You know, I don't keep meaning to do this to you, tens of readers. It's just . . . well, I've been getting a little on the side. I didn't want you to hear about it like this, but . . . well, I've been seeing Oregon.

Not that I haven't been fantastically lazy about updating, but the wife and I did recently take some time off to go hang out in Cannon Beach. Because if there's somewhere you want to go in early March, it's the Oregon coast! In truth, we had originally scheduled this trip in--you'll like this--last November, which is the second most popular time to visit the Oregon coast, but that had to be rescheduled when torrential rains wiped out large swaths of I-5 as well as peeling the roofs off of hotels all up and down the coast like so many lepers' fingernails.

And so! We gave the old car the usual checkup before leaving, and upon being told that the old car needed the mystical ministrations of Dr. Strange before we could ever dream of driving it for more than six miles or so, we promptly rented a car and drove to Cannon Beach! (Did you know that there exists a little gutless thing called a Chevy Stratus? Did you know that Chevy still makes cars? I'm not sure they do even after renting one. Renting this car was like renting a Zen koan. If a car makes no sound, was I really there to rent it?)

Interestingly, we weren't actually staying in Cannon Beach. We were staying in Arch Cape, which is only four miles or so south of Cannon Beach, except for the part where we found out that we were actually staying one mile south of Arch Cape at he Arch Cape Inn, which therefore put us five miles (of pretty twisty road) south of Cannon Beach, which is, in itself, no metropolis anyway. But it was cool--it wasn't like we were right off the highway where you could hear logging trucks screaming by all night, except of course we were, but at least we did have a convenience store located about 100 yards away down the highway, which was pretty exciting walking down, especially when the giant trucks howled by us and gave us incredible wind-wedgies and fucked up our hair, and anyway the convenience store was closed the whole time we were there anyway.

The Oregon coast! You're stupid if you don't go in early March!

But I'm making it sound as if we didn't have a good time; we had a glorious time. For one thing, any time away from 1. work and 2. one's normal house is a glorious time. It's good to get away. And Cannon Beach is pretty much away, particularly in, well, early March. We soon discovered there's like six places to eat in town in the off season, and three of them advertise "burgers and pizza." Oregon's native delights. We settled in at a place we had visited before, the Drift Wood Inn, which is sort of like a Cheers where everyone wears gum boots. We were to discover that the Drift Wood Inn also had improbably fantastic food, given the proletariat atmosphere; the wife had a ridiculously creamy filet mignon while I tore into some absurdly flaky tempura shrimp with two types of cocktail sauce. Meanwhile, yards away, some locals fed video poker machines with the same kind of fervor that you see people in Jerusalem tucking prayer slips into the Wailing Wall.

At night, we would retire back through the twisty dark road to our rather out-of-the-way hotel-thing. It was not really a hotel. It was a series of little connected self-serve bungalow things where you checked yourselves in; when you coughed up the cash online, they gave you a door code. Can nefarious people discover our door code and rob us? I wondered, and then immediately dismissed the idea as ludicrous, as we are worthless. Any robbers or kidnappers or mountebanks or whatever would steal up in the dark of night, filled with malign intent, and then would immediately spy the Chevy Stratus rental in our parking space and then disgustedly tiptoe away to break into the abandoned convenience store to see if anyone had left behind a roll of quarters.

Ensconced in our roughly bed-shaped room (there was an entertainment center whose doors, when opened, prevented one from opening the room door), we then proceeded to enjoy the creature comforts, including a lovely little sea-stone fireplace with the newspaper and kindling all set up and ready to be lit for a comfy fire! I looked quizically at it for a moment, as it seemed that they had stacked a rather large log on top of the newspaper and then thrown kindling on top of that, like a careless pasta dish, but I figured: Aw, they know what they're doing. I lit the paper, which burned merrily for a few seconds until it died out abruptly; the large piece of firewood continued to squat stolidly atop the ashes, its haunches unscathed by even the merest hint of scorching. The kindling, far above the fray, was not even warm, and victoriously keened with Elven voices into the maw of the chimney above.

We tried again, with similar results. Then we realized a key problem: the firewood was wet. Not "wet" as in "left out in the rain for a bit," but "wet" as in "unseasoned, green wood that might have been a boat keel last week." We would have no fire that night, unless you count the FIERY DIALOGUE BETWEEN JUSTIN LONG AND BRUCE WILLIS IN LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD! Which, of course, we do.

You see, we also watched a bunch of movies. The wife wondered aloud at one point if Cannon Beach had any sort of taxi service in case we wanted to spend a night at the Drift Wood Inn "getting loaded;" I just laughed weakly. It's like asking how many ATMs there are in Chicken, Alaska. No, it was movies for us, and fortunately for us, we adore horrible movies. To wit: 30 Days of Night, a movie that dares to ask the question, "Can we make this even stupider than the terrible comic book?" Thrillingly, the answer was a resounding YES. This movie did feature a bracing sort of schizophrenia where the laughable overacting of the WAMP-EERS was perfectly balanced out by the reliably affectless performance of Josh Hartnett, who can at least boast that he perhaps contained more moisture per cubic centimeter than, say, our firewood.

That same night--because we are fearless and fucking crazy, I guess--we also watched the astonishingly witless Beowulf, a movie so barking mad that it assumes that the viewers do want to see Angelina Jolie's alarming, nipple-less, motion-captured tits, but does not want to see Ray Winstone's alarming, presumably leathery, non-motion-captured penis. Beowulf is essentially 300 for people who worried that the latter was too realistically homoerotic.

Aw, there I go again, making it sound like we didn't have a good time. We did have a lovely walk on the beach under iron skies, a good half mile or so from the city center to Haystack Rock, which the wife informed me was the "third-tallest monolith in the world." But thanks to a series of childhood ear infections, the seaside wind was wreaking havoc with my pathetic auricles, so I ignored her, opting instead to point at a scuttling (read: completely motionless) hermit crab in a snail shell that I spied in a tidepool. The wife picked up the creature and cooed at it; the beast waved a tiny feeble claw in some sort of parody of defense. I hunched miserably against the wind and glared at the basalt-colored clouds bearing down on us from the sea.

It rained like Thetis' own vengeance on us all the way back into town, and we of course stopped by the Drift Wood Inn for a warming beverage before returning to roadside Lilliput to watch terrible movies, and of course we wish we were still there.

I checked with her, and she doesn't mind: this is the year the wife turns forty. And it only seems fair that before I leave her for a younger woman I show her a good time.

(Ha ha! I kid. No younger woman would have me. So I'm leaving her for an older woman: Here I come, Helen Mirren!)

It has long been the wife's wish that on her fortieth, she would like to be in Paris. And so we are planning on making this happen. (Though today's economic autocornholing has certainly put some zest into the plans. Is there a Wikipedia page on "Things You Can Melt Down For Money"?)

It sounds like a good time, and of course I am willing to do anything to make the wife happy--which now that I reread that, sounds hilarious: "Oh, I suppose I can take one for the team and go to Paris." I've been to Paris; it's nice! So is London, so is Rome, so is Brussels; I think all the major European cities that I've visited are positively swell. They're corking!

So how come I always have more fun in the smaller cities?

Part of it is simple: I'm a tremendous pain in the fucking ass. Somewhere there is a Platonic Ass Ideal, and there is an identifiable Pain Solid in it, and it is almost certainly Skot-shaped. It's always some little fucking thing, really.

In Paris, it wasn't the food--which was wonderful, particularly (I'm not kidding) this fucking rad little taco joint--it wasn't the snottiness (everyone who acknowledged us was lovely). It was the goddamn phones. (This was pre-cellphone for me.) I just wanted to make a call to check my bank balance (prior, of course, to being able to do this online), and so I got one of those little phone cards and proceeded to dial. And dial. And dial. All to no avail; in 2001, at least, France's public phone system was about as user-friendly as ENIAC schematics. For my efforts, all I was able to obtain was a stream of recorded Gallicisms that I became certain was trying to tell me, "You are a vexing little sausage of a man." I finally gave up, and found myself staring down at a bit of graffito reading, "American shit." I then proceeded to beat myself about the head with the plastic receiver in a truly Krustyesque display of self-mortification.

I know that this is an unfair and unrepresentative way to remember Paris. And yet I do, except for the dim parts that have been occluded by self-inflicted head trauma.

When I think of my time in France, I much prefer to remember our Thanksgiving night in Arles, a sleepy little town in the south of France, remembered mostly for being so relentlessly charming and so implacably beset by chilling winds that it caused a certain Mr. Van Gogh to completely lose his shit, paint radioactive sunflowers and eat his own ear.

We loved Arles almost immediately. There's something about a town that has kept its semi-medieval protective walls, because fuck Huns, or whatever. I demand a completely Hun-free night when on vacation. Also, you have to love a place with a functioning arena that continues to stage bullfights. It certainly explained where my Thanksgiving meal came from that night, listed on the menu in helpful English as "STEAK OF BULL."

(There's something oddly warming and special-making about spending Thanksgiving in another country where obviously nobody gives a shit about your US holiday. It's like sharing a secret, albeit a secret that isn't secret at all and that nobody else cares about anyway, and let's not even think about the fact that it's one of the lamer holidays for being manufactured and fraught with all kinds of lies and misdirection and so forth, but anyway: it's still kind of your secret thing on that day in that place, even if Bastille Day makes it look like some clumsy, raddled milkmaid by comparison, because Bastille Day is fucking awesome in ways that Thanksgiving will never be. They stormed something for their holiday! What did we do? We had dinner. And then half the people at dinner died of communicable diseases a little later. AMERICA!)

Anyway. STEAK OF BULL! Who could resist that? Well, the wife could, for one, and she instead had a little mistake of a salad that was decorated with strips of uncooked salmon, which she pawed through gamely if unenthusiastically; the oiliness of the fish had permeated the entire dish. She resorted to pushing the stuff around the plate in a manner recognized by parents of young children everywhere until the waitress appeared with her next dish, a much more well-received preparation of rabbit. Meanwhile, I sawed mercilessly at my STEAK OF BULL, savoring it's loser-y goodness. "You were a warrior," I thought at my plate of meat. "And you lost to a mincing peacock with swords. Suck on that, cow."

At the end of the meal, we ordered and received two creme brulees, and . . . oh my. They were heavenly. Bar none the best brulees we had ever eaten, seasoned lightly with the staunch unsmilingness that is the hallmark of French waiters and waitresses the country over. (Not rude! Just all business. I love French waiters: they bring you your shit and get the fuck out of the way, because that's your table for as long as you need it, and if you need something else, well, you should have thought of that before, stupid. It's like they trust you enough to take care of yourself for the night, and if that's not the case, well, that's sort of sad. French waiters are basically Turing machines.)

After the meal, the wife and I decided, well, we're not done Thanksgiving it up! It was like nine, but of course Arles had rolled up like blown-out socks; we wandered for a while in front of nothing but dark storefronts. Finally, we found a little bar that was open and walked in. A group of men were playing Parchisi in the corner; they favored us with a curious glance before returning to their game. The floor was covered with sawdust and peanut shells and the here-and-there chairs were all well-worn wood--spare and spartan was the rule.

Awesome.

We took in what the bar had to offer, and were mildly disheartened to see that the sole scotch available was Clan Campbell, an incredible horror that we have never seen in the US, unless that's what you're getting when you buy things like xylene or butyric acid. Clan Campbell is a fiendish hellbroth that is essentially what frat boys squeeze out of their carpets to drink when their trust funds are tapped for the month. Naturally, we ordered two.

