I got up this morning, took my shower, brushed my teeth, put my clothes on, and dashed out of my mother’s house before she could say good morning at 5:30 am. She wanted to talk to me, but I slipped out to the garage, where my car was parked because I didn’t want to be annoyed.
I drove along Jefferson Street towards the coffee shop, and an angry red Prius cut me off. Come on, Brother. I drive a Toyota, too. We should be family. But this person must’ve been a morning drunk because he or she was swerving in my lane, and a red light was ahead, and they zoomed right through that intersection. Go on ahead, Brother. Break the law. I’m waiting right here for it to turn green. I crawled closer to the crosswalk, and it turned green when it was activated by my movement.
I made it to the coffee shop by six a.m., the only one in there besides the workers.
“How can I help you?” the barista asked.
They hadn’t lined the breakfast sandwiches on display, so I got a little worried.
“Where’s the breakfast sandwich with the English muffin?” I asked.
“Sorry, sir,” he said, “but we don’t put them out for display anymore.”
“Oh, so you do have them.”
“Yes, we do.”
“I’ll have one of those and a cold brew. Thank you very much.”
He warmed it up, I paid my bill with Apple Pay, which I always use in case the Romanian mafia had infiltrated the touchpad, and he handed me my breakfast.
I ate the egg sandwich with bacon and used only half of the muffin to stay an inch closer to my low-carb diet, even though I should’ve ditched the other half, too. But oh well. I love English muffins too much.
Now I sit outside in the wind. A pesky fly keeps landing on my forehead, and I keep swatting it away. It’s insistent on ruining my morning. I think that jerk in the Prius has possessed that fly. Either way, I’m very annoyed.
I have to take my car in for maintenance today at 9 a.m., and I know it’s gonna take all day for them to work on it because that’s what car dealerships do, especially with a car like mine, which is a mess inside, and the outside is full of dirt. A co-worker who had a cousin who worked as a car mechanic at a dealership once told me that they take their sweet ass time with dirty cars and work on the cleaner cars first. Makes sense. Who wants to work on a dirty car? It would be like a server not serving a table full of dirty people. They would rather serve the cleaner people.
But anyway, it’s a Saturday, so who am I to complain?
I need to read more poetry, such as Cummings, Dylan Thomas, and Robert Frost. I’ve read Milton’s Paradise Lost, which was a difficult read. I had no idea what it was, but I respected his use of verse. I also read The Preludes by Wordsworth, which was another difficult one, but not as much as Milton’s.
A young woman interviewed Billy Collins on a show on Youtube, and he was being rude to her. I’ll paraphrase him. He said young poets today haven’t read the essentials like the works I mentioned above and that they needed to devote 10,000 hours to reading poetry, which sounded a bit excessive to me. He also said they needed to learn iambic pentameter. They write bad poetry and post it on Instagram.
I can agree with what he meant by what they’ve posted there. It’s not the best poetry, and it feels rushed, kind of how I’ve rushed these blogs, but at least they’re trying.
I’ve tried my hand at poetry by writing a sonnet every morning, but I wouldn’t dare show it to anyone. They’re like my journal entries…just for me. It would be pompous and careless and irresponsible to post those poems. I’m better off keeping them private than upsetting the masters, dead or alive, by showing them on Instagram or some other social platform.
What is poetry anyway? I know it’s expression, but there are so many types of it. Most poetry these days is free verse. Contemporaries said to hell with verse. “We’ll break the rules and make our own.”
That’s lazy to me.
Then again, I prefer classical paintings over impressionistic paintings. You can’t convince me that Monet did better than Da Vinci.
I remember memorizing Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night.” I forgot it because it was too complicated. It was a villanelle, a form that was invented in Italy during the Renaissance. The rhyme scheme is intricate, not the simpler ABAB, CDCD, et cetera. I’ve written a few villanelles, but like I said, I won’t show them to anyone. They’re too embarrassing. They’re stashed somewhere in my piles of legal pads which I journal in every morning. I throw those legal pads out after a while, although it’s painful to do. It’s like throwing old clothes away that I might need later. They hold a sentimental value, but those villanelles were just something I was fooling around with.
