from IM:

TorgoTen: BTW, I have bad news for you. L.A. just paid a quarter beelion dollars for a giant prop from /Earth: The Final Conflict/ http://www.organhouse.com/disneyhall/picpage/page1.htm

This is how my life has looked to me lately:

Jared and I have an interesting “grass is greener” friendship. Sometimes when we’re talking it seems like we want to be each other, and then we both laugh as we realize it.

I went to the Macaroni Grill tonight and expected it to be awful, but it was ok. The saltimbocca was, anyway; I avoided the big pasta dishes. Bad Italian food is a terrible thing, because real Italian food is so transcendently good.

I’m so much of a fool lately that I can’t hardly keep track of which kind of fool I am. I hope the good kind of fool triumphs o’er the bad kind.

Coming up PCH from Capistrano with Matthew Sweet, Richard Thompson, the Furs, Buzzcocks, and the Kinks keeping me kompany felt good, especially after all this social anxiety lately. I think i have somehow become 16 again. Anyone notice my voice changing recently?

I might go on a drive to nowhere tomorrow night late. Anyone wanna go? Alternatively, come over and I’ll make everyone a big salad. I got to talking about caprese again today and I’m thinking obsessively bout roma tomatoes, fresh wet buffalo mozzarella, basil, olive oil. Like, a 55 gallon drum of caprese.

I can listen to a really depressing Richard Thompson song like “The End of the Rainbow” or “How I Wanted To” and feel better. I realized tonight that it’s because Dave Mattacks hits the drums like he’s using a nailgun, bam bam bam, and he’s actually stitching my universe back together. Thank God for good drummers; without them, I’d be useless gelatin.

Easy to fall
harder you stall
starts to slip away
drunk and in love
out at a club
holding a neon sign

I guess I’m off to disney tonight, since none of the girls I like will let me touch them. pbd and I can ride the teacups and drive the bears wild.

Right now I’m at the Borders at 19th and Newport, watching the craziness that is the rush hour develop. This is one of the busiest corners in town and it’s full of yuppies revving their $80,000 luxury cars, poor mexicans in Chevy LUV trucks from 1980, catholic schoolgirls on bikes, cops pulling everyone over, and maniacs. One maniac in particular just shambled out of the bookstore and grabbed an ashtray and is in the corner with it, coughing and hacking.

I made a damned good stirfry last night. I do love hot red peppers. This weekend I want to go to India Sweets & Spices at some point and have Indian food.

I got an email on my Danger from the T-Mobile people telling me to call them because they had remotely diagnosed my phone as sick. It isn’t dangerous, they said, but we want to replace it.

For the crime of hubris, the Gods sentenced substitute to this: That he should be intelligent, resourceful, interesting, and neurotic, and that he should remain celibate for one million years while watching his friends score with each other over and over and over. However, he got a really cool cat as a pet.

I still can’t extract the audio from these swf files, damnit. Quicktime Pro doesn’t seem to want to do anything with them and I can’t find a decompiling tool. Grarmpf! Thwarted Geekery. It’s really good stuff, too. Many clips of horny guys who think they’re leaving messages for hotties. I DEMAND MY SEXUAL SCHADENFREUDE. SOMEONE HELP ME OUT HERE, CHOP CHOP, LET’S GET IT IN GEAR.

I know he’s been irrelevant for years and years, but Michael Stipe rocked my world 20 years ago and I have a tremendous amount of respect for his work through about 1987.

So it was a bit of a shock to see his “celebrity playlist” at the Apple Music store and find Justin Timberlake on it.

Here’s hoping that either his publicist did the list for him, or he’s got Alzheimer’s.

American Idol for Jesus.

No really.

Help…

J.R., one of the local characters, presented me with three pages secured with a huge paperclip tonight and said “read this, it’s one page of a screenplay. read one page as a GIFT”. I took it and read it while he wandered back into the D’s parking lot. It was an odd, disconnected one-pager with a protective cover sheet. I don’t know a thing about screenplay treatments but it didn’t make any narrative sense to me.

He came back later and I asked if he’d finished the screenplay itself. “No, I need to get together with some really creative people! This is just the treatment!”

Later on, some young girls in field hockey uniforms wandered through, and our resident transsexual witch was giving teenagers tutorials on vampirism. After a few hours of this, and some badinage with the gang, I wandered off to the drugstore where I got some medicine and some dried fruit. I ate a few prunes in my car in the parking lot and stared up at the haze through my moonroof.

At Café Ruba later, it was the usual Satyricon as nickjb properly describes it. Every creepy person from every party you’ve ever been to on one patio. Their wireless network doesn’t work yet, but A.J. is “working on it”, which is a topic in itself.

I just want one kiss. Really.

They caught the guy from yesterday’s fracas. He probably walked past my house getting from the Back Bay to the typical motel on the boulevard where he was nobbled.

From the OC Register:

Investigators traced Carpenter, who had worked as a handyman at the physician’s home, to a Costa Mesa hotel room on the 2200 block of Newport Boulevard.

They staked out the room overnight. At 4:20 a.m., Carpenter used a house phone to call the motel office for a replacement key to his room, police said. The manager began to walk the suspect to the room when police arrived, and the suspect ran.

Officers ran after him, and he finally surrendered.

Yet another reason why we’re all glad odradak isn’t a night clerk at his boulevard motel any more.

We get letters.

I also got bizarre commentspam on Content Goes Here this week, consisting of a literary review mangled together with links for an online travel agency.

The internet is a Word Salad Shooter.

We had a real dust-up in my neighborhood today. The usual unreliable handyman tied up wealthy doctor and her personal assistant and was I guess ransacking the place. P.A., who had been hit on the head with a HAMMER, escaped and summoned the constabulary who rescued the lady neurologist from her house, which was now burning. Moriarty escaped on foot down into the Upper Bay, in which he probably swam briskly off to his underground base on Catalina Island or something.

And now, another 35 years of quiet.

Amazing the cops didn’t catch the guy, considering the rather upfront nature of the crime. Maybe he’ll be the D.B. Cooper of Newport Beach and never be found. I was a bit frightened for my mom since this whole mess occurred less than a mile from her house and really the last thing she needs is a charred, murderous handyman crashing into the parlour pursued by bloodhounds.