[sic]

Today marks the 13th anniversary of a suicide in the valley that led me to begin this column for the Pierce College Roundup like this:

Evelyn Ruth Billings made a lot of people late to work October 12.

Because of her, the two right lanes of the southbound San Diego Freeway were closed for nearly three hours. Rush-hour traffic was backed up to Nordhoff Street, to Winnetka on the southbound Ventura Freeway and to Coldwater Canyon on the northbound. The resultant traffic clog led harried commuters to inundate the surrounding canyon roads and Sepulveda Boulevard, jamming those streets for several hours.

All because she died that morning.

The column, published in the October 20 issue of the campus paper, went on to take first place Column Writing category of the 1994 Journalism Association of Community College’s statewide competition. Only after receiving the award did I learn legendary L.A. Times columnist Jack Smith was the judge and I immediately wrote him a letter telling him I’d been reading him since I could remember and I wasn’t sure which I was more honored by, winning or being judged worthy by him. A shortwhile later I received a handwritten note back thanking me for my kind words and for making the selection process easy for him by writing an exceptional column that readily stood far above the other entries.

It is my proudest moment as a journalism student and a journalist, but I keep my pride tempered never forgetting that my personal success resulted from another person’s failure. And every October 12th since, I’ve always made sure to say a little prayer for Evelyn and hope she rests in peace.

Sometimes epiphanies can be found in the heart of the most trivial tediums, such as this morning as I was washing the petfood dishes after their breakfast. Certainly it is a simple task involving some hot water, a touch of soap, a scrub brush, some scrubbing. It is a chore I do in the morning and the evening after the animals have been fed. It takes a minute, maybe two.

But in the midst of doing it this morning a bigger picture was revealed: I am not a fan of unfinished business. In and of itself there is nothing at all profound there. Duh: who is? Instead, the profundity lies in my extrapolating that trait to the realization that I’m now at the milestone of 10 years into some seriously unfinished business. It was around this time a full decade ago that I cracked open a new document screen on the computer and pecked out these words:

Passed all the way down through the ladybug years,
From ladybug parents to their ladybug dears,
Does ladybug custom so dictate the telling,
Of a ladybug tale told each ladybug evening,
To ladybug children in ladybug beds,
Not quite ready to rest their little ladybug heads.

And Paperboy and the Ladybugs was conceived. It gave me chills to pen those first few stanzas. I was spontaneously subsumed with a creative energy I hadn’t felt since Breakdown, that apocalyptic short fiction I wrote at 18 years old when my future had gone into the crapper at terminal velocity. Suddenly in 1996 I had a story to tell. And in that first heady initial rush I did my best to tell it:

“What tale shall I tell? asked ladybug Cypress,
His children responded, “Dad, you must decide for us!”
“I have an idea,” he said striking a pose,
With a nod and a wink to his beloved Rose,
“I’ll spin you a story, yes, I know the one,
I’ve told it before but it’s sure lots of fun!”

I am not generally predisposed to procrastination — at least obviously not on small scales. If something needs doing I do it. But while I may not be able to leave those dishes for later or any of a score other chores/errands/projects that arise in the course of a day/week/et cetera, I sure as hell can subjugate my creative calling seemingly indefinitely without much consideration.

Ten years. That amount of time hit me over the head like a hammer this morning. And this from someone who’s been in a wide variety of deadline-oriented journalistic endeavors for the last 15 years.

How embarrassing. How frustrating.

In the past I’ve excused the dearth by how much my life has changed. I blamed the killer hours I spent at the Pasadena Weekly. I blamed the disintegration of my relationship with my daughter, for whom I had dedicated the book. In short all those tactics have been camouflage for a crisis of confidence; a lack of belief in my ability. I have been successful in continually devaluing my creative currency, and as a result I’ve diminished the story as well. But not completely. No matter how determined I’ve been to power my storytelling down, I’ve never been able to discredit the story itself:

The children all snuggled and Rose took a seat,
Only ladybug Cypress did stay on his feet,
As he swept them far back to a time long ago,
In a place that was busy and dirty and low,
Where many less did smile than those that did frown,
“The story,” he said, “takes place in a town.”

