Did you know if you mixed equal parts of gasoline and frozen orange juice concentrate you can make napalm?

Ah Sunday. Football. Looking up BLM maps for next weeks opening of quail season. Purposely ignoring the news and the disaster looming on the horizon like an avalanche of shit. I just paid my bills and have some spare change left over, worthless really but it makes me happy. I worked my ass off for a week and a half and now I am going to sit on my ass some more and watch football. Yeah, I'm going to take my first day off and watch millionaires beat the shit out of each other while wearing tights and really ugly jerseys. Ha! Football is so damn gay and it doesn't even know it!

I finished two books and read three magazines while working on the KMart job. Good lord, those people are dumber than a bag of rocks and because of that we wasted so much damn time that I had plenty of time to sit and read. It's funny, pull out a book and people think you're some sort of fucking genius. One of the PAs took a photo of the camera crews while we were waiting for the client types to find their asses with both hands. In the photo everyone except me is dicking around with their iPhone. I'm sitting off to the side reading the museum book I mentioned a couple of posts back. The PA found this very profound. Funny, books used to be fairly common place but I guess smart and educated is now gay in the Bush-era. I hope that changes when Obama wins. I hope that as a country we return to investing in education and looking to educated people for ideas and leadership as opposed to going with whatever the superstitious believe or going with the guy you'd like to have a beer with. Hope. I hope it will be better after it is worse.

Peace out, bitches!

Alas, poor country, almost afraid to know itself. It cannot be called our mother, but our grave...

And so it starts, the blame begins to shift from the majority white perpetrators to the minorities who are the victims of the whole thing. Nice. What is it about white people that they feel a need, almost a genetic imperative, to shift the blame to minorities? Apparently, the economic problems we are all facing as a country are the fault of blacks and Latinos who were given loans that they shouldn't have been given. They got the loans, the argument goes, because of a THIRTY year old law that was created to abolish racist lending practices. Oh, the only banks it applied to were FDIC insured. Also, it's interesting that this law took thirty years to fuck us all. I guess the next thing they'll do is to blame the Jews since this whole thing involves money. Just watch. It's always the fault of someone other than the fucking assholes in charge: rich, white, boy's club bastards from both political parties. If we don't stop this now the base elements of America, the ugly underside of this shit hole, are going to start some craziness and catch most people by surprise. I know, I sound paranoid and ridiculous but sit back for a minute and think about the usual suspects when shit goes wrong for white people and try to remember how those people get treated. Civil War, New York, mobs kill black people for "causing" the Civil War. Depression, who got fucked for "taking jobs"? Right now, how easy is it to make racist comments in polite society when one is talking about "immigrants"? Yeah, I'm fucking paranoid.

Peace out, bitches!

Human beings were not meant to sit in little cubicles staring at computer screens all day.

It's Wednesday, I'm making a good bit of money, and I'm broke. I love freelance work. You know, that special self-imposed torture of waiting for paychecks as you slowly spend all your money on food and gas and credit card debt accrued over a tumultuous marriage. Nothing beats the financial reminder of one's failures at Life. Ho hum, at least I'm not a fat bastard bilking millions from the American taxpayer. Actually, that doesn't sound half-bad right about now! Ha! So anyway, here are some random photos from several days of work and stupidity.

My dear, sweet brother Numsie!

Ah, Monday night and I'm not on a dumb music video getting my ass kicked! Just finished day one of six of a super easy KMart commercial and it felt like a vacation. I may have missed the Vikings beating the Saints but at least they one and we did a bunch of overtime at full rate so the world is once again back to good. Added bonus: my girlfriend made me fried chicken and is now curled up around me as I type and watch ESPN. Does it get better? Oh yeah, it does! Doc and Lil Sleepy are back from Spain! Hoorah.

Peace out, bitches!

Small town, not much to do in the evenin'.

Today was incredibly productive and I'm very happy right now. I started the morning by sleeping in because I'm sick and dying. Then a little yoga followed by some dog walking (two dogs, the stuck up Lady and the retard Ghost, match made in WWF heaven) and a sensible breakfast. I needed to get some errands done and then swing by a camera house to prepare for next weeks job, this weekends having been prepped yesterday afternoon into night (ah, never let the boss stop by for a visit). Before anything could happen I got a ticket for not coming to a complete stop one block from the new cave. How fun. The officer tape recorded the whole thing and wouldn't listen to any of my pleading. I'm going to egg his car in about a week, should be fun as he clearly had no sense of humor. By the way, if an officer tapes your conversation without telling you he's going to do so, does that render the tape itself inadmissible in court? Just curious.

Anyway, after all was said and done and Johnny Law gave me his little lecture about kids and pedestrians with dogs (see how the smart cop tied in his speech with my dogs, he gets a donut!) I proceeded to get everything I wanted to do done in a timely fashion. That kind of stuff makes me happy. I only sat in traffic for a minute, I had a really good street dog for lunch, and the waves weren't as good as they would have been in the morning but who cares? I got to surf while most people were still at work. Fuck it, that's a good day for me.

