IT'S GREAT TO BE HERE!

I'm running out of Sriracha. And discovering, to my dismay, that I do not have a spare bottle. Sriracha has made living among the whitebread people bearable for so long I'd probably go mad without it. Or reasonable substitutes, like the library of chilipastes in the fridge.

In some ways, California is a hardship post. Good coffee has been almost entirely elbowed aside by Starbucks, and flavoured "coffees", outside of the inner city Chinese food consists of 'orange chicken' and fried wontons, bread in the supermarkets is still largely spongy poof for baloney sandwhiches, and the newspapers, after a brief period of relevance, have become messy unproofread excuses for birdcage liner.

The New York Times, pork products, and Oxford Marmalade, are flown in.

We have been taken over by refugees from Shizlandia.


Which starts, if you didn't know, at the Oakland Hills and continues all the way to Maine.
[Some might say all the way to the Urals and as far south as Zanzibar, but much of that is unexplored territory filled with space aliens and worm-people, so it's unfair to consider them part of the known world. I've heard that they subsist entirely on Royales avec Fromage, purchased from Les Arches Dorées anyway ..... ]


A friend overseas, who grew up among the slope brows in the upper-south, before emigrating, loves what he calls the "real America", and chastises me for my snobbishness and pretensions. He plays guitar, hearts the grateful dead, smokes pot like a true Murican, and thinks Texas and Florida are slices of heaven filled with honest to goodness patriots. Why shucks.

COLORFUL NATIVE COSTUME: MISSISSIPPI

He does have good points. And sometimes insight.


Despite being wrong. Even out of it.


I can't stand guitars.





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