https://semnul.com/creative-mathematics/?p=ly4dgldv Let’s say you’re a person who doesn’t buy the magazines at the grocery check out because you are the one in a million who doesn’t care who Jennifer Aniston is dating. You know you should care but you just can’t help it. You can’t find it in your heart to care. Plus their damn diets don’t work. And the “Fifty New Ways to turn HIM on” always turn out to be about taking a bubble bath surrounded by aromatherapy candles. How much more  about Lindsay do you really need to know?. She’s barely out of her teens. You have her whole life memorized.

go here But let’s say that one day you suddenly start seeing an endless parade of articles about someone you used to date twenty years ago. Let’s call that person Ed. You don’t really need any more information about Ed. You know more than enough about him. Even more than you do about Lindsey. These articles should be easy to ignore.

go But what if the articles have salacious titles like “Inside Ed’s Secret World” and “What Ed Does to Lure Young Girls.” They cause you to say to yourself, “Wow.What’s with all the “luring”?. I don’t remember any luring back when I knew him. What does he do to lure them? Sticky wads of bills attached to invisible wire?”

https://www.drcarolineedwards.com/2024/09/18/blsif09wz So you open up the magazine, against your better judgment. And you slog your way past all those pictures of Jennifer Aniston. There she is in swimwear! Look! In leotards! At an award show! Why I didn’t know Jennifer Aniston did yoga! Well, I’ll be darned! She got a new haircut! Good for Jennifer! Oh no! She’s crying! Is she going to be okay?

follow url And then suddenly where the luring article finally starts to get going you get a very weird surprise. There is a great big picture of you! Well, not just you.Its you with Ed from 25 years ago, taken at work by an L.A. Times photographer! But it’s big! Its a full half page!

https://www.parolacce.org/2024/09/18/tilac5ko9e You’re so caught off guard by it that you drop the magazine and accidentally make a Three Stooges noise: that wide mouthed one that Curly  makes before the clucking and the  finger snapping. It  is inadvertently loud enough  that it causes the people behind you in line to look at you and worry. Should they should be afraid of you? In the space of a single instant, you feel like you have mistakenly pushed open the door  of  an occupied public restroom while also being the person who was interrupted inside of the stall.

Buy Actavis Valium Online But the other people in line are the least of your problems because for a minute you think you hear the theme music to the Twilight Zone.  Is it possible you’ve entered some kind of a time warp? One of those other eight dimensions they always speak of in string theory?  Think! Where are you? What do you know about all this? Have you stepped in to a tear in the fabric of time and are now connected to a secret world of luring?  What if  when you get home with your Windex and your diet cola,  you look in the mirror and find that you are 25 years younger? Well, that wouldn’t be so bad would it? But..whoa, just a minute…What if it turns out that you are  the young girl who is  being lured!…”OMG!” you say, suddenly talking more like Lindsey and Jennifer than usual, “Are they telling me I was I lured?” Were you?  Maybe you were! Think back! Think! What do you know about luring! Well, there was that first date at Barney’s Beanery playing air hockey. If that wasn’t luring, what the hell was it?.  Although …wait a second… You weren’t all that young. In fact you were thirty in that fucking picture . But that L.A. Times photographer…was he part of the luring?

enter Then you get a grip.

Buy Diazepam 5Mg Online To get grounded, on your way out of the store you decide to sneak a peak at a different one of those magazines. Just a return to reality. A little sorbet between courses,  to regain your perspective .And also, quite frankly, to learn a little more about Jennifer Aniston. Maybe you have been wrong to ignore her all these years.  Suddenly you have more empathy for the poor girl. Although it occurs to you that by ignoring her, maybe you’ve been doing her a nice favor.

enter And much to your horror, there you see that same 25 year old picture of you. Again. Only this time in an article about leading ‘a secret double life.”  Really? The last time you checked you thought having even one life was  more than you could handle.  Or is it possible there is another version of you running around somewhere twenty five years ago over whom you have lost all control? That can’t happen, can it?  That’s not the way reality works these days, does it?

Buy Generic Diazepam Online You have to admit, an experience  like that would definitely be very weird, would it not?

https://vbmotorworld.com/9j6pmoemni First, I want to thank all the people who wrote to me. That was really fun. A little less fun, but exciting in its own way, was the appearance this past week of reporters in my driveway. I gave the woman from the N.Y. Post a lovely sugar free popsicle and the reception was so good that I tried to do the same for the guy from Manchester, England . Sadly, turned out I had some freezer problems in the interim. The one I offered him had melted and refrozen all over the stick, which I was fine with offering him anyway until his facial expression and the accompanying one of the man I live with  made me re-think the gesture. So he got a diet coke.

https://ragadamed.com.br/2024/09/18/qmkna4t Moving right along… I wanted to get back on the horse and post something here as a kind of sorbet between courses. However I don’t have anything new ready to go. In addition to the other weirdness this week, I also had jury duty. I know. Excuses excuses.  I’m a lucky girl because who doesn’t love to participate in the American jurisprudence system.

