The California Conservatives

A highly informative essay about Demographics, Barbeque and Google...

Every August I visit Sacramento, California for my mom’s birthday and every August I bring my son up from LA because I rarely get to see him and every August we go to Poor Red’s and eat Barbeque ribs.

(That’s my son on the right and my brother Dan on the left.)

Poor Red’s is a famous rib joint in the Sierra Nevada foothills and people travel from all over to eat there, which I’ve done dozens of times over many decades starting in high school, but apparently I never tried to go on a Monday or Tuesday because due to my World Famous Lack-Of-Attention-To-Details we drove up there on a Monday and it was closed.

That being the case…

We switched to Plan B which we didn’t actually have on hand and after some discussion we all decided we were really looking forward to eating ribs so we Googled “Barbeque restaurants near me” and Google said if we just kept going up into the foothills we’d find a Barbeque restaurant in 20 minutes.

Turns out, Google has a very loose definition of “Barbeque restaurants near me.”

I’m not going to name the restaurant because this next part won’t be 100% flattering and I don’t want the fans of that restaurant to get on their Harleys and come track me down because I’ve seen all those Roger Corman biker flicks where a gang of motorcycle-riding hoodlums surrounds a station wagon being driven by some citified suburbanite and terrorizes him and his family at 85 miles an hour, although I never understood how that was possible because the citified suburbanite was driving a two-ton station wagon and the terrorizing hoodlums were driving two-wheel motorcycles.

Jesus L. Christ, just do some swerving and knock Marlon Brando into a bridge abutment.

But as usual, I digress and you need some local background to fully grasp the next part of our story.

The Conservatives of California

If you don’t live in California you might think it’s filled with Liberal Weed-Smoking Surfers and when I first moved to Kansas City I was occasionally asked if I surfed and I pointed out that I grew up in Sacramento which is two-to-three hours from the coast, depending on what part of the coast you’re talking about, so it would take a humongous rogue wave for the surf to be up in the Sacramento Greater Metropolitan Area.

So just like Californians having misconceptions about Midwesterners — “Do they let livestock roam the streets in Kansas City?” — Midwesterners have misconceptions about Californians.

While the Liberals of San Francisco and Los Angeles make lots of news and get lots of publicity, there are plenty of California Conservatives (face it, they elected Ronald Reagan twice) and if you drive up into certain parts of the Sierra Nevada foothills you might run into some.

For example:

When I took my son to see the high school I attended so he could pretend to find it interesting (he’s a good son) he started laughing as we got near my high school and I asked what was up because I missed it and he said someone had erected a huge sign in their front yard that the high school kids would have to see every morning on their way to school and the sign said:

“FUCK BIDEN!”

Example number two:

A few short years after graduating high school I walked into a bar hidden down some back road in the foothills to buy a six-pack of Coors to go and me and my friends had hair down to our shoulders and the bar patrons looked at us like we just arrived in a UFO from Neptune and would glow in the dark if they turned off the lights and one of them turned to me and said:

“Just what the fuck are you supposed be?”

To which I replied:

“Scared?”

Which made everybody in the bar laugh and probably prevented us from getting our asses kicked because things were definitely trending in that direction, so once again, thank you Mr. Sense of Humor; you’ve got me through and out of some tight spots. (Wait, now that I think about it Mr. Sense of Humor has also gotten me into a lot of trouble, so I guess we’ll call it even.)

Anyway…

Lots of Conservative Californians if you know where to look and once again I found some.

The “Barbeque” restaurant

So we walk into the restaurant Google assured us served Barbeque (yes, in the Midwest we always capitalize “Barbeque” because it’s considered one of the major religions) and all the patrons at the bar looked like cast members of Duck Dynasty doing some day drinking and just in case you think I’m stereotyping (which I pretty much am, so good call) a big sign on the wall said “GUNS, GOD AND TRUMP” and another sign had pictures of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris with the words “DUMB AND DUMBERER.”

The restaurant definitely had a “Just So You Know Where We Stand” vibe.

Meanwhile…

The only item on the “Barbeque” restaurant menu that could make even a vague claim at being Barbeque was a pulled pork sandwich and tasted like pork put through a blender, then soaked in Kraft Barbeque sauce and if you know anything about real Barbeque you know the meat is supposed to be smoked for approximately a year and a half before serving and the only smoke this sandwich had been exposed to was probably from the cook that made it.

All in all the food was OK, but it definitely wasn’t a Barbeque restaurant and later I went on Yelp to see what people said about it and most of the reviews called it “a great biker bar” which seemed way more accurate.  

Apparently (and I say “apparently” because I’ve only got a hazy idea of how this crap works) that blithering idiot, AI, decided it was a Barbeque restaurant because it had one item tangentially related to actual Barbeque and my brother swears he recently asked Google for “Puerto Rican restaurants near me” and was advised to go to a Taco Bell.

Today’s Lesson

If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again and later in the week we went to Poor Red’s and got in, but I learned three important lessons:

1. Poor Red’s is closed Mondays and Tuesdays.

2. Don’t trust Google.

3. And if a restaurant menu has just one B-B-Q related item, order a cheeseburger.