Fit To Be Tied

I stopped by my folks house to pick them up for lunch and I was stunned to see "50 Shades Of Grey" sitting next to my mom's Laz-E-Boy.

"Do you know what this book is about" I asked my mom.

"Not really" she replied.  "I'm only a few pages into it.  Everybody is talking about it."

My mom is 81.

Who would have thought I'd live to see the day Bondage & Discipline and/or Sadomasochism went mainstream?

But mainstream it is.  The boyfriend and I were in the supermarket Monday and there it was on the bookshelf, right next to the frozen food.  It was paired with Dick Cheney's "In My Time".  Makes a certain amount of sense I suppose.  I think we can all agree Dick Cheney knows a thing or two about masochism.  All the same, it was a little creepy.

I'm having lunch with the folks again later this week.  I can't wait to see what my mom thinks once she gets past chapter one.

Rainy Days And Tuesdays

It seems like only yesterday, probably because it was last Tuesday, that I was telling the boyfriend that things were looking up, that we finally seemed to be getting our heads above water.  The bills were paid and there was even a little left to stash away in a rainy day fund.

Well, the rainy day came Thursday.

The dogs had been acting not quite themselves for weeks.  We chalked it up to the turmoil of the move and the fact they were having to deal with something new... stairs.  But last week the symptoms became somewhat more acute and I decided we needed to get them into the vet.  Shortly after we had moved here we found a groomer right down the street.  It was also a vet's office and since the dogs had been well cared for and the staff seemed extremely nice, and without other recommendations, I booked a Thursday afternoon appointment.

We sat in the exam room for only a few minutes when the Korean doctor came in.  I'm ashamed to admit that my mind jumped to all kinds of horrible stereotypes, but you would have too if you'd seen how he was examining my little dog, like a rump roast.  A cursory physical exam didn't yield much, other than the fact that their teeth were in desperate need of a cleaning.  We decided to do x-rays to rule out any back issues (a prudent move when dealing with aging dachshunds) and the Dr. wanted to do bloodwork on my older dog.  We left with few answers and $600 poorer.

The bloodwork came back around lunch the next day and I was shocked.  Shocked... that they had gotten results that quickly.  The boyfriend went to the doctor two weeks ago and he's STILL waiting for results!  That pretty much sums up the American healthcare system...dysfunctional at best.  The results weren't good.  My older dog has diabetes and will now have to be on insulin for the rest of his life.  But before we could address that, their teeth would need to be cleaned.

I dropped them off yesterday morning and the preliminary estimate was that it would be around $800.  "That doesn't include extractions" the sunny little assistant said at the desk.  "Extractions are $65 each."  The Dr. had also wanted to remove a suspect fatty deposit on my older dog's flank and he suggested we do it at the same time, while he was under anesthesia.  I agreed and left, planning to pick them up late in the day.

During lunch I received a call, the dogs had to have some teeth removed after all... 22! Seventeen from my poor little dog alone!  Suddenly I felt like the worst daddy on the face of the earth and all afternoon I dreaded picking them up.  And the dread was well founded once I got the bill, $1200.  They took pity on us and gave us the "bulk rate" on the extractions.

Yesterday was one of the worse days ever.

My little dog looks like Grandma Moses.  I think she's only got about 4 teeth left, but I don't know for sure because she refuses to let me look in her mouth.  She gets her vanity from her other daddy.  And my older dog looks like Frankenstein, a three inch stapled incision across his side.  And he hates me.  The boyfriend fell apart once he saw the dogs and last night proved to be horrible for all around.

My older dog is going to hate me even more today because I had to take him back so they could start him on insulin.  I have to go back later this afternoon to learn how to give him shots, twice a day for the rest of his life.  That should do wonders for our relationship.

Cabin Fever

Throughout the turmoil of the past four years, through the losses of jobs and homes and security and peace of mind, we did manage to cling to one little luxury... our cabin in the woods.

Actually, "cling to" might not be the right phrase; we couldn't unload it even if we wanted to (which we don't).  Bought at the height of the real estate bubble in 2007, it's so far underwater it might as well be next door to the Lost City of Atlantis.  Selling it wasn't an option and at the depths of our despair we considered just giving it back to the bank, although I'm not so sure what they would have thought about the matter.  Having already lost one house in a short sale, I can't imagine they'd be too pleased with me losing two.  I imagined they would want to make an example of me and I pictured being hauled off in the dead of the night to some Citibank Gitmo.  So we hung onto it, through thick and thin.  Mostly thin.

