[sic]

Whilst most Labor Day’ers went back to work today, I took me an extra day off. Of course, it involved laborious stuff like cleaning the bathroom, taking the dog to the vet’s and picking her up, and a Costco run, which meant it didn’t involve mountain biking and a trip to the driving range as I’d hoped.

But I still found time this afternoon to set a spell and see me the sundown while plucking my gee-tar on our porch. Always a good thing.

Tomorrow it’s once more into the breach.

I last filled up my truck’s gas tank up in the beginning of July. In the time since I’ve only put 139 miles on the odometer because I mainly use it on weekends for local trips to the hardware store or Costco. The two longest trips we’ve taken with it this year have been Disneyland in February and Ventura at the end of May.

That 139 miles includes yesterday when, it being superheavyduty crunchtime at the job, I had to go in yesterday, and when I finally got out of there at 10 p.m. I figured why not set up the cam on the dashboard to record a timelapse of the trip home. Anytime’s a good time for timelapse!

Of course the 405 Freeway at 10 p.m. on a Sunday night was farking jammed up from the moment I boarded that parking lot so I got off of that crawler as quick as I got on and surface streeted it around the back-up to the 10 and it was smooth sailing the rest of the way.

In no real order:

1. Haircut.
2. Take the dogs for a good long neighborhood walk.
3. See “The Dark Knight” with Susan.
4. Replace the bottom bracket on my bike and maybe get a new handlebar stem, and a new chain and while I’m at it swap out the brakes (and put them back on my road bike) with the new set that’s been sitting in my closet since a week after I got the bike last January.
5. Drop off my rear wheel at Orange 20 to get it rebuilt with a new hub, because the bargain-basement loose-bearing hub that came with the bike is toast.
6. Hit a driving range because I’m scheduled to play in a business trip golf tournament (at this PGA championship-level course in Savannah, Georgia, where I’m bound to break records for the highest score — even with steady practice) in less than two months and I haven’t so much as picked up my clubs in more than two years (other than to put them in the basement).
7. Go to an AT&T store and get the new iPhone because I can’t wait no longer — but I’ll have to because by “get” I mean wait 10 days (or more) for it to arrive because the AT&T stores around town are apparently on a no-stock/shipment-only basis. Yes, that’s right. I’d rather wait a week-and-a-half (or more) than in line at The Grove for an hour or so. Because I hate lines. And because I hate The Grove. And yes I understand there are other Apple Stores out there. I’m not an idiot. I hate the Beverly Center, too. And the Glendale Galleria.
8. Put Buster through a test day and night run in his new outdoor tortoise house I built last month.
9. Go for a Sunday morning bike ride.
10. And probably a half-dozen other things I can’t recall right now because it’s Friday afternoon and I just wanna go home and chill with my baby and a DVD.

UPDATED (07.27): 1. Not done. 2. Not done. 3. Done. 4. Partially done. 5. Done. 6. Done, and didn’t hit too badly for a two-year layoff. 7. Done. 8. Done. 9. Not done. 10. Well, I did laundry and watered the yards. Bonus unseen big task: Basically rebuilt the bottom of the new tortoise hutch, replacing the screen and slats with plywood.

First comes me changing my evil road warrior ways and instead of confronting/berating every vehicle that excessively encroaches on mine and my bike’s space, I come up with this entirely verbose and overtly diplomatic manner of raising awareness.

Now this morning as I’m moving the cans down to the curb for trash pick-up, I encounter a Mercedes partially blocking our driveway — not the most egregious ever, but still worthy of me speed dialing parking enforcement and having the tard ticketed.

Instead, I come upstairs and tap this notice out on the keyboard:

To the owner of this Mercedes:

You are partially blocking the driveway. To you it may not seem like much, but this is a tight two-car garage, and any infringement – such as how you’ve chosen to leave your vehicle – makes it difficult to exit and enter.

In the past I’ve never bothered leaving notes, I’ve just contacted parking enforcement to have any such offending vehicles ticketed and/or towed. But I’m trying a different angle: I’m attempting to be considerate and respectful towards people who aren’t in the hope that the next time you’ll be a bit more attentive.

We’ll see how that works out. If it doesn’t, parking enforcement is just a phone call away.

I even saved the file to my desktop for potential future use with other infringers.

At the northwest corner of Crescent Heights and Wilshire this morning sat a weathered man holding a weathered piece of written-upon cardboard in one hand and a plastic cup in the other. I don’t remember what the sign said verbatim, but it included the words “Please Help” and gave information that the man was hungry and had no place to go and that he was a veteran of the Korean War.

Had the light been green to cross Wilshire and continue southward I would’ve just kept on going, but it was red and so I pulled beyond him and stopped and even though he was out of my sight he stayed in my mind — especially the word “hungry” — and so I pulled up onto the sidewalk and retrieved the container of yogurt and the banana and the Luna bar out of my backpack. It was to have been my 400-calorie breakfast consumed later at my desk, but suddenly I didn’t need it because he needed it more.

As I drew beside him, he jumped a little at the sound of my voice when I said “It ain’t much sir, but you’re welcome to it,” and then he gratefully accepted the items and said “God bless you” and I said “And you” and he caught sight of my bike with a sidelong glance and added “Be careful out there!” and I said “Thank you, take care” and I got on my way.

Yup, with five days left of 2007, it’s right about now when I start mulling what I’ll make happen in the new year. So here’s where I’m at, and it’s all about keeping it simple and specific — no “read at least 16 books” or “lose weight” or other such vague and general nonsense.

