Homecoming.
Suggested Soundtrack: “Homecoming” by Kanye West
In less than two days, I will once again be a resident of San Diego. This is wonderful news. It’s no secret that I prefer the sunshine and beaches of San Diego to the thunderstorms and desolate urban sprawl of Dallas. When I first got here, you could actually hear my bitching, faintly, all the way to the tip of Point Loma.
At the same time, I am leaving behind a place that I grew to like quite a bit. The people make the place, you see. It’s easy to love San Diego, because there is a beach and the weather is awesome 99% of the time, but without lots of fantastic people living there, I wouldn’t feel this strong urge to return. It’s the people that are staying in Dallas that makes me sad to go. I’ve made great friends here, and found new family. I know that if I want to or need to, I can come back. That being said, I’m probably going to cry a little when I leave here.
As you may or may not know, I am not coming to San Diego alone. Two of my good friends have decided to go on this adventure with me. Really, I’m going on the adventure with them. Daniel and Adam have never lived outside of Texas. Both of them have 25 years of history here, with friends and family that will devastated when they go. To me, this is huge. The fact that two guys I’ve known less than two years are willing to move to another state with me is mind-boggling. Both have visited San Diego. Both fell in love the same way I did when I visited from Palm Springs almost a decade ago. And both will be happier than pigs in shit when they spend their first lazy day at the beach. I can’t wait to ride bikes with them and show them their new city. Their City. I’m envious of them, because they get to experience San Diego in all of its glory for the first time. As for me, I’m excited to be back home, among a group of friends that I love dearly in a city that makes me happy to be living there.
Since this is officially the last post of Nik Does Dallas, I’m gonna take a moment to go over some of my favorite posts from the last two years. Join me, won’t you, as we go back in time…
sunday, july 29, 2007
“What was originally supposed to be a two day drive instead became a grueling all-nighter.
It was a long and sometimes surreal journey. I started in Palm Springs, at my dad's, waking up at 8am. At 10am, I left and drove to San Diego to pick up some crap that I left. Left San Diego at 2pm, determined to do the drive in one go, but unsure if I could or, for that matter, should. But then I figured: ‘Fuck it.’
So I drove. I drove through desert, across rivers, up mountains, and down them. I drove past billboards for "The Thing?" which was "400 miles ahead," then "200 miles ahead," then "100 miles ahead," then "only 50 miles ahead," then was sped by at 75mph, then was forever behind me, thank goodness. I drove until I needed gas, or a bite, or to stretch, and then I'd stop, do whatever it was I needed to do, and then I'd drive some more. I drove past cops, and cows; through counties, and states; on good road, and bad; while singing, and silently; through good weather, and poor; with windows down, and windows up; while smoking, and eating; from sunset, to sunrise. Drive is what I did. ”
monday, august 6, 2007
“I chain to a tree. Shopping is without incident. This Walgreens is almost exactly like a California Walgreens, except that everyone is slightly nicer, and they sound funny. Finished, I go unlock the bike. As I mount my bike, the unmistakable feeling of a bug stuck to my leg makes me pause to smack it. In doing so, I realize that both of my legs are covered in ants. One hundred ants. Red ones. What followed was probably pretty funny for spectators: I hop off the bike, dancing around the parking lot, slapping myself in the legs while letting out an unbroken stream of curse words that would make a sailor blush. All the while with cheery music from ELO piped into my head from the iPod. Once the slaughter was finished, I rode home (more of the same: pedal, pedal, smack, pedal, pedal, smack), went inside and relayed my story to the Martin family.
‘Better hope those weren't fire ants.’
But guess what?
