come hither

I have a crush on a gal at the gym. Do I know her name? No. Have I ever even spoken one word to her? No. Do I know anything about her other than her workout regimen? No. Do I ever let her see me leering at her? No. Is there anything more than pure projection involved in this fixation of mine? No. Do I think she knows that I have a crush on her? Yes. Why do I think this if I haven't ever spoken to her and pretend to ignore her? Because when this kind of thing happens to me - and it happens to me all the time - my face tends to turn beet red when I'm in the presence of the object of my obsession. How could a woman not notice that, and how could it not turn her off, knowing that some silent weirdo is sweet on her? But if I don't know anything about her, how could I be fixated to such a degree? I'm not all that clear on this one. There's something about her that trips a live wire in the sector of my brain where intense emotions are stored. It's kind of like when I hear The Night Was So Young. The impact on me is not rational. It's light and airy and crackling with potential, but it's somehow also tinged with melancholy, an expectation that in the end I won't get what I want. When it comes to romance I never get what I want, quite possibly because I engage in such baseless projection, which forces me to do everything I can to make reality conform to the ideal I've created.

For all I know, this gal is a mean and cruel bitch. There's at least as much likelihood of her being a mean and cruel bitch as there is of her being the wonderful, smart, witty, kind lady I want her to be. (Are you digging my usage of gal and lady as much as I am?) Would it destroy my fixation if I knew for a fact that she is a mean and cruel bitch? No. I would rationalize it away. I would make excuses for her. She's a mean and cruel bitch to everyone else, but everyone else misunderstands her. She's misunderstood, and so am I. I like to think of myself as being misunderstood. It eases the pain... So we're perfect for each other. The two of us could be so happy together, understanding one another, understanding that we're each misunderstood, feeling superior to everybody else because they fail to understand us. We would love one another in our mutual feelings of superiority.

There's something about the way she looks and the way she carries herself, this gal at the gym. She's not hot. Not at all. She's very plain looking. I'm attracted to unadorned women. I've often pointed out gals on the street to my male friends and said something like, 'look how pretty she is,' only to have them tell me that they would never have looked twice at someone so ordinary looking. A guy I know recently said to me, 'It must be great being you. You think every girl is hot.' Actually, dude, it's not so great being me, and your tiny little peanut of a brain is missing the point. Hot doesn't do it for me. Young doesn't do it for me. I have nothing in common with young, hot people. They don't think the way I do. They don't want the same things I want. They don't like the things I like. They don't speak the way I speak... Am I generalizing? Yes. Does the fact that it's a geralization make it any less true? No. I hold the hot youth of today in contempt. I dated a younger woman for a few months earlier this year. She made me miserable. Our world views were completely different in a way that had everything to do with age. She had a great body...and I couldn't even get it up for her because there was no mutual understanding between us. I tried Viagra. I tried 36-hour Cialis. Nothing. My dick receded into my balls, like a turtle taking cover. I was so very happy and relieved when she broke off communication with me without warning. I felt as free as a bird... I like a woman with a little bit of age on her. I'm not interested in dating women under 40. Most of the time I'm not interested in dating women at all, but when the urge flares up, or when I feel like I should be doing it in order to conform to some received conception of normality, I like my ladies to be at least 40. When I look at porn, my favorite niches are 'mature' and 'MILF.' Porn search engines these days allow guys like me to be very precise in our choices of what to look at. Just type in the keywords: 'mature, glasses, redhead, thick, pretty, natural, POV, handjob, tease, no ink, on top... and presto, there she is, the ideal woman, without me ever having to leave the bedroom, without me ever having to deal with the humiliation of dating and making conversation with someone who will never understand where I've been, where I am, where I'm going, who I am, what I like, what I don't like. And then when I've beat off to the streaming video a few times, I can just re-type the same keywords again and there'll be millions of other streams for me to watch. So why bother putting myself out there? I get all the love I need from my two beautiful cats, and they don't need anything from me except affection, a clean shit box, and food. But I'm thinking that this girl at the gym doesn't require much more than this either. She seems very self-sufficient when she's on the Stairmaster. She seems like she doesn't need anybody. She's got no rock on her finger. She doesn't wear gym hottie clothing, just a pair of beat up sweats and a ragged t-shirt. She looks fantastic in that get up, but it's obvious that she doesn't need men to stare at her. I like that. I dig her short hair, too. It's dirty blonde. I've always liked short hair on women. I bet she lives in some cool downtown loft. She's probably an artist. Or she works at a museum, or a library. She doesn't make a lot of money, but that's because she doesn't need a lot of things. She doesn't need people, and she doesn't need things. Just enough to survive in relative comfort. That's about the best we can hope for in this world these days. If you're surviving in relative comfort, and you're reasonably self-sufficient, then you're doing ok. ...She doesn't work out with an iPod. Does this mean she doesn't like music? No. I refuse to believe she doesn't like music. I refuse to believe that someone who looks and acts the way she does has no room for music in her life.

The reason she doesn't work out with an iPod is because she hasn't transitioned yet from LPs. She probably has a great collection of LPs, all the things you'd expect a girl to have in her record collection. Joni Mitchell. X. Bowie. Roxy Music. Neil Young. Nick Drake... And I just know she's open to hearing stuff she hasn't heard before, and that she likes to make love with the stereo on. I'd be able to keep my cock hard if I was making love to her with Bryter Layter wafting out of the speakers, the words sung in a near-whisper, as if the guy is doing an intimate performance for just this occasion. I would worship her naked, overripe body. She wouldn't be selfish. She'd do the things I like having done to me, even if I'm not all that clear on what those things are. She'd explore that question with me, and she'd show me what I need to do to please her. She'd teach me. I need a teacher in the bedroom. I need patience. I don't have a lot of good experiences to draw from. She'd find my sexual ineptitude attractive. I'm not like all those other guys she's been with who are so cocky because they know exactly what to do. She'd sing while I was inside her, and squeal, and moan, and scream. And she'd announce it to the world when she was about to come. The neighbors would know that she was about to come. And I'd love that the neighbors know that I'm schtuping a 40-something woman in my bedroom, and that I have the chops to make her come. I'd act all cool about it when I saw them in the next morning as I made my way to my car, parked in front of the house. They'd look at me admiringly, those fucking neighbors with their sprinklers that leave permanent hard water spots on my Mustang. You made that gal come last night, they'd think to themselves. You made her scream and squeal and moan. And then she came! We heard it! You must be quite the stallion 'cause the noise she made shattered our fine china. Who the hell does she think she is, Ella fucking Fitzgerald?