“A large one, a city, as big as can be,
With buildings that dwarfed even the tallest of trees,
Where rivers of asphalt met islands of pavement,
A harsh place that clearly was not much for ladybugs meant,
But ladybugs did thrive as ladybugs will do,
In spite of the dangers that were not to few.”

“But where was it,” peeped Kate, “What was this place called?”
Said dad “I suspected you might be appalled,
This place on a ladybug map you can guess,
Is far, far away and called Los Angeles.”
“Angels?” Chuck asked, adding, “were there any?”
Sage leaned over to Charles and whispered, “not many.”

Anyway, it’s time to get this dish done. I’m through blaming. I’m finished dismissing. I’m way over whining. I’m going to get this out of my head and off my back by making this the primary focus of my days from here until the first draft of a manuscript is done.
With diligence and determination I might not be away too long, so wish me a bunch of both.

Having given up yesterday afternoon, I’m now back at the transcribing desk, or rather a satellite version of it. Inside a few minutes earlier I mandated a change of place — namely an outdoor one. So having duly relocated the lapper and its webcam…

…to the patio table and cracked open a fresh Diet Pepsi Lime I am read to rebegin.

Additionally after aaaaaall these years of owning a pair of Bose noise-cancelling headphones and transcribing, it finally dawned on me that I could plug them into the tape recorder the better to hear what was recorded and thus potentially speed up the glacial and lifespan-reducing process of deciphering my interview subject’s voice.

Wish me luck.

I’m ankle deep and sinking into the transcription of an hour-long recording of a phone call wherein the person I was interviewing yesterday was on a cell phone first in his car and then in what sounded like a Starbucks. Translation? Transcribing audio tape is hell enough without a word or several in practically every other sentence getting garbled or dropped or zapped or drowned out by the freaking traffic and/or espresso machinge in the background. In other words this is gonna take a helluva long time of pushing play then rewind then listen then rewind then listen and type then play and type then stop and type and rewind and play and stop and rewind and play and stop and type and rewind and play and type and… get the idea?

Case in point: I spent practically 30 minutes deciphering and logging the first maybe 15-20 minutes of conversation and I finally pushed away from the desk and got the hell out for a walk with Shadow and along came the following eye-catching little scene of a child’s bike at the end/edge of a stretch of cracked concrete driveway catching my eye somewhere near the top of the famed Music Box Steps (made famous by the Laurel & Hardy shorty from back in the day). On top of that I worked up a wonderful hypoglycemic attack on the way back that left me stumbling home to binge on mangos and peanut butter like I’ve never binged before.

Anyway… the above slightly surreal interlude has been brought to you by the vastly fleeing remains of my sanity as I eye the tape recorder with what can only be described as disdain and get back to the maddening task at hand.

The salient points are this: before my wife and I embarked on our trip to Africa this time last year, my friend told her neighbor about our journey and the neighbor, an editor for the L.A. Times, got in touch with me informally to see if I’d be interested in documenting the Rwandan portion of the trip for as an article, packaged with our photos and videoclips. Thought it seemed like a slam-dunk, it’s not as if publication was guaranteed and certainly no deadlines were discussed, nor any rates of pay.

Absolutely, I said, and off we went. Upon our return, I was decidedly slow in getting the piece finished in large part because I was finding it difficult to convey in words how freakin’ transcendental it was to be 20-feet (and less) to any number of the last remaining mountain gorillas on the planet, and in smaller part because at some point the editor relayed to me that her section’s freelance budget was tapped out for the remaininder of 2005, but there was thought that it could be used in 2006.

The ensuing timeline isn’t really important other than the editor told me that instead of plans for it as a stand-alone feature there were thoughts on including it in and Africa package booked for this summer and eventually I lit enough of a fire under my butt to file a first draft, which was reviewed and returned with copious notes offering suggestions and corrections, and a couple months later I relit that fire and (by now it’s May) submitted a revised manuscript that I felt was pretty solid and incorporated a lot of the suggestions and corrections that had been requested.

The editor acknowledged receiving it and that she planned to review it and send it on up the line — again it was all on spec; no money was ever discussed or greenlight given.