I wanted to take a poetry class at a community college but couldn’t find one. You would think they would offer them if they offered arts and crafts classes. But oh well. I guess I’ll have to learn on my own like I have with everything else.
I feel as slow as a snail this morning after getting out of bed. I wear a shell to protect myself from danger but mostly from stress and criticism. But I wear no tentacles, and I’m losing my eyesight, although my nose drips mucus. I don’t hang around in gardens or forests too often either, but I couldn’t move any slower today.
When my parents used to live in the old house where I grew up, I would step on snails. They would crunch under my shoes, and I would feel bad for them. Those snails had a long twenty-five years ahead, but not anymore. My mother didn’t mind because they were feasting on the plants in her garden. I could see their secretions across the walkway when I would venture toward the driveway.
I read about snails and found that they’re hermaphrodites who trade sperm with each other. I’ve never seen a snail’s egg before. What do they look like? What kind of birds, mammals, and insects feast on them? I know that humans eat them, but I’ve never been to France, so I’ve never eaten escargot.
Sometimes I want to hibernate when it’s too cold or estivate when it’s too hot. I’m fascinated by the nautilus designs on their shells. They’re attractive animals to me. I want to own a snail and feed its herbivorous appetite. It would live in a small tank with plants all around it. I would call him Sam.
Where I live now, I don’t see any snails. I guess the plants aren’t made for them. What a shame. Maybe the next time I see one, which could be never again, I’ll capture it with a napkin and take it home. I’ll stick it in a jar and feed it lettuce.
But anyway, that’s all I have to say about snails.
I wake up and bemoan at the fact that it’s just the middle of the week. It’s difficult to adjust after a short vacation, but now I work all five days. Next week will also be a full week, and then the next two weeks will be short weeks for my birthday. I just hope nothing disastrous happens today, tomorrow, or Friday to totally sabotage my weekend. And disaster usually does strike in some form from my job. I keep telling myself not to let whatever occurs bother me. It’s easy as a reminder.
I’m sitting in the coffee shop. They’ve installed a TV with a styrofoam sheet covering it for some reason. And there’s a green pen lying on the floor with a straw wrapper lying next to it. The old lady with her dog on the pink leash has walked in and found herself a table. The dog wags its tail quickly and snoops around for any crumbs. She wears a red top with honeycomb designs on it, white cotton pants, and pink running shoes. Her dog is hyperactive. Customers walk by and pet it.
There’s a newspaper on the table in the middle of the shop. I didn’t even think they had newspapers anymore, but someone apparently was reading it.
An email came yesterday from WordPress saying a new version is coming, and I would have to change my interface, or else my website won’t function properly. I don’t know what that means. The email instructed me on what to do, and I followed those instructions, just hoping for a positive outcome. The last thing I need is for this website to lose its functionality.
It’s almost seven in the morning. A long day is ahead of me. I have to field inbound calls for my job. Who knows what personality will be on the other end? I wish I didn’t have to do it, but I have to, so I have no choice.
Wednesdays, ugh. At least tomorrow is the street fair in Palm Springs. I wander through it after work and never buy anything. It’s usually trinkets and junk food: two things I can’t afford to have. But the street fair seems so far away.
It’s all based on perception. Time is different from perception. At one moment, time moves quickly, but at another moment, time moves slowly enough to where it freezes, and I stare at the clock, waiting for the next minute to pass.
Not much is happening at the beginning of June. Summer starts. Boredom sets in. It’s going to be a long, hot summer. Summer used to be something to look forward to when I was in school. Now, with work year-round, what else is there to look forward to but dinner?
I eat tacos every night. That’s all I know how to cook. I suppose I could cook a steak, but I need a grill for that, and my kitchen can’t fit one with all the other stuff in there.
