In college I had a great enthusiasm for journalism. I did achieve some success in the field and got a good job later on, but my first few attempts are notable for humor value only.

As a freshman in college I was seeking a paid internship. One of my father’s former students, a novelist friend of the family, was working in publishing and she tried to give me an in, so I went on an interview at her job. At the time she was working for Playgirl magazine, which was conveniently close to me. The same office put out at least one other magazine (some women’s fitness and health thing) and she said they were very busy and could definitely use a part-timer intern.

At the interview, my father’s friend introduced me to my potential boss and then left us to chat. The woman I talked to had that prissy, intense falseness that a lot of people get in business situations, but she was kind enough to tell me in code how jacked up the place was. They were going through their second Chapter 11, things were “in transition and there’s a lot of flux”, and it would be a “challenging environment”. They ended up not hiring me and I forgot about the whole thing. It was an interesting situation, though. Playgirl couldn’t make money because not enough women wanted to see pictures of naked men to make it worth their while, and almost all of their subscribers were actually gay men. However, they could only keep those customers if they kept up the fiction that it was a magazine for women, so gay-themed advertising was out. Therefore, without being able to sell their nonexistent female audience or their closeted gay audience to advertisers they were horribly screwed. But anyway.

Years later, at a different newspaper, I met the woman who’d got that internship. The place was far, far worse than I had thought. Not only was a skeleton staff cranking out three monthlies under tremendous pressure, but the bankruptcy and ownership changes had made pay a very chancy thing, and people kept flipping out at the office and quitting in a storm of tears, etc. To make things worse, the head lady was the kind of deliriously power-mad creature who only succeeds in publishing, an absolute monarch of an obsesso-compulsocracy.

The denouement of my friend’s career there came when the boss lost her dog.

It’s a terrible thing to lose a loved animal, and everyone was sympathetic. But boss lady went far beyond that. All activity in this overworked office ground to a halt. Employees were summoned to a conference room. They were told that their new job was to find the dog, at whatever cost. Each employee was given a map grid of part of West L.A. as their search zone with instructions to go through it with thorough attention to detail. And an expert was brought in: Dr. Sherlock Bones, celebrity dog detective.

My friend left apparently as the art director was making dog loss flyers for the staff to distribute over the entire Westside. I think Playgirl went through three or four more bankruptcies. My dad’s friend moved out of state and raised horses. And I got an internship at a music magazine.

Never did find that dog.

I am full of stories. Pick one.

The latest technical foul caught by cameras in Iraq is all over the news. Nasty business; a Marine appears to have shot a wounded enemy. And there are pictures of dismembered toddlers, accounts of starvation and disease, descriptions of the use of dreadful weapons. If you’re a person of any empathy these things make you choke. Here’s the odd part. The news media covers these as shocking aberrations. My politically liberal anti-war friends cite all of these as evidence of the brutal inhumanity of the current administration and the wickedness of the current war.

What did any of you think a war was like? Have you ever even read a good book about one? The strangest ones are the people who back the war but say “we have to do this by the book” or “these abuses can’t go on”. Well of course they can go on. That’s what a war is. The “rules” are a polite Victorian fiction.

Real wars consist of the following: pants-filling terror, rage, uncontrollable killing rampages, rape, the slaughter of prisoners, the deliberate burning to death of other humans, torture, dead babies, useless mass death, the destruction of every useful thing within reach, theft, and insanity. When you agree to send soldiers into battle you sign off on all of the above and more.

Every time this foolishness comes up I’m reminded of the first Gulf War and the attempt by that sad madman Ramsey Clark to prove that the U.S. forces were war criminals for using combat bulldozers against earthworks, thereby burying enemy soldiers alive. One general’s response was basically: “It is indeed horrible. Most of what happens here is horrible. You might think from watching war movies that dying from a gunshot or a grenade blast is a relatively quick and clean death; I can assure you otherwise.”

The “boys” over there shooting dying prisoners or mortaring infants are doing exactly what you asked them to. Just admit it already.

IS THIS THE ROSEGARDEN FUNERAL OF WHORES OR DID I PRESS THE WRONG

I just finished croc-wrestling a friend’s server for a few hours as a side gig. It was so dot-com! There I was editing configs on the live box and restarting services all over the place. I think I did him some good and very little harm, anyway.

I always feel very Ghostbusters signing on to someone’s computer that’s sad and finding problems and fixing them. It’s partly just an ego boost but mostly the excitement of a new problem to solve that makes me happy.

Speaking of film, I had the opportunity to see Master of the Flying Guillotine again last night. Now that is some kung fu movie. It has everything: deadly flying hatbox, evil old man with tremendously long eyebrows, racial stereotypes, bad music, impossible anatomical feats, people flying, and comic eating scenes. do_not_lick pointed out that kung fu movies all seem to have at least one comical noodle or soup eating scene, which I hadn’t noticed before.

I drove 100 miles today for a meeting that didn’t happen. Existential agony is alive and well in the #1 lane of a freeway near you.

MY WEASEL POPPED

This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a tchotchke.

All of these attempts to fix the soup my brain sits in have been messing with my equilibrium. Literally, in fact. One side effect I’ve noticed this week is poor balance, which isn’t so great. Admittedly it’s not in the class of the Great Medical Side Effects of the Past, but it really shows up once again how medieval mental health care is.

After dinner I had a bit of a post-prandial slump, which I hadn’t done in a while. I awoke from my nap with a sudden memory of an Indian restaurant my friends and I frequented in the early 1990s, on Ventura Boulevard in the Valley. I flashed back to meeting friends there, eating way too much cheap good Indian food that we really couldn’t afford, telling dumb jokes, hanging around too long in the parking lot, etc. It was a shitty time to be a twenty-something in Los Angeles. We all had bad or no jobs. There were citywide riots, earthquakes, floods, the works.

Wandering out of the Indian joint on Ventura full of naan and beer, chewing an anise seed and talking about some new record with Greg, it wasn’t so bad for a moment.

The painful part of all of this was an intense feeling of nostalgia and the realization that as shitty as 1992 in the Valley was, it was better than now. I had to go for a walk to kill that feeling.

Of all the stereotypical things that I thought I might have experienced, this is so far the weirdest. I’m really dreading turning 40.

I’m not someone who paid much attention to big birthdays before. My 18th? I was pretty much functioning as an adult already, or so I thought. My 21st? Not too interesting. 25? I was too depressed to care one way or another about a quarter century. 30? I had just started a new career and was too excited about life to be interested in a decade birthday one way or another.

Forty feels like a death sentence. Mostly, I think, this is because the great failures I’ve had in life could mostly only be fixed in youth. So 40 is not “old” in the sense that I’m about to drop dead or move into a nursing home, but it’s become for me a symbol of missed opportunities and the finality of life. I have reached a point where I can see what things are going to improve bit by bit and which things I’m probably stuck with, and the latter is hard to swallow.

When you’re 15 or so, the world informs you that you’re going through a lot of changes, that life is going to be very unsteady, that you’ll feel out of place and very alone, and that you’ll feel a terrible sense of urgency to change things that you really can’t. What they omit is that it continues for the rest of your life.

A month left of being 39, and for some reason I care a lot about that, in a bad way. It’s a puzzle.