the downtown zebra

let me recount the best halloween ever with my cousin jeff.

wait a minute, let me back up.

i hate halloween. hate it. bah-humbug. don't enjoy it.

i am reasonably sure that the hatred started in my youth but is rooted in my bloodline. believe it. i just found out a few days that not only my mother hates halloween (its no wonder dad was always on duty for dragging us around the neighborhoods), so does her sister and brother. this was big news. it explained a lot. it will be worthwhile in the next year or so to dig deeper in to the family tree and see if there are mysterious photos of my great great grandpa HANK holding up a sign reading "fuck halloween."

ok, so maybe profanity wasnt necessary there, but profanity always proves a point. and i hate halloween. i want to tell you why.

going back to my youth i was always a bit on the husky side. i was very frequently getting the "philip, you just dont know how strong you are" line from mom when i would accidentally dislocate friends' shoulder's and things like that. as such, i never fit in to the cool costumes that you would find at halloween USA or meijer.

nope, just not happening.

i was permanently demoted to being a football player for something like 6 years straight (with the exception of being a pirate in kindergarten-- it should be noted, however, that the pants didnt fit and that we had to cut slits in the side to stretch them around my waist) because in my eyes that was cool. every single halloween when all the students at central elementary would line up single file and do the halloween parade after we had worn our costumes to school i would plod along in the middle of the line donning my detroit lions costume.

6 years in a row. this is enough repetition to bore a hamster. this is the beginning of halloween hatred.

living in michigan around halloween time was painful. it was always cold and rainy on halloween. now, try wearing a silly hutch football uniform in these conditions-- tight football pants, short-sleeve jersey, helmet, etc. then before i would hit the streets for a night of candy parading, i would be instructed that i had to wear a jacket under my football pads in order to prevent the onslaught of sickness throughout the night.

bullshit. this killed the costume.

instead of looking like a burly football player i now looked like the pilsbury dough boy. try walking around trick-or-treating and having people tell you your dough boy costume is great. fuck that.

fast forward now.

college. wooo! halloween parties! everyone loved halloween because the girls managed to create a slutty version of nearly everything. what started humorously as the slutty cop eventually morphed in to things like slutty librarians, slutty veterinarians, etc. all of the sudden the girl who didnt say anything in your geology class showed up to the party with two 40's taped to her hands wearing a slutty gorilla outfit.

absurd. this holiday somehow became the coveted invitation for college youth to just act like slutty idiots.

i still hated it.

the parties ended up being absolute shit-shows and nobody ever remembered anything anyway. i can remember one where i managed to break a tabletop in the living room by standing on top of it trying to dance. i had consumed a pint of blue label popov vodka for the occasion. now, for those that dont know, this stuff duly acts as paint stripper but was perfectly suitable for getting absolutely anihilated on halloween night my freshman year.

i never put thought in to my costumes and this killed halloween for me as well. sure, this is my fault. getting a halloween costume involved going to goodwill the day before and trying to finagle my way in to something of a costume. lord knows the day before halloween everything in all the thrift stores had been filtered through and what remained was rubbish reserved for me. as such my costumes always sucked.

one year i was an old lady-- this was my attempt at wearing something comfortable and warm (hot pink crushed velvet stretch pants, multi-colored windbreaker with my wool sweater beneath it). if i was going to participate in this stupid day, i was definitely going to be comfortable and warm in my costume.

the best costume i ever came up with was in 2002. i dressed up as everyone's best friend steve irwin. god bless his soul, its no wonder halloween was at least tolerable that year. but rest assured, shit hit the fan when a ceiling tile fell on my head later in the night.

halloween still sucked.

now, post-college.

there are no more slutty winnie-the-pooh costumes all over the place and i am no longer drinking popov vodka.

awesome.

so, we roll up to the great salt lake city on october 31, 2007-- halloween night. it was approximately 5:12pm when i pulled up to cousin jeff's house. as we pulled in, i was secretly saying hail mary's in the drivers seat in hopes that jeff will not bounce out of his house in a costume screaming that he has a shitkicker of a costume party for us to attend that evening.

oh, the suspense.

