10086 Sunset Boulevard

Years ago, one of my favorite things to do on a hot summer’s night was to visit Fenton’s Creamery in Oakland. Besides having the best ice cream, they put together a crab sandwich that I can remember to this day, even though I haven’t been there in at least twenty years.

This afternoon, a little fed up with the cold, wet weather we’ve been having in Northern California and realizing I needed a break from the computer, I ventured out to the new Nut Tree Village where they have a Fenton’s. It was the coffee and peach pie I was in need of, the mother of all comfort foods in my book. Sometimes you just have to say “yes” to yourself. It’s was seriously good and it banished the winter blues in a matter of minutes.

The Vintage Sweet Shop, where they make chocolate and fudge and also a Jelly Belly outlet are located within the same building. It’s like having a great big sugar landmine on my doorstep.

A new look for 10086 Sunset Boulevard is here at last. The plan to change my website and give it a face lift has been in the works for almost a year and is the first step towards Sunset becoming the kind of site I had hoped for in the beginning. I’ve floundered for a while with the website, as I did in my own life, not really having found my direction since the beginning of 10086 Sunset Boulevard. Back then it served more as a catharsis and somewhat entertaining journal for the soap opera that was my life.

The artwork for Sunset became much more labor intensive than I could have imagined. I had to learn Poser 6, an amazing art tool, that provided me with quite a challenge. I’ll post the story behind the artwork sometime soon, along with some pictures of it’s metamorphosis.

My mother has listened to my complaints and frustrations along the way and finally, she told me that the only thing she wanted for her birthday was, at long last, to see the new and improved 10086 Sunset Boulevard.

So Happy Birthday Mum!

And thank you to my ever patient Webmistress Kuleana, for her commitment, patience and allowing me to swear.

I’m quite intrigued with this lady. Last year, at fifty one years of age, she took a little trip to Egypt. While on horseback, her long black hair flowing, with the Great Pyramids of Giza in the background, she was spotted by a young Arab man of interesting parentage and they fell in love in the shadows of the pyramids. Soon after they became man and wife.

God, I want her life!

Well, okay, not the part where she was in Egypt getting treatment for multiple sclerosis and having a bit of a nip-tuck done at the same time and not the part about becoming the wife of an Arab and perhaps skipping the part about having Osama Bin Laden as a father-in-law. There’s also the matter of his other wife…..

Marrying Omar Bin Laden probably doesn’t seem unusual to this woman. She is an interesting person with a colorful past and once bumped into his father, Osama, at a party in the 70’s, when her current husband was not even a twinkle in big daddy’s eye. Jane Felix-Brown or Zaina Alsabah, as she is also known, has had a few marriages before marrying this youngster, who is the same age as her sons. She’s also had a few occupations, like aircraft interior designer and psychotherapist, if the British tabloids are to be believed.

Zaina and Omar plan to become Peace Ambassadors, but in the meantime she’s hoping to get him a Visa so that he can come and visit her in England. The British officials have insisted that he get a divorce from wife number one, before allowing him to come and stay with wife number two at her million dollar home in Cheshire. The one with the white Jaguar with Egyptian plates parked in the garage.

This woman is no ordinary woman, whatever the motives may be in this situation, so to all the so-called journalists who are lacking in imagination and decided to simply dub her the Granny Bride, take a moment and hang your heads in shame, you simpering, misogynistic little weasels.

Jane Felix-Brown Update.

Sunday afternoon was all she had to look forward to now. She would sit on the porch, alone as she had been for the past two years, sipping absinthe, allowing her mind to wander. When he had been here, he would drink absinthe with her on Sundays and after the absinthe they always made love. As they grew older and their sex life diminished, the Sunday absinthe ritual remained, even if they only lay together in an absinthe afterglow.

Sipping the aromatic aperitif she remembered the first Sunday they had shared a glass. Forty years ago, when he was a man in his late thirties. He was her neighbor, a friend and he’d offered to do her hedges, claiming that he needed to try out his new electric hedge trimmer. Her hedges didn’t really need trimming. Afterwards she invited him inside for some refreshment. Absinthe.

He’d downed the first glass in one gulp. He was a beer man. She laughed and told him to sip the second glass, it wasn’t a gulping beverage. He wasn’t sure he liked the taste, but it was seductive.

He wore no shirt that day, just jeans and a tool belt. She savored the absinthe while she took him in with her eyes, letting her gaze lower in a slow tease, following the sweat as it made a trail from his chest to his navel. By the time her eyes dropped below his tool belt his zipper was strained.

The taste of absinthe mingled with the taste of him. How a sense memory could bring everything flooding back to her, almost too painful and yet such a delicious memory. He had joked later, to their friends, that she had gotten him drunk and taken advantage of him.

