They eat raw goat hide in Earlimart don't they

Tuesday night I found myself in Earlimart, California. Earlimart if you don't know, (and why would you know anything about Earlimart unless you picked grapes or you're fortunate enough to be able to underpay a bunch of people to pick grapes or maybe you're dad happened to be born there) is a small farming town in the central valley a few miles north of Delano. 3 hours up from LA barring traffic. I found out last week my father was flying in the Sunday night before Thanksgiving, with his nephew and his brother -in-law, his brother-in-law my uncle is the mayor of Solsona, the town in Illocos Norte where my dad is from. My uncle is here to meet with the sizable community of transplanted townspeople here in California—most of them in LA or Delano— to raise money for civic improvements back home. According to my uncle his town has suffered a brain drain, not only farmers, but nurses and other professionals have moved to Cali or Hawaii. We thought my dad would never come back to the states again, he was paralyzed from the waist down when I left him there 2 years ago this November. But now he can stand and waddle around if only a few feet before he gets winded, his prodigiously globular bulk now resting on atrophied but stunningly smooth legs that would put any woman a third his age to shame. So my semi-incontinent, mobily-challenged father has returned for a check-up—either he doesn't trust the doctors over there (even though his US doctor of many years is something of a quack) or else they're ill equipped (back when he first went back to the PI, someone advised me that in the event he would need an oncologist, I'd be hard-pressed to find one in Manila, no less the northern province. So only 2 days with my dad and I'm emotionally and physically drained. Tuesday I thought I was just driving them to Glendale for lunch and ended up driving three hours to Earlimart where the Solsona transplants were cooking up some kilawen kalding, which is ceviche but instead of raw fish it's goat hide. So by the time it was dark in the valley we were only in Bakersfield. I misunderstood the directions and looked for Exit 48 not realizing 48 was avenue 48. Turned out Avenue 48 was the wrong exit anyway. So for about an hour we were driving past vast pitch-black grape fields, trying to read street names obscured by trees and dust. While driving, I've had to overhear countless conversations about pootang. Eventhough I barely understand their northern dialect, which is vastly different from tagalog, I know for certain that my 70+ year-old dad and 34 year-old cousin were talking about fifteen year old pussy, estudiante, as they say. (I'm writing from an internet cafe with my cousin right now and I was so sure he would be looking at porn which I told him would be frowned upon especially at the way gay cafe I've taken him to, and he's actually being good, maybe I'm being an asshole...OK no, he just looked up from his laptop and asked me if I want to meet someone). On the plus side when we finally got to the party in a suburban-looking enclave of Earlimart—it's middleclass facade given away by a preponderance of parked semi-trucks—there was some good goat and seafood and finally got to try out the wireless microphone with the karaoke chip, a whole karaoke machine with a thousand songs contained in a microphone. We left the party after 11 and by the time I got back to the 5 Interstate it was fogged over—visability down to 10 feet. Thank god the 5 is straight as a straight man in straightown. Luckily when we got to the grapevine we reached an elevation above the fog. I couldn't help blaming my dad for the fog. Goddamn asshole ruins everything.