tell me again about that wonderful feeling

Today I re-learned important safety lessons via a small kitchen fire. The victims were 1 bag of coffee beans and 1 small coffee grinder. Yesterday I re-learned an important traffic safety lesson by making a dumbass move on the freeway and doing so in front of a CHP car, resulting in a ticket. It’s been a LEARNING time, lately.

The other lessons I’ve been re-learning are more uncomfortable and sort of continuing, so we won’t go there right now.

Thanks to zebulon_y and friendly_bandit for the Blundstones boots recommendation. These are some good boots.

This suppressed version of the Eno/Byrne song, with Kathryn Kuhlman on it, is just wonderful.

rosy-fingered dawn

I love and hate early mornings.

It’s a beautiful time of day even in ugly places. The light of the first hour or so paints things nicely. And when I’m up very early I have a feeling of excitement and possibility. The day stretches ahead to infinity! Anything can happen! The coffee tastes good, I like other people, things are tingly and effervescent. At the same time, things are calm, there’s no anxiety, and the quiet is beautifully relaxing.

Unfortunately, I’m almost always dog-tired too. Even if I went to bed and to sleep in time to have a nice 8 hours of sleep, 5 am is a big cup of exhausted. The exhaustion and the calm elation balance neatly and I feel as though I stayed up all night. I will almost always require a nap by about 10 am, or be fighting sleep the rest of the day otherwise. When I had to get up early to take a crosstown bus to a day job, I would hit a wall at about 10:30 and not come out of it until afternoon coffee at 2 pm or so.

I have a couple of dawn images that always come up when I think about mornings. The first is from childhood. We had a 28 foot sailboat and would go to Catalina Island (26 miles off the coast here) for trips in the summer. We’d moor at Hen Rock Cove. In the very early morning, I’d go up topside. The water in the cove was nearly flat, with the tiniest waves rolling in from the fogged-over sea. The only sounds were the creaking of the boat and a few bird cries, maybe a very distant sound of some other boat running a motor. If I looked down into the clear cold water I might see a bright orange Garibaldi fish. Time just completely stopped. Until it was time to have cereal out of the cool little boxes, or toast made on a stove!

The second one is from college. When I first started doing radio shows on KLA, they were the least favored shift, 3-6 am. I’d play my favorite records to 1.5 people and then stagger home just as the rest of school was waking up for their 8 am classes. UCLA is a particularly pretty campus at dawn, with all that rosy brick lighting up and trees everywhere, and lots of cobbly pathways. A bit dazed with sleep deprivation, I’d toddle back to the dormitory and eat Captain Crunch and scrambled eggs while the PA played shitty Top 40 and everyone else was hurrying to get something in their faces before class. Then I’d go up to the 7th floor where I lived and sit in the lounge for a while watching the sun hit Bel Air and the tennis courts. I was so tired, but it was a little magic time.

I hope that this brain work I’m doing offers the opportunity to wake up earlier and enjoy it more. That’s supposed to be one of the goals, and it would be great to see more dawns, and feel less down-the-bone exhausted while doing so. One good result of NFB so far is that I feel that “morning calm” more often, when I can just look at what’s in front of me and sit, and not need to be reading-talking-typing-driving-thinking-zooming all the time.

while Nat King Cole sang “Welcome to my world’…

Udon soup for dinner two nights in a row. Last night with a few frozen langoustines tossed in, tonight with a cut-up chicken breast. Both times with a sweet red pepper and a few mushrooms. The udon-in-a-bag stuff I got has unusually sparky spices in it; I was coughing and my eyes were watering a few times. I didn’t think Japanese people used a lot of pepper in soups! It’s just the thing in this drudgy weather though. Lunch today was a BELT (bacon egg lettuce & tomato sandwich) which was also a fine, fine thing.

Trying to focus through attention problems to get some reading done. I’ve read most of Stephen Batchelor’s Buddhism Without Beliefs and I like it so far. I like Buddhist thought and practice, but the 79 heavens and hells and saints and devils and flying things were too much for me.

They didn’t listen to me at the dealership last time when I told them the car was slipping a bit between 2nd and 3rd. Now it’s really slipping, and in fact has gone completely off at least twice and spun up near redline. Argh. Must now get car fixed again next week.

I’m looking forward to seeing The Predicate at Din Din tomorrow night. Who else wanna go?

touched by an anvil

My day: some work, therapy, hanging around at D’s, Trader Joe’s, home.

Currently I’m making some oven-fried chicken and baby dutch potatoes with spinach & curry spices. Sort of an almost Saag Paneer thing.

At TJ’s the hottest woman ever to live on the surface of the planet was buying valentiney things for someone who is, at least tonight, way luckier than me. It was hard not to follow her through the aisles in a dog-like manner.

C’mon rain, actually rain tonight! Dear God the curry smell is making me something something.

Pugs not drugs

The “johari window” mostly has complimentary or at least non-pejorative adjectives in it. This is good because people are more likely to be honest if they don’t have to avoid bad adjectives (capricious, drunk, totaly retarted) and partly because it’s less likely to cause fist fights.

Unsurprisingly the person with the least complimentary set of adjectives chose a pseudonym.