"Rokes?" asked the nice barlady. We made the international monkey-faces of Not Understanding.

"Rokes! Rokes!" she hollered, and reached down and picked up a few cubes of ice to show us.

Ah! Rocks. Got it. "No thank you," said the wife. The barlady cocked her head quizzically and then shrugged and put ice in our drinks. Oh well. It couldn't possibly make the horrible stuff worse.

It somehow made it worse. Which, perversely, made it better, because now we were laughing at this suddenly comical horror-fluid, which caused the Parchisi guys to laugh with us, unaccountably, which made the lady next to us laugh as well, sitting comfortably on her chair and petting her dog happily--and let me just say that France is a country that would never, ever think to prevent people from bringing their dogs into restaurants (at least I hope this is still true), and let me further say That's fucking rad, and to sigh to think that we like to think of the French as being tight-assed and all--and then the chair the dog lady was sitting on broke right beneath her, pitching her down onto the filthy sawdust and peanut shells and cigarette butts, causing her to give a little yell of surprise, and that was it; the whole bar lost it, dying laughing, holding our sides, tears running down our faces and throwing back this awful scotch while the dog gamboled in delight, and a chill wind blew outside to the concern of nobody within the safety of those battered walls.

To paraphrase John Irving, I want a whole life like that night. I look forward to going back to Paris. And I don't think the wife will mind too much if I also say: I really look forward to getting out of Paris, out amongst the locals, the happy dogs, the sawdust and the broken chairs.

All right! *rubs hands together eagerly* Time to rip into some Chicago! That Chicago! What a . . . they're so stupid! Chicago. Please. It sucks like . . . a thing that . . . sucks! Sitting on that lake! Like it's so big and, uh . . . lake-sitting! Gay. Chicago, you're gay! You're so . . . wait, "gay" isn't gay anymore. What's the new "gay?" Well, it's whatever Chicago is! Chicago is the new gay pejorative term! So next time you want to malign someone for his or her sexual preference, you walk right up to them and scream, "GOD HATES CHICAGOANS!"

This is getting complicated. I need to call Fred Phelps and see if he's cool with all this.

Oh, it's hopeless. I can't really make fun of Chicago, because frankly, Chicago is awesome. It's awesome in practically every way. It's got world-class public art (Miro! Picasso!), world-class pizza (oh, shut the fuck up, New Yorkers), world-class architecture, outstanding museums, outstanding baseball history (times two!), even outstandingly entertaining political corruption. (I would love it if on the "Welcome to Chicago!" signs, they would add the phrase "Fuck You, We're Still Electing Daleys.")

If there is anything to quibble about with Chicago, it's that maybe it's almost too awesome. It's almost oppressively awesome, to the point where you simply don't know what to do with yourself. Do I go see the Sears Tower? Do I go to Wrigley Field? Do I go puzzle over that Miro piece? Do I go visit that weather-witch of a giant fucking lake and wait for my marrow to freeze? Do I fall into the Daley gravity well and helplessly vote for him even though I don't live here and it's not an election year?

I think this is why the wife and I are so comfortable in Seattle. Seattle is nothing like Chicago: Seattle is a fake big town for dumb hicks who want to think that they actually live in a big town. But Seattle is flyweight compared to Chicago. Our public art consists of things like a bronze pig and a great big silhouette of a guy crushing his penis with a hammer. Our wan museum displays things like Andy Warhol's ear hair and waits for touring shows of other, more important shows to make bank; additionally (and perhaps most awesomely), it is directly across the street from a strip club called the Lusty Lady. Our architecture is usually exceptionally bland or utterly demented; the Smith Tower narcoleptically exemplefies the former, while the Gehry monstrosity that is the EMP demonstrates the latter. In between is the iconic 70s discarded toy for giant babies that is the Space Needle. I'm not kidding. On the base of the inverted lawn dart that is the Space Needle is a parental warning: "Suitable for giant children age 3 or above." There have been so many giant babies that have picked that stupid thing up and just jammed it right into their fucking eyes.

Don't even get me started on the local politics. Do you know who the mayor of Seattle is? His name is Greg Nickels, and his main accomplishment is, astonishingly, being less exciting than an actual pile of nickels. His predecessor was named Norm Rice, whose main accomplishment was, yes, being less exciting than rice. Washington's governor is Christine Gregoire, a politician noted most prominently for her slightly unsettling hairdo, which perches over her cranium like Fuseli's nightmare incubus.

So Chicago is in pretty much every way more awesome than Seattle. The wife certainly had a good time raiding the town while I was stuck at work doing things like manning a computer lab that was attended by nobody (no exaggeration--not one person showed up over three hours). We're dinky latecomers with no claim to any kind of the sort of throne that Chicago commands.

On the other hand, even in downtown Seattle, I probably won't have to pay ten dollars for a gin and tonic.

But on some mythical third hand, Chicago has wonderful public art that does not feature a giant guy who smashes his genitals with a hammer.

On Friday, the wife and I teamed up with her brother and his wife for an exciting adventure on the SPIRIT OF WASHINGTON DINNER TRAIN! A three-hour-and-change excursion from Renton (it's Levittown for the moderately wealthy!) to a winery and back, the Dinner Train unexpectedly reveals that the Spirit of Washington is: waiters with canned schtick, hurried meal-eating, and relentless drink-gouging. Washington! It's everything the father of our country believed in.

Actually, it was sort of fun, but that's not what we're here for.

Brother-and-wife-in-law (uh . . . shut up, you know what I mean) actually live in Renton (yes, he works for Microsoft . . . I wish I had the prosodical talents to describe his expression when he told me of spending time working on projects leading up to the Vista rollout. The best I can do is say that his face looked like a Dostoevsky novel and when he spoke, ashes fell from his mouth to collect mournfully in his lap), so we met them for a drink before finding our way over to the train. After all, it's important to drink before taking a dinner train with drinks out to a winery to taste and purchase drinks before re-embarking the drinktrain to have a half-hearted dessert with drinks.

The train car we were assigned to was a double-decker, and we rode on the top level in a "domed" car. This was courtesy of the wife's parents, who have taken to Christmas-gifting their kids with adventures on outmoded travel vehicles; my tens of readers might recall last year when they gave us all two nights on a houseboat. In the years to come, I look forward to rides in stagecoaches, being shot out of torpedo tubes, and brachiating merrily through the jungles of Madagascar.

Presently--and efficiently--dinner was served shortly after boarding, just in time for some truly astounding railway sway. As we clutched at our drink glasses, skidding across the table along with our little lamp and all of our silverware, we occasionally had an opportunity to regard our food, which was serviceable in the way that any 100 or so catered meals can be. My order of medium-rare prime rib was apparently taken quite literally, as it was a uniform pink the color of the hides of dodgeballs. This was served with lifeless steamed vegetables and an inexplicable side of horseradish-laced applesauce which our waitress bragged about; it was perversely scorching and inedible and seemed like something developed by sociopaths. I mentally renamed it "sociopapples." Nobody else at the table seemed to quibble, though, possibly because most of their meals ended up on the train floor as the car shuddered hideously along the track, although it was entertaining to watch wife-in-law offer b-i-l her rather mealy-looking salad tomatoes, which he chokingly reported moments later were, in fact, hunks of grapefruit. He looked a bit green as he solemnly chewed this citrus ambush, as did the wife, succumbing slowly to motion sickness. Just what you want when you're approaching a wine tasting session.

But before anyone could get too far into the nausea zone, we were there. We had 45 minutes to storm the winery, sample a few wines (a measly three) and then fall like Cossacks on the cashiers clutching sweat-stained lists of our orders before being herded back onto the train. We did take a little extra time to take in an utterly information-free little winery tour where the biggest yuks were saved up for the inevitable utterance of the term "bunghole." I took some cheer when the tour-person noticed a sunken-eyed person with a nametag wandering around. Identifying him immediately, and also naming his shame for all gathered, she hollered, "Oh, you Mystery Train folks need to go upstairs for the Special Murder Mystery presentation!"

Yes, the train offers, hellishly, a "Murder Mystery" option, one of those horrifying immersive-theater nightmares where you and several of your favorite strangers all dully ruin an entire evening feebly trying to pretend to care about staying in character while planted actors around you all try and not stick forks in their eyes while trying to sell the idea that you're INVOLVED IN A MURRRRRRDERRRRRR, and it's all a catastrophe, because you're not an actor, and you're beginning to see why, and the actors are all hating you for, well, being you, and plus they're not drunk, and they're beginning to wonder why.

Anyway. The poor shithead looked at the tour-thing hollowly, nodded, and glumly staggered up the stairs to join the luckless Murder Mystery fools who were mercifully segregated from the rest of the group. I got the feeling that if he made it all the way upstairs without flinging himself over the bannister, he was probably going to damn well get his money's worth and genuinely murder somebody; probably one of the actors.

We eventually sampled our three wines--hurriedly--and then, yes, we grabbed a case of wine apiece (per couple), the reasoning being, "Well . . . it's a winery." We do need some new wine glasses, but I rejected all the samples shown at the place, as they were uniformly hideous: the best of the bunch were emblazoned with the winery's name, and the worst appeared to display the same design aesthetic behind the creation of the Uruk-Hai. I looked around for someone to bludgeon to death with these startling instruments, but then I remembered that the Murder Mystery folks were sequestered upstairs being glummed to death.

Finally, we were back on the train heading back home, eating either apple crisps or raspberry-chocolate things and enjoying our pre-ordered dessert drinks--the b-i-l and I had ordered cognac, and we stared at our poor choices: $9 Hennessey half-pours. Hennessey? We stared at our tiny drinklets, and swirled them unconvincingly. I'm certainly no stranger to paying exorbitant drink prices in situations just like this, but they were a little ridiculous; I wasn't expecting Manute Bol, but nor was I prepared for Peter Dinklage.

In the end, it was not as shriekingly horrible as I was dreading it to be: I was not served rubber chicken, and the grapefruit IED was actually pretty funny. We ended up with a lot of really nice wine--the Sangiovese we had tonight is just stellar--and I did not buy any Sauron-sponsored wine accessories. But most importantly, I never had to hear--or, thank God, say--anything like "Heavens! Colonel Denbury has been murdered! The murderer must be ONE OF US!"

I think it was that dead-eyed guy with the nametag. He was just looking for a getaway. I know I would. I'd kill anyone who stood in my way.

This weekend, as mentioned before, found the wife and I taking a drive up to Cle Elum to spend some quality time with five other friends in the mountains, playing in the snow.

It was completely awesome, of course.

The wife and I were the first to arrive at the TWO-STORY LOG CABIN, which was all-caps rad, as you see. Fireplace! Foosball table! Hot tub! Dart board! Live-in pixie prostitutes! I assume, anyway. Those fucking pixies can hide anywhere, but I know they were there, because that's how great it was.

We had a couple hours before the others arrived, so we set about making the place homey. The wife built a fire and I hauled in sacks of booze, and began dumping cider in the crock pot to heat. I chopped lemons to go in it and threw in a handful of cinnamon sticks; later it would be married with Tuaca and Metaxa, and would cause us all to moan and flop around happily. We also, of course, scouted out the best bedroom to claim. We were first!

