Dear Cameron,

These are trying times, as I’m sure you’re aware, and a girl needs a place where she can forget about what troubles her for a spell. An urban place where she can sit on a tall stool in a corner by a window, chin on her palm and one leg crossed over the other, her feet falling asleep for all the dangling and legs clad in skinny jeans and the fabulously stylish red shoes that are—after a long day of circumnavigating Republicans in the workplace—just a little too tight.

She needs a place where she can feel like she’s part of a hip trend but is simultaneously indulging in one of the city’s best-kept secrets, a place where she can flirt mercilessly with a cute waiter but still be more discreet than the 20-something set. In short, she needs a place where she is transported to the Amalfi Coast by sipping citrus-infused Prosecco while feeding her inner Parisian with a ham and butter sandwich.

It takes a special person to recognize the complex pleasures and healing properties of such a simple combination; it takes an enlightened individual to put a ham and butter sandwich on his menu. No offense, Cam, but I have it on good account that there’s a woman behind that decision.

Counterpoint is my go-to spot du jour when things become dire. And after last week, I had my face set on devouring one—possibly two—of your little Euro cholesterol bombs to assuage my ever-sinking faith in humanity. I was ravenous when I arrived on Wednesday night. So you can imagine my dismay when nowhere among your eight sandwiches did I see the specialty on which I’d set my face.

“Sorry, but we took it off the menu,” said your muscular bar boy Ryan with the dangerous, laser-beam eyes and tight gray T-shirt. I nearly started to cry, I was in such agony. “But the fried bologna is really great!” He was trying to fix things. “We could share it,” he said.

Maybe you should give him a raise.

“Could we feed it to each other?” I asked. I may have twisted a strand of hair around my finger just then. OK, so I wasn’t more respectable than your younger patrons. But I wanted Ryan to be so enraptured that his only choice was to present me with a ham and butter sandwich! This is comfort food, and I was despondent. Have you, by any chance, had time between changing the beer on your taps to read the news lately? It’s ugly, Cam. U-G-L-Y.

This will probably come as a shock to you, but BP has been low-balling / disguising / hiding / lying about (choose your descriptor) the estimated number of gallons of oil pouring into the Gulf of Mexico. Steve Wereley, a mechanical engineer at Purdue University, told Congress on May 19 that, actually, no, there is no way in the deep, deep pockets of greedy oil companies promising to pay for “legitimate and objectively verifiable” damages that 5,000 barrels of oil are pouring out each day. The real number is somewhere around 20 times that much. Did you watch the video of the oil gushing, Cam? It’s breathtaking. NPR correspondent Richard Harris encouraged listeners to imagine seven fire hoses on full blast all the time to get an idea of the oil currently “mushrooming” into our ecosystems. It took the images of an oil-drenched soft-shell crab and an iridescent blue dragonfly with brown sludge dripping from its delicate wing before I removed The Huffington Post as my homepage.

May 19 also marked the anniversary of Anne Boleyn’s death. The poor woman had her head chopped off because her husband didn’t quite grasp the concept of who, exactly, was responsible for the X- and Y-chromosomes in the family. (Something tells me it wouldn’t have mattered anyway.) On the same day 474 years later came the story of the excommunication of a nun in Arizona—and don’t even get me started on Arizona—revealing once and for all where the Catholic Church draws its line. Sister of Mercy Margaret McBride signed off on the abortion of an 11-week old fetus in order to save the life of a patient, a mother of four who was in heart failure. Never mind all those priests who diddle little children and get the wink-and-nod as they’re quietly shipped off to other parishes with whole new gaggles of wide-eyed, impressionable children at their disposal. Approve the removal a clump of cells from a uterus and it’s a lifetime of You Do Not Have A Place With Us. As it was in Boleyn’s day, so it is in McBride’s: This is a man’s world.

If you don’t believe me, Cam, look at what’s going on down under in the down under. According to the Australian news program The Hungry Beast, womanly parts are too unseemly for print and have thusly been photoshopped right out of existence. All the naked lovelies in their glossy magazines have ethics-board-mandated little-girl vag, which may please the aforementioned and very ill priests, but which has also convinced grown women that their “pendulous” labia minora are an aberration requiring removal. Some call this self-mutilation. Others call it “neat and tidy.”

Kentucky is running a racist named after Ayn Rand as a possible candidate for the U.S. Senate, Texas is re-writing its history books, and here in California, a billionaire is buying the governor’s seat with promises of tax breaks for the wealthy and massive job-purging amongst the state rolls. And for God’s sake, Bret Michaels just will not die!

Do you see where I’m going with all of this, Cam? Directly to your pub. To drink. And eat a sandwich. The fried bologna is pretty good. But it’s not the same. So please. Cam. Cameron. Do the right thing. Be a hero. Listen to your wife and put the ham-and-sweet-butter sandwich back on the menu.

Oink,
~aaryn

(As published in last week’s issue of San Diego CityBeat. Sorry for the delayed posting.)