It all began, as many things do, with a vomiting incident on a CalMac ferry. It was a fearsome morning at sea, which would have sorely tried the valves of the most iron-stomached sailors, and thus, for Oliver from Basingstoke, things went swiftly from green to purple. On a tossing ship at sea, everyone lives their own digestive drama oblivious to everyone else. We reel about the deck, one hand clutching our stomachs, the other stapled over our mouths, bouncing off each other like  pinballs, hair streaming, bobble hats and small pets flying as the seagulls scream for us to vomit. The average person can resist throwing up under such circumstances for about half a bilious hour but unfortunately the ferry ride lasts two and a half and Oliver was from Basingstoke besides. Hence, 5 minutes out from the port of Ullapool, our poor, wretched hero was coming face to face with his own biology, God and strawberry pop tart.

However, as everyone who ferries knows, once you have up-chucked, you are grand. Grander than all the other miserable souls trying to preserve their over-priced Inverness breakfasts and determined to, as a matter of bloody principle after managing to keep it down on the roller-coaster bus ride to Ullapool (or Ullapoop as children and Free Church elders hilariously call it.)

Thus it was that our friend, Oliver, was feeling quite chipper when the boat reached the head of Loch Broom, where the ancient submerged moraine makes for notoriously choppy waters even on glass calm days. He was strolling about deck, whistling and nonchalant at a 45 degree angle against the battering gale, when suddenly from out of the deserted cafeteria hurtled a vomiting girl – no, a vomiting woman – of such rare and green beauty that Oliver’s hat was quite blown off. You might say, “Ach, PCB, away and boil your bunions with onions, it was just the wind, lassie!” But it wasn’t, you know, it was love. I’m from the romantic NW and we see this sort of thing all the time. Yes, and have to listen to the naysayers too. It’s never the wind. The wind only takes gloves and high-denomination currency, and pregnancy tests before you can read them. It’s only love can blow your hat off like that. (If you are a man and your scarf should blow off, however, island lore says you may find you have lost something very precious indeed, so make sure to tie a good windsor in it. The scarf.)

OK, now I have drifted off in my own moon-eyed reverie and can’t focus n’more. Plus, I only have until 1pm to do all the things I’ve been putting off  this morning by reporting on this instead.  I shall continue the tale of Oliver and his Vomiting Venus the next time I have other stuff I’m meant to be doing. Kim doesn’t believe me, do you Kim?  And Conan thinks this will be just another half-baked, half-finished, half-tale from Sam. But I will. I will. So until then I leave you with that too, too solid advice from the last paragraph of the story there: tie a knot in it. Plus video of the same ferry that used to run between Ullapool and Stornoway in the Outer Hebrides. Now in New Zealand or Fiji or Somewhere.

Pip-pip, peeps.

HMV Suilven. Erstwhile Ferry For Lewis And Harris

“Good God, the orifices of what, PCB?” I can sense you shrieking, hands flying to clutch at your throats – and in a few cases your groins: you know who you are, you People Who Are On Another List Entirely. Well let’s draw back a little and I’ll describe what I envision:

It is a beautiful day and all that is six-legged and good is out twittering and buzzing around the glorious green-and-brownery of Southern California. In the distance, children laugh and then trip and cry and somebody says something’s not fair and the teacher has to be called and it’s quite a hullabaloo but it’s not happening right in front of us so we don’t care. Somewhere a dog barks, completing the Arcadian idyll. The lush green canopy filters light onto the long table below and a gentle breeze flutters the sleeves of the cadaver as blood drips bucolically down the white sheet and onto the innocent grass. See the flies buzzing greedily around the exposed brain cavity! And watch as pale maggots inch fatly out of a gaping wound where a tummy button ought to be.  In a short while children will gather, having washed their hands and then picked their noses again right afterwards. They will crowd around the deceased and begin to feast from his orifices. For this is the annual school Mad Hatter’s Tea Party. Oh yes, hats will be worn. And, oh yes, tea WILL be poured.

Another mother and I have elected that gore is to be the theme of our class picnic-table this year. It is to be a palpably disgusting triumph. To that end, I have been busy sploshing red paint around on white sheets and trying to figure out a way of making a man-sized cadaver with food-safe orifices in which to stuff all manner of despicables. Or Jello in plastic bags mainly. But Jello of many hues, and tapioca pudding! Tapioca to simulate suppurating sores and pus-filled cankers. Brains so far are looking like they’ll be semi-melted marshmallow with strawberry jam haematomas lovingly presented in a screwtop skull. There are huge opportunities for red licorice, obviously, but as yet, the other mum and I haven’t had a chance to discuss them. Eyeballs are going to be black-grape-stuffed lychees because we need to be mindful of establishing healthy-eating habits early on, and there will be more than just the usual two. This is Ojai, so we can just say the extra ones are inner eyes and chakras an’ that and nobody will bat a third eyelid.