They were.”
monday, august 13, 2007
“SATURDAY:
10:00am Wake up to the sound of many children yelling and playing
10:15am After peeing for a solid ten minutes, I head into the living room. The kids ask, ‘What time did YOU get home last light?’ I think to myself: ‘Time? HOW did I get home last night?’ but out loud I say, ‘Real late. Now, Uncle Nik needs some cereal.’ Eat and read quietly, drink water
4:30pm Head to Mike's for dinner and booze. We make a big batch of strong lemon-and-vodka drink, and drink it all. Then the two of us, plus another guy, finish off a bottle of Crown. ‘Finally, my hangover is gone,’ is the last thing I remember thinking”
thursday, august 16, 2007
“I finally found something cool about the office where I work. It's the walk to lunch.
Off I went. I had my iPod going, my shirt untucked, and the sun in my eyes. The Subway was around the corner, across the street. The side of the street I work on has no sidewalk. I crossed the street, fully exposed to our closest star, in what was to become the only real hot portion of the walk. Because on the other side, there was a little sidewalk I had not noticed before. It ran between two twin rows of shade trees. The entire walk was shaded! I was cool as a cucumber, stretchin' my shit out, listening to Stevie Wonder and loving life. Thus began a tradition (if something I've done 6 times to date can be considered tradition).
I get alone time, which is nice. I see things that other people in the office never will. I see lots of bugs. My friends the fire ants pop up here and there. Of winged insects there are no shortage: butterflies galore, dragonflies, and the occasional yellowjacket, who tend to buzz around my ankles for a few yards before flying off to do whatever it is that yellowjackets do besides scaring the crap out of me. Huge mushrooms grow out low and flat in places the sun doesn't reach. One time, I got to see a little bird with a long beak nab a dragonfly out of the sky. He landed, set it down and gave it a peck, only to have it fly off. He quickly re-caught the fat green insect as it landed on a leaf, went back to the ground and pecked it twice. Problem solved. As I watched, singing ‘The Circle of Life’ to myself, I realized that although I am not very happy with most of the aspects of my life right now, this walk is mine, and mine alone, and as long as I'm working here I'll have the walk to keep me the slightly sane and tolerably happy.
It's almost like being on my bike, which always made me feel like I was getting more out of travel than anyone in a car was. For instance yesterday, as I thought to myself that there are more and more dead leaves and acorns on the ground with each passing day, a brief but powerful wind kicked up in the middle of what had been a perfectly calm day. For close to a minute, all of the trees waved, letting loose a rain of leaves that poured out sideways and flew in circles, little tornadoes of leaves, as far as I could see, going up and down and around, getting in my hair, smacking into my face, while the leaves already on the ground skidded along like a moving carpet. It made me want to spin in circles with my arms outstretched. Instead, I just took it all in, and when it was over, when all the leaves had settled on the ground and the road and the sidewalk, I smiled and looked at the cars driving by and thought: ‘Suckers.’ ”
saturday, august 18, 2007
“There is a peculiar custom here in Texas. This is in their terrible handling of traffic accidents. Namely, they leave them there. I've seen this a few times now. A car will rear-end another in the middle of the freeway, and officers arriving on scene will leave it sitting there. So a fender-bender can shut down a major freeway in rush hour traffic. You find yourself stopped on the interstate, late for work, and getting later, creeping slowly ahead. ‘If there isn't a dead body up there,’ you think, ‘if I don't see a dead human, in pieces, splayed across three lanes, I am gonna be PISSED.’ Sure enough, when you get to the bottleneck, you see flares shutting down a half mile of three lanes, a Jetta with minor front end damage sitting in the middle of it, and sixteen state troopers in cowboy hats with their thumbs looped into their belts, kicked back and chewin' the fat. ‘Stupid hicks!’ you say. To yourself.”
sunday, september 23, 2007
“Flying at night takes the sometimes ugly scenery of the flyover states away and just leaves the shiny pretty stuff. The Atlanta to Dallas portion only had one thing worth mentioning: the guy sitting next to me was an absolute mystery. While the flight was boarding, and as it taxied and took off and flew along, the guy was writing tiny notes in a full size notebook. Not the page-filling, serial-killer-from-that-movie-Seven kind of tiny notes, but more like islands of itty-bitty writing on a sea of paper. He'd put one near the top, another to one side, and then flip the page and start on the next one. I tried to peek while pretending to read, but I couldn't make a bit of sense out of it. No rhyme or reason whatsoever. I don't think he was scary-crazy like the screaming guy in SD, but more of a kooky-crazy, like he had a pointy tinfoil hat at his apartment and owned a ferret. I can't say what I wanted more: to read his notebook or to magically make him not smell as bad as he did.”
