Angel Fire

One of the best meals I've ever had in my life wasn't at a fancy "eatery" (please excuse the hipster term) in a trendy New York neighborhood full of outsiders looking to make it big in my hometown. It was at a modest cabin nestled quaintly in the gorgeous Sangre de Cristo valley of New Mexico. I'm not an avid skier, coming from a childhood home of much humbler and inexpensive past times, but during my active teenage years, me and my brothers (with a cousin or boyfriend/girlfriend or two, thrown into the mix) would fly out to spend our college breaks with my father and his wife at a lovely small-town resort they found in New Mexico that's within driving distance of their West Texas home.

Since it wasn't some pricey tourist dive*, our trips meant (as they always did growing up) that we had to socialize with the local provincials, with their very limited experiences that they had no trouble abusing children over, so that we could have maybe a day's worth of fun during our grueling college years to satisfy our parents arrangements. It was also weather and/or our pocketbook(s) permitting, or my father pulled his purse-strings to call the shots that favored him best. We were lucky to have a good time at all, is what I'm saying to you, and as my faithful working class readers, I know you understand the drill.

It's like a Florida vacation washed out by monsoon season with your ADD grand kid who freaks out during horrible airplane turbulence that lasts for hours and you spent $8000 for it (and you couldn't even afford that), which is why credit cards were invented: so you could try and escape the soul-crushing reality of your 9-5 office hell with the promise of a heavenly vacation that was never real like they are on t.v., except now you're in debt, in addition to having a really bad time. Oh, and there's all those work emails in varying tones of recrimination and panic to go through before Monday morning, too. You lucky asshole. Isn't it grand? Our family trips were like also that: a terrible guessing game of who will get drunk and be a complete piece of shit first, because every family vacation is like that. Every. Single. One.

The revelation of an uncomplicated good time at a family restaurant that served us at a long table with mismatched bowls we simply passed around to each other, without worry of this one's Epi-pen peanut-dust allergy or her Celiac Disease that's easily manageable with basic human speech skills that are devoid of the typical (and repetitive!) brain-dysfunctional Off-Broadway show, was utterly miraculous. A husband and wife team cooked the food they served to us in the cabin they lived in, as their only guests in attendance, away from the maddening tourist crowds. They served the best mashed potatoes I've ever had in my life, followed by the best peach cobbler I've ever had for dessert, too.

As we stood on their wood-plank porch watching the Milky Way stars emerge above the rural New Mexican mountains, free of sky-obscuring light pollution, after a spectacular pink and purple sunset we knew was divinely inspired, not even my dad's annoying toothpick habit that included repeatedly sucking his teeth loudly could spoil our mood. For an evening, just one evening, we'd been in heaven, and it was worth the price of the ticket. Believe you me. And you should. Some memories are so good, they withstand the test of time, like a love that's everlasting. Amen to you, on this holy All Saints Day in 2016. 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angel_Fire,_New_Mexico

* https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angel_Fire_Resort

Over Hill, Over Vail

"Gore Creek Drive - Vail, CO" by Nick Csakany.

On the way to Vail, I tried to prep my largely impatient punk-rock boyfriend about the pretentious twitchy qualities that mark my oldest brother and his wife, but...what to say? It was like trying to describe the desolation my father had exiled himself to, deep in the wastelands of western Texas, that he pitched as a false paradise to anyone who listening; it was, by its very nature, a contradiction in terms. Some things (and people) you just have to see for yourself.

Because Kent was a brilliant man, he and I got on really well as friends, and that was the main bond between us, way beyond any temporary romance he and I may have had. We just "got" each other and the worlds we came from, in the present tense. When I told him about Jim's trendy Internet "start-up", the very first question Kent asked me was: "Why are they pissing away all their money on family vacations for the executives and their entire families, on one of the wealthiest resorts in the country?!". Uh....because they're corrupt, dude. I was always embarrassed by the obvious nature behind my brother's greed. It unnerved me, which is what he likes about money: it's power that's fleeting but satisfying, to the right type of mind.

We didn't share his fascination for all things rich, white, and insane but Jim came about honestly, meaning, he picked it up practically from birth. As far back as we knew him, Jim has always been attracted to the wrong types of things. Give him real food, and he wants fake. Take him to a cousin's overly extravagant wedding you know he can't afford, and Jim wants a pass to the country club just so he can grovel to get in, and then pound wanna-be joiners over the head with his success. It sucks, and it doesn't feel like how family should feel, but that's the world he wanted; it's also about as far from the lessons any true Acadian should have learned a long time ago as it could possibly be, but that's how it is.

Corruption isn't for just the insanely rich. It also infects anyone aspiring to it, the way a suicide wreaks havoc on anyone near the crime scene, in a blast zone of evil that tries to eat at the healthy life around it, or so the perpetrator wants you to believe, like the cartoon victim who lies to the very end, denying it every step of the way. But, Jim's taste for ostentation and bragging far surpassed his need for discretion, and that's what I fall back on during his worst times: he'll snap out of his "money haze" to see the truth of how it really is. After all, his kids are dark as fuck! They ain't passing as "Anglo" at family reunions anytime soon, and isn't that why he and his wife avoid them? I know he knows that, deep down inside, where his ancestry tucked away all the good stuff that no raving lunatic can ever snatch away from him, no matter the amount of pretty guises.

