Bread and Bread

Take that, all you uber-healthy wheelchair racer types. A few nights ago, because I still can’t go to sleep without images and voices flashing on a screen, I started watching Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan . I remembered the documentary coming out when I was in college, and it had stuck with me—maybe because in elementary school I’d watched Alex: The Life of a Child a bunch of times. It was a TV movie about a girl who died of cystic fibrosis, the disease Bob Flanagan had, and as a kid I thought, Cool! Bob Flanagan was prodded with needles and choked with mucous from the time he was a few months old. He knew about pain. He knew about not being in control of his body. And so his brain did what funny human brains do, and decided to take control by liking pain. (You can’t fire me, I quit.) He became a masochist, and as the documentary reveals in his interactions with his mistress wife, the bottom is always really the one in control. He became a performance artist, ...

Right now I’m in San Diego for work, staying the Crowne Plaza Hanalei. It has a Hawaiian theme, in case you couldn’t guess. There are waterfalls and tiki statues in the hallways, and canoes hanging from the roof of the valet area. My room is nonsmoking but you would not know from the smell. I don’t mind, though, because it reminds me of the approximately four times I stayed in a hotel room as a kid. Mostly my family went camping, which my dad, at least, found vastly preferable to expensive, smoky hotel rooms. Meaning, naturally, that my sister and I loved the forbidden fruit that was hotel life. Once in a while he was forced to attend a conference in San Diego, and his organization put him up at a budget hotel. We came along so that we could all go camping afterward. The hotel had waterfalls and koi ponds, smoky rooms and a pool that I did my best to spend every waking moment in. I don’t know if I’m staying in that hotel now, although the era of the architecture seems abo...

1. rush hour with bears Last night we ate dinner at a place called the Silk Road —and in case you’re wondering where Missoula keeps its fusion restaurants and funk stores, it’s on The Hip Strip. It’s actually called that. The Silk Road’s schtick is international tapas. It’s a pretty new restaurant and when we walked in, the host/possible manager or owner asked where we were from and proceeded to explain how tapas worked, then sort of half apologized, like, Oh, you’re from L.A., you must be cosmopolitan. (Other people just said, “Is there any time of day that isn’t rush hour?”) But the trying-so-hard vibe was friendly and the food would hold up to or surpass any place in L.A. For $26 plus tip, we had fried goat cheese ravioli, seared shrimp with grilled peaches, an amazing pile of savory French-ish mushrooms and a dessert appropriately named “The Bombe”—chocolate-covered sea salt-flavored ice cream cake. Then we walked along the river and watched the multigenerationa...