[sic]

So I’ve let the dog out into the backyard to go pee, at about the same time as I do every day, and she trots on out, does her business then goes sniffing around the new look I’ve given the southeast corner before coming back to the grassy area under the tree with the fragrant little blossoms (whose name I still do not know) and sitting down.

Most of the time she comes trotting right back inside after she’s finished, but on occasion she likes to linger a bit. This is one of those occasions so I come out from the backdoor and grab a seat on the low brick wall next to the walkway and Shadow’s just sitting there looking back at me intently with that look she has and I tell her I’m in no rush to get back inside if she isn’t. So she walks her front paws out in front of her and lays down.

And the the wind chimes are chiming and the late-afternoon sun is shining and the pre-dusk blue of the sky is especially vibrant and from the tree boughs above Shadow fall those aromatic little flowers like rain, and she’s still staring at me with this lazer look and before I know it I’m all teared up because of… hell I don’t know. Because it was just so damn beautiful. And because I’m so damn lucky and double damn thankful. For everything. For my wife. For my life. For Shadow. For the backyard. And the sun. And the breeze.

If this were a script, Shadow would rise sensing my emotion and come to me comfortingly, but this isn’t a script and Shadow just relaxes there looking at me and looking around, and scratching behind her ear, and letting out one of her huge sneezes, the kind in which the forward recoil drives her nose into the ground, which of course makes her sneeze again even harder.

And that made me weepy all the more because it was just as it should be, with Shadow at home and comfortable in her backyard for what I hope will be many more years to come. And maybe that’s part of why I got all choked up, too. Because it’s been such a strange journey getting to this point. For me and Shadow. And I’m so blessed that things have worked out the way they have.

Eventually the sounds of Pepper and Jiggy wrestling in the kitchen brings Shadow out of her meditative respose. She rises to cross to the walkway and trots down past me to the screen door where she waits for me to unlatch it so she can enter and disperse the play-fighting felines.

I wipe my eyes and get up to open it for her.

So I hopped the No. 4 MTA bus at 7 a.m. and got down to the Stanley Mosk Courthouse for my jury duty with plenty of time to spare. Once the paperwork was completed and my juror badge was clipped to the collar of my jacket, it was all about filling the void of time that was only broken on a couple occasions with the juror assembly room personnel calling for everyone’s attention over the PA system and reading off a bunch of names.

I didn’t make either of those panels. So in between I plowed through the newspaper, crept through the first few chapters of Curse of the Narrows, listened to some Sounds From The Ground tunes on my iPod and tried to ignore Regis and Kelly being broadcast from the small TV across the aisle.

Finally the PA came to life again asking for everyone’s attention for a panel that came complete with “special instructions” and sure enough my name came up near the end of the roll call.

And what were those special instructions, you ask? That I am to report to Department 309 on the 14th floor of the Central Civil West Courthouse on Commonwealth Avenue near Wilshire at 10 a.m. tomorrow.

While my first instinct was disappointment at being made to abandon such a smooth public commute away from downtown for this less-familiar new place, it didn’t taint the combined relief at 1) landing on a panel, and 2) not having to hang around the jury room anymore.

Of course, other prospective jurors didn’t take it as well as I did. One man expressed his “shock” at not being excused, and another lady tried to protest saying she couldn’t afford to be on a jury. Both were met with stoney, unsympathetic looks from the assembly room workers.

I’m just wary enough to think that I may be in for a longer haul… that this new courthouse might be host to a trial that might be expected to take longer than normal (typically five to seven days) and that despite announcements that all selections are random, my current unemployed status might right up their preliminary alley.

I did manage to squeeze a $14 weekly MTA bus/rail pass out of them before leaving. Technically the passes are only for people who end up on juries, but I pointed out that sense I have to return tomorrow — and to a second location — I should be granted one. They acquiesced, even though I still might not make whatever jury I’m being pitched towards. If not, my service is done and I’m a $14 pass richer. But I’m still hoping I get to use the pass to get me to and from a jury box.

Anyway, with the remainder of the day all mine, I walked through downtown and ended up here at the Central Library where I had a salad and now am debating whether I’m going to head home or hang here awhile.

Yes ladies and gentlemen, I’m off to jump into the jury pool — and actually wanting to! That’s right, I may very well be the only person there who doesn’t want to be anyplace else and actually wishes to get on a jury. I’ll personally be affronted — not relieved — if I am excused or dismissed.

