[sic]

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!

Things I Wanna Do This Weekend (and probably will):

• Bike up to the Hollywood nunnery and get a loaf of pumpkin bread (thanks for the reminder Militant!)
• Begin my Christmas shopping
• Clean the bike (and change the slow-leaking rear innertube)
• Take Susan to dinner at that new El Caserio restaurant on Silver Lake Boulevard north of the 101
• Put up the Christmas decorations

Things I Wanna Do This Weekend (and most likely won’t):

• Finish my Christmas shopping
• Drive over to The Kobbler King on Jefferson and check out their wares
• Drive a little further on Jefferson and pick up the abandoned fence post I saw ( if it’s still there; don’t ask)

Things I Don’t Wanna Do (but gotta):

• Go to the vet’s and get medicine and special food for Shadow
• Groceries (Costco & Vons)
• Clean the house
• Rake leaves
• Laundry

UPDATED (12/3): Not too shabby. The only things I didn’t get done were that visit to The Kobbler King, dinner at El Caserio, and my bike’s cleaning.

A minor comedy of errors this morning. I get up and go out into the backyard to make sure the fog bank isn’t smoke from a fire and notice that a small potted kangaroo paw plant I’d been successfully attempting to nurse back to health this last couple months had suffered a second and this time fully fatal assault by Ranger.

The first came after my initial attentions helped the plant pring back to life sitting near ground level where it had been entirely ignored by the dog until for some unknown reason she decided to dig it out a couple weeks ago. I was pissed then but the sturdy little fella’s roots were still relatively intact and so we repotted it and moved it up onto a table next to the bbq grill where I thought it would be safe.

Stoopid me.

There it was this foggy a.m. fully mangled amid the spread of its soil — the plastic pot nowhere to be found (as if hiding that piece of evidence would be sufficient) — and I went into a mid-level WTF. The only problem is that when I pivoted barefoot on the patio to face Ranger who had that “Busted!” look of guilt all over her muzzle I ended up stubbing the big toe and the ball of my right foot righteously on a raggedy cinderblock.

That elevated my anger somewhat but I managed to stop short of assaulting the dog in part because I was bleeding something fierce and had to turn my attentions to staunching the flow and cleaning the wound.

When Susan got up she sensed a change in the force and asked what was wrong and I told her “I don’t like the dog anymore,” which is not true in a big-picture sense of course but at that immediate time and place…? Yeah, I didn’t like the fucking dog one bit.

The final domino to fall is that while the injury to my tootsie isn’t as bad as it seemed it might now prevent me from participating in Franklin Avenue’s much-anticipated 2nd Annual Great L.A. Walk tomorrow morning, that will span the entire length of Pico Boulevard from the Coca-Cola plant at Central all the way to the beach (some 15 miles). If so, I still plan to show up and see them off and/or hobble along for the first mile or so with them.

And in the meantime the scrapes are bandaged and I’m going to work off the fury I’m retaining towards Ranger (and yes: my silly over reaction) on the bike ride into work.

(click to quadruplicate)

Yep. Happened again this year. Halloween. Got home in time to get the lights set and the fog machines rolling and the spooky sounds playing and the blacklit ghosties spinning to the creepy organ music wafting out of the library. Then there were the last minute touches like putting the sugar skulls into the pumpkins and adding a lantern to the gnarled stick the big ghoul was holding. Everything looked great.

And just as happened last year for an hour or so I fretted that Susan and I might be the only ones to enjoy it — and Joe, our tenant upstairs. He got home while I was waiting on the porch and admired the set up.

“But where’re all the kids?” he asked.

Good question. 6:30 p.m. came. Then 7:00. Then 7:30. Nothing. Had all our work to celebrate this favorite night of the year been for naught? Would this be the year that we pay the price for being one of only several houses on our block that does the evening up right and tries to make the hood seem less a dead zone.

No, it wouldn’t. Eventually they came. Just like last year. And the year before. Whew. Probably had a good 80 or 90 or so Spidermen, and nurses, and goblins, and bunnies, and Hulks and such that made it up the stairs to get their treats by the time we shut things down around 9 p.m. Some were just there for the candy. Others stopped to smell the doom and decay.

“Oooo look at the leg!” “This is the scariest house I’ve been to!” “See all the bones!?” “Check out the pumpkins!” “Whoa, the ghosts inside are cool! “The smoke is great!” “This house wins the award!”

Some of our neighbors who batten down the hatches for the night and darken their porches and homes probably roll their eyes and consider us childish what with the theatrics we present. They might scoff at it as a waste of time — so many hours work for so little reward.

But like Linus in his eternal quest for the Great Pumpkin, we’ll do it again next year. Bigger and better than the last. And again I’ll stand out on the porch as darkness falls and wonder if anyone will come share it with me.

Flickr photoset here.