When everyone else arrived, we helped them unpack an unholy amount of food, gear, and of course, even more revoltingly improbable amounts of booze: nine bottles of red wine, a couple of bottles of white, vodka, gin (relabeled impishly as "Liquid Valium"), whiskey, beer . . . I'm surprised nobody ended up brandishing a bottle of imported absinthe. "This stuff killed my great uncle!" "Really? Can I have some?"

After warming ourselves with a drink or two, and with the stove, and with several dozen hugs--actors hug like other people hike up their pants--we prepared the night's dinner, which was a bunch of Boboli build-yer-own pizzas. Now, I readily admit that I am a picky eater: I opted for only tomato sauce, meat and cheese. The others . . . did not. In fact, they went fucking nuts: they chopped peppers and mushrooms and tomatoes and artichokes and pancakes and spark plugs and marmot scent glands and hair and toothpaste and a priori concepts and Bosnian military forces and more cheese and dumped all that shit on their pizzas while I stared in horror. It's not healthy to eat that much cheese, people, but they wouldn't listen, and hit me in the face with hot spatulas while they cooked these horrors. WHATEVER.

We played some games that night, but I didn't win any of them, because everyone else fucking CHEATED, so there's no point in talking about that in any detail.

The next day, after rousing ourselves out of bed--can you guess who was last to get up?--and making fun of each others' bedheads, we gradually started to form a plan. We wanted to go do some sledding, dammit. None of us had been sledding in like fifteen years! Say, I'm sure our bodies are going to be down with that! Happily, the Magic Cabin of Snowy Awesomeness came through again: I found four or so little dinky sleddin' things by the side of the house. Clearly made for children and not rampaging adults, we cheerfully picked them up anyway with the certain knowledge that we were going to destroy them.

We also abandoned the idea of going to some fee-based sledding hill or whatever. For one thing, we didn't want to drive--we all drove laughably mountain-unfriendly cars--and for another thing, we didn't want to pay money to anybody for a fucking hill. Pay for a common geographic feature? Fuck that. That'd be like paying for a rainbow or a river or a freeway. We found our own damn hill.

The plastic flimsy sleds proved to be real quitters, and practically exploded under the stress of demented thirtysomethings slamming their girth down onto them. They were like riding potato chips, and we glumly unsped down the hill, shedding shrapnel the entire way. Then we threw those aside and urinated on them contemptuously. Much better were the sled thingies made of that stuff that they use to make beer can cooling sleeves. Not only were they virtually indestructible--except for the one that we broke a slab off of--but we discovered that tandem riding allowed two people to careen down the hill at satisfyingly terrifying speeds that guaranteed a broken bone in the inevitable event of any kind of crash, or so you think, until you remember the one great thing about wiping out in the snow: it's actually really hard to hurt yourself, provided you don't hit something terribly unsnowlike, such as a tree or a fencepost or a wolverine.

If there is something better than sledding, apart from the usual suspects, I don't want to know about it. The snow was cold enough not to melt on us, no matter how much friction our spectacular wipeouts applied--we used to call these sort of falldowns "snow sales" when I was a kid, owing to the astounding amount of gear that ends up lying on the landscape in the aftermath of such crashes. Then we would lie there in the snow laughing our asses off. People managed to take some really excellent action shots of their good friends plowing horrifically into the snow, or simply just screaming by the camera while, well, screaming.

After a while of this, we returned back to the cabin to rest our shrieking joints in the hot tub and consume hot chocolate with brandy, and our friend L. created a masterful baked pasta dish with ziti, hearts of palm, palms of heart, Gary Hart, Hartz Mountain tick medicine, the Hartford Whalers, and discount heart meat. I mean, I assume it was masterful, but I wasn't going to eat that nightmare, so I had hot dogs that I sandwiched with bagel slices. I'm not crazy.

Then we all got loaded (read: I got loaded) and played more games, which I lost, because everyone else fucking cheated again. Also, during a game of Balderdash, nobody voted for my definition of the acronym NAPA as "Next, Another Pussy? Awesome!" Because all of my friends are cheating scum.

Let's do it again, cheating scum, let's do it sooner rather than later. Next time we'll find those sex pixies.

On my way to the bank after work today, I was waiting on the corner of Broadway for the light to change. A crusty-looking guy approached me. Uh oh.

"You got a lighter?" he asked. Oh.

"Sure," I said, and pulled out my Zippo, but he didn't seem to be reaching for a cigarette or even looking at the lighter.

"You know, that's my iPod," he said, pointing at my other hand. What the--?

"I don't think so, buddy," I replied cheerfully. I was still holding my Zippo in the other hand, waving it distractedly. If things got bad, I could always light myself on fire.

"Anyone ever tell you you're a sexy man?" he asked. Fuuuuuuuuck.

"Just my wife," I lied. Nobody calls me sexy. "Ham-face," sometimes.

"I'm not gay," he said, a picture of solemnity. The light finally changed.

"I gotta go," I said, and started crossing the street.

"Hey, come back! Don't go! I . . . aw, God dammit!" he cried.

So that happened. It occurred to me that I needed a break from the city. Happily, I'm getting one!

This weekend, the wife and I are driving up to Cle Elum, a dinkish little town near the pass for a couple days of snowy recreation! I'd love to say this was all my idea, but it was totally the wife. She set it up, and a bunch of other friends are coming up there with us to stay in our three-room room-thing complete with a hot tub! And ping-pong table! And we're gonna go sleddin'! And inner-tubin'! And hypothermia-gettin' and pelvis-crunchin'! And of course, drinkin'!

There's something very rejuvenating, I hope, anyway, about spending a couple days with good friends behaving as if we were twenty years younger than we are. There might actually be genuine youngsters there to give us the scornful laughs that we surely will deserve as we drunkenly careen into trees, or snow plows, or bears. Or, even worse, they might laugh at the bunch of nervous drunks who are worriedly scanning the landscape for potential disasters.

"This looks pretty steep . . . there's a jump over there that I don't like the look of . . . is this inner tube rated for two people? Maybe you should go ahead . . . why are those kids over there laughing at us? . . . if you want, we can go play some more beer pong . . . "

Whatever. However things turn out--DANGER DRUNKS? OR COWARDLY SOTS?--it promises to be a good time. After all, there will be cider! And pie! And that sort of uncomfortable good cheer that comes with sitting too close to your nearly naked friends in a hot tub!

So I don't care if those kids laugh. I really don't. Even if the whole weekend turns out to be a bust, and we get shivved by the villainous teenagers after calling them "a pack of debased, trout-sucking rotters," I'll still be happy, lying there bleeding on that hospital gurney. A smile will play over my blued lips.

Not only for the memories of a weekend well spent with friends. Also for the secret knowledge, stored deep in my heart, that somewhere is a crazy street person who thinks that I am a sexy man.

Okay, so it turns out I have a few more things to say about our recent trip to Italy. It's just a bunch of random crap, really, that I never got around to fitting in anywhere else.

THE FLIGHTS

. . . were fairly horrible. As they usually are, of course, even though British Airways still makes with the free booze and gives you wine with dinner. I really do like that when they served dinner--some mysterious roast-y kind of thing, which could have been worse--they asked me if I wanted white or red wine. This despite me still having a full beer in front of me. "Red, please!" I squealed. Just for good measure, I also grabbed another beer. Who knows when I would see them again?

Alas, the meal and/or the flight disagreed with the wife terribly, and she got horribly sick right when we were coming into Heathrow. As in, circling Heathrow, waiting for landing clearance; the wife hunched over her knees, wracked with nausea. I felt helpless and awful, and passed her one of those pitiful barf bags, not sure if I should hover over her consolingly or turn away and let her vomit in peace. The guy on the aisle looked pretty jumpy too. But she hung on. She even signaled frantically to the strapped-in stewardess: Can I go heave in the bathroom? She got a prim "Nope!" response. She clenched her teeth. Finally, we landed, taxied for a small eternity, and then when the signal came, she made a heroic dash to the WC and audibly brought up the unidentifiably roast-y matter from her stomach.

My girl is strong. She don't vomit in her seat! By God, she'll get to that bathroom or die trying. And the guy on the aisle seat's body language was pure "Man, that's awesome that chick didn't puke in her seat." You wouldn't think that body language could say that, but his totally did.

On the way back from Italy, things grew more baffling and horrid. My thesis is, on BA flights from the States, the airline strives to American-ize their meals. Hence the puzzling-yet-edible roast-y thing. But on BA flights from England, well . . . I suspect that the menu is a bit more Brit-oriented. Otherwise, I have no explanation for what happened on that flight when the "meals" were handed out.

"We have a selection of sandwiches," the steward announced (if "selection" is really a word when the number of choices is "two"): "We have chicken and ham, or cheese."

What?

Chicken and ham? Versus . . . lonely cheese? I was immediately nervous, and while I like chicken, and while I like ham, I was not really interested in a pas de deux of these meats. I decided to get the decidedly unthreatening cheese.

As it turns out, the whole "chicken/ham vs. cheese" thing turned out to be a cruel joke, a trick question no matter what. To paraphrase Wargames, the only winning strategy was not to play. They were not "chicken and ham" sandwiches; there were two half-sandwiches in one wrapper; one chicken, and one ham. This is what the wife went for. Similarly, the "cheese" option contained two half-sandwiches, one with some sort of clotted pus shot through with orange matter. I read the ingredients label and discovered that this alarming snot was infested with "carrot chutney." And the other half of the "cheese" sandwich is unknown to me, since the phrase "carrot chutney" combined with the leukemic substance purporting to be cheese had made me forget about the concept of eating for the next ten hours. The wife, I noticed, had similarly given up on both the chicken and the ham options, as one was polluted with horrifyingly elastic onion slices, and the other seemed to pulse with malign intent. We both guiltily wadded up the things a little bit--maybe they'll think we actually bit into them if we make them smaller!--and crammed them back into their bags, uneaten and mutilated.

THE MUSIC

I have already commented on many of the mind-wrecking songs we were forced to endure, over and over, thanks to the familiar banality and sheer repetitiveness of MTV Italia (as with any iteration of MTV): Madonna, Pink, the goddamn Red Hot Chili Peppers (whose "Hey-O" uncomfortably set up echoes in my mind where I'd try and shoehorn the lyrics to "Day-O" into the flabby melody of their terrible song).

But I forgot to mention the incredibly awful and incredibly ubiquitous Evanescence, whose single "Call Me When You're Sober" got almost nonstop airplay in Italy. This is such a weird band. Featuring the worst excesses of goth, nu metal and vaguely Teutonic chord progressions, and fronted by one Amy Lee, a woman who sings with the force and grandeur of a stuck car horn, Evanescence is yet again an answer to a question nobody ever wanted to ask: What if Fred Durst and Bette Midler died, came back to life, and joined Sisters of Mercy?

THE FALL

There really isn't much to this last story, really. One of the funny features of our trip was our ability to find out-of-place Irish bars all over the place. We found one in Rome--it was five blocks from our hotel--and we found one in Florence. (We didn't find one in Arezzo, and that was just fine.)

Going to an "Irish" bar on the continent really only guarantees two things: one, they will have Guinness on tap; and two, there will be TV screens with soccer playing. That's cool. I like Guinness. I don't give a shit about soccer, but I really like Guinness.

In Florence, when we discovered the Irish bar, we walked in enthusiastically. Too enthusiastically. The wife was in the lead, and as she opened the front door, she failed to notice the extra step up. She opened the door to the place, and warm air hit us; many people were seated right inside, glued to the football match; she tripped. She fell down on her face spectacularly, her arms thrown out in front of her. It was a complete disaster of an entrance, worthy of Buster Keaton.