As I write, my dog is asleep by the door, the newspaper is half-read, and I'm almost done with a really good book by the name of Dry Storeroom No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum. If you like science or esoteric writing you should pick this up, it's very good. I've been trying to read it for the longest but life keeps getting in the way. You know, dumb dog, girlfriend, Bog, work, sickness, moving, the whole gamut of bullshit. Point is, through it all this book has kept my attention. I plan on finishing it tonight just to spite the universe. Then I'm really going to have a fun read by picking up Ishmael Reed's "Mixing It Up." Love that guy. I hope I'm that interesting and grumpy and right when I'm that old.

Off to Yang Chow for a time-tested LA cure for the common cold: Yang Chow's Spicy Won Ton Soup. Throw in a little hot sauce and voila! You'll either burn the cold bugs right out of you or fry your skull so you won't notice you're sick anywho. Good times and I think I'll take the girl and Bog with me. And Ghost because he really can't do anything without me as he starts whining and drinkin' gin to excess.

Peace out, bitches!

I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time like tears in rain.

I'm fighting a cold but need to work and it's one hundred fucking degrees around LaLa lately, lame! I think my head is fixing to explode and I know my balls are about to melt out the bottom of my shorts. The only way to fix any of this is to go jump in the mighty Pacific and sink into her cooling folds. Possibly while riding a longboard.

I surfed yesterday afternoon at El Porto. It was amazing. The waves were crap but I took a nice long paddle up the coast from midway through Manhattan Beach and stopped at the breakwater just north of El Porto. There's an oil processing plant there, on the shore, with two towers rising out of the main mass of machinery. Everything hums along quite nicely and the squat behemoth in beige belches out precious little plumes of white smoke every so often. As beige and boring as the thing looks it really is surprisingly tranquil when the light hits it and the beach and the waves just right. Yesterday afternoon was one of those times and I was struck with how relaxing the whole thing was. I rode a few little peelers off the breakwater and took a walk back afterward, along the shore at a negative tide is a great time for this. I found a sand dollar that was still alive and furry and squirming so I put him out to sea, hopefully to remain furry and squirmy for some time to come. I should look up their life cycle. I watched a variety of sea birds peeling overhead, cackling and chasing each other along the waterline and above. All in all, it was the time of moment that reminds me of why I love it here so much and why I'd very much enjoy it if most of the people around here would just go back home. LA could be so much nicer if everyone and their tragically hip buddy weren't clogging the joint up all the time.

On that sour note I'm off to sea and then into the bowels of Hollywood for some camera prepping time at Panavision. I'm going to pull focus on yet another horrible hip hop video for yet another group of horrible no-talent kids who'll probably get tricked out of all of their money before they hit thirty. Idiots. No hunting trip for me. Following that it's a week of K-Mart commercials. Yeah, take the money and run, that's the new motto until January when the motto becomes "Do it for the reel." Burn Hollywood, burn indeed.

Peace out, bitches!

A vendetta, held as a votive, not in vain, for the value and veracity of such shall one day vindicate the vigilant and the virtuous.

Today is October 1st and it is a great day indeed. Why? Because this is the first 1st on which I have not had to write a rent check in thirteen years. Or one hundred and fifty-six months. It feels both liberating and vaguely uncomfortable to not be paying rent for the first time in forever. Liberating for the obvious reasons and uncomfortable because I'm not living in my own space. It's nice, it's free, the neighborhood is great but it's all temporary, gone at any moment really as I have no idea what my Turkish friend is actually up to with the renovation. Heaven gone without any warning. So typical of an Angeleno, living on the seam of Heaven and Hell and not really caring too much. I truly hope this works out and I'm not living like a couch surfing bum for nothing. Time will tell.

On another note, I saw another thing so very typical of Los Angeles: a Hummer H3 with the words "God is good" written on the back. What the fuck is wrong with people around here? A gas guzzling, accident prone hunk of junk that the driver probably can't afford is considered a status symbol by the type of jackass that would write "God is good." Not "awesome," not "great," not "holy," not anything that really conveys one's love of God. Just the mundane and idiotic "good," as if the holy was sort of kind of whatever, ya know? Call me crazy but shit like this really bugs me because it is indicative of what I feel is the slow death of intellectualism in America today. Give it up to Gawd! Got milk? It's all good! What the fuck, people!? Anyone else notice the number of soft-core porns masquerading as teen flicks? Spoof movies that are as unfunny as anything ever created, almost as if the creators of said fiascoes concocted some calculus by which the movie is inversely funny in relation to the idiocy of the overall concept. The Republican's new favorite is calling Obama an "elitist" because he speaks in full sentences and can answer a reporter's questions. Palin couldn't even answer softball questions thrown at her by Katie Couric who is by no means one of the nation's intellectual giants. I mean, she's on TV! How fucking smart could she really be? And Palin couldn't deal? No wonder the ex-leader of Singapore called her a hick.  Good lord, what's to become of us?

Peace out, bitches!