monday, october 1, 2007
“Went to my hometown of Shreveport, Louisiana last weekend… The world is sometimes a very ugly place, full of sad people in unintentionally funny clothes, people for whom smiles are few and far between. At least it is that way in my hometown. It's a poor and backwards part of the world, the embarrassing older brother of American culture. It's worse than movies make it out to be. It is quite miserable. I am so happy that my parents moved us kids to California when we were young, and I called my father later and told him just that.
Next time you see Britney Spears on the TV driving on a suspended license while intoxicated and using her infant children as airbags, I want you to understand that she comes from Louisiana, and the statement that starts with, ‘You can take the girl out of the trailer park...’ is absolutely true. I was happy, for once, to be heading back to Dallas.”
monday, november 26, 2007
“In other news...
My foster mom's out of the country again, picking up the new kid from the Ukraine, so the duty of doody collector falls again upon my thin shoulders.
Since I am going to talk about dog shit, again, I think I'll introduce the dogs this time.
BELLE
Belle the retriever, is a good girl. She listens, doesn't beg, and tolerates the stupidity of the other dog, who is younger yet larger then herself. Belle is not just a good girl, she is a considerate crapper who shits dainty, hard little tootsie-roll-type shits that rattle around on the shovel and don't smell bad.
MIA
Mia the mastiff (aka the "couch cuddler" since she always climbs up on the couch with me when I'm watching TV), who weighs as much as I do, is as dumb as a bag of hammers and produces extraordinarily large turds. Lots of them.
Mia's turds are the size of baguettes (but not the color).
They frequently have foreign objects sticking comically out of them. This is because Mia is the dog that will eat anything she can wrap her jaws around. She especially wants whatever it is that you're eating. For example, I was carrying a dirty plate out of the TV room that had bits of trash on it (I was tidying up, you see) and Mia was plodding along behind me, jamming her snout into my ass like she always does. A candy wrapper fell off of the plate and Mia, without a moment's hesitation, ate the wrapper. Just because it came off the plate and she figured it was probably people food and knew that she wasn't allowed to eat it, so she did so quickly.
Which brings us back to this morning, where I'm scooping up a giant turd partially covered in a bright orange Kit-Kat wrapper.”
monday, april 28, 2008
“I recently got a pair of sunglasses. Since my opinion on the matter is that sunglasses always end up getting lost or broken, so spend accordingly, I got my pair on the way to Austin at a truck stop in Waco. Seven bucks. Rosy-tinted, gold-framed aviators.
I love ‘em. And I was never really a sunglasses kinda guy. I’ve always been more of a squinter. Clint Eastwood is also a squinter. But I got these glasses, and now I’m having to learn what to do with them, and to try and build good glasses habits. For example (and here’s the word of advice), always put your glasses in the same spot while not in use. I like the little ‘V’ that is formed by the collar of a button-up shirt. That’s where my glasses go when they’re not on my face. Some people prefer the shirt pocket, others will hold them and set them down on the table, whatever. Whichever person you are, consistency is key. Same spot, every time or else. Otherwise, you may go to lunch one day and on the way out, you may realize your glasses aren’t (for example) in the ‘V’ of your shirt collar, nor are they in your car, so you may just run back into the restaurant and look around the table, and then you might go over to the trashcan and hold the little ‘Thank You’ flap open and look inside to see, yes, okay, that’s my trash on top but still no glasses, and then you might even walk up to the counter because one of these little minimum wage kids might have taken the sunglasses you like so much, and then, as you get up to the counter, you might just all of a sudden realize that the glasses are there, right there, perched on top of your own fucking head, so you stutter something to the counter kid and leave, and because this could happen to you, because this may have happened to someone you know, I urge you to be consistent in your glasses spot.