I got my iPod and laptop charged, I’ve shed any sharp objects and fire-starting items. There’s a bottle of water holstered in a side pocket of my case and inside a box of raisins, a protein bar and a couple servings of pretzels… and what else? Oh, my current book Curse of the Narrows (which I discussed a few days ago).

Since I’m busing it, I’m debating bringing a camera (other than my phone’s cam) as I won’t have a car to stash it and I believe they’re pretty much prohibited. Pity the courthouse doesn’t have day-use lockers… but then again I could go stow it in one at the YMCA a few blocks away. We’ll see. Just get me empaneled first!

So I put on a tie and got myself down to the Ronald Reagan state building at 300 S. Spring Street in time for my 8:15 a.m. hearing to appeal the Employment Development Department’s categorical denial of my unemployment benefits. As I said yesterday, I felt the opportunity to elaborate my side could bring needed dimension — and reversal — to the EDD’s very one-sided decision to deem me ineligible. Nevertheless there are two situations I dread: courtrooms and hospitals. So to say I was anxious is putting it mildly.

After having a chance to review my case file my name was called and I followed the hearing judge down narrow corridors into a small windowless chamber. After some orientational instruction the tape recorder’s play button was pushed and away we went.

Since no one from the Greater Los Angeles Zoo Association or the L.A. Zoo saw it fit to show up and dispute my appeal, it basically came down to me restating the letter I sent to the EDD after they denied my claim.

Less than 20 minutes later it was over and I came away with the strong sense that the judge would be overturning the EDD’s decision, which definitely added to my feelings of elation and relief that the ordeal was over. Even if the ruling isn’t in my favor, I’m just glad to have gotten through it. Time to put it away and move on.

And I celebrated by deviating from my diet with a McGriddles value meal from McDonald’s that I got on the way home. I don’t know what’s worse, eating the tasty but craptastic food items or acknowledging their abject lack of nutrition on my fitday.com journal (the McG has how many calories!?). Nothing to worry about though as I’m going to further celebrate this positive turn of events with a 20-mile bike ride with an hour on the treadmill down at the YMCA thrown in for good measure.

First up: I finally — finally! — finished and filed the story on gorilla trekking in Rwanda that I’ve been working on for months. And by “working on” I mean “dicking around with so frustratingly.” Being my own worst critic, I am not at all satisfied with it. It’s waaaaaaay long and suffers from a convoluted sequencing wherein I jump back, forth and sideways in time.

But there is something to be said for it being done. And by “done” I mean at least it’s at a certain level of readability and completeness that I could deliver it to the editor who’s been interested in it for as long as we’ve been back from Africa. Hopefully she won’t throw it back in my face and say “Ha-ha, very funny… now where’s the ape story we talked about?”

Second up: I got those primates off my back not a moment too soon as tomorrow morning I have the joyful task of appearing before an administrative law judge downtown who’ll hear my appeal against the Employment Development Department’s denial of my unemployment insurance claim. I feel I have a good case as to why I’m entitled to my benefits, but courtrooms are almost as terrifying to me as hospitals so I could use any and all hopes and best wishes and crossed fingers that all goes well and I’m able to calmly and persuasively state my side to the best of my ability without pulling a cowardly lion and running away down a corridor and out through the nearest window. Thanks in advance.

Oh, and third up (just to break the monotony and brighten the mood): Another example of my newest fauxtographic diversion. In this case the subject is Pepper, captured while lounging this morning atop the back of the club chair in the library:

Two Decembers ago, just before 2005 landed, I stepped on a scale and whopped out at 260. I’d been in that neighborhood weight for the better part of a year, having climbed there after peaking at 229 following the conclusion of the 475-mile bike ride I did from San Francisco to Santa Clarita in October of 2003.

I’ve hated every minute of it. But I haven’t hated it enough to do anything about it other than take short-term steps to increasing my physical activity. I’d certainly done far less to regulate my eating.

I’ve never fallen for diets or weight-loss programs. Certainly they are an option and are very productive to many of the people who participate, but other than a gym membership I can’t see paying a company money to tell me what essentially boils down to what we all know: Eat Right & Exercise.

