Well it’s summer again, so here’s another amusing checklist.

Fire extinguisher
I really shouldn’t have to explain this one. Leftover fireworks. Drunken hipster BBQs. Flaming couches. Flaming machetes. Your beat up car overheating and bursting into flames. These are all very real and sometimes funny threats that will put you, your house, your friends and furniture in jeopardy.

Rush Inn drink tokens
I know you have a few and chances are you’re going to need to cash them in.

Warm Clothes
Santa Cruz Nights can be deceptively cold at times.

A working bicycle
Most of us have put this off for a long time, but it’s time to mount up and drunkenly run into inanimate objects.

BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD!
The blood god is always going to need blood. This summer is no exception.

Bike helmet
Your brain is soft and mushy.

Coffee Places that are 3/4 of a mile from your house
If you’re (f)under-employed & sedentary like me, you can definitely appreciate the allure of having somewhere to walk to in the late morning. The Abbey may have mediocre, over-priced coffee, but it’s just the right distance from my house to get my blood moving and snap me out of the Firefly marathon that could easily consume my entire afternoon. Tomorrow I check out the news stand on Mission for the first time. Having goals is awesome!

Vacations
Hiram & I (Ethan) recently fled Santa Cruz for the sweltering relief of Davis. We lounged around in cut-offs, baring our pasty limbs to anonymous strangers instead of to cute girls we would run into at the bar later. Allegedly some screen-printing got done, and a vicious black widow was slain with a hammer, and I lost at Munchkin.

We also jaunted up to the Yuba River and climbed up-river through boulders & water-slides until I got tired and almost threw a tantrum… then beyond. We ended up at a 20-foot-rock that we all jumped off of, and there was much jubilation. I fell a whole bunch of times, once really hard onto a rock that looked like a goomba from Super Mario Bros. I was pretty concerned that I had fallen onto my liver and was probably going to die, but it just left a wicked bruise that healed from the center outward so that for a few days I looked like I had gotten a hickey from a Fraggle, and now it’s almost gone.

Austin didn’t get to go because he’s not on our insurance, by which I mean he was at Comic Con taking shots with famous authors and jump-starting his writing/film-making career. Sucks to be him.

Have a wonderful rest of your summer, everyone!
Check back soon to learn about more must-have summer life-savers that we forgot.

There I was. Enjoying iced tea and reading on my porch on a sunny afternoon. I took a shower at around six and headed downtown to grab a beer. Here’s where the plan falls apart.

6:30 Find Bryn drinking alone on the back porch of Pergolesi. Join him

6:50 Grab Bryn and head over to the Cypress Lounge for a sick art punk show

7:00 Burritos

7:20 The Screaming Females kick off the show. So good! This three piece from Philly destroyed. The lead guitarist/singer was this tiny girl that could fucking shred like a metal god.

7:45 More beer.

8:00 Shellshag, a cute couple that could beat the living shit out of any boyfriend/girlfriend band. Taking an interesting approach to drums, they rocked out so hard that you wanted to get what ever drugs they might be on.

8:50 The Cysts, part of some weird thrash scene revival that i was unaware of until then. I probably would have really liked them if i wasn’t distracted by a cute girl. (not Bryn).

9:20 We all got are dance on with Abe Vigoda. This is the second time I’ve had the pleasure of seeing them and they do not disappoint one bit. Last time I saw them they had a tape for sale of their new album Skeleton which a promptly bought and has been in heavy rotation in the truck stereo.

10:00 The show is over but one is about to start at Santa Cruz’s newest venue, The Parish Public House. And we’re off! I hop in a friends car and give up on having a nice quiet night at home.

10:15 We arrive at our destination to find the show hasn’t started yet. More beer! We grab a six pack and head over to a friend’s house on Dufour.

10:25 Three cute girls decide to shotgun beers.

10:26 Hilarity ensues. Having three cans of bud left and one fancy beer and our ranks having swelled to five we stand in a circle pounding the rest in rapid succession always passing the beer to an empty hand.

10:45 We head back to the show to find an opening band none of us are very interested in. We continue to chain smoke and shoot the shit.

10:55 After giving away all my cigarettes (I can never say no to a pretty lady even if there is four of them) I run over to the liquor store to resupply and somehow ended up with a cute little bottle Bushmill’s.

11:20 Oh my god. Botron starts playing. Imagine three kinda dirty punk kids playing the most perfect, schizophrenic mix of psych rock, metal, math rock and good ol’ southern rock. Hell yeah. Also this girl would not stop spitting on her boyfriend then performed drunken CPR on a Safeway security guard. WTFuck.

