Moving Violations

Today while running a tiny fly hit me in the eye. I found it later and dug it out. I'll keep you posted on whether I go blind. Yesterday while running I was attacked by a wee chiuaua. While I was dancing around trying not to step on it and its tiny fierce teeth, I had the fleeting thought to squash it. And then little kids came to get it and I didn't.

Once while biking a bug flew in my mouth and straight down my throat. And once while walking in the woods at dusk a bat flew straight into my chest.

It's good to know animals can be idiots too.

The Gastro-Intestinal Path To Enlightenment

So Katie came to town and man, did she get a good plateful of LA deliciousness: dolphins at Little Zuma, stumbling upon movie sets with recognizable actors, Disneyland, riding bikes on the Venice boardwalk, witnessing car accidents and calling 911, extreme and unbearable heat, camping out in movie theatres and watching several movies in a row to avoid unbearable heat, Mulholland Drive, Sunset Strip, Melrose Ave and only the briefest, long-distance glimpses of the Valley, impromtu BBQs in grassy backyards, film cast and crew wrap parties, drunken karaoke, and some hours in a coffee shops where everyone is writing a screenplay on their laptop.

Part and parcel of all this was some serious LA eating: Pink's the day she arrived (I had a heart-burn-wrenching spicy polish with chili, cheese, and three strips of bacon in a tortilla, she had a foot-long jalapeno dog with chili and saukraut), quickly followed by Pinkberry and when we got home that night, a dinner of popcorn and frozen, chocolate-covered bananas. And whiskey tonics. We ate at El Coyote, El Cholo, Loteria, Swinger's, bought pie from Du-par's, had more Pinkberry, had frozen chocolate-covered bananas in Disneyland (and meat on a stick in Adventureland), made pancakes, ate barbeque at picnic benches, drank poolside cocktails in our bathing suits at the Avalon Hotel and Irish car bombs at Tom Bergen's. And then had more Pinkberry.

Last month I did the Master Cleanse, which is the state of shutting down your digestive tract by only feeding it a concoction of water, lemon juice, cayenne pepper and grade B maple syrup, with intermitant gluggings of salt water to flush away all the evil stuff that gets sloughed off. I read a whole book on it before I did it, so I was reasonably assured that it 1) wouldn't kill me and 2) it might have some health benefits. It was a weird experience, totally turning off food. For one, it totally changed my schedule. Making food for myself and then making time to eat it takes up a lot of time, it turns out. Not to mention buying groceries and managing the whole do-I-have-enough-milk-for-tomorrow thing. But it also made some things a little awkward. When I got to campus early, killing time by getting a tea was no longer an option. Meeting people for dinner didn't work so well. I wasn't ever hungry per se. I did miss food a bit at the beginning, but that was soon replaced by an aesthetic smugness (which can sustain me for quite a while). I did have to make sure I had a bottle of The Concoction with me at all times, otherwise a serious fatigue and inner hollowness would set in that didn't feel quite right.

By day four (of ten prescribed days), I was watching Abel Gance's Napoleon at LACMA and decided to throw in the towel. It's not that I was watching a four-hour-long silent film from 1927 because the film is actually mesmerizing. It's more that I felt that the encroaching dizzyness and the skinnyness were better suited to some shopoholic fashionista anorexic that I was not. I had some delicious broth and a heavenly glass of orange juice that evening.

What did I learn from all of this? That food is spectacular. And also that I can go through phases of monkish discipline and emerge with wisdom. A wisdom that can support chasing a meal of the most insane hotdog ever with ice cream, popcorn and chocolate.

Springtime for Kitties

The heat wave has finally popped. The best indication of this is that the cats are running around chasing each other again and trying to jump up on my lap again and accidentally cover me with fur and hit me in the face with their tails/asses again. The cats were worrisome during this heat wave. They would just lay on the floor in the living room or the hall, despondent. Sometimes they'd lay directly across from each other and look into each other's despondent eyes. They could not, unlike us humans, Google LA public pools or ride their bikes up to Pinkberry. They couldn't even go to work in a freezing cold office all day. Nope, they just lay around like pools of fur.



We tried to cool them down. We put ice cubes in their water bowls a lot. I tried to make them comfortable with the cold packs from the freezer (too weird, they got scared). We moved the fan into the hallway during the day to circulate the air. Once, I picked OJ up and opened the freezer and held him up to it.

But the best solution is just for it to be LESS HOT. And lo it is. And Pig is blithely getting fur all over my shirt right now.

Books Are Cool

Henry David Thoreau has been credited with saying that, "Libraries will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no libraries". This has got to be true, even if you not are living pond-side and eating weeds. Here's the thing: swap out the word "money" for the words "air conditioning" and it still works. Wahoo!

