Eat or We Both Starve

by Jim Washburn

... in which event at least we wouldn’t be eating chicken shit.

Back in the days when “alternative journalism” was more than just two random words bundled together, I used to occasionally get asked to speak to organizations with names like the South Orange County Democratic Club, which would basically be seven people and a chuckwalla, at a lovely house with a prized koi pond or a Mimi’s Café without one. Sometimes my fellow OC Weekly alum Rebecca “Commie Girl” Schoenkopf would be speaking as well.

I’d prepare for days, getting all my anti-Bush facts in a row, preparing any number of seemingly spontaneous witticisms and such, and then I would speak, which is what writers do when food is promised. And no matter how reasoned, charming, etc. I was, Schoenkopf would get up after me to speak, and begin, “I would have prepared something, but I am so wasted right now ...” and suddenly the day was hers.

She was reasoned and charming and all that, but was blowing not so much the way an improvisational jazzman would as much as a decidedly drunk person would, in big palpable chunks. And people loved her for it. You could be Walter Cronkite bottle-feeding an orphaned baby chimpanzee and you wouldn’t stand a chance against her. Audiences love drunk.

I’m relatively confident Rebecca isn’t drunk right now, because I saw her this past weekend and she’s likely still recovering from that. What is it about her that when a stripper mannequin—or at least a fleshy part thereof—is stolen from a Halloween party, people naturally assume it’s Rebecca’s doing, just because she drove off with a life-sized Cousin Itt (of Addams Family fame) from the same party the year previous? Her legend precedes her.

 But during this moment of presumed ComGal sobriety, let me say, I am so wasted right now, having drunk a significant speck of a bottle of Layer Cake cabernet, a brand I mention only so that I can remember the name when I’m sober. My host bought it from High Times, the Costa Mesa liquor store that really cares about your buzz, though I do think they’d attract a better sort of people if they changed their name to Liquor Trough.

I’m lit, folks, and topped it off by just now smoking a vaporizer-ful of some herb. Next I’m going to chew tannis leaves.

(Incidentally, vaporizers are the way to go. If you happen to smoke, for example, oregano, you have no idea how vile and bad for you the byproducts of its combustion are until you’ve ingested the same through a vaporizer for a week or two. When you return to your pipe it suddenly seems like you’re licking an ashtray, and I don’t mean just any ashtray, but one stolen from the Roxy circa 1977.

So much better to be inhaling through a vaporizer, which typically heats your chamber of herb to the point that its essential particles become vaporized and can be inhaled minus the tars and such. The taste is refreshingly clean, like a sip of Herbal Essence shampoo. Some vaporizer units, such as the Iolite, are nearly as compact as a cell phone and are shaped nearly the same, allowing for discreet use, as long as you don’t mind being the one guy on the beach who’s periodically sucking on his cell phone antenna.)

But I digress.

I was driving through Corona del Mar recently, and on a breadboard in front of one boutique restaurant the words were chalked, Eat or we both starve. Hard times, even there in the playground of the rich, where if I had any entrepreneurial spirit at all, I’d be standing outside the Quiet Woman nightspot selling “Cougar Food” T-shirts to all the young guys in line. It’s a den!

I’m still digressing, and for that matter, I’m heading right back into parentheses. Somehow I feel safer in parentheses, like I’ve got side-collision airbags on my head.

(Is everybody noticing that while people are suddenly blaming Obama for the war, the economy and everything else, the evils of the Bush administration just keep on rolling, like smoke out of Mordor? Just this week, an Italian court found 23 Americans, 21 of them CIA agents, guilty of a Bush-era kidnapping in the case of an “extreme rendition” carried out on Italian soil of a Muslim cleric. Meanwhile our allies in England had been tussling over whether “national security” was really at stake in its government’s attempt to suppress the release of a document pertaining to the torture of a former Guantanamo inmate—British resident Binyam Mohamed, now released, all charges dropped, thank you—who alleges that when the CIA rendered him to Morocco and Afghanistan, he was beaten, deprived of sleep and was repeatedly cut on his penis with a scalpel, which is probably about as close as Republicans are ever going to get to health care reform.)

(The Obama administration’s in a tough place: In the nine years preceding him, America’s earned a reputation for injudicious thuggery, not just kidnapping and torturing terrorists but poor innocent schlubs as well, not to mention all the innocents we continue to kill with drone attacks and such. As even the progressive, Western-leaning Pakistanis who chided Hillary Clinton last week made clear, they’re never going to love us when we’re bombing their children with our sleek sci-fi machines. But Obama can’t side with the British and Italian courts without losing a lot of career CIA guys, and alienating others, who may just be needed to fight the genuine terrorists who mean us harm. When America is attacked again, as we’re almost sure to be, guess who gets blamed if he’s seen as being the least bit soft on our defense, and then America will vote in a leader who makes Bush look like Francis of Assisi.)

I’m liking writing in parentheses. It feels like making ravioli instead of paragraphs.

 (Along with the economy, there are a lot of domestic messes to unravel, such as the sweetheart deal the Bush Interior Department crafted for oil companies interested in our oil-shale buried on public land, from which Royal Dutch Shell in particular stands to rake in billions of dollars. E-mails now reveal that Interior even worked with Shell to craft the media perception of the deal, since it rather stank to high heaven. Under our system, hard work is rewarded, and Bush’s Interior Secretary Gale Norton now has a spiffy job as an attorney with Shell’s oil-shale division.)

(Of all the chickenshit ideas afloat in the world, one of the worst has to be feeding chickenshit to cows, which we do in this country evidently. “Ban on feces in cattle feed urged” was a headline found in the LA Times on Oct. 31. Granted, you had to look to find it, because it was back in the business section, because who wants to read about the systemic poisoning of their food supply when they can read about that dead Anna Nicole Smith instead? Not that you care, but the beef you eat is fed “poultry litter,” of which feathers, spilled chicken feed and “poultry farm detritus” are the good parts, while for the most part it’s chicken feces. You don’t see that claim in the ads: “You can’t beat our shit-fed beef!”)

(That’s some crazy shit. How crazy? How about mad cow crazy, because chicken feed contains ground up cattle slaughterhouse ick, and even small amounts of ruminant protein can carry the disease. Mmmmm, beef-fed chicken, can’t beat that either. Thanks, Jerry Hirsch, for a fine story in the Times, which really should have been on the front page. Why’s it back in Business, so other industries can look at the factory farm model and get the idea to start feeding their shipping and receiving department’s shit to accounting and vice versa?)

(Now, here’s one more thing I don’t understand about conservatives: if you really hunt and peck around in the Bible, you’ll find nothing about abortion, and a couple of sentences condemning homosexuality, along with cutting thy topknot and myriad other shalt-nots; and they’re going to keep grinding on those two issues until the universe turns cold. Yet nowhere in God’s great plan do cows and chickens eat each other or each other’s shit. The Founding Fathers, I do believe, would be puking into their wigs just at the thought of it. Yet all these “traditional values” Americans don’t give a fig about tradition when there’s money to be made bulldozing it.)

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