#154

come on in here to the third bedroom which of course is the master with beautiful hardwood floors all around and back in the kitchen all stainless steel appliances and vaulted ceilings in the living room and a beautiful lemon tree in the spacious yard and all of this for only six hundred dollars a month and you may ask how this is possible and i will tell you how its because when you sign the rental agreement you are also agreeing to do small and annoying errands and non repayable favors for me at my request which basically means that i will find out when you are most busy at which point i will call you early in the morning and plead with you to do an errand which involves you driving all the way across town to do something unimaginably annoying and to make it worse you wont have time to do it and when you tell me so i will plead pitifully and use words like desperate and need until you feel guilty because you did sign the agreement so you do the errand and call me to tell me its done but i dont answer so you leave a message asking me to please give you some more warning next time and then i send a text message back that just says k

#153

the boys broke the banister and i gotta tell mom and dad for crissake we were doing just fine besides a friendly tiff about if and when they were too mean to each other and then the rubber band ball falls down the stairs and breaks the goddam upright on the banister i was just sitting there on my computer when i heard a thud crack crash and i shouted out what was that and then silence and then i said i said what was that guys then i walked around the corner to find that the rubber band ball fell down the stairs and snapped the upright like a twig and they were all like he was playing with the rubber band ball nah ah it wasn't me it was him and i said i dont care go put the rubber band ball back upstairs and i held the two pieces of the broken upright in my hand and said this costs money and they hung their heads as if money were some magical heavy thing which had an importance beyond their comprehension and then after they put the rubber band ball back upstairs they tried to walk right out the front door right under my nose as if it was a normal thing for ten year old boys to do to just leave the house without telling anybody

#152

coffee cuppa coffee in this crazy multicultural cafe in east hollywood called sabor y cultura where a table of eight middle aged nerds plays mysterious board games and four black ladies crowd around their elderly mother on this mothers day sunday and the asian barista pours a beverage for a dominican looking fellow and a mexican guy in a dodgers cap hunches over his laptop with his headphones on bobbing to an unheard beat and the korean guy on the couch who looks like he is waiting for someone and the clean cut persian businessman flipping through the back pages of the la weekly and the long haired metal scum finger pecking on his tiny netbook in between biting his nails and the swarthy fellow of indeterminate ethnicity with a mohawk that doesnt match his fiftyish years and me the white guy writing in his notebook at a round table pressed against the wall spying on all my crazy neighbors of the next hour or so who are busy talking or gaming or listening or surfing or reading or serving or asking or daydreaming or whatever else like the redhaired guy that looks just like louis ck with an inscrutable expression who must be thinking of something he doesnt want to be thinking about

#151

hummina hummina summer is coming the weather is warming and hummingbirds humming around my canyon window in the last weeks before i move my carload worth of personal possessions to a fortified compound in the barrio of highland park where i plan to spread out in the three bedrooms of the main house and set up a writing office in the grand finished garage out back where i will write my masterpiece as the great rob fitterman scoffed not believing in the idea of the masterwork ha tell that to richard wagner who probably would have beaten rob to death with a potato which i heard is all wagner could afford to eat in his early days as an unrecognized genius in his own mind or a goddam maniac in my mind but whats an unrecognized fellow like me got to say about genius when i cant even get recognized as a real writer by my friends and family who have the manuscript proof that i do in fact commit words to paper at a frequent and often feverish rate and which i will soon string together in masterful fashion in my mad garage of verbal alchemy within my fortified compound in highland park when the weather is high and you can stretch right out and touch the sky in the summertime hummina hummina hummina

#150

keep me outta this buster i dont want no part of your insanity alternate universe trip from hollywood on buckboard to inside the movie from prokofiev to my funny valentine without a bridge or an approach just boom and there you are the characters shift taking one anothers personae like it aint no thing like its some cubist story where each character is every character seen from all angles at once flicking on the screen and then there in real life lights out transformation green skin and now youre him wait what surreal thing am i seeing and what does it mean and if it means nothing then does it matter and what matters in the first place does any art matter even if art changes the world we live in does change matter who decides what matters i suppose entertainment matters because when entertained youre not thinking about the futility of thinking about what matters i like laughter but whether laughter matters or is just a freakish spasm of the chest and throat is entirely possible though that doesnt change its entertainment value even if you dont value entertainment you gotta admit that laughing is all right whether it matters or not for that matter