How our recent San Diego trip nearly killed us.

The whole trip in itself started out innocently enough. Knowing that sometime in the near future that we'd have to visit family out in California, She-Ra found quite the deal for a downtown San Diego hotel on Groupon.

Called the Porto Vista hotel, near the famous stretch of whats known as “Little Italy”, just a hop skip and jump from the ocean, it seemed like the perfect getaway after spending the day with She-Ra's sister, brother in law and their two kids. So she bought the Groupon and we tentatively made arrangements to not only pass through Palm Springs to see my dads but to hit San Diego and check in with Erin, Jay, Nick, and Natty.

Then, a rather bad thing happened. On the eve of the Super Bowl, while doing work on the computer, the phone rang and on the other end was the co-owner and manager of the restaurant I was kitchen managing for. It didn't take long for her to make it clear that my services were no longer needed and my position was made redundant. Since then it has been a daily struggle to find a decent job here in Tucson and plans were put on hold to drive to the Golden State and enjoy the company of our loving, yet completely insane, family.

Then one day She-Ra had made a discovery. The Groupon for that hotel in San Diego was going to expire soon and eating a hundred bucks didn't seem fun or feasible. So after some much delegation we both said “Fxxk it! We need some time away from her job and my job worries. We have some money saved up. My government benefits had finally started kicking in. Let's take off for a few days and bask in the sun and let our toes run deep into beach sand!", a near fetish for my lady if you must know.

Our plan was to leave first thing Monday morning and return late Wednesday night. Boom, boom. Quick and painless. Easy in and easy out. Or...so we had thought.

Monday morning rolled around and our garden was covered in sleet and hail. Flurries were coming in from the west and the winds blew mighty gusts nearly tearing the canopy off our patio, sending hanging plants to their near doom. To say the least, we were delayed. Luckily a break in the weather gave us enough time to load up the car and consider hitting the road. The family wanted us there for dinner at 5:00. It was well past noon. It was going to be close. Very close.

After grabbing a snack and rolling on to the I-10, all was clear and it looked as if our trip was going to be on time and just fine. We hit the mountainous overpass that leads you into the San Diego valley and were delighted to find that it had transformed into a winter wonderland. Snow was everywhere, covering rocky plains and pine trees, enough that you might be tranced into believing a man in a thick red coat was scurrying off in the distance with a pack of reindeer. It was that magical. I tried to take a picture of it, but we were moving much too fast.

Then...we hit the decent.

At first I just thought it was the rough road below us, but the face of She-Ra told a different story. Apparently everytime she applied the brakes, the entire rig would rattle as if to incite complete destruction of the Chevy. It was harrowing. We white knuckled the entirely too long drift downward and when we finally made it to flat territory, She-Ra made the call to her sister.

Luckily Erin and her husband Jay and military so we know we could get a smoking deal on some new brakes if we just dropped the car off on the base's auto lot. Erin assured us that would be no problem. Then asked us if we wanted to go to Sea World.

We said yes.

Finding the hotel was easy enough as it was right off of the I-8, but parking would turn out to be a problem. Apparently the Porto Vista hotel wants to charge $25 a night for parking. That's outrageous, even if I had the cash. Luckily for me, spending over 12 years in San Francisco, it gave me an advantage to seek out and locate street parking. My skills of yore had not faded and we got a tight spot just a half block from the lobby. It's like riding a bike I suppose, except back in SF your bike is a full sized car and you spend endless hours at night circling your neighborhood just to find a spot. Sometimes, they don't come. Sometimes, the city wins and you end up a mile away having to hail a cab to make it safely back to your flat.

Checking in was easy enough, but after getting into the elevator, hitting floor 4, turning right and heading towards the second building as instructed by the desk clerk, we ran into yet another snag.

The two separate buildings that make up the Porto Vista hotel is not connected by mere hallways. Oh no. They align by the thinnest of catwalk bridges that are fully exposed to the elements. I immediately did a double take seeing the vertigo inspiring sight and all She-Ra could muster was a “Oh hell no!” Now, I'm not afraid of heights, I just don't like them, but this, my friends, was like a scene from Temple of Doom when they have to cross that narrow and flimsy rope bridge overlooking a deep chasm below. The only reason I made it across the bridge was because I had to pee really bad. She-Ra on the other hand, completely in tears, made a bee-line to the lobby to try and plead her case for a more non-phobic soliciting room.


(this picture gives the terror no justice but...you get the idea)

After doing my duty and running as fast as I could to avoid hitting a seagull and getting blown off of the catwalk from sturdy ocean breezes, I made it to the lobby where She-Ra was in deep negotiation with the front desk clerk.

“Happens all the time,” he said nonchalant. “This building is kind of weird.”

“Weird?” I said. “The architect is the weird one. Why would anyone design a place that causes panic in people? Who is this maniac?”

The man just shrugged and handed us a room card, one that was right above us and nowhere near those vile gangplanks of death.