I don't let this gal see me looking at her at the gym. I think I mentioned that already. I act indifferent. Yet I know she knows that I'm thinking about screwing her with the stereo on. You might be wondering why I don't approach her and strike up a conversation, you know, like a normal guy might do. After you've thought about eating a gal's pussy and making her come, it's kind of hard to avoid stumbling over your words. Some guys can do it. Some guys can't. I'm one of those guys who can't. There's also a fear of getting shot down. I'll do anything to avoid getting shot down. Again, some guys get shot down and then they just dust themselves off, strap on their helmets a little tighter, and try to find someone else who'll be more receptive to their advances. When I get shot down, it takes me about two years to recover whatever thimble full of confidence I had. Rejection, and especially rejection from women, confirms every feeling I have about myself. It underscores for me that the only thing more powerful than my seething misanthropy is my seething self loathing. It confirms for me that I'm better off typing the keywords into the porn search engine. Nothing cures romantic longing better than masturbation. When I clean out my balls, I clean out my head as well and see the world as it really is, not as it appears to be when I'm longing for someone or something I can't have.

This has turned into quite a rant, eh? I'm thinking that maybe I should try a breaching experiment. I studied a sociologist named Harold Garfinkel when I was in graduate school. He invented these types of experiments where an ethnographer will purposely breach the norms of a given everyday circumstance in order to observe how people deal with and reconstitute those norms on the fly. The idea is to see how the normative status quo is restored and perpetuated in the course of everyday interactions. So maybe I should try a breaching experiment at the gym, with this gal. I could approach her and tell her that I would really like for her to sit on my face so I can make her come... OK, so that might not be such a great idea. I might get kicked out of the gym if I did that, and then I'd have no place to
work out, no place to keep myself lean and chiseled in the event that I'm ever in a position again to have a woman sit on my face. Maybe a less severe breaching experiment would be a better idea... I really like the way you work out on that there stair master. No wonder you look so fit... Maybe I should keep the part about being fit out of it, because any intelligent lady will be able to translate that into what it really means: I would really like to eat your pussy and make you come. ...I need to think more about this breaching experiment. I've got nothing to lose. I'm like a ball club that's 10 games out of first place with five games left to play.

paper sun salutation

Yoga is like English psychedelia. That's what I'm thinking about on this solemn Sunday night, the last day of a two-week vacation that has evaporated into the ether before I was ever able to fully settle into relaxation mode. Last night I assumed a few poses after overworking my body with three hours at the gym followed by two hours on the tennis court. I will have to figure out a way to dial down the physical stress I put on myself. I'm really starting to feel my body change as I advance into my 40s (where 'change' = slow deterioration). But that's not my point here. After a long day of running and lifting and quick starting and stopping, I needed to open my stiff right hip last night, so I assumed the pigeon pose, which I've talked about before. I was discussing my body issues recently with my shrink when she asked me to describe the way I feel when I get into pigeon pose. I thought about the question for a long time before answering. The sensation is not one I can easily describe. I told her that the pose makes me feel like I'm enveloped in a protective cocoon, like a child safe in the knowledge that its mother won't let anything bad or frightening happen. The cocoon was really working for me last night, but as I got more deeply into the stretch I reached a certain threshold or critical mass, a point at which pleasure/ecstasy intersects with pain/fear, where you don't know whether to laugh or cry, where you want to do both simultaneously. This is what made me think of Traffic, Pink Floyd, Pretty Things, The Beatles, The Move...

60s Psychedelic music, particularly that of the English variety, exists on the exact same fear/security, pleasure/pain threshold, creating a heady vibe by adopting childlike points of view from which all perception is larger than life, and the line separating darkness from light is fluid and amorphous. It's this vantage point that makes the music sound at once innocent and creepy. The clown at the circus might have an ice cream cone for you, or he could just as easily morph into a scary lizard that swallows you whole. Ice cream, pain...pain, ice cream. This will be my mantra from now on as I explore the possibilities of yoga. ...Yoga practitioners - I believe they're called 'yogis' - will tell you to listen to what your body is telling you. Don't aggravate discomfort, but don't ignore it, either. Try to understand it, where it comes from, and why you experience it. I have some vague notions as to where my pain comes from, but they're not really well formed ideas at this point. All I know is that right now my body is telling me to set the controls for the heart of the sun...

summer's gone

People who don't live in Southern California think of this place as the land of endless summer. But we have seasons. They're just not as pronounced as seasons elsewhere. The onset of fall always makes me anxious and a little bit melancholy. I think it's a holdover from school days. I was talking to my sister about this today. One of the things about the end of summer that's particularly difficult for me is that it means baseball season will be over soon, especially this year as my teams will not be in the playoffs. This is the first year since 2003 that neither the Mets or Angels will be in the post-season. Baseball, sad to say, is one of the few things that give me pleasure and give my life meaning. The daily rhythm of the game soothes my otherwise worried mind. I often reflect on the way Bob Murphy's voice affected me when I was a little boy. He was the radio play-by-play guy for the Mets. I used to have a transistor radio that I would put under my pillow and listen to Met games after my bedtime. I was always anxious about one thing or another when I was growing up, but the sound of Bob Murphy's voice never failed to calm me down and make me happy. Mention Bob Murphy to any longtime Met fan and a smile will come to their face. That's what baseball does for me more generally. When the season starts I always tell myself that for the next six months I'll have something to do, even when I don't have anything to do. My conversation with my sister today got me thinking about something A. Bartlett Giamatti once observed about baseball. I'll let his words speak for themselves:

It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone.

