It is with a certain sadness that I announce the passing of Steve Warrington the ostrich monger.

For rather than feeling like I had gained a certain bit more universal traction with one less namesake to share the world with, I felt a certain kinship with this particularly strange Steve Warrington, and so feel his absence now like a piece (albeit small) of myself that is now gone.

But some good has come of this gloom: the ostrich monger owned stevewarrington.com, and having contacted his estate to inquire about the possibility of the purchase of his domain, was able to work out a handsome deal with the executor to make the domain mine. Now, for all negative one of my type-in visitors, you now have two less letters to poke: stephenwarrington.com is now stevewarrington.com.

So update your bookmarks and reprogram your navigators, boys blink your browsers and girls flush your caches. This e-ournal is about to get buck. wild.

My typical answer to “what do you do?” sometimes invites a metric tonne of questions that I do not feel like answering. I have learned to say “Internet marketing.” in a tone that does a pretty good job of closing the topic. But today I have stumbled upon a better answer. Please.

Courtney and I stepped outside for a moment to enjoy one of the last warm nights of the year, and stood looking down at the pumpkins we had painted instead of carved for Halloween this year. Which is your favorite? she said. I was quiet a long time considering it. You don’t have to be nice, she said. I wasn’t going to be, I said, I was just having a hard time deciding. Then I pointed to one of mine. I really like this one, and another, and this one, and another, and this one... She laughed.

I like the way yours look, I said, but I just want to touch mine. She was quiet. I elaborated: I’m quite fond of yours, and I pointed at one with beautiful dots, but this one, indicating a small one of mine with green and blue swirls, I kinda want to sleep with this one.

Pumpkin porn, she said. Exactly, I said.

Despite getting a ton of visits to my vegetable porn post from people who  – I’m guessing! – were looking for something a bit less wholesome than an affectionate close-up of a gorgeous watermelon rind, it is only appropriate to refer to the whole-body experience these pumpkins produced in me when naming this post. For all you visitors looking to see the hardcore stuff, you will be far happier here.

I don’t mind that liking the color pink makes strangers wonder if I’m gay, or if I support breast cancer, but I am proud of the fact that my ability to compartmentalize politics and aesthetics leaves me free to love the color in a vacuum, devoid of the BS the rest of the world brings to such a nice, (effeminate, breasty) shade of my favorite color red, and that that ability sets me apart as one of a few, a proud, a aesthetes.

And I might even go so far as to call myself an early adopter of this particular round of pink in-ness. Waaay back in aught-two I was preaching the merits of the handsome j crew pink khakis, etc, while all you philistines was still taking cargo pants to the next level.

But when the susan b komen marketing machine begins to take over my world, putting pink towels on the belts of quarterbacks and pink pistol-grips on glocks, i.e. when pink becomes so ubiquitous that I am unable to compartmentalize my appreciation of it from the rest of the world’s clamoring, then I begin to feel a bit put upon.

Because it is nowhere near as much fun to love something that every other soul on this planet loves as it is to alone love something.

Jack surprised us all when he showed us this video he made using animation software from the web. It had us all L-ing OL at the understated yuks. I with I could make videos that funny.

There is a signature look that one gets from the employees of a certain establishments where morale is low. The first part of that look is that it is a look at all. In general, as a customer, I am grateful to to be acknowledged and left alone. In this dynamic, I’m one of a faceless blur. A healthy company’s employees treat me as if I were special, but they do this as a rule, to every customer. It’s when I sense that I’m being looked at by an employee as an individual that I get uncomfortable.

Despite everything corporations say about treating every customer as if he/she were the only one, endowing a customer with the kind of individuality that I’m talking about, that is, treating a customer as a human, belies an imbalance in the viewer. There is something lacking in an employee who sees a customer not as a customer but as a person that makes them bigger than they ought to be. They are discontent, and it manifests itself in various ways: resentment and lust being the two popular ones.

That I am seen at all is disquieting. Then there is the matter of the sentiment of the gaze.

It is not so much what is in the look, but what is lacking from it. There is no sense that we are sharing in a symbiotic relationship of consumer and provider. Rather, it is a look from across a divide, it is an “us vs.  them” look. It is a look that leaks wariness.  I saw that look tonight at Frita Batidos when we walked in. Again as we left and two employees trained their eyes on the mess our children had made underneath our table.