Fast forward to about a week before Susan and I left for our roadtrip at the end of June. Having heard nothing in the interim (and thus sensing the editing on the wall), I dropped the editor an email looking for any status report she could provide and advising her that since I would be out of town for the next two-plus weeks if the article was to be included now would be a good time to figure out what photos/videos they might want to use with the piece.

It didn’t take long for her reply to get back to me and it wasn’t the news for which I’d been hoping. She told me my piece hadn’t passed muster, partially because a decision was made to go with a staffer’s article on chimpanzees in Tanzania. She said she’d sniff around to see if there was any thought to using it later, but I think she was just trying to be nice. I certainly didn’t hold out much hope for that happening. It seemed highly unlikely that a section devoted to Africa would then come back a few weeks or months later with a piece on trekking after Rwanda’s mountain gorillas.

I thanked her for her efforts and involvement and told her that in the meantime I’d be submitting the article elsewhere, which I did. I wasted no time in pulling together a package sent off to the query editor of National Geogrphic Traveler magazine, which was rejected quickly. I found my return envelope in our mail Saturday. In with the query letter and the clips was a postcard with the following:

We appreciate receiving your recent submission. It has been carefully reviewed, but we regret to inform you that it cannot be adapted for use in the magazine at this time. Please excuse this form response. The volume of submissions we receive each week makes it impossible for us to reply personally to each one, as much as we would like to. Thank you for your understanding and for your interest in Traveler.

Oh well, I figure I’ll bundle it up and send it off a couple more places and if rejections follow in those wakes I’ll look into posting it here. After all, the I know the editor. He can’t pay me nothing but he’s a really nice guy who doesn’t believe in form rejections and certainly he wouldn’t thank you for understanding them.

And it sure beats writing on spec.

Right out of the gate let me just say that you can put Robert Duvall in a cowboy hat and situate him anywhere on a wide open plain under a big sky and I’ll watch him do just about the most mundane of anythings. Lonesome Dove is just about some of the most awesomest television ever made and I’m terribly ashamed to admit I’ve never seen his Oscar-winning turn in Tender Mercies (I know, I know… I’ll remedy that soon).

So when I read last weekend all these glowing reviews that he was starring as an ornery old cowpoke in the two-part Broken Trail on AMC beginning Sunday I skedaddled over to the TiVo and programmed her on in there youbethca — hell I would’ve done so even if the reviews had been bad. Duvall in a western illicits something of a Pavlovian response. I even allowed it precedence over Deadwood, which I have most definitely become enamored with this season.

Well, I watched the first 105 minutes with limited commercial interruption and I have to amend my above statement about my willingness to watch Duvall watch paint dry as long as he’s sitting in a saddle somewhere in the latter half of the 19th century. I’ll sit in love with Duvall in a cowboy hat doing just about anything other than starring in a crap western where whoever wrote and produced the thing obviously missed the crucial ass/elbow life lesson because they clearly cannot differentiate betwixt the two and certainly demonstrate a failure a tell a tale that isn’t as by-the-numbers remedial as it gets.

Cases in point:

In the opening after the rather graphic exhibition of how bulls are turned into steers and then burned with brands — not a bad start — we have Duvall (Print) riding up out of nowhere to confront his nephew played by Thomas Haden-Church (Tom) to tell him he’s sorry but his momma died and he’s even sorrier to report that she done deeded him everything but this letter that essentially tells her only boy he can go fuck himself. Again, all’s good so far.

But Print’s got a plan, see. He tells Tom that he’s gonna put the momma’s property up as collateral for a loan so he can buy a heckload of horseflesh to drive on up to Wyoming to sell to some representative of her majesty the queen of England who’s advertising for them, and he urges the boy to come with him for a 25-percent cut.

Of course Tom does, but this is where the first red flag comes up, albeit a minor one. It would’ve been nice if the nephew had done a liiiiittle bit more than just basically thought about his uncle’s proposition for 1.9 seconds before saying m’kay and upending his life. Would it have killed the storytellers to stretch out the nephew’s disgruntlement and doubt so that maybe a scene could’ve been worked in where he has to come to his stubborn old uncle’s aid — maybe a fight or something — and thereafter decides he can’t live with himself if he let’s this old dude just go off and get himself killed?