Anyway, it’s just Wednesday, and I’m spent. Maybe I’ll rearrange my shoes in the closet.
It still feels funny to me, writing on this laptop. I write in longhand every morning, and it’s tiring tiring tiring. But that was how they used to do it back before the typewriter. It’s hard to imagine people used to write letters to each other rather than send text messages or emails.
I don’t know why it feels weird. It must be that it’s artificial. I can produce with a hand and a pen in a different sort of way. My thoughts are copied quicker on this machine than they are with a pen and paper, but that doesn’t make it better. It makes it lazier.
I copy my stories from longhand. The problem is I can’t read my own friggin’ handwriting. It’s as sloppy as spaghetti. My alphabetical letters look like squashed insects. Squashed black insects because of the black ink. I choose not to write with blue ink every morning when I journal.
Some people are opposed to journaling. I don’t understand them. How do they jump right out to writing without warming up? That would be like skipping stretching.
Journaling is hard work. I usually write the same crap every day, but I know better not to show it to anyone. No one would want to read it anyway. They would think, “My god, what is this person doing?” Or “Lock this person up.” Yes, some morbid thoughts intrude in the morning. They’re distracted as the day continues by worries such as my job. I would rather keep those thoughts and bottle them up for later, but they dissipate like dreams. Then I’m stuck with dull thoughts, like what shall I do later?
I’m reading a book. I’m always reading a book, except my ADHD doesn’t allow me to focus. The books I read are long, such as The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen. Damn, it’s long and dense. I have no idea what I’m reading.
But anyway, my laptop is a fountain of activity. I use everything for it, it seems, as it pertains to writing. But I can’t just dive into it without my stretches. I have to get loose, and this is one way of doing it. If only I could read my own handwriting, I could write a whole book that I copied by longhand.
But no. I have to do it the hard, unnatural way, and that’s by jamming these keys with these fingers and pressing ENTER every time I finish a thought. That’s right. I space it out like a weirdo and then go back and form these paragraphs to fit the prose together.
What’s the proper way to form a paragraph? Do I even know, or do I just make an attempt? I never diagram sentences. They never taught me how to do it. When I was in high school, they showed me how to outline, which was the worst thing they could’ve done. I’m terrible at outlining. A. Ab. Ab1 Ba1. How much more confusing can it get? I always skipped the process and dove right into the writing.
Of course, my mother would help. She showed me a short story I’d written in elementary school. It was obvious that she’d helped me. I didn’t have such a rich vocabulary when I was eight, but she swore I’d written it on my own. Yeah, right. But I guess I’ll take the credit.
Anyway, this laptop has saved a lot of time and effort. I just wish I was born in the age of the typewriter. It would’ve taught me much more discipline. I would’ve had to toss the page after a typo and start all over, not simply tap DELETE. Oh, well.
It flashed on more than a week ago after I’d started the ignition. MAINTENANCE REQUIRED SOON on my odometer. It stared me in the face whenever I looked down on it, and it kept staring when I looked away. My car is run by a hard drive now. I thought it could’ve been an error. Sometimes cars, these days, need a system reboot. But no. It stared at me and kept staring on the day before Memorial Day. And I had a long trip ahead of me up north for several hundreds of miles.
Then yesterday, as I was driving back to Palm Springs, and the message was still staring at me, it changed to MAINTENANCE REQUIRED. VISIT YOUR DEALER. So now I was expecting my vehicle to break down at any moment. This was a desperate time when I had to use the bathroom. I hadn’t gone before the trip, and I had to go then, but I decided to hold it in. It was a three-hour drive through Tehachapi, the countryside where no bathrooms existed, and I thought I could do it the whole way, but nope. I considered pulling over to the shoulder and going in the bushes since I was stuck in California farmland. Yes, it was the middle of nowhere. I’d never had to go that badly.