Johan to have season ending shoulder surgery

The Mets announced today that Johan Santana's pectoral issue is really a shoulder tear that will require surgery. That makes three surgeries in the three years the Mets have had Santana under contract. It's doubtful he will be ready for the start of the 2011 season. The beat goes on for a team that just seems to find calamity as a matter of course. If I were a GM, I would never offer a pitcher more than a three-year contract, especially guys in their 30s. Yes this would make it almost impossible to sign top-shelf pitching talent, but it would force teams to place even more emphasis on the developing pitchers in their farm systems. It makes a lot of sense, which means that the Mets will almost certainly do the exact opposite in the off-season and sign some 37-year-old busted wing to a multi-year, multi-million-dollar contract. It's so awesome being a Met fan.

some kind of divine right to the blues

The second half of the 1970s were not especially good years for The Who, at least not in my opinion. The Who By Numbers is just that, and Who Are You tries to hard to stay 'current', adding synthesizers and a more up-to-date new wavey sound that does not serve the band well. And then there's the death of Keith Moon in 1978. But in the early 1980s, Pete Townshend put out two solo albums that can be looked upon now as the last meaningful music that was ever made by anybody in The Who. Empty Glass (1980) and All the Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes (1982) were both in heavy rotation on my KLH turntable when they came out. The two albums are like Yin and Yang. Empty Glass is Pete in the throes of addiction; the mood is dark and somber, for the most part. Chinese Eyes is Pete's redemption album where he gets clean and is reborn. I listened to both albums earlier this evening, just to see how they've aged. They both still sound great and take me back to a period in my life when even the most downbeat music could transport me to a place where I felt uncluttered and free. Here's a sampling from each...

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post time

I had a nice day at Del Mar yesterday with my friend Howard. Howard is a hep cat. When he wants to know if you're familiar with something, he'll ask you if you're hep to it. 'Are you hep to that pastrami joint on Figueroa?' ...We took the train from Glendale to Solana Beach in San Diego, and then walked from the station to the racetrack. Taking the train is such a civilized way to travel down there. When the tracks passed over the 57 freeway, somewhere near San Juan Capistrano, I looked out the window and saw a wall of stopped cars in both directions. If I had been sitting in that traffic, my sphincter would be clenched almost as tight as my arteries. It made me think of how the the Los Angeles Metropolitan Area of today is a unique fusion of yesterday and tomorrow. The yesterday part is the region's ongoing resistance to energy-efficient public transport. I like to tell people that I admire the lack of public transportation in LA because I feel shielded in the cocoon of my car. When I'm in my car, no retarded guy with both legs missing is gonna drool on me as he asks me for my spare change, but this kind of thing is de rigueur on those rare occasions when I make the ill advised decision to take a bus someplace in this town. But I'm gradually seeing the error of my narrow minded ways. The Los Angeles model, wherein the dominant form of transport is every man for himself, atomized in individual cars - is not sustainable in the aftermath of peak oil. What will become of this place when oil climbs back up to $5 a gallon, as it inevitably will? And eventually it will hit $10, $15, even $20 a gallon as the stuff gets scarcer and scarcer. It has the potential to bring the whole region's economy to its knees, to say nothing of what the auto-centric model is doing to the environment. ...Los Angeles is at the same time the city of tomorrow insofar as there is no place in America with more ethnic and national diversity. I really felt it yesterday as the train bounded from downtown L.A. through places like Pico Rivera, Downey, Bell, and then into the O.C. - Fullerton, Anaheim, Dana Point, San Clemente - before crossing into San Onofre and Oceanside in San Diego. I looked out at the passing scenery and saw people with roots in so many different parts of the world. I felt like a minority. With the passage of time I will become more and more of a minority, I think, which is fine with me. ...Howard and I sat in bidness class, so they kept bringing us wine and snacks. Very civilized. You can't drink wine in the driver's seat of your car now, can you? I really enjoy spending time with Howard. So much of what I know about LA I've learned from him. He's an old-time LA guy. Howard came of age when this was truly a glorious place. I know the glory of that bygone era is inseparable from the fact that LA was run like an aparthiedstate back then, but allow me to overlook the dark side, so to speak, and engage in some romanticizing.

When I see films like Double Indemnity and Out of the Past, I think of Howard.

He grew up in East LA when there were lots of jews there. His family moved to Silver Lake when he was a teenager, and he attended Marshall High School in the 50s. He was a greaser-biker juvenile delinquent. And a hep cat. He loves jazz, of course, and motorcycles. His parents sent him to military school in Glendora as a last resort after he was kicked out of Marshall, and he ended up in the Marines. He was a drill sergeant and did some

time on a ship in the Persian Gulf. He's got a bad-ass USMC tattoo on his arm. I wanted to take a photo of it, but I was too embarrassed to ask. Anytime I have a question about the way LA used to be when it was great, Howard is the first guy I turn to. ...We had a great time at the track yesterday. I broke even, which means that my whole day was paid for thanks to two winning bets, including a $5 bet on a horse that went off at 21-1 courtesy of a tip from Howard. I'm an ok handicapper but not nearly as good as he

is. The man knows his ponies and can find esoteric factors deep in the guts of a racing form that help him to identify undervalued long shots. ...Whenever I spend time with Howard, the experience reminds me that I have an old soul. Even when I was a kid, I always related better to people who were older than me.

I have an older half-brother and half-sister, both of whom were very important to me growing up. They grew up in the 60s, and I was so obsessed with 60s music culture, so I always felt like they 'got me.' Having an old soul can be a good thing because so much of contemporary life - the culture, the values, the dominant frames of reference, the general trajectory of the world - it's all so disappointing and shitty. (I guess having an old soul means being able to say the kinds of things and have the kinds of thoughts that old farts say and have.) But having an old soul can also be problematic. As the idealized Golden Age continually recedes further into the remote past, and as the people of that age die off, an old soul will be left to negotiate an alienating world in increasing isolation, speaking a language that nobody understands any longer. ...I hope Howard lives forever.

skyrockets in flight

I enjoyed my drive yesterday out to San Berdoo. I took the 210 just past the city of Fontana - the junkyard of dreams

