floorpie

Did I tell you I was in a band?

I’m in a band.

We’re awful. Or honestly and more correctly I’m awful, and I’m fairly certain that that’s not just self-deprecation. I’m the lead singer and lead guitar, though. This may be because the other two guys don’t want to sing and don’t play guitar, or because I don’t play drums or bass, but either way Hello America, it’s me your frontman.

For now, anyway. As I said, I suck. I base this on the following:

.: my own ears

But I don’t care. We’re having fun and we’re not quitting our real jobs any time soon. We’re just warming up for our respective mid-life crises. You’d be surprised how amazingly cathartic it can be to scream your guts out and bang on a guitar until your knuckles bleed (literally…clearly my technique needs a little work).

I won’t forget you when our first album comes out, though…probably.

I watch a lot of hulu. Like an embarrassingly large amount. Which wouldn’t be so bad if I didn’t watch a lot of TV…but I do. At least I feel like I do. And everything I watch is crap as I’m astoundingly poorly informed about what’s going on in the world. Did you guys know we had a new president? It’s cuh-razy!

But I digress.

I watch a lot of hulu, which I mentally offset by reading a lot as well.

How vain is it, by the way, that I felt compelled to slip that last little bit in there? As if you care, for one thing. As if there’s even a “you” for another. I could just as easily lie about all of this, so what’s the point in managing your impressions?

But I digress.

I watch a lot of hulu. For those of you with any experience with this gift to humanity, you’ve undoubtedly noticed that each episode of whatever you’re watching lists the season and episode number beneath it. So, for instance, if you’re watching Hell’s Kitchen like I am right now, you can see Season 5 : Ep. 2 (43:12) underneath the thumbnail showing the episode. Understood, yes?

Along that same vein I saw something that not only made me feel dirty, but also made my body shudder for the loss of the last vestiges of an already declinng humanity. I saw this:

Cops:Cops: Upon Further Investigation
Season 21 : Ep. 18 (21:48)

Read that carefully.

Season twenty-one! There have been 21 years of COPS! Cops, the show about shirtless petty crimes and poor diction has been on for over two decades! It’s been successful! It’s beloved! It’s claiming to be older than 90% of pornstars whom are trapped at perpetual “19”! 400 years ago we had Shakespeare and now we have t21 consecutive years of Cops.

I weep for you, humanity.

On an unrelated note, I wonder if they still use the Bad Boys theme. Hmmm…

I’m desperately boring.

I knew it was too good to be true. After working 16-18 hour days including nights, weekends, and holidays for the past several weeks, I was stunned to suddenly be done (done!) at 3AM last night and woke up today with nothing to do but to enjoy my first free Saturday in as long as I can remember.

It went according to plan for most of the day. I woke up late having not been able to go to sleep until 6AM, my mind still buzzing and unwilling to let go. I did absolutely nothing for a couple of hours…which, in and of itself, was something given my last few weeks.

Then I went to Walgreen’s.

Perhaps you are not understanding the import of what I have just told you. I went to Walgreen’s.

I went outside, I got in my car, I drove somewhere anywhere, I interacted with people non-virtually…I bought much-needed toilet paper. Whomever thinks that living in LA isn’t really glamorous is clearly mistaken.

Of course, this bucolic existence was ripped back into present-day reality with a call from China. sigh. I am determined, however, to keep my dinner reservation.

There was a time not so long ago, still within the vague reach of my spotty and age-addled memory, when I used to have a life. I went out all the time, worked on losing my hearing at what the kids call the “rock shows”, hitting up the bars, hanging out with the cool kids, and frequenting low-quality brothels (wait, what?).

Now though, my lady keeps me ridiculously busy, and I now understand the compulsion to cheat (no, she doesn’t read this). This may be why I’m not yet married, because there’s something about spending every waking moment with something that starts to make me feel desperate and smothered. Sometimes I wonder if I’m alone in this feeling…but then I just Google US divorce rates and regain some semblance of calm and balance.