i think within 10 minutes of our coming together i inquired about the plans for the evening. this was very important. and it was like angels, wizards, doves, panda bears, puppy dogs and everything else adorable in this world were singing the words "i have no plans" when jeff replied with such news.

beholdeth! the great news hath come upon me!

i was jumping for joy inside, there were no plans on halloween night.

and thats just it, that was the best halloween ever. there were no shitty costumes, there would beno paint-strippper vodka, there were no falling ceiling tiles, no trips to goodwill shop, the weather was uncharacteristically beautiful.

instead cousin jeff, his girlfriend kirsten, brad and i produced a medium-sized arsenal of halloween candy and increased our pabst blue ribbon stockpile to somewhere in the neighborhood of about 32 cans.

delightful.

what ensued that evening is just exactly how every halloween should be: family, friends, candy and beer. doesnt that sound so wholesome? i could be mistaken for martha stewart right now giving an account of her favorite halloween. but no.

we handed out halloween candy to what turned out to be a cheery and polite group of kids in the neighborhood (sans the kid that showed up as a box of kleenex with the words "blow me" written across the front. i will give creative points there, however). brad ate approximately 98 bit-o-honeys. we killed all the beer. and we laughed a lot becuase halloween was fun this year.

i loved halloween for the first time in my life.

and the fun didnt stop there. hanging with jeff in salt lake turned out to be something of a legendary time. he was a gracious host to two smelly, grimy roadies and didnt bat an eye. he even gave me his coffee press so that i could stop drinking the instant folgers crap that has been littering my stomach the past couple weeks. just a champion that cousin jeff, just a champion.

i think i could have stayed in salt lake for a while-- having a bed, a house with ample amounts of coffee and a patio to sit on was more than luxury. it was tough saying goodbye.

and then all hell broke loose.

well, sort of.

en route to jackson, wyoming i got the red light of fury.

we stopped at the idaho border crossing over from utah (you have to cross over to idaho from utah to get in to jackson) so that i could get a photo with the sign that welcomed us in to the great state. all throughout my life i have had some sort of romantic vision of idaho-- this relatively undiscovered frontier. it is an odd-shaped state and i think this intrigued me in early days of map-glancing. plus, nobody ever talked about trips to idaho or the lovely sandy beaches that it had. the only thing i could associate with idaho were potatoes and napoleon dynamite-- but even that was a stretch.

so here we sat on the border of idaho, taking photos of the sign. we hopped back in the car and i really gave the accelerator hell.

within approximately 53 seconds of pedal-to-the-metal activity i got the red light.

CHECK ENGINE.

ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh god.

for those that dont know, i have something of an extremely rough past with cars and check engine lights. i really dont want to re-hash the nightmare that was, but basically i bought a giant conversion van a few months ago and within 3 hours of driving it off the owners driveway the check engine light went on.

awesome.

i took the monster to the local auto zone and told the attendant my situation. i was sweating profusely and struggling to put cohesive sentences together. the young man hooked it up to the computer and prompty told me, in these very words:

"you got boned, man."

turns out this gorilla of a van was misfiring on all 8 cylinders. after a quick look under the hood, he estimated the repair bill to cost somewhere in the neighborhood a few G's.

WOW, that was an interesting moment. i think i was seeing stars.

after about 14 hours of scrambling i got the situation sorted and i took that van right back to the owner and somehow managed to get my money back.

fine, dandy, sweet, super story--- but christ, now i had this damn check engine light on.

4 weeks ago i nearly sold my soul to the local mechanic for him to look over my truck. he did everything under the sun to it fixing joints and harnesses and hubs and sprockets and doing things with fluids-- of which i was clueless in the purpose of. i was reasonably sure, based on the work performed that this vehicle of mine was in it to win it.

and there i sat with the check engine light on.

step 1: owners manual. consult the owners manual. read. brad was feverishly rifling through the pages trying to find news on the issue.

step 2: sweat. sweat a lot. i am sweating under my finger nails at this point.

step 2.5: sweat some more because this is what i do in situations that involve engine lights and long haul trips.