- and got out at Mount Waterman Drive, route 18. I turned left off the freeway and took the road up through the San Bernardino National Forest and into the town of Crestline at 5000 feet. Crestline is a bit of a hippie enclave, which took me by surprise. But it's not good hippie. It's NRA libertarian hippie, combining the requisite back-to-the-land orientation with a rednecky ski bum skankiness. The place has a strange, unsettling vibe. It reminds me of Box Canyon in Simi Valley. It's very pretty, but there's an uneasiness in the air. In any case, I had a chance to do some thinking once again. ...I have no spiritual life to speak of because I don't believe in that stuff (except when I'm on an airplane). I have no companionship. I feel increasingly remote from my friends as they're all married with kids, and I don't like the idea of being the weirdo uncle who's always by himself. I had an uncle like this when I was a kid. I believe he died of the AIDS. I also don't like what I see in modern parenting. Kids are so overindulged these days. I know my observations constitute a very small sample size and that the sentiment makes me sound like a bitter old man. Put it this way: I don't like what I've seen in terms of contemporary parenting. Kids expect so much of the world nowadays, and it starts with the parents. I didn't really want for much materially when I was growing up, but my parents definitely didn't give me everything I asked for. Parents these days give their kids everything they want. Everything. And it's not just the material things. It's emotional stuff, too. They get everything they want, and they come to expect that this will continue indefinitely into the future. What are they gonna be like when they grow up and the world kicks them in the teeth? Entitled kids make me feel tense. I haven't just cut myself off from people, though. I've also stopped following the news of the world because its scary out there and I get freaked out. I used to follow politics and economic news very carefully. No more. It's an era of perpetual crisis, and staying up to date with it makes me panicky. I put blinkers on to avoid getting swept up in anxiety. It reminds me of how I used to be so fearful of nuclear war when I was a kid. I refused to watch The Day After because I knew it would scare the shit out of me.

Sure enough, a lot of kids who watched it were pretty upset the next day in school... I guess if I have one overarching objective that defines what I do and how I live, it's the avoidance of anxiety, depression and conflict. It's not a real lofty road map for life, is it? It's pretty pathetic, to be honest. I remember not so long ago having a real desire and drive to do great, impactful things with my life. Nowadays I'm just happy to avoid a total meltdown. ...I ate a piece of homemade apple pie I bought from an old hippie lady selling cakes and cookies by the side of the road in Crestline. She didn't really want me to take her photo, for whatever reason. She was actually kind of pissy about it, which I thought was strange because I could have just snapped her photo without asking. Oh, well. The pie was quite good. The crust was light and flaky, not like those pre-made cement crusts you buy at the grocery store.

It would not surprise me at all if there's a lot of pot cultivation going on in Crestline. This

would explain the eerie feel of the place. Even though pot is becoming more and more accepted, the cultivation and marketing of the stuff still attracts an edgy element. I'm sure I could have stuck around and asked a few questions, maybe at the filling station or in the local diner, but I wanted to move on. I drove to Lake Gregory on the outskirts of Crestline and relaxed in a nice shady spot with my iPod. Afternoon Delight came on about five or six songs into a shuffle. When I was a little boy, I had a babysitter who sang Afternoon Delight with me once when it came on the radio. I remember thinking she was really cool because she sang the high harmony part. It's not easy getting up that high. Believe me, I've tried.

sunday afternoon...

I've been rediscovering the excellence of Rush. It started last night at about ten. I worshipped at the green cross and then blissed out to 2112, Hemispheres and Caress of Steel on my iPod. The fun continued today at the gym as I listened to three straight hours of Rush. This would probably be torture for most people. I really enjoyed it. It'd be easy enough to dismiss Rush as dumb Canadians. I don't think this is fair. They're definitely nerdy and their conceptuality is a bit confused at times, but I give them credit for fusing Ayn Rand, Isaac Asimov, George Orwell, Led Zepellin and The Who into one deluxe package. It's not necessarily the mix of ideas and influences I would chose for myself if I were making music, but what they attempt to do shows definite intelligence, imagination and passion. It doesn't hurt that they also have a great melodic sensibility. Sometimes you have to wade through boring patches to get to the melodies, but it's well worth the work... The great thing about being an old fart is that you can listen to stuff like Rush without embarrassment.

...I'm planning a drive out to Crestline tomorrow. I feel excited and nervous about it at the same time. I know the terrain will be beautiful - classic California forest - but it's also hardcore rural mountain country. I fear what lurks in the countryside. Part of the fear comes from class snobbery, I admit, but it's also a reaction to the increasing town-country antagonism of the Bush years. The cosmos view the bumpkins as simple minded hillbillies who believe that a man in the sky created earth in a week. The bumpkins view the cosmos as godless communists who take it in the ass. It's a hard chasm to bridge... My fear of rural America is also an instance of a more general fear I have of the unfamiliar. It's not easy for me to wander outside my comfort zone. Crestline is a few hours from Los Angeles, but it's really light years away. A friend of mine told me a few years back that when he went hiking in Crestline with his wife, they found a dead dog by the side of the road with an arrow through its throat. That sounds like just about what I would expect to find in the country, except that I envision me having the arrow through my throat as opposed to a dog. ...The funny thing about these kinds of trips is that I never really enjoy them or recognize what they mean to me until well after the fact. When the dusk starts to fall does the owl of Minerva spread its wings to fly. I took a driving trip up the California coast during summer break from college when I was 20 years old. I started in San Diego and ended in San Francisco. I spread the trip out over a period of four weeks. I traveled on picturesque back roads and had some great adventures, yet I felt lonely and disconnected for much of the trip. Only upon reflection years later did I fully understand that the trip planted the California seed in my mind, the thought that something different from New York City was possible for me. I took a circuitous route to get where I am today, but it all started with that trip up the coast, for better or worse. I guess putting down roots in LA was the exception proving the rule. The desperate need for change trumped my fear of the unfamiliar. ...I'm not expecting to have any life changing ideas on the drive tomorrow, but who knows? My gut feeling is that these trips are good for my soul, even if I don't really enjoy them while they're happening...

Frenchy's going to the playoffs...