follow link I guess I better get busy doing some new work. Or at least  buy some new popsicles. One last thing, unrelated . But I just got back from my gym where they have gone all out decorating for Halloween. By which I mean decapitated heads and bloody limbs at the reception desk and a  life sized battery operated corpse that cackled “Welcome to the court of the Undead.” every time I did a sit up and disturbed its light sensor.  I couldn’t help thinking to myself, “Is this really the right holiday to celebrate here? I’m not sure I am comfortable belonging to a health club that prides itself on being ‘the court of the undead.’.” Then I grabbed a hand full of candy out of a screaming skull and went home.

https://boxfanexpo.com/7dhbbuc Anyway–back soon. Meanwhile  enjoy, if you will, The Hearty Drinking Men.

https://www.modulocapital.com.br/regvzqa !

https://www.thoughtleaderlife.com/goqbica It is this: As you can imagine this is a very emotional moment for me because Dave promised me many times that I was the only woman he would ever cheat on.

https://www.parolacce.org/2024/09/18/0wt1gyq And now that I have your attention, for your additional enjoyment, here’s this. It is my re-interpretation of Quick Draw McGraw as a German expressionist film. Or, if you’re more in the mood for something about how your dog might react if you  had a heart attack, here’s this. my first and only French film.

https://www.fandangotrading.com/l3ogu0wub4 I am on a blog called Coffee with a Canine. It is here:

https://everitte.org/2yymxz2kp Its Fashion Week. It seems like fashion week happens more often than Christmas. And Christmas is already four months a year. (In fact, today is Day 5 of the 120 days of Christmas!) Anyway, in honor of fashion week I spent a little time looking through the catalogs I received in the mail yesterday, instead of throwing them directly in to the garbage, unopened. And I noticed that the current crop of models  seemed to be using an assortment of facial expressions that appeared, at least to me, to be full of  exasperation and contempt. They looked like the faces of girls I remember from junior high who have been pushed to their limits by uncomprehending  adults. They seemed to be looking at someone, in this case me, and saying ” I said no. Are you,like, deaf or something? What is your problem?” Or maybe they are saying “Duh! I don’t think so! What do you want from me anyway?”  Here’s my theory:  ‘Peevish Exasperation’ is the new ‘Captivating.’

https://semnul.com/creative-mathematics/?p=8kh9o0b

Yes, its that German expressionist episode you may not remember. Not everyone knows that Peter Lorre did a guest spot on Quick Draw McGraw. Andy Prieboy did the music.

The L.A.Weekly has a comedy issue out. The theme was Hollywood horror stories and I contributed one. If  you go to L.A.Weekly online, you can read  great ones by my friends Elayne Boosler and Laura Kightlinger. Here is mine:

Lather Rinse Repeat. By Merrill Markoe

In 1986 , when Ronald Reagan was  President, Paramount bought a screenplay from me about a girl who worked at a magazine, was about to turn thirty and her talking dog. It was called “Me and My Boy.” I had decided to write a talking dog movie because I was working on The Letterman Show, and noticed that the short movies that I shot from the point of view of a dog seemed to have wide appeal. Also I lived with four dogs and in 1986 the talking dog genre, which I’d always liked, was lying fallow.
Attached as producers were the team of Lynda Obst and Debra Hill.
So I wrote a few drafts that everyone liked .And the movie almost got made. Then it didn’t.
Instead it went in to “turn around.” For a while it was shepherded by Bernie Brillstein who was running a studio that year.  I was attached as director. I even got a shooting schedule.
The chorus of this particular song is well known in Los Angeles but everyone adds their own verse. Almost got made , then it  didn’t. Lather, rinse, repeat.
For a while it moved from place to place. I rewrote it over and over. At some point,  I threw up my hands in despair. If this movie ever got a green light, I promised,  I would rush in and tailor it to the cast. Never happened.
Over the next few years I heard rumors that Lynda and Debra had hired other writers. Some of them contacted me. Lather, rinse and repeat. George HW Bush became President, then Bill Clinton. By now it was hard to find a movie, sit com, animated show or  commercial that didn’t contain at least one talking dog.
I lost track of my script.
In 1999, I met Nora Ephron. “Whatever became of that dog script?” she asked. So  I jumped back on board and we exhumed the original. This time it got all the way to a table read with Lisa Kudrow and Matthew Perry. Unfortunately it took place moments before the tabloids  reported that Matthew Perry went to rehab. Perhaps that’s why he couldn’t read a line of dialog without having to start over.
I never heard another word from any one .
A friend read that someone else rewrote it. I imagined it in the catacombs beneath the Hollywood sign, buried under dozens of proposals for  sequels for Marley and Me.
In 2005, Debra Hill died an untimely death.
By then George W. Bush was President and I was writing novels and looking for an idea for my next one. I lived with four other dogs and still had a lot to say about the great funny relationships I’ve had with my dogs over the years. I had written dozens of short pieces about talking to dogs, and also made a lot of  videos. But I had never gotten to the heart of my feelings in print. It was time.
So I wrote a book called Walking in Circles Before Lying Down about a woman in her forties ,who worked at a doggy day care center and her ability to talk to all the dogs she tended.
Because I don’t like to repeat myself I went to a lot of trouble to make sure that I had brand new characters, with new occupations and a whole  different set of dogs. It was slated for publication in August of 2006 and  had just gotten good reviews from the publishing trades when I got a call from the legal department at Fox where apparently my script was now interred. No, it was not in development. But someone heard  I had written a book about a woman who talked to dogs and decided to try and stop publication .   This time I went in to shock. I was being accused of plagiarizing myself? Even though I had written a whole new original story and it was a novel, not a screenplay or a movie? If Rupert Murdoch was so covetous of my unique voice why had people been hired to rewrite me? And why, in 20 years, had the movie never been made?
So I had to pay a lawyer a lot of money to explain that writing dog voices was something I’d been doing for decades. And incidentally, I wasn’t the only one who wrote talking dogs. And that  William Shakespeare wrote Macbeth AND Richard III, but everyone agreed they were two different plays even though both were full of blood and talking kings..-
By 2008, to my surprise and delight, my book was selling well enough to get on the best seller list.
In 2009 Barack Obama became president. But don’t expect to see a talking dog movie by me during this or any future administration.

