The Three Types of Strawberry Milkshakes

If little faults, proceeding on distemper,
Shall not be wink'd at, how shall we stretch our eye
When capital crimes, chew'd, swallow'd and digested,
Appear before us?
-- "Henry V", Act II, Scene 2

It was a dark and stormy night.

My 10:55 outing to the corner fast food dispensary had failed; wily Jack had Box'd himself up five minutes early, and I would be without my Philly Cheesesteak combo. This wouldn't do.

Failed and wet I marched back up the office stairs. "Where can I get a Philly Cheesesteak around here?"

"Around here? Everything closes around here."

"What is this place, a town of reverse vampires? Something's got to be open. Aren't there any Denny's in this desert?"

"Where do you live?"

I answered.

"You don't want to go to the Denny's around there."

"Well, where am I supposed to get a Philly Cheesesteak?"

"Jack in the Box."

"Jack in the Box is closed."

"Denny's."

"Well, where's the nearest Denny's I would want to go to?"

"There's one in Rancho."

"You don't want to go to Rancho."

"What, do the Cucamongans rise from their tombs at night?"

We talked in circles for a few minutes. Eventually we agreed on a Denny's that I might have a good chance of reaching. So off I went.

*****

It was a dark and stormy night.

Must have been Prom Night in San Bernardino. The festooned youth billowed through the double glass doors. I watched them from the counter, sipping icewater, waiting on my Philly Cheesesteak (with fries), and cheese sticks, and strawberry milkshake. Prom Nighters were plumper than I remember -- maybe that has to do with the demographics in this town, who knows -- but fashion hasn't changed much in, Christ, what's it been? Almost ten years?

I don't remember a damned thing about Prom Night, and I've been to three of them. All right, that's a lie, too. I remember exactly one thing from each. I remember looking down through the hotel window and seeing hookers change dresses under the streetlight below. I remember getting a group of us to wheeze along to "Lay Lady Lay" on the karaoke machine, and I remember exchanging frenzied handjobs with my date on various parts of the cruise ship.

"Handjobs -- there's something they ought to teach kids in sex ed. How to get through your high school years on handjobs." That's what I told the last high school teacher I went to bed with when she told me that most of her kids were going to lose their virginity on Prom Night. "That would work. It worked for me."

"Just what do you hope to accomplish with this website of yours?" she asked me later.

That didn't last long.

*****

The milkshake arrived. I looked around the restaurant and wondered who lost their virginity that night.

I am, if I have not mentioned this before, a strawberry milkshake connoisseur. There is a test to determine if the strawberry milkshake you have ordered is a good strawberry milkshake. It is a simple test. If, at any time you are drinking your strawberry milkshake, your straw should happen to clog with a chunk of actual strawberry, then it's a good bet that you are, in fact, drinking a good strawberry milkshake. And extra points for you if you can maintain suction and draw the immense chunk out of the shake and hold it aloft before the tribe like a lion's head on a spear.

That said, there are three basic types of strawberry milkshakes, in descending order of quality:

The well-mixed shake. Aforementioned chunks of strawberry in abundance; uniform in color if not consistency; aggregate flavor. This, the greatest of all shakes, can if you are fortunate be found at the local creamery or restaurant of choice, or, if you are especially lucky, Lyon's.

The ill-mixed shake. No prize chunks of straw-blocking berry present. Lump of white ice cream left at the bottom. Soft flavor. Regularly found at Lyon's.

The overmixed shake. Or, as I call it, the Pepto-Bismol shake. No consistency nor flavor worth mentioning, much like the Democratic Party in the 2002 midterm elections. Generally gives the impression of sugared lard mixed with pink food coloring. Normally found at fast food outlets, and, yes, Denny's.

But we take what we can get. It isn't as if there's a Lyon's in this godforsaken town.

That I've found yet.

*****

There was a Lyon's in Santa Barbara, open 24 hours. I used to hold court there, late in my college newspaper days, as night prolapsed into morning with whatever Daily Nexus staffers were still around after we cranked that mighty paper into reality. Many a good shake was drunk then.

Er, drank.

We spent the wee hours talking office politics, plotting scenarios. I was, amidst the fried food and slop and early morning hangovers, a god. But an angry and a jealous god.

It would have been better for us all if I had just enjoyed my milkshakes. I hadn't always been such an embittered asshole.

*****

A few years earlier, I lost my eyeglasses after downing a crappy shake at a McDonald's in San Diego. It was entirely artificial and left a bad taste in your mouth, just like the event we were there to cover -- the 1996 Republican National Convention.

Having seen so many Republicans in their natural environment, I can report the following:

They are equally insane to whatever rabble the left can draw at its quadrennial gatherings, only better dressed and more strangely coiffed. I have never seen so many bizarre haircuts as I have at the Republican National Convention. There were hairstyles there that may have very well indeed been in fashion several decades prior, but must have been pushed ahead through the space-time continuum, tearing through the years, propelled only by bizarre aerodynamics.