The football fans glanced over at this sprawling American woman with little interest. The wife climbed to her feet and gave a Mary Katherine Gallagher "ta-dah!" gesture. The football fans turned back to watch the soccer players dick around some more with the ball, resolutely not scoring.

I do love my wife so very much. But I have never laughed so hard in my life.

It took the wife and I a little while to adapt to the unique rhythms of Arezzo, a lovely Tuscan hill town. Not that this was trying or anything; on the contrary, it was actually pretty charming.

Take, for instance, the widespread custom of what basically amounts to a siesta, where businesses close up for a few hours so people can take naps, veg out, watch TV, or just go home for a quick knob session, whatever. During these times, which are frequently from 1 to 3, or 3 to 6, or 2 to 4, or 25 or 6 to 4, good luck doing anything, unless you find someplace open, which you might! The whole thing is typically puzzling, as the Italians are, wonderfully, a sort of society that seems to value not really giving a shit about any sort of consistency at all, particularly in temporal matters. A clearly posted sign that says "Closed 3-6" may mean that they are actually closed from 3 to 6, but it just as easily could mean that they will not open until 8, and it might also mean that they aren't closed at all. The best you can do is rattle the lock, and if it's open, see if someone charges at you brandishing a knife or something.

I think this is why Mussolini got shot like a dog. I think he was drafting legislation about people actually having to read and follow their own signage, and the Italians were all like, "I don't mind the oppressive authoritarian statism so much, but now there's talk that we'll have to pay attention to our own shop signs."

But then we found something magical happening in the early evenings in Arezzo, starting around 7:00. People started walking the streets.

All of them.

Streets that 30 minutes ago were sleepy and deserted suddenly filled with masses of people, wandering amiably, with no real purpose, seemingly for no other reason than to see and be seen, to say hello, to let their dogs piss happily (Rome is a cat city; Arezzo is a dog city). They weren't shopping; store workers mostly stood holding themselves in doorways, smoking and calling out to acquaintances. They weren't bar-hopping; most of the bars didn't bother to be open yet. They weren't even going anywhere; when they reached the end of a particular street, the Italians would simply turn around and amble back the way they came. This was the small-town Arezzo version of dragging Main Street. They would do this for a couple hours until nine or so before finding somewhere to get dinner, and I found it charming as hell, even the one basilisk-faced old woman who gave me such a frightful glare (why?) that my feet swelled and frost collected in the whorls of my ears. "Buona sera!" I called to her, and she deepened her terrifying scowl, making her face a detailed contour map of alien steppes.

Arezzo had other surprises, almost all of them shockingly great. One minor example was finding a fifth of Johnnie Walker in the supermarket for nine euros (not my brand, really, but since this is about twelve bucks American, uh, THANKS!). Another fun romp was to be found in the local farmacia--the wife unfortunately needed to restock her supply of tampons, and unfortunately rejected my advice to ask for "timpanis" or "trombonos" or "Jeffrey Tambors"--where we discovered delicious new brand names such as Ribex condoms ("Made from genuine frogs!" they unfortunately did not say; I immediately thought of a dancing frog with an erection singing gaily, "Ribbit! Sex! Ribex!") and a diaper brand called "Mr. Baby." The wife and I really love the brand name Mr. Baby. I like to imagine a tiny little mustachoied child, a Meerschaum bubblesoap pipe clenched in his pink gums, indignantly demanding that some peon cleanse the feces from his upper-class buttocks. "I'M MISTER BABY! And I have soiled myself."

But perhaps best of all was one morning when I went to have a morningish cigarette at the apartment. I opened the window to let the smoke out, and . . . music? Clearly, something was going on in the main square just around the corner from us, as I heard brass oompahing with some emphasis. The wife scrambled out the door to find out what was going on while I placidly continued to enjoy my cigarette. She came back moments later as I was finishing.

"It's a marching band competition!" she yelled gleefully. "There's marching bands in the square!"

I cocked my ear out the window one more time. A familiar tune was being played, and I heard the distinctive squall of majorette whistles. It took me a moment to place the melody, but then I had it.

There is really nothing like waking up in a semi-obscure Tuscan hill town and hearing a marching brass band belting out Donna Summer's "Hot Stuff" at ten in the morning.

After I took a shower, we went to take a look. The marching bands would play a song or two in the square and then would march off down the Arezzo streets, blatting the whole time. Then the next band would play a couple songs in the square and follow. The dogs of the city must have been driven half-mad, and I thought I heard them all howling like hungry ghouls as the astonishing racket bounced off of the stone walls and empty storefronts and bored, smoking store employees.

The adults walked slowly, without any illusions of urgency, while the children (and some of the dogs) chased after the musicians. An old man without any apparent teeth clutched his cymbals and hunched over them as if they were twin chalices worthy of fierce protection; the dogs jumped spastically when he grimly crashed them together.

Then they were gone. And we went to go take a nap.

I HAVE GOOD NEWS!

My tens of readers are getting a break. The wife and I are going on vacation for a few weeks, and so Izzle Pfaff will be mercifully silent until at least December 7. So y'all are going to have to get your RDA of strained metaphors, clumsy profanity and pointless, overfreighted verbosity from somewhere else for a while. Fortunately for everybody, there's always Fox News.

Where are you going? I hear you all asking. Is it somewhere uncomfortably humid and with lots of feces lying around? Somewhere unpleasant? Please let it be unpleasant. That's what everyone has been asking us. The guy who cuts my hair just asked me this, and when I told him, he was not pleased. In fact, he was envious. (Really!) He was so envious, in fact, that he literally stamped his foot with jealousy. I'm not sure I've ever seen an actual human stamp a foot before. But he did. Then he proceeded to spitefully give me the worst haircut I've ever had in my life.

(One thing I like about getting my hair cut is that it tends to make me look younger. In fact, minutes after the haircut was finished, I was buying some wine at the grocery store and the cashier carded me. "You're making my day!" I chirped. "Did you really need to make sure I was over 21?" She stared at the top of my skull and replied, "I needed to make sure you were really human.")

So anyway. On Tuesday, the wife and I leave for Italy. We're taking a lovely nonstop flight out from Seattle and then spending a few contemplative hours at Heathrow to have our rectums politely examined--hopefully from harrumphing, mustachioed fellows smoking briar pipes and saying "I say! No hexplosives up this one's bum! Roight!"--and then on to Rome.

We're only spending a couple days in Rome, though. We have been once before--for one whole day--in 2001, where we dashed around madly, managing to see the Vatican and the Colosseum before we had to madly dash somewhere else . . . I think it was Naples. (At the time, we were experiencing severe travel madness; this time, we basically have no excuse.) Anyway! Maybe this time we can bag us a new Pope sighting! (We got blessed by good old John Paul the Sequel back in 2001--along with about 10,000 of our closest friends at St. Peter's--so we figure if we can get blessed twice, we basically can give God a wedgie if we feel like it. This is leaving aside the fact that neither of us are Catholics, but hey, these guys don't have to keep blessing us.)

Our big destination for week one is a little town in Tuscany called Arezzo. Through an astonishing website that a friend clued us into, we are renting an actual apartment in the city; an apartment that opens right onto the fucking town piazza.

This is awesome.

One, it's not a hotel. It's an apartment. It has a bedroom. It has a GREAT BIG FRESCO OF JESUS in the bedroom, right opposite the bed, actually, which, uh . . . well, that might be distracting. BUT IT'S STILL AWESOME! ("Honey, you feel like . . . you know . . . ?" "But . . . He's . . . staring at us." "Sigh." "But this is awesome." "It's getting slightly less awesome for me." We'll see.)

For another thing, and nothing on giganto-cities, but I have found that most of the time when I am traveling, that I really kind of love the more village-y places, the small towns that you can walk through on foot, and where you see the same regulars in the same places every day. I'm looking forward to finding that place where, without ever quite knowing you've decided, magically becomes that place where you end up every day at 2:00 for a sandwich or a drink. I can't wait to meet all the characters who own the little shops who crinkle their faces in pleasure to see a new face, someone new that they can show off their stuff to, to say, This is what I do! I do it very well, don't you think? And I always love finding out that, most of the time, they're absolutely right, and telling them so.

I cannot wait.

Oh, and as if all this weren't enough, we're spending four days in Florence after that. Florence, home of the Uffizi Gallery, the tiny museum that just happens to house the most heart-stoppingly concentrated collection of Renaissance art that you can find--and comprehensively tour in under three hours. If I were even remotely religious, this place would be church for me.

And then, of course, there is also--walking distance away--the Accademia. Nothing special here. Just David. Just the most beautiful piece of physical art that I've ever seen in my life. Just the only inanimate object that I ever found myself falling in love with. The only thing that it was wrenchingly difficult to leave, to take my eyes from.

I have heard songs, seen paintings, read books, many times, that made me intensely jealous and awed. Jealous because I want to create art on that level. But I do not. Awed for similar reasons, but awe also for the artist: How did he/she think of that? Could I ever come up anything close to that? But I cannot. David, while it does these things, also provokes this in me: it makes me feel small. I am utterly unable to conceive of the creation of its perfection. Its beauty is palpable and unknowable and nearly inhuman. I am diminished and imperfect in its presence, and I am so small in the knowledge that such a thing is so beyond my ken--in its conception and execution and its existence--I have no choice but to simply rejoice in it, in my tiny way. For me, David nearly inspires something I would in other contexts call penitence. And I don't even know why or what for.

I have been longing to see Michelangelo's David again since the moment I stopped looking at it five years ago. I would posit that it is simply the most beautiful thing ever created by man. This is of course a matter of opinion, and is also of course intensely personal. All I can say is: I really look forward to feeling small again.

I can't wait to get there. And I can't wait to come back to write about it. You're never going to get a David out of me, of course. But the point of David is: You should try.

AND SO IT WAS on Thursday that the wife and I bailed on work halfway through the day to make our way to Whidbey Island. Our destination was the dubiously named Bush Point B&B, located just outside a lovely nothingness of a townlet called Freeland.

Island culture, it seems, leads to certain oddities in, well, naming things. Freeland, existing as it does in America, is pretty damn free, to be sure. However, my hopes were a little mashed when I wandered into the grocery store hoping that all the price tags would read "$0.00." YOU CALL THIS FREE? Oh, well. On the other hand, anecdotal evidence did suggest that the nearby Useless Bay was, in fact, actually useless, as did learning that there was a nearby golf course. And then there were the various cutesy-wootsey road names: Raindrop Lane! Cloying! Ptarmigan Ptollway! Puzzling! Handjobbe Hollow! Kind of disturbing!

Anyway, the Bush Point B&B--situated on a beach which was irritatingly bereft of much bush, frankly, but on the other hand, there were pointy things like sticks--turned out to be kind of awesome. First off in the awesomeness parade, the "B&B" part became clear enough when the kind folks who checked us in encouraged us, when breakfasttime rolled around, to "open the fridge and eat!" The fridge contained a couple blueberry muffins and a bunch of tomato juice. (The muffins went unconsumed, but I gleefully guzzled down all the tomato juice in the evenings to come by making Red Beers--don't scrimp on the black pepper!--much to the dismay of the wife.)