The rooms themselves were nothing fancy, but an odd curio of the place is the inclusion of images of thin white people doing activities on the walls in the rooms and elevator. Are they trying to be LA metro? Artsy? It came off as a bad interior design student flaw in a final so after cleaning up we headed out to get that well needed complimentary cocktail.



Included with the room was what was described as a “Welcome Cocktail” in the top floor's bar and bistro. Walking in there, I was immediately struck as a grubby invader of their swank little happy hour soiree. The bartender seemed to disapprove of us as well. No matter though, we handed over a voucher, ordered two vodkas with a Jager back. The ratio to soda and vodka was like 90 to 10 and the Jager shots came in glass thimbles. Just getting the shot to my face was hard enough though. After a harrowing day, heck, a harrowing two months, I seemed to have developed a bit of a shake and I had to handle the small shot glass with both hands to insure it got to my mouth. The trip was off to a rocky start.


(the view from my side of the bed. Ugh...)

That's when She-Ra called her sister to inform them that we just got in and would not make it for dinner. On the other end, I could hear chaos. The kids, staying up long past their bedtimes and not getting a chance to see Auntie Roo (that’s what they call her) and Uncle Mark sent them into a series of shrieks and moans. We felt bad, but, what could we do? So after finishing our “cocktail” we left the Porto Vista to take a well needed calming stroll around Little Italy and the bay.

This part of the trip went right. It was a cool evening, a mellow dining crowd was either over packing one restaurant or completely ignoring another. This was a strange didactic that we really couldn't figure out. We found a good English style pub and had a pint with a sous chef who told us of another “better” bar, a real dive he called it when we made it known we were visiting from Tucson, so after our pints we headed out to find this place.

It wasn't a dive at all. In fact, here in the T-dizzle, it's what we might call a “douchey crap hole”. Sure it had fun stuff on the wall and was kind of dark but the clientele deemed it otherwise. So we quickly downed our drinks and went in search of mixers for the bottle we had packed before we left.

Here's a tip for all you drinkers that want to visit downtown San Diego and enjoy drinks in your room: Come fully prepared! They can't legally sell booze to go for some odd reason the guy at the 7-11 gave us, and mixers are tiny and overpriced. Why I forgot the soda water and 7Up is beyond me, but we made due with what we found and crawled in to call it a day.

The following day we met up with Erin and drove the car out to the base. What might cost us a few hundred dollars out in the real world would only run us a few bucks here. In fact, the original estimate for fixing the brakes was less that $40. Score.

Luckily the kids had a half day so after gathering them up from school, we headed out to Sea World.



Now, I'm not going to bore you with a “We had so much fun at Sea World!” montage of tales (which we did), but here's a few shots of the day with some captions. The only thing missing is the photos and tale of the two kids and myself riding the roaring rapids ride four times in a row. It was that slow at the park and after what we've just been through and what I've been going through, getting absolutely soaking wet and screaming your heads off sounded like a good idea. At the time. It was pretty miserable trying to maneuver throughout the day with clothes that weighed a ton and some indiscreet chafing going on down below.

Enjoy!


Erin, NIck, Natty and Auntie Roo about to get Shamu splashed.


And....spalsh!



These fish beggars were soooo loud!


Yay!


Even our favorite motorcycle video game was there. Alright!


About to get soaked again...


Toward the end of the day Erin received a phone call that garnered some concerned looks on her face. Thinking that it just might be a problem with the current school the kids are in because, well, apparently there's some kind of teacher/student discrepancy and they might have to relocate the two to a more suitable institution. After hanging up, Erin pulled me aside.

“Mark,” she said in a whisper, “I don't want to freak Roo out but....it's about the car.” She-Ra was a good league away from us walking with the kids so I felt our conversation would be privatized.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Well...it's a lot worse than we thought.”

“How worse?”

“Like...two grand worth.”

My jaw dropped. My heart sank. And I felt the pangs of poverty swipe over me.

“Well,” I tried to muster a sentence, “well...what's wrong with it?”

“Everything,” she assured. “It's not only the brakes but you have two cracked axles and a cracked manifold. Literally, your engine is fxxked.”

I didn't know what to say. What could I say? There was nothing to say? I guess I could go into the robbing of convenience stores but after watching a few episodes of Worlds Dumbest, I know I would get pinched and be featured on a future episode.

“Don't worry about it,” Erin said. “I went ahead and authorized the whole thing. We can work something out.”

The rest of the day was spent in relative shock. Back at the hotel room, we were too dazed to sleep so at 1am, we left the room to find the only bar open was that douchey place that sous chef told us about. It had been a long time since we closed a bar. We did whatever we could to ignore the horror of knowing that the trip coming into San Diego could have been met with much more disastrous results. Luckily we would pick up the car tomorrow and head back home. She has to work on Thursday and I had a big phone interview with the Reid Park Zoo at 3pm. At this point, we just wanted to be back home.

