that there were other things out there like seitan and tofu. But then Melanie chimed in: "I used to have this thing for hipster guys in tennis shoes. I would always fall for them. But then the other day I saw the handsomest guy and he was getting in his fancy car and I looked down and there they were: lace-up Converse. And I almost wanted to shout: would a nice penny loafer kill a man? And that's when I knew I was an adult."

Which just about sums it up, if you ask me.

Episode 84: How to Make a Martini

Okay, look, jackrabbits. I don't care how you like your martini. I don't care if you graduated from Mr. Boston's Bartending School for People Who Couldn't Get Real Jobs. I don't care how your father did it. I don't care how Don Draper on Mad Men does it. If there's no vermouth in the thing, it ain't a martini. The end, wrap it up with a bow and smoke it. Don't give me that "I just glance at the vermouth bottle." First off, it isn't really funny, even when you do that smarmy wink thing. Second off, a martini without vermouth in it isn't a cocktail at all. It's just a very cold shot of gin. Which as we all know is what hoboes drink. Vermouth makes you James Bond; lack of vermouth makes you Jack Nicholson in Ironweed. And if you have just recently enjoyed a "chocotini," congratulations on your upcoming diabetic coma. Too bad you're gonna die without having had a real martini. And don't even get me started on this vodka martini nonsense sweeping the nation one Applebee's at a time. Gah, I need a drink.

Episode 83: How to Go Camping With Small Children

So last week I went on an awesome camping trip to Mammoth Cave with my friend Meg and her Chicago friends Judy and Rob and their hilarious, very citified twin children. I think the kids are six, but I could have that slightly wrong. It was the kids' first camping trip and that was verrrry interesting. Lots of questions. Why are we cooking outside? Why are we sleeping in a tent? Why is this tree here? When is it my turn to fall out of the hammock? Is the chicken ready? Is the bacon ready? Where are you going? Where have you been? Can I go sit in the car and play my DVD player? Would you like me to show you the remote for the DVD player? Again, when is it my turn to fall out of the hammock? Would you like to hear me sing a song about the fifty states in alphabetical order that rhymes? I always like to name the campsite to reflect the tone and tenor of the trip - like two weeks ago it was Camp Dogbite because I got bit by a dog - and it becamee quite obvious quite quickly that the only name for this campsite was going to be Camp Ohmigod Please Quit Singing That Song.

ANYWAY. So I had it in the back of my mind to tell a ghost story at the campfire one night and the only ghost story I know is "The Monkey's Paw," which I only know because it's the only ghost story my father told when I was growing up and he basically tells it wrong because when the lady opens the door at the end, Dad just screams real loudly and scares the ever-loving-beejezus out of you and you never do find out what happened because you have to go change out of your pee-soaked clothes because he is a really scary screamer. So the day before the night, I sort of observed the kids to see if they were ghost-story-ready and I eventually determined that they were not. But the boy kid decided he wanted to tell a ghost story so he made us all be really really quiet and he started by telling us that this was going to be a very terrifying tale and we should prepare ourselves to be scared witless. Then he lit the flashlight and held it under his chin to make his scary face and very seriously intoned: This is The Tale of the Invisible Latté... and I laughed so hard I really did almost pee in my pants.

Needless to say, none of us slept a wink.

Episode 82: How to Be a Good Samaritan

Okay y'alls, so if you were to hire a private detective to ask around about me, your Psychopediast, I think you'd find that almost anyone queried would immediately respond "oh, he's such a giver."

And it's true! I give people headaches, I give people hard times, I give people what for... ha ha, I'll be here all week! Stay for the veal!

No, I am not famous for my generosity. I mean, I am friendly and I never say bad things about people to their faces and I will go out of my way to run an errand to Target for you if I am going to a Target, so I don't really feel too badly that I haven't adopted a Cameroonian or rowed around in circles in a rowboat in New Orleans with Sean Penn.

But recently, my bountiful cornucopia of generosity was tested! I went on a camping trip with my friend Sarah. We drove for a few hours and then set up eight million pieces of camping equipment, one of which was an air mattress. Now, I have an air pump, so that took about eight seconds. And we laughed and said "oh, ha ha ha, don't you feel sorry for people who blow these things up with their lungs?" which apparently some poor people still do even though if you go to Target (or I can go for you!) you can get a pump for fifteen dollars and avoid the fainting black spots and possible date rape altogether.