And the message was staring me in the face. With hundreds of miles to go, it couldn’t have come any slower.
I finally gave in when I reached Lancaster and pulled off at an exit, desperately searching for a bathroom or somewhere that would let me use it. I found a teriyaki restaurant, pulled into a parking space, dropped my keys, had trouble picking them up, and rushed inside there, praying they would let me.
A sign on the door said RESTROOM IS FOR CUSTOMERS ONLY.
I had to make myself a customer, so I ordered a small Pepsi. At least the young woman behind the register in that small town was fast with it. I used my iPhone to make the purchase and poured the cup after I filled it with ice, in disbelief since I was panicking and didn’t have time to pour ice into the cup. What was I doing? What was I thinking?
In order to use the bathroom, I had to use a key. My stomach was swelling. That was how badly I had to go.
So I politely asked the young woman, “May I use the bathroom, please?”
“Sure.”
“Thank you.”
She pulled out a white measuring spoon with a key attached to it.
I hurried to the men’s room. It had only one toilet, no urinal. I think I spent about five minutes just going, not knowing where that desperate urge had come from because I usually could control my bladder.
When I was done, I returned the key to the young lady and got out of there with the soda in my hand, but I still felt the urge to go. It fascinated me.
And when I turned on the ignition, I prayed that the message would go away, but it remained. MAINTENANCE REQUIRED. VISIT YOUR DEALER. I pictured myself on the shoulder of the 14, with my hazard lights on, just standing there with a broken-down car, waiting for a AAA truck to pick me up in a strange town. But where would it have taken me? It was Sunday. What dealership was open on a Sunday?
To end this on a happy note, I made it home safely. I never peed my pants, and my car never broke down—the way I figured it would. But you really never know.
Last night was the one-hundredth-year celebration of the Greek Orthodox church in my hometown. I showed up with my parents and my aunt and uncle from the east coast. All of our relatives from that town came to celebrate, including my uncle from near San Luis Obispo.
We stood inside a banquet room, talking, gossiping, and eating appetizers like hummus, pita, kalamata olives, and feta cheese. I mostly ate because I didn’t know anyone there besides my relatives. They were busy talking to strangers, and I was shy around people I didn’t know. I’m socially awkward like that.
Not too long after we got there, my uncle from near San Luis Obispo began shaking as he stood at a table. People noticed him, so they hurried over to help him. He’s in his seventies, and he carries a cane for his bad knees. I knew earlier there was something wrong with him by the look of his blue nose. Actually almost his whole face appeared blue. I thought he might’ve been drunk because he liked to drink. People tried to help him from shaking. They even brought a chair over for him to sit in, but he collapsed and fell to the floor, passing out. Everyone gathered around him and watched him.
We called 911 to come pick him up. The fire truck showed up not ten minutes later because the fire department was only a few blocks away. They pumped his chest, broke one of his ribs, and hooked him to a monitor. His vital signs were okay, but I heard later that his heart had stopped. It was tragic watching him on the floor because I’d never seen him that way.
The firepersons rolled him on a stretcher to the nearest hospital, although my uncle was protesting not to go. He’s the type of person who says he’s fine even when he isn’t.
After they carried him away, the festival went on. There were about two hundred and fifty people who’d shown up. The price was a hundred dollars a plate of Mediterranean food. We sat at round white-clothed tables. My favorite cousin sat next to me. We’re the same age. Of course the main topic of discussion was my uncle. I was still shaking after what had happened. It could’ve been a heart attack, or it could’ve been a panic attack. I know after years of experience with anxiety. But after I heard from my father that his heart had stopped at some point, I realized no, it wasn’t a panic attack.
I looked at my cousin and told her, after she said she couldn’t believe everything, to get used to it because now we’re old enough to where people close to us are going to start dying or ending up in hospitals just like my poor uncle. She agreed.