That's when things got more tense.

The next day as we were packing up Erin called to say that the car would not be done until Thursday. So we made frantic phone calls to try and get her shift covered and my phone interview redirected to her cell phone. She got her shift covered rather easily and I called all of the zoo contacts I had to be sure they called the cell. Now, all we could do was wait.

That night we played with the kids and picked at our dinner. This “vacation” was turning into an anxious account of ones own ability to embrace what obstacles life gives you and be thankful for the support and love of family.

The only question was, would we ever make it home?

The following day, Thursday, we checked out and waited at Erin's for not only the garage to call but the zoo as well. The garage closed promptly at 6pm and the zoo said they would call at 3. So we waited. And waited. A minute would become and eternity. Erin's phone would ring and we would spring up thinking it was the garage but, it never was. By 2:30pm, we thought that I might have to stay another night and pick it up on Friday and send her home in a rental car. We tried to read our books but our eyes just glanced over the words, making very little sense of what was really going on.

3pm. No phone call. 3:10. Nothing. That's it I thought, I blew the big interview. But at 3:15 She-Ra's cell rang and on the other end was the zoo. At least one thing went right.

I went into the office and sat down. They asked a series of questions and I thought that I had actually nailed it. In reality, I probably sounded like a warbling gibbon set for dumb. I tried to get the words out as best I could but each syllable was a struggle. At the end I thanked them and exited the office.

That's when it hit. I broke down. Now, I am not afraid to say that I cry in movies and have a good amount of estrogen flowing through my system, so in front of She-Ra's sister and her Marine drill instructor husband, I wept. Was it because of my current job situation? Was it because I really wanted to work at the zoo? Was it the fact that I'd have to stay yet another night in San Diego and drive that long drive home alone? Who knows. Point is I let it all out and in the end I felt a little better.

4pm rolls around and Erin's phone rings.

“Oh it is? Oh great. We'll be there soon!”

The car was done! We could go pick it up! We could go home!

Thing is, we had no way to get out there.

Jay had the van and was picking up the kids from school. 4:30 comes. No Jay, no kids. Maybe you should call him She-Ra suggested. When Erin did, apparently Jay was in an impromptu “meeting” with a teacher. The sweat began to pour off of our palms.

Finally around 5:15 (mind you, the garage closes right at 6pm and we still have to navigate the San Diego freeway to get there) Jay arrives with the kids. We don't think, we pile our stuff into the van and crawl in.

“I forgot I have to get a haircut and pick up my uniform for tomorrow,” Jay says. “remember I have that big interview?”

I begin to shake even more now.

Seeing the gravity of the situation, Jay acclimates and just has us drop him off at a barber nearby and he'll walk the kids back home when he's done. We quickly say our goodbyes and speed off onto the highway.

It's 5:30pm on a central Southern California freeway...so guess what we run into? Wall to wall traffic.

Erin is making rapid calls to the garage, giving credit card information as she drives.

“Just hold the car till we get there!,” she instructs. “We're almost there.”

The traffic begins to move, we round the edge of the residential area, we start to see large helicopters, are those barracks? Yes. It's the base and the clock now reads 5:50pm.

We pull into the base, make a quick right turn and, blammo, we see the garage. At first sight we see all of the repair depots locked up for the night but see that the office is still open. In the distance, beyond the gray surface of a well worn parking lot, is our little Chevy Impala.

What started out as a fun retreat had developed into one of the tensest days of my career as a human. What started off as a $36 fix it, turned into a three page, it took the guy a full ten minutes just to ring up all the repair work that had to be done, over $1,500 worth of parts and labor, epic event. And here all we wanted was to go to the beach.

No time for that now.

We then transferred all of our stuff from the van into our car and fueled up on base. When folks in San Diego found out that we here in Tucson still have gas prices in the late $3 rage, everyone was shocked. In California, it's nearly $5. On the base? Back to Tucson prices. Much thanks to the US military for saving our asses...in more ways than one.

We hugged and thanked Erin and then got in the car, which jumped the minute She-Ra hit the accelerator because of the newly installed power, and was soon on the freeway. We were on our way. I never thought I'd miss the dog so much.

The first length of the drive was in relative silence, seeing as we were still in shock and awe about what just happened. But once we got on that flat, long and dreary stretch towards Arizona, She-Ra made a fun suggestion.

“Since we didn't bring any audiobooks and the DVD player is in the trunk, what don't you read your book out loud?”

I was re-reading The Hunger Games seeing as the movie had just come out and I was about 75% of the way through. Seeing as she has already read the entire series three times, I could just pick up where I was and she'd know exactly where I was.

So I grabbed the book, turned on the little rear view mirror light and glanced out into the speeding darkness to find a sign that indicated Tucson was a good 200 miles away. So I tucked in and began reading.