And then there was the employee who rolled her eyes at the customer in front of me as he walked away. As a rule, eye-rolling at customers is not good for business. If I see you roll eyes at another customer, I can only assume you’ll roll your eyes at me when I turn my back.

This look, it is the result of bad management. There is only ever one explanation for discontented employees, and that is a management style that alienates and demoralizes.

There are two other examples that come to mind of local businesses suffering from poor management: Plum Market, which I have always understood to be a place where unhappy people with disposable income go to shop. The now-defunct Merchant of Vino is another one from a few years ago. Merchant was coincidentally run then by the same founders as Plum. I shudder still when I remember the frequency of the tensely surreptitious looks from the produce stockers when you walked in the door. The Beckettian I can’t look, I must look conflict of a person at odds with their own discontent. They were horribly ashamed to be so pathetically bored.

It is offputting to be made aware that you have that power as a customer. I tend not to want to go back.

I can’t go back. I must go back (because I always convince myself that this time… this time it’ll be different).

I am not in the habit of writing reviews of restaurants as I rarely feel compelled to force my bitchiness judgments of a particular establishments merits on another’s subjective experience, but tonight’s dinner at Frita Batidos was so piss-poor that I feel obliged to warn others for their own protection.

This was my fourth meal there. The first two were fine, a little shaky, but charming enough to warrant further inspection. The vibe was a bit much: the staff seemed to be high on the fresh start (according to an unimpeachable source, Frita’s owner, Eve Aranoff, stiffed investors and staff alike as her last venture crumbled), and sold the concept of every item in booming uber-enthusiastic voices that made it hard to taste the food for yourself, and I had a hard time hearing my companion(s) because of the canyonesque acoustics of the room, but the sandwiches were good (can you go wrong with chorizo and french fries?) and, despite inconsistency and items that failed to live up to the hype (conch fritters), most of the ingredients and combinations were thrilling and novel, so I was willing to go back for more.

The second time we casually commented to an employee about the noise. “We’ve heard that, yeah.” the server said. “The Roadhouse had that problem,” I said, “they put up some baffles in the dining room and that was that.” I half expected to find baffles the next time I went in.

The third time was not-so-charming. The fruit flies arrived at Frita Batidos in late summer (big, juicy, jungular ones – they must have ridden in on a carton of mangos), and were a nuisance while we ate. It was also disquieting to have a half dozen buzzing around with me in the cramped bathroom. And to my surprise, after a lapse of more than six months, nothing had yet been done about the cacophony.

All of this prelude to tonight’s dénouement. Shall we begin? How about with the flies.

Apparently, they loved it so much this summer they moved in permanently. We (Courtney, Henry and I, and our friend and her two children) decided to try the furthest-back table, hoping to keep our kids’ high chair legs out of the crowd by the order counter and also hoping that it would be beyond the canyon of noise. It worked for the former. We couldn’t gauge the latter. More on that later.

Behind our table, against the wall, was a trash can. Above and around this can, clinging to the wall and the pile of napkins and the bottles of condiments on the shelf at the end of our table, were somewhere between fifty and a hundred fruit flies. It took us a few minutes to notice them (they were mostly still, and small enough to blend in to the dark nooks and crannies of the whitewashed brick) but by meal’s end they were restless or hungry enough that they had come off the wall and into our circle and we were vigorously shooing them from our faces and food.

At one point, after noticing them early on, I joked with an employee that had sent them flying when he moved some decorative bamboo stalks near the trash: “Mind those flies now,” I said, and he chuckled. “A shop vac will really do the trick.” I tried again when he missed the subtle call for help. He walked off with the bamboo and I did not see him again. It would appear that that early booming enthusiasm has been replaced by chuckles and apathy.

Our food came moments later. I liked my chorizo sandwich. But then I found a hair in it, nice and dark and curly, facial or pubic I couldn’t decide without my gag reflex activating. I set it aside and finished my sandwich – I compartmentalize well. I understand that this happens. Still, it can’t help but be added to the negative impression I was cumulating.

I will venture that it did indeed seem quieter in the back with the flies and the pubic hair, at first. But then the music coming out of the speakers directly behind and above our table was turned either on or up. Whichever, it was so loud that we all paused in our conversation, waiting for order to be restored. When it was not I turned and got the attention of the employee behind the counter and motioned a request for him to turn it down. He did not understand my gestures for a long moment. Someone out of view turned it down at last.