Long story short, I followed my wife Susan’s lead and signed-up for a free account on Fitday.com. She had begun her program right after 2006 began and about a week before I did. I was so impressed by her motivation (her goal is to lose 30 pounds by July 1 when we will be going on a roadtrip up through several national parks (Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, Yosemite, others) on the way to Montana to visit her grandma and uncle.

In this the twelth day of my regimen, I’m feeling really good. I’ve been averaging about 2,000 calories a day and though I’m matching up my newly found eating habits with the regular physical routine I want to do I have been walking the dog these last three days far beyond the five-minute, end-of-the-block-and-back routine upwards of two a mile. Why today, we did that mile and then detoured a couple blocks over and up the landmark Music Box Steps (all 133 of them) made famous by the Laurel & Hardy film “The Music Box,” over to Micheltorena and down those 200-plus steps to Sunset and then back home… probably around two miles in total.

Anyway, so far so good. Even though I stepped on the scale last Sunday and had only dropped a solitary pound, there’s nothing wrong with that. Besides, I’m just getting started. According to my long-term goal (the same as Susan’s; to ditch 30 by July 1) I should only be dropping about 1.25 pounds per week so hopefully by this coming Sunday another one will bite the dust.

And now a word about my motivation. I was thinking about the almost two years that I’ve been bummed about my weight (especially after have acheived a sub-230 level… something I hadn’t seen in the 10 previous years) and despite the many protestations I made I just wasn’t able to take any really dedicated steps. Well, I figured it out. I do best after my complacency gets rattled. There are several examples:

• After losing my position as a Sparkletts Man in 1991 and being a very fit 220-pounds in the best shape and conditioning of my life (that job is practically eight hours or more of strenuous activity per day), I wallowed for awhile packing the pounds back on until I made the snap decision to joing the Navy and get the hell out of Dodge. Within a few months I was back to my fighting weight.
• After injuries in a traffic accident that occurred during my farewell party about a week prior to my shipping out to basic training in San Diego, I responded during the delay by getting all the way down to 216 pounds, something I hadn’t been since my late teens. I hadn’t felt so good about my body ever.
• Of course, a few months after still with lingering injuries, the navy decided they didn’t want me anymore and discharged me having ever having served a day. I was depressed, out of work (save for some temp stuff in Glendale as a freakin’ file clerk) and living with my mother and I started stacking it back on again.
• A few mild fluctuations in my weight followed during the next few years, but it was after I was back on my feet and working again following my 1994 motorcycle accident that I got moving towards controlling my weight again. My drive this time was to counter the frustrations I had with the disfigurement to my face by feeling better about my body. And by 1995 my sihouette was tight to the point of me wearing old jeans I’d long sense put into the back of the closet.
• I changed jobs after that and then came a four-month period of unemployment before I landed at the Pasadena Weekly, where I ate pizza for lunch and pastrami sandwishes for dinner and worked horrendous hours and had little time to do anything healthy or physical.
• I carried most of that weight with me over to my next job at the L.A. zoo and kept packing it on until late in 2000 my daughter told me she didn’t want to see me anymore. Again there was some wallowing with that shock, but less than six months later in 2001 I finally said enough was enough and began a simple regimen that limited my intake of food and maximized my physical activity. it worked like a charm and in a few months I was down to my 230s.
• From there I maintained my weight in my 240s until the decision to do the bike ride in 2003 and I kicked up the training to the point of where I was doing 60-80 mile rides practically every weekend. By the time the ride itself was done I was very happy not only with what I’d accomplished, but how I looked.

And now we’re back at the end of this two-year-long summit at 260, which began with the defeat I felt at being rejected by Karen Poly a couple months after that epic bike ride, and continues with my being rejected by the zoo two months ago for — of all things — posting my feelings and opinions about Karen on this blog (or last year’s version of it).

I’m not trying to neglect the fantastic marvelousness that has found me: my wife Susan, the repairing of the breaks between my daughter and I… all those are phenomenal blessings. All I’m trying to say in all that is that some of my highest accomplishments are born of my deepest defeats. And this latest reawakening of my long dormant drive for conditioning and fitness has left me very hungry to give myself a positive to help eliminate the negative. It’s worked in the past and it’ll work now and it’ll work in the future, too.

I know I have a long way to go, but I also know for the first time since the end of 2003, I am capable of doing it. And I’ll get to my first destination of 230 pounds by the time we leave for Montana — if not sooner.