ANYWAY. About an hour later, we went to get ice. On the way back, we saw a person at a campsite blowing up his air mattress with his mouth. I figured this was a sign from lower-case-g god so I went back to our site and got my pump and then rolled back down the hill, where I jumped out of the car and offered him the use of my fancy air blower. He took me up on it - we pumped up the air mattress in like five seconds and then when I turned to go, a dog came out of nowhere (actually, from under the picnic table, where he had been sleeping) and bit me in the leg! A deep bite; torn skin! Black blood! Texas tea! Then the guy - Dutch, long hair, patchouli-smelling - said "Thanks!" without mentioning the river of blood that was forever staining the Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area along with its watershed and I limped back to my car, drove back to the campsite, drank fifteen glasses of wine and then fell asleep and vowed to never help another living soul as long as I was drawing breath.

That was six days ago and so far I am not frothing at the mouth or afraid of water and not one person has called me Old Yeller, so I guess I'm safe. Unless I have goddamned rabies, and then one of you better fucking help me and give me a kidney or a pancreas or WHATEVER it is that cures rabies. Or you can drive your own sad self to Target after I die.

Episode 81: How to Make a Hot Brown

Seriously, it's not dirty - it's a sandwich. I meant to post this a couple of weeks ago during Kentucky Derby week, but I didn't want to post it so close to the fried bologna one because you might get the wrong idea about my eating habits. Which are above reproach, FYI.

Hot browns are like my third favorite food. Let's talk about that, the difference between food and ingredients. For example, tomatoes. Tomatoes are not food. Tomatoes are ingredients. If you slice them up and put them on a lovely BLT, well, then now you have some food. The same with eggs. An egg alone is just a dumb old ingredient that came out of a chicken. But if you whip it up into a chocolate souffle, well ta-da! Food!

Actually, I don't really know if hot browns are my number three food because I can't think what the two above it might be. But I hesitate to say hot browns are number one because I might think of something I like better later.

Anyway, the hot brown. Do they have them up north? They originated in Louisville and Kentucky was a Yankee state but people forget that all the time and I think of the hot brown as pretty southern. The only place you can get them here are those little old lady tearooms where they have Victorian needlepointed chairs and lacy window curtains and they're only open from like 11 until 1. So getting one these days isn't very easy. But it's worth it!

You know, if you type the words "hot brown" enough, it does start to sound a little dirty, like something my father might say. "I'm going to the bathroom to make a hot brown." I guess that's why they're #3. Because if I made them #1 or #2, it would seem even dirtier and I could probably never eat one again.

Episode 80: How to Stay On My Good Side

Y'know, I think the single worst thing about the onslaught of the internet* is this idea that everybody gets to say whatever they want and have a valid opinion. I assure you: you have no right whatsoever to an opinion, especially if I think it's dumb. I have one friend who insists that that's wrong - that everyone's opinion is valid - which as far as I'm concerned just proves my point. Hi, Carol!

I have some other friends who own a new restaurant and they're suffering through an onslaught of suspiciously-organized-sounding negative web reviews and comments by people with names like "FauxFoie" and "Pork-ePig" and oh, whatever - don't get me started on Foodie people who think they're clever - you get the picture. The reviews always start "my husband and I have dined in the FINEST RESTAURANTS in the world..." which means they haven't been outside of East Twatsqueal in fifty years but, you know, they watch "Top Chef." Gah, these people. Excellent choke-on-their-own-vomit candidates, all of them.

They had one lady call out of the blue after the chef appeared on one of those loopy noontime television shows (they're always called "Hey There, Whereverville!") wearing a baseball cap instead of a chef's toque. She ranted and raved and cussed for like an hour about that, how it was an an insult to the word "chef" for him to not wear a chef's toque. They responded that she was an insult to the word "lady" and then they went and got all likkered up on Makers' Mark. Ha ha, so there are some opinions I can get behind. But if you want to stay on my good side, you better be pret-ty careful.



*Don't say "internets" or "webernet" or "intertubes" or any of those other dumb hipster things. You know it's called the "internet," just like I know you're a complete "idiot." Oh, and stop using unnecessary quotation marks. I promise the next one won't be so rant-y.