Cal Thomas is really tall.

Rush Limbaugh is really wide. And red-faced. Though, to be fair, his complexion may have only been due to the long walk uphill. I distinctly remember hearing him huffing behind me as the sun set and I came back to the hotel.

When I forget my glasses at McDonald's after finishing my crappy shake, and am forced to wear my prescription shades after dark, and am dressed in a three-piece double breasted wide-lapelled suit punctuated with a flaming red tie and topped by a black Stetson fedora, and am wearing black sneakers with two pairs of socks on because, like the rest of the idiots from the Nexus who wore their new dress shoes for the first two days of the convention, my feet are covered in blisters -- when I am walking around after dark in this get up, all Republicans will ask me if I'm with the band and two young business reporters will tail me in the lobby with a reel-to-reel recorder and beg me for an interview and force me to show them my press pass until they are convinced that, no, sadly, I am not Quentin Tarantino.

Chris Rock, who was covering the convention for MTV, was sitting on the floor near one of the blue curtains with which they corralled the corridors of the convention floor. He was looking tired, or exhausted, or overwhelmed, or exasperated. He looked at me and pulled the curtain over his head.

Earlier that afternoon I was in the hotel lounge among the party faithful as Colin Powell took the podium. The faithful clapped and cheered and the gleam in their eyes shone bright as he spoke. Then he stood up for affirmative action and it was as if everyone were at a wedding and the bride had just laid an enormous, rippling, wet fart. Everyone just looked away and pretended they didn't hear it and the ceremony went on.

These are among my memories of the 1996 Republican National Convention with the Daily Nexus. We young journalists were, as Sean Connery famously said to Indy, pilgrims in an unholy land, and we got booed and hissed at with everyone else leaving the convention center by the lefties who had shown up to protest outside.

*****

Not that we felt that way toward all Republicans. Brooks Firestone, for instance, one time Assemblyman and, a few years later, candidate for Senate, won the Nexus endorsement -- no small feat for a Republican, however moderate and however opposed by his own party's wingnuts. We were, after all, the on-campus "commie rag".

Moreover, Brooks (R-Los Olivos) was running against Lois Capps, widow to UCSB's Professor Walter Capps, who had died in office. But Brooks was smart; he had treated us politely over the years and answered our questions, and it paid off; we felt he was better qualified to deliver the pork to the home district that Lois. So we endorsed him. I remember the TV station was shocked and came to interview me. It must have been disappointing. All I kept saying was, "We feel we summed it up in the endorsement."

Not that it did him any good; Firestone, like so many moderate Republicans in the 1990s, was done in by his own party's wingnuts. In many ways it was a preview of Dick Riordan's ill-fated run for governor in the primaries of 2002; putting Bill Simon on the Republican ticket was the smartest move Gov. Davis made that season.

I met Davis at the Nexus, too -- what I remember about him was that he must have had very well-tailored shirt cuffs. He was very expressive with his hands and his cuffs never moved; he reminded me of a marionette. But I digress. Politics. Milkshakes. Handjobs. Flying sandwiches. Flying sandwiches?

*****

There was a time at the Nexus where one of my editors threw a sandwich at me during a meeting of the editorial board. It must have been 1998, because we were arguing about Clinton and The Calamitous Blowjob.

(I'm lucky it wasn't a milkshake. That would have been hard to clean off my shirt.)

Anyway, half the board felt it was of national importance that the president refrain from lying about blowjobs, that he serve as a role model for America's children, and assorted such silliness. My half of the board thought the president could boink whatever he felt like boinking as long as he attended to larger issues like the economy, and that it was damned silly for people to look 3,000 miles away for a role model when kids ought to be looking up to people in their neighborhoods or at their schools or, preferably, under their own roofs.

For advocating such foolishness, I got Jodie Stout's lunch thrown at me. Aside from a violent (though nutritious!) temper, Jodie was a level-headed county editor, and went on to do press work in China before landing this respectable job. Hello, Jodie! My shirt remembers you!

And I thought of all of this tonight sipping my milkshake, basking in the unholy afterglow of George Bush's war. What an Enron of a war, with its fake boiler-room soundstage and its inflated causus belli and its weapons of mass destruction nowhere to be found. And like Enron, no convictions, in every sense of the word. We will impeach a president over little lies, but if the lie is big enough, we will follow him anywhere.

We are such a battered wife of a county when it comes to our leaders. They lie and cheat and steal and ship us off to be killed, and we keep coming back, after all, because they love us.

You tell me what kind of milkshake George W. Bush is.

4:08 a.m. Saturday, May 03, 2003.