Thank you.”
sunday, may 11, 2008
“My friend Daniel just got a cool bike, and he lives in Addison, so I convinced him that we should ride our bikes to the festival. He was reluctant but he agreed. The only problem is that Addison is really really bike unfriendly, as only a master-planned suburb comprised of housing developments and strip malls can be, which is to say no bike lanes and intermittent sidewalks. It was treacherous. But we made it and had fun on the way. After the ride, Daniel was fully converted to a bike lover.
This festival itself was a very good time. The Black Crowes, those hippy-rock throwbacks, were live on stage and jammed the fuck out. We were under the influence and the show was great. Afterward, we went to a local bar and got even more drunker.
Everything was perfect, then…
Let’s take a moment here to go over the reasons why you should always, always ride your bike in the street, namely a) the street is smooth, straight and usually well-lit, and b) the sidewalk, by comparison, is fraught with peril in the form of uneven concrete, large cracks, sharp turns, road signs, fire hydrants, low-hanging branches, and debris.
But at two in the morning, when the streets are full of drunks hauling ass to get home, and there are no bike lanes, what are two intoxicated guys to do? Take the sidewalk home, of course.
Which is why, today, I am hurting. ”
sunday, august 3, 2008
“Since I knew one of the dancers well, and a couple more through her, I was well taken care of. Drinks weren’t ten bucks a pop, they were three. So I drank. Kept drinking. Traded a hundo for ones. Made it rain to the extent that I could. Making friends like I do, I had people there to talk to that weren’t working. At one point, one of the dancers I knew came up to me. She had a bunch of pills in her hand. ‘Want some?’ she asked. I was completely plowed, and remember this with only the haziest of memories. ‘Yes,’ I said without hesitation. She gave me four. If I had any common sense left at that point I would have asked what the hell it was I was about to eat. I pride myself on the fact that while I’ve had my share of prescription drugs, I’ve never taken Ecstasy (big fucking deal, right?). Here I am, completely fortified and staring at four little white pills in my open hand. I hesitated for a split second, and the guy next to me asked, ‘What are those?’ ‘I have no idea,’ I said, ‘you want some?’ He did. He grabbed two. Then, like the drunk moron I was, I threw the remaining two in my mouth and swallowed them down with a big gulp of Jack and coke. I had made the decision (unwisely) to take whatever the night threw at me. Then, a thought: What the fuck had I just swallowed? Was I in real trouble here? I sobered up slightly, as one does when one is driving tipsy and a cop is tailing the car and one realizes that one just might be Well And Truly Fucked. It was at this point that I understood what I had done, and the possible consequences flooded into my drunken skull. Shit. Depending on what it was that I swallowed, the night could a) end quickly, b) never end, c) turn into a Dali-esque nightmare of distorted vision and twisted thoughts, or d) become chock-full of heightened sensory perception that made me just wanna lovingly rub couch cushions and chew on the inside of my cheek. None of those sounded good at this point. Not only had I eaten the mystery pills, I had actually given some to the poor stupid motherfucker who was sitting next to me. As I looked on in horror, he popped his two pills into his mouth. Too late. He wasn’t even swallowing them with booze, the dumb bastard was CHEWING them.
‘These are mints,’ he said.”
Sunday, September 7, 2008
"I'm going to take a quick second to mention that there really is nothing like In-n-Out Burger in Texas. Every so often, some ignorant bastard will make the "Whataburger tastes just like In-n-Out" statement. This is wrong. Whataburger is a filthy shithole with burgers that cause explosive gas 99.9% of the time. The burgers are greasy, the fries are for shit, and the staff mopes around like sweatshop workers. There is no comparison. The lack of Double doubles (animal style, with whole grilled onions) is an empty part of my Texas existence, the same kind of emptiness I have from the lack of three-dollar, two-pound Carne Asada Burritos..."