Now, here is the power of reading and reading a good book. What I thought would take a good three hours to get to Tucson, felt as if it'd taken ten minutes. Before I knew it she was turning off into Miracle Mile and heading towards home. I couldn't believe it. I had completely lost track of time. Thank you Suzanne Collins for the awesome words. And thanks of all be to She-Ra for making the suggestion. And, before I knew it, we were turning into the parking lot for Nancy's Pub where our good friend Tank was bartending and a few random pals were scattered about.

We regaled them with our terse fable of what we just went through and shots were being bought all around. Real ones. Not those hoity pen caps they served it up in back at that dumb hotel. Afterward we had to get She-Ra back home and in bed. She had to be up early the next day. While I just had a ton of laundry and praying to do.

A few days later I found out that I did not get the job at the zoo. Well, to be honest with you, I kinda didn't think I would anyway, but I was honored just as much to have the opportunity to even get an interview. So I must be doing something right.

Oh, and the car runs like a dream. It's like we have a new car only...it's the same car. So thank you She-Ra's family for coming through for us. And thank you Tim for taking care of the place and dog while we were gone. We owe you big.

One last thing. We found this downtown near that douchey bar we closed out. Ah, San Diego. It really does mean a “whale's vagina”.





Thanks for reading.

"Beyond the 99%"

As I type this I am now entering my third week as an unemployed person. This is something I have not experienced, voluntarily, in quite some time. The last time I was “fired” (for unknowingly insulting the wife of the Grateful Dead's Phil Lesh, who was a major investor, it turned out, in the restaurant I was a host and bartender for) I remained on the schedule for over a month and it was me who had to ask the chef and owner to take me off so I could try something new. Even my last job in San Francisco slowly took me off the schedule when word got out that I might be moving to Tucson, AZ. Big whoop. The owner was an alcoholic asshole who kept threatening me because I had long-ish hair. About a week or two after I was completely removed from the schedule, I packed up a rental car and drove over fourteen hours to be with the girl I had fallen in love with.

We've been engaged now for over seven years.

Finding work for me in a completely new town was rough. I even spent two nights as a disc jockey at a high end strip club but couldn't take it for several reasons. One, I was a DJ in a strip club and, Two, when I saw little baggies of undisclosed white powder being sneakily handed around, I knew I had to get out quick. I managed a kid's dinosaur and science museum for a while but the owners were complete idiots and ran that place straight into the ground. Desperate for just “work” my lady, She-Ra, hooked me up with a kitchen job at the restaurant where she bartended.

It wasn't a bad gig, making pizzas and flippin' burgs for a decent wage and corporate benefits, but after four years of being stuck back there, with no room for growth, I knew I needed a change. That's when I went to cook with a popular chef here in Tucson at some fancy resort. It was cool for a while, I learned a lot, but it became pretty obvious that they don't teach you interpersonal management at the Culinary Institute. The day after a particularly horrific shift (I'm talking flooding, dishwasher exploding, hundreds of tickets just flying out of the machine, managers and servers yelling at us, all that good stuff...) the chef sat me down and told me I was on my final warning. Shocked, I was all “Um, what were my other infractions?” He informed me of a few and I told him it was his responsibility to let me know if I'm getting written up. After that, he hired a guy, a really cool guy unfortunately, at nearly $2 less an hour than me and slashed my hours. As I began trolling the internet job posts I came across a small but busy family run bar and grill that needed a kitchen manager. I soon jumped ship from the fancy resort and chef to got to work with ex-cons and chain smoking servers.

Basically they needed help with their disaster of a kitchen system and service problems. Having some corporate training behind me, I pretty much implemented a whole new system, organized everything, set up efficient stations and was there, every day, to try and make the place run a little smoother.

Then I got a raise. Then my hours were cut in half but my workload had doubled.

One night I was scheduled to close the kitchen with just one other guy and we got hit like nobody’s business. Tickets just wouldn't stop coming out of the machine, the servers were out of control, we were literally just throwing food into the window and when it was all over with, it took us almost two hours to restock and shut down that tiny little kitchen.

The next day, as I'm doing my taxes online, the phone rings. It was the manager on the other end and she told me that I obviously performed “Less than effective” last night that I was “Obviously not happy” with my job and let me go right then and there. No warning, no sit down conversation about my abilities or performance, nothing.

I sat there in shock. Once the realization hit of what just happened, all I could think of was “Are you serious? They used me to fix their restaurant then just plain got rid of me. Assholes!”

Turns out that the owner of the place was a former manager at the corporate restaurant I worked at for four years, stole a bunch of recipes then opened a “similar” place on the other side of town. I always wondered why the pizzas looked familiar and the peperoni filled dough rollups were almost an exact match to the ones I made at my former employer's.

Huh. Once a thief, always a thief.