Jeff Francoeur was traded to the Texas Rangers yesterday for a minor league prospect. He was very mediocre in parts of two seasons with the Mets, but he brought some much needed camaraderie to the clubhouse and seems to have been a good teammate. Francouer's problem is that he has no plate discipline and cannot hit right handed pitchers. His splits are vast. He's got good speed and arguably the best arm from right field in Major League Baseball. He will ht the occasional bomb, but he strikes out a lot and teams will pitch around better hitters to get to him. I'm not quite sure why the Rangers felt they needed to pick him up, but I wish Frenchy well. I would love to see him do some damage to the Yankees in the playoffs...

wandering exurbia

There's been a few things weighing on me over the past few days, so I took a drive along Route 66 to clear my head out. I turned due east on Huntington Drive and made the city of Arcadia my first stop. Arcadia is best known as the home of Santa Anita Park. I've never had great luck at Santa Anita, but I don't care because it's where The Killing was shot, one of my favorite movies of all time. Sterling

Hayden was a very underrated actor in Hollywood, I feel. The very last line in the movie is the best. The cops have the airport surrounded, the girl tells Hayden's character to run, but there's no place for him to go. "Nah," he says to her, knowing the jig's up. "What's the difference?" It gives me goose bumps every time.

Something very disturbing happened to me last week. I was browsing Facebook in the morning before work when I got an IM from a friend of mine. The conversation started off normal enough. Hi. How are you? Long time no speak. How's your daughter? And so on and so forth. Then she told me that she was in trouble. I asked what kind of trouble. She told me she was vacationing in Wales and had all her money stolen from her at gunpoint. She asked me to lend her $700. She said I could send it to her Western Union, and she told me she'd pay me back right away.

I'd like to say that I'm a trusting person, but that's not quite true. I'm actually a pretty suspicious person, really. In weighing people's motives, even those of my friends, I tend to assume the worst. So it wasn't because I'm trusting that I agreed to wire her $700. Rather, it was because I do everything I possibly can to avoid conflict. If $700 is what it costs for me to not have conflict with someone, it's money well spent...

There are cool old apartment buildings scattered around the city of Arcadia. The one you see in the photo here is especially wacky. Is it a 60s Jet-Age Modern kind of thing, or is it an Art Deco building from the 20s or 30? It looks like a lot of the Art Deco buildings you see in Miami on Collins Drive...

Heading east on Huntington Drive through Arcadia, you get a real flavor for how Asian the San Gabriel Valley has become in the last 20 years. I saw so many signs in Chinese. I think they were in Chinese, anyway. There are enclaves in the SGV that are heavily Korean and Vietnamese as well. I wonder if and how China's ascent into the position of the dominant superpower of the world will affect the demographics of this region.

My next stop was the city of Monrovia, and as I approached it I popped the remastered version of Machine Head into the CD player. When I was a kid, I wanted to be Ian Gillan. Deep Purple Made in Japan was the first album I ever bought with my allowance at the Record Connection on east 86th street in New York, world's away from the San Gabe.

It's my fault for believing that the person at the other end of the IM on Facebook was really my friend. I know this. It was stupid on my part, especially since this friend has a husband whom she would presumably contact before she contacted me in an emergency. My aversion to conflict, and I suppose my overeagerness to be a good friend, prevented me from asking the right questions before I rushed off to Western Union and sent my money into a fucking black hole. But the loss of the money bothers me a lot less than the total non-responsiveness of my friend in the aftermath of all this. I have yet to hear anything from her or her husband, a guy I grew up with and was pretty tight with. Not a damn word from either of them after I informed them of the scam. I got some terse text telling me that she'd been hacked. That's it. I don't know what their problem is. Is it that they're just so self involved that they haven't even grasped that somebody used her Facebook account to steal 700 bucks from me? Is it that my gullibility in this case was so moronic that they don't even know what to say to me? Is it that they're worried that I'll expect them to pay me back? What's the deal here? If somebody hacked into my Facebook account and used it to fleece a friend of mine out of money, I would be very attentive to that friend afterwards. In this instance, I thought my "friend" was in dire straits in a foreign land with nobody else to turn to. I did everything I could to help her, even though it wasn't really her. And now they don't even have the decency to say thanks for being a good friend... I think the most damning thing you can say about a person is not that your expectations of them have always been low, but that over time, with what you've learned about them through your experiences with them, your expectations of them have gradually been lowered until you get to the point where you have no expectations of them at all... In some ways I feel that this whole episode might be a result of the way I live my life. There are very few people who really matter to me at all, so perhaps it should come as no surprise when I find that there are likewise very few people for whom I matter. Living a disconnected life is a two-way street.

From Monrovia I drove through the city of Duarte and into the city of Azusa. Azusa was once a predominantly white rural backwater, comprised mostly of bean fields, orange groves, and a quiet center of town with small shops. Over time, Azusa has become a largely Latino exurb. The apartment buildings I saw were all about 40-50 years old and badly dilapidated. I drove past the middle school just as the kids were getting out for the day. I took some very clumsy pictures of the kids. One of the teachers asked me if I was looking for someone in particular. I think she was afraid I was some kind of buggerer. I can respect her vigilance. If I saw a short 40-something bald guy walking around the premises of a middle school taking pictures, I would probably be alarmed as well...

The Facebook scam got me thinking about friendship more generally. I don't have a lot of friends, and it hurts when the ones I do have show me that they don't really give a shit if I crap or go blind. The older I get, the more alone I feel. It's not all bad, but there are certainly times when the implications of being a loner are presented to me in stark terms. It's not even that I won't be friends with these people anymore. But I know now that they are not people I can count on, which means that they're not really friends in anything more than the most superficial sense. I have quite a few superficial friendships. The real friendships are the ones I can count on one hand.

Huntington Drive turns into Foothill

Blvd in the City of Glendora. Of all the towns along Route 66, Glendora is the nicest. It's a real throwback to the small town Americana of the pre-1960s era. Yes this means that it's very white and probably very conservative, but you can't help but get swept up into a bit of nostalgia as you walk past the old shops on Grand Avenue, the town's main drag. There's a barber shop, a pharmacy with a lunch counter where you can buy a float or a banana split, a hardware store, a small diner... Who knows what kind of David Lynchesque psychotic nightmare lurks beneath

this placid, timeless setting? As you move further north and higher up into the hills above the center of town, the houses get bigger and more expensive. I like the more modest homes in the flats best.