How we came to own it was somewhat circuitous.  Long before I met the boyfriend back in 2002, I'd pretty much lost any sense of wanderlust.  Too many unfortunate trips with regrettable friends, too many bumped, cancelled or diverted flights and missed connections, too many lost bags.  And then there was the weather;  the best predictor of freakish weather was just to check my travel plans.  Heat waves, hurricanes, swamp like humidity in places they normally don't occur.  The one constant, no matter where in the world I traveled, was some local explaining that "the weather is NEVER like this."  And finally, there was my knack for always being seated next to the sickest person on the return flight, guaranteeing the one souvenir I brought back from every trip I took was a week long bout with the flu.

That's not to say the boyfriend and I didn't travel, we did.  But it was always short weekend trips to Vegas or the desert, somewhere we could DRIVE.  When the dogs came around they introduced a new wrinkle... boarding.  In theory we could have had someone house sit them, but the friends we had at the time were horrible, the type of people who would rifle through your drawers and closets, hack into your computer and inevitably throw some little get together that would spiral out of control and involve the authorities.  And the odds were great that at least one of the dogs would go missing, which would kind of defeat the whole purpose.

Everything pretty much came to a head during the "Alaska Cruise To Hell" of 2005, a nightmarish experience combining the worst of both air and sea travel.  As if every conceivable disaster hadn't already befallen us, once we entered cell range somewhere outside Ketchikan, my phone rang with news from the boarder.  Turns out our dogs don't play well with others and had been "quarantined".  "Actually" said the frightened sounding girl on the phone, "is there any way you could come and take them away?"  It took the dogs weeks to recover.  And us too.

That was pretty much the end of our travels.

But still, you want to get away from time to time, so what to do?  The boyfriend hit on a novel idea... camping.  No one would ever peg us as "campers".  And they'd be right.  But the idea of camping appealed to us because it would allow us to get out of town with the dogs in tow.

The boyfriend found a 1984 VW campervan on eBay.

It had obviously been used a lot, but it was well taken care of and maintained.  It was bright metallic copper.  It if was a person we pictured a 50something redhead, seated at a bar, hard and worn.  We imagined her name was "Karen", so that's what we named the van.  It only took two trips in Karen to realize we had miscalculated.  Less than a year after we bought her, the boyfriend put her back up on eBay and we sold her to a brutish looking lesbian from Vancouver. 

So now it was 2007 and we found ourselves with a little money to invest.  I'd watched my 401k languish and always considered the stock market a casino where the odds were always stacked against you.  We decided we would invest in real estate.  You could NEVER go wrong investing in real estate, right?  It would be a twofer - it would be an investment property AND a weekend getaway.

A place at the beach was way out of our league, but perhaps something in Palm Springs or Big Bear?  At the time, places there had already skyrocketed out of our price range.  And the prospect of a four or five hour drive in rush hour traffic dampened the enthusiasm.  So the dream was put on hold.

Since the boyfriend couldn't have a weekend getaway, he decided he would get the next best thing... a tanning bed.  This was just days before tanning beds were revealed to be nothing more than cancer causing death machines.  He found one on eBay and won the bidding and then the question became how to ship it.  It's not exactly the type of thing UPS delivers.  "Why don't you just come up and get it?" said the seller.  Turns out, he lived in a small mountain community north of LA we had never heard of.  "Bring a 4 wheel drive" he said, "there's snow on the ground".

We borrowed a truck and schlepped up the 5 and then off into the Los Padres Forest.  By the time we reached the village we were already smitten.  We found the seller's house, but he wasn't home.  He had thoughtfully left the tanning bed in pieces in the snow.  We loaded up the truck and headed back out of town and as we passed a real estate office, the boyfriend made a sharp turn into the lot.  He didn't even have to ask since I was thinking the same thing.  We ended up looking at just one home and instantly fell in love.  Not wanting to be rash, we thought we should sleep on it.  And we did.  We drove back up the next day and put an offer on it.

And here we are.  Literally, here we are... we drove up yesterday to spend the holiday weekend.

And glorious it is, our little refuge.  I'm so glad we didn't lose it.  I think it's the only thing that's kept us sane these past four years.

Welcome To The Dollhouse

If there was one saving grace of our unfortunate exile in Hooterville (and that's a big “if”), it was that the cost of housing was so cheap we were able to rent a fairly large house.  Not only did it allow us to accommodate all our stuff without the humiliation of having to sell things off or trundle them off into storage, it also allowed us to live in denial about our drastically diminished circumstances.  Since we're basically homebodies anyway, we could blithely go on living our lives as before and ignore the fact we were doing in the middle of fucking nowhere.

That isn't the case here in Orange County.

