chic chico

Thursday, aug. 19, 2004   |   0 comments

What do you know, the very morning after my big blue moan about the sadness and badness of everything, everywhere, I woke up to discover my white meats sore, sore, sore. Ohhhh right, PMS. It’s so hard to keep track of now that I’m on the eternal pill, which has no end and no beginning to set my nether clocks to. So that mystery is SOLVED. It was Ms. Scarlet in my Basement with The Cramp.

I’m still a little out of sorts, but a lot less hopeless-feeling now that I can attach a name to the dread, “blood.” Plus Caroleen’s TV Tots helped a lot. When administered orally, Tater Tots really do some good deeds.

Chico, too. Chico with its hamburgers and swimming holes and post-sundown 80-degree heat and sorority girl cars inexplicably tipped into ditches with both airbags engaged and frantic bevies of blondes denying your help so they can get rid of the booze before the rangers get there. It’s a good, possibly the best place to retreat to when your parts and mind are aching.

The cattle auction, which Chico State (where our in, Kristin’s lovely Aunt Donna, works) broadcasts remotely over its satellite dish, was especially great and weird. They let me operate the audio for a few minutes, a very straightforward task that involved moving a knob up or down to make sure the normal volume of the regular announcer matched the booming “twenty-one-twenty-one-batter-batter-swing” of the bidder. Super simple, but inexplicably scary and fun. I looked very non-confidence-instilling with my death grip on the lever. “You know you’re allowed to look away from the board,” they told me, but I just kept my wide eyes on the prize.

Kristin’s job was way more frightening because she had to press a bunch of buttons whenever the “SOLD” sounded while HOLDING A CONVERSATION AT THE SAME TIME. Kristin is really smart and talented and has really cute shorts.

Cattle monitors, scary audio boards, Kristin smiling and nodding and suppressing panic, Bear Hole, a bar bear, and some heads.

You know I think the rolling call of a bidder would make an excellent white noise option on a sleep machine: “train,” “ocean,” “rain forest,” and “cattle auction.”