The First Annual Electro-Acoustic Music Festival
The future begins now. Correction… Read more »
On Child Stardom
I’ve been a failure since the day I turned twelve years old—the day my mom put me in an acting class being held in a house across the cul-de-sac.
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My Treat
I’ve tried to write this story three different times but I still haven’t gotten it right, mostly because the story is not about me. It’s about my girlfriend, the girl I have been dating. It’s sort of a warning to the guys my age about younger women. But it’s also in praise of young girls and their virtues, all the things most guys spend their life trying to feel: the firmness, the newness, the sense that you are making an impression on something so beautiful and firm and new, the feeling that life isn’t all crap. This story is also about how all those things can be bought for at least a while. To me this is a story about confusion, desire and the mall. I hate when an interview in a magazine starts that way. Like, Chelsea Clinton spills the beans on growing up in the White House, Oxford, and vibrators. Then there’s one line about vibrators and it’s probably Chelsea laughing about something the interviewer says about a cell phone being like a vibrator. But this story is about confusion, desire and the mall. I promise. Read more »
Rekindling High School Romance
Being paranoid is really just the ability to read minds incorrectly. I got tired of people saying I’m paranoid (and being paranoid, I guess), so I’m glad I quit doing drugs. I have enough trouble reading my own mind; the best move was just to leave everyone else’s mind alone. Looking back, I probably should have quit way earlier. Read more »
GFE-Girlfriend Experience
REASON, v.i. To weight probabilities in the scales of desire.
Ambrose Bierce (1842 - 1914),
The Devil’s Dictionary
It didn’t make any sense. I just lost my head and let all my planning go to shit. I guess you call it an addict’s mind, the horses of desire dragging the sullen saint inside of me, etc. But in a few minutes I wasted the most fascinating research that I have ever conducted, and made a completely foolish decision. For weeks –whenever I shouldn’t be– I had been searching for the perfect escort. In minutes, I gave all that up and made a date with the first girl I could get to meet me. Read more »
Another Sunshiny Day in Obamaland
July 11, 2011
Rick Vasquez remembers how traffic used to be on the 110 Freeway. At one time it seemed like a sea of stalled cars puffing out gray smoke was a necessary torture he had to endure every morning to get from Norwalk to Downtown LA where he worked at Cal Trans.
He almost misses being stuck sometimes, especially since he’s learning Arabic on NPR 4 and his car—a plug-in Hybrid—uses as much energy as a boom box when it’s idling. But there’s no traffic at 2 PM when Rick and ten percent of Cal Trans commute in. There’s not even traffic at 8 AM when another ten percent of Cal Trans begins their workday.
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Watching Larry Caukly
“If you are not criticized, you may not be doing much.”
Donald H. Rumsfeld, Former Secretary of Defense
A whole week Larry Caukly’s been plugging away without getting called into the Principal’s office. Now some punk in either his third or fourth period has stolen his role book on the day before grades are due.
“Give me four minutes, Cauk,” says Gino Horowitz the Union Rep when he comes to get Larry at the end of the school day. “Gotta drop the family off at the pool. OK?”
The union rep is a hard-assed shop teacher, the kind of educator that calls kids butt-ugly to their faces and sometimes even gives them Charlie Horses if a shithead breaks some equipment or makes a particularly demoralizing mom joke. He’s the kind of teacher that won’t exist much longer, he’ll tell anyone who listens. And because of his personally endangered status, he feels obligated to protect misfits like Larry Caukly from persecution by the PC patrol—the Liberal, ass-sanitizing-then-ass-kissing bullshit police represented at Jay High School by the school administration.
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Free Association
Something was wrong. Principal Schneider and Vice-Principal Berg had never been in our classroom for longer than a minute—except for a Holiday party. But now they were hanging around, hovering, whispering at each other and ruffling through things on Ms. Gold’s desk and pretending as if we weren’t watching everything they did.
The longer they stayed, the more it reminded us that that morning was already way better than a normal morning.
We’d missed at least the first half of math because we’d been left standing near the foursquare court in our boy/girl line. After fifteen minutes, Keith decided that we should play Telephone since it was something to you could do if you had nothing to do and a bunch of people. Ms. Gold gave Keith the nickname “Stubborn” the first day of class, so everyone knew it wasn’t worth trying to disagree with him, especially when he had a good idea like telephone. He started the game and the message went from ear to ear, sometimes whispered two or three times as we tried to get it right. By the end of the line, “Ms. Gold’s sub is late” became “Sucked thumbs taste great,” which made us all laugh—even Walter who was never laughed because his family lived in a bus and he probably owned just two or three pairs of underwear and socks. And we kept laughing until Mrs. Lowry, the other fifth-grade teacher, heard us and brought us inside.
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A Reassuring Monologue from the Creepy Guy On the Bus Delivered to a Girl Who Never Takes Her Ear Buds Off
God, I hate it when I’ve cough like this. It’s bad—I’m always coughing. My daughter said I’ve had a cold since the day I began to look fifty. But this thing is bad—it’s like broadcasting exactly where the mucus in my body has settled.
It’ll stop. I’m not contagious. We love that lie, don’t we. We love to say, ‘No, I’m fine,’ and then list everything that’s wrong.
We love to complain. Complain, complain, complain. Complain. COUGH, complain. Everybody does it. It’s like a little award speech we’re always giving—I never could have done it without everyone and everything who tormented me and made my life a little hell.
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