A very pretty young girl on Facebook wants to Friend me. I can see why! She has NO Facebook friends. I should accept her invitation, and help her out. I’m surprised she’s from Lagos, though, because her photo looks like a white girl from SoCal. Well, such are the mysteries of life.
I’m glad to see this on the menu. It’s been a hit in Alabama, Virginia, and New Jersey. Look for more locations in November of next year.
I love books. Many, many books. But I don’t love all books. (For examples, see: The Martian; Dhalgren; Rich Dad, Poor Dad; and any cat-focused books found at cash registers.) Still, I’ve always assumed there was someone for every book; right now, I would imagine there’s a booming business in Mein Kampf among many of the president’s supporters who show up at rallies (if I also assumed they read books).
But in all the glories I found today in the four-story book mecca known as Powell’s Books in Portland, I came across many, many books of arcana that I can’t imagine anyone, anywhere, will ever need.
No, not just the outdated and therefore uselessly old books, such as science books or medical books now proved wrong; they might be a curiosity. But what need does the world have, exactly, for “Game of Draughts” (below), which recounts 24 tournaments of checkers that took place across the British Isle in 1905? By “recounts,” I mean that literally — it is a book almost entirely composed of columns of numbers. While I have no need of this book, someone at the time evidently did; the pages are filled with pencil notations. But I can’t imagine that Powell’s will ever ever ever sell this book. I almost bought it out of pity, the way one would adopt the one-legged dog who’s had both eyes poked out — but even then I didn’t buy it. If you’re interested, I’m told that every book of Powell’s is on their website for sale. Now’s your change. It’s $9.95.
This book, astoundingly, was not the only such book from that golden era of hard-fought checkers games. It turns out that the War of 1812 was not the last time that Britain fought the United States; no, there was also the 1905 war of checkers between the two great nations. This book too contains pages upon pages of columns of numbers.
Although as a people we’ve lost our excitement for checkers, here is one consolation: The spine serves to remind us that whose who came before us were not wiser than we.
Finally, here is a more recent book that I can’t imagine wanting, although it did spur thoughts toward many sequels and, indeed, a full potential series, with titles like: “How to Drink Water from a Glass,” “How to Look Out Your Left Eye,” and “How to Not Buy Useless Books No Matter How Sorry You Feel for them.”
I’m at some sort of early evening outside barbecue awaiting the arrival of Mikhail Gorbachev’s wife. I’ve been emailing back and forth with her — we’ve grown to be close friends online — and now I’m looking forward to meeting her in person.
At some point, I have to be part of repairing a mid-size flat-bed truck so that someone else can drive it as part of this mission. I also drive it for a bit, too. But then I’m back at the barbecue.
Mrs. Gorbachev arrives. She’s a middle-aged platinum blonde in a slightly tarnished white fur coat, standing apart on a small patch of grass near the barbecue pit. I introduce myself and she’s glad to speak with someone she knows. Black-suited secret service agents mill in the background. My daughter takes a photo of the two of us, Mrs. Gorbachev and me, and I have the idea to also get one with my daughter in it, but now there’s a line to see the former first lady of Russian (and the Soviet Union), and the man at the front of that line, who is also barely constraining a large dog on a chain, is growing irate and saying that he’d already been jumped in front of.
Having finished pleasantries with my friend Mrs. Gorbachev, I go inside the nearby house to use the restroom and pass a television set that’s playing a commercial. It’s a commercial for pet food that mentions my daughter by name, and also shows her and her dog playing around. This reminds me that recently she’d won a contest to be the person featured in this commercial campaign. I also know that, resulting from my belief that dogs are dogs and should be happy with what they get, we don’t buy this pricy pet food at home, so now I’m considering, again, the hypocrisy over our family now being affiliated with this pet food.
I go into the restroom and I see the shambles created by dozens or hundreds of guests using a small, suburban bathroom. The trash can being full, a succession of people have stuffed their used paper towels into the sink, backing up the sink. I patiently pull all of that from the sink and jam it down into the trash can, and now the sink is back to functionality and I use the toilet.
Then I wake up.
Almost none of this dream bears examination or interpretation in the morning light. Except for one thing.
I assume the reason the dream featured Mikhail Gorbachev’s wife and not Vladimir Putin’s wife is because Vladimir Putin’s wife is the president of the United States, and I don’t want that guy showing up in my life, let alone my dreams.
My wife wanted to know why I didn’t want to go do the Thanksgiving grocery shopping at Trader Joe’s. I would be perfectly happy doing it at Ralphs — I adore Ralphs, and especially the colorful and valuable coupons they send me — but Trader Joe’s? No. Sorry.
“You don’t like the TJ food or the actual store?” she asked in a text.
No, it goes much deeper than that.
Other than that, I think it’s great.
McCarran International Airport (aka “Las Vegas Airport”) has rows and rows and rows of seats with helpful charging outlets.
Well, they would be helpful — if someone wired them to electricity. Or plugged them in. Or something.
As I was reminded on Thursday, and again just now.
There’s a t-shirt I’ve seen for sale on the Internet that reads, “I’m silently correcting your grammar.” Whenever I share this saying with a fellow sufferer of synesthesia — those of us whose ears hurt when someone trips on the language — they smile and nod. I can’t speak for them, but I really do, honestly, try to keep my mouth shut. I love the English language and I know that it’s fluid, and I have a deep appreciation for regionalisms and the musicality of slang and patois, whether it’s Spanglish or gullah or good ol’ boy tongue or whatever we’d call the voice of Chaucer and Twain.
But just now I couldn’t help myself.
I’m at Chicago Midway airport waiting for my flight. Seated next to me was a dad and his wife and their three small children. One of the kids said she’d “sneaked” over to do something, and the dad immediately said, “Snuck.”