The decor was vintage 1973-era Lamer Homes and No Gardens, but we didn't care. In fact, we kind of loved the octagonal glass-top dining table, and the frosted-glass filigreed lighting fixtures, and the astonishingly terrible mixed-media paint-o-thingy still life that must have been entitled Raised Tin Flowers That Will Surely Suffer From Neglectful Dusting. A sliding glass door gave us egress onto the rear deck, which sat thrillingly atop the actual breakwater, and featured not only a gorgeous view of the ocean, but also an unblocked look at the former fishing platform, which, since it had been eaten away by corrosive sea brine, was now unfit to be trod upon by human feet, and has for some time been adopted as a seagull sanctuary. The gulls had coated the entire structure with a thick layer of guano, and the birds spent their time doing that great feather-ruffling shrug thing that they do and crapping with a palpable enthusiasm. It was great!

We took it easy that evening. We took our dinner in the restaurant upstairs, where for seventeen bucks I indulged memories of a youthful Skot by ordering deep-fried prawns. (When I was a kid, I just about made my parents cry by clamoring constantly to be taken to Skipper's.) I also managed to startle the waitress--and myself--by forgetting the difference between a carafe of wine and a half-carafe, with the result being that by the end of the meal (and the full carafe), the wife and I were half in the bag. Good job, Skot.

Actually, looking back, it put us in the perfect frame of mind for the DVDs we had rented. We woozily fired up the first one (with me starting in on the Red Beer), Spike Lee's Inside Man. I loves me some twisty caper movies, and hey! This one was pretty good. We had a good time. I made another Red Beer, and readied myself for the next feature, one that I had high hopes for.

It was Basic Instinct 2. At the video store--actually the Freeland Payless--I said to the wife, "I'm not sure I can pass this up." She concurred. We figured this film to be a lock for the "so bad it's great" categorization.

Basic Instinct 2 made me want to call the CDC to alert them about the world's first cinematographic disease vector. This movie is stupefyingly terrible on nearly every conceivable level, and should only be watched by burn victims, who are the only people on earth so overloaded on pain that it cannot possibly touch them. Only burn victims can lie there and moan, "Oh, that's nothing! My skin comes off in sheets!" For the rest of us, there is nothing but agony. Sharon Stone, who is clearly a hermaphroditic reef fish, has completed her transformation into a full-blown drag queen, and is hair-raising in her utterly unsuccessful attempts to raise anything else, much less her utterly luckless male foil, an actor named David Morrissey, whose every scene, every expression screams, "I know I've thrown my career away, but they gave me so much money!" So there you go: two hours of a leathery protogynecological nightmare gnawing away at a pasty-faced dullard with the Hollywood business acumen of Krusty the Clown. The wife and I mercifully passed out/went into neurological shutdown halfway through.

Did that happen? we asked ourselves the next morning. We stared at the awful evidence of the DVD cover on the floor. It really did. How did we get to bed? We weren't sure. We were lucky not to have drowned in our own unconscious bile, our heads tipped back on our necks like rainstruck turkeys. We were fortunate to have survived. We plucked the poisonous DVD out of the player with tweezers, handling the nasty thing like the filmic plutonium it was. "Don't touch it!" we hissed. "It might want to replicate itself. Don't let it touch your skin." We returned the thing to Payless and hurled it at the counter girl's skull, scoring a direct hit that dented her forehead and left her dazed and bleeding. "What are we, socialists?" we screamed. "Don't rent this to nice people!" We got the hell out of there. It was a scary time.

Whidbey Island lay before us, and reborn, we knew it was time to put it to the sword. We ransacked that island like huns, incandescant with the killing spirit. Occasionally stopping at bars to, well, kill spirits.

And so it was.

Tomorrow is going to rock. And I'm working tomorrow! So why is it going to rock?

Because I'm leaving at noon. And Friday is going to rock even harder! HOW IS THAT POSSIBLE?

Because I won't be going at all. Yes, I am living the dream, the dream that every worker has: not going to work. (Hey, I like my job fine. I just happen to like it better when I'm not doing it.)

The wife and I are taking a couple days to get out of our fetid, stinking apartment and are treating ourselves to a couple days on Whidbey Island. We had originally thought about spending some quality time in Spokane, but we want to get away from the whole fetid and stinking thing. But we really were sold on Whidbey Island once we remembered that the place has some lovely wineries, and is just kind of beautiful, and is also where Robert Mathews, former head of white supremacy group The Order, was slaughtered in a shootout with the FBI. That's history, people!

And really. Is there anything more relaxing than lounging in bucolic surroundings and reading such truisms like, "The Jew is like a destroying virus that attacks our racial body to destroy our Aryan culture and purity of our race. Those of our Race who resist these attacks are called 'chosen and faithful' " while enjoying a nice syrah? I don't think there is. There really isn't anything like a nice wine that isn't too oaky while retaining notes of grapefruit and sandalwood, but still maintains highlights of racial purity. And it finishes really well.

Which is sort of why we're also digging up the corpse of Sterling Hayden and taking him with us. I'm thinking of this whole weekend as Operation Dropkick. Look, I don't want to sound like an asshole, but I can no longer sit back and allow communist infiltration, communist indoctrination, communist subversion, and the international communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids. I just want to relax! Which is why Whidbey Island is so perfect, because everyone there is white. Just us, white people, and the corpse of Sterling Hayden. What could be finer?

Hey, don't worry, guys! I'll be back! We'll meet again.

It's not the end of the world.

The morning after our initial introduction to Yakima, we got to experience what must be the most pleasing feature of that fine city: driving out of it. We were on our merry way-ish to a region known as Rattlesnake Hills, home to approximately a choadillion wineries. Rattlesnake Hills also has the distinction of being near the Washington town of Zillah, perhaps the only US city named for a Gashlycrumb Tiny, so how awesome is that?

After a brief freeway drive, we were there! Lost! On a road lined with yards populated by mangy dogs! Where the fuck are the wineries! Oh my God! Are those banjos I hear? We turned around, and a mere twenty minutes, we were there! This time, at a winery--Hyatt. We walked in to find an utterly empty tasting room, which boded well, since, you know, fuck other people. The gal behind the counter greeted us: "On your way to Walla Walla?" Ominous. Not a question you want to hear as any conversational opener--it made me jittery. "FUCK ONIONS!" I yelped. She stared at me for a moment and then explained that there was some big fucking wine hoedown going on that weekend in Walla Walla.

Good news! Less people = Skot happier. We dug into the offered wines. While we swilled, we were joined by another couple, who, in the time we had moved from wine #2 to wine #4, managed to rack up a $534 order. This, of course, made me feel like shit. By the time we had completed the tasting, they had whisked out of there with a couple cases of grape along with some fancy stuffed olives. This all made me feel, of course, like a tool. We meekly bought a measly three bottles of wine and some of the damn olives, because HEY WE CAN BUY ANCILLARY CRAP TOO. (As it turns out, they're olives stuffed with hot peppers, and boy are they good.)

We made our way from Hyatt to Two Mountain, which featured a lazing dog in front of a tin building. This was great. Lazy dog raised its head at us briefly when we cooed at it, and then rested back again, totally unimpressed. Two Mountain featured an extremely loquacious gal given to telling us stories about how "this is a pizza wine!" and getting drunk in Seattle and spending the night at someone's house and doing the "walk of shame" back to her car--but without the sex! Well, she was a nice gal, but her stories could have used more sex. She also told us the story of the lazy dog, named Gus, who, heartbreakingly, and legbreakingly, had a broken leg from being hit by a car, but was on the mend. This was again sort of puzzling, since Gus was very clearly a female dog, unless he had grown six tiny mutant penises on his belly, but we left the whole thing unchallenged, because, oh for God's sake, let's buy a couple bottles of wine.

Next! Probably our favorite: Paradisos del Sol. Upon leaving our car and walking to the tasting room (which was a kitchen in a ranchhouse), we were assaulted by a silent tiny white dog trailing a couple of weird, apparently flightless grey birds. The dog sniffed at our ankles and the birds gabbled around aimlessly, pecking at shit on the ground. We also heard the unmistakable cries of roosters from a barn somewhere. "I see you've met Snudley!" Or whatever the dog's name was--I couldn't hear her, the woman who called to us from the veranda. "Yeah!" I said. "Now you have to tell us what these birds are!" "They're baby turkeys," she replied, "future Thanksgiving dinners." she continued flatly. Then without another word, she disappeared into a door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY. Good to meet you, misanthropic bird-killin' lady.

We went into another door, which led into the kitchen-tastery-whateveroom, where a tiny bespectacled woman lurked. "CHALLO!" she screamed. "I am Bulgarian. Will you have twenty minutes? I tell you everything, I teach you." Good Lord. Don't argue with the Eastern Europeans, or they'll pluck out your tongue. We let Greta, or whatever, give us the full business about all things wine. She brooked no demurrals at all--hers was the only tasting where there was food accompaniment, to better demonstrate how wine works with a full palate. At one point, she brought out some crab-artichoke dip and all but pried open my jaws to make me eat it. Later, out came something she called "Glop"--a blue cheese and garlic dip. EAT!

She was really fucking great, actually. Halfway through, another young couple showed up. She tore into her spiel with them, of course, and the guy tried to beg off the whites: "I don't really like sweet wines." Greta tartly shot back, "You try them all. You do not like, you spit." She fixed him with a withering Bela Karolyi stare, and the guy slumped like overcooked asparagus. I silently guffawed and ate more Glop. "ZO!" She returned to us. "You see the color of the wine? How do you say?" We nervously held our glasses up to the sunlight. "Amber?" I ventured. "You see!" she beamed. "It is yes." I felt like Kerri Strug.

I loved Paradisos del Sol, and so I was that more grateful for not running over little Snudley when we left the parking lot, which I nearly did, since the little fucker was sniffing at our tires at the time. That would have sucked. The baby turkeys, not so much, I guess, since I could have just marched up to the chilling porch-woman with the carcass and declared, "Thanksgiving comes in May this year!"

Next up was Horizon's Edge, manned by a very, very enigmatic fellow named . . . well, I cannot recall if we ever caught his name. He poured indiscriminately, often not telling us what we were drinking, and then gently mocking our confusion. "Is this the merlot?" I would ask. "What--did you think it was the rose?" "I--I think I'm getting palate fatigue," I said lamely. He stared at me like a carny stares at a mark. "Of course you are." Moments later, he abruptly asked, "So, which of you is wearing perfume?" The wife shot me a look, like, I hope it's me. "I'm embarrassed to say I'm wearing White Diamonds," said the wife. That was news to me. "It was a gift," she concluded lamely. "Well, as long as you can't smell it," the guy said mildly. "I can't smell it," I offered in weak defense. He broadened his grin. "Even better." We stood there awkwardly for a moment. "That's a professional's nose for you," I said witlessly. He continued to lazily smile, and then poured us some more wine. What a freak, I thought. That's probably why we punished him so harshly by buying three bottles of wine.

Portteus Vineyards was another tin-building affair, with an extraordinarily affable fellow who told us stories about how he met his wife of twenty-plus years at his old college chess-and-pot-smoking club, which, really, that's kind of awesome. We also had a lengthy discussion about prostate cancer clinical trials, which was fairly weird, but he seemed to take a shine to us at the same time, and cheerfully opened up a bottle of Malbec for us that wasn't on the regular tasting menu, but hey! If you can't share some nice oddball-variant grape with your new cancer-and-pot chums, where are you anyway? There was no way, of course, that we could not buy a bottle of the Malbec after he opened one up for us, which we did happily, since it was great, and then we bought a couple of other bottles as well. The case box in our car was pretty much full up.

