Same-o Same-o

I was dining with friends of my father who were from the political arena, in a night of joy and laughter.

I slept in a luxury five-star hotel in Paris that cost six-thousand per night. The suite was a palace, replete with Francois, my personal valet. It had a private mud bath and steam room to go along with the library and swimming pool

An absolutely drop-dead gorgeous masseuse on call 24/7.

You know what?

I slept just as well in my buddy’s cramped, musty, trashy trailer that always had that kid smell that permeated the little coffin twelve months out of the year.

Not the cute little Johnson and Johnson baby powder smell.

The other ones.

I remember as a little kid being very self-conscious because we couldn’t afford (or my parents just forgot), a store-bought costume, so mine was literally thrown together in minutes in our cramped little car, on the way to the Halloween Festival, which was evidently, a pretty big deal.

I looked like a patchwork pirate-Indian-Chinese-mummy-vampire-doctor.

I remember being sooo pissed at my Mom for fucking up this whole Festival and the much ballyhooed costume contest.

I wondered how, or if, I’d ever be able to forgive her.

All the way up to when they called me up on the stage for second-place and the accompanying one-hundred dollar check!

I was only four, so you see that kids can be assholes at an early age.

Childrearing according to maddogg.

My attorney once invited me over to his estate where we ate Iranian gold caviar and drank Cristal in his three-tiered infinity masterpiece of a pool complex with a panoramic view of the blue Pacific Ocean. I stood directly under one of the cool waterfalls and smiled.

You know what?

I got just as cooled off and refreshed in one of those Walmart inflatable pools at my buddy’s house with only a rusted-out stop sign that he stole as a teenager to look at while we scarfed down Pringles and Budweisers.

Idiot.

Same-o same-o.

I have tasted a few desserts that used vanilla extract instead of reducing vanilla beans (think something simple like Floating Islands), and while the flavor can be approximated, the velvety sheen given when the heavy cream leaches the vanilla essence cannot be replicated.

Every so often I miss cooking in a French kitchen.

It is starting to cool off outside (currently in the nineties) but it is a balmy seventy-three degrees inside.

I wrote about my Pop Warner football team and our experience playing an abbreviated scrimmage during halftime of an NFL game between the Arizona Cardinals and San Francisco Forty-Niners.

 When we got off the bus, an old faded-yellow school bus that had seen better days, the team from Scottsdale hopped off a nice, air-conditioned Mercedes-Benz Tour bus.

They were decked out in the latest Under Armor equipment and protective braces, pads, and wraps.

I had to buy half of the players on my team tennis shoes.

I was worried about our boys until my middle Linebacker Scott, the toughest kid in the league, told me “Coach, I got this.”

I trusted him and walked over to my assistant coaches.

We demolished them.

Stay well.