The children are going to be wearing surgical masks and using my old pairs of eyebrow tweezers to extract the maggots (white jelly-beans) from the carnage. There is to be spinal-fluid lemonade but it will have been pre-extracted and put into teapots to avoid unnecessary stickiness. There will be no chocolate pudding of any sort, anywhere. They are children, and as such not nearly as puerile as at least three of you, and we don’t want anybody to cry. It’s happening on Monday. If anyone has any suggestions for embellishing our cadaver with edibles please spew them into the comment box where I will pick the sweetcorn out and stuff them into our stiff. The more abominable the better, although grits and marzipan are out, obviously.

His hat had seen some living

And it was his for that

Its straw had taken hits and storms

And it was Gary’s hat.

~

Its own peculiar story

belonged to it alone

Its beaten frame most eloquent

of the long life it had known

~

And in that hat so humble

There lived a mind as rare

The vast and storied landscape of

A country warm and fair

~

It wasn’t much to look at

Plain worn out at the end

It was all in how he wore his hat

Our dear old missing friend

~

Misshapen, lumpen, beat-up thing

And beautiful for that

Only one man could have owned it

And it was Gary’s hat.

Gary Ellingsworth

I miss you, dear friend. x

Samantha Zahringer is an upstart housewife of some moral dubiety. She has lived in Ojai for 9 years where she teaches her children stuff.

Samantha Zahringer is a blameless housewife of impeccable character who has lived, written and bred in the Ojai Valley for 9 years, sometimes all at once.

Samantha Zahringer is a housewife of low character, dusty mantlepiece and several outstanding warrants. She has lived in Ojai for 9 years where she writes and teaches her children how to think for her.

Samantha Zahringer loves dawn, rum babas, the way you run your fingers through her hair, and the special light in the eyes of adorable old Tibetan men.  She is 35 and married with two children but her number can be found on bathroom walls throughout town unless the despicable swinehunds have painted over them again.

Samantha Zahringer can rather pitifully be summed up in a lot fewer words than Bret Bradigan allowed her.

Samantha Zahringer: men love her, women adore her and small children are always polite and good when she is near. She lives in Ojai with a husband, two children, a clinically obese cat and several trillion beneficial gut bacteria.

Samantha Zahringer has been clinging to sanity, passing handsome men and her unfortunate children in the Ojai Valley for 9 years. She is 35 and 3/4 and enjoys writing, vigorous health, and ribaldry of stripes both bawdy and ticking.

Samantha Zahringer is a wretched solipsist who imagines people have nothing better to do with their time than to read this dreadful tripe.

Samantha Zahringer is out of stuff to say and bored thinking about herself, which is saying something.

Gonna have myself a time

Going down to Nawlins

Gonna meet some freeyunds o’ mine.

For Britishers, Nawlins is New Orleans. The Tennessee Williams/Southern Lit Festival is on there this week. Absinthe and good books. I might never return.

(With apologies to Twenty Major for ripping off the title of his latest book. The lisp, however, is all my own work)

As for what my terrible, dreadful, no-good, very bad dream looked like – well, it would curl your hair. More. It would reach deep down into your gametes (gametes of the sort that aren’t a type of Small French ham steak although if you need me to point that out you are most probably a closet Communist or something mustachioed like that) – anyway, this dream, it would get deep, deep down into your gametes and affect the future hair of your future offspring, curling their future hair too. In the future, like. And if they were going to have curly hair, this nightmare would curl the curly bends back on themselves thereby making the curly hair be straight hair. Yes! Even that hair! And who wants that?

A tiny but potentially devastating (!) shift would occur in the shampoo market with brands known for their excellence in curly-hair products either losing or winning – who can tell which? – and shampoo futures would plummet, along with shampoo presents. Leaving only the smug Ghost of Shampoos Past.  All rather like that butterfly effect doodad, which basically states that if a curly-haired butterfly flaps its wings in Kansas, the tipping point in global air-streams might be …uuhr…tipped, and, ipso facto, that could cause a tsunami in Asia which would wash away all their shampoo factories and people wouldn’t look so good – curly-haired or no – and nobody would get any dates and the birth rate would decline and people would get upset – even more than they normally would because they’d be extra uptight on account not getting any action – and all because of what could happen if I told you about my dreadful nightmare! Which, curiously enough, featured only hairless people.

You’re not with me any more, are you? I can tell. Neither am I, truth be told. I couldn’t explain this again from about the third “the” on, in the paragraph above.

Anyway, what about them Oscars this year, eh? Who says women can’t direct harrowing-yet-compelling cinema about the complexity of the soldier’s psyche and do big bangs and crashes good too? Probably, the same people who say women can’t parallel park. Probably even the same guy who clipped my car last week, trying to parallel-park for the 3rd time before squealing off to find an easier spot to maneuver. That’s one in the eye for him, then!  Hahahahahaha. The rotten, stinking car-clipper.