Finish up your milkshake and go back to everythingwrong.com

everythingwrong*
Home	*The Three Types of Strawberry Milkshakes* If little faults, proceeding on distemper, Shall not be wink'd at, how shall we stretch our eye When capital crimes, chew'd, swallow'd and digested, Appear before us? -- "Henry V", Act II, Scene 2 It was a dark and stormy night. My 10:55 outing to the corner fast food dispensary had failed; wily Jack had Box'd himself up five minutes early, and I would be without my Philly Cheesesteak combo. This wouldn't do. Failed and wet I marched back up the office stairs. "Where can I get a Philly Cheesesteak around here?" "Around here? Everything closes around here." "What is this place, a town of reverse vampires? Something's got to be open. Aren't there any Denny's in this desert?" "Where do you live?" I answered. "You don't want to go to the Denny's around there." "Well, where am I supposed to get a Philly Cheesesteak?" "Jack in the Box." "Jack in the Box is closed." "Denny's." "Well, where's the nearest Denny's I would want to go to?" "There's one in Rancho." "You don't want to go to Rancho." "What, do the Cucamongans rise from their tombs at night?" We talked in circles for a few minutes. Eventually we agreed on a Denny's that I might have a good chance of reaching. So off I went. *** It was a dark and stormy night. Must have been Prom Night in San Bernardino. The festooned youth billowed through the double glass doors. I watched them from the counter, sipping icewater, waiting on my Philly Cheesesteak (with fries), and cheese sticks, and strawberry milkshake. Prom Nighters were plumper than I remember -- maybe that has to do with the demographics in this town, who knows -- but fashion hasn't changed much in, Christ, what's it been? Almost ten years? I don't remember a damned thing about Prom Night, and I've been to three of them. All right, that's a lie, too. I remember exactly one thing from each. I remember looking down through the hotel window and seeing hookers change dresses under the streetlight below. I remember getting a group of us to wheeze along to "Lay Lady Lay" on the karaoke machine, and I remember exchanging frenzied handjobs with my date on various parts of the cruise ship. "Handjobs -- there's something they ought to teach kids in sex ed. How to get through your high school years on handjobs." That's what I told the last high school teacher I went to bed with when she told me that most of her kids were going to lose their virginity on Prom Night. "That would work. It worked for me." "Just what do you hope to accomplish with this website of yours?" she asked me later. That didn't last long. * The milkshake arrived. I looked around the restaurant and wondered who lost their virginity that night. I am, if I have not mentioned this before, a strawberry milkshake connoisseur. There is a test to determine if the strawberry milkshake you have ordered is a good strawberry milkshake. It is a simple test. If, at any time you are drinking your strawberry milkshake, your straw should happen to clog with a chunk of actual strawberry, then it's a good bet that you are, in fact, drinking a good strawberry milkshake. And extra points for you if you can maintain suction and draw the immense chunk out of the shake and hold it aloft before the tribe like a lion's head on a spear. That said, there are three basic types of strawberry milkshakes, in descending order of quality: The well-mixed shake. Aforementioned chunks of strawberry in abundance; uniform in color if not consistency; aggregate flavor. This, the greatest of all shakes, can if you are fortunate be found at the local creamery or restaurant of choice, or, if you are especially lucky, Lyon's. The ill-mixed shake. No prize chunks of straw-blocking berry present. Lump of white ice cream left at the bottom. Soft flavor. Regularly found at Lyon's. The overmixed shake.** Or, as I call it, the Pepto-Bismol shake. No consistency nor flavor worth mentioning, much like the Democratic Party in the 2002 midterm elections. Generally gives the impression of sugared lard mixed with pink food coloring. Normally found at fast food outlets, and, yes, Denny's. But we take what we can get. It isn't as if there's a Lyon's in this godforsaken town. That I've found yet. *** There was a Lyon's in Santa Barbara, open 24 hours. I used to hold court there, late in my college newspaper days, as night prolapsed into morning with whatever Daily Nexus staffers were still around after we cranked that mighty paper into reality. Many a good shake was drunk then. Er, drank. We spent the wee hours talking office politics, plotting scenarios. I was, amidst the fried food and slop and early morning hangovers, a god. But an angry and a jealous god. It would have been better for us all if I had just enjoyed my milkshakes. I hadn't always been such an embittered asshole. * A few years earlier, I lost my eyeglasses after downing a crappy shake at a McDonald's in San Diego. It was entirely artificial and left a bad taste in your mouth, just like the event we were there to cover -- the 1996 Republican National Convention. Having seen so many Republicans in their natural environment, I can report the following: They are equally insane to whatever rabble the left can draw at its quadrennial gatherings, only better dressed and more strangely coiffed. I have never seen so many bizarre haircuts as I have at the Republican National Convention. There were hairstyles there that may have very well indeed been in fashion several decades prior, but