But the festivities continued as if nothing had ever happened. It was strange. The Greek dancers started dancing in a circle. We ate Greek chicken, lamb, more pita, more hummus, and drank more wine. I thought about my uncle for the rest of the time I was there and about what I’d said to my cousin.
My mother sat at the next table over with her sisters, and I kept looking at her, thinking someday I’d have to take care of her. She’s fine now, but she’s in her late seventies.
“When my mother goes,” I told my cousin, “it’s over for me.”
And I meant it. My mother is my world. It was a morbid celebration. No one expected that someone like my uncle would collapse, even with a lot of elderly people there.
The older I get, the more I’m preparing for funerals and hospitals. I didn’t dance. I just ate. The food was excellent. Now it’s Sunday morning, the morning after the festival. I’m still full from the chicken, lamb, and baklava, and I’m wondering about my uncle and whether he’s still at the hospital. I’ll drive back home today, a three-and-a-half-hour trip back to Palm Springs, and tomorrow will be another workday. But I’ll keep him in mind.
What I missed about the bars were the unexpected faces I would see whenever I walked in. The women would sit on their stools with their large purses on the counter. The men would grip their glasses as if they were pulling the clutch of their automobiles. The bartender would polish the glasses and hold them up to the lights to see if they had wiped off every blemish.
“What’re you having?” they would ask me.
Those were the new bartenders. I always felt discouraged when facing the new ones because the old ones knew what I wanted. They wouldn’t have to ask. As soon as I entered the bar, the familiar bartender would begin to make my vodka soda, and I would sit on my usual stool after work. From then on, it was happy drinking until I blacked out. Yes, those were times that were simpler, I suppose.
What I miss are the karaoke bars. There was one on Sepulveda–it’s still around, but I forgot its name–where people sang every night. I would sit in the back patio near a fish tank, chain-smoking with my vodka, listening to other people’s conversations since I would sit there alone. Weird me would type their words in my notepad on my iPhone for later if I had any use for them. Shit, I might’ve. A blues band played in that bar every weekend. They were loud, but they never bothered me.
What I miss is the bar on Cahuenga and Wilcox, I think, which was owned by the same people who owned my favorite watering hole. It had a fireplace in the back smoking lounge, where I would stare at the flames and contemplate what to do with myself. This was me in my early thirties. I was high all the time when I went there, and then I would get drunk. The bartender was lovely. I forgot her name, too, but she was an older lady with purple hair who always loved to see me. She knew what I drank. I downed whiskey there for some reason, not vodka. It was self-medicating. Why lie? I was all alone with no friends, reminiscing about the times when I did have them around.
What I miss is the bar-hopping from one bar to the next in Hollywood. We would always start out west on Sunset at a western bar with a mechanical bull which drunk people would ride and fall off of. And then we would work our way eastbound, closer to where we lived, to bars that were less packed. I remember we would drink at Chateau Marmont, a place where some famous people had died because of an overdose.
What I miss are the afterparties at my friend’s apartment. He would always let me crash there on his couch. I didn’t need to take a taxi home. This was before Uber and Lyft. I would wake up on Saturday and Sunday with a gargantuan hangover. My car would be parked somewhere on his street, which was permit parking only, and I would stagger to it in the morning like it was the walk of shame without the sex with a strange woman. Sometimes I would get a ticket, or sometimes I was lucky. I always had to hurry before the parking enforcer would show up.
Speaking of women, what I miss are the one-night stands in my late twenties/early thirties. Those will never come back again. We all went through them before we settled down. And we always had stories to tell to our closest friends–good or bad.
But what I miss the most are my earliest days of drinking: the first shot I ever took in that small town with the woman I was dating. Or the short time later, when my cousin drove me to Vegas, and we drank and drank and drank and hardly did any gambling. We’d come there to drink because I’d just turned twenty-one. Those days will never ever come back. Now I’m surrounded by death on the same street as I’m walking. People close to me will begin to die when I wake up sober each morning. It’s a sober life from here on out, a bittersweet beginning and ending. There hasn’t been a lot to miss. Except it feels better not to wake up hungover. I drink my coffee and still smoke cigarettes, but I’ve given up drugs and alcohol and the times I’ve had with them. There’s no hiding from the fact that I miss those younger days. But what will I do? Go back to where I was? No. It’s too late. If I go back, there would be no coming back. That’s what I worry about the most. I miss it too much.
