What happens in Vegas almost stays in Vegas
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2S08QulJfSk]
Contrary to popular belief, I read a lot.
(The popular belief being, apparently, that I am usually too hung over or too busy with my incredibly glamorous life to have the time to read actual books, often without pictures.)
That substance seeping through your monitor is actual, palpable sarcasm, by the way.
At any rate, I’ve never been much for biographies (auto or otherwise). I’ve always found them fairly boring and dry. Born on such and such a date, did this amazing thing that made me famous at this time, spent rest of life milking it, died on blah blah blah.
>Skimming my list of read books, I don’t see anything remotely like a biography, in fact, unless you count things like On the Road or A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, which are more like semi-ficitonal memoirs than real biographies.
So, it came as a surprise to me when I bought, and then actually read, Howard Hughes: His Life and Madness… and liked it. I always wanted to be a pilot, growing up, and still do, so Huges has always been a mini-hero to me.
Plus, he was crazy as a loon so that’s always a plus.
Apologies to the 4 people that may have tried to access my site over the last few hours. My host Laughing Squid (whom I still recommend) unfortunately had an issue with a bad RAID controller that ended up corrupting the file system. After replacing the hardware, and restoring from back-ups, floorpie.net is back.
Luckily, Blogger also keeps your posts, otherwise the world would have lost my fascinating re-cap of my night at Backstage. *cough*
I’m back from Vegas where I had an awesome time. What happens in Vegas, etc etc, but you have got to see this video I took. I’ll post it once I figure out how to…
[UPDATE] One minor note that I write hear more to remind myself of than anything else. Why do They sell cigarettes in the convenience stores in airports? You’re not allowed to have any fire-making implements on that side of the security checkpoint, so you would presumably have to go somewhere else to get a lighter. Given that everything is more expensive in airports, wouldn’t you just by cigarettes at the 7-11, too? Discuss…
If there’s one thing my friend Jules is good for (and there are many things), it’s knowing where the good dive bars are. I’m not sure if it’s some kind of sixth sense, or if it’s just because she knows everyone on the westside, but she knows where it is you should go on a Thursday night.
Which, by the way, is a requirement for a good dive bar outing: it must be on a weekday. That way, when you’re sitting on your couch eating ghetto-sghetti while watching Swingers on your laptop and pondering either going to Home Depot or The Rumor Mill to do your laundry in the middle of the night, and your friend calls you to cowboy-up and, as she so sweetly says in her own lady-like manner, “slap some balls on” , you’ll have some awesome place to go and scream ironically after a few 7-and-7’s, “Thursday NIGHT!”
For us, the dive bar was Backstage.
Located across from the Sony lot in Culver City, this little bar, next to a gas station was the kind of place where, as we drove up, I asked, “How did you even find this place?” Of course, the boring answer was that she used to work for Sony. I prefer to think, though, that some awesome dude who had a walk-on on Blossom took her there once. The boy faded away but the dive-bar remained kind of thing.
Anyway, it’s a small-ish place with a fireplace, a pool table, and a Playboy pinball machine. Totally cheesy… which of course means I loved it.
>And then there was the small manner of the karaoke stage.
>There were good ones, there were bad ones, there was the guy that was a dead-ringer for Hurley from Lost who did the best fucking Zeppelin impersonation I’ve ever heard. I screamed along with him through several songs, after which he came up and gave me the bro-hand-punch, and shouted something or other for 30 seconds that I nodded emphatically to, punctuated by a “You like Whitesnake?” at the end to which I shouted, “Fucking right! You were awesome, man!” After he left, Jules leaned over with a, “What did he just say?!” and I replied honestly with, “I have no fucking idea. Whitesnake was involved though… Thursday NIGHT!!!”
All I could think about while I was driving home today… besides how lucky I am to live in LA… was how I remember to back in the day when the McDonald’s sign had an actual running tally of how many satisfied customers had been served, instead of the “Billions and Billions Served” that’s been up there for years.
I remember being driven by mom in our white 1974 Buick Regal with the maroon leather top past the local McDonald’s and being excited when I noticed that the numbers had changed… that ever more people had been served!
Over 80 Million Served
“Wow!” I thought to myself, “80 million people! That’s way more than in my school!”
It was momentous.
So, I thought about that today, and realized that most likely the majority of the people I’ve been meeting, lately, would have been too young to remember a time when the McDonald’s tally actually meant something. Or, put another way, I’m too old.
I paid my outrageous rent for the first time since the fire, today; and, what with all of the torrential rains lately, it’s a little hard to remember why I love living here so much.
Seriously, though, if you knew how much I paid in just rent (not including gas, water, electricity, the internets, and satellite), you’d call me crazy. You’d be right, of course, but it’s not because of the rent I pay.
It’s because of the other stuff.
But then I remember that people like Jessica Alba live here in LA. Which means, of course, that I have a marginally better chance of meeting and falling in love with her than you do, Jake Grogan from Fairdale Kentucky who visited my page at 7:06:30PM on 04.06.30 while searching for the word “obese” using Google.