Guess so, because next thing we see is they’ve got the bazillion horses and just the two of themselves are gonna transport them all the hell up to Wyoming. Just the two of them. With a bazillion horses. Riiiiiggggght.

Next we’re shown the bad guy played by James Russo somewhere buying five Chinese slave girls that he’s gonna sell to a madam somewhere. So there’s your set up. You got Duvall and Haden-Church moving horses across the prairie and Russo doing the same with some future whores. Think they’ll meet? Of course they will, but not before Tom has to tangent into a town for supplies, which is just a weak-ass excuse for the writers to put Tom in a bar where he kicks the ass of a bartender who — shock! — objects to some guy playing a fiddle and panhandling in his establishment.

Let me get this straight. The best the writers could give me is a bartender who has the audacity to not want a freeloader bothering his customers? And wait… you want me to like Tom for opening a can of whoop-ass on this poor sap?

Riiiigggggght.

To make it even more implausible, Tom shows up back at camp with the supplies and the fiddle player with some lame excuse about how they need the help, which Print readily says m’kay to. Well hell, why didn’t they get a hand before setting out? And why hire a guy whose shown he knows his way around a violin and panhandling but not herding horses? Can’t you at least give me a scene where fiddler shows he knows his way around a lasso?
Nah, because it’s crap writing people — and there’s pa-lenty more.

Despite it being the wild wide open West, it isn’t long before Russo’s evil captain and his fivesome of winsome Chinese lasses end up on the same very trail going in the same very direction as Print,Tom and Itzhak Perlman. Coincidence? Lemme guess the guys who wrote Crash wrote this, didn’t they?

What follows is some serious grade school-level scribing. At the releuctant invite of Print the captain is invited to join them for dinner. In response he brings a bottle of whiskey — that he’s drugged, of course… but why we don’t know specifically. Then over the meal by the campfire and while Print and Tom and Fiddleboy drink up and the five young ladies cower in the background, the captain explains where the girls are headed what they’re to become and offers them pokes at a buck a piece. All decline. Next morning? Oh yeah, our trio wakes up groggy and way late from the drugging to find four of the five ladies still there and still terrified, but the captain and the bazillion horses and all their money are long gone. Poof!

What the hell?

So of course Tom has to set out solo for the pimpthief and when he finds the bastard pronto with the one girl and all the horses — this is my favorite part — does he shoot the bastard? Nah, he sneaks up on him with a rifle while he’s sleeping, wakes him up so that he can hang him. Hang him? One moment the captain’s waking up with he biz end of a Winchester repeater pressed against his cheek and the next Tom’s riding off with the gal and the horses while the captain swings from a tree.

So pop quiz hotshot: Assuming you’re writing a scene about basically a descent nonsadistic cowboy who’s got a schedule to keep and a cantankerous uncle back wherever waiting with the fiddler and the four other whining hookers-to-be, would you…

A) Have him just blow the thieving bastard’s head off and get on ’bout his business?
B) Have him take all that extra time to tie the captain up and then make a hangman’s noose and then find a tree strong enough to support the baddie’s weight and then struggle to get that guy who I think would be rather unwilling to get up onto his horse and be hung and finally enjoy watching the guy slowly choke to death if his neck didn’t break right off. But then don’t show any of that stuff.

And pardon me, but how exactly does one guy get a bazillion horses and a scared girl back to Uncle Print? Oh well, if the captain could get ‘em away, it shouldn’t be too hard, right?

Riiiiiggggght.

Back to the quiz. The answer’s C, which is better yet howsabout you rewind and give up that whole drug-the-booze bullshit and create a more plausible conflict in the first place and one that isn’t resolved right away. Maybe the captain kills the fiddler and has to bail on the gals and then later on takes Tom hostage to get the girls back and then Print kills him. Something. Anything!