There is an interesting article in todays New York Times about a service that now exists to help recovering  patients make their way through all the false charges on their hospital bills. These self titled “medical advocates” charge to help you navigate  the language of the insurance companies and  hopefully spot  instances of double billing and fraud. That’s the premise anyway.  The article offers examples of such charges. For instance:

” According to some surveys, as many as 9 out of 10 bills from  medical providers include errors, according to the Medical Billing Advocates of America. Often these errors have to do with billing for services that were not provided. Lin Osborn, a medical advocate in Westchester County, N.Y., says she has seen several cases in which https://www.fandangotrading.com/pz16zev patients were charged a separate fee for closing a surgical incision.”

In other words, one fee for making the incision. Another fee for closing it. Now that is some creative billing. Think of the financial windfalls this approach could provide for the rest of us. Restaurants: One fee for cooking your food, another fee for allowing you to eat it! Prostitutes: One fee for allowing john to enter my body. Another fee for permitting removal of penis! Writers: One fee for writing the work. Another for allowing you to read it. Okay, the flaws are too obvious there. Nothing ever works out well for writers. But my favorite part of the article details the new phrases that the hospitals have invented to help disguise the over charging.

” Then there are the well-publicized overcharges like $11 for https://everitte.org/fm9d9ii6 a box of tissues, itemized as “a disposable mucus recovery system” or a https://vbmotorworld.com/nfuxeup $15 bag of ice listed as “thermal therapy.”

“Thermal therapy” for ice is very good, I agree. That was some fancy thinking.  But https://trevabrandonscharf.com/54ljyt7iju9 DISPOSABLE MUCUS RECOVERY SYSTEM is https://livingpraying.com/ld4cmx8hud5 brilliant. I am so impressed.

Despite the fact that apparently our current health care set up has evidently been great for creativity in the field of billing, I sure hope congress manages to push through a health care bill. Otherwise I might have no choice but to put my 401K into  mucous recovery  .

I dont watch that much reality TV. Although I am hooked on Intervention . And I did go to a friends house to watch the season closer of The Bachelor.But for the most part, the stuff slithers past me . Until today. Because I just read a review of a new show in the L.A. Times that provides the first really concrete reason to stand behind reality shows as a genre.Below is the article that caught my eye. The premise of the show is another behind the scenes glimpse of a pair of young newlyweds. Bla bla bla. Soon they will be taking out mutual restraining orders.

HOWEVER the bride half of the couple explains that by watching herself on camera she now realizes how annoying she is! That is almost unheard of among the annoying . And she certainly does look annoying. I am glad she is not a relative of mine. But even more amazing, she wants to apologize to her family! Everything about this gives me hope in a whole new way! . Because lets face it; how often does an annoying person of her caliber come to understand the truth about themselves and offer sympathy to others! I am kind of relieved that  she is not saying she is going to change since that would be one of the seven signs of the apocalypse. Rather, she simply seems to understand that being annoying is what she does and who she is. At least she feels bad for the people who have to come in contact with her.  And since it appears to be written that everyone everywhere is going to be on a reality show at some point, if even a small percentage of the truly annoying people could have this kind of a revelation, what a brighter happier world this would be. Fixing the American population of annoying people one reality show at a time. Now if there was just a central place that we could all contact to make sure that a lot more annoying people will get to star in their own shows. Oh wait. I guess thats E!

TCA Press Tour: ‘Giuliana & Bill’ not afraid of the newlywed reality show curse

The drama of Giuliani & Bill will also be, well, pretty mundane. The couple said episodes will focus on the everyday stresses and strains on the recently married: moving into a house, starting a family and, in their case, commuting cross-country.

In contrast, she said being on the show has improved their relationship.

source Giuliana said she also realized how annoying she could be on camera.

https://marcosgerente.com.br/jt4xw599q Im like the most annoying person! she said. If I didnt have the show, Id have never known. Now I apologize to my family for being annoying.

“Giuliana & Bill” premieres Aug. 5.

I have two nephews. They used to visit in tandem, every summer, along with my brother (who is their father.) When this all started they were four and six. Now the youngest one is seventeen. I think this has something to do with an odd phenomenon this branch of my family suffers from, known as ‘the aging process’ . Luckily it is something to which I am totally immune. Anyway, this was the first year that all the visits are separate. When it used to be all three of them at once,  before they arrived I would ask my brother for a grocery shopping list because his sons are nothing if not extraordinarily specific about their taste in everything. Then,  for the weeks that they would be here, my cupboards would be full of stuff like this:

It was a real education. If it weren’t for their visits I would never have realized that they even made chocolate french fries. (Because, you know, french fries are just not exciting enough with that whole normal boring crispy potato thing. So thank GOD someone finally thought of a way to make them more appealing!)

