floorpie

A funny thing happened on the way to Saints & Sinners

Despite being a fucking bastard, I come from a long line of Good Samaritans. I’ve never been quite the altruist I always dreamed of, though. Or more correctly, I was never the altruist that Renee was in high school and beyond, which might have been the one redeeming quality that would have pushed her past the “We’re just friends” stage. Like the time when she took me over to this mentally challenged kid’s house. She had become friends with the guy over the years, and would stop by from time to time to spend time with him and send him news from the world outside his door. It was fun, and a little bit infectious, but at the same time I knew then that I was way out of my league.

But I do my part, I think. Or at least try somewhere near my best to.

So, when I was driving on the way to S&S; and saw a guy lying in the street with people huddled around, I stopped to see what I could do. Perhaps my Boy Scout days would come in handy. Short story it wasn’t that serious. A guy skateboarding down the street had got tagged by an old man in a car as he was pulling into traffic. The guy was in a lot of pain, but he could move his extremities and he was fairy aware of his surroundings.

For whatever reason, I quickly lapsed into Guy-Speak, which only has a passing resemblance to how I really talk. I said things like, “Where’s it hurt, bro?” and “Dude, just stay still for a bit, yo.” He responded in kind, though… the “dudes” and the “bros” being the common language amongst the many guy-dialects.

As it turned out, there wasn’t much I could do. I just kept an eye on his leg to see it was swelling and had him keep his foot up until the ambulance arrived. I did want to sock the guy that him in the face, though, when he said, “It doesn’t even look swollen.” Shut your mouth, jackass, no one asked you for money, yet.

I’ve been having this intense e-mail exchange with a ladeez that has sapped me of any leftover creativity and cleverness for the blog.

For instance, it took me 3 attempts to write the above sentence.

More importantly, my replacement TV is rolling its way across the Great Plains to instantly, upon its arrival, transform my place into a pimp palace. All I need now is the pimp.

People are pretty sick of me mentioning the fire; which just serves to illustrate that peoples’ tolerance for tragic events is only the initial sting, not the long-term consequences. All told, it will have been nearly 6 months since the fire, and things are still not back to normal… or better than normal which is what I’m going for. I have very little to complain about, of course. I have a home, and all of the necessities, plus a few non-necessary ones… and I’m not really complaining now, just listing the facts.

I wonder what will happen, actually, when I do get TV back. Will I watch 8 hours a day? Will I instantly surround myself with Lost and American Idol and Oprah? Or will I eschew TV and take advantage of the weaning that I was forced to go through? I hope it’s the later, ’cause I still have a lot of crap to take care of.

Brilliant Wes Anderson Amex Ad

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spCknVcaSHg]

I could watch this all day! …if it were longer. *ba-dum-dum-CHING!*

Propogating what might become a meme,and is really just ganked from kottke: the list of the 50 best book to film adaptations as decreed by The Guardian. Like kottke, I’ve marked which I’ve read the book and which I’ve seen the movie:

1. [B] 1984
2. [B] Alice in Wonderland
3. American Psycho
4. [BM] Breakfast at Tiffany’s
5. Brighton Rock
6. [BM] Catch 22
7. [BM] Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
8. [BM] A Clockwork Orange
9. Close Range (inc Brokeback Mountain)
10. The Day of the Triffids
11. Devil in a Blue Dress
12. [BM] Different Seasons (inc The Shawshank Redemption)
13. [M] Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (aka Bladerunner)
14. [M] Doctor Zhivago
15. [BM] Empire of the Sun
16. The English Patient
17. [M] Fight Club
18. The French Lieutenant’s Woman
19. [M] Get Shorty
20. [M] The Godfather
21. [M] Goldfinger
22. [BM] Wiseguys (aka Goodfellas)
23. [BM] Heart of Darkness (aka Apocalypse Now)
24. The Hound of the Baskervilles
25. [M] Jaws
26. [BM] The Jungle Book
27. A Kestrel for a Knave (aka Kes)
28. [M] LA Confidential
29. [M] Les Liaisons Dangereuses
30. [M] Lolita
31. [B] Lord of the Flies
32. [M] The Maltese Falcon
33. [B] Oliver Twist
34. [BM] One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
35. Orlando
36. The Outsiders
37. Pride and Prejudice
38. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
39. The Railway Children
40. [M] Rebecca
41. The Remains of the Day
42. [M] Schindler’s Ark (aka Schindler’s List)
43. [M] Sin City
44. [M] The Spy Who Came in From the Cold
45. The Talented Mr Ripley
46. Tess of the D’Urbervilles
47. [BM] To Kill a Mockingbird
48. [M] Trainspotting
49. The Vanishing
50. Watership Down