step 3: resolution. after a bit of scholarly analysis, we deemed the vehicle road-worthy and concluded that we had filled the tank with a bad batch of fuel. stupid vehicle emissions.

turns out we were right.

check engine no more 3 days later.

now thats how car mechanics should work: issue comes up, sweat it out, read a bit, let it sit, car re-calibrates and issue resolved.

awesome.

it should be noted that this is auto fix number two on the road (recall the blown fuse fiasco)-- i am considering something of a career in what i like to call informed auto therapy.

so now that the wheels were good as gold, we moved onwards.

we showed up in yellowstone with complete fur trapping guidebooks, binoculars, plant specimen digests and a full-on crisis plan in the event that we would actually spot a grizzly.

"hey brad, when i was in alaska they told us that if you spot a bear you lay down and act dead or you just crouch real low cause bears cant see you at that height. it changes for black and brown bears though. i think you crouch for black bears and act dead for brown bears."

"right. as i understand it, our best bet is to band together and start screaming as loud as possible. i will have my camera handy if this actually happens."

awesome, so we totally had a plan. if we saw a bear we were either screaming, acting dead or crouching on the ground-- three completely opposite activities and we would do one of them in the event that we spotted a big fury creature.

that was the crisis plan. sweet.

well, it turns out yellowstone was closed.

awesome.

we shoved off after a casual walk through the park (you can hike or bike in the park just cars cannot pass through). this casual walk yielded no bear sightings, however. this was mildly devastating to both brad and i given our level of preparedness.

driving from west yellowstone in to montana was an absolute sweetheart of a drive. i can wholeheartedly proclaim that it was my favorite stretch of road we have happened upon thus far. the terrain is mountainous-- picture jagged peaks with ample amounts of vegetation to cover them, streams and rivers are abundant, evergreens all the hell over, clear skies and crisp fresh air-- absolute beauty. montana clearly walks the walk-- this place is gorgeous. i would venture to say that i will be coming back to this great state at some point.

bozeman, montana!

arrival time was 5:22pm and it was already dark. this time change bologna and cheese is seriously making me loopy. now, pulling in to a cowboy town in the darkness at an early evening hour calls for one thing, and one thing only:

shopping trip.

CORRAL WESTERNWEAR. you betcha.

holy shit, that place was just amazing. everything a cowboy like myself could ever want. i took a long time looking at the cowboy boots. equally as impressive was the time i spent marvelling at the western style button down shirts. the intricate designs on both items was something of small miracle. now, a cowboy like myself enjoys good denim and i will tell you something-- i heard those same doves and wizards singing beautiful sounds when i stepped in front of the wrangler denim stand.

oh you bet. you wanna talk about falling for someone? love at first sight? oh, right there when my pupils calibrated to the sight that was in front of me.

i am extremely pleased to announce that i am the proud owner of an official rodeo novelty: wrangler denim jeans. and these arent your everyday run of the mill trousers-- they are the real deal. cowboys wear these things.

trust me, i fit right in that night at the bar.

we happened upon the crystal bar on main street in bozeman and met an interesting cast of characters. i am very pleased that people of bozeman are of the nicest variety. this was refreshing.

we havent been going out all that often because bar tabs add up, waking up hungover in the back of a pickup truck is not that fun and to be completely honest, some of the places we have gone had bars that were frightening.

we played some pool and i enjoyed a local montanian beer-- of which i couldnt even attempt to remember the title of. montana state university is just down the street so there was a decent contingency of young people drinking that night. turns out wednesday is the best goddamn night for drinking according to a couple of our newly-acquired friends. it also turns that at the next bar you could get any variety of whisky for a nominal fee of $2.

ummmm, yeah.

this place was the downtown zebra. and although it most closely resembled a cold-war era subterranean prison it was probably the best thing that could have happened to me that night. we met some cool folks and had a hell of a time.

no night on the town is complete without a bedtime snack and this night would be no different. i got in to someone's backyard to plug in our water-boiler-extraoirdinaire and voila! ramen was produced. eating those delectable noodles on the tailgate before the evening sleep was a fitting conclusion for COWBOYS LIKE US.

(cue the song. and play)