Then the deep seated doom thought quickly washed over me. I would no longer be getting a regular paycheck. Sure I’ve had my struggles in the past, but once I was seriously out on my own and grown up a bit, I have always had a steady job to coincide with all of the other dumb stuff I like to get into. Being 41 years old, in a committed relationship, planning for the future, planning to own our own business with bills coming in, the idea of being unemployed really didn’t feel too hot. In fact, the feeling just plain sucked.

That first week without a job I literally was machine gunning my resumes out into the ether. Managing a tea shop, supervising a sandwich place, selling toilets at the Home Depot, managing a burger joint, shelving books at the library, writing for an Aerospace newsletter, admin for the Nature Conservancy, sushi chef, garde manger for a French bistro, etc etc etc… Nothing. Not one call back. Actually, that’s not true, I did get a few calls but they arrived literally minutes after I submitted my resume and the last time I took them up on their offer, well, let’s just say I got canned over the phone.

Here’s a tip: If you are job hunting and someone calls you back like within minutes of your submission – do not take that job! It’s obvious they are super desperate and are willing to give you crappy money for crappy work so let the real jobs take their time. This chain of sandwich shops, Jimmy John’s, which has the reputation for being the fastest made and delivered sandwiches (and they are!) anywhere called me back less than an hour after they got my resume for manager. Nope, no thank you. Not to mention I’m 41, a little chunky and pretty mellow so being in an overly kinetic environment five to six days a week for eight to ten hours a day starting at $9 an hour really didn’t seem like a good option.

The best one was getting a call back from Panda Express, to manage one of their stores, who phoned, you got it, minutes after I sent the resume to their website. On the other end was a lady with, and I am not kidding or being racist here, one of the thickest Chinese accents I have come across. And I used to live a few blocks away from Chinatown back in San Francisco! This lady was almost impossible to make out.

“Why you like work fo Pan-na Eh-spress”, she said. Look, I am not joking here. This lady, who obviously has something to do with the hiring process, sounded as if she just landed in the US from her native country after studying English for maybe a week before doing so. I was pretty confused.

“Oh. Well. Um…” I then gave her the spiel about how great the company is, how amazing the product (even though I hate Panda Express) is, how talented and competent I am, blah blah blah. After this went on for a while, she then asked me what I made at my last job. When I told her she gasped.

“How come you leave lass job when you make so much money?”

Er, I really didn’t make that much money which indicated to me that they even start managers at a dishwasher’s salary. Pass.

I started to get frustrated. By the end of the week, I was pretty spent. Luckily for me I have an amazing support system with She-Ra, who is my lady for you that may not know, and a bit of savings so the situation was dire but not that desperate.

I exited week one on an angry note. Week two of being unemployed, I was pretty threadbare and forlorn. If you know me at all, I’m a pretty sensitive guy, so when the phone continued to not ring and my emails not filled with job offers, I started to get worried that my only option at this point was to pack up my knives, put the old chef’s coat back on and get behind the line once again. This is something I know I could do but really wanted to break away from for a while. My time at Old Chicago was great. My time at Lodge on the Desert cooking with Ryan Clark was amazing. Going to Brooklyn’s was a step back, but at least I was a manager. I figured that if I could make the same amount as a cook or chef without having to run around like crazy, be “in the weeds” all the time, face down in fire and grease while dealing with annoying servers and managers, sounded like a much better option to me. I mean, some people just crave that lifestyle, life for it, love it. Not me. Sure I love to cook but at my own pace. Standing for over eight hours with nonstop tickets coming at you all day, trying to juggle meat, sides, salads, appetizers, deserts, creff thrown in the fryalators and trying to get them all out on time and temped just right was starting to get to me. I don’t strive for that kind of action on a regular basis. It’s not really me anymore. Time to move on.





Week two slowed down for me job hunting wise as I took to watching TV more, taking long naps, puttering around the house, Facebooking way too much, and all that good stuff of the woe-is-me section of unemployment. I started to have weird dreams at night, that is if I slept at all, and poor She-Ra had to deal with me and my newfound blah-ness. Good ‘ol peppy Metal Mark had taken a backseat to poopy ol’ Misery Mark. And this was only week two! Man do I like to spread on the drama.



This really didn’t last too long at all. Because I remembered something.

Unemployment benefits.

Man, the last time I filed for unemployment was when I did production work that first year or two I lived in San Francisco. A job would end, I’d file my claim and, boom!, free money. That was over fifteen years ago and I hadn’t been anything but a good boy to Uncle Sam since. So I went online, filed my claim and found out I would be making only slightly less a week than I would if I stepped back into my chef clogs and began sautéing once again.

Week three was more of the “acceptance” stage of me being without work. Luckily I got paid two days after getting the shaft so I was stretching that as far as I could. About a week before me losing my job, She-Ra and I started this program for ourselves where we actually plan our dinners, shopping only once a week, utilizing an organic produce co-op and making sure we eat as frugally and healthily as possible. So meals were pretty much taken care of. Not to mention we stopped going to the bars like by more than half and good things it’s late winter, early spring because the heat/cold hasn’t clicked on in quite a while leaving us with livable energy bills.