So it was back to Yakima. Back to the Lotus Room. Our waitress from the previous night came over just to say hi. We ordered some more ridiculously alcoholic drinks. I've written some sucky things about Yakima. But it's suckier to be back home.

As has been alluded to before, this last week, the wife and I took an anniversary trip into Eastern Washington's wine country. Specifically: Yakima!

YAKIMA! Does not that name sing?

After extensive (read: desultory) research into lodging in (sing it!) YAAAA-KIIII-MAAAAA!--we rejected many B&Bs, mainly on the grounds that 1. they were pretty expensive and 2. I don't really feel like making forced conversation with bright-eyed strangers over runny-egg breakfasts--we elected to stay with the fine professionals at Best Western.

BEST WESTERN! Does not that name sing? BEEEEEEEEEST WEEEEEEEES-TEEEEEEEERN! (SFX: crack of a whip!) YEEEE-HAAAAW!

Best Western's website promised nice things, such as an "adjacent facility providing a lounge and a 24-hour restaurant." Which was true! If you elasticize the definition of "adjacent" to mean "an unwalkable distance away from you." It also promised that it was "near the freeway," which was also true! It was in fact nearly under the freeway, which we discovered as I maneuvered the car down the offramp, and the wife immediately screamed, "THERE IT IS!" provoking a spectacular, tire-smoking hard right, and we jounced merrily into the Best Western parking lot. Upon coming to a rest, we found ourselves staring at the nearby "adjacent" facilities such as a Harley dealership and an Exxon station. They were both closed. The gas station nearest the offramp was closed at 4 PM. I . . . whatever.

After checking in with the helpful gals at the front desk, we decided to use our never-fail "ask the locals for advice" non-trick for finding the city's delights. "Where's a good place to get a decent dinner?" we asked. The girls looked at each other uncertainly, as if we had inquired about hidden uranium deposits. "There's an Outback Steakhouse down the street." I thought I'd rather eat at the Harley dealership, but remained silent. The wife tried another tack. "All right. So where's a place to get a good drink?"

At this question, the youngest-seeming of the girls positively leaped into action. She began furiously scribbling directions down on some scratch paper. "You need to go to the Lotus Room," she babbled. "They serve a good drink. They'll treat you right. It's a friendly place! You--you--it's very . . . well, these are good people--"

She was starting to decompensate to some unnameable mental pressure, but I was catching a vibe. "Will no one help the widow's son?" I asked her gently. She relaxed visibly and favored me with a relieved smile. "You're going to have a great time."

So we followed her crabbed directions to the Lotus Room. Located in the rear of some faded restaurant called the Golden Wheel, which looked like it had had its peak in 1972, its entrance was a featureless metal fire door set into a plain concrete wall. A white sign overhead read, in black letters, THE LOTUS ROOM. It was about as inviting as a needle exchange center. The mouth of a green plasticpail outside the door gaped, ready to receive gallons of cigarette butts. It looked like a perfect place for enthusiasts of receiving pool cues to the back of the neck. I started to wonder if the hotel gals hadn't set us up for a bad end. Oh God! I thought. They've sent us to our deaths and then they're going to break into our room and steal our nothing!

We made our way inside, and encountered a faux-opium den sort of place, with lots of Oriental dragony carvings and lots of no light relieved by a little red light. It was sort of like walking into someone's mouth. The jukebox near the door had a hand-lettered sign that read, "PLAY AT YOUR OWN RISK." Noted, I guess. Someone probably got chain-whipped for playing "I Want It That Way" some fateful night. We found a booth and sat down.

But for all of the ominous portents, the Lotus Room? Friendly as hell! Every person who came in was greeted by some other patrons with "NORM!"-like cries of welcome. A pleasant aging waitress came over and took our order; remembering the possibly-murderous hotel gal's promise of "good pours," I then eyed the bartender make my whiskey soda.

FSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSHHHHHHHHHH! went the whiskey from the gun. FSH! went the soda. Our drinks returned to us, and we sipped them gingerly, and we felt icicles forming on our livers and kidneys. Our bladders glumly started rolling out the fire-suppression gel. The waitress eventually returned, and the wife asked for a couple of glasses of water. "These drinks are pretty strong," the waitress said amiably, "so it's nice to have some water." Which was a lot like a doctor saying, "Well, you've been bitten by four hundred cobras, so it's happy news that we have aspirin."

We ordered a second round. Someone braved the threatening jukebox and managed to coax it into playing "Tusk" without sustaining terrible injury. Red-limned dragons leered at nothing at all, and we sipped again at our impossibly alcoholic drinks, which I was starting to think of as some sort of interesting refinement of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle: I was beginning to become unsure of both my position and my momentum, particularly when trying to descend the stairs to have a smoke.

We had entered Yakima County. And we hadn't even made it to a winery yet.

So, Utah happened. They named a raptor after this fucking state? I'd go extinct too. On the other hand, I doubt any dinosaurs are climbing out of their desert beds clamoring to have me find their remains either. "Skotraptor? No thanks." Me, if I were a dead dinosar, I think I'd like to be found by, say, a porn star. Waddraptor! Gingersaurus! And the dreaded Tiffanytops.

I can't really slag a lot on Salt Lake City too much, mainly because as predicted, I hardly left the hotel. I can report that, from an airplane, it looks a lot like a bunch of discarded children's toys dumped onto a vast dirt expanse. Drab, said my mind. This city looks like that ugly babysitter you used to have. The one that read Sidney Sheldon? She had glasses and sucked on popsicles in a way that managed to be totally unintriguing. I had arrived.

I couldn't complain, however, about the free shuttle service to the hotel. Or, frankly, the hotel itself, which has five diamonds, or four stars, or ninety blue horseshoes, or whatever fucking rating they were touting at the time. It was a swank place, no doubt, the Grand American. You got greeted by no less than six people before you even hit the front door, and of course I undertipped all of them, as I wasn't prepared for the pomp. Some duffer got unlucky enough to wrestle my luggage away from me--the staff would sooner shit out their hearts than let you lift anything--and I think I gave him my spare coat buttons. While I was waiting in line, I was assailed by more of these poor minions. One approached and said, "How are you, sir? Water?" He held out a gleaming bottle of water. I eyed it as if evaluating its salinity. A beautiful woman advanced moments later. "Cookie?" she inquired, holding a basket of baked goods. They gave you cookies and water while you waited. Either that, or the waterguy was a random Mormon poisoner and the woman was simply the world's most cryptic prostitute.

The room, when I finally got there, was stunning. As usual, I went straight to the bathroom. THE BATHROOM IS THE MOST IMPORTANT FEATURE OF A HOTEL ROOM, I say, because there's something exotic about taking a dump in any strange place. There is a frisson about taking a dump in, say, a public rest room in the park. A nervous one, to be sure, but it's there. In a hotel? It should be downright awesome to take a dump, because it's costing someone good money. This bathroom did not disappoint. For one thing, marble floors. (Let's ignore that I nearly broke my back a few times slipping on that fucking crap coming out of the shower and missing the bath mat--I'm blind as a goddam bat.) For another thing, it had a tub and a separate glass-encased stand-alone shower stall. For another another thing, it had a husband-and-wife sink arrangement, with two separate hookups. And FINALLY--the dumper itself was its own room besides all of the rest, and of course had its own phone--"Simmons! I'm taking a shit on company time! Go into your toilet and take a shit with me! This is rad!"--and one of those ridiculous gilt toilet paper roll-covers that help you out with the tearing motion. I love this sort of vaguely infantilizing hand-holding: "You notice how people rip the hell out of toilet paper rolls, all jaggedy? Let's give them some sort of clean-rip technology. Poor bastards are wiping their asses with substandard wads."

I won't bore you with any of the business stuff--if you're not instantly numbed by words like "practicum" and "forum" and "plenary" then you are not of my species--but I will tell you that even before I boarded the plane, I felt a low-grade cold coming on. Just what you want when getting ready to get on a plane! A compromised immune system! In SLC, my cold built up a little steam, but nothing too unbearable. I had some mild sniffles, but nothing that would keep me out of the game.

Then the stomach virus hit on Wednesday afternoon. Like a switch. Crippling nausea, frequent romping trips to the bathroom, the whole bit. I sat miserably on the toilet, during commercial breaks from The Amazing Race, perversely willing the phone to ring. "Hey, Skot, how's it hanging?" I imagined my telephonic pal would say. "Right above a bowl full of abject horror. I think I'm dying." I would reply. But nobody called. I spent the night shivering and hopelessly smoking cigarettes on my second-floor balcony, staring out at the pool and listening to the sound system blasting out Sheryl Crow songs. The diarrhea was a relief from this sonic assault. Eventually, I fell into a fitful sleep, plagued by horrid dreams involving me giving practicum talks while seated pantsless on a toilet.

Happily, the virus proved to be of the really punctual 24-hour sort, and again, switchlike, I felt magically better the next day at five. I was still a bit whey-faced from the lingering illnesses (not to mention from my utter inability to eat dinner the previous night), but I heroically managed to attend the "hospitality" party for the survivors of the meeting, where I cautiously sipped oaky, croaky red Cab while my unpukey compatriots shamelessly dumped horrible Riesling into their maws.

(On the night of my arrival, I had already learned the folly of ordering liquor in this bizarre Pollyanna state. Upon ordering a martini, I was given an absurdly anemic little glass of cloudy gin, which I figured was due to a criminally scanty pour, but later learned was thanks to Utah's mind-wrecking state laws that mandate some system involving odd metal nipples on liquor bottles which marry to laughable booze-measuring doodads that mete out truly depressing amounts of premeasured shots. The whole thing is Byzantine and insulting and childish. I have convinced myself that, contrary to the historical record, Kafka was trying to get a decent pour in a Utah bar when he decided he wanted all of his papers burned after he died.)

Oh, lord, it's all gone on long enough. Leave it to say that I'm back, and feeling better, and I've had a few days to recover. I'm back to work tomorrow, in my proper office. The wife even got me all set when I arrived back home with a movie night. We watched the Eli Roth masterpiece Hostel, a movie so soulless and unblinkingly mean that it dares to ask the question, "Who wants to see a guy get his Achilles' tendons slashed?"

We cringed our way through this grindcore nightmare of pointlessness, this objet of dumbosity where nothing is really scary but everything is disgusting. In the hands of Scorcese, blood red can be shocking. In the hands of others, it's just another crayon color. What a dreary, idiotic movie.

I missed the excitement of diarrhea. I didn't miss Utah. So Hostel has that going for it. Sort of worse than diarrhea. Better than Utah. I'll leave the rest to you.

Ah, friends, my tens of readers, it is with a heavy heart that I write tonight, for tomorrow . . . tomorrow, I am off. Off to sail the crummy, cramped, smell-other-people's-farts skies with a few hundred of my closest strangers, off to fly to Utah. I will be gone for the week, and so you're just going to have to content yourselves with a deficit of snotty complaining about, uh, everything, for a little while. Sorry about that. This is going to have to hold you.

And I don't even know if my heart is in it tonight. Do we really need yet another bunch of rambling crap about how awful airports are? Is anyone really interested in another jeremiad against airline gouging, or their horrible, alleged food? Does anyone really want to read another unfair, unkind, and ill-informed screed against some innocent city that I happen to spend four days in?

I say: We do.