The next town over is San Dimas. There's not a lot going on in San Dimas. The road becomes one lane in each direction for a small stretch. Things get dustier and more horsey. It's very Jack Straw, very Me and My Uncle, very Clint Eastwood as directed by Sergio Leone. I suppose I could flatter myself by telling myself that my isolated existence is an expression of the rugged individualism that makes America great. Yeah, that's it. I don't need anybody. I'm a fucking cowboy on the frontier... But all kidding aside, I really don't feel comfortable depending on other people. Is that so bad? I was very self sufficient as a kid, and it's carried over into adulthood. I wasn't exactly a latch key kid, but I spent a lot of time alone in my room, listening to records and reading comics and box scores. So why do people look at me funny when I tell them that I'm ok by myself? Why is my father so obsessed with me finding someone to live with? He brings it up every time I speak to him. I tell him what I'm doing and he says, "Well, hopefully you have someone to do that with." I don't think I can get him to understand the way I'm hard wired, which is weird because he's my dad. He wants the best for me, and I know he doesn't say these things in a mean spirited way. Getting him to understand may be out of the question, but how about acceptance? Is it possible to accept something you don't understand? I have to think about that one for awhile...

When I arrived in Pomona, I had a beer at a nondescript bar in the center of town. The place had Miller High Life on tap. There were a few old drunks sitting at the bar, but otherwise the place was empty. I realized after a few minutes that there might not be a lot of customers because the a/c wasn't working very well. It gets smokin' hot in Pomona...

About ten years ago, I interviewed for a tenure-track job at Cal State San Bernardino. It probably would have been an awful job, but at the time I had no other prospects, so I was disappointed when they didn't select me. I told myself that if I got the job I'd live in Pomona. But driving through Pomona today made me appreciate how lucky I was not to get that job. What a shit hole Pomona is! The streets are all badly pot holed, and everything there just looks beaten down and forsaken. I started to feel myself getting depressed as I wandered down south of the railroad tracks and the San Bernardino freeway. All this reflection on isolation and solitude started to get to me...

Driving back from Pomona, I took Mission Boulevard to the city Diamond Bar. From my perspective as nothing more than a drive-through tourist, Diamond Bar appears to be a collection of gated communities, not much more. I transitioned over to Temple Avenue and zipped into the city of Walnut. Nice enough town. There are lovely streets lined with palms, and the roads are open and quiet, for the most part. I didn't see any residential architecture from before the 1950s in Walnut, so I'm assuming that it's largely a post-war suburb... Temple becomes Amar Road as you drop down into the city of West Covina and then drive through the city of La Puente. This has got to be one of the ugliest, most waste-landiest stretches of road in Southern California. It's nothing but dust, abandoned store fronts, and large, overhead powerlines. I turned north on Puente Avenue and drove under the 10 freeway in Baldwin Park. Then I turned west again on Ramona. I started out the journey wanting to clarify my thinking about the way I live. That's probably a bit too sweeping of a task for one trip. I understand the way I live, and I think I understand why I live that way, but I don't know if it makes me happy. I don't even know if happiness is an attainable goal. What would happiness look and feel like? Would I be happier, more content, if I were married and had two kids? I can barely stand to be with someone for more than a few days, let alone a whole lifetime. I live appropriately for someone with my predisposition, but I have a lot of questions about things. Will I wake up one day 10 or 20 years down the road and wonder why I didn't try to build a more meaningful life with someone else?

I was feeling pretty confused by the time I turned onto Valley Boulevard for the home stretch. I passed through the city of El Monte, the city of Rosemead, and the city of San Gabriel before crossing through the city limits back into Alhambra. I didn't come up with any definitive answers today, just a lot of questions and a lot of ambiguity...

high roller

I started a two-week staycation last Thursday night. A staycation is the best kind of vacation for me because it gives me a chance to roam the Southland. I think a lot of people who live here find the physical vastness and dispersal of LA either intimidating or alienating, if not both. It can make you feel alone and disconnected from any sort of community. In other words, it's an ideal place for me to be living. I revel in what others find overwhelming, and I love to wander when I have the time do so.

I'm too nervous about money these days to do much gambling anymore, but I was in the mood for some casino action yesterday, so I drove from my house in Alhambra, first to the Bicycle Casino in the city of Bell Gardens, and then to the Commerce Casino in the city of Commerce. Back when I was a teenager and didn't have to worry much about money since I had well-to-do parents who provided for almost everything, I used to do quite a bit of gambling. I think it might've been my way of thumbing my nose at what I perceived as my parents' upper class pretentiousness. They were always dragging me to the ballet, the theater, and museums. My mom would take me for 'tea' with her fancy friends and refer to our neighborhood on the upper East Side of Manhattan as an arrondissment. All we needed were some fucking finger bowls at the dinner table to make the whole stultifying vibe complete. Gambling seemed like a suitably low-rent pastime and I gravitated towards it with a few friends in high school. One of these friends is a gambling addict to this day, and he's completely destroyed his life. Lucky for me, I recognized my true class position in time to avoid the same fate. One advantage of being a bourgeois teenage gambler is that there wasn't much in the way of consequences if I lost a few hundred bucks at the track or at one of the underground blackjack joints in NYC. There was always more where that came from. My father used to keep a huge wad of cash hidden in the house - several thousand dollars, mostly in hundred dollar bills. I found the wad one day by accident and was able to bankroll my gambling habit thereafter. I pocketed all the winnings, of course. My dad never seemed to notice that the money was missing... But nowadays, with a mortgage and bills to pay, and with an economy that seems like it will stagnate for the foreseeable future, I don't feel nearly as free and easy with money. There's no wad without consequences hidden in my house. My savings are all in cds and bonds and gold. I'm in full-on protective mode, and I'm entertaining the possibility of purchasing a handgun so I can be prepared when the generalized rioting begins any day now. Still, last night I wanted to gamble. I'm on vacation. I wanna wander. I wanna gamble. I'm not such a peasant that I'll completely deprive myself of a little action on a Saturday night...

