Sugar Van Bon Bon and Her Automashtoubli

 Warning: not well thought out

Well holy crap it's New Years Day and I am sitting here enjoying a Dagger Falls IPA and listening to some Tool.  The 'Dreaded Lurgy', as my UK friends might call whatever bucket of snot disease I had, IS GONE. I am recovered, and grateful to be feeling healthy again.  At the mo I have a pot of beans on the fire.  The whole El Apartmento II smells nice and homey. Tomorrow we'll have Huevos Rancheros for breakfast, with tortillas, and it will be fucking glorious.

Our little town was decorated quite nicely for the holidays.  I'm old enough now that I appreciate this kind of thing. 

I'm also ex-Sumas enough to appreciate how well things are maintained here in Fruitland. Trees are trimmed, buildings are in good repair, the plantings are maintained, streets are clean and well-paved, and codes are enforced. And hell yeah; if there's one thing this neck of the woods has down pat, it's water management.  After living for more than twenty years in Dying Small Town Gothic, it's nice to be in a community that looks like a place where people give a fuck, you know? 

Even now! 5:00 in the evening! Rain! Cold! Kids are out riding bikes, and people are walking their dogs. 

Every day folks stroll along, and ride their bikes, or their recumbent bikes, or zip past on their roller-skis or electric scooters ,or alarmingly speedy motorized wheelchairs (!!!), and folks say 'Hello!' and will stop and chat for a bit.  The tuner guys don't go blasting past, they just drift their cars down the street, and the bikers do a steady 20 mph.  It's civilized, and it's nice.  At my age, I can fully dig 'nice'. 

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Most people drive SUV's, or big dually trucks - and here they get a full pass from me because most of this fuckin' place is dirt roads and bare prairie, except where it looks like God got pissed off and took an axe and just started hacking the shit out of it.  

Oh hell yes. You need to have really good brakes here, and a really forgiving transmission too. 'Up' isn't a gradual climb. ''Up' is suddenly come around a curve and WHOAH MOTHERFUCKER you're looking at clouds. No warning. Similarly valleys. No gradual slopes here. They're sudden cracks in the eartWHAT THE FUCK and you're gaining speed down the side of some deep chasm, like it or not.

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 If you decide to take an online, virtual overflight of Fruitland Idaho you'll see lots of suburbs and developments.  And that's real. Google Maps is not lying to you. The thing is, there is so very, very much more Idaho than there is Fruitland. Or Weiser, or Payette, or basically every town here.  Even Boise. Maps misrepresent how much actual nothing there is here. What there is here in Idaho is land, and a miraculous, neverending supply of ground water courtesy of the Snake River Plain Aquifer.  So naturally, this is an agricultural state, and the name of the game is rangeland, wheat and produce.  

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There are not a lot of people here, and there never has been a lot of people here. 

Mostly there are antelopes.

And onions. 

I am not even joking.  I cannot count the times I've been driving down Whitley and an onion truck has blasted past and almost bounced an onion off my windshield. And these things are the size of CANTELOUPES PEOPLE. They do not go 'splat' when they hit the ground, or a car, or a tree, or the side of a house. They are VEGETAL CANNONBALLS.  The gutters are full of them in September-October. People stopped at lights make their kids get out of the car and gather them up.  I have seen this. It is not pretty. 

Oh the antelopes! Right. Pronghorn antelopes. Yeah, they aren't the shy, retiring creatures that the internet would have them be.  

Antelopes, as it turns out, are abundant, and are not what you would call a 'bright' creature. Example:  I saw a rabbit hop up out of the grass near where some pronghorns were grazing near the town of Payette, and no, that would not do; so the entire herd just, like, turned and meandered across the busy highway. No sense of caution whatsoever. Cars and trucks rocking past at 45mph. There were almost several accidents as these stupid things ambled across four lanes of traffic to get away from this fucking rabbit that dared jump in their presence, or something. I do not pretend to understand the motives of yer bovid ungulates.

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Right across the river is Ontario, Oregon (YAY OREGON WOOT WOOT WOOT YEAH). 

Ontario is where Idahoans go to commit sins. The colloquialism for 'gonna buy some dank' (or whatever the kids are calling it these days) is 'visit Ontario'.*  Similarly 'I need an abortion' or 'let's get some shrooms*' or 'I need a minimum wage job that might actually allow me to eat on a daily basis'.  

On the other hand, say you live in Ontario and you've just run out of meth.  Just drive 3.6 miles to Idaho and buy all the pseudoephedrine you want over the counter here in Idaho, just you and a car full of Oregonian buddies taking turns, going from store to store, stocking up.  Then you go back over the bridge, into Oregon, because Oregon apparently needs more meth, and nobody bothers to stop you, and you grab you a dixie cup and a stick and some...*

(The Biker just put on some Stranglehold (the Nuge) and it's pretty good. Not Ted, because he's an asshole. Just 'Stranglehold.' )

What Idaho has, are smoke shops. It is not uncommon to see two of them in the same retail strip, or a block apart. They are everywhere.

 In a smoke shop, you can get liquor, beer, vape juice, tobacco in every brand and form imaginable, paraphernalia paraphernalia paraphernalia, and KRATOM.  

Oh my God this place is Kratom central!!! And it's all old people who buy it, because Kratom is miraculous on pain, and the doctors here in I de hoe are real, real stingy when it comes to pain meds. So if you're poor, old and on assistance, you buy a $130.00 jar of Kratom tablets every month and cut them up into fours.  Younger people also buy it enthusiastically, although they take it by the whole tab. That shit's fun for exactly twenty-five minutes - but in that time you see sounds, hear colors and love the whole universe.  It's really something.

So I've heard.*

Another example of the border economy is that you pay six cents on the dollar sales tax for groceries here in Idaho (given a bill of 75.00 dollars, that's four bucks in sales tax) - but go 3.6 miles into Ontario, and you can shop until the cows come home and save that four bucks. 

The punchline?  The big bargain grocery store in Ontario is owned by Idaho distributors and stocked with Idaho-grown products. 

AT A DISCOUNT. 

IT'S WINCO. 

IT'S WINCO'S FLAGSHIP STORE. 

Let's hear it for late-stage capitalism, y'all!

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All things considered, we're doing pretty good. I am working my way through my cookbooks and my other projects.  The Biker is recuperating from too many years of working like a dog.  We are learning to love a new ecology, and the future is looking interesting and unexpected.  God knows I never thought I'd end up here of all places.  

And it does not suck. Not at all.

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*Psylocibe cubensis

*Erowid

*I do not brag about my drug use. I revel in it.