It's with real anticipation that I await getting to the airport tomorrow, since my flight is on the not-at-all trouble airline Delta. I imagine their employees are going to be so happy! It is indeed fortunate that--assuming I get on my flight all right--I am essentially incapable of staying awake on flights, an attribute which has earned me my wife's enduring resentment. I can't help it--I fall asleep basically right away. It might be a defensive reaction against those particularly insectile male flight attendants, who all seem to resemble David Spade. They creep me out, and I have uneasy dreams about them extruding silk from their vest-concealed spinnerets to encase me before they extract my blood from my wiggling frame. Yes, in my mental world, David Spade is basically a big gay Shelob.

It doesn't help that I'm going to fucking Utah, the boxy state that fails even in its geometric imperative towards Platonic boxiness. This is a state that got out-rhomboided by Wyoming, for Christ's sake. WYOMING! Here's a gerund of a state, which is just pathetic, and yet it eats Utah's Platonic lunch.

And plus, I'm going to Salt Lake City, a Borglike grid of a city dumped down into the desert, and named in honor of a lake that is totally fucked up in the first place. Great Salt Lake? Who asked for that? They couldn't get a lake right? "What a gorgeous lake!" "Yeah, fuck that. It's full of salt." Hanh? Swell. I also can't wait to see the Mustard Mountains and the legendary Paprika Forest.

Look, I'm sorry. Like I said before, this is all very unfair. I was in SLC once, a long time ago. I'm just not very enthused about going, since it's a business trip, and I'm away from my wife, and blah blah blah. I'll be putting in some long hours, and I'll have to wear a tie all the fucking time, which, honestly? I'd rather cinch up my nuts with a spiked belt. (Oh, shit! Did I remember to pack my spiked belt?) WHICH REMINDS ME! What essential thing did I forget to pack? I'm sure it's something, and something big! Or maybe they'll just send my luggage to Oslo! And don't forget about that travel anxiety, like compulsively checking my back pocket to make sure my wallet is still there, and which looks to the rest of the world that I appear to have some ass-clutching twitch! Oh, it all adds up, and it makes me miserable. I hope this week goes by quickly, which I am certain it will not.

Oh, I'll see you next Monday or so. Fresh off the trip. At which time, this post will probably seem kind in retrospect. In the meantime . . . seriously, they couldn't get a lake right? Good Lord. Maybe someday I can go to a conference at the Big Rock Candy Mountain.

The wife and I made a break for it this weekend, to the only place that made sense any more in this cold world: Brinnon, Washington. We were cashing in on a Christmas gift from her parents, a free couple of nights in the Olympic peninsula on . . . houseboats for two! Yes, we had a romantic holiday getaway weekend on a houseboat. Nothing says, "Say . . . why not conceive some grandchildren while you've got nothing to do but sit in a houseboat?" like a trip to Brinnon, Washington, whose lone restaurant (Open until 8:00 on Fridays and Saturdays!) is called the Halfway House.

As it turned out, the brother-in-law and his wife also received the very same gift, and yes, they had booked the same weekend. Nothing quells lustful thoughts like wondering, "Say . . . I wonder if your brother could hear us?" Well, almost nothing. For me, the actual thought of children quells lustful thoughts, so there was that too.

We actually had a very good time. From the very beginning, we were treated very well by the Brinnon folk, who exude that mysterious quality that baffles people who live in larger cities: incredible niceness. Our intrepid houseboat matron had told us to give her a call on arrival so she could let us in to the houseboat. Unfortunately, T-Mobile had different ideas . . . my awful cellphone refused to even countenance the idea of a reception bar. So we asked the proprietor of the marina store for help, and she immediately said, "I'll call her for you!" Then she charged me $7.41 for a pack of Camel Lights, so I guess she wasn't exactly coming out a loser on the exchange.

Settling into the tiny boat was easy enough; it had a hot tub that overlooked the little bay, and we were charmed by the seabirds that frolicked in the water, and occasionally stopped by to peck curiously at our window. This is, I must confess, somewhat unnerving when you're sitting naked in a hot tub. Tippi Hendren didn't have to experience dark thoughts about her nipples coming under avian attack.

The houseboat was also equipped with a stereo, TV and DVD player, and so after a bit of poking about, we decided that--given the paucity of Brinnon nightlife--we'd better go hunt down some horrible movies. We went to the video store--right by the Halfway House!--and discovered a dilapidated ruin that Snake Plissken would sneer at. I did appreciate the "NIGHT DROP" sign sagging morosely next to a kicked-in window. The wonderful gals at the Halfway House informed us that yes, "That place closed!"--no shit!--before referring us to the liquor store.

I love this idea! But, uh . . . the liquor store? In Washington, the liquor stores are all state run. Why would there be movies to rent there?

And yet. Sure enough! A whole shelf bulging with DVDs! And several more with VCR rentals! Um . . . okay! I assume that it's just a happy sideline for the manager, an--of course--incredibly nice woman who was more than delighted to rent us a couple of DVDs. "What do you need from us?" I asked, reaching for my ID, my credit card, a buccal DNA sample . . . "I need you to fill this out," she said, handing over a regular piece of white office paper. "Give me your name and phone number. I'll fill out the titles." That was it. She quoted me a price of four dollars plus tax for the two movies we were taking. Perhaps I got a sympathy discount, since the movies themselves were manifestly horrible, of course: we rented Changing Lanes and Flightplan, which we unfortunately watched. Perhaps this accounted for her less-than-exacting security measures. I don't care if I ever get these back, I imagine her thinking.

Later that evening, after a dinner at the Halfway House (how could I not go?), we retired to the houseboats where a spirited game of Trival Pursuit Mit DVD! was had, and I won, thanks largely to the kindness of the other players who let me have a pie for missing a question about when the Spirograph was introduced. (1966, not 1967. FUCK YOU, SPIROGRAPH! And also the death-deserving research staff at Trivial Pursuit. What a shitty question.)

The whole weekend was like this, really. Wake. Watch insane birds. Crawl nervously into hot tub. Go try and find non-alarming cuisine.

Our second night, we ventured to the nearby town of Quilcene, home to one stop sign and, we reasoned, at least one more restaurant than Brinnon. (We were right! There were two.) We eyed an establishment called--and I love this--the Whistling Oyster warily, but I vetoed it for a few reasons: 1. It was called the Whistling Oyster; 2. It advertised PULL TABS quite prominently; and 3. It looked like, if not the inspiration for, then at least the actual filming location of The Accused.

So we ended up at the only other place that was open: the Logger's Landing. The others had cheeseburgers while I contented myself with that most satisfying of all meals, the grilled cheese sandwich. By the end of the dinner, my dentition was thoroughly coated with a fine, impenetrable lacquer of semisolid melted orange matter. The others topped off the meal with some alarming thing called a Walnut Eat The Fuck Dream, or something. I had a Jack Daniel's while the others moaned deliriously.

And then we went back for some more Trivial Pursuit, and I was once again triumphant, thanks to about nine million lucky, lucky rolls. And hilariously easy questions. And the fact that it was the "90s Version," which--hey! I was alive in the 90s! And finally, this terrible game had made it . . . marginally worthwhile to endure! Thanks, Trivial Pursuit! All is forgiven for that fucking Spirograph thing.

It was all very relaxing, very nice. We had a good time. I was reminiscing about it today, in fact, as I walked home from work. I happened to pass a guy and his gal walking along. As I motored by, the guy stopped to pick up a weird little piece of plastic off the sidewalk. I don't know why. I heard their conversation for a moment after he stooped down to grab what, to me, was obviously, a piece of discarded junk. It was very pink.

"Check it out!" he said.

"What is it?" replied the gal.

"I dunno. Some kinda . . . cock ring?"

I thought, I'm back home.

The wife and I are back from Chicago. What a crazy city! I mean . . . crazy! You know? Totally crazy! You know what's so fucking crazy about it? Seriously?

Nothing. It is the least crazy city I've been to. Chicago is, from what I can tell, pretty definitively not-that-crazy. Or if it is, it's crazy in such a quotidian way that it's not really noticable to the outside observer. And I was really looking forward to the crazy. I mean, my God, this city does after all have a Daley at the helm. Give me some corruption, Mr. Daley! Don't bore me! Offer me a bribe! Promise me free socks! Threaten me with arbitrary prosecution! DO ANYTHING!

Again, nothing. Which isn't to say we didn't enjoy ourselves; we did immensely, even despite our utter failure to get a toehold onto some of the city's infamous graft scene. The closest we got to discomfort was some diffidently inclement weather (Oh no! Wind!) and an alarming experience on the El with something called the SANTA EXPRESS! Where we were greeted by CTA elves wielding candy canes and packed cars of glum people all miserably clutching . . . candy canes. "It's only November 19th!" screamed the wife, striving helplessly to be heard over the sound of Perry Como being lashed by the Christmas Furies.

There's a lot to tell about the visit, so I will as usual be obnoxiously talking about this for a week or so, so for the travelogue-hating folks out there . . . happy Thanksgiving! From here on out for a while, it's going to be nothing but Tales From Chicago. And I have a few. Including this one time where I fucked this hot chick from Canada, but you don't know her.

Anyway. We were hosted the entire time by our good friends S. and J., old pals of ours from Seattle, and their cats, Herbert and Dora. I bravely do not feel the need to protect the identities of the cats, you see, mainly because, well, one, they are cats; and two, perhaps someone will kill them for me. For while our hosts are lovely and gracious and kind, their cats are FUCKING POISON to me.

I've had a lifelong allergy to cats. I thought to mitigate this with medication, so before our trip, I coughed up a good amount of dough for some Claritin. No problem! RIght?

Those fucking cats nearly killed me. DORA AND HERBERT? ARE YOU READING THIS, NASTY CATS? I'm still breathing funny! I've stayed with friends before who have cats, and it's never been much of an issue, but this time, it was like some awful histological key party where Dora and Herbert waltzed off with my immune system (played by Joan Allen) and rough-fucked it into oblivion, leaving me, immunologically-compromised Skot, to gasp and cough and wheeze the entire time until I finally wandered the icy Chicago roads only to be electrocuted by a downed power line. (Unfortunately, Elijah Wood was nowhere to be found.)

Stupid cats. Stupid worthless Claritin. Even when I doubled the Claritin dose--knowing full well that when pharmaceuticals get approved for OTC use they routinely halve the dose--it didn't do fucking jack. Here's a sentence that should make for some good Google hits: CLARITIN BLOWS DEAD CIRCUS BEARS. Here's another: CLARITIN ANAGRAMS TO "CLIT NAIR," FOR WHAT THAT'S WORTH! And finally, CLARITIN DIDN'T HELP ONE BIT WITH MY ALLERGIES, BUT I DID FUCK THIS HOT CANADIAN CHICK, BUT YOU DON'T KNOW HER! SO THERE'S THAT!

My fussbudget antibodies are, happily, starting to chill out now that I'm back home, but I can tell it's going to be a while. It's fine, though. It gives me time to ruminate on my other experiences, such as the astounding gay bar known as SideTracks; the utterly appalling theater experience we, uh, experienced; and of course, the gigantic banquet thrown in my honor by many friends who wished to come and pay fealty to their king, which was me. (NOTE: While I am not lying about the banquet, some attendees would not refer to me as their king, and would instead prefer the term "that jittery jackoff.")

Oh, and there was also this hot chick from Canada that I totally banged, but you wouldn't know her.