I've spent some quality time with Katie in libraries lately, enjoying the temperate climes and the studious atmosphere. Except for surprising a homeless woman unpacking her entire kit in the bathroom, it's been unremarkable and productive. Viva libraries! Especially those within biking distance of your house on mornings when you it's so hot you can hardly put your brain in enough order to leave the house.

It's brought me to finally suceed in several days' worth of the three hours or three good pages discipline.

The maggot situation is holding steady, by the way.

And now, for all my Southland readers:

Some Nerve

Today I had a knock on the door from some Jesus people with Jesus pamphelets. One woman in a big hat was talking to me while some other women in big hats milled around behind her, knocking on my neighbors' doors. At the time, I said very little, because I didn't want to get stuck in conversation, but it really did piss me off.

The neighborhood I live in is Jewish. A lot of the people who live here have lived here for many years and a lot of the people that live here are Hasidic. My apartment has kosher labels over the sink and Mezuzahs at the doorways. My neighbors are all Jewish women aged 80 and up. My upstairs neighbor was in a concentration camp during the Holocaust. Women on the sidewalk speak in Yiddish to their kids and men on the sidewalk wear giant round fur hats and long black coats in the middle of summer and prayer shawls on holy days. Do you think they want to come to your meeting about Christ? I think it's pretty clear they've made up their minds on the religion question.

Man, why is Christianity the only religion that has consistantly hit me up, via strangers, for conversion? It's super-obnoxious.

Rudyard Kipling and Maggots

So I've been thinking a lot about maggots lately. Mostly because I've been encountering them a lot (kitchen garbage, inside the compartment in the trunk of my car) and they are food for thought, pardon the expression. I heard that the medical community is bringing maggots back into medicine, because the magic of maggots is that they will only eat the dead flesh, making them excellent friends in the fight against gangrene and other similar infections.

I've also been thinking about Getting Older recently, or more accurately, Growing Up. I turned 29 this week and had a great party and was at my friend Andy's 29th last night at which someone asked me what words of advice on being 29 I had to dole out to Andy, having a three-day jump on the experience. Is 29 one of the big ones? I know 30 is a big one, but knowing me, I'll spend so much time thinking about turning 30 that when it actually happens it won't feel like a big deal. The best description I have for 29 so far is that you have an ongoing T-minus 365 days countdown going to finish up all your 20s bullshit. Because there are a number of things that you can't do in your 30s. Pigtails. Throwing up from drinking. Accidentally making out with people. And then there's a whole litany of things that you can't do north of 30 that I never have done nor do I plan to regret not doing. Cocaine. Sex with unnamed strangers. Tube tops.

But I've also found myself thinking about things along pretty different lines these days and by these days I mean the past few weeks. It's a combination of being finally done with school (in the sense that for the first time this summer I'm not spending five days a week on campus) and having had a series of unfortunate events occur in a short period of time. In fact, so many shitty things have been happening, that it has brought me into this strange zone where I feel really zen about it and at the same time am totally ready for whatever is coming down the pipe. Like I'm doing my best karate beckon to the fates. Like when Paul Simon sings about the Boxer leaving, but the Fighter still remains? I'm the Fighter.

I've also internalized some Kipling and build my days around filling each unforgiving minute with sixty seconds' worth of distance run.

Pile all this on a birthday and 29 is a windsprint. It's eating the dead flesh. It helps me meet with Triumph and Disaster and treat those two imposters just the same.

The Lights Are On

Dear Reading Public, I think I may be back. Hard to say. Currently there is something unhappy between my computer and my ISP that makes it not want to load any Blogger pages. Or any Goggle pages. It's not a happy situation. Anyway, addiction to Facebook has somewhat supplanted addiction to blogging. Anyone else find that? Internet narcissism: what will fill the caverous hole in my soul next?

What shall I tell you about? The mystery of the totaled car smack in the middle of a park with no roadways? My summer of strange sunburns? The many weddings I have attended? That I'm a foley genuis but a mixing failure? That I've been going to screenings of kid's movies from the eighties a lot lately? That I finished school?

Okay, so I finished school. Not even part-way finished: I took my last class, TAed my last epic screening, worked my last shift at SPO. I still have keys to the doors of Lucas on my keyring (that is kind of magical, metaphorically speaking) but I'm done. It's scary and liberating at the same time, to be in LA without the safety net of school attendence as an excuse. The best and scariest thing about starting school was the feeling of a new environment with new rules and structures to understand and learn to navigate (and eventually master-- hence the name of the degree?). The best and scariest thing about leaving school is the same thing. Looks like I'm still good at up-talking myself.