Here, for twice the price, the best we could do is a condo that's approximately half the size of where we once lived.  Welcome to the dollhouse.

Ironically, now that things are actually looking up, I feel poor.  Two years ago, at the depths of our despair, life still felt kinda roomy.  Not so here.  We were able to fit roughly half our belongings into the condo.  The other half still sits boxed in what is theoretically my parking space in the garage.  We've been here two months and for the first three or four weeks we naively believed that with thoughtful planning and a creative use of space we'd be able to get the bulk of the remaining items into the house.  Turns out... fat chance.  Looks like I'll be parking on the street for the foreseeable future.

Truth be told, I actually like living in a smaller space.  It's certainly much easier to clean.  The dogs, however, hate it.  Where once my older dog had a huge house as a racetrack, he now has to be content with running tight circles around the coffee table.  And the little dog, used to chasing tennis balls down a long hallway, has to settle for having them bounced off a wall. I know they're unhappy because they show me in the way they know best, forgetting they were ever housebroken.

I imagine this is a lot like living on a boat or in an RV except that it never goes anywhere.  If I have any regrets it would probably be for my partner's and my taste in Mid Century Modern furniture.  All those sharp angles and hard edges make for a perilous existence in such a small space.  It's like living in the Cave of Swords.  I've lost track of the number of times I've come close to severing my femoral artery on the glass coffee table.  The easiest solution is just to move very slowly, to make no sudden moves, to move through the house as if you're practicing tai chi.  That's going to have to suffice until we can wither afford softer furniture.  Or move.  Again.

Sadly, You Can Go Home Again

If you had told me, thirty years ago, that one day I'd be living back in Orange County, I would've thought you were smoking crack.

Actually, the year would've been 1982 and I don't think we yet had crack, but you get the idea.

I was leaving Orange County for the bright lights and big city of college life and I wasn't looking back.  Sure, I'd visit from time to time, to see my folks and mock whichever high school classmates were left behind, but there was no way I'd live here again.

Or so I thought.

Much was lost in the Great Recession, not the least of which was my career, my partner's job and the home in the Hollywood Hills.  Simply to survive, we had to take what work we could find, which is how we found ourselves banished to “The Place Which Shall Not Be Named”, an ass backward cow town the name of which I can't even type for fear of triggering PTSD.  When, quite out of the blue, job prospects arose back in the good 'ole OC, we jumped at the opportunity.  Compared to Bumfuck, Orange County now seemed like the French Riviera.

And so, here we are.

Turns out there's a reason they coined the term “The More Things Change, The More They Stay The Same”... it's true!  I was shocked at how quickly I've regained my OC navigational skills.  Every day is like a new case of deja vu.  We've ended up living just down the street from my old girlfriend, the one I lost my virginity to.  Shame she isn't around to meet the boyfriend.  And we're close to my folks, which I love.  When I left this place for school, we were barely on speaking terms and now I meet them for lunch at least once a week.  Strange times.

Of course, there have been a lot of changes over the past thirty years.  For one thing, there are Toll Roads, the purpose of which escapes me.  I wouldn't want to drive to Riverside in the best of times and I'm certainly not going to pay $4.00 to do it.  My sister informs me that it shaves 30 minutes of the drive to her house.  Now there's a choice... 30 minutes stuck in traffic or an additional 30 minutes in the company of her family.  I'd call that a toss up.

But by far the greatest change in the past thirty years has been to the whole concept of “Orange County”.  When I left here this place was known as the home of Disneyland and the birthplace of the John Birch Society (and the reactionary Rightwing politics we know and love today).  There was a reason we referred to living “behind the Orange Curtain”.

And now look at it!

It's had an Extreme Makeover!

It's the New Gold Coast!

Actually, the transformation was already beginning when I still lived here.  What happened was that people with money discovered that despite the fact it was more than a little backwards, it had the one thing that Los Angeles ran out of decades ago... undeveloped coastline!  So the McMansions went up, the Nouveau Riche moved in and they demanded the same level of shopping and dining experiences found in more cosmopolitan locales.  And before you knew it, Orange County was, dare I say it, stylish.


Oh sure, there were sacrifices.  Chief among them was the pristine coastline, the view of which is now blocked by Faux Chateaus and phony Tuscan Villas.  And sadly too, Laguna Beach.  It was once my favorite place in the world, a quaint artists’ colony where I spent many a summer.  Now it's chock full of insufferable One Percenters.  Oh well, can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs.

So here we are, the adventure continues.  Now that the dust of the move has settled, it's time to see what life in OC has to offer.

Besides “Housewives”.