1. I will bike 3,000 miles.
2. I will read “Don Quixote.”
3. I will step on a scale and it will show 195.
4. I will mountainbike the from Ubehebe Crater to Racetrack Playa in Death Valley and in the middle of the dry lake bed camp under the stars.
5. I will write fiction every day as an exercise and post it to this blog.
6. I will complete two manuscripts and pursue their publication.
7. I will help Susan plant and grow a backyard garden.
8. I will learn Spanish.
9. I will adopt the south side section of Sunset Boulevard between Occidental Boulevard and Benton Way and spend at least three hours a month cleaning it up.

…On the way to the office today. Actually two — actually three, with the third one teaching me a valuable lesson.

1) In what may very well be a quintessential L.A. rite of passage (or at least a case of what-are-the-odds timing), I intersected with the downward trajectory of a falling palm frond (loosed from its unknown mooring no doubt by the blustering Santa Ana winds) that clipped me while biking westbound on 4th Street through the east end of Hancock Park. Had the feathery frond side of the project raked down my back I might not have even noticed, but instead I got thumped a glancing blow along my pack by the back end. Didn’t hurt. Just startled me in a “sky is falling” sort of way.

2) Still on 4th after safely crossing Highland, about a block or two further west a white Chevy SUV pulled up alongside me and the sheepishly grinning shaggy-haired driver immediately started apologizing out the open passenger window for almost hitting me. Being that I’m A) usually pretty aware when I come into close contact with vehicles and, B) had no knowledge that such a thing happened, I inquired as to where this purported near-miss happened and he told me that he had turned right onto 4th from Rossmore and didn’t see me until it was almost too late. Mind you, we were now aaaaall the way past Highland and not only was he not at Rossmore and 4th when I crossed that quiet intersection (with the nearest southbound car a 100 or so yards away from me to the north), but now I was three blocks from La Brea and as I have a helmet-mounted rearview mirror and use it religiously I would most certainly have seen him behind me at some point between there and here, but I had not. Still, given that he was being so nice and conciliatory about it, I opted not to dispute him as either stoned, hallucinatory or perhaps confusing me with another cyclist and instead just thanked him and he moved forward.

3 ) Last but not least… well actually it is pretty trivial. But the lesson learned resonates. For the last several commutes in which I’ve traveled on Venice Bouleavard, I’ve passed a corner 99-cent store wannabe a block east of Hauser, and painted on the walls are various rough representations of some of the merchandise available inside. There’s rudimentary wristwatch and a skewed scooter and other items and in the midst of them is this nicely grafitti’d anteater that clearly falls into the “one of these things is not like the others” category. Each time I pass by I chuckle wondering what aisle the aardvarks might be on and each time I vow to stop the next time and get a picture for posterity. Well, this morning was that next time, only the animal that had been there the previous Monday had been painted out sometime between then and Christmas, dangit. That’ll teach me to put off tomorrow what I could snap today.

Santa brought my bay-bee a brand new shaft-driven velocipede so we took it out on the L.A. River Bikeway Christmas day for an inaugural spin before heading downtown for a matinee of “I Am Legend,” which was disappointing, but we made up for it by riding the Bonaventure Hotel’s elevator to the top floor afterwards and then wandering around taking snaps of stuff.

Flickr photoset is here.

I had dinner with Mark Burton last night, one of my oldest friends. I pedaled up just ahead of the surprise rain showers  to the Versailles restaurant (never bothered to figure out why a Cuban restaurant chain is named after a French palace) on La Cienega just south of Pico. I hadn’t seen him since his birthday last May.

We caught each other up about friends and family and jobs and stuff and at some point Mark cut to the chase and wanted to know why I wasn’t writing. It caught me off guard because it’s not like I have the word “fiction” with a big red  circle and a line through it on my blog broadcasting a present lack of creative focus, but Mark’s always been intuitive like that; he didn’t test the water with “working on anything new lately.” or “how’s the writing going.” Nah, he got right to it, in part because he knows me pretty well and was one of my first readers having soldiered through my inaugural short story; a little apocalyptic tale I spun from of a lot of anger at the age of 18 titled Breakdown.

I won’t go into it here other than to say back then as a deeply disturbed and depressed young man right out of high school whose hopes for a future had just fallen apart, I had a couple options: 1) I could write a story about blowing up my world, or 2) blow it up for real. Both Mark and I are  glad I opted for the former, but the resulting tale still bothers him when he thinks about it.

“Still scares the shit outta me,” he said, adding, “fucker.”

Your mileage may vary, but I’ll transcribe it one of these days and post it around here somewhere.

But I digress. Truth is I’ve been asking myself that question about my writing more recently of late, but I didn’t have an answer cop out for him that was any different than for me: “I can’t seem to get out of my own way.”

He nodded knowingly and let it slide but as we said our farewells a short while later he gave me an action plan: go home and give Susan a kiss hello, check your email, do your little blogging thing — and then fucking write something. Anything.

And I did. I gave Susan that kiss when I got inside, then got out of my soaked clothes (the rain had caught up with me basically sat over the section of L.A. I rode home through). I didn’t blog. I didn’t check email. But I did write something. Not perhaps what Mark had in mind, what I wrote in a fresh new word document, centered in 24-point bold all-cap verdana type was:

I WILL TELL MY STORIES. I WILL EXPLORE MY POTENTIAL.

Certainly that’s not the first time I’ve attempted to motivate myself and while it might seem as as cliché and meaningless as my excuse for not writing, every journey begins with a first step, and now I’ve taken it.  Let’s see now if I can take the second and third and 3,000th, because the real answer isn’t that I can’t get out of my own way, it’s that I’ve been afraid to.

Our wonderful tree for Christmas 2007, as decorated this afternoon and seen with its reflection in the glass top of our coffeetable:

Merry Christmas!