Sure enough, as soon as we hit the first steep hill into town, there was Jim's insane "tanorexic" of a wife running uphill in the snow with my nephew in her "runner's" baby carriage that cost a mint, and immediately upon seeing her, we both bust out laughing. That crazy bitch could always be counted on for being just what we know her to be: stupid as fuck, and deeply programmable by any corporation that needs available drones for rent. You see, her womanly "baby fat" struck the wrong chord with the obviously gay and very butch woman she reported to, the one who barked at her whenever she felt like it (day or night, weekday or weekend, during office hours or while on "vacay"), so she could have the pleasure of seeing my brother's wife lick her boot-heels, in one of the gayest female displays I have ever seen in my life, but that bitch is beyond cray-cray. We all know it.

Not one of our friends and family like her, and we have a HUGE family. Not. One. Person. She is one of the rudest, nastiest, viciously aggressive cunts we've ever had the misfortune to meet in my family, and we're New Yorkers. Know what I mean? Like many a company of underlings and "yes-men" I've worked my way through, that's exactly what every total ass-kissing MBA really wants: to trap each other in a cycle of cowardly cringing and then furious lashing out, in one of the sickest examples of "making it" that humans currently have. How is that success? It isn't, but that doesn't stop them from tap-dancing all the way to an early grave with fully loaded pockets.

Sure enough, their trip was by-the-book: a grossly over-priced "villa" that every executive booked his family into, so that was the first thing we heard about, their plush "suites" in a hotel resort. Oh. Kent and I exchanged knowing looks during their delusion opening stump-speech; they do realize we actually live in Colorado full-time, right? Like, their insanely over-decorated tourist trap for dumb out-of-town white folk is our everyday. They must know, right? After all, my brother went to an very impressive and really expensive Ivy League school for his business degree. They must know, no? 

No. That wasn't the facade at all. As soon as we asked them astute questions about re-investing in chancy Internet start-ups, my brother's wife began her real drinking of the day, early as the afternoon was. As we watched her skinny tan arms slinging it back, the jig was already up. Ohh....that's it. It's a bank scam! Huh. Funny, or did my bro not remember that our "Pops" (her annoyingly cutesy name for my father that we all hated for its falsely intimate Southern hokey charm, because he disapproves of her the most, first and foremost) actually spent his time in the banking system as young man working at The Bank of New York, and then as the owner of The First Bank of Lockney, because I sure did! I remember his lessons quite well, because I know how to listen, and that's an essential skill in business.

After that, me and my man tore through it proper. We spent our time as far away from the madness as we could, and as actual Coloradans, it wasn't difficult for us to disappear into the landscape. We booked a snowboard lesson with a pathetic stoner on a wildly dangerous "bunny" slope designed for maximum casualties. Those dumb shits actually put small children on the same hill as a 250lb 6' Scotsman on a seriously sharp blade edge, because if you can maim your customers while draining their wallets, what better way to score huge bar tabs from "weekend warriors" in their designer casts, made by the hotel doc who loves all the "powder" he can get? Heavy on the hints, natch. 

And that's actually what my man on the real did, after I couldn't take the dip-shit surfer lingo from some blond kid who just wanted to get high for free while giving away absolutely nothing in "how-to's" that were cleverly disguised as "snowboarding lessons" for the dumb, rich, and insane, like the generically spoiled Generican she must surely be. Sure enough, I couldn't do it, especially with toddlers on skis whizzing past us, so like any really good mother, I bailed on a set-up made for accidents soon enough. My man didn't, as is his nature, so I got the pleasure of watching my death-metal rock g-d plow into that fucking idiot who was, in order: severely under-weight for a real athlete, too short for her job with full-grown adults, falsely blond, overly tan, and a truly dumb, naive youngster in over her head.

I saw him (safe at my cafe table a good distance away, with my gear already off and soaking in the warm mountain sun) knock her off her feet and straight onto her back at full ramming speed, as she stayed down on the snow holding her arms across her chest for a good long while, with the wind knocked out of her. Ha! My man! That's what a real Scotsman-on-ice does as a "novice", honey! Knocks ya right off yer feet. It was good fun, and she called it quits after that, beat right down to her feet by an actual man with a penis. They were some brilliant moments, though, like meeting my brother in the village at a cool lunch spot, high off really good beer, free as we were from his overbearing hexan-hagen* to order actual good German food that we love, in the perfect setting for it, without his wife's anxious fretting over her non-existent "back fat" that she manufactures on cue to escape notice of her eating disorders (yeah, we know).

Or, seeing the lights of town wink on one-by-one magically, lighting up the quaint village in a town awash with sparkling snow and pretty lights, with cute lil' baby Jimmy and his adorable chubby cheeks red from the cold, as we watched a few ice skaters make their way leisurely across the small rink at sunset, as happy in this world as any other place on G-d's green earth, and isn't that our way? Bring on the snow, then, and a cheerfully roaring fire. I've got the really great stories to tell, over a strong lager in a tall-necked glass. Not her, though. She has this disease that makes her fingertips turn white. 

Best that she go to her fucking "feng shui" designed condo in her native Florida, where she can simply tan and diet in peace, in an "vacay" second home that was bought during my active time in MMA, because it was in foreclosure, thus could be had for a song-and-dance during someone else's most difficult times, financially-speaking, of course. What a coincidence, don't you think? Or is it just more genius marketing "synergy" by one of the former female corporate "greats" of the world"? Hmm. That's for you to decide, my liebchens.

* https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Biest