Craving new Izzle Pfaff hi-larity over the coming week, are you? No? Nobody? Well, you're all in luck! On Sunday, the wife and I travel to the City of Hot Dogs, fair Chicago! So I'll be blessedly silent for a good week or so. Our good friends S. and J. have agreed to put us up for our stay, and I just can't wait to make fun of them or the city they live in. Yes, I'm on a serious joke-finding mission, and nothing--not inclement weather, not the generosity of our hosts, not even a minimum standard of goodwill nor taste--will make me stray from my path. My path to hot dogs. And also to Ozzie Guillen. I'm bringing him a gift! It's a button that says, "I'm kind of a creep!"

See? I'm not even there yet, and I'm insulting the place! This is going to go great.

It's just too bad that actually getting there will, of course, involve yet another immersion into what has become America's Lousiest Fucking Common Experience, air travel. Oh boy! The airport! We all know how this is going to go.

"Hi, I--"

"HAVE A GUN? GUN! SECURITY!"

And then I'll get gang-tackled by a bunch of guys who got demoted from mall duty. After a brief tussle, I'll finally be muscled into a locked room and surrounded by the brutes.

"Strip off his clothes," will say the one who has mastered human speech. "We've got to find that gun he's been bragging about."

"I don't have a gun!" I'll scream. "All I've got is a cigarette lighter!"

And an ominous hush will settle over the room, as they stare at me with fresh hatred.

"An explosive device!" the lumpen leader will hiss. "You confess! Boys . . . get me Alex."

Helpless tears will roll down my face as I struggle at my restraints. "Who's Alex?" I will gasp.

"He's our bomb-sniffing crocodile. We're going to light him on fire and then slip him right up your asshole. He'll eat that bomb in no time! And maybe your heart. We'll see."

"WHAT BOMB? WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?" I'll scream. Then I'll pause for a moment. "Wait, why are you lighting it on fire?"

"I dunno. It's in the regs." And he'll show me a little book with a page that clearly says, "IMPORTANT: ALWAYS LIGHT THE BOMB-HUNTING CROCODILE ON FIRE PRIOR TO INSERTION. IT IS TOTALLY HILARIOUS." So there's no getting around that.

And then I just know they're going to make me check a carry-on.

But anyway, when I get back, I have a new project. Just FYI--clear your calendars!--for I am yet again taking the stage for another kind of bullshit theatrical experience that doesn't really require much effort! Which is really my cup of tea these days. In December, Open Circle Theater will be mounting its all-expenses-spared production of a thing called " 'Twas A Night of Shitty Theater," a holiday-themed reader's theater show where actors read from scripts of the worst holiday plays ever imagined by man. Good times! (Note: Good times not actually guaranteed.) I'll keep you posted.

See you after next week. Unless in a fit of button-inspired rage, I get choked to death by Ozzie Guillen. I'm not ruling it out.

The saga continues! Follow our heroes as they make their way to Cannon Beach! (I'll also try to make this slightly less tonally schizophrenic than the last entry, which seems at some point to have gone completely off the rails. It's probably never a good idea to post a blog entry on the tail end of a vacation while, uh, kind of besotted.)

After sleeping in for an indecent amount of time on Saturday morning, the wife and I clambered into the Purple Snatch-Dazzler and made our way out of town. Well, almost. First we made our way into town, inasmuch as Seaside has actual town, because . . . well . . . see, Seaside has something that not just every city has. Something wonderful. To put it simply: NOTHING SAYS "VACATION DETOUR" LIKE "OUTLET MALL!" AAAAAAAAHHHH!

Eddie Bauer! Liz Claiborne! Uh . . . Totes! Oh, yes, we were pigs at the trough. After an exciting Liz Claiborne visit--where the men's "department" consisted of a rack of ugly belts and some truly unforgivable pants--we sped to Cap'n Bauer's, where I gleefully latched onto athletic socks! (We only use them for sex, people. We just don't feel right doin' the Grunt 'N Shove unless we are both clad in bright white athletic socks.) Then! On to . . . Totes! Look! Cheap umbrellas that will last for one month. We need two!

And some other fucking crap. Finally, the wife decided she needed some new bras, so I stood outside the bra store and smoked--smoking at the mall! I felt like a teenager again, until an actual teenager laughed at me and hit me with his skateboard. Not really. Nor, as a teenager, did I ever smoke at a mall. I am a failure. Anyway!

Finally the wife emerged from the Playtex Compound with a new bra or two. Can I just say? Is there anything sexier than the delicious interplay between the words "Playtex" and "outlet mall"? I don't think so. Boy, it almost makes me want to go suit up in some white athletic socks. I'm not going to give out these sex hints forever, people!

So we eventually did make it to Cannon Beach, all of about seven miles away. (I've actually been there before, but not for many years.) We immediately were entranced by the rustic charms of the setting, and decided quickly to anesthetize those feelings of affection by having a couple drinks. Spying a free outside table, we darted into a place called, God help me, the Driftwood Inn. If I ever open a down-homey place on the Oregon coast, I swear I am going to call it something like the Medical Waste Cabin or Mysterious Jelly on the Beach Saloon or the Kelp 'N Grit.

After a couple glubs, we made our way to the beach to complete our evening of relaxing cliches and, yes, watched the sun go down. (I snark, but this was all of course unbelievably great.) I diddled around hopelessly with the cameraphone, and took some perverse, photon-fucked bad photos of the sunset, and the wife beamed happily. We noted at one point that a couple locals had joined us, and were standing nearby with glasses of wine. They toasted the sunset, and I swear it was even pretty cute.

Then we had dinner at . . . sigh . . . the Driftwood Inn again, because every other joint in town was completely full. Well, the good old Driftwood was actually full too, sort of: the hostess informed us that there would be at least a 45 minute wait. And there were a lot of people there before us waiting already, so I didn't much buy that. "What about the bar?" asked the wife. "Oh, you can eat in there, sure." We walked into the bar and immediately found a table. So those other people? Dumb.

And that was Cannon Beach. I know it doesn't sound like much, but man, it was pretty great. Even though the town would clearly dry up like a mummy without the tourist dollars, it was still very charming and lovely, and yes, we did get to see Haystack Rock, a gigantic rock whose claim to fame is being a gigantic rock. That's one thing you have to love about the Oregon coast: the total innocence. Check out our big fucking rock! Christ! Man, that's a big rock, huh? Hey, you want to eat some taffy? Because it's good taffy, man. Later on, I'll pop some wheelies on my Huffy and you can watch! Being on the Oregon coast is a lot like being in a really charming and enthusiastic commune for a while, but with the difference that you can leave when it starts to grate on you. Also, it's never your turn to go out and weed the beet rows.

We took our time the next day hitting the road, because why? We both took Monday off, so fuck that. We wandered up to Seaside's beachfront aquarium, a scruffy little building that housed all manner of bummed-out marine life in little Plexiglass-fronted tanks. Hey, octopus! You dick! Move around! Change color! Mr. Octopus declined, and maintained his sucker-hold on the window. Hey, eel! Make Abe Vigoda faces at me! And he did, which was so great. They also had a "touching pool," mostly for the kiddies, and say, we should change the name to anything but "touching pool," you know. We laughed at the tots who were busy hassling starfish, who I'm pretty sure are the most-hassled sea animals of all. I don't even think hermit crabs have to put up with as much shit as starfish do.

But the real draw of the tiny place were the seals, a whole passel of them that had been raised in captivity, and now spend their lives competing for the attention of tourists, who for $1 buy little fish chunks to throw at them. They slap their bellies. WHAP WHAP WHAP WHAP! They swim upside-down and give you heartbreaking, imploring looks. THROW ME FISH! They dunk their heads artfully and direct a spray of brine at you. And, if you're really stupid, and stick your hands too far out, they viciously bite you. Sadly, nobody around us on that day took them up on that talent. I wouldn't have minded one of the screaming kids losing a couple fingers to the hungry beasts. But really, the best one was this proudly bewhiskered male who would simply poke his head up out of the water and wail: "YORB! YORB! YORB! YORB!" at the most astonishing, ear-rupturing volume. It was simply the most incredibly appalling, hilarious noise I've ever heard, and I say that as someone who has listened to Diamanda Galas albums. It was also really effective: his howls inevitably produced a hail of fish parts.

And then, after a lunch stop in Astoria--a curiously scuzzy-seeming city; I'm sorry, but maybe that was just the weirdly gray and depressing nonarchitecture and my water glass complete with a lipstick stain--we headed home.

Man, I already miss it all. Particularly the outlet mall. We should have gotten three cheap umbrellas. 'Cause that would have been bumpin'.

Well, this whole weekend was just one big fucking disaster. There's no getting around it. We set out for a nice road trip to the Oregon coast to relax, get out of town, get away from work and all . . . and it all ended up in the fucking dumper.

For one thing, the traffic? It was not entertaining at all. Me, when I go on the roade, I want traffic, and lots of it. I want miserable, endless jams, say around Olympia, the kind where I can lean my head out the window and chat with my fellow roadmates. "Hey!" I always like to say, "That sure is an ugly dog you've got!" In this way, I bond with my roadmates. Another one that always prompts good conversation is to mention someone's wife, like, "Whoo-whee! I can smell your wife's nasty business all the way over here! You need some Febreze?" I can't tell you how many times this has opened up a conversation with a stranger on the freeway--"Look at this guy pound on my window!" I like to observe, while the wife cowers.

But on this trip? We got jack shit. Not one time did we even hit a slowdown, and so by traveling, on average, at about 75 mph the entire time, we lost our chance to really engage with some decent folk.

When we got to Seaside and checked into our hotel--a stately establishment dating back at least several months--we noted happily that there were a bunch of school buses parked in the lot. Hey! Our weekend was to be blessed--BLESSED!--with the presence of several dozen young teenagers. And sure enough, our hotel room was directly above the swimming pool, where the delightful youngsters frolicked. Audibly. We rested our heads, that first night, our rapturous heads on our pillows, as the adorable tots below us shat freely into the pool and hit each other over the heads with cheap plastic bongs. (When will our youth discover apple bongs? I ask you.) Sadly, the pool closed at 10:00, forcing the unhappy teens to glumly skateboard on the pavement outside our window, and they bellowed and lowed like wayward buffalo as they clattered along the urban plains. I cheered myself for a while by pitching my butts at them as they skated. (Yes, it was a nonsmoking room, but I AM SUCH A REBEL.)

It was time to go to a bar. We discerningly picked a place called the Bridge Keeper (I think), mostly because, uh, it was closest. The tavern was filled with what seemed to be locals, and they stared at us for a little while, but we fearlessly took a table anyway, because, like I said, it was the closest bar. And we weren't really in any danger anyway, but it's fun to pretend. We got a couple drinks and settled in, and soon enough the terrifying locals all . . . went home, at about midnight or so. Feeling unjustifiably menaced by Oregon coast locals? My suggestion: wait for the witchy hour of midnight, and they all get tired, apparently. We wandered over to the Megatouch game, feeling ballsy, and I'm proud to say we murdered that fucker: we easily toppled the existing trivia champs--named "CUPPAPOOP" and "CORNHOLE"--in the music category, and only narrowly missed taking the top spot in the "Erotic" category, thanks to a question about the motility of pig sperm. Thanks a lot, pig sperm! You suck.

More to come later as I describe the TERRIFYING SPECTACLE that is . . . Cannon Beach, Oregon. Seaside never looked so good. No, seriously . . . Seaside never looks good at all. It mostly looks like an old man in ratty overalls that are stained with gravy. And go