After stopping at a decidedly unfulfilling Halloween store on San Fernando Boulevard, Susan and I beat a path to Stats in Pasadena where we proceeded to spend waaaaaaay too much money on ghouls and goblins and tombstones and strobe lights and stuff to decorate the front yard with this October 31st.

This fiendish fellow’s my favorite:

After that we journeyed down to Olvera Street for Susan to find a specific type of top and skirt for her Day of the Dead costume this year, then we had dinner at La Golondrina before heading home.

I can’t remember if I first spotted it Monday or Tuesday this week, but on one of those days while bike commuting to work south on Redondo Avenue in between Pico and Venice boulevards I spied a discarded wooden bench curbside. The first time it was upright and the next day it was turned over. And when I saw it on Thursday I knew it had to be mine.

So I told Susan about it and how it would look just about perfect at the foot of the river rock wall that fronts the porch and she was all like “Duuuude! I’ve wanted a bench there for like the longest time” and I was all “Duuuuuuuuuude!!” and thus we decided after coffee early this morning to reconnoiter at 0830 hours and proceed on a Mid-City recovery mission, which was not only successful but also yielded a beaten four-shelf colonial style bookcase (for the basement) and included the added celebratory bonus of breakfast at Roscoe’s Chicken & Waffles on Pico.

The bench itself is fully waterlogged from the rains and distinctly aged and weathered andwobbly, plus its previous owners had seen fit to nail a quilt over the seating area that was delightfully moldy and mildewed and delightfully difficult to remove, but ultimately I did and after hammering some strategic reinforcing followed by a test placement of my 220 pounds upon it wherein it did not collapse, I documented its new and honored place below as the cats gave it varying levels of attention (click to triplify):

Susan has pix of the actual recovery that I’m sure she’ll be posting to her blog, but in the meantime there’s a photoset titled “Eight Photos Of A Bench And Two Cats” here on Flickr.

There’s something about the parking lot where the Ralphs is on Glendale Boulevard in Silver Lake that makes people silly. A couple years ago I apparently wasn’t crossing  in front of a stopped car fast enough because when I’d barely gotten by the driver gunned it past me and flipped me off and when I shrugged a WTF!? at him as he glared at me in his rear view he slammed on the brakes and made like he was going to open the driver’s side door but remembered what a chickenshit he was and kept on going when I took off towards his car ready for whatever rumble might have awaited us.

Then today coming across the lot in my car, southbound on the right side of the parking lot lane with a two cars coming northbound, the trailing car without reason or need justs pulls directly in front of me as if to go around the lead car, but then doesn’t and just stops. And so does the lead car who’s now waiting at my 10 o’clock for a car behind me that’s pulling out of a space.

Does Car No. 2 pull back in behind Car No. 1 so I can go by? No. Does Car No. 2 stop? No. Instead Car No. 2 keeps coming toward me  until there’s only about 15 feet between our front bumpers. Then she stops. And now I have to wait for Car No. 1 — who’s doing nothing wrong — to wait for the car to exit the space behind me. When that happens does Car No. 2 then pull back to the right? No. She sits there barely moving and entirely unwilling or unable to acknowledge she’s sorry or a tard until I opt to go to my left and around her and as I do I give her a smarmy look and say mostly to myself in my closed up cab with the A/C and Sirius radio going full blast: “This isn’t England ya know!”

Not the cleverest thing, but hey.

And she responds how?  Of course by fully animating in a nanosecond as if someone hit an on switch. In the blink of an eye she went from comatose or overdosed to sitting fully upright and jetting her arm out in a full-thrust extension toward me upon the end of which stretches one of the most adamant middle fingers I’ve ever been given. You’d think I’d just insulted her mother or her hair color. And for added emphasis she yells “fuck off!” for all she’s worth and loud enough for me to hear in my closed up cab with the A/C and Sirius radio going full blast.

And then I did this remarkable thing: instead of going ballistic I laughed at her and shrugged at her irate over-reaction and just kept on going to a space up ahead where I parked and got out. I laughed even harder when I saw she’d done the same thing and was glaring at me with  eyes in a head that barely cleared the top of the door frame of her sports car. Seriously if she was five-feet tall then I’m a hipster. King of the hipsters.

To make things even more ludicrous, she was damaged. I mean physically. As she got out in the open, headed thankfully for some other venue besides Ralphs where I was going, Ms. Gimpy walked with a pronounced limp.

As timing would have it as I was on my way out of the market she was also heading back to her car from wherever she’d been, limping and a-glaring at me and so ready to open a can of badmouth on my ass. I just shook my head and kept on going.

Now that the RatCam has been retired I’m finding other faaaaaaascinating things around the backyard to catch video… all of which entirely by coincidence involve me including, chronologically: me reading in the hammock (with Ranger on the lookout for interruptions), me at the grill and me and my bay-bee dining with our good buddy Al Fresco (with Ranger and Shadow not begging at our feet):

What a wonderful Sunday it was!