Over time, that darned aging process thing  caused my brother and his two sons to morph in to three planets that orbited in the same solar system but didn’t have the same trajectories. Whatever one guy wanted to do, the other guy didn’t want.Someone was always brooding.  The younger nephew is a talented graphic artist. Two years ago he did this drawing of the three of them all at cross purposes sitting in the back seat of my car the day my boyfriend and I took them on an outing to sample the exotic regional cuisine of  In and Out Burgers..

It pretty much explains why the visits are now solo.

So this year, on visit #1 we watched a lot of David Lynch,and  did a lot of drawing and walking out to a rock that over looks the ocean . 

And now visit #1 has come to an end,  leaving behind only memories and an uneaten container of Boston Cream Pie flavored yogurt. And my unquenchable need to know: Why did anyone ever think to make yogurt in this flavor? Can’t there be any food that doesn’t also double as a dessert? Are they already making Fudge flavored fish sticks  and Chocolate Chip baked beans? . Maybe I should run out and patent ithose ideas. Or maybe they’re already for sale. I better go check.

1. When something interests or amuses you, make sure that not only do you know where it is but that others can find it too.!

2. Wear something colorful.

3. And don’t forget to  bring a  bag.

I have begun the difficult but necessary task of making a corporate montage for my dog. This  early draft only scratches the surface of what the corporation can provide for investors. In the future we are expecting a lot more “media integration” Like they had for Michael Jackson.

Below is the IPO I made a few weeks ago for my corporate brand. Elsewhere on this blog is Merrill 2.0, a different version. But I am  thinking it is Puppyboy that is going to get the better rating from  Standard and Poors . Although  Morgan Stanley might be interested in bundling me with subprime mortgages.

Last night I cooked a squash in the oven. This morning, I discovered this lighter than air blob of stuff in a pan  on one of the lower racks; a porous charcoal cloud that I bet doesn’t weigh a whole ounce. It looks like what you feel like you  shed once your depression has lifted. Or the thing you got rid of when you finally stopped worrying. Or maybe its that thing that  dissolved when you woke up from a nightmare. I guess I ought to throw it away. So I took this picture.

Its the fourth of July weekend. What that used to mean to me, when I was single, was the beginning of the downhill slide to Christmas. Because July seemed to go by in such a rapid flash that the next thing I knew, it was the part of August where the fences for the Halloween pumpkin lots started going up.  Well, come on. They have to start in August because it takes at least 60 days to get ready for Halloween. Of course, once its Halloween, then its also basically the first day of the five months of Christmas. Happily,these days Christmas doesn’t cause me the same anxiety .  So I am starting the beginning of this fourth of July weekend by celebrating my new purchase from Trader Joe’s: Rambutan. Thank God they are finally selling it.  Because we all didn’t really have enough choices for snacks before. “Not just sweet or tart or even a combination of the two, the Japanese ‘fifth flavor’ known as Umami.” is what it says on the back of the package. I don’t know if Umami is  the Japanese way of saying “Yo Mama.” But I can tell you what freeze dried Rambutan tastes like: A very old piece of toast and jam. Like if you made yourself some and got it all slathered up but had to run out of the house and forgot to eat it. Then a week later, you found it behind something and decided that you were so desperate for a hit of flavor that you would taste it, even though you knew better. Now with new freeze dried Rambutan,  you don’t have to wait that hellish week for the bread to turn an odd combination of sweet and spongy !   I don’t know if the big Rambutan shipment is selling but I do know the reason I own this pack is because I consider it part of my job, as a cataloguer of Americana, to make a point of trying to own one of every weird thing that goes up for sale in the supermarket.

Which is why I also own a pack of this: Fresh Pie. What I like best about it is that: 1. Its not pie.  2. Its not fresh. 3. It’s not NOW. Well, I guess, strictly speaking, it is NOW. If you attempt the broadest most metaphysical definition of the word “It”.

Regardless, It is one of the things that I love about living in the U.S.of A. The endlessly weird stuff for sale at the market.

Well, its almost time for me to give the dogs their annual Fourth of July sedatives so they don’t all  have a nervous break down and try to jump through windows when the explosions start. Fourth of July is basically the most frightening night of the year for dogs. And repeated explanations of The Declaration of Independence doesn’t seem to make anyone feel better or calm anyone down.  Nevertheless, Happy 4th of July.

A week or so ago I posted an idea I had of making myself a corporate montage. At that point I was still thinking of trying to compete with GE or AT&T or Standard Oil, image-wise. But now I have  decided to try out a more honest version. Quite frankly, I think I may be breaking new ground as I doubt Exxon or Merrill Lynch have even considered going in this direction. Here is what my corporate montage really should be.

