Side of Sauce

A hale and hearty tale of the bountiful journey west.

My husband and I both arrived at the decision to move out west as if by simultaneous revelation. After a brief interment in upstate New York, where the winter leaves much to be desired, we were both desperate to get back to some place warm and forgiving. Our decision to leave sooner, rather than later, was doubtless inspired by lackluster accommodations.

During our 5-month stay we slept on an aging, saggy bed in sleeping bags wrapped in the frosty chill air of a house with no heat. I had left the safe confines of New York City with the express purpose of skulking about and reliving the college life while simultaneously my husband took a stab at finally getting the PhD he had been savoring for the past 11 years.

Five months later, having relived the college life all over again with a
bevy of roommates all stepping on each other’s toes and fighting about whom used the last square of toilet paper and who should be forced to cough up the 1.99 to buy a new roll, I was thoroughly disillusioned. I loved college, but I have no desire to live like that again. So in the midst of undue angst about who ground flavored coffee in a coveted, ‘non-flavored-coffee-only’ coffee grinder and buried in 6 feet of snow with no end in sight, I looked at my husband and we both said “California”.

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Okay, so, I was swallowed whole by a rare and particularly vicious species of woman-eating monster (right after the dog ate my homework). I swear.

Actually, I really was. About 3 months ago the new version of Everquest was released and my life just hasn’t been the same since. I abandoned my blog, put my freelance work on hold and buckled down to do some serious gaming. Three months later I am starting to feel a little rotten to the core. Three solid months of doing absolutely nothing productive (unless of course you count having three 23+ level characters and close to a platinum piece in your virtual bank, productive) and my head is spinning with self-abnegating thoughts. Now, I am coming up for air. I have actually disconnected my PC so as not to be a temptation. After all, I have plans for my life and sharing an umbilical cord with my computer is not one of them.

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It’s a wide, wide chasm — I assure you.
I consider myself a scientist. In college however, I took many art classes. I drew lots and lots of naked people, which was exciting and liberating — for them. For me it was about blushing in the light of ignominy while the professor critiqued the lack of detail in the nether region of my drawing of a male subject. “Look at this drawing, class — you will notice that the subject doesn’t have a penis…”It didn’t take me long to figure out that the art department was a helluva lot more entertaining than the science department. For example, there were long-haired art professors who chalked up their career in art to youthful enthusiasm and were happy to make you vegetarian bean stew provided you were attracted to father figure types. There was the annual pumpkin carving contest in which the negative space pumpkin inevitably carried the prize year after year and there was pot smoking, underage drinking and lots and lots of angst (pronounced aaaangst).

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What’s the big deal? We are all naked underneath our clothes….
I went to Queens last night for an actual BBQ. There was an actual backyard, with an actual grill and we were eating actual tomatos from an actual garden. You are probably saying to yourself “big deal, who cares?”, but when you live in Manhattan the closest you get to an actual BBQ is passing by a herd of rats having their weekly shmorgasboard on trash night.

The reason behind this suburban love-fest was the screening of a documentary called “Naked World” which featured 2 + hours of naked people ripping off their clothes and posing for contemporary photographer, Spencer Tunick. Tunick, whose technical skill and aesthetic sense as a photographer are obvious, has traveled all over the world convincing passersbys to strip down and hit the pavement for the sake of art. He gets on a ladder, yells through a megaphone and directs a sea of nude people as they arrange themselves in an artistic configuration while he snaps a photo. The bodies often resemble a land or seascape and are set against natural or historical backdrops.

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I’ll let you in on a dirty little secret: I’m an addict.
I am sure the word addict conjures up all sorts of squalid visuals of me with track marks on my arm, spending my free time vacuuming up all the dust and cat hair in my Manhattan apartment with my nose in search of a few lost granules of utopia. In this, I am sorry to disappoint, but I am an addict of an entirely different species. My addiction has its roots back in the days of Atari and stand-up arcade games where I spent a small fortune pumping quarters into a machine for the mere thrill of getting my initials on the scoreboard of Space Invaders. When my brother was young his first word was a phrase, which was something like “want supanintenda”. Before long, we had our very own machine and our family room became a den for late night matches and the slaying of a wide range of evil-doing foe.

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