Good One

Suppose you are a filmmaker in Hollywood. Say you’re pushing forty, and you’re beginning to get a little sentimental about all the things you remember from your adolescence, like the toys and clothes and sitcoms. Perhaps you start thinking about expressing that erstwhile longing by revisiting your past via the silver screen. Instead of wasting all that dough and creativity, you should maybe get on a jet to Fiji or Monaco, or you risk winding up with something like The Dukes of Hazzard. Not that I didn’t enjoy it. But it just isn’t the sheer, uninhibited orgy of stoopid goodness Super Troopers is.

It's the end of the line for the Ambassador Hotel, which makes me sad because I've always thought of it as the LA equivalent of San Diego's Hotel Del Coronado. The mirrored disco ball that hung in the Coconut Grove lounge reportedly went for $900.00. I would have paid more.

I received the actual official certificate for my Level I Operator's Certification over the weekend, and I hung it in the lobby, in the empty frame between Travis and Jeff's. Then I pondered whether the MagneStir (a square contraption in our lab, with a spinning magnet inside that causes a small metal pellet in a glass flask to spin, mixing the contents at a variable rate but with a consistent motion) has enough torque to make mousse.

It's hunting season. The whole town looks like a military encampment. Last night there was a batch of scruffy, unrecognizable cavemen skinning an antelope by the light of the streetlamp at the foot of the on-ramp to I-80. The world reverts.

Yesterday at Rose's house, Mom, Morgan and I wrapped a date palm (which Grandpa planted the summer I turned a year old, from fig seeds he got in Death Valley) in ecru sheets with Great-Grandma's hand-crocheted tatting. It looked like a long, thin body in a fine shroud. We put it in the bed of Morgan's Chevy (which we're driving around the state sans plates because Wells Fargo somehow screwed up the title transfer) and drove it home, where I installed it comfortably in a sunny corner of the above-mentioned lobby. Rose had a hard time letting it go. I suppose she feels in some way it's the embodiment of Grandpa's life, and who am I to judge? I talk to the Cadillac like Dad can somehow hear me through its Bose sound system. And now I sit in the square of sunlight from the window and talk to the date palm. Grandpa wasn't a big listener; he was a big talker. The palm is a considerable improvement in that respect. But then, I wish I'd had time to hear him talk more. He once lopped the bill off Rip Torn's cowboy hat with a bowie knife, and other celebrities besides. But that is a story for another day.