I’m a little squeamish when it comes to dental work, but Craig is a down right wuss.  He had some work done on Friday, easy stuff like replacing old fillings.  I had to take the day off to take him to and from because he had to load up on Valium.  He had what I called the Homeless hole.  He of course had to have gas.  He doesn’t remember if they gave him Novocaine.  He also had me cue up The Carpenters greatest hits on the iPod.  Now he’s all set.  Our dentist really is quite old school and his equipment looks exactly like the equipment they used when we were kids.  There is a reason to be a little concerned, and who am I to talk.  My flying Phobia is almost out of control.  He drives a 1979 mustang fast back.  It’s not in great shape either, but I’ll bet he bought it new.      Actually I don’t go to him anymore.  I had a bad experience with a crown.  I am spending way too much time with doctors lately.  I’ve decided to play grown up and actually get my blood work done and fix the blood pressure and stuff.  It has been awful so far.  The drugs my Doctor gave me at the same time for several different ailments make me real sick.  This too shall pass.  I have resisted western medicine for so long and now I’m in the thick of it.  Go figure. 

     Is everyone well?

               What I don’t miss will be mostly a pictorial.  We’ll start with snow.   

                How about the inversion layer.

                                                                                                                                      How about the politics.                                                            

     Strip malls.

     and kids, everywhere.

     There is much more but I don’t want to offend.  How about you?

     Moving from Salt Lake I thought I would never miss anything,  I moved away once and had to move back.  I moved again for good.  I have had years of nightmares where I am stuck in Salt Lake and couldn’t leave.  I wake up almost in tears.  There are still some things I miss.  I have said this before and I’ll say it again, Training Table cheese fries, not to mention the hawaiian hamburger. 

Another thing we can’t find here is a good greek restaurant.  My life for a good gyro.

Since California is the Florida of the west, all of our good produce gets shipped away.  I got better avocado’s in Utah.  Lemons and limes here are just so-so and tomatoes suck.  Every summer I crave a good Utah tomato.  Our nights get too foggy and cold for tomatoes to do well.  I miss fry sauce.  Doesn’t exist here.

And then there are the freeways.

    None of these things could even come close to making me want to move back.  If I had to move from California I would probably go just about anywhere else before I would go back there.  It’ll be in my book.  What do you miss about home?  If you’re somewhere else.

I don’t like facebook.  I feel too exposed.  But one thing it does do is allow every one to post pictures.  I would like to see every ones holiday pictures.  We had a great christmas dinner with friends.  It was a great finish to a wonderful holiday season. 

I read a book.  Well, read and skimmed.  Really I did.  It was called “The Practice of Writing Memoir”.  This is what I learned.  Let me know what you think.

As I sit in my silvery, stark, stainless steel kitchen set, in the hollow, sparse, slightly cold, great room, I look out the big, winter dirty, spider web laced window at the volumnanously tall, drenched, dripping, drowning, redwoods.  (Redwoods are a first cousin to the Sequoias…)  I’m reminded of a distant , past, vague, memory that reminds me of my fourth grade teacher with her wet, dank, dark, drippy, odiferous arm pits.  Her name was Mrs. Grant.  (Sister Grant to the fourth ward.)   And squirrels are scurrying up and down the drenched, dripping, drowning, redwoods.  But I digress. 

Ummm…the redwood deck is also damp, which reminds me, of the cold, cavernous, moist, damp, wet deck at Deer Valley.  I worked there two winters. 

Speaking of first cousins, I remember a time when my second cousin sold us a house.  It was dark, dank. dreary, but not drippy.  But it leaned to the north.

I’ve been working for somebody else since I was 12.  Some jobs have been good and others have been really bad.  The job I have now is not bad at all.  I’m respected and have a lot of freedom, not to mention great benefits.  I still don’t want to be there.  Both Craig and I were thinking of a way that I could work at the candy store part time and we could cut hours of our existing employees.  I went to a tree lighting ceremony on the town green and didn’t make it to the lighting.  Bottom line is I don’t like crowds, kids, candy.  What kind of a candy store employee would I be.  Here are some pictures of the event. 

 I’m going part time at work starting Jan.1.  This might really help.  I would like to free up some time to write a book.  I decided I’d start by actually reading one.  I’m in the prossess of doing that now.  We’ll see what happens.  Do you think that “Poor Picked on Little Gay Mormon Boy” is a little too much for a title?

Here we go again, Winter.  We had ten inches of rain already and it’s supposed to keep it up for awhile.  I know that some of you are saying, “oh you poor thing, Rain”  And some are saying, “only ten inches?  Must be rough”.  I would have said the same before I spent a winter in the forest.  We have had to evacuate a few times in heavy wind cause the ground gets so saturated that trees come down, often.  We have mud slides and floods. 

A few years ago we had a mudslide right above our house.  At the same time there was a mud slide down the street half a block.  This one brought a tree upright down the hill and left it in the middle of the street.  Ours brought down a huge tree and snapped a telephone pole in half.  Last year was a breeze but the year before we had some wind storms that I’ll post pictures of.  My mud slide pictures are at work and it’s hard to sense the drama with pictures.  I’ll also leave you with an article from the local paper.  Just know that I wasn’t that freaked out.  The paper made me sound like such a girly man.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Picture it: Magna, 1978.  I’m working at a car dealership at 20 years old driving whatever car I wanted on the whole lot.  I was the new father of an infant boy.  I’m living  with and married to my best friend Sheila, who is even younger than me.  I have some fond memories of our very short marriage. 