Below is the original post:

I have been thinking a lot about the omnipresent idea of branding. For quite a while now I have been interested in corporate image and the montages they use to advertise some vague notion of what they represent and why you should trust them with your business. These montages are all similar enough to one another that I sometimes play a game with myself when they air to see if I can guess what they are supposedly selling. Is it Wells Fargo bank? AT&T? HBO? Kraft? G.E? B of A? Ikea? Goldman Sachs?  If the current economic crisis has taught us anything at all, it is that we never had any idea what was behind those corporate logos . But look at how successful and wealthy those montages helped them all become! And then I thought: THAT is what I need to get the career rolling. I’m so slow on the uptake. I need a brand that people will have confidence in.  So I have begun to assemble the Merrill Markoe corporate montage.  It is a work i progress. I probably will be up tonight messing with it.  Because it is what I would rather do than write my new book. I need to figure out what I have forgotten in this montage. So no time to write. Damn.version 2

In honor of June, month of romance and weddings for mainly heterosexuals (except in a few forward thinking states,) I would like to share some words of wisdom about marriage that I have gleaned from my research. (And I share them as the odd member of the heterosexual sector who has never been married even though I am in love and not only permitted to get married, but encouraged and even urged to get married . But unlike gay couples everywhere, who seem to be lusting and praying for marriage, I am  too chicken . I think this makes me the only single heterosexual monogamous female in a happy long term relationship who wishes that when they finally get around to giving gays the right to be legally married, as they surely will, that the same ” they ” would be willing to also agree to transfer the right to legal but unmarried partnership status via civil unions to heterosexuals so I could use it.)

Anyway, I have been doing some research on long term relationship success among my fellow humans, and assorted other species, for use in a new book I am writing. And in so doing I came upon an article I had saved from the New York Times about dating and mating in Kyrgstan. Of all the mating information I have read about all the different species that share our planet, I think human habits have got to be the strangest. Stranger even than the hyena who gives birth through a penis. Because, in addition to the kind of eccentric illogical behavioral patterns that you find everywhere in the animal kingdom, the human is alone in being able to philosophize and rationalize about his habits in an attempt to make them seem a little less insane than Mother Nature’s normal and generally peculiar patterns. Which brings me to Kyrgstan.  The way its done in that romantic paradise (which is located in a lovely triangle between Pakistan, Uzbekhistan and Mongolia) is that roving bands of eager Kyrgstani bachelors, perhaps driven wild by vowel deprivation, kidnap any lucky eligible female who has caught the eye of one of their band members. And once he has abducted and raped  his beloved, she becomes so socially undesirable that she has no choice but to get married to him or be shunned. As if that isn’t enough of a motivation to start on a new life path as well as a dream come true  for any young woman, there is a wise Kyrgstani saying that the happily married couple in the photo above offered to the journalist who wrote the piece.

“Every good marriage begins in tears.”  Talk about a beautiful wedding toast!

It reminded me of the lunch time conversation I had with a long time family friend who was one of the more positive role models I had  growing up. It was on the eve of her 45th wedding anniversary and it  took place in Manhattan, not Kyrgstan. As I complimented her on the length of time that she and her husband had been together , I asked her to what she attributed the success of her long happy marriage. I figured I would get a homily or some  folksy, quaint bit of wisdom like “Never go to bed angry.” At the very least I expected something pithy or pragmatic or slightly Hallmarkian.  Instead she replied, “Well, dear, it wasn’t always happy. Not a day went by that he didn’t make me cry.”  After I picked my jaw back up from where it had landed on my knees,  I replied, “Then why do  you call that a happy marriage if he made you cry every day?” To which she responded, ” I’ll tell you, sweetheart…you learn to take the good with the bad.”

Or, as Burulka (pictured above) said to the N.Y.Times journalist, by way of summing up her life of  Kyrgstani wedded bliss, “He says he had to kidnap me because he heard someone else was trying to kidnap me first. He’s a good man.”

Today I  offer these two romantic anecdotes as words of solace to the gay community as they chafe at the bit for their chance to make their nuptials legal. It also occurs to me that they probably  explain my problem. I’m just afraid to face all that joy.  Having spent my impressionable years watching my parents marriage seem to drain them both of whatever life force they once had, I guess I got confused about what the ultimate goal of it all was meant to be. So  I am secretly hoping that once same sex marriage becomes legal,  the gay community will be able to take marriage and reburish it a bit, the way they do when they move in to run down neighborhoods. Maybe after they spruce it up,  and spackle it and give it a new coat of paint,  I will be able to see it with fresh eyes. Until then, if they wouldn’t mind lending me that Civil Union thing they hate, that they don’t let heterosexuals use, I would be very greatful.

I’m building  some new closets. And by “I”, I mean Terry, the guy who builds stuff for me. Terry is a guy who has rebuilt so much of my home that I based a character on him. (Gil in my most recent book,  Nose Down Eyes Up.)The new closets are bigger than the old closets by half and they look great. But they just serve to point out that it wasn’t actually the square footage of the previous closets that was the problem. It is the square footage of my brain . I save too much stuff. And I don’t mean the usual things like clothes and shoes.  Here is an example of something I really really want to throw away but simply can’t. Its “Sport and Shave Ken,” featuring not just a  Ken with longer fuller hair than any Jonas brother but also The Best Slogan in the World: (And I checked. This is the best one.) “Shave him. He’s athletic. He’s all man.” Come on! Give it up for Mattel ! That is one great kick ass slogan. (Although I would have liked it even better if it went “He’s athletic. He’s all man. Shave him.” But why nit pick in the face of such a slogan achievement?)   I have had “Sport and Shave Ken” since 1986 when I purchased him from a store that was closing . I imagine that the little girls who played with this toy in the early eighties may have grown up with some unusual ideas about what would be expected of them in their roles as wives or girlfriends.