I’ve hated all of my jobs in adulthood except for one when I would deliver for restaurants when I was in college. That one was easy. We used walkie-talkies back then. The dispatcher would tell me to drive to a restaurant to pick up food, and I would deliver it, no problem. That job lasted all but a month.
Other than that, jobs have been hell. I was a substitute teacher for two years, and the kids wouldn’t sit in their seats after I’d told them to. They paid me eighty dollars a day to supervise the classrooms at those schools. I gave up hope of ever becoming a teacher. It took a certain person to do that.
I also applied through a temp agency when I was living with my parents right after college because no one was hiring. They set me up with the weirdest job. I had to file medical records in a trailer right out front of the hospital in the small town. They stuck me with a kid who was about nineteen years old. He was a thug. I was about twenty-three, twenty-four. I can’t remember.
The manila folders in which the papers were kept were so old that they were dry and sharp. I would get papercuts along the edges, and I would bleed on the folders. Not to mention the kid would try to fight me.
“What are you, a p****y?” he would say. “I’ll f***k you up.”
I would just keep my eyes on the medical records in that trailer and try not to engage with that punk. The job lasted for only two weeks before I turned that scumbag in to the temp agency, and I quit. I remember there were bandages on my fingertips after doing that miserable job. That was about as blue-collar as far it went.
When I moved to Los Angeles from the small town, I went with what I was good at and took up another restaurant delivery job. It was flexible, like most jobs in the service industry. I got to choose my hours, and I would write in my spare time (or attempt to write). It wasn’t easy driving through Los Angeles through all that traffic. I still get post-traumatic stress over the thoughts of some of those nights. Or maybe they were just bad memories. I don’t know.
There was one night when the transmission on my Honda Civic was failing, and I was at the edge of a cliff near Mulholland Drive after delivering sandwiches to some rich guy in Beverly Hills. When I released the parking brake and turned on the ignition, the car began rolling backwards towards the cliff, and I slammed the brakes. In order not to fall off, I had to punch the accelerator quickly enough, or I might’ve died. I closed my eyes, counted down from three and punched it just in time to where I could safely drive up the hill in that guy’s driveway. It still keeps me up at night.
Restaurants hated me when I came in to pick up food, especially the takeout people, because I didn’t tip them. Maybe I should’ve, but it was against company policy. But I dated some of those takeout women. It was unethical, but this was at a time when it was still socially acceptable. Now that that’s been taken away, I’m sure people are still doing it behind the scenes.
When I got good enough at my job, they promoted me to dispatcher. So then I was just a part-time delivery guy. I made more money delivering orders, but it was safer to sit in the office and listen to a guy singing loudly in the dispatch room. It was in the other room from the call center, which was all women with a man as the supervisor. They would take calls from angry customers and check the status of our drivers to see how close they were.
The call center was like a nursery, but the dispatch room was like a bar. Eighty percent of the dispatchers were high when they came in to dispatch. I wasn’t one of them. I always came in clean.
The guy who sang all the time was a movie buff who directed short films on the side. He’d spent over fifty grand on a short that lasted five minutes. Most of the money he’d spent was used on a crane to make a sweeping shot in one of the scenes.
The other dispatchers made fun of him behind his back. I felt sorry for him for spending all that money on such a wasted film.
But anyway, the dispatching job lasted for over ten years. People came and went obviously, and years went by too fast. Most of the drivers were either Brazilian or Bulgarian. They would speak in their native tongue to each other in the same room. I had no idea what they were saying. They were probably teasing us or saying bad things about us because we were forcing them to drive everywhere in town and not making them enough money. This was before the advent of cell phones as wallets. So, we drivers had to copy the customers’ credit cards using receipt paper and a mechanical object that I couldn’t name. Yes, those were different times before Steve Jobs took over the world.