So, all in all, it’s kind of the perfect time for me to be without a job. Even though I really really want to get back to work. I like working. I mean, if you like what you’re doing it’s not really a “job” then is it? It’s more like stepping away from your house for a few hours, having fun, making some money and when you do get home you can appreciate it all the more.

So week three started off great. I would wake up in the morning and take nice long walks around our neighborhood. I even found a quaint tea shop, some artist kiosk and an aviary and koi pond run by a bunch of Krishnas. I then set a schedule for myself. Research jobs that are actually available and would be something that I not only would want to do but could actually do them. Send out a few resumes and contact those jobs. Set a list of chores and keep the house nice and clean and organized. Write. Read my book. All that good stuff.

See, the thing is, what I’ve learned most about being unemployed right now is patience. I kinda have that “can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel” thing when times seem grim. But you have to wait for something really good to come your way. Luckily I have lots of friends out there willing to help and a lot of random experience behind me so I know something, eventually, will come my way. And, hey, if I do have to step back on the line and cook professionally again, a little break from it was good and I can appreciate it all the more.

Until things get too crazy. Then I’ll wish I had gotten that degree in library science.

So for all of my jobless pals and readers out there, do as the good book says, and by good book I mean “The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy”, and that’s don’t panic. There’s a lot of us out there right now so if you’re sinking in a lonely hole of ‘what the heck am I gonna do’, just know that there are millions of others out there in that same hole. So don’t despair my little pavement pounding pals! There is hope for us all and all good things come to those who wait.

But if it doesn’t, we can always pull panties over our heads and rob the local Gas ‘n Sip.

There is always an option.

What lies under the desk, hiding all the wires and plugs.

Our windowsill basil plant, one that has been blessed by an orthodox priest.

Way too many Archie comics in our bathroom.

The idea came to me to write a children's novel back in 1998. At the time I was working for a publishing company called Children's Book Press back in San Francisco. After interning there for a bit I started working as their submissions manager and helping with student outreach programs. When my boss up and left for a better job out in New York, I got my walking papers too.

Anyway, as I was slogging through the daily pile of submissions (which I would 99.9% have to reject because they only published bi-lingual and multi-cultural kids books from local authors and artists) this one story kind of caught my eye. It had something to do with a castle, some enchanted forest and all that jive. As I geared up to compose my “Thank you for submitting” refusal, this one word in the tale got my attention.

Thicket.

What the heck is a thicket, I wondered. Looking it up, I came across this: 1. A dense growth of shrubs or underbrush; a copse. 2. Something suggestive of a dense growth of plants, as in impenetrability or thickness: "the thicket of unreality which stands between us and the facts of life" (Daniel J. Boorstin).

Huh, I thought. I liked that word.

In notebooks and journals I kept playing with the idea of some forest friends gathering in a thicket to do...something. I was planning to actually write a story but then I got caught up in the whole millennial “dot com” thing that ate up the Bay Area and started to seriously get into music journalism. All the while jumping from dead end job to dead end job, bad relationship to bad relationship. So, to say the least, that idea got shelved.

After much good times/bad times in San Francisco, which I chronicled in my first book, a memoir, “Rabbit Every Tuesday”, I finally fell madly in love and decided to leave my coastal home of 12 years. She lived in Tucson, AZ and the idea of solace, a new environment and cheap rent really hit home with me. In February of 2006, I packed up a rental car and drove the 15 hours to get to her.

Once there, Tucson proved to be a much rougher job market than I had anticipated. Nothing in my field was available to me; at least none that actually paid. No writing jobs, no publishing, no DJ gigs...heck, I couldn't even get a job at the local used book store! So after a few failed endeavors (which included running a children's dinosaur museum, writing for a crappy Arizona tourist newspaper, DJing weddings and even penning an interview with Los Lobos for a small weekly periodical), my now fiance She-Ra (Sherra, actually, but I'm a huge “Masters of the Universe” nerd so, you get the idea...) made this suggestion:

“Just get a job where I work. Work in the kitchen, write your books and just get on with it!”

A kitchen? I've never worked in a kitchen before. Sure, I can cook like the wind but...a real actual restaurant kitchen? No way.

The managers and most of the staff already knew me there so when I applied I was in training to be the new daytime pizza chef before I knew it. Turns out, the job aint half bad. I show up, I do my job, I have fun, I go home, I write and that's that. It's actually the perfect job for a dork like me. There's no “working from home” with this job, I'm not in an office, I don't work with the public, it's close by and, best of all, there's free beer waiting for me at the bar after a particularly busy shift.