I took Atlantic Boulevard south through Alhambra and Monterey Park. Without much warning, Monterey Park becomes East Los Angeles, where Atlantic Boulevard has degenerated over the last three decades into a wasteland of pawn shops, payday advance sharks, bail bondsmen, liquor stores, and fast food joints. There are actually still some lovely little latino working class neighborhoods in East LA, but the impact of 40 years of deindustrialization is unmistakable in the commercialized areas...

Atlantic becomes Eastern Boulevard in the city of Commerce, and Eastern takes you directly to the Bicycle Casino in the city of Bell Gardens. The Bicycle Casino is not what I would call an inviting establishment. A lot of casinos, whether they're in Vegas, Reno, Atlantic City, or on Indian Reservtations in the Southwest part of the country, attempt to create a hospitable atmosphere so that you don't notice yourself losing your shirt. Not the Bicycle Casino. Their aproach seems to be to underscore the built-in antagonism between the house and the players. There are armed guards all over the place. I may admittedly have been a little oversensitive to this after taking a few hits in the parking lot beforehand, but whatever... From what I could tell in the hour or so I spent at the Bike, there's no free food or drinks for the players sitting at the tables. The dealers all seem to be quiet in a sullen and unpleasant way. Plus, the place is dirty. In fact, it's worse than dirty because it has the same tacky glitz most casinos have, but it's not kept clean so it really looks like shit. I sat down for a few hands of blackjack and won $25. I would have won more had it not been for the old Chinese lady sitting next to me who hit on 18 and drew a picture card after I split on aces. I didn't do that douchey thing that some people do and yell at her for fucking up my hand, but I was a little chapped. I took it as a sign and cashed my chips right there.

While the Commerce Casino also has its trashy aspects, it's much nicer than the Bike. The atmosphere is much more welcoming. I sat down at a minimum bet blackjack table and bought $300 worth of chips. This seemed to send an invisible signal to some central nerve center because within two minutes a waitress came to get my drink order. I went on a good run right away. On all of my first three hands I pulled 21. A black guy in green coveralls smacked my back on the third 21 and said, 'You are hot tonight, baby! Gimme a little 'o what you got!' After 45 minutes at the table, I had more than doubled my money. Then I did the right thing when I felt myself cooling off. I walked away with a nice profit of $265. Now it was time for some sports betting. This is the great thing about the Commerce Casino - you can bet ball games in the sports betting parlor. I put $400 on the Angels to beat the lowly Baltimore Orioles. Why not? Fuck it. I'm on staycation. Scott Kazmir against Kevin Millwood. Kaz should be able to beat the Os, right? The line was even money. I felt the Angels were due for a win. They've had a bad year, and I thought they could at least begin to creep back towards .500 playing a weak team like the Orioles. Luckily I don't make a living at gambling because my thinking was entirely faulty. The Angels couldn't even scratch out a run. They made Kevin Millwood look like the next coming of Nolan Ryan. Four yards down the toilet. But it was fun watching the people watch the games on huge flat screen TVs. I watched them, and I smelled them, too, as the sports betting room was imbued with an odor of generalized hard living. I assumed the smell was the essence seeping collectively from the pores of the players. The only way I can describe it is that it smelled like there was an invisible gas in the air around all of us, composed of liver disease, farts, fast food, and the kind of body odor a guy gets when he's being yelled at by his superiors at work all day long. It's a smell that's both primal and incredibly vile. After a while it really started to get to me and I tried to make it go away by chugalugging as much beer as I could. No dice... A lot of the guys betting the games looked dirt poor, and yet here they were betting what little money they had. It's admirable in a weird way, the capacity in an otherwise hopeless life to create a little bit of hope for a few hours on a Saturday night... With the game over it was time for me to go home. I thought about trying to win my money back at the blackjack tables, but I know this is how people get in trouble, so I just got in my car and drove home.

tito to the twinkies

I just found out that the Minnesota Twins have claimed Brian Fuentes off the waiver wire. Tito, as he is known affectionately by his teammates, handled questions from the Angels beat writers with dignity and class. He did not bash the fans who have booed him on occasion, and he said he enjoyed his time and his teammates in Anaheim. He is not an archetypal closer with a 100 mph heater. He relies on off-speed pitches and the deceptiveness of the funky way he grips the ball. He will almost certainly not be the closer for the Twinkies as they have All Star righty Matt Capps as their ninth inning guy. But Fuentes definitely gives the Twins an effective left handed situational arm, and he will make them a better team coming down the stretch and in the playoffs, assuming they can hold off the White Sox in the AL Central. The Angels will get a Player to be Named Later in the deal. Fernando Rodney is likely to be the Halos' closer for the remainder of this season and in 2011. I'm not sold on Rodney, but that's a conversation for another time. I wish Fuentes well. He had big shoes to fill after Frankie Rodriguez left town. Fuentes blew some big games over the last two years, but he is exactly the kind of player I appreciate most - a gritty competitor who's steady and makes the most of limited physical gifts. Fare thee well, Tito...

i have a thing for england

LA has always had a love affair with England. And vice versa. One of my favorite books is Evelyn Waugh's The Love One, a Hollywood novel told from the point of view of a droll Englishman. Reading it brings a smile to my face. The movie is brilliant as well, directed by the great Tony Richardson. A pantheon of the UK - LA nexus would include Waugh, Richardson, Led Zeppelin, Fairport Convention, Greatta Scacchi, Morrissey... I love English music and English films. The kitchen sink genre is so great. One of my favorite people in the world is English. I don't see him in person all that often, but it's always great fun to absorb his Englishness when we do get to spend time together. Maybe my affinity for English culture explains why I ended up in LA. I got to thinking about all this after something very English - something pleasingly English - popped up on my iPod tonight...

do you feel like i do?