He didn’t know that she’d had many an absinthe Sunday alone. Sipping and watching him while he worked on his house or his yard or washing his car, she’d fantasize about the first time they would drink together, wondering if she’d ever have the nerve to make a move.

Now, once again, she drank absinthe alone as she looked out upon her overgrown hedges.

Please click here for current American Idol news and reviews.

Give us your nut jobs, your freaks
Your delusional masses yearning
to be famous
The laughing stocks of your
teeming streets
Send these, the rejects, the misfits,
to us
We lift the microphone beside the
Golden Door to Hollywood
and mock them, that they ever dared
to dream the Idol dream.

Yes, once again it’s time for American Idol and I am going to watch it and I am going to blog about it….. but not here. You can read my American Idol rants, raves and bored commentaries over at Blogging Idol. Or not.

Okay, now the man is just showing off! Actually The Gun Seller was written by Mr. Laurie a good decade before he achieved fame in America through his portrayal of Dr. Gregory House on the T.V. series House M.D.

The story is a spoof on the traditional spy novel and if the story doesn’t pull you in, his way with words will:

“Imagine that you have to break someone’s arm.

Right or left, doesn’t matter. The point is that you have to break it, because if you don’t…well, that doesn’t matter either. Let’s just say bad things will happen if you don’t.

Now, my question goes like this: do you break the arm quickly — snap, whoops, sorry, here let me help you with that improvised splint — or do you drag the whole business out for a good eight minutes, every now and then increasing the pressure in the tiniest of increments, until the pain becomes pink and green and hot and cold and altogether howlingly unbearable?

Well exactly. Of course. The right thing to do, the only thing to do, is to get it over with as quickly as possible. Break the arm, ply the brandy, be a good citizen. There can be no other answer.

Unless.

Unless unless unless.

What if you were to hate the person on the other end of the arm? I mean really, really hate them.

This was a thing I now had to consider.

I say now, meaning then, meaning the moment I am describing; the moment fractionally, oh so bloody fractionally, before my wrist reached the back of my neck and my left humerus broke into at least two, very possibly more, floppily joined-together pieces.

The arm we’ve been discussing, you see, is mine. It’s not an abstract, philosopher’s arm. The bone, the skin, the hairs, the small white scar on the point of the elbow, won from the corner of a storage heater at Gateshill Primary School — they all belong to me. And now is the moment when I must consider the possibility that the man standing behind me, gripping my wrist and driving it up my spine with an almost sexual degree of care, hates me. I mean, really, really hates me.

He is taking for ever.”

If your appetite still needs whetting, you can read the rest of the first chapter over at Simon and Schuster. The Gun Seller is Hugh Laurie’s only published novel to date.

Inspired by, but by no means about, my friend Linda.

He sat in her parlor, sipping insipid tea and munching sausage rolls filled with fake veggie sausages. He tried not to stare at the mason jar of kidney stones, prominently displayed on the mantel like some twisted trophy. She had said they belonged to her ex lover, that men always left a little of themselves behind. He’d already lost his appetite before she served him tea.

She failed to notice that the man sitting on her couch was willing to endure this discomfort because he thought her worth the effort.

Polite in his bold faced lie, he pretended to enjoy the sorry fare and she knew her aloneness would remain untouched another day. She would wait for the man who would come to her parlor and declare “this tea is like gnat’s piss, there’s no meat in my sausage and for the love of God, let go of the ex’s stones”.

Happy New Year to you. I’m sitting here, catching up on emails and putting off, for another day, calling my dentist. As I wrote in my last post, I’ve got a tooth in need of repair, but since my dentist has only just returned to work after a ten day break, I’ll let her get caught up with things and call tomorrow or maybe Friday. That’s the reason I’m giving myself.

I received an email this morning from Aunty B in England and with it a link to a news story about a woman whose knickers put out a kitchen fire. Aunty B sent this link to me saying that she thought of me when she saw it, which gave me a moment to pause and wonder why she’d think of me when reading a story about big knickers, until I reflected back on how we first met. She left a comment about knickers on my very first posting here at Sunset.

So, back to the fire story. Jenny Marsey wears large cotton knickers, practical full sized ones, no messing about with high cuts or thongs, perish the thought. She leaves them lying about, freshly laundered and in a basket she says, in the kitchen where her son and nephew were when the fire broke out. The large cotton underwear served well as a fire blanket and the flames were quickly extinguished.

Jenny Marsey is a baker and likes to pop out for pub lunches, so I doubt that this incident will result in a new diet and subsequent weight loss. I think Jenny found the one upside to big knickers.

I also think it must be a slow news day in the U.K. and apparently here on Sunset.

Link: Fire, Fire, Put Pants on Fryer