Dan White

Just got back from a Santa Cruz-area farmer’s market, where I paid $5 a pound for fancy apricots. One of them looked so good that I started eating it in spite of the obvious hole in it. “I’ll just eat around it,” I said to myself. So there I was, chomping away, but when I got to the pit, there was a fat, juicy, disgusting earwig sitting in the middle of that apricot, clacking its mandibles, wiggling its antenna, with a “what the &%$@ are you looking at?” expression on its face. The weird thing is, the bug was so much bigger than the hole it must have crawled into to go inside the apricot in the first place. I guess he hung out there for a while, eating the inside of the apricot and getting so fat that he couldn’t get out again, like the squirrel protagonist in Timmy…

At the bottom of this blog entry, you will find a link to my brief cultural history of the UCSC Banana Slug, published on UCSC’s news page. Just so you know, the slug mascot turns 25 this year. As I mention in my story, the slug is popular now but it used to be a counter-cultural upstart, caught in a rivalry with another animal that wanted to represent UCSC. To find out which animal I’m talking about, you’ll just have to click on that link and read the whole thing. As part of my due diligence for this story, I asked for (and received) permission from Hank Card of the Austin Lounge Lizards to use their unofficial UCSC banana slug fight song in the story. You can hear it in both video clips. By the way, Hank Card was kind enough to give me a bit of background about the…

OK, this post is older than the hills, but a couple of people mentioned it to me so here it is a second time. It’s a list of things you should never, ever do during any outdoor excursion. The Cactuseaters List of Backcountry “Don’ts” (the unexpurgated version!) NEVER bring a fondue maker into the woods with you. The bread crumbs, fruit wedges, gas and molten cheese will form a white magma that will spew all over you, leaving fourth-degree burns all over your entire body. NEVER cook a meal while sitting inside your tent, even when it’s raining outside. (Trust me. Your tent will explode.) NEVER forget that “freeze-dried’’ and “chili’’ is a very bad combination. (Trust me. You will explode.) NEVER try to reason with anyone riding an All-Terrain Vehicle — especially if he or she is drunk and holding a 12-gauge Mossberg hunting rifle and wearing a knit…

I see a Mayflower truck out there right now. Hooray! I mean, “Bon voyage”! http://cactuseaters.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

There is a violent gardener in my neighborhood. Call him Mister Green Fist. He put a defeatist sign up in front of his victory garden. The sign (which faces a busy thoroughfare) warns that he’ll “beat the crap” out of anyone who messes with his flowers. Will upload a photo of that sign when I work up the courage to take a snapshot. Speaking of wickedness and extreme gardening, I am eager to go see Amy Stewart, bestselling author of Wicked Plants, when she arrives in Capitola to read from her new book, Wicked Bugs, on Wednesday June 8 at the Book Cafe. The talk begins at 7:30 p.m. I didn’t realize that Ms. Stewart is a former Santa Cruzan. For the sake of this book, she tracked down 100 of our most horrifying bug enemies, from disease-vector flies to bugs that can turn entire libraries into mulch. Stewart’s books…

I’ve read so many memoirs that skirt around issues like race, class, family dynamics and the “prestige track,” the rut that can trap aspiring editors and authors into low-paying but impressive and privileged positions. Ben Ryder Howe’s My Korean Deli jumps into these issues right from the beginning. Here’s what happens when an author and editor refuses to get off the prestige track altogether (he refuses to abdicate his low-paying position at the Paris Review) even while taking an extreme step toward possible financial independence (he and various in-laws pool their resources to buy a delicatessen in Brooklyn.) As the book progresses, you can see the author struggling to maintain his footholds in the store and at the magazine — an increasingly difficult task, as you’ll see. I did not know that an author could extract so much narrative juice from store ownership. If you think it looks like a…

Since moving back to Santa Cruz, I’ve added a new tradition to my life: heading up the hill, jostling for parking, and making my way to the UCSC student Print Sale, which is coming up next Friday. Some of the stuff is dirt cheap. Other stuff is quite expensive. All profits go to the artists. They have all kinds of handmade books, posters, children’s illustrations, portraits and lithographs. Last year I saw pictures of bristlecones, moths, Easter Island heads, dancing bears, possessed clowns, and recreated old-time California maps. Last year I bought a wood-block print showing five owls standing in the crook of a moonlit yew tree. It’s hanging above me as I write this. Below the owls, there are five dangling ribbons with an inscription running across them in French. I have no idea what it means. http://cactuseaters.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

Here are a few new or new-ish books that you — both of you — might like. Stewart O’Nan’s Emily, Alone is marvelous. In this slender book, old people live in an in-between world. Just driving across town — braving roundabouts, moving in and out of tight garages in a big clunky boat of a car — is an Odyssey in itself. Emily, the title character, lives in a crooked piece of time. She’s trying hard to hold on to her routine, her memories, and her vitality. At the same time, she’s moving toward resignation. At one point in the story, Emily is filling out holiday cards, a task she despises but can’t bring herself to give up. She glances at her address book and notices a near-perfect split between the list of friends who are still alive and those who died years ago, or moved away. It’s just one…

If you’ve never been to Nisene Marks, get in your car and go there now. It just rained, and the place is oozing with giant banana slugs — skinny ones, fat ones, short ones, curly ones, straight ones, green ones, yellow ones, old ones, baby ones. I was only there for an hour, and I saw 25 of these slime-covored creatures without trying. Strange that I saw exactly that number, considering this is the 25th anniversary of Sammy the Slug, the mascot over at UC Santa Cruz. Coincidence? Yes. http://cactuseaters.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

On Cinco de Mayo, one of neighbors got really drunk, staggered out into the street and began to shout a list of specific grievances to his housemates. Since I couldn’t sleep anyhow (he woke me up at 1:55 in the morning with his shrieking, bellowing and sidewalk stomping), I took out a pen and wrote down his rantings, verbatim. Here is his list of grievances: 1. His friends are insensitive to his needs.2. His friends (male as well as female) refuse to touch him in affectionate ways. He was especially concerned that his housemates touch each other’s knees during conversations but rarely if ever touch him on the knee. In fact he cannot remember “one freaking time” when they’ve touched him on the knee.3. His friends rarely hug him.3. He has low self-esteem. His friends are responsible for his lack of self esteem. The lack of knee-touching and hugs makes…