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
"There was plenty of powdered chocolate milk mix to go around. This gave me an opportunity to observe their mixing technique, which is, in my opinion, just as important as the powder/syrup issue. There are two techniques.
The Roomies went with technique one: each put two heaping spoonfuls in their respective cups, added milk, and stirred like crazy.
This is wrong.
Technique one leads to sludge at the bottom of the cup.
When I was a kid, I loved the sludge. When I was done, I would tilt the cup way up, position my open mouth at the bottom, and wait for the sludge to slowly creep its way down. Then I would chew the stuff, which was slick on the outside, and powdery on the inside. Only kids can enjoy this. Kids also eat frosting and leave the cake. As an adult, though, I now appreciate the fully-mixed cup of chocolate milk, one that I can sip away at for a little while, and then, at about the halfway mark, finish in one long swallow. I drink orange juice this same way. It allows for measured enjoyment for a while, and then the kind of flavor “hit” that only someone who drinks or smokes or does drugs to excess can appreciate. Having a pile of sludge at the bottom after drinking my chocolate milk in the sip-sip-sip-then-guzzle manner would be like chewing the ice at the bottom of a cocktail, eating the filter of a finished cigarette, or drinking the bongwater: more of the same, but worse."
Thursday, November 27, 2008
"Grown men in homemade superhero costumes exhibit creativity, and chicks dig this. Guys who asked if I made the bat-hoodie myself probably thought I was gay when I told them I did. Girls who made this same inquiry were always impressed, because even bull-riding Texas girls sometimes dream about being with an artsy guy, at least for a little while, and wonder what life would be like with a man who creates brilliant things but also chainsmokes, drinks cheap gin straight from the bottle, and is strung out on painkillers. They see a guy that turned an umbrella into bat wings and they think, “We will have an apartment over a bar, and sleep until two in the afternoon. We will listen to music I can’t even fucking conceive of right now, and get high, and then he’ll have me model nude for him. After he’s done painting me, we’ll have passionate sex for hours. After about a month of this, I will move back to my parent’s ranch in Horsepatty, TX.” I am almost completely sure that every girl has this fantasy."
Thursday, November 27, 2008
"The last night I wore the goatee was Halloween night, where my bangs and facial hair added to the Emo look of my costume (see Dall-o-ween post for costume details). The following night, a bar in my neighborhood was having a costume party, and I switched to my other costume: 1970’s-era tennis player. This consisted of a tight white polo, short (short!) white shorts, tall socks, head- and wristbands, my aviator shades, and a pink sweater tied around my shoulders. I had worn this to an 80’s party months ago, and everyone loved it because grown men in tight clothing and short (short!) shorts is funny. This time around, I was bringing something else to the table in the form of facial hair. But goatees weren’t very 70’s. I needed less. I needed a mustache.
Sadly, I only wore the mustache for two more days.
I miss it now.
“Why not grow it back?” you might ask. Because I am lazy, is my reply. I value interaction with attractive females more than I value the support of guys I know that insist facial hair looks good on me. I cut my hair off shortly after this, and I was back to Nik as usual.
Even though the ladies may love my clean-shaven look, I know now that I have lost something more. It’s hard to tell when it happened. At first, I was a boy pretending to be a man. Now that I’ve shaved it, I feel like a man pretending to be a boy."
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
"Thing two: I am moving back to San Diego. I am most likely bringing Texans with me. My friends Daniel and Adam, who have both visited San Diego with me at some point, have decided to come on this adventure with me.
They are awesome guys and I couldn't be happier or more excited. I am sure this will be a wonderful move and I hope to get back in school and become a teacher, because the work I'm doing now crushes my happiness to a degree I did not think possible."
***
And now here we are. Over the next day Adam, Daniel and I will be loading all of our earthly possessions into a huge UHaul truck and driving that shit to California. I look forward to hanging out with you soon.
Nik Did Dallas.