Twenty minutes later we were finishing our food. Henry asked for another of the pretty umbrellas that came with a drink. The music volume had also crept back up to an unbearable level. “I’ll ask,” I said, and got up with Henry. There was a man ordering at the counter. I did not notice anything remarkable about his manner. He finished and turned away, and I looked at the clusters of customers milling abjectly near the counter, waiting for, I presume, to-go orders, to make sure that I wasn’t cutting in line. Satisfied, I stepped forward and looked up at the woman, who had just completed an eye roll to her (bearded! off-duty or non-employee) companion (about, I presume, the man who had just ordered). She was nice to Henry and I, took time to offer him his choice of pretty umbrellas colors, and made small talk. I thanked her and asked her if she could turn the music down. She said she would. I am not certain she did.

We left soon after so that we could hear ourselves finish a conversation. I considered warning the couple I saw eyeing our table about the flies as we prepared to go, but decided against it. I could not gauge them and wasn’t confident that they would appreciate my input. We walked out, through that abject crowd, and as we hit the air outside I felt noticeably relieved. I turned around as we waited for our friend, and looking back in it was clear. It was written all over all of their faces: “I can’t come back to this place anymore,” I said after a moment. “There is something really off in there.”

Frita Batidos In summary:
Flies: Really, really, really gross. Reported, observed, ignored.
The Hair: Ick.
Inordinate Volume: Requested. Ignored.
Atmosphere: Stifling.

I want to reassure you that I am a material man, that my first impulse is not to think metaphysically about these kinds of things. But dudes I am telling you it was awfully hard to avert my thoughts from the possibility that the universe was trying to tell say something to me here. Or rather shout it.

I kept thinking about the This American Life episode in which Spalding Gray’s widow tells the story of the bird that visited and revisited their family after he disappeared. She refers to an Irish story: “if you find a bird in your house after someone dies and it’s alive, the person’s soul is free. And if you find a dead bird, the person’s soul is restless.”

She didn’t say anything about if a bird lands on your head and then can’t be shooed, but I am inclined to believe it is a good sign.

Also, this business about foo shit.

1. The mound view of the Mound View Inn has been obscured by a Wal Mart. 

2. Entry to the room is gained via metal key. Not even a big, blocky, old-school-but-still-of-this-generation-albeit-pre-plastic-swipey hotel key, but a regular old toothy key, a just-like-my-house-key key.

3. The dead bolt can’t be turned from the outside. Only just barely from the inside.

4. No little bottle of lotion? C’mon.

5. Flapjack pillows, two per bed, tucked into hunnert-percent polyester sheets and blankets.

6. The tag hanging from the inside doorknob reads: “MAID PLEASE HAVE THIS ROOM MADE UP AS SOON AS POSSIBLE.” I.e., if you want your room cleaned, you have to execute the extra step of laying out the tag – the default is: NO SERVICE. After fortunately noticing this text this mid-afternoon, I put the tag out as I left , only to realize upon my late-night return that it was two-sided. The opposite reads: PLEASE DO NOT DISTURB.

(p.s. how I love the declarative of this sentence: “MAID!” Not an impersonal address to any and/or all maids but an irontight, hands on the back of the neck “HEY YOU! (who happens to be passing by) YEAH YOU! CHOP-CHOP WITH THIS CLEANING!”)

7. The last guest to inhabit my room covered the peephole (a peephole. in a hotel room.) with a corner of ruled eight and a half by eleven. To avoid, I suppose, being peeped from without. Though one can never be sure it wasn’t the without that he was protecting himself from casually or paranoically peeping. Third hand, could have been a she.

peep me not

All of this I could happily tolerate were it not for the sadness that seeps from the walls of the long narrow unbroken hallway outside my room and pools in the murky green shadows of the compact florescent lights ensconced on the dinghy used-to-be-white walls.. Thanks to the abovementioned seven signs I am now (at last) tuned in to and – as ever – averse to the sadness that I couldn’t at first smell. Mayhaps by next time I will have learnt my lesson and will see (or hear, or smell) that whatever distance between my destination and the nearest five-star is “dudes, totes do-able.”