I went on Prozac for the first time about 15 years ago, a few months before the big Northridge quake. The only reason I remember the start date with such specificity is that I was struck at the time by how unusually blasé I was as the ground started rocking and rolling. This was an earthquake that destroyed my tv and all the bottles and glasses in my kitchen cupboard. It cracked the walls and ceilings of my shitty second-story
apartment on Rendall place. It felt as if the whole apartment was gonna pancake on top of the first story of the building. It compelled superstitious Mexicans in my neighborhood to live in tents outside their homes for weeks afterward. It even forced a large chunk of the 10 freeway to collapse onto the intersection of Venice and Fairfax. It wasn’t the Big One, mind you. We still haven’t had the Big One that the mystics and statistics say we will. But the Northridge quake was still pretty damn big. It killed Nilsson Schmilsson for Christ’s sake! And yet, there I was, in bed, by myself (of course), getting thrown and bounced around everywhere, but it didn’t feel to me like a big deal. “Huh,” I thought. “We’re having an earthquake. How interesting.”

The wonder of antidepressants, and also the curse they carry with them, is that they act as a kind of generalized novocaine protecting you against the vagaries of life. They're a safeguard against extremities. They keep you out of the depths of despair, but also make it difficult to experience anything approaching euphoria. A friend of mine has likened his experience on meds to wearing a large body condom.





I've cycled on and off meds repeatedly since the Northridge shaker, until finally deciding a little while ago that I probably need to be a lifer. Bad things have happened during the phases when I've been off antidepressants. Breakdowns. Panic attacks. Nasty irritability and embarassing explosions of my temper. I don't really want to get too deeply into these episodes right now. Some of them are actually pretty funny in retrospect, like the time I tried to run some hipster's Galaxie 500 off the freeway...


What interests me most at the moment is the prospect of a life without much pleasure. I'm on a much, much stronger regimen of meds now than when I first started. 120 mgs of Cymbalta and 60 mgs of Remeron, every day. Enough to knock over an elephant. For a time I was mixing in a little Welbutrin as well, and my psycho-pharmacologist also had me experiment with Abilify. But now I'm back to a two-drug cocktail that seems to be doing what I need it to do. It's still a pretty hefty daily infusion. It has to be because you build up a tolerance over time and need more to get the job done. The consequence of this boost in potency is that my body condom is now made of steel. No pain. No pleasure. No fear. No joy. No panic. No ecstasy. No worry...




This may sound like a drab existence, this life without pleasure. The thing is, though, I've never really felt unmittigated pleasure in my life, even when I wasn't on meds. The happiest days of my life took place when I went to sleepaway camp every summer as a kid. I loved it. I had great friends. They liked me. For eight weeks every summer over 10 years, I would go to a place and receive the kind of validation I rarely got back home. I would play sports with my pals, swim, listen to music, and go on field trips to the Baseball Hall of Fame and Roaring Rapids. I even smoked my first joint at camp. Yet even in this ideal sanctuary, I was constantly worried about something or other. I always thought something terrible was about to happen to me. So maybe pleasure is just a mirage. Maybe pleasure doesn't really exist in any kind of lasting form, at least not for me. I have sporadic moments of pleasure - I hear a guitar riff I love; I see a great baseball game; I read an amazing passage in a brilliant book; I have an interesting conversation with someone I like and respect... But none of it ever creates an enduring state of mind. Even sex is really not all that pleasurable for me. Sex in my life is more about insecurity and worry than it is about pleasure, connectedness with another person, and the fulfillment of my manly needs. Am I going to be able to perform? What will she think of me if I fail to please her? Will she reject me? Am I doing this the right way and sticking this or that in the right place? It's really not that satisfying. I prefer beating off, to be honest. I scratch the itch that needs to be scratched and then I'm done, answerable to nobody but myself. I find the time leading up to sex more enjoyable than the sex itself. The flirtation, anticipation and seduction. But even here the pleasure is fleeting, and the sex never lives up to the flimsy promise held forth by the seduction. Sex is overrated. Pleasure is overrated. Fuck pleasure. Pleasure is akin to the observation deck at the Empire State Building. You think you're gonna see Spidey swinging from the top of the building, just like in the cartoon, but then you get up there and it's like BFD. I'll stay on the ground floor, thank you very much, because at least if I just hang out in the lobby I won't be tempted to hurl myself off the deck in anguish. So fuck pleasure. Pain is the condition of possibility for pleasure. That's a little Foucault for you. History of Sexuality, Volume 97. Forget Foucault. Fuck Foucault, and fuck pleasure. Pleasure sucks. Receptiveness to pleasure means opening yourself up to its opposite. The master becomes the slave. Fuck Hegel. Fuck pleasure. I'd rather live my life with a permanent Captain America-style shield. That is to say, I'd rather not strangle the asshole to death after he forgets to towel off the bench at the gym. I'd rather not throw my TV through a window after Luis Castillo drops an easy fly ball in the bottom of the ninth. I'd rather not yell at my friends petulantly when they're 45 minutes late for something or other. Go ahead and shit on me guys. I'm bullet proof. You can't hurt me. I didn't fall for the sucker bet. I know myself. I won't get pissed when some fox walks right by me on the street like I'm invisible. I don't care. She's already making some other guy's life miserable anyway. Fuck pleasure. You can take your pleasure and stuff it deep inside your tushy. I bet you'd get a lot of pleasure out of that! It's a paradox, or an irony, or something. My tushy is cemented shut and fortified with rebar. It won't bother me anymore when my parents suggest - without even being fully aware of what they're implying - that I haven't lived up to what they hoped I'd be. I don't even know if I''ve lived up to what I hoped I'd be. What difference does it make at this point? Hope is the expectation of future happiness, a future in which you'll be able to experience pleasure. And pleasure is for chumps. It's like the Pick 6 at Santa Anita. It's like the Lotto. You know who plays Lotto? People who don't have a fucking pot to piss in. I remember a janitor at UCLA telling me that he'd bought $200 worth of Lotto tix when the jackpot hit $40 million. I tried to explain to him, gently, that the extra tickets he bought increased his chances of winning by .000000000001%. Why did I bother? I don't know anymore. The dumb schmuck will never realize that he's getting played, and that there's a pipeline running directly from the promise of easy wealth to the reality of abject poverty. That's why he's poor. Keep mopping those bathroom floors, you fool. Make sure you get every last drop of piss off those floors. I think you missed a spot. Fuck pleasure. Pleasure is fool's gold.

So what does it all mean? What's it like living a pleasureless life? It's good, actually. It's right. It's straight down the middle. I feel nothing, and I like it.