12:20 ish. Trying to figure what’s next we buy more booze and end up at my house.

Here’s where things start to get a little hazy.

1:00 I never went to college, but most of my friends did. So i have never played this drinking game Kings Cup.

1:30 I’m really drunk. And smoking inside.

2:00 More friends show up and my house mates come to investigate and end up part of the game. I am no longer wearing shoes at this point as a result of swearing like a sailor. Don’t ask.

3:00 my room smells like a fucking bar, but there is half a watermelon. Yay!!

3:30 DANCE PARTY!! the game has been abandoned due to lack of beer. I’m gonna go ahead and say that it was probably a good thing.

3:50 Jay-Z, strobe lights, animal masks, suits, ties, ladies, gentlemen, headdresses, whiskey, jacket related injuries (i’m really sorry about your eyebrow..)

4:30 The people start to filter out, and we start to clean up a bit.

4:50 “Want to watch True Blood??” “Sure!”

Sunrise.

Hooray for S.O.N.S. 09′

-Hiram Coffee (I’m a fucking journalist!)

So here I am in Austin, TX not doing what I told Ethan I would do. Yeah I know I told him that I would keep up with writing articles and not “slack off because I would be too busy going to shows, drinking and losing money in casinos”. But as you all have probably guessed by now that is not the case. Right now as I get ready for bed and day three of SXSW I would like to apologize for my incompetence as an internet presence on this tiny site we call Vitamin C4 and hope that Ethan can find it in his heart to forgive me. Oh and Ethan, if you kill my fish there will be blood..
Until my return please enjoy this picture of myself riding a mechanical bull in Las Vegas, NV.

Signing off for the duration of my whirlwind tour of the west and southwest U.S.
Hiram Coffee

Everyone knows about the Boardwalk (evil), the UC (unpopular) and the semi-circular ledge at the north end of Pacific where you can whisper into one end and your buddy on the other end can hear you just as if you were talking into his ear (awesome). This post is not about those hotspots.

Raise your hand if you know anything about Santa Cruz Biotechnology, Inc. Well, let me educate you. They are world leaders in deriving well-characterized transfected lysates. They offer over 2,500 lysates of human gene specific transfected 293T cells, and over 1,700 mouse gene specific transfected cells. For sale. On the internet. To any terrorist or communist with a credit card. I may not know what a transfected lysate is, but I know a couple other words that end with “fected”. Well, actually just one. Is it too early to presume that Santa Cruz Biotechnology, Inc. is blinded by hubris and greed, that their “transfected lysates” will spread and mutate, hastening the zombie apocalypse and bringing humanity to its knees? Only time will tell, but as far as snap judgments go I think that’s a pretty sound one. Fuck you, Santa Cruz Biotech.

For further examples of trespass against God, we need look no further than our town’s own history. I think everyone kind of assumed that Santa Cruz was founded by a missionary traveling up the coast looking for a chill spot to crash, and this is true. In 1774, Father Palou happened upon this fertile crescent north of the Monterey Bay and decided that it would support a large and prosperous mission. In 1791 he got around to erecting a cross and proclaiming “Let’s do this”, which by modern beach town standards is some pretty good turnaround time. The mission was built shortly thereafter.

That very winter, Mission Santa Cruz was flooded. The padres decided it might be a good idea to build it on a hill this time around. That was probably a good call, as it allowed the mission to enjoy almost six years of prosperity. Well, apart from some mild-to-moderate fire damage in 1793, most likely caused by the Quiroste indians in the area. It would appear that there was some sort of philosophical disagreement between the padres and the natives regarding work and education. Mainly regarding how much free labor the Quiroste were expected to provide (some thought “none”, others, “a lot”) and whether or not the padres should be allowed to discipline the natives with metal-barbed whips when they failed to memorize the Bible quickly enough. More on that later.

That brings us to 1797, when California Governor Diego de Borica entrusted some land to Miguel de la Grúa Talamanca y Branciforte in the interest of capitalizing on some sweet beach-front real estate. The brochures promised “neat, white houses”, farm tools, clothing and a substantial paycheck to any colonists who came to till the fertile soil along the San Lorenzo. Surprisingly enough, these claims turned out to be false. Even more surprisingly, the only people who got duped were a bunch of convicts from Guadalajara, sent here by the powers that be. This is the first documented example of another town sending its degenerates and undesirables to Santa Cruz, but certainly not the last.