This is what you found, by the way. Charming.
Jessica just successfully got an apology from Mr. Hefner for using her picture on the cover of Playboy… implying that she was naked inside when she wasn’t.
Personally, I think I should be the one getting the apology because I did think she was going to be naked inside and she wasn’t. I’ve not been so let down since Lindsay Lohan was over and she got naked. *ba-dum-dum-CHING!*
So yeah, a lot of money in rent.
Things are finally coming together apartment-wise… or at least as compared to where I was a few months ago. My replacement TV, an upgrade to the one I had for less than a year, is on the way… and from there, I’m pretty sure model-girls follow.
As is my understanding.
I’m pretty stoked on getting back into my stories, and recording Oprah and all, but at the same time I’m a little hesitant about it. Aside from a few instances at friends’ houses, I basically haven’t watched TV since the fire, 4.5 months ago.
Unless watching Chinese ping-pong with Korean subtitles while in Hong Kong counts.
For the most part, to my never-ending surprise, I don’t miss it. I thought it would be very difficult to find something to fill in the time, or to mediate the silences (I haven’t had a stereo for that long, either), but somehow it hasn’t been. Granted, I’m astoundingly behind on my pop culture. Water-cooler talk beginning with “Did you see that commercial where…?” and “Did you see the preview for that movie from…?” goes right over my head. I feel a little out of touch (despite my best efforts) with the news; and, this is the longest I’ve gone without hearing Bob Villa talk about his wood.
I have a subtle and small fear that, with TV now finally back in my grasp, I may fall quickly into a 10 hour/day habit and actually start Tivo’ing Oprah like I joked I would.
I don’t think so, though. I think my inner-self realizes that part of the reason I’ve been getting out and having so much lately, is because I haven’t been holed up in my apartment with the lights off watching The Cosby Show reruns alone in my underwear.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
sarah hepola is shutting down her blog after 5 years. This makes me sad.
I had this dream last night, more nightmare really, where somehow I was talking to ADG. It was somewhat based in reality because it was as if it was today, a year and some since we’d broken up, and we hadn’t seen each other since. It was not based in reality in that we were actually talking. Yeah.
At any rate, she was describing her daily schedule for some reason, and basically rubbing my face in how great her life is or something. To her (dream) credit, she wasn’t doing it intentionally, it was just an honest assessment of her day to day life.
By the way, can you believe what a fucking wuss I just was in that last sentence? You know goddamned well that the Dream ADG was maliciously trying to make me feel bad in my dream… I’m just so f’d up in the head with feeling that everyone has to like me, that in the extremely remote chance that she, or anyone who interacts with her, reads this particular post out of who knows how many, I have to make sure that I make her sound cool.
Seriously though, what the hell is wrong with me?
Anyway, she’s describing her schedule and it goes something like, “Yeah Sunday I have church, and then Monday is class, sex on Tuesday, Thursday is…” And on and on; naming all the minutiae that in her mind make her life more interesting than mine.
As she goes on, the specific minor things start to drop out of her schedule… because most people don’t know what they’re doing weeks ahead of time, you see. She starts to just name the recurring things like “Yoga on Wednesdays”, as she mentally clicks through the coming weeks.
Eventually, only one thing remains that is for sure going to happen on such a regular basis, and that is, of course, “Sex on Tuesday”… to the point where she just starts repeating, “Sex on Tuesday. Sex on Tuesday. Sex on Tuesday. Sex on Tuesday. Sex on Tuesday….” With a little pause between each instance, indicating that she’s looking at her inner calendar and really ticking it off as it occurs to her. I interrupt her to tell her that that doesn’t sound very romantic. She agrees somewhat, but then explains that it’s really much better this way, as she’s always guaranteed sex, and now looks forward to it. All the other times during the week she does it is just gravy then.
After the explanation, she goes back to her schedule, a look of intense concentration on her face as it gets harder and harder to think so far in advance. Somehow, she’s able to persevere, “Sex on Tuesday. Sex on Tuesday. Sex on Tuesday. Sex on Tuesday. Sex on Tuesday…”
And then I wake up.
Good morning.
I love High Fidelity. I just watched it for what has to be the 2,747th time.
It gives me hope.
It reminds me why I am a hopeless romantic.
It makes me feel cool.
It makes me want to hang out in chill bars and see bands in small clubs.
And it just has a fucking great soundtrack. And if a movie has that, you almost don’t even need a plot or John Cusack to hold it down like a champ.
But High Fidelity HAS a plot that’s rich and funny and heartwarming and awesome, and High Fidelity HAS John Cusack who holds it down like a stone cold P-I-M-P, making him, in my opinion, one of the coolest actors of the new(ish) school.
And that soundtrack. C’mon, the soundtrack! Velvet Underground for chrissakes. Barry White, Elton John, Love, and even the Chemical Brothers, Elvis Costello, and Dylan. Grand Funk Railroad, Sheila Nichols, Sterolab, Stevie fuckin’ Wonder, and Marvin Gaye.
You just can’t, g’ah! …Such a great damn movie.