At the Ralphs tonight someone had brought an entire binder of coupons. It went on and on and on. There was only one checker. Coupons Galore was a large round young woman with a blonde ponytail, accompanied by a short round young woman and a large goofy guy with hair all over the place. They looked like they were on their way to an Insane Clown Posse show or just to get arrested. But she was a coupon nut. The poor checker was starting to lose his cool, and the line was stacking up. The guy behind me cracked “Coupons are illegal after midnight”. It went on and on. A few minutes later the dark-haired woman shot me an angry look and mumbled at me. “Eh?” I said. “It’s just COUPONS. What’s funny?” I said “I have no problem with coupons.” “Well what’s so FUNNY?” The guy behind me said “Coupons are funny.” She made him repeat it twice and then said “WELL WE COME IN HERE AFTER MIDNIGHT BECAUSE WE FIGURE NO ONE’S HERE.” She was looking at me for some reason, and I recalled now that she was glaring at me in the aisles earlier too. And now she was getting all street, yo, and throwing some Angry Mexican Girl vibe. “If you don’t give me any attitude I won’t give you any, how’s that?” I asked cheerfully.

Then another checker arrived and we all went to him. The end.

In the horrible mall down by where Bave and Dethya live, the one that looks like the Sherman Oaks Gallery turned into a half-solved Lament Configuration, there is an “italian” restaurant called, no joke, VER-SA-CHEE.

I love sitting at the bar at D’s chatting with Michelle. She’s so great.

and our hair cut the wrong way

Cornmeal-crusted baked chicken breasts with black pepper; beet and tomato salad with garlic mayonnaise; steamed French beans with butter.

My cat is barking at me. I keep saying to her: WRONG ANIMAL.

atrustheotaku linked to the strangest book I’ve seen in a while, a turn of the century guide to some kind of jacked-up Japanese pidgin. My favorite page of his scans so far is the Review from the Native Press.

It’s so quiet in here I can hear my eyes moving like in a Ren & Stimpy cartoon.

Bird Attack.

Edit: It seems unlikely that this was a heron due to the rarity of white herons in this area. The editors egret the error.

A heron dived into my back yard this morning, ate both goldfish and a few of the mosquito-eater fish out of the pond, tried without success to walk out the back gate due to insufficient runway length, mesmerized the cat, and finally hopped on the roof and left. The rest of the photos are in the Heron Visit Flickr set

We would also drink red flavored punch beverages

When I was in sixth grade, I’d go to my friend Jamie’s house after school sometimes. Jamie’s parents weren’t around after school. We would cook up a can of Chef Boy-ar-dee ravioli and go up in his room. The room had a cool loft in it, and we’d climb up there. We would play records and look at dirty magazines while eating our Chef Boy-Ar-Dee. I remember looking at all this weird crap in the dirty magazines like dildoes and ball-stretchers and various other things that you stick in people or have people whack you with. We didn’t understand any of it but pretended to each other that we did.

Jamie had a record player in his room, too, so we listened to stuff. Mostly we listened to whatever we weren’t supposed to, so dirty comedy was the #1 choice. A personal favorite of his was “The Crepitation Contest” which was all about farting. Also there was some Monty Python.

And then we’d listen to some ELO. Which is why Matthew Sweet’s version of “Do Ya” triggered this memory.

Weird thing is, I still like Chef Boy-Ar-Dee ravioli although I know it’s shit.

Airport

Went to pick up my mother at LAX. International Arrivals is great people watching. Today was also the day of Themed Plane Arrivals:

My mom’s flight was Singapore Airlines from Tokyo/Narita. Almost all of the passengers were Japanese business guys who immediately pulled the cellphone out of one pocket and the cigarettes out of another and rushed outside to use both. One spiky haired young Japanese guy wearing stripy weird clothing and Vans was met by an obsequious limo driver.

An Aeromexico flight from Guadalajara brought what looked like about 50 Mexican art students. All of them were about 20 and most of them were carrying some kind of portfolio. I think it’s time we woke up to the danger here. All those art students are swarming across the border and taking our barista jobs and/or seats at the coffeehouse where they can whine about not making it.

Finally an El Al jet disgorged lots of beautiful, beautiful, beautiful Jew girls all of whom had long flowing dark hair, big earrings, classic Mediterranean features, and huge smiles. They strode happily down the ramp and were immediately intercepted by nervous men in yarmulkes before the rest of us could get at them.

There was also a Sikh family of about 25 who all greeted each other expansively with a factorial number of hugs exactly in the gangway so no one could get through. This happens each time and I suspect it’s the same family.

good morning aztlan

Last night Sylvia related the amusing story of how she got stabbed at Alberto’s. It’s amusing mostly because she was only slightly injured, and also because I learned the street Spanish for “shut your piehole”.

There was also a long and interesting discussion of the racial politics of primary education around here. I was once again reminded of how lucky I was to have gone to school in the 1970s when “everyone gets along” was the example set starting from the top and working down. My junior high in particular was a cross-section of California ethnic and religious groups, but we had not one incident of racial or other communal violence the whole time I was there. Meanwhile they were telling me about the year at Ensign Middle School that the administration divided the place between the whites and the Mexicans like a prison because of all the fights.

I gave Michelle an MP3 CD of all the Jelly Roll stuff plus some other things which made her very happy. I really like the look on people’s faces when I give them music they haven’t heard and want. This is why I liked being a DJ so much!

There is crazy music from Aquarius winging its way to me, also more RAM for my computer. It’s sunny outside. The cat is cleaning my elbow.

Later this evening, I hope to churn out two book reviews for y’all.