Righto, just one more teensy wee weensy glass of wine and then off to bed with me, I think. Yep, just the one…

We are very lucky here at Rancho Problemo and have a full orchestra ready and waiting to provide heightened emotion to our everyday activities – things like The Luvin’ Spoonful hits on shuffle at breakfast time, “O Fortuna!” when we prepare fish steaks and, unexpectedly, “I’m Going To Wash That Man Right Out Of My Hair” when I’m doing the hoovering. But we’ve had “Bright Eyes” on a loop for a week now and, frankly, I’m about ready to reach for a big ole Elmer gun and thort that pethky orchethtwa out.

Rabbits are not like us I observed lazily this morning, the sun shining in the window and bathing my bumble-bee slippers with light. They don’t have our inhibitions and “meta”ness. Their manners in mating matters aren’t like our’s either. They will tear about the garden like lunatic furballs without a care for the circling hawks above, the possibility of a beaky death only adding to the piquancy of their lust. Then a frisky young doe will suddenly turn coquettishly with a shiver of her little bobtail and she and her suitor will crouch face-to-face, ears flat and stock-still for half a minute or more, only their twitching noses to tell us that we aren’t looking at a still-life painting. Their twitching noses and the lack of a frame.

Then, suddenly! she will leap 3 feet straight up into the air and they’re off again, haring round the lawn and sending little clods of turf flying. Moments later they will disappear into a bush which will tremble and squeak for about twenty seconds before two plumes of lazy curling smoke come out of its top.

Later, you see them pretending they don’t know each other, but she has a new looseness about her hips when she hops, and he’s writing poetry in the mud with his nose. Lovesick and unguarded, he will hop out into the open for a better peek at her as she grazes with her girlfriends, forgetting that he, as a bunny, is one of the most eaten creatures on earth. The sky will darken, a hawk will swoop and a bobcat will pounce and collide with the hawk in a puff of blood and fur and feathers as our hero hops a few hops forward forward, oblivious to the carnage behind him, his only concern whether he should have used the Petrarchan rather than the Shakespearean form for his x-rated sonnet. The end.

Hey, it’s just after Valentine’s Day, folks – you didn’t think I was going to kill the bunny, didja? No, he is flattened later by a UPS delivery truck.

Anyways, this is what our pops orchestra played this morning when I threatened to disembowel them with the cymbals if the played one more bar of “Bright Eyes”:

Bunny lovin’ – had me a blast
Bunny lovin’ – happened so fast
Met a doe, crazy for me
Met a buck, cute as can be
Bunny fun, something’s begun
But ooooooh these springy dawns

A well a well a well a…

(Massed Blue-birds and fawns)
Tell me more tell me more does he have an o-er bite?
(Massed gophers and raccoons)
Tell me more tell me more, was her tail fresh and white?

Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huhoooaaah

She hopped by me, nibbled some grass
He just sat there right on his ass.
She went skipping, I caught her eye
He ignored me, I don’t know why.
Bunny treat, doe and buck meet
But oooooooooh, these springy dawns

A well a well a well a…

Tell me more, tell me more, did he sing you a song?
Tell me more, tell me more, was she wearing a thong?

It grew warmer as the day broke.
I spiked her dew with ‘hypnol and coke.
I woke up, about mid-day
Oh she was flat out and I had my way
Bunny rape, too doped to escape
oooooh ooooooooooh these spri-ngy daaaaaaaaaaaawns

Oh oh oh

(Sotto voce)
Tell me more, tell me mo-ho-ho-ho-ore!
(And fade…)

Repost from 2008 to try to get me motivated to start up this cobwebby old place again.

30 hours of straight travel ahead, door-to-door, and all night it’s been Nature loud in hoot and chirrup at my house.  There is a cricket stuck inside in the the sitting-room somewhere, making more racket than you think a single cricket in a house could.  I’ve been up twice trying to bash it/release it lovingly back to the wild, but every time I turn the light on it shuts right up and I can’t find it.  But worse than the cricket were the owls!  Two of them!  I don’t know if they were getting it on or having a tete-a-tete, a heart to heart, dancing beak-to-beak or what but they had a lot to say to each other and it sounded like relationship stuff. 

“Get a room, owls!”  I silently shrieked. 

Silently, because Problemchild 2 snuck into bed with me at about 3 and by then all sleep would remain just a crazy, waking dream.   

So, up, fully dressed and leaving an hour earlier than I thought becasue I couldn’t check-in online last night for some reason and that’s making me nervous.  Why? Why can’t I check in?  Why is that?  I figure if I’m there an hour earlier, more shouting and bawling can be packed in if there’s any problem, and shouting and bawling is a more efficient use of my time than listening to owls getting it on while a cricket plays its mournful, incessant dirge for freedom.  On the other hand, maybe cricket-squashing and owl-slaughter are more efficient uses of my extra hour.  Oh, If only I’d remembered to exercise my constitutional wotsits and become a gun-owner. 

Byeee.

xx