overhaul / undertow

Tuesday, February 28, 2006




Pannies!

It's National Pancake Day today. IHOP was giving away free short-stacks of pancakes. For me, this is golden fluffy manna from heaven.



Mmmm. Thanks Jesus, for dying so people would fast leading up the the anniversary of your death, thus requiring them to use up their eggs and milk beforehand. What foresight. But you ARE Jesus, so I guess you've got the inside info. Do I still get pancakes if I'm a Pastafarian?

I had to pay for the eggs and coffee, of course.

Sunday, February 26, 2006




ding ding ding ding

Perfect band name:

Magnolia Curtain

(cribbed from the name of a Tav Falco's Unapproachable Panther Burns album)

Saturday, February 25, 2006

s.t.f.u.

Will someone please give the Olympics bobsled announcers a fucking quaalude?

Either that or a swift smack in the head with a shovel.

Jeeez.

I am 29, btw

My birthday was on the 15th of this month. I'm 29 (for real). I spent the night of Valentine's Day with my best girlfriend from high school, at the Echo with some of our mutual friends, watching Winter Flowers and waiting for Dntel to play. Because I am newly old, I got tired around midnight and went home before Dntel went on at 1 a.m. But while I was there I bought myself a birthday present: the guy who makes Hip Hop Chocolates was there, and I bought myself brass knuckles made of butterscotch clocolate and holy shit, it was great. I hate promoting myspace, but this is his myspace thing: http://www.myspace.com/hiphopchocolate.

I also got a tear painted on my face. Some sort of theme night, I guess, in conjunction with Valentine's Day. Or maybe I'm just remembering my homies.

But once it turned midnight, it was My Birthday(tm), and V-Day no more. :)

If it's true that the way you spend the first few moments of each birthday sets the tone for the coming year, this year should be good.




history and place

I moved back in with my parents here in Canoga Park about two years ago now. It's hard to believe. I must confess it's not intolerable. My parents are not completely insane. We always got along reasonably well, except for those few years in late junior high / early high school when everything they did was hopelessly obtuse.

Now, it's still not normal in this culture to live at home with one's family when you're in your late twenties. In many other places throughout the world, though, for an unmarried daughter to stay at home with her parents is perfectly reasonable, and I'm sure that in some places around the globe I'd have rocks thrown at me if I *didn't* live with the fam.

You know, here in the U.S. there are no places where people have lived for more than maybe five, six generations. I'd guess that's about the cap before we start tracing our roots back to our nations of origin. There really aren't any places, or that many, where families have lived for more than two, three generations. But in Europe quite a number of people live in the same town where their ancestors rode out from on Crusades.

Here, in the U.S., we are laying down the days of history, building up time, and progressively creating the same sort of sense of belonging to a place. But we can't create it any faster than days go by.

I was reading a woman's column in a local paper about moving into Altadena, a few blocks down from the house in which she grew up. She'd sworn she would've moved far, far away, but the apple had come home to fall very close to the tree. She was content about it, and told how the land itself had been owned in large parcels early on, large farms and estates, and subdivided largely during the Depression: "infill" it was called, as small clapboard bungalows--"charming" nowadays--were built up, chunking the large parcels of land into smaller ones. It was interesting to see her consciously creating history as she settled into her own home on the same land her grandfather had raised her dad. I'm doing something quite similar.

I don't plan to live with the family for more than another year: I'm giving myself until July to not worry about it, and then in July I will begin to set goals and make plans. It's a great thing I moved home: I needed the support to shift my career. I couldn't have made the changes I've made without my parents taking up the financial slack and putting a roof over my head while I took two internships and threw myself into writing. I still would've been stuck in the same job, miserable.

It's just very...comforting, to think I'm building a sense of place, a sense of "we are from here"--here in Los Angeles and its environs. Anyone who comes after me will feel as though the earth they walk on is just a little more full of humanity for my having been here, maybe. As it is now, under my feet and when I look around the San Fernando Valley, I feel the past as this crushing wildness, a smattering of people who came before me in sepia photographs to plow the land and plant oranges, and then before that the Chumash Indians, and before that nothing but a vast desolation--not in a negative sense, in a very full sense; but the vast desolation of nature and the globe without the mark of human hands...

The centuries of human life that layered onto the village when I visited Cortona were very different from the wildness here in the Americas. Neither is better, I guess. Maybe they're really both the same thing. One is just familar to us, and the other is unknown.

Tuesday, February 21, 2006




Pajama Party

I'm home sick today, but one of the perks of being a writer/editor is that you can work from home, in your sweatpants.

I'm finishing up a story on little radio, a web station out of Downtown that began as a pirate station, then switched to web after much grief with the FCC (and one too many nights of scrambling on rooftops and basements to set up antennae). They go multimedia on the 1st, which means a web magazine, music videos, blogs etc. Should be very cool, and it could really help launch the L.A. music scene. The station's beloved by indie rock fans worldwide and currently has shows hosted by everyone from the Beastie Boys to some chick in Italy.

LR's founder, Dave Conway, asked me to do a occasional radio show, which I just might go for. I need to get out more, and I've been missing the music scene. I dj'ed for several years at L.A.'s bastion of DIY radio, killradio, and then moved on to work with the founding of theoryradio, but never got really involved there because I was so busy with other stuff; it was really Normal who did all the work. But now, several years later, it would be nice to do a guest spot once in a while.

Saturday, February 18, 2006




I am always tired these days.

I got nine hours of sleep last night and I'm still tired.

The doctor said that the Sjogren's syndrome would cause me to get tired a lot.

Shitty.

In other news, however, I feel very blessed and lucky in my life, which is a weird contrast from the above whining.

But I do feel so lucky. My life is amazing.

I will meditate upon that as I nap.

Sunday, February 05, 2006

I am sick and it sucks.

Look, my neck's all fat.



I drew a little line to show the extra swelling. It's that super???

I'm currently missing seeing Jaylinn travel thru LA at the Burbank airport. I am missing hanging out with my boyfriend. And I am missing feeling healthy.

I am whiny. Sorry. :(

Friday, February 03, 2006




I've been mildly under the weather ever since I got sick, about two posts down I think.

It's kinda sucky to feel so wiped out every night.

I have nothing interesting to write about.