American Cream

I was going to bring up something about the walk in this morning, about the fizzy wave of comfort falling with Girlfriend Is Better on the headphones and pre-dawn industrial lights sparking faded memories. Something about the grid work atop the baseball stadium brought back something about the permanent orange glow that is Southern California at night and my stumbling around grimly through its industrial parks.

But then Gorgeous brought up how she had at one time had a problem with dipping fries in ranch dressing. This seemingly innocuous statement sent all sorts of memories tumbling of days in Santa Barbara.

When Greta May and I were both living in Santa Barbara, both attending UCSB and both relatively miserable, we used to spend many evenings at JK Frimples. Frimples was one of those restaurants from another era, a diner of sorts that was open twenty-four hours and was filled with comfy booths. Frimples was on State Street, in Santa Barbara proper and not over by the campus, so it attracted little in the way of student traffic. Frimples had been built around an enormous tree that still grew in the center of the restaurant.

Greta May and I would go sit in a booth, me drinking mug after mug of coffee, and play Spite and Malice with two worn decks of cards. If one of us had some extra money, we would order cheese fries and a side of ranch - standard.

We would talk about the things that excited us to talk about, developing personal jokes and a language that would mutate and change over the years. This was back when I was sure we would be wandering, drunken writers together. It seems funny to think back to a time when there was no Chris in the picture, when I didn't know who Bif was. To think back to a time when neither of us had any idea that one day we would run off together with our significant others and marry together in a blurry, scotch-fueled haze in Reno. It's odd to think back to a time before there was no Built to Spill in our lives, back when we had no idea we would visit Prague and Venice and Greece together.

It seems sort of innocent and charming to think back on it, and not as turgid and desperate as it seemed at the time.

We were kids, playing at being adults and trying to figure out who the hell we were. She had just had her resilient heart shattered and I was in a perpetual state of being in the wrong place and thinking massive amounts of Jack Daniel's would fix it. I remember her being upset a lot, trying so hard to figure shit out, and I remember feeling as though I had wandered into a prison that was so nice I didn't realize it was a prison. I remember a vague frustration constantly floating around me.

Honestly, I remember a lot of difficult times, but I like to remember is a bright spot in all of it filled with genuine laughter and calm and cheese fries with ranch.

Oh, and hey, sort of related, but not at all: We were in Greece together when the four of us found chips that were "American Cream" flavored. We thought that was so funny and couldn't wait to find out what American Cream tastes like. Tastes like ranch. Turns out Europeans have no idea what the hell "ranch" is.