le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com
CHEAP EATS Deevee and me were eating polenta with all the colorful vegetables in the world sauced up on top, and meatballs, complaining about shit. Mostly, I confess, it was me doing the complaining, but Deevee and the meatballs were getting in on it too. We all have problems.
Where some of us are better off than others is in the solutions department. For example, meatballs and me just exist, as in: do what we do. We beat our heads and hearts against brick walls and dumbass dudes and dykes then complain about the lumps … and simmer in a sauce and taste real good, respectively.
“You know what I’m going to do?” Deevee said, after dinner, after dishes, after tea. She was making chocolate chip cookies with butterscotch chips. “I’m going to buy a BB gun.”
“That sounds reasonable,” I said.
“I’m going to bring it to your barbecue on Saturday,” she said, “and we’re going to shoot cans.”
“That sounds great,” I said. It sounded, in fact, better than great. It sounded like just the thing. However, had I anticipated (and I should have, really) that shooting cans with BB guns would make Deevee want to have back her pink straw hillbilly cowboy hat that she’d technically given me, my enthusiasm for the idea would have been less unbridled. Or more bridled — however you say that.
Another thought would have been to hide the pink hat before she showed up with her hot shit new BB gun and truly brilliant ideas. But I was at a rehearsal for a 20-minute rock opera about sea monkeys that I had accidentally gotten involved with, and the rehearsal ran late, and Deevee arrived at my shack before I did with a fold-up camping chair, some beers, and, yes, the gun.
The hat, her hat my hat her hat, was sitting outside on an oil drum, where I’d left it, and — even I had to admit — it accessorized the beer, BB gun, and fold-up chair to a T.
T for treachery! I’m kidding. We’re in our 40s. We have a long history, as friends, as sister-in-laws (or sisters-in-love, as we used to say, because she and my brother were never quite married) and then as friends again. Only better. Sisterly friends, like this: If something looks better on one than the other, they can have it. And this pink straw hillbilly cowboy hat most definitely looks better on her, even without the beer can and BB gun. I freely admit this.
I was too busy making food, because people were coming over, including children and dogs, but Deevee and the Jungle set up cans under the apple trees by the street, and were shooting from the log at the edge of the driveway. Some of my guests were afraid at first to turn in. They thought they had the wrong place.
Until they smelled the baby back ribs with blueberry barbecue sauce and hickory smoke. I’m not bragging. I’m just saying. In fact, the chickens came out better than the ribs this time, I thought. As far as I know, everyone got nervous but no one got sick, which is just the way I want it, when the meat’s on me. I want it to be not only on my dime, but on my conscience.
Deevee slept over, I had nightmares, and the next morning I got to shoot cans too, which was almost as therapeutic as therapy, only 10 times more so. Then, while she and the Jungle went skinny dipping in the hippie compound pond down the road, I made breakfast: bacon, eggs, and leftovers.
In fact, I’ve been eating leftovers ever since, so you’re lucky I have anything at all to say about restaurants. Which I do, which is this:
Earl Butter’s new favorite restaurant is Kome, the enormous sushi buffet in Daly City. I went there with him, but it wasn’t for me. Cheaper than SF sushi buffets, yes ($12-ish lunch, $20-ish dinner), but not a lot of things were great there, and some were downright yucky. Plus: it’s popular! Lines! Why???
Ol’ Earl thought Kome was going to change my life, and he meant well, but was wrong. Cans did.
KOME
Mon.-Fri. 11 a.m.-9:30 p.m.;
Sat.–Sun. 10:30 a.m.-9:30 p.m.
1901 Junipero Serra Blvd., No. A
(650) 992-8600
AE/D/MC/V