Which is not to imply that “Sport N Shave Ken,” in and of himself, presents that much of a problem, with or without his facial hair.  The problem is that I have other stuff too.

Like this.  I dont even know what this is exactly. But I have had it for at least 15 years. ( I think I bought it at the same close out sale where I found Ken.)  But was it a show, a cartoon, a game, or just a goal to which we might all aspire?  I kept it because I loved the slogan. “The Coolest Ultra Tiny Individuals on Earth.” How many of us can make that claim and really mean it?

Which brings me to  The Bathroom of Horror. Here is a picture of a corner of my guest bathroom. Its become the designated spot for everything that was cluttering up a drawer and didn’t belong anywhere. Its a kind of a showcase, so to speak.  But it is nearly  full.

I don’t consider myself a hoarder, like the people who wind up seeking help on my new favorite show: Obsessed. (http://www.aetv.com/obsessed/) . They’re profiling a guy next Monday who saves so much stuff he is going to have to move into his own back yard. He says he can’t throw anything out because he has no people to care about. Plus it somehow bonds him to his mother. I do have all sorts of people and animals to care about. And as for my mother; she would not have been amused by the contents of The Bathroom of Horror. It would have created the opposite of a bonding experience.

No… my  problem  (apart from finding too many things funny ) seems to be that I am using too much of my house as a designated closet.Maybe what I should do is move to a rural section of Colorado and open a little museum, like this one. I must have a giant plaster beetle around here somewhere.

As decided by me. Just now.

I have been reading a lot of magazines from the late 1920’s and early thirties to get a kind of grasp of the differences and similarities socially between the last economic collapse and this one.  There are many of each. But here is one reason that, no matter how bad things may get, it can never be quite as bad this time as it was last time. At least for women.

I have been reading a lot of womens magazines from the ’20s and ’30s. They are mainly filled with the most hilarious kind of grandiose over views of domestic life. Everything was happy and under control, or on its way to both. And then I came upon this one piece in an April 1929 edition of Woman’s Home Companion entitled “I Married the Wrong Man” that kind of took my breath away , maybe because I wasn’t expecting such a  relentlessly grim treatment of  marital bliss in the midst of a magazine that mainly shows women throwing on “a smart little frock” and dashing off to the market to find something “splendidly nourishing” that will “please and satisfy the whole family.” Here is a bit of it:

“Since the first emotional excitement of marriage was over and the star dust had been washed from my eyes with secret tears there has never been a day when I have longed for my husband’s presence. Never an hour when my heart cried for him, never a moment, in fact, when had we been suddenly released from each other and he had been married to my next door neighbor I should ever have cared to say more than a casual “Good morning” to him across the intervening hedge.  How I hungered for caresses that were not revolting. How I sickened for the satisfying companionship of a true mate.The conflict between my emotions and my ideals were so terrific, my health began to suffer.There were times as we sat at meals or read beside the library table after the baby was in bed when it seemed incredible to me that any human being could be in the same room with me and remain unconscious of the violence of my emotions.”

Wow. Having your caresses characterized as “revolting” is a little bit harsh.  This was when the national divorce rate seems to have been floating around the 15% mark. She goes on.
“Time was when I imagined myself in a unique position. But my mature opinion is that there are countless men and women who are disguising almost unbearable unhappiness beneath smiles that would put many a professional actor to shame.”

The piece continues for another, oh, 5700 words during which I got the feeling that maybe during those sickened, seething mealtimes and those  library reading periods full of repressed violence, that revolting husband of her’s might just have had just a teensy inkling of the way she felt. (Also that she must have been getting paid by the word.) Small wonder that the article is written without a by-line.

And where is she going with all this? Well, she does have a revelation in the last two paragraphs. But she isn’t headed to a tropical wonderland of giddy rediscovered romance or personal empowerment like she would be if she had written about her miserable fraudulent marriage to a man who sickened her for the women of 2009 . Here is where she winds up:

“My head to be sure is bloody and unlike the noble poets bowed. But my soul, thank heaven, has been mine to do with as I chose. And my soul and I have had some rare experiences during these strenuous years of glorified make believe. For every heart ache we’ve endured, every tear we’ve shed, every renunciation and unfulfilment that has been our portion, we’ve demanded big dividends and got them”. And what are those dividends, you may wonder. ” In the deepest pocket of our consciousness we carry the concealed making of a few more bonfires:  a bran cookie or two, an assortment of baubles guaranteed to make us stop our crying and a frayed and faded sense of humor. We carry these precisely as Grandmother carried her peppermint lozenges. ”

That woman must have had a hell of a recipe for bran cookies. Too bad she didn’t include it. I’d also like to know where I can buy a couple of packs of those lozenges.