Do I miss them? Well, I miss the partying or the self-medicating–depending on how you perceive the traumas I went through.
But one thing I do know. When people ask me, “How do you like it?” My job they were asking about. I would say, “It’s just a job.” In other words, I didn’t take it seriously, and it wasn’t who I really was.
It’s Thursday, which I favor every week. It’s only closer to another Friday. Otherwise, the weeks are wasted by my job. I won’t get into what I do. There are so many better ones. But am I qualified? I look at hiring websites, and I find the descriptions to be too complicated. Sans the joy I get from work, it brings me misery. The people yell at me.
Just yesterday, a caller asked if I was pulling pranks because of how incompetent I was. They’d poorly trained me. Now I’m stuck with what I have, which is a job with benefits and punishments. I take my sixty lashes for every minute that rolls by per hour, just waiting for the weekend to arrive. The hours go by so slow every Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. Thursday gets here, and I see a glimmer. Not too much, but a little. Every Friday gives me half a day to work, so it allows me to go on errands and make appointments.
Anyway, I’m taking Thursday and Friday off this week because I’m going to a festival up north. You can’t imagine how relieved I am not to have to work, although I’ll be driving on the road for quite a while. I’m talking over six hours through heavy traffic through Los Angeles and up the grapevine. I say up because it’s north, but in reality, it’s down because it’s a steep descent.
Who can say how fun the festival will be? I hope the food is great. It’s a celebration for a Greek Orthodox church that has been around for a hundred years. They’re serving Greek food. And then I’ll meet with family, including my aunt and uncle whom I haven’t seen in years–a decade plus. I never was religious, but my family sure is, just not fanatically. My mother wants me to get dressed in a suit and tie. But I don’t have a suit and tie. I’ll have to buy them.
Tomorrow night, the family and I are going to a French Basque restaurant. It’s a custom in that town. I’m Greek, but part of my family is Basque. The restaurant serves bread, beans, soup, salsa, salad, spaghetti, and pickled tongue as part of the setup. And I’m supposed to eat it all. The best item on their menu is the fried chicken. You have to order it on your own, along with steak and pork chops. All I know is I’m going to eat a lot this weekend.
My mother said they won’t serve gyros at the festival. That’s a shame because it’s my favorite Greek food to eat. It looks like it will be just chicken and salad. The recipe for Greek chicken is as follows:
4 boneless, skinless chicken breasts (or thighs, if preferred)
I found that online. Don’t think that I knew it from the top of my head. I could never cook like that.
Another way to cook it is with:
1/4 cup fresh parsley, chopped
Lemon wedges
Feta cheese, crumbled
Kalamata olives
I would prefer it that way because of how much I love feta cheese (especially fire feta) and kalamata olives. I could eat those on their own.
But anyway, there will be dancing at the Greek festival. There’s always a guy who dances with a pint of beer on his head, and it never spills. I know this from experience because I used to go every year when I lived in that town.
The town used to be small, but now people commute to their jobs in Los Angeles from there because it’s much cheaper to live, although it’s two hours away. I couldn’t possibly live like that. I work remotely, and I’ve worked remotely ever since COVID, which was four years ago. I can’t see myself ever working in an office again. The co-workers were too much to bear. It’s better to be alone. When I lived in Los Angeles, it was an hourly commute to work. I lived in Hollywood and had to drive to Culver City during rush hour. That was two hours of my free time wasted in my car with traffic that wouldn’t move much often.
But just because it’s remote, it doesn’t make the job any better. As long as I have to use the phone, I’ll be miserable. Sometimes, I daydream about living as a nomad without a job, although Thursdays wouldn’t taste as sweet. They would be just another day.
