floorpie

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.

Where does devotion come from? Sometimes, it is truly altruistic…though even as I write this those words ring hollow. Do you ever do anything without getting something in return? Even when that something is the self-satisfaction of helping someone in need; or the deeper darker self-satisfaction of martyrdom in the face of impossible odds.

As of late, I’ve been devoted to my sweet sweet mistress, Gainful Employment. Even now, at 11PM, I’m sitting at my desk at hour 14 in counting. Hardly a drop in the bucket to the day after day that have looked just like this prior. I’m reflecting on the canceled vacations, late nights on the weekend clicking on the keys of a company-sponsored laptop, my fingers glued to my iPhone and responding to emails even as I’m driving home.

What am I getting out of it? War stories, weeks turning to months of unused vacation, people who deserve my attention growing bored while waiting for it.

It ain’t for the money, that’s for sure.

I sure hope I look back on this time with a smile and not a grimace. Gainful Employment, ye be a harsh mistress…

An anonymous commenter asked me if I used to be a redhead (based on the pic below). This, coincidentally, is something I was thinking a lot about while visiting my parents over Christmas, and we discussed in great and bewildering detail.

I did not used to have red hair. I did, however, use to have blond hair. In fact, the bulk of my arm hair still turns blond during the summer…maybe this is common for everyone, but I like to think it makes me special. The thing I don’t understand, though, is that my birth certificate says Hair: Brown.

…

I was pretty obviously blond for the first few years of my life (as to be proven with photographic evidence, later). How did they know I would end up brunette? Did they even care or notice? Did they make the Brown determination based on the not inconsiderable amount of placenta I probably had plastered all over me?

Did anyone else just throw-up a little in their mouth?

You’re welcome…

It’s like facebook has replaced floorpie. Tragedy!

Why is it that, in movies, when one of the characters is eating cereal for breakfast, there is always milk on the table? Be it either a half-filled gallon, a quart carton, or some kind of glass carafe, it’s always there.

Who does this?
Do you?
I don’t.

Why would you ever just leave milk on the table to sit there and get warm? That’s like making pancakes and leaving a box of Bisquick next to you, isn’t it? Or are there re-fillers out there?

Weirdos.

Parents have things they say. This may have been obvious to you. Parents have things they say like mantras, and they end every conversation. “I love you” is one, though now that I write this I realize that that’s not something my parents actually say very often. They (we) say “Lovingly” right before hanging up the phone, or walking out the door. And we say it like it’s at least two words: “Love-ing Lee!” And as I was growing up, I actually thought that it two words and that it was a phrase that I just didn’t understand, yet…which is true, as I apparently didn’t know that “Love” had an adjective form at the time.

For some reason, I never questioned it.

It honestly wasn’t until my early 20’s when my mom and dad said it to me in the usual singsong voice we use when I had a vision of a handwritten not seen from the perspective of the writer, her quill pen just scribing the salutation…”Lovingly,” and I then realized what I had been saying for 20-odd years.

I still hear “Love-ing Lee”, though. And in my head I don’t think of “Lee” as a person, but instead the lee of a rocky outcropping, a safe haven in a storm.

No, I don’t know what is the matter with me either.

You know, the thing that sucks about being alone on the holidays is…oh wait.