4th of July Blog-Warning: Includes loose assosications.

So it's the 4th of July here in America, Independence day.  Day of 3 day weekends, BBQ's, county faires and blowing shit up, which where I live is decidedly illegal and that much more fun. 

Anymore I feel like this is less of a holiday and just another day that disrupts my routine.  The whole weekend is spent avoiding the freeway because that empties into both Costco and Walmart where the masses are loading up on masses of shit.  I'm a little out of it because of it. 

Also I live in possibly one of the hottest places in the U.S.  It's a weird heat.  I just got back from a road trip to the southwest where the temperature was exactly the same as it is here and it was infinitely more bearable.  The heat here is strange, oppressive, not quite humid all the time but always thick.  At House Rhuad we combat this by hunkering down as much as possible in the air conditioned house until Dark, when we come out and cavort in the garden and square.  As a result we usually miss the early morning semi-cool hours, but that's okay, we own the night and really it is nice to be able to move freely through a town with a different sort of people, the night ones. 

As I mentioned I just got off a road trip which took me to the southwest and the beginning of the Heartland.  Well, not really but Utahians like to think they are the heartland, they really do.  What I noticed most about Utah was the churches, water parks and shopping malls as far as eye could see and every other billboard with Glen Beck's pasty face on it.  It was dizzying and strange.  All this from the freeway.  It looked like white heaven.  Especially with the other billboard advertising white stuff from clothing to mayo and the myriad places of worship.  And don't kid yourself, the water parks and shopping malls factor in as big here as the churches. 

Maybe bigger, it's hard to tell. 

Off the freeway it's a different story.  There were more Mexican markets in Utah than I have seen since I was in San Diego last year.  It was a strange contrast from a state that is avidly in accordance with Arizona's crazy immigration policies and busy drafting its own illegal alien bills.

However, Mexican markets aside, we were hard pressed to find any other world cuisines. Other than of course the watered down Americanized Chinese food, etc.  We were there to visit our college student and I really did not believe that there was no falafel in the stores there ,as she had told me.   But there wasn't . Now I have to send a box packed with falafel out there for her.   There also was precious little Indian Food, the best food we found came wafting from the apartment in the motel we stayed in.  Delicious scents only Indian grandmas can create.   I was told they order spices online. 

This is the land where the 4th of July was once more important than any other holiday.  Christmas wasn't celebrated in Utah by the early settlers, only Independence Day and Pioneer Day which are in the same month.  Maybe because it was warmer and easier to get together. Anyway it looked like the whole state  was heading up to a big asses explosion of red white and blue.  It was a little frantic, a little scary.  It reminded me a tad of film I watched of Anthony Bourdain's cookouts in Greece where men sat around shooting guns in the air and eating at the same time.  Big pieces of meat.  It felt like that. 

It's a different America there than what I grew up in and in truth what I am comfortable with.  My childhood 4th of Julys were on Coronado Beach in San Diego, where bananas roasted in coals with caramelized sweet milk.  Mexican polka played next to 70's rock and fireworks lit the sky while we watched surfers so brown it didn't matter what tribe they were from.  Little children digging into welcoming family campfires from all nations.  Fresh fruits sprinkled with chiles from Mexico and the middle east.  I knew we were a melting pot.  We tasted good, like a rich stew. 

Middle-ish America 4th of July is cool whip compared to that.  And I get the feeling that they want to spread their cool whip message everywhere. 

I hate cool whip. 

It isn't real, it's made in a lab of chemicals containing nothing of what real whip cream is, something divine and to be cherished, skimmed off the top.  It's a fake, a pretender.  And it's cheap easy and filling and like this fantasy of Americana it's spreading to everywhere near you. 

It makes me sad.

Anyway.  This 4th of July I intend to eat my way around the world.  Kabobs for BBQ, ceviche, roasted bananas, jicama with chiles, fennel and oranges and if I have need of anything white, it will be real.  Believe it. 

I also intend to honor our forefathers by doing something they did.  Something less than strictly legal.  Mark the Sky.

Announcing Grainne's Subversify World Re-location Tour! 20-teens!

I came back from the holidays to find that my health care provider Blue Shield has decided to ramp up the prices in my state 50%. It's not that I don't know that they are greedy bastards, it's just that they just increased it 50% with my Patron's insurance plan 50% last month. Since I do not want a new Patron I have decided to look for a new location.

I would also like to blame, erm, I mean give credit to longtime pal MadMollyMillions who has been egging me on for almost a decade now to relocate to Great Britain and even sends me nice links of job sites.

I figure this is going to take some time so I have allotted the entire decade to this search and yes I am committed. I will even be making World Re-location T-shirts which you can buy at our Subversify Web-store. Or if you are lucky enough to host my search for the most perfect place on earth to write with a Patron in tow and a gang of Brownies who will most likely be grumpy about re-locating, then you will get free t-shirt swag!

So this is my plan, I am going to start by visiting all the spots where my cohorts and writing partners already live. Don't worry I won't be writing anything bad about you unless you are veryvery bad host/hostess' in which case expect the worst.