must have been pushed ahead through the space-time continuum, tearing through the years, propelled only by bizarre aerodynamics. Cal Thomas is really tall. Rush Limbaugh is really wide. And red-faced. Though, to be fair, his complexion may have only been due to the long walk uphill. I distinctly remember hearing him huffing behind me as the sun set and I came back to the hotel. When I forget my glasses at McDonald's after finishing my crappy shake, and am forced to wear my prescription shades after dark, and am dressed in a three-piece double breasted wide-lapelled suit punctuated with a flaming red tie and topped by a black Stetson fedora, and am wearing black sneakers with two pairs of socks on because, like the rest of the idiots from the Nexus who wore their new dress shoes for the first two days of the convention, my feet are covered in blisters -- when I am walking around after dark in this get up, all Republicans will ask me if I'm with the band and two young business reporters will tail me in the lobby with a reel-to-reel recorder and beg me for an interview and force me to show them my press pass until they are convinced that, no, sadly, I am not Quentin Tarantino. Chris Rock, who was covering the convention for MTV, was sitting on the floor near one of the blue curtains with which they corralled the corridors of the convention floor. He was looking tired, or exhausted, or overwhelmed, or exasperated. He looked at me and pulled the curtain over his head. Earlier that afternoon I was in the hotel lounge among the party faithful as Colin Powell took the podium. The faithful clapped and cheered and the gleam in their eyes shone bright as he spoke. Then he stood up for affirmative action and it was as if everyone were at a wedding and the bride had just laid an enormous, rippling, wet fart. Everyone just looked away and pretended they didn't hear it and the ceremony went on. These are among my memories of the 1996 Republican National Convention with the Daily Nexus. We young journalists were, as Sean Connery famously said to Indy, pilgrims in an unholy land, and we got booed and hissed at with everyone else leaving the convention center by the lefties who had shown up to protest outside. * Not that we felt that way toward all Republicans. Brooks Firestone, for instance, one time Assemblyman and, a few years later, candidate for Senate, won the Nexus endorsement -- no small feat for a Republican, however moderate and however opposed by his own party's wingnuts. We were, after all, the on-campus "commie rag". Moreover, Brooks (R-Los Olivos) was running against Lois Capps, widow to UCSB's Professor Walter Capps, who had died in office. But Brooks was smart; he had treated us politely over the years and answered our questions, and it paid off; we felt he was better qualified to deliver the pork to the home district that Lois. So we endorsed him. I remember the TV station was shocked and came to interview me. It must have been disappointing. All I kept saying was, "We feel we summed it up in the endorsement." Not that it did him any good; Firestone, like so many moderate Republicans in the 1990s, was done in by his own party's wingnuts. In many ways it was a preview of Dick Riordan's ill-fated run for governor in the primaries of 2002; putting Bill Simon on the Republican ticket was the smartest move Gov. Davis made that season. I met Davis at the Nexus, too -- what I remember about him was that he must have had very well-tailored shirt cuffs. He was very expressive with his hands and his cuffs never moved; he reminded me of a marionette. But I digress. Politics. Milkshakes. Handjobs. Flying sandwiches. Flying sandwiches? *** There was a time at the Nexus where one of my editors threw a sandwich at me during a meeting of the editorial board. It must have been 1998, because we were arguing about Clinton and The Calamitous Blowjob. (I'm lucky it wasn't a milkshake. That would have been hard to clean off my shirt.) Anyway, half the board felt it was of national importance that the president refrain from lying about blowjobs, that he serve as a role model for America's children, and assorted such silliness. My half of the board thought the president could boink whatever he felt like boinking as long as he attended to larger issues like the economy, and that it was damned silly for people to look 3,000 miles away for a role model when kids ought to be looking up to people in their neighborhoods or at their schools or, preferably, under their own roofs. For advocating such foolishness, I got Jodie Stout's lunch thrown at me. Aside from a violent (though nutritious!) temper, Jodie was a level-headed county editor, and went on to do press work in China before landing this respectable job. Hello, Jodie! My shirt remembers you! And I thought of all of this tonight sipping my milkshake, basking in the unholy afterglow of George Bush's war. What an Enron of a war, with its fake boiler-room soundstage and its inflated causus belli and its weapons of mass destruction nowhere to be found. And like Enron, no convictions, in every sense of the word. We will impeach a president over little lies, but if the lie is big enough, we will follow him anywhere. We are such a battered wife of a county when it comes to our leaders. They lie and cheat and steal and ship us off to be killed, and we keep coming back, after all, because they love us. You tell me what kind of milkshake George W. Bush is. 4:08 a.m. Saturday, May 03, 2003. Finish up your milkshake and go back to everythingwrong.com