Wow, It’s before 8 a.m. and I’m up and showered and dressed and ready to go somewhere as if I have a real job or something, which I do, albeit it’s more of a personal mission. The plan is to finish this Rwanda feature by Friday. Pardon the analogy but this ape story has become an 800-pound gorilla sitting in my head that I haven’t been able to move out of my way.

So! In short order I’ll be busing it downtown (don’t feel like biking it today, besides… tomorrow night is the monthly Midnight Ridazz group ride!) for breakfast at Clifton’s or Philippe’s (haven’t decided yet) then I’ll be walking over and installing myself at a desk in the fourth floor of the downtown library for an all-day jam session where, good, bad, or ugly, I will purge myself of this piece of primate.

Enough of this tinkering writer’s-block crisis-of-confidence bullshit.

“Dont think about all those things you fear,
Just be glad to be here.”

— From “Hayling” by FC Kahuna

And with that tripsonic tonic flowing out of my iPod and into my ears I rolled on The Phoenix over to the post office to mail a couple things and pick up a bunch of two-cent stamps that will keep our now-obsolete store of 37-cent’ers company as they venture out toward extinction in this brave new 39-cent world.

Leaving the post office, an interesting thing happened. I petite little Asian gal walked up to me holding a spiff Canon camera. At first I thought she was heading past, but she stopped right in front of me as I was boarding The Phoenix and started telling me how she’s in a photo class and she has an assignment to snap something orange and when she drove by on Alvarado and saw the bike she had to stop and ask would I mind if she took some of The Phoenix, which is decidedly that very same color. So I said go right ahead and she was totally thrilled. Then as she’s snapping away another postal customer comes out, a very Steve McQueen-looking dude (he’d been a few behind me in the ridiculously long line inside the P.O.), and he smiles and said something not unsarcastically like “Yeah, that bike’s a chick magnet, man.” And I replied with a laugh, “Nah, it’s just the color. The ladies go crazy for it.” To which he replied way loud enough for the lass to hear(but I don’t think she did because she was focused on focusing), “Dang, wouldn’t ya know I picked today to leave the house without my orange condoms.”
Insert awkward silence as he moves on chuckling with the gal still busy composing her shots and me just thinking “whatever dude.”

Anyway, once the very thankful young lady got the shot she wanted it was over Sunset to Philippe’s for an early lunch (double-dipped lamb with blue cheese; side of potato salad and dill pickles) and dang if a cool picture opp didn’t come up (but nothing to do with the color orange) and double dang if I didn’t curse the fact that I don’t have a truly portable digicam at hand. Sure, we have the Digital Rebel, which is great; and the Canon G3 is a great little cam as well. But neither are very pocketable. As a result I’m forced to resort to my mobile phone’s near-worthless cam’s alleged 1.3 megapixel resolution or the next to near-worthless (but still working) 7-year-old Casio QV-11, which takes 320×240 pics and that’s it.

The opp I’m digressing from had to do with this wonderful elderly Asian gent who was occupying the same upstairs section at Philippe’s as I was. We had the place to ourselves. Me at one table reading the Times and chowing down on one end of the room and him at another. He was doing something odd, going through pages of some Chinese-language newspaper and tearing sections into long strips and then keeping the strip and folding the rest of the page up and putting it in a pile to his right. At one point he got up and left, but soon he was back and doing the same thing again. The opp came at one point where he was just sitting quietly reading something with the light streaming in through the southern windows and I was left so wishing I had a cam with some resolution and zoom capability. Alas I had to resort to the QV-11, and this is what I got (pffft):

This could’ve been such a cool shot if I could have closed in a bit on his face or had the megapixels to blow it up. So I did what any megapixel-deficient geek would do, throw the low-resolution image into Photoshop and have some Fun With Filters. The psuedo photo-illustrative results can be found here.

Shortly thereafter, I got myself over to the downtown library and got busy the rest of the afternoon doing some real work.

Totally forgot to mention that a jury summons arrived on Christmas Eve. I went through the phone registration and now I’m scheduled to report to the Stanley Mosk Courthouse at 111 N. Hill Street January 30 (or at least I’m to call in the weeked before to see if I need to report). I’m so going to end up on a jury, I just know it — and, in fact, I’m very much looking forward to that possibility.

Click for a brief vidclip of some of the
wetstuff that fell to earth this last day of 2005.