Driving home, I blasted and sang along with Styx’s “Come Sail Away” on KLOS FM radio through my old car’s speakers. Then listened to the 2012 rerecorded version off my computer’s equalized speakers. Even though the new version is near identical to the original and uses more modern recording equipment, I still like the original …
When my Mom was a little girl, they would celebrate Good Friday and the following Saturday by keeping quiet, no music except for prayer songs, spending the time to reflect on why Jesus sacrificed his life. Only on Easter Sunday would there be a celebration, beginning with mass, and then a family feast, always remembering …
Somewhere in my parents’ attic is a two-minute movie of my 9th birthday party, shot on 8mm film. Part of that movie was a snippet of the pinata game, where blindfolded kids would take turns swinging a stick to try and break the pinata, a papier mache hollow donkey which was filled with candy and …
I would have preferred not to have been born under the shadow of men whose self-worths are directly proportional to their legacies. I would have preferred that their legacies would have consisted of creative accomplishments like music, or architecture, or philosophical discoveries, or mathematical theorems, or timeless novels. I would have preferred that their legacies …
I once saw somebody kill another person with kindness. It was the most brutal beatdown I’d ever seen, relentless, savage, uncompromising. After the attack, the victim was so beyond recognition that you couldn’t even tell who he used to be. He didn’t simply die, he was transformed.
There is a running joke in disaster movies lately, about how nobody cares if Los Angeles gets obliterated during an alien attack, or swallowed up because the Earth’s tectonic plates suddenly decide to shift a few thousand feet within a matter of days. After all, what would be lost around here—the culture is in New …
Somewhere in the near future, a kid will come up to me and ask what happened back in 2011. I’ll think really hard and remember that Charlie Sheen got everybody at CBS pissed at him, that his boss made half a billion dollars creating a funny show that lasted about nine seasons, and if you …
“If you have honor and dignity as a man, come and protect me, and other girls in the protest. If you stay home, you deserve what’s being done to you, and you will be guilty before your nation and your people. Go down to the street, send SMSes, post it on the internet, make people …
This is the kind of thing that happens to me during a prolonged bout with the flu/pneumonia. Written within a couple minutes, as fast as I could type. BUCKET LIST Be healthy enough to hike Machu Picchu. Spend three nonconsecutive days inside the Louvre with a sketchbook and my old 35mm camera with TMAX film. …
“Sometimes they have to kill us. They have to kill us because they can’t break our spirit.” –Jimmy Looks Twice, Thunderheart Perhaps I dreamt it, perhaps it actually happened, or perhaps a little of both. When I was very young, my mother took me aside during a party and told me something. She pointed …
A man comes up to me and wants to talk about his neighbor’s house, how it needs to be repainted, how the grass needs to be restored, how ugly the decorations are, and how stupid that neighbor must be for not seeing this, or for being inconsiderate for seeing this and not doing anything about …
“Dude,” this guy says to me, the point is to realize it’s a game and just let it happen without it bothering you so much the game is formatted so you’ll get all these distractions, like having to deal with irritating people, and waking up to an alarm clock, and deciding whether you’re gay or …
Time can be a liar, a joker, a magician, a fool, and a navigator. It will try to make you think that where you are is a permanent place, right before it tries to make you think again a second later. And when it has convinced you that nothing lasts, and nothing is worth keeping, …
I had spent a dozen years trying to obliterate my ego, trying to understand what it is that made me do what I did. I bought books that attempted to help me analyze every aspect of myself, paid people to listen to me and tell me what to do, spent countless days and nights at …
“It’s not a swamp, because the water moves. It moves slow, but it moves.” The Everglades is one of the places featured in Ken Burns’ documentary The National Parks. It’s a place where people hid, from displaced Indians to runaway slaves, to thieves, deserters, outcasts. A politician named Napoleon Broward wanted to drain the Everglades …
The electrical system in my house is acting up again, and it’s bothersome. I’m not able to smoothly surf the Internet, watch my high definition television, and run the central air conditioning without a little bit of interruption every hour. Amazing how bothersome is a relative term. Until the age of eight, I lived in …
I wanted the web site to be a blank canvas. I wanted the art, design and writing pieces to be the most prominent elements. I wanted the design to be stark and to the point and in your face and to get down to business as quickly and efficiently as possible. Stop screwing around with …
I had this thought lately while watching a reality show. “How art thou out of breath when thou hast breath to say to me that thou art out of breath?” –Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet Whenever I hear someone arguing to the point of shouting, three things come to mind: 1. This person has enough energy …
As I was driving down Lakewood Blvd. today, I thought about fiction. Why do we read them when we have our own imaginations that can come up with our own stories? Why do we trust what we read when it’s fiction? Why do we get angry or happy or sad or crying about made-up stories, …