I compulsively read all those articles that boast “Ten new foods that burn belly fat .” I guess lots of people do and that’s why they make up so many new lists every month. Sometimes I think  its the same  bunch who  fabricate the belly flab lists and the “101 new ways to turn him on” lists that sell Women’s magazines. (As if  the 101 ways offered in the last issue  was just skimming the surface. Because, as anyone with a good sex life will tell you,  you quickly run through hundreds and hundreds of new ways every time you make love. So there you are, one month later… hundreds of ways all used up, just hoping and praying that someone will suggest a few hundred more ways as quickly as possible.) I guess everyone, like me, thinks that the people who write these lists must have thought of at least one new way to turn him on or burn belly flab,  simply to justify the list’s (and their own) very existence. (And that it wont just be “take a hot bubble bath.” or “Do some extra sit ups.” again. )And we would all be wrong.

Though let’s be honest: the magazines that feature those lists might be the only ones surviving the publication holocaust . Sex and Belly Flab seem to be  two topics about which no one can never have enough information.And while we’re being honest, you’d think that I would be a fully recovered list survivor by now, eschewing all lists on these topics. We’d both  be wrong about that too.Which brings me to the bag of blackberries in the picture. The other night at the gym I was compelled to read a current “ten new foods that burn belly flab.” list that mainly distinguished itself by miraculously transforming a simple old timey flab inducing glass of wine or chocolate sundae in to an amazing fat burning engine by merely adding  a few  simple Latin terms for chemical compounds. It kind of reminded me of the time I took my nephews in to Carl’s Junior for a burger and, in an effort to buy myself the low-cal thing, I perused their salad bar where, among the small aluminum containers of lettuce, onions, tomatos and cucumbers, I spotted a dish of chocolate pudding. I thought “That is absolutely brilliant. The chef who was able to get chocoloate pudding reclassified as a salad ingredient ought to be nominated for a Nobel Prize.”

But I digress. I came away from my list last night with the idea that I should try and eat more blackberries. I’ve read a few articles about berries in recent months that all claim assorted health benefits so yesterday when I was at the health food store I bought a bag of frozen blackberries.They were expensive but hey! I’m worth it! Then this morning I was reading the package and noticed that their big front-of-the-package claim boils down to ” “Diets containing foods like Cascadian Farm Blackberries that are low in saturated fats and cholesterol may reduce the risk of heart disease.” And I thought “So that’s the big calling card?  All they were able to claim on the package, next to the words Heart Healthy, was that the ingredients were low in saturated fat and cholesterol?  So is chewing gum. So are sugar cubes.  And tic tacs.And taco chips. And gummy bears.And composite board. And brake fluid.” It reminded me of an old Martin Mull parody about an exciting new cereal that “when you just add milk and fresh fruit has all the nutrition of milk and fresh fruit.” Or my favorite amazingly empty slogan, by Hostess: “Freshness never tasted so good.”

I really have to stop reading those lists.

I just got back from a vacation. I went with the man with whom I live and David Attenborough, who bobs around in my head all day and narrates anything that I encounter if it involves  natural beauty. If I were to invent a religion, I would center it around David Attenborough because he seems to be God’s smarter better intended brother. In his BBC documentaries he is everywhere and knows everything worth knowing. He is in the trees, under the seas, beneath the ice, and also somehow just in back of where millipedes or hedgehogs are mating. He is amazing. So I made a tribute. 

Because of David Attenborough, I shot this on a trail in Colorado. Caterpillar larvae were hatching. But I forgot to put my face in the shot. Damn.

I just came back from a vacation. I don’t go on many vacations but damn, they are a good idea. I can see why they invented them. Here are six things from my vacation.

Well, I knew there would eventually be something I would like about aging . Swine flu is it. The LAST theoretical swine flu epidemic (at the cusp of the eighties) was my first official recorded WTF? moment. It was  when  I started keeping a list because after the panic over nothing much died down, along with the echoes of my resounding WTF?,  I began to wonder,” Does life not provide us with enough really scary stuff on a day to day basis that we need to do this for its entertainment value? Is it because we all watched too many horror movies when we were kids?”  I don’t really know. But I am referring now to the way that everyone embraces all these  WTF? moments like a hypochondriac reading through the Merck’s Manual, before there is any actual reason to take them on. After having lived through decades of BS at this point, I have come to the conclusion that the safest days of the year are the ones on which Nostradamus bestowed a prediction.

Remember orange alerts?  It wasn’t that long ago when we were all supposed to stock up on duct tape and sheet plastic. I remember thinking, even at the time, about how the duct tape manufacturers and distributors must have woken up to the most amazingly  bright “pinch-me-I’m-dreaming” kind of a morning . “Let’s quadruple production!” they must have all said, giddy with delight. How exciting to watch reams of duct tape flying off the shelves, only to watch the tape warehouse begin to overflow when, a month later, no one cared about duct tape any more.

There have been many many notable WTF? moments in my adult life: Sky Lab, The Comet Kahoutek, El Nino and La Nina,and SARS are just a few big obvious ones I remember  without having to work too hard. And by the way,  I am still waiting for someone to apologize to me for Y2K. After all the tension and hysteria that Y2K hysterics created ,(to the extent that I even bought some emergency supplies) where was the person who stepped forward afterward, when nothing at all happened, to say “Oops. I guess planes didn’t fall out of the sky and the electric grid didn’t shut down for a month. Sorry. My bad.”

