Kayden's Korner: Sacramento

So, if you like nature, Sacramento is cool, and if you’re allergic to it, Sacramento will kill you. The first top ten list I ever saw my hometown mentioned on was the one for worst air quality, because coupled with all of these trees casting their sperm into the air, we sit in a valley and collect the runoff smog from San Francisco. We also collected the runoff homebuyers from San Francisco, so I think we’re a top ten city for foreclosures too, but that’s another story for another time.

Sacramento is a cheaper California alternative to the more popular cities though. A large soda from McDonald’s is exactly half the cost here as it is in L.A., not that I drink soda, or care for that matter. I just consider McDonald’s prices to be an honest standard when it comes to indexing everything. The golden arches stand for cold efficiency, and I believe they will have a strong bid for the first formally recognized world government. While we’re not on the subject really at all, I've learned that ‘no’ is one of the two most recognized words in the world. The other? Coke. Fucking soda.

"Like any city whose people don’t leave very often, Sacramento has its own vernacular. That vernacular is "hella." It is a shapeshifting word, much like fuck, but is used predominantly as a prefix. Things get hellacold, hellahot, hellalame, and hellasweet. While I’m not gonna say I’ve never heard it used as a noun or verb, it is less common. It is quite popular as an adverb or an adjective, and there are still other ways to use it. For example, when asked if he wanted to grab a beer last night, the man replied, simply, "Hella."

I just don’t know how to classify that.




I was told that Sacramento is the Riverside of the North. This may very well be true. It does exist in the shadow of a cooler city, and everyone does like lifted vehicles and flip-flops in the dirt, and, like the Inland Empire, it is a major exporter of porn stars (the great Sasha Grey, Monique Alexander, Alexis Love, Sandee Westgate, Sabrina Maree, Claire Dames, Charmane Star, Tiffany Tyler, Paris Dahl, me). There are also a lot of tattoos and excuses to grab a beer, on someone’s lawn, underage, where you can compare tattoos that were also bought with a fake ID. I know. I have one. It’s an outdoor city in general though. Remember, we have trees. We also have the Sacramento and American Rivers running right into each other in the middle of the city. There are beautifully paved bike/skateboard/rollerblade trails and boy-scout maintained horse/quad/motocross trails running along the water that will take you all the way to Nevada if you have the time. You cannot live in Sacramento without developing a hobby that requires a helmet.

The food: Sacramento likes to Americanize ethnic food. Actually, America likes to do it in general, but Sacramento is like one of those celebrity impersonators whose potbelly makes him possibly more loveable than the real thing. We had exactly one conversation in San Diego when we talked about what we missed about home. There were four of us. We went to the same middle school. The conversation went like this:

First girl: "I miss Jimboy’s Tacos."




The rest of us (in squealing unison): "Oh my god me too!"




I guess you can’t call Mexican food ethnic food though.




Jimboy’s Tacos is so popular that when a branch opened near my high school, only the dance royalty and members of student government could get jobs there. When class let out the drive-thru would back up into the street. If you weren’t driving, you had to know someone who worked there to get a table, because everyone there was popular, and you can’t just walk up and sit next to the prom queen or she'll give you that cockroach look that super social hot chicks give to people they want no part of. The prom queen was probably not without a car though. If she was inside, it was so she could scope out the people working there (her coworkers). It was a good show, with the burrito grillers and wrappers grilling everything to perfection, beautiful hair spilling lazily out of their hair nets, white-pressed pants held up with a skater belt below their ass cheeks, and the petite blond girls taking orders in pink sparkle lip gloss.




Me? I worked at McDonalds.

And then there is Mikuni’s.

Mikuni’s is a little sushi restaurant that was opened off of Hazel Avenue in 1987 by a Japanese reverend and his wife. My mother tells me how she used to come there when she was pregnant with me, and how we all ate there when I was a baby and the restaurant was less than half the size it is today.




That is impossible. I was born in 1985.




But that’s not the point. The point is that everyone feels nostalgic about Mikuni’s. The son, Taro, became a local celebrity as the restaurant expanded with its reputation. Taro is known for driving around in exotic sports cars and looking my age (also impossible), and now I guess he’s written a book, or his father has, or someone, somewhere in his family, documented his experience with the American dream. They came over here, did the fish on rice thing, then spruced it up with American things, like mayonnaise and ketchup, except for it’s nothing at all like mayonnaise and ketchup. I just need an example of something that we can all relate to. I guess what I’m trying to say is sauce—they spruced the fish and rice up with sauce. The best fish and rice sauce in the whole wide world.




I’m not sure if we can call sushi ethnic food anymore either though, especially in California.

If you’re going to sight see, you might as well go where the baby locals are initiated via field trips. There is the Railroad Museum, the rose garden at McKinley Park, Old Town Sacramento in general, the Capitol, and finally, the Delta King. If you start at any one of these places you can get to the rest of them by foot.

I feel like The Railroad Museum and the Capitol don’t need much in the way of explanation. McKinley Park definitely does. Sacramento likes to have about one park per square block (they need a place to keep all of those trees) but this one is the boss park. I’ve had more than one birthday party there. The whole city has. There are playgrounds, overly friendly/borderline aggressive squirrels, geese, ducks, swans, and chipmunks, barbeque pits and picnic tables, a city pool, tennis courts, basketball courts, a jogging path on the perimeter, ponds, and fountains. These things are all typical in parks (although most parks don’t have this many amenities at once. It’s like a 7 series), but what’s not typical is the rose garden. The rose garden is the fault of way too many wedding ceremonies in my opinion. It’s pretty though. Just go.

Old Town Sacramento is still intact from the 1800s when the city was growing. It's located directly on the Sacramento River, with the same train station (crazy how the railroad museum is right there), the same soda fountains and candy shops, an old theater that I suspect was a whorehouse, and a few dozen other businesses that are still running as if time stood still. Horse drawn carriages run through the few square blocks that end with a red one-room school house. Quaint doesn’t begin to describe it.

And if you cross the train tracks to the river, you can keep walking right on down the gangway to the Delta King, which is basically a giant boat that is now used as a floating hotel and casino, and where, in my opinion, way too many people have wedding receptions after the rose garden experience. It’s just too easy.




So if you ever come here, just dirty up your shoes, remember to start everything with "hella," love our two local restaurant chains, and follow the field trip buses around the one square mile that we’ve planted all the good stuff, and you’re golden.




People say golden a lot in Sacramento too.