And before I could catch myself, and because we’d already had a conversation where he’d apologized for his rambunctious toddlers and I’d said, “It’s okay — I traveled with three of them myself,” I volunteered, “Actually, it’s ‘sneaked.’ ”
Some would say that both “sneaked” and “snuck” are proper (and that’s where Merriam-Webster lands, and I live by the AP StyleBook, which says “sneaked” is preferred), but “sneaked” has about 300 years of history on the latter — and it sure sounded to my ear like someone miscorrecting a child who was actually right.
The dad said, “Is it? Oh, okay,” in a nice way — he didn’t seem to mind at all — but what left me feeling crummy was the one kid who said, “Wow, did we video that?” because now he wanted a record of his dad getting corrected, which the other two children joined in on.
Next time I’ll just remember to stick with silently correcting people.
Unless it’s my own kids.
I ask you: What exactly is this thing for?
I’m staying in a rather nice hotel in a very nice area of Chicago — Lakeshore Drive, in Magnificent Mile — and am confronted, as one generally is in such a place, with this pillow log.
It is too stiff to function as a headrest.
It is too long to fold into a headrest.
It is too narrow and, again, immaleable, to serve as a body pillow. (If one were the type to use body pillows.)
So what is its purpose?
I consulted Mr. Google, who yielded this listing on, of course, Amazon, where one may buy varieties of this trunk of pillow. You will note that it is listed as a Marriott Hotel Decorative Bolster Pillow. (The accent on “decorative” is mine.)
So this thing is pure decoration. Because, lord knows, to the consumer, it’s useless.
But I think it has one other function. Its presence helps to justify the price of the fancy-schmantzy hotel. When you check into your room and see the decorative bolster pillow, you realize, “Hey! There’s a Decorative Bolster Pillow on the bed! Of course! Now I know why this room costs six times as much as Motel 6!”
(Well, that, plus the clean sheets. And the lack of toenail clippings on the floor.)
I will not be buying a Decorative Bolster Pillow for my home. Because I already know that that place is not a Motel 6.
Just when you think some things in the world can’t get worse… a comic-book convention gets shut down by an armed group.
After leading my playwriting workshop yesterday, I drove down toward San Diego to see a couple of friends, a married couple who were in town. They’re housesitting, and here for a while, and they’re very good people I’d like to see more of, but they don’t live around here, and given what my schedule’s been like lately (as reflected in the dearth of posts), Saturday into Sunday was the only chance I had to see them.
As is the way with things, in Southern California at least, Mr. Google promised that the drive would take me an hour and nine minutes; instead, it took about two. This was late on a Saturday afternoon. Why was traffic backed up on a Saturday afternoon? Because traffic is always backed up. Years ago, my friends and I settled on this great idea to avoid traffic coming back from San Diego Comic-Con: go see a movie early Sunday evening after the convention, and by the time it’d be over, traffic would have cleared. These days we still see the movie — but the traffic is pretty much 24/7. It never clears.
I stopped and picked up a nice bottle of wine — a red blend that the wine-shop owner strongly recommended and that my friends effused over after we opened it — and they grilled beautiful ribeye steaks from an upscale supermarket where I’m too cheap to shop, and paired them with squash and cucumbers and other delights. We swapped all sorts of stories from the past year, and thoughts about current events. Eventually, the husband and I broke out cigars, and his wife went to bed, and he and I sat out back under a heater and smoked those cigars and drank scotch and worked on the world’s problems while one of the dogs kept coming back to me with a tattered chew toy. After Tuesday’s Democratic sweep of just about everywhere, I was feeling hopeful, but truly no one knows what’s going to happen — with anything — so it’s all wait-and-see.
My friend is living in Germany right now; that’s where he came in from. He was surprised how relatively cheap it is. The nice apartment, the healthcare insurance, food, and other costs total out at $1800 a month. My mortgage alone is just under $4,000 a month. Our cable/internet/phone package runs $275 a month. Food — for four of us, sure — is $775 a month, and at that amount, people around here can’t believe that’s all I’m spending. The more he talked about Germany, the better it sounded: great cultural institutions, nice people, high walkability and easy access to cheap public transportation…. “Sounds great!” I said. “All I’d need is about 1500 certain people to move there with me.” Because there’s a very good reason I stay in Los Angeles: all the people here I get to work with and socialize with — theatre people, business friends, friend-friends, some family. Actually, there’s another great reason I stay in Los Angeles: I love Los Angeles. I’m crazy about it. Really. It was having this discussion with my friend last night that helped crystallize for me that I don’t foresee ever living anywhere else. Never say never — as Sean Connery learned when he said he’d never play James Bond again, only to return as Bond in a movie called “Never Say Never Again” — but the odds seem slim.
We finally called it a night at 2:30 in the morning, so I went upstairs to the bedroom where I was staying and pulled out the book I’m reading, “Us Kids Know,” by my friend former student, JJ Strong. I downed one of what I call “Sleepytime Alleve,” with a seltzer water, because every joint in my body ached just from being alive. Around 3:15, I switched off the light and snuggled in to sleep, but kept hearing this nearby crashing sound coming from outside. It was somewhat regular, and infinitely distracting to someone trying to sleep, like something coming in and hitting something, and then pausing, and then hitting it again. Finally I realized I was hearing the surf crash onto the beach. I wonder if whoever first romanticized the pounding of the surf actually tried to sleep near it.
At 7:46, the dog walker arrived to walk the housesat dogs; I know this because the dog pandemonium woke me up. I drifted back to sleep, waking up a few hours later, checking the news and social media and my email and going downstairs for a beautifully cooked and served breakfast, before driving back. I left around 1 p.m. — a good time, I thought — checked my phone, and saw that Google was predicting an hour and nine minutes to get home.
It took about two.