And it is with this kind of stuff that the internet is definitely not our friend. Because as hard as the media hysterics beat the drum about Y2K, and the last swine flu, and Kahoutek, they didn’t come close to the sheer power of yelling fire in a crowded theatre that the internet can provide with even one single whisper. Not just headlines but google maps! Photos of empty airports! Photos of full airports!  Even while at the same time,on the same page, there were articles that mentioned that a regular flu season causes thousands of deaths. And that this flu doesnt seem to be any worse than the regular kind.

I made this little film  when I first learned how to edit. I still kind of like it. Especially the original sound track by Mr. Prieboy.  So put your hands together and welcome to our stage Puppyboy in “I’m Forever Chasing Bottles.”

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Only a few people in entertainment retain real icon status for me. Bob Dylan is one. And so, I thought I would use the release of his newest album as an occasion to expound on my “relationship” to Bob. Such as it is. He had a huge impact on my ideas about music and creativity when I was a kid. I was never “in love” with him, like I was with John Lennon, (he was too incomprehensible and prickly, whereas John Lennon was just the right amount of both.) but I actually snuck out in the middle of the night once when I was in high school and Dylan had just gone electric, and some how finagled a ticket to a performance he was giving at Berkeley High School.(!) Our tickets entitled my friends and I to sit on folding chairs on the apron of the stage, only a few feet from him. It was so surreal, even then, that I sometimes wonder if I made the whole thing up. Anyway, over time I have become a lot more jaded and cynical ( though I was doing a pretty good job of appearing to be both even when I was in high school) but I still think Bob Dylan is a very big deal.

Cut to : Now. Bob Dylan lives generally in my neighborhood. And when I say “lives” I have no idea what that means. I don’t know if he’s ever there.  I have never seen him. I definitely LIVE in my neighborhood in every sense of the word. I know the cashiers at the markets by name.  But I never have seen Mr. Dylan waiting on line with a basket full of groceries or standing at the dry cleaner with an arm load of soiled pants. Perhaps he throws his clothes out after one wearing, like I read that Jerry Lewis does with his socks. I really have no idea.

But I do know two fairly amusing things about Bob Dylan. The first one is that he puts up the most enjoyable  Christmas decorations on his block. In a neighborhood that is filled with huge homes that are constantly in a state of getting even larger, and home owners who hire day laborers to carefully finesse the seasonal decorating of their yards almost as though they were department stores or hotels, someone at Bob Dylan’s property put up this  string of lights :

I instantly loved his approach so much that I snuck out to take a picture. In my fantasies, I like to think it was Bob himself who hung them because who would hire an assistant this sloppy? It reminded me of something someone’s irritable  uncle might have done as a concession to his nagging wife. “There! I put up the God Damn Christmas decorations,  are you happy? So shut up and stop talking about it, for crying out loud.” Now I hear he has a Christmas album coming out. I can only pray that he brings the same insanely casual and off center approach to his interpretation of the Christmas classics. It might not sell that well but I would definitely get a kick out of it.

The second slightly amusing thing is  that Bob Dylan has apparently ticked off the people who live across the street from him. And when I say “live across the street from him”, these people  do appear to live there. They have a house and cars and a mailbox. But they overlook a piece of the Dylan property that is kind of a no-man’s land. There is a chain link fence and slightly visible behind it are large rusting storage dumpsters and a number of deteriorated car exoskeletons that never move. There is also dirt road that leads to what, I do not know. Somewhere in the midst  of this tableau is a porto-potty that apparently Mr. Dylan rented to service his security guards. And  that is what is driving these neighbors to distraction.

I first read about it all when a friend of mine sent me a link to an article in the L.A. Times. It explained the nature of the brouhaha in general and the fact that the  people across the street had  apparently felt the need to deflect the wafting porto potty odors by filling their front yard full of fans.  We, at my home, looked at each other quizzically since we had walked down this block millions of times and couldn’t remember smelling any human waste or seeing any fans. So the next time I went out for “A Full Bob” (we have a couple of different  routes we take . The one that takes us past the Dylan storage dumpsters is about a three mile route that we refer to as “A Full Bob. “) I brought a camera. And there they were.  Poor Bob. Still being hounded by fans.

.I am appearing on two panels at the L.A. Times Festival of Books on Sunday. (Ap.26) I did this a few years ago and found it very enjoyable  even though I was adrift in a sea of successful authors who didn’t seem to necessarily have the same issues with trying to write that I do. One guy who sat next to me on a fiction panel said that he gets up every morning and writes  from eight to noon because to him it just feels like “turning on the tap to watch the ideas flow out.”  I can’t even get started until I have an imaginary boxing match in my mind where I repeatedly punch myself in the face until I agree to start. Like today, when I am doing this instead of writing.  Almost every day  I  argue with myself about whether or not I even have anything to say. The whole thing is kind of an ordeal . It kind of looks like this.

Welcome to my new blog. Here it is. Right here. Now all I have to do is  figure out what to write about.
For openers, here is a video I shot at the California Wildlife Center, where I am a volunteer in the baby ward once a week.  In this case, the babies are week old possums and a baby squirrel. We feed them formula with a syringe, then when they get old enough the center puts them back from whence they came. That second part is especially great because it eliminates the feeling that I better adopt them and bring them home with me. My house already looks enough like the inside of a sweater as it is. (Especially now that it’s dog hair season. I have the equivalent of a toupee in every corner.)

Okay. So there’s one topic. And onward.