.: I miss Isla Vista. I would sell my soul for a burrito from TA's right now. (via tony pierce)

I forgot to mention, it turns out I’ll live. Annnnd, I didn’t go to the doctor. I woke up the morning of my appointment, and although I didn’t feel entirely better, I felt well enough that had I felt the same way the day before, I never would have made an appointment. So I powered through, instead.

The fact that I was out until 4 last night is probably not the best way to ease back into things. Then again, back on the horse etc etc.

Last night, M asked me if I was a blogger… because she’s a smart girl and quickly figured out that when I made a joke about something saying, “Dear diary…” and made a typing motion with my hands instead of a writing one, that that obviously meant I probably blogged. I tried to distract her with, “You know, like Doogie Howser,” and even hummed the theme song (how that came to me instantly, I’ll never know), but she didn’t take the bait. So, because I don’t lie, I sheepishly admitted that I do.

I’m not sure what her reaction meant.

I might also have mentioned that I’ve been doing so for something like 6 years, long before she’d even heard of a blog, but instead went ahead and did lie and say that I don’t really write anything personal, just observational… which at the time didn’t feel like a lie because up until fairly recently, that was basically true.

Honesty is the best policy, kids.

So of course I like her which means that (also of course) she is competely wrong for me. I seem to only really really go for the challenging unattainabe girls that aren’t boring to be around. Go figure.

And by unattainable I don’t actually mean unattainable, otherwise I wouldn’t have secrets I’m not teling you about last night.

So I’m going to the doctor tomorrow morning. I don’t know that I’ve ever gone to the doctor without something clearly broken or life-threatening. Hopefully, I’ll find out that my “sore throat” will not be terminal. Or maybe give me at least a few months. Summers coming after all.

I’m temporarily caught the plague again. It’s funny (in that it’s completely not funny at all), but growing up I was sick just shy of never.

Maybe once.

For like three days.

This year, though, I’ve been sick a lot, or at least felt kind of under the weather. There was a time back in January, in fact, where I was fairly certain that I was going to die sooner than projected. It’s been so frequent, lately, that one of my best friend’s declared that I’m “sick all the time.” I’ve never been stuck with that label. It sucks. I don’t like it.

And it’s migrated to work as well. Today, a co-worker asked me if I was feeling any better, yet, followed by, “What’s wrong? Your lifestyle starting to catch up with you?”

To which I could only cough out, “YES!”

You know that, though? It’s been totally worth it. Better to go down swinging, than to lie down voluntarily.

Besides which, a friend just invited me to Vegas for Cinco de Mayo. Tool is playing at The Joint at the Hard Rock. I mean, you can’t just pass that up, can you? I just hope I live that long. Also, let me know, and I’ll meet you there.

Apartment update

So it’s been about 6 months since the fire in my apartment and about 1 month since I’ve actually moved back in, and things are slowly (slowly) starting to come together.

I did some painting last week, and made my umpteenth trip to IKEA this weekend, so things are feeing a litte less cold and sterile and a bit more like I actually live here.

My bedroom is more or less back to normal, though there are still blank walls.

My “office” is still a miscellaneous room with no direction, but at least it’s usable.

The kitchen is still missing a table and chairs, and a washer/dryer; but I can at least cook stuff again, and have yet to be left wanting anything critical. A few key items inexpicably didn’t survive, though; like a paring knife and the little stopper that goes on the food processor. All replaceable, of course.

The living room is my main focus right now, and the only thing preventing me from throwing a huge House-Warming-Not-Burning-Party. I need to replace the couch, the TV’s on order, and the stereo died an ugly death.

At least there’s progress, though…

I woke up this morning at 5:12AM to the sound of fucking. Sorry if that’s crass, but I know what “making love” sounds like, I’ve even done it once or twice, and this wasn’t it. This was fucking.

