Thanks

Evil Ex-Roommate seemed to be reforming his evil ways after losing his ranch job, becoming unemployed, broke, and homeless, and then getting a new job that actually paid him more than he was spending. We were talking again and I was really happy that I was finally getting my friend back after losing him during the last two years.

Like last year, we were both stuck in LA without any family for the upcoming Thanksgiving holidays and had made plans to spend the day together. I wasn't about to cook this time, though; we were going to go to a casino and spend the day basking in the artificial daylight and try to forget about the fact that we were giving the Morongo casino money even though their radio and TV ads are really annoying.

And then, of course, he backed out of our plans, saying that he didn't think we had set anything in stone and he didn't have any money for a casino anyway and, most importantly I believe, he had gotten an invitation to a party at some of his ranch friends' house. I told him that next time I would be sure to make it absolutely crystal clear that we did, in fact, have plans I was relying on to the point of not making plans with anyone else, except that there will not be a next time. We were friends since fourth grade. We are not friends any more. I told him I hoped his new friends would drag him out of his bathrub the next time he passed out drunk in it at three in the morning, stopped him from driving drunk by standing in front of his car while he screamed at them, and let him take advantage of them, because that's apparently what he needs from his friends. He said he hoped I would find some new friends who wouldn't make me sad. I said I was pretty sure I'd be able to manage that just fine. I hope I sounded a lot more sure of that than I actually felt.

This leaves me alone tomorrow with the following food items to try to make a meal out of:

-French's French Fried Onions, chedder flavor
-Pasta, dry
-Milk, skim, slightly spoiled
-Poppycock brand chocolate and peanut butter popcorn, very delicious
-Ten cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon Light beer

I'm sure some type of casserole can be fashioned out of this.

Fortunately, the Stabucks down the street will be open for a few hours tomorrow, and I will drop by there for some human interaction. There are some days when they are the only people I speak to. This is why I really need to get a job outside of my apartment. Working at home has been fun, but the vacation is over. The people at Starbucks know that my first name is spelled with no "H."

Aside from all that, there are things I am happy about and thankful for and I will think of them tomorrow. Tonight I will wallow in self-pity.

A Reason To Watch The News

Jim Hill thought he had it goin' on over at the KCBS nightly news with his perfect newsanchor name: the familiar first name that suggests he's more of an informative friend than a stranger broadcasting to thousands and a solid, unmoving geographical feature for a last name that creates an impression of a trustworthy and dependable news source.

But then they hired JOHNNY MOUNTAIN, who totally one-upped him with his even MORE familiar first name and an even BIGGER and MORE SOLID geographical feature last name! JOHNNY MOUNTAIN is like Jim Hill times one thousand! And he knows it, too. Just look at his face! He is goddamn proud of himself. Meanwhile, poor Jim Hill, squished into a corner, bravely tries to pretend none of this is going on. But his smile doesn't reach his eyes, where his sadness and anger can clearly be seen. Hell, his smile barely reaches his moustache.

Meanwhile, human buffer zones Paul Magers and Laura Diaz are just like " ... awkward."

If this dynamic translates to the news broadcast, I may just start watching.

Bad Company

Hey, at least they didn't go with their first company name idea: AIDS (Amazingly Ignorant of Disease-name Shortenings).

And Now, the Answers

The answers to the three questions posed at the end of my last blog entry, written back in 1979 at the dawn of the internet (I really need to update more often, I know. But, you see, I was trying to build suspense with the three-month absence. Totally):

Evil Ex-Roommate does, in fact, live in a barn surrounded by hay bales. There is no indoor plumbing.

We were able to move my things without incurring significant damage to our persons, even though my friend's meat-free diet lacks sufficient amounts of protein and my mother and I are small women. This was accomplished by the on-the-spot decision to leave my couch on the curb of my old apartment building, because it was way too big and heavy to get into my new building's elevator. That brings us to the last question:

We were not, in fact, able to avoid confrontation with the neighbors. If you guessed that that was the "no" answer, you win! Also, if you know me personally and did not guess the answer that involved me getting into a fight with someone, you should be ashamed because you really don't know me at all. Call me sometime.

The fight was because my apartment building's next-door neighbors (I always called them The Sims because they have at least two room's worth of furniture hanging out on their front yard, not unlike when you first start to play the popular computer game and you don't have enough money to build all the walls or floors of your new house so you and your SimFamily have to live outside until you get a promotion in your SimJob because you SimWorked out on your SimSoloflex for one day), did not appreciate that we left my couch on the curb once we realized that it was not going to fit in the elevator of my new building, which was built in the twenties when people were apparently really small and fond of real wood paneling. I'd like to point out again that these people have two couches, a dining table that would not be out of place in a Medieval Times, and two old-fashioned salon hairdryer chairs in their yard, so you'd think they didn't really have a leg to stand on with the no-furniture-outside argument. Unless, of course, they were standing on the leg of one of the fifteen chairs around their massive table. That's, like, sixty legs. I tried to point out to them that maybe someone with a goddamn FIREPLACE hanging out in his front yard shouldn't have a problem with other people trying to create their own outside living rooms, but the guy insisted that we live in a "nice neighborhood," which apparently means that we are to keep our outside couches behind the high walls of our ugly and cheap-looking stucco fence. Dude, just because you were stupid enough to pay over a million dollars for a house that was condemned just a year ago and then renovated by a team of laborers who I'm pretty sure were taken to the jobsite directly from the Home Depot parking lot they were hanging out in in hopes of getting hired for an odd job, doesn't mean that the rest of us have to conform to your standards of what a million-dollar home neighborhood should be. And by "the rest of us," I mean me, the homeless man who built a two-room tent with adjoining greenhouse on the sidewalk, whoever it was that stole two loads of my laundry out of the goddamn dryer, those kids who kept sneaking into my apartment building to use our pool, the dead pigeon, and, of course, this guy:

I will miss you (the pool, not the guy. My new place doesn't have a pool).