I’m in LA. Specifically, I am in a Panera near Playa Del Rey, eating soup and eating free WiFi. But yeah, I have been here since Tuesday, looking at places and stressing out about where we will live. I believe we have a place picked out down near here, but I better act stupid so I won’t jinx it.
I’ve found a lot of the landlord/broker/managers here to be very spacy. And there’s a level of deception not as great as NY, but more than Denver. Like I went to a place in Santa Monica – great, great neighborhood, one block over from the ocean. But the interior basically looked like a very rough Varsity Villas apartment (non-Bloomingtonians: a shithole apartment complex where jocks go to puke, black out, and date-rape sorority chicks.) Very sad because I really do like that area, but what are you going to do.
So I’m staying in a shithole Econolodge, driving around the Yaris, which is odd. Imagine taking a trip to Vietnam or Siberia or Dubai, and when you get off of your 24-hour plane trip, your home-town vehicle is there waiting for you. And instead of commuting to work or taking the holland tunnel to jersey or whatever else, you’re driving past desert and oilwells and dudes on mopeds with 2000 pounds of monkey brains on sticks passing by you. It’s just odd to me.
My fucking iPod broke, which is pissing me off to no end. I didn’t do anything catastrophic, like drop it down ten flights of stairs. It just failed to boot the other morning, the sad mac face. Yes, I already tried all of the stupid tricks – it is 100% dead, end of story. I blame my old I-25 commute, because once a week I would have to lock the brakes in a 75-to-0 full stop when some fucknut pulled in front of me, sending everything in the car flying, and slamming the iPod against the floor or dash or whereever it landed. All I can say is I’m glad it didn’t happen before or during my long drive out here, or I would have gone insane.
And no, I am not buying an iPod touch. I would have to buy five of them to keep all of my music on it. And without keeping all of my music, I might as well go back to cassette tapes. I am selling my old Mac Mini on ebay if you are in the market for one, that will be the “replace my iPod” fund. (Auction here.
I saw jfrankov of UCS fame last night – we caught a dinner, and also took a quick trip through a Trader Joe, so two nice bits of nostalgia there. He is well, and it was good to see him after something like 13 years. It’s also further weird in that I worked for him last summer, and we did everything by phone and email. I still need to see my friend Julie, so we will catch up at some point.
This journal entry is nothing but short sentences and no real paragraphs for two reasons. One is that the MacBook keyboard sucks, and I never use it because I run with an external. So when I am mobile, my typing speed and accuracy is roughly the same as it was on the old Atari 400 with membrane keys. The other reason is I’m in Panera at peak hours, and I keep stopping to enjoy the dirty looks from people. So yeah, all of the misssspelliings, if it bothers you, you’re always welcome to cut and paste this into Word and fix it yourself. Or I will refund your full purchase price. (ie $0.)
I am too lazy to write a giant esoteric introduction right now, and I will later, but go here to check out John Sheppard’s new book, Tales of the Peacetime Army. (There’s also some more at paragraphline.com. The short version is that John and I will be publishing his next book from the same publishing entity I created to put out the zines.
OK, I better get out of here before they lynch me.