But by then, hope is gone and I’m at the point where I’m talking to the TV as the plot continues downhill from there and all the iconic images of Duvall in his hat don’t mean shit. One of the horses breaks its leg and Tom’s gotta put it down much to the shock of the girls. Print takes a liking to all the five gals, teaching them to ride and such. One dies from tick fever. We’re introduced to the madam whose bordello is in a lawless town and who’s upset that the captain hasn’t arrived with her new merchandise. Greta Scacchi shows up in a supporting role somewhere. Then back on the plain there’s a flat-out odd confrontation where Print up and shoots two travelers dead in the belief that one is a fellow named Smallpox Bob who tours around purposely infecting the natives. Then they burn the bodies and the horses.
Huh?

By far the most inane cheaply written twist comes at the end. All of sudden kind-hearted grandfatherly Print just doesn’t want to have a cotton-pickin’ thing to do with them orientals no more and basically ordains that Tom and the fiddler (who by the way has not once played the instrument since the bar scene way back) take them to town and it just so happens the very town they begrudingly go to just coincidentally happens to be where the perturbed madam is. Of course she finds out and the first part ends with Tom blowing the thumbs off a would-be rapist (guess there wasn’t time to hang the creep up by them) and they make their escape (with Greta for some unknown reason) past the cursing rock-throwing madam who vows vengeance as strongly as Tom and fiddleboy vow not to desert those girls.

Good grief. It’s enough to put me off my feed. And needless to say I will not be returning for the conclusion.

I’m always relieved when I finish a writing assignment. Whether it’s the best thing I’ve ever written or just an exercise in going through the motions, when I put a story to bed it’s as if the biggest burden has been lifted from my shoulders.

Thus before I put myself to bed last night, I cracked the whip and stayed up until I had first said rock-a-bye to my latest scribing gig, making this wide-open morning with my baby that much more enjoyable.

With yesterday’s hawk back and being pestered and strafed by some mockingbirds none to happy with the raptors proximity to their home, Susan and Shadow and I set out for a walk up Silver Lake Boulevard to the reservoir that culminated with breakfast of iced cofffees and a fried-egg sammich for me and an omelette for Susan at the precious Back Door Bakery & Cafe. I just love that place. Sitting there at a sidewalk table in the shade of a pepper tree watching the neighborhood go by is just the right way to spend a bit of the morning.

As for the rest of the day, I’m thinking I’m gonna book me some hammock time later and if for some strange reason I become particularly motivated to do something productive I just might drag the clubs over to the driving range and/or transplant a couple potted plants into the backyard and side garden.

And/or not.

Given the fact that we did the photo shoot last freakin’ Sunday afternoon, I didn’t think the story was going to run until next week or the week after, so you can guess my surprise when I saw myself and the other faux-militarized contributors to the cover feature of this week’s Los Angeles Alternative weekly staring back at me from the stack:

Cool. The backstory is that when Ryan McCracken (second from right; of the awesome Losanjealous blog) conspired with me to eat at and then dual-review the risky-weird L.A. Chinese Food place on Sunset Boulevard just east of Parkman (my opinion is here on Blogging.la; Ryan’s is here), it caught the eye of L.A. Alternative’s Michele Knapp (that’s her in the center) who commented that this was just along the lines of an idea she had for a cover story group-reviewing dive eateries — especially those on the low end of the health inspector grading scale. When she asked if I’d be interested, I said hell yeah why not!

A bit of time went without hearing anything else and I figured the concept died on the vine, until right before Susan and I were leaving for Memorial Day weekend in Death Valley and I got an email from Michele seeing if I was still in or not.I wrote back in the affirmative telling her I was going to be out of town for the holiday weekend and she responded that she had been hoping to get everything and everyone finished up by then but maybe next time.

Which was just fine with me and Susan and I go to Death Valley and have a phenomenal weekend and when we come back I find a semi-frantic email from Michele telling me that she wasn’t able to get all the restaurants covered and would I please-pretty-please be able to turn one around on really short notice. Of course I could, I wrote in my reply and dared to inquire what I might be able to count on in terms of meal reimbursement and payment.

At first I hoped she was joking when she said that any slim chance of getting paid for my writing services and/or reimbursed for my expenses was dependent on a main advertiser paying its bill. Yikes! And though I could have played hardball and written back that I only work for free as a blogger, I wasn’t really in the mood to play hardball and instead took one for the team last Thursday and went down to a dubious kabob restaurant in the fashion district called Nayeb, had lunch, didn’t get ill, wrote about it, filed it, and even took a bit out of my Sunday afternoon to go up into Elysian Park and participate in the group photo cover shoot. All gratis.