These settlers were pretty mad when they showed up and there was nowhere for them to live and nothing for them to eat. They soon settled into their routine, kooking the Quiroste locals and not really farming much of anything. They did contribute one thing to their community – they constructed a racetrack so they would have somewhere to blow the money they were getting from the government. Let’s save all questions and discussion for the end, please.

In 1802, the Spanish crown realized what was going on and stopped sending welfare checks. Much to the relief of the few padres who could bear to stick around and watch the grisly social experiment unfold, many of the Branciforte settlers decided to try their luck over the hill at the Pueblo of San Jose, which I am told was also not doing so hot. Now that they were no longer being hit up for cigarettes and change every time they turned around, the residents of the mission were able to focus on their real passion: beating the natives.

By 1812 what Quiroste remained were getting pretty tired of the whole situation. They did what any of us would wish to do under the circumstances. They kidnapped Father Andres Quintana, an especially metal-whip-happy motherfucker, and beat him to death. To drive the point home, during the beating they smashed the living hell out of his genitals. Let this be a lesson to anyone considering fucking with some indigenous people. The possibility that your nuts will be smashed is very real. There is historical precedent. I back it.

I imagine this kind of took the wind out of the other padres’ sails, which would explain the events of 1818. When Argentine corsair Hippolyte de Bouchard showed up on the scene – just, you know, pirating around – the residents of Mission Santa Cruz hightailed it to Soledad for the duration. They asked (very nicely, I expect) the remaining residents of Villa de Branciforte to safeguard their valuables while they were in hiding. The Branciforteans decided that the best way to safeguard the padres’ belongings would be to, naturally, steal them all. And destroy anything they couldn’t carry. It makes sense. This way, de Bouchard wouldn’t get any of it, unless one of Branciforteans traded something to him for crack.

The padres did return, but you could tell their hearts were no longer in it. I doubt they even cared very much when the land decided that it had had its fun and destroyed their mission in a series of earthquakes throughout the 1840s and 1850s. The mission that stands next to the Holy Cross Church above downtown is, in fact, a half-size replica financed by Gladys Sullivan Doyle in 1931.

I hope this has been an informative little trip into our town’s past. The major lessons we should all take from this include: don’t fuck with the locals (if you value your balls), don’t let outside mayors send their troublemakers here, and above all, let’s keep Santa Cruz godless.

Brought to you by the Vitamin C4 Institute for Revisionist History

I trust that everyone has had a fun-filled summer full of misadventures and bouts of missing or unaccounted-for time. Now that fall is here with winter biting at its tan-to-brown-colored heels, all of us here at Vitamin C4 have compiled a checklist we hope will help prepare you for the harsh times ahead of us in our sleepy little coastal town. Good luck and godspeed.

Canned Food
We cannot stress this enough. Nothing will brighten your day more than eating fresh-out-of-the-can, two-year-old pineapple slices to remind you of the almost tropical days of summer here in Santa Cruz.

Whiskey
To cheer you up after being reminded that you wasted your summer sitting in a bar that smells like cat urine and Dan’s feet. It also keeps you warm, I guess.

A certain special someone
Hopefully you’ve had your fill of summer flings and romance. But now it’s time to settle down with that special someone and hunker down for winter. Nothing sucks more than being cold, drunk, wet and alone.

Post-Apocalyptic Novels
World War Z is a good start. Nothing is quite like curling up on a couch with a blanket and a baseball bat dreaming of a world consumed by the living dead.

Firearms
You never know.

Coffee & Cigarettes
When you don’t feel like braving the rain to go to your local bar/liquor store, sleep deprivation is the next best things. Try to read Infinite Jest in one sitting, disassemble household appliances, whatever. The sensation that you are walking on the moon at around eight in the morning is the real “good shit”.

Salad Dressing
Adds valuable calories to lettuce. Cheap, cheap lettuce.

Towel
I think this goes on every checklist.

Chicken Soup
Your house does not have insulation. This is Santa Cruz, and that is a fact. Every moment spent with your head bent over a steaming pot of awesome is another reason to drag yourself out of bed.

The new BATTLE /MTN\ record
Cause it’s off the mother fuckin’ hook! Uh, I mean chain. Yeah, chain!

Facial Hair
I can’t grow any personally, neither can Ethan. We tried once but we ended up looking like preteens.

Strobe Lights
C’mon guys. It’s about time we bring back the dance party. YEAH!

A second job
Less free time, more tattoos. Woo!

Little pocket-sized moleskines
Being able to read your palsy-drunk chicken scratch is marginally more realistic than being able to remember where you were, what you did, who she was & that one great idea you promised never to let yourself forget.

Sit tight guys! More to come on Vitamin C4.