Nevertheless, though, I still feel trapped. What do I do? Find someone else to occupy my time? Push her away and grow distant? Talk (*shudder*) to her about it?

I can’t…I won’t do any of those things. I guess I’ll stick it out and hope for the best.

I love you, “Work”, even though you drive me crazy sometimes. And don’t take it personally if I take off from you for a couple of weeks and just get the fuck away from you for a little while. Distance makes the heart grow fonder, you know.

I wax philosophic pretty much constantly, but especially at night. I had a vague recollection of writing one of my good friends an e-mail in reply to her asking me, almost literally, “What’s up?”. In checking my sent items this morning, I confirmed that I did indeed reply…and she got a good return on her investment. Assuming words are currency. And it rains donuts. I digress.

That IS weird. I mean, you can’t cook!

In summary, I miss you desperately. I don’t mean that as a playful exaggeration, I actually do miss you to near the point of desperation. Luckily for me, my memory is shot through by whiskey-created neurological voids and I have only the vaguest of notions that your house is somewhere in a direction from here. Otherwise, I might be on your front lawn with a boombox over my head a la John Cusack. I would, however, be blasting Journey.

I’m on a literary roll, please save this for my posthumous memoirs.

Working a lot. 62 hours last week not including the weekend. Searching for meaning in my life. Strangely finding little solace in iPod accessories. Turns out that you can’t really have a passionate love affair with an FM transmitter without rather horrific physical consequences. And you thought your high school reunion was awkward!

I’m not finding an easy answer to the question of what I’m going to do without you for 8 months.

Dancing is good, yes? In truth and self-boasting I say this a lot, but even then not nearly enough: I’m proud of you, D.

No, I don’t know why your boyfriends don’t write you stuff like this, either. ZING!

-DAK

PS she didn’t call. Shock! Dismay!

I don’t think there has been a movie since Schindler’s List that has made me appreciate life as much as Slumdog Millionaire. In retrospect, I wonder what that says about me. That I need a celluloid representation of a meaningful life to better appreciate my relatively less-meaningful one.

Then again, maybe every $12 experience I have is not an opportunity for introspection. Of course, if that were true, I’m going to be freaked-out in the morning by the stranger in the mirror.

One thing is for sure: I want to live a considered life full of regrets. Yeah, you read that right. At least with regrets, that means I gave it a hell of a go.

hi Skittles!

Tonight we were talking about this mutual friend of ours who acts like a player. Or rather, he acts like a PLAYA, on the real. To which, she laughed and explained you have to have a few things to really be a player:

:1 good looks
:2 game
:3 money
:4 clothes

I, obviously, only have 3 of these and told her so, and left it to her to guess which one was missing. “Well,” she said, “You definitely have game, that’s for sure!” And we laughed and laughed.

In retrospect, though, I wonder if that makes this the best day ever, or the worst?

Pretty girls make everything better.

Have you noticed that? Even when you’re getting violently raped at the auto repair place, the pin-up in the grimy corner somehow makes it all go a little smoother. It only hurts at first.

Not that I would know, I pilot a jet-pack around town.

I walk on the backs of wood sprytes to the market, swim on waves of carpet samples to the post office, slide on electric eels to the podiatrist and back.

I have had a total of 2 really good New Year’s Eves. I’m really only thinking of this last one, and just assuming that I’ve had at least one other. I’m failing to remember it, though. What I can remember is being deathly-ill in Tahoe one year, fighting with a girlfriend on another, being on a plane back to nowhere, hiding alone in my apartment with the lights off, eating KFC cross-legged in front of the TV watching The Cosby Show re-runs, half-hearted countdowns at overly-optimistic parties.

This last one was good, though. This last one at the haunted Vogue Theatre, celebrated with one of the great LA band’s, Nico Vega, and their slightly lesser brethren Saint Hotel. There was a New Orleans marching band. There was mist upon the moors. There was no bullshit ball drop. There was a kiss for luck.

And oh, we be jamming.