After I got settled in with the job, I sat down and composed my first novel, “Rabbit Every Tuesday”, which chronicles the last year of my life in San Francisco. It's not one of those “Oh look how cool my life was” memoir, but rather “I'm stuck in this weird ex-girlfriend's apartment working as a bartender with an alcoholic demon as a boss all the while getting addicted to cocaine because I'm miserable and lonely as my time as a heavy metal DJ is coming to an end” type of thing. But it has a happy ending. I met She-Ra. The end.

Once the editing and fine tuning of the book was completed, I set out to get it published. After endless submissions to agents and publishers, spending countless hours on query letters and author bios, along with shelling out money I really didn't have for mailings, I now am in the possession of a large file drawer stuffed with rejections. Most of which say: “Love it, don't know what to do with it.” Oh well, I thought. I'll keep trying.

As I geared up to send out more submissions while at the same time outlining the “sequel” to the book, the Tucson years!, I came across something that would get the “Thicket” gears in motion.

A new “super” Target store opened up on one of the main drags here in Tucson. Like any good and diligent member of the consumer race, we had to go and check it out one afternoon. It was huge, sprawling, and much too bright for my eyes, which were used to a dark room and glowing computer screen. There was just too much stuff to take in. Eventually we made it to the “book section”, near all of the noisy TVs and video games, and slowly scanned the area. Outside of all of the Oprah book club rot, bland cookbooks, sad self help crap and once good novels now made into movies with the film poster art as the new cover, I found the kids section.

Now, there were a good amount of picture books, mainly new and popular titles along with all the Disney fare, but the biggest section of them all, the one that trumped any in the book area, was the young adult expanse of shelves. In it, you had your Harry Potter's, below them, were countless rip offs of adolescent wizards and their problems. I mean, dozens of titles and new series, even some with the Potter font to get you duped into buying it. Then there were the pink and light blue hued “tweens that love to shop and gossip” area. Just absolute pulp for the poor little girl who wants to be popular but is stuck in her room, listening to Avril Levine and reading junk like “Shoptastic Besties” and “The New Cute Guy That Caught All of Our Eyes!” Ugh.

Then, and this was the section that made me slap my forehead, hard, were the endless, countless, worthless copycats of the “Twilight” phenomenon. I mean, for real...it went on and on! Nothing but black covers with teenage girls bearing fangs with titles such as “Bitten”, “Night Falls”, “Blood Oaths”, “Marked” etc etc etc. I could go on but I stopped around the 20th book and went to the game section to get some Hungry Hungry Hippos therapy. Literally, I felt both overwhelmed and let down. And, honestly, I wasn't too sure why.

Basically, it comes down to this: I have been an advocate of children's literacy and a fan of kids books for years now. My time at the publishing house, my stint as a volunteer with the San Francisco and even Tucson library, along with my love of books in general just kind of made me feel as if kids and teens these days are just being fed over-marketed pablum to get you to buy tickets to the next movie, tee shirts, whatnot, without much substance to go with the product. Now, here's the thing! I actually liked the “Harry Potter” books and most people I know (all girls) love “Twilight”, She-Ra and my cousin Lisa included. So, there must be something there.

Thing is, those books were original, even if they aren't the be all end all of literature. They're fun! They're written and aimed at the young reader. It's just the ripoff factor that was getting to me. And I know kids are a lot smarter than we pretend to think they aren't. Especially when it comes to trends and the next cool thing.

The next morning, I woke up with an idea. An epiphany if you will. Not only do I love to write but I also love kids books. Mix that with my resentment I felt in the young reader book section at Target and whammo!, I knew my next move.

I'm gonna write a kids novel.

But what? Where do I start? I don't want to write about vampires in love, or young wizards or even a boy and his dragon. Oh, and that whole pre-teen girls that love to shop is definitely out of the question. So I sat on the porch with a notebook and began to sketch and brainstorm.

It didn't take long, as this is not only one of my all time favorite subjects but also the title of my blog, for me to write down: “Furry woodland creatures”.

That's it!, I thought. I then went to my file drawer, pulled out an old notebook with “Kids Book” crudely written on it in black Sharpie and found my outline for something called “In The Thicket”.

Perfect. But...what's it about?

For the next month I literally pulled my hair out going nuts over the storyline. The characters I had; I wanted forest and woodland friends, so a squirrel, elk, beaver, fox and rabbit began to take shape. The squirrel was most important. My love and fascination with those guys runs deep. Heck, in film school I had to come up with a name for my “production company”, an assignment for a class, and the only thing I could come up with was Hindu Squirrel Ent., which combined my favorite religion and favorite animal. The others, well, I picked them for their personality types.

Elk would be a strong leader, fox would be cocky and wily, beaver would be steadfast and curmudgeonly and the rabbit would be kooky and weird. But as I leafed through that notebook, one sentence kept coming up:

“And a squirrel shall save them all...”

Then I had to come up with names. At first I was going to base their names off of the sounds each character made. All I came up with, after listening to endless nature sounds on various websites (mostly hunting sites so you could download the mating call of said animal to get them to come near enough for you to, well, you know...), were names like “Rar”, “Whee”, “Chippa” and stuff like that. Not even close.

