Blogtrotter

Thanks for "my photo" comments!

Why do I look so gray? I used to have a beard practically orange. At least I am not bald-- yet.

I wanted to assure my two respondees to my mugshot (the first test of the wife's digital camera she bought as a toy to supplement her toy red phone with a similar supplemental camera feature) that...

1) I tried one Raymond Chandler book, "Call It Sleep," way back in high school. It was complicated and I liked the noirish atmosphere. Haven't read more since then as I tend not to favor mysteries in print or film, but I do think of the film, and by extension, Glendale's one-time resident fellow scribe of our Southland ennui and its discontents, James M. Cain, when I go past Fountain and Vermont, now a busy corner with the only remaining House of Pies (no blackbottom however, a Proustian madeleinish talisman from my childhood that I long so for, last having a slice in Westchester on the way to/from LAX-- not flying; it must have been to pick someone up as I did not fly until the year of our nation's bicentennial-- at a plastic orange place that I assume was an H of P once way way back) on the southwest, an apartment on the northwest (as in the locale in "Double Indemnity") and on the northeast, I cannot recall. I think some sort of giant concrete faith-based community center for Sikhs or Masons or their ilk/s.

2) Speaking of ilk, I thought Miss T's comment about "massage therapist was so stereotypically Northern Cal until I realized that we have them too in our greater LA basin. What a dumb name for our region. I taught a student once who worked as this esteemed occupation at Burke Williams, the place all the celebs go for whatever massage therapists outside of China- or Koreatown do. A famous local Latino labor leader, Miguel Contreras, was found dead at a shady establishment of the latter type and those who adored said leader at our uber-liberal hapless LA Times covered it all up until the LA Weekly, showing a glimmer of its own stereotypical lefty roots, excavated the sordid evidence. The Weekly depends on solo "therapists" for half of its income judging from the ads littering its back pages; the front given over to colonics, medical marijuana clinics, and various operations promising vaginal rejuvenation.

Speaking of rejuvenation, I also realized that thanks to said wife, who splurged on a massage up at stereotypically Northern Cal Big Sur on her solo adventure last month-- yes, she deserved it, ok-- our dear family is now further enmeshed in our own eclectic demographic Claritas marketing niche, doubtless one of the 161 or 64 ticky-tacky little boxes they all place us supposedly free-spirited non-conforming conformist consumers into. In the spirit of that marketing niche, or congruence of a dozen such Angeleno perennials, we not only both drive Volvos and shop at Trader Joe's (and the wife listens to KCRW; I refuse but will turn on if necessary KPCC, a real community station run by locals not grating New Yorkers living large on the Westside within scent of our Pacific breeze and trust-fund rastas and Brits or ex-wife of Big Name Record Producer on payola)-- but we fulfill another scenario from the Californian dream.

For, our nuclear family of two kids, two adults, albeit different genders for parents if still the same for sons, has its very own yoga instructor come to our shabby house's disheveled living room's bare wood floor cleared of chairs and dogs barking behind the one childproof fence still extant (our domicile must be on his Silverlake route including well-heeled non-conforming consumer marketers Rivers Cuomo and Rick Rubin et alii-- the Sh*ttiest of his visited dwellings full of inductees into ancient Sanskrit acrobatics-- no, unlike wife over on CasaMurphy I do not incessantly curse in print or voice, only in thought) for a Wednesday night hour when time stands still as we do not. I cannot even get into that typical one leg up near other knee, hands at prayer posture that's the very sin qua non of emblematic yoga in I suppose its basic pose.

P.S. Thanks to my dear spouse, I can now place images on my blog without knowing all that html that in vain I tried earlier to use (sorry Lee, that Book of Kells wallpaper is stashed away and I have to figure out how to experiment with it on a fake template here). I think this is a painting done of that famous scene (among many) in the film "Double Indemnity." But, doesn't the man look like he could be Edward G. Robinson as much as Fred McMurray?"