Some of my favorite memories are having Jay, Wendy, and Bub (Sheila’s sister Pat’s kids) over for summer weekends.  We started the tradition of going for scary rides.  I was always driving  new cars so the scary ride was an excuse to ride around in them.  It started out by driving to a boarded up house and me making up a story about how the owners had to move out because of ghosts.  Then I would pretend the car would stall and something was trying to pull me out of the car.  I’m sure you get the picture. 

After awhile, even though the kids would beg for a scary ride, they would say things like ‘this is stupid” “we’ve done this before”.  Well, that was all Sheila and I needed.  This is where things get almost illegal.  I called my brother Joe, who at the time was in high school and asked him to get some friends together to stage a murder.  It was all rehearsed and so realistic that it even scared me.

I was driving a brand new lipstick red T-Bird with white vinyl interior.  All the better to slide around on during a car chase.  What seat belts?

                                                                                             THE STORY

We picked up the kids from Pat’s and they immediately started in on wanting a scary ride.  We drove out to a kind of ghost town called Bacchas in the Oquirrh’s by Hercules I went around the loop of old homes and I made up stories about whatever and sure enough, they started complaining about how lame it was.  I said, “that’s it for the scary rides” But why don’t we take this dirt road before we go home”.

Keep in mind, this was way late in the day, almost dark.  We drove a very short distance on the dirt road and saw a guy in a mask and a shotgun run across the road. 

The kids (Jay, Wendy, and Bub) didn’t really know what they’d just seen but it gave them a heads up to pay attention.  The next event was pretty graphic.  The headlights hit a knife blade just as it was being plunged into a guy that was roped to a tree.  They had the blood pack and everything.  It was gross.  Sheila, having been a high school drama graduate, started screaming and saying “we’ve got to get out of here.”  I lit up the T-bird’s tires and we were once again risking the life of our nephews and niece driving like Starsky and Hutch with no seat belts.  Then Sheila said “we have to go back, what if the guy isn’t dead?”

We drove back to the grove and the only thing we saw was the blood on the tree until a set of headlights came on.  Then Sheila said “they’re going to come after us because we’re witnesses!”

The French Connection car chase ensued.  Sheila saying “Stay down, they might shoot at us”.  The whole time the kids are saying “I can’t believe this, it’s a nightmare.”  Bub, being the youngest, was halfway under the front seat and they were all sobbing.

At that point, they didn’t want to spend the weekend with us, they just wanted to go home.  When we arrived they just walked up the stairs to there bedrooms whimpering with their big puffy red eyes.  Pat said “what have you done to my kids”?  We later had to call my brother to have him explain that it was all set up cause they didn’t believe us.  That was the last of the scary rides and weekends over.   Sheila and I should have done jail time.

The economy is doing all kinds of things to all kinds of people.  For us, the Candy store and the town green in general is changing because people are putting away their credit cards and using cash.  Less cash.  We’re not worried yet, things are going well. 

Our town, on the other hand, is falling apart.  I started coming here to vacation years ago.  Many years ago.  It was a young, energetic, party place.  Through the years the crowd got older and fluffier.  A lot of the young and firm became older and retired here.  I guess, expecting things to remain the same.  We didn’t consider that time changes everything.  The Triple R just closed.  That was the pool I’ve talked about in Blogs.  It was a pool, restaurant, and bar that was in the middle of town and had been around since the mid 70′s. 

This was the resort whose guests supported most of the Guerneville’s shops and services.  There was another resort that was actually first in gay resorts but it became way toned down and advertised to the straight crowd as being Gay friendly.  What’s happening to our little gay town? 

 I think that  the reason it used to be so popular is that when we were growing up we were so desperate to be with people like us.  We were so not tolerated as main stream.  We came to Guerneville and we were mainstream.  Maybe kids feel more accepted anywhere and don’t feel the need to find safety in numbers.  Wouldn’t that be nice.  I have noticed in the last few years that the crowd that used to be in the 20′s and 30′s ended up being 40′s and 50′s.  Now there’s no crowd at all. 

We will see whether the Triple R comes back and the town is renewed.  Chances are, it will be leveled to make room for subsidized housing.

I was going through my picture shoe box - you remember pictures - you stick that round expensive cylinder into a camera making sure it never sees the light of day and then take it to a photo mat after the camera won’t click any more and pay even more money to have pictures put on paper, and I found a lot of cute pictures of the best dog in the world.  This is our boy Black Jack.  We rescued him when he was  four and he instantly became a part of the family. 

He was one of those dogs that would sit outside the grocery store and wait for you to come out.  He hated cats but if you told him no,  he would sit there and let them humiliate him.

And speaking of humiliation,  we did our part.  He was such a good sport.

He never made messes, he never tore apart a Christmas tree, or anything else.  If we went to work leaving part of breakfast on the coffee table, it would be there when we got home.

We never had to wonder what he wanted.  He was very clear.  When he had had enough of whatever it was we were doing he would let out this ear piercing sound.  It was a cross between a howl and death rattle.  He let us sleep in every once in awhile, but when he wanted us up he would stick his nose in your hand and give it a little push.  Or he’d breathe on your neck, that sort of thing.  He was always super gentle and super patient.

He didn’t like most other animals.  He was very short tempered with most other dogs except Charley.  She was a friend’s golden retriever who took a shine to Black Jack, and he tolerated her.  He gave us a lot of joy and is very missed.  He lived to be 17.