Then I began researching animal deities of various myths and religions. The origins have been lost from negligence on my part, most likely the pages of notes got thrown away from my constant need to clean away clutter, but I settled on these:

“Oskar”, for the squirrel, which I believe is Native American in origin. Just shortened a longer name to make a fairly normal one.

“Uwa” for the elk, which is Scandinavian if memory serves me correct.

“Jorty”, for the fox. Again, Native American.

“Dobran” for the beaver which I'm pretty sure is a derivative from a Sumerian folk tale, a beaver character named 'Doboranian' or something like that.

“Micha” for the rabbit, which was Asian. 'Mi kah' was a bad bunny in some Japanese fairy tale. Not a pleasant fellow at all...

There, I had my protagonists. Now what?

As I sketched in my notebooks, my longtime love of mythology and fascination with theology kept coming up. I wanted to create a whole new world, yet it had to be absolutely familiar. A forest setting, of course. “The Woodland” as I call it. Then the notion of a “higher power” kept creeping in. Now, I didn't want this to be some “christian” book or have the religious overtones of some CS Lewis series, but I do like the idea of the great artist creating the play field for our forest friends. After much shifting and moving ideas around, I settled on the innocuous “Almighty” as the governor in the sky. These are animals mind you. Who makes the rain? What makes the sun rise and fall? Etc. Plus divine intervention is always a fun thing to play with.

Then the story started to evolve. I wanted our five friends, the beaver, squirrel, elk, fox and rabbit, to be sort of outcasts within the Woodland. In an environment filled with simple hunters and gatherers, these five want just a bit more than a life laid out in such simple terms. Through trial and error, they found each other and, although they are all quite different from one another, rely on one other for support. Their bond and friendship is essentially misunderstood and even looked down upon by the other inhabitants and clans of the Woodland. So they keep their group a secret and even meet in a secret and hidden away place.

The Thicket.

Now I just needed a story. I had this idea about the bears governing the Woodland like some lazy, spoiled royal family. The idea of bears just lounging around and being “in charge” was compelling and rather amusing to me. Fat kings and queens with servants at their beck and call, so to speak. But that needed more substance. So I threw in a connection with the owls, which are birds that are always related to 'wisdom'. Why? Owls are essentially vicious predators, but because they look the part of some wise old creature, along with endless tales and tomes about them being so, I wanted to smash that. So an allegiance between the two factions started to take form; a sort of dictatorship over the Woodland so to speak.

But that storyline could only go so far for a writer like me. I'm not very political and I really didn't want kids and their parents to be bored by some furry woodland creatures being overrun by bears and owls and they somehow triumph over them in the end somehow. Still, it was intriguing.

One afternoon, as I was peddling around in the garden, I had my stereo on with music on shuffle, playing fairly loudly as I pruned and planted. A song came on that would get the serious and exciting meat of the story going in the direction that I wanted. A band called Scorn, which, at the time, was a very heavy and brooding industrial metal band, did a very long and almost ambient cover of Black Sabbath's “The Wizard”. Clocking in at almost 12 minutes, it chimed with thundering beats, distorted guitars, lulling soundscapes and vocals echoing into near obscurity. After a lengthy instrumental break, and me sitting on the porch calmly repotting, these words fell over the cool afternoon breeze:

“Black sun rising...”

For some odd reason, those words and the way they were said, moved me to stop what I was doing, run into the house, grab a pencil and paper and scribble it down, dirty hands and all. That's it, I realized. I now have my starting point and dark mythological edge to the book. But what caused the sun to black out? Who cares? Let's get writing!

Early the next morning I opened a blank word document and began typing. Hours later, I had the characters introduced, the menace of a blacked out sun looming, panic and terror within the Woodland and other threats and pitfalls for our protagonists to play with. The words and story just started to come and every morning, for five months straight, before and after my shift at the restaurant and on my days off, I wrote and wrote, getting deeper and deeper into the Woodland and all the secrets it holds.

The journey started early November of 2009, and one sleepy afternoon in late March of 2010, 300 + pages later, I finally typed those both welcome and dreaded two words:

The End.

Then some tears came, a beer was opened and I sat on the patio looking out onto the brisk Arizona spring air and sighed.

“Now what?”, I wondered.

As with my first book, “Rabbit Every Tuesday”, which was a wonderful learning tool, I now knew that the hard part was upon me. Editing, writing query letters, an author bio, synopsis of a book that is hard to explain outside of just reading it, and trying to find the right agent and publisher to get such a heady and epic (yet still funny and cute!) book out there for a whole new generation of readers.

Waning is the time of young vampires in love, adolescent wizards in trouble and tweens that love to shop. Arise the age of furry woodland creature!

Oh and this is just the beginning. Wait till you read book two. Hoo doggies!

Thank you.

-Mark Whittaker