No, really I just want to get a picture of the wide places people live and work and why they hang on there. People don't have to know I'm there if they don't want to. (just leave some warm cuppa by the couch and the bathroom light on so I can find my way)

I kid.

This sprung from my flippant remark that #in2011Iplanto show up in Alaska and Gloucester. And really I found that I want to. I have lived in California all my life and while I have travelled the western U.S. pretty extensively I have never been anywhere further east than Denver, I've never been to the American South, I've never been to the birthplace of my country-And yes Rich that does mean I am coming there, prepare.

Also I don't fly, I'm a big scaredy cat about it and really that needs to be fixed so that's another bit in this decision.

I will be writing about it, the places I go, the people I meet, the religions that try to get me to join up. And I do want to know if I want to relocate because to be honest I love California, but what do I know? Also our economy is in the shitter and the only thing really keeping me here is the employment gig, but there may be something out there...

Okay that sounded really "That Girl"-ish so there is definitely something out there but I don't know what's for me and us. I'm shy by nature. I am the one sitting in the crowd taking it in who you avoid because you think I look familiar and I know something about you or I am figuring something out about you. Which I am, it's my hobby which got worse in college when I discovered investigative psychology, but it helps me write.

It does not always help me interact with people, so I want to see how that changes as I move far out of places I have known.

I have a tentative list beginning as stated before with Alaska and Gloucester but also including:

Philadelphia, PA
Waterbury, Conn
Alberta, CANADA
B.C, CANADA-Okay I've already been there but I have to visit my second cousin anyway
Victoria,CANADA
Florida-undecided
New Orleans, LA
Puerto Rico
New Braunfels, TX
Santa Fe, NM
Phoenix, AZ
Portland, OR
The Sound Area of Washington State

Okay that's a start I'm sure places will be added, most places we have had contributors at Subversify from. There are other places I want to go but it will require more planning like Australia where one of my very favorite one-time contributor is from and New Zealand, and also India which I would love to visit and which may be do-able as we do have friends who have a family home there. But that may not make it in the decade-goal because...

This is going to be like a mix between a pub-crawl and a couch crash which as I'm writing this I realize go hand in hand anyway. It is going to be the anti-thesis of glamorous as it is the penny-tour. The sex drug and rock and roll bits of the trip will have to be cut out except for the rock and roll part. The sex and drugs are just out of my budget.

If anyone has great ideas of not-to-be missed cities/towns/areas/mountain tops for relocation let me know and I will try to add them in. Here are my requirements:

-There must be Internet/satellite connection in at least one pub or coffee shop in town.
-There must be someplace other than Walmart to shop
-People cannot be waiting there with effigies of me to burn...Okay, I'll drive by and get pictures of these places because an effigy of me is pretty classy, but really I can't re-locate there.
- Oh and jobs for Social Workers because yeah, we gotta pay the bills still.

Okay those are my preliminary plans, I am kicking this bitch off this year because really it's time to deliver on promises to visit and check places out anyway.

Blog Notes from the Road

I'm working from the road this week. The 9-5 breadwinner in my household got a free room in exchange for attending boring conference discussions about paperwork and client service models for public mental health. So as it is in Monterey I packed up my laptop and jumped in the car. Free away from home writing inspiration for me!

My stereo went out last week so we had no music for the trip which worked out okay, we discussed the things tripping through my mind, like global human migration, worldwide responsibility for helping other countries and if we should if they clearly fucked up their own situation...We discussed indie music and my most favorite kind of musician the ones you can't describe, as in he/she plays this or that.

Also on my mind as we travelled were changes in the Monterey bay area. Santa Cruz has grown quite a bit and Monterey itself is filling up with strip malls like anywhere America. The old military base-turned college campus looks like it's tearing stuff down and selling space to Chili's and Bath and Body Works.

Monterey has lost some coastline, there is plastic on the shores in frightening proportions. I watched as a birthday balloon was tossed by a wave to the shore. I wondered where it had come from...what it's sad birthday story was....I always ascribe sad stories to trash at sea, it could have been a happy birthday, I don't know.

I began reflecting on these stomping grounds of Steinbeck which have changed so much just since the last time I was here, he I think wouldn't recognize or even feel comfortable here. Development wars for zoning seem to be being lost, I guess money can buy you whatever you want, at least ski-high hotels and Starbucks on every corner. Even the Hookers are displaced, had initially thought to go and look for where they may have ended up but alas some of my traveling companions necessitate a nixation of that plan.

I'm thinking of a write up, retrospective on Steinbeck, shall visit important Steinbeckian points of interest this week, which I'm sure will thrill the Brownies some of whom came with me, they are only interested in adventure, so I must think hard on how to sell it to them.

In any case This Day is beautiful sunny and warm, couldn't ask for better so off to walk the shores I go.

Oh yes and go check my article this week at http://www.subversify.com which talks about a revisiting of Hurricane Katrina as it relates to Haitian relief and disaster relief in general. Also check out all the other juicy non-status quo stuff up for offer this week.