To top it all off, they couldn’t even find room to give me the brief bio I requested: Will Campbell is a writer and photographer at work at play all around L.A. and on the web at wildbell.com. Is that too much to ask? Apparently so. Still, there’s no real sour grapes. I may be out a ten-spot for the meal but I’m on the cover of a weekly, and most of what I wrote made its way into print inside. I’ve worked cheaper.

In celebration of World Turtle Day, not only do I want to recognize our very own Russian tortoise Buster, who’ve I’ve been guardian of since 2001:

But I also want to recognize and reflect on what is without a doubt to me the most important and influential — however metaphorical — chelonian I’ve ever encountered, namely the “land turtle” John Steinbeck brought me to in his The Grapes of Wrath.

I did crazy shit in my early/mid teens, like read books for pleasure. I credit my seventh grade English teaching team of Ms. Latzke and Ms. Diamond at Le Conte Junior High with getting that going. Sure, I raced through all six of C.S. Lewis’ Narnian chronicles in sixth grade, but it was Latzke/Diamond’s assignment to read Richard Adams’ Watership Down in 1977 that got me fired up about reading, big time. It remains my favorite book of all time.

So, while other kids in the years bookending 1980 could be found honing their marginal skateboard skills or getting recreational with drugs or trying to figure out how to get their parents to buy them radios with the then-unexplored and mysterious FM radio dials, I could often be found inside with KHJ or The Mighty 690 or KGIL on the Admiral Hi-Fi… reading. And not just Hardy Boys mysteries or the terrifying stuff from the frightening mind of Stephen King, but shit like Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby and Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead and Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. For fun in 9th grade I read Frederick Forsyth’s Day of the Jackal. In one day. A Saturday. In the summer.

What a nut I was. But if I can request a digression: that’s nothing. A few years earlier after seeing Jaws in the old Wilshire Theater in Beverly Hillls (having already read the book, of course) I decided to face my suddenly all-encompassing fear of the killer fish — I’m telling you I was sure one was going to come up through the shower drain and eat me —by going down to the Hollywood branch of the library, checking out a whole bunch of material on sharks, and not just reading about them — but writing a freakin’ report to myself on the topic.

I can’t recall exactly how I got introduced to Steinbeck, but if my memory isn’t playing with me I viisualize myself reading it in the duplex apartment we lived in on Wilton Place a few blocks north of Beverly Boulevard, which means it would be ‘78-’79. It was my mom’s copy of the book and I think the catalyst that drove me to pick it up was learning that my favorite actor at the time, Henry Fonda, had starred in the movie version, which I hadn’t yet seen. Opening the book up I was immediately drawn into it — not so much because it mythically grabs you and doesn’t let go… moreso because of Steinbeck’s wholly accessible writing style and the visuals he seemed to so effortlessly create.

Through the first chapter I went, disbelieving the unfathomable desperate dusty dryness of Oklahoma that Steinbeck was showing me. I could almost feel it caking my skin and powdering my nose. In the second chapter he put me in a truck with its nosy driver and a homeward bound Tom Joad fresh out of prison for murder and I knew immediately Tom’s who Fonda must’ve played in the film.

Turning the page to chapter three I was like the driver and very curious to learn more about Tom myself, but Steinbeck had other plans. Instead he decides Joad’s been intruded upon enough and for the time being he says come over here away from Tom for a bit and let me show you this tortoise here along the side of the road. And at first my entirely unsophisticated 15-year-old intellect balks hard at this strange interruption. I don’t care about some critter crawling around in the dirt out in the middle of nowhere, I wanna know what’s going on with Tom! But Steinbeck puts a hand on my shoulder and points to the tortoise and says we’ll get back to Tom in a few minutes but right now this is important, right now take a closer look.

And so I do.

And three pages later I want to be a writer when I grow up. Three harrowing pages later at the chapter’s end I’m riveted to the old fella dragging itself and its shell along through the dust on the other side of the asphalt and I got it. I may not have known it was called a metaphor or even how to spell the word at that stage in my life, but instinctively I knew what Steinbeck had done. At first literal glance he was showing me why the tortoise crossed the road. But far deeper down he had shown me an unforgettable symbol of the struggle to persevere in an unforgiving environment, of resolutely overcoming obstacles amid tremendous adversity. Of surviving.