I was disappointed to find out that it wasn’t me, but was instead my neighbor… which is interesting as he and his live-in girlfriend broke up a month or so ago and she subsequently left forever (sounds familiar). I’m assuming this is why it was the fucking and not the making love.

At first I thought, “Good for you, go cat go!” as I listened to the floorboards squeak and groan, squeak and groan, squeak and groan… but then I figured out it was 5:12AM and was just confused.

Who has sex at 5:12AM?

Ony two types of people:
1. People that have been fucking all night long, and their third time happens to fall in or around 5:12AM, or
2. Weird people.

Seeing as I hadn’t heard anything all night long (or, by the way, ever before… this might be part of the reason my neighbor and his girfriend broke up), I concluded that he must have been working and working and working on this girl all night long until finally, somewhere around 4:47AM, she relented. Weird people.

I’m sure I’m just jeaous.

I went to see a play in an extremely small Venice venue last night. The theater was comprised of tiered seating for maybe 30 people total, with stacks of 4-wide seats on one side of the aisle, and stacks of only 2-wide on the other… kinda like a 737 but not nearly as big. A friend of mine and I had the last two seats in the back on the double-seat side, and we had to climb a little ladder to get up there, as if it was a crow’s nest on a very small tall ship.

The whole production was put on by 4 people, 2 main characters and then a couple of other guys that pulled double-duty for some of the smaller parts; and 4 red chairs arranged in different ways was the sum total for the sets.

This play was… intense. So intense, in fact, that one of my friends had to leave at intermission, along with a couple of other random people. When 3 people leave in a 30-person theater there goes 10% of your audience. The thing was, it was good (at least I thought so), but it was kind of like walking into A Clockwork Orange when you were expecting to see a cute film about elves making magic clocks in an orange tree.

A Clockwork Orange, by the way, being the only other performance that I’ve ever seen anyone walk out of due to it just being “too much”. It was the girl who would eventually become my college girlfriend, and she left during the part where Alex is being brain-washed and they’re holding his eyes opens with those clips to force him to watch violent movies. The ironic thing was that I always had the impression that L was the toughest girl I ever met, and that little episode illustrated for the first time that that may, at least partially, have been a front.

But I digress.

The play basically consisted of a married couple, dealing with an illness in their family, and succumbing to the intensity and pressure of the situation to where they start to take it out on each other.

You know, like real life.

The arguments and the biting comments were so real, in fact, that it took me back to every mean spirited argument I ever had with ADG or L or anyone, and it made my stomache churn (and I liked it… cause I’m weird). At intermission, I turned to my friend and said, “I am so glad I’m single right now,” and he looked at me laughing, “I was just thinking the same thing!”

It was that kind of play.

It was also that kind of play where at the end of it you said, “I need a drink,” and meant it. So, down the street to James Beach where I met an enchanting girl from Hollywood… and two of the girls I’ve dated briefly in the past few months. I was on my toes. I was on eggshells. I was on fire.

A smaller retinue eventually migrated over to the Backstage again where we were denied singing due to a long list of names. I was totally ready to sing Livin’ on a Prayer, too.

After that, Hollywood Girl and I slid into Johnnie’s Pastrami to share chili cheese fries and pie a la mode. Here’s the thing about the chili-cheese-fries:

I know what I’m doing.

I’ve had your Tommy’s, I’ve had your Apple Pan (OK, not chili-cheese fries, but it’s in the same genre), I’ve had your Original Tommy’s and all the other clones, and I’ve now had your Johnnie’s Pastrami.

None of these even compare with The Habit in Goleta, right outside of IV, but still firmly within the paradise that is Santa Barbara. The Habit (formerly The Hamburger Habit) has, without a doubt (and I believe tony will back me up on this0, the best chili-cheese fries, burgers, and shakes that have ever been created.

I do not exaggerate.

I may, in fact, need to drive up there this afternoon just to re-prove it to myself.

Having said that, Johnnie’s was OK, but it was really the company that made it great. When I flopped into bed at 3:30 I reflected how I told myself that I was going to keep my head down this weekend. So far, I’m glad I didn’t.