So on this World Turtle Day I give thanks and respect and love to the tortoise I’m personally responsible for, to all turtles the world over, and especially to that resolute and persistent one from Steinbeck’s imagination and talent.

My quick-’n-dirty business cards arrived via VistaPrint today. I ordered them after attending the blogger gathering at the Golden Gopher last week and I was practically the only one who didn’t have one to hand out. So I went home and whipped one up via VP’s handy cardbuilding tool — even used a photo I snapped exiting the Gopher of the defunct Italian Kitchen restaurant frontage across the street as the card’s background graphic:

Of course, the risk I run is that literal people will think I operate a business called Italian Kitchen. Whatever. All I care about and that is that they were cheap and easy and painless and now I have a not-your-every-day calling card where as yesterday I didn’t. Ta. Da.

Speaking of business, let’s talk about the freakin’ collection notice I get in the mail yesterday from some agency in Youbetcha Wisconsin telling me I owe the City of Los Angeles $157 and change. It doesn’t say for what honor I have of owing my native metropolis said amount, just that I do and that I’d better pay up and fast. Not that I don’t have some idea it has something to do with the business license I set up a couple years ago when I had delusions of some sort of full time freelance writing career, but I let it lapse in 2005 in part because I never received anything from the city offering to renew it and also because I didn’t do a thin red cent of freelance work in 2005.

So I’m wondering why I’m getting taxed $157.12 on a freelance income of Goose Egg. Typically I call the City’s Finance Office, which is listed as the creditor on the collection notice and — get this: they don’t have any idea who the hell I am. The lady on theother end of the line gives me some song and dance about accounts of less than $1,000 are automatically referred to these outside (way outside!) agencies. But I ask her why the hell didn’t the city first send me a freakin’ notice of money due? And before she can answer I say and besides why are you taxing me anyway since I didn’t make a taxable dime freelancing last year???

And all she can tell me to do is contact the agency — which I do and when I tell them I don’t owe squat they tell me to call the city again. Greeeeeeaaaaaaaat. Fortunately when I call the city I get a much more helpful and knowledgeable person who takes the time to find me in the system and to explain that the money I owe is not tax so much as it’s basically the renewal fee for the license. One that I never really needed in the first place. And certainly didn’t in ‘05.

When I ask why oh why didn’t the city send me a renewal notice she punched some buttons on her computer and said it was because the city didn’t know where I was. I had to laugh out loud that the city I live in couldn’t find me but some Green Bay Packer-lovin’ bill collector in Beerbatter Wisconsin was able to paint me with a laser beam probably in between bites of his brat and kraut sammich.

Sheeesh!

Anyway, it was nicely offfered to waive the $47 penalty portion of the amount and mutually decided that my best course of action would be to come down to City Hall and settle up the amount in person. Right before hanging up it dawned on me that I might be on the hook for mo’ money for the current year and sure enough after punching a few more buttons she basically said she was glad I asked because indeed there was another delinquent bill getting ready to be shipped via the Polar Express to Badgerland.

I told her howsabout we make my information more current since it’s obvious your office probably still thinks I live in the valley or something (close, they had my address on Del Mar — though I’m pretty sure I sent in a letter notifying them of my current Silver Lake addy when I moved in with Susan almost two years ago).

So essentially I’m on the hook for a couple hundred bucks — then I can cancel the license if I want. The good news is that I may have a use for the thing after being so long dormant. My friend Rodger Jacobs was kind enough to email me yesterday to say the editor of a trade mag he writes for on occasion is always looking for new penners and would I be interested in potentially gigging for the publication. I believe I responded with a diplomatic version of hell yeah!

Thank you for the assist Rodger and here’s hoping it pans out. And at least now I have a bizcard to hand to the editor if we ever meet. That and a current city license to operate a keyboard or a ballpoint pen.

Now I’m off to the downtown YMCA to swing a tennis racquet for the first time in about 10 months. No license required.