From Here To Whence.

 

Complete exhaustion is about to overwhelm me. Long hours every day. This would be alright in itself, but the seesaw between working zero hours one week and the ramping up to 84 the next.

Exhausting.

And the toxic waste wreckage of human personality I have to navigate, byzantine and dizzying. One man with an odd face flounced into the office and basically asked me to my face if I was the enormous crashing douche that parked in the wrong spot.

'Do you drive a silver car?'

'The Royce?' Why not start fucking people this early if they walk in and that is the first thing out of their mouths is what I say.

'I'm sorry?' He flounders a bit encased in his ill-advised check shirt.

'No.' I finally put it to rest. Best to just nip it in the bud, but then this devolved into a conversation between the buskerer and the weird faced one that made me wish to hide in an interior office and misuse English at random and at intervals.

I haven’t seen the new Star Trek or the new Ab Fab and it is starting to grate really that I am stuck with these people. These items I suppose is more apt. Why give them qualities they so evidently lack? They will not shut up about sports. Even sports that aren't going to be happening for months. How impending child birthing may interfere with critical matches. The burdens of breeding and breeder spectating I suppose. I could scream into the void and feel no better. God I am in a foul mood and I need to do the sex with a normal like pronto. Or see the new Star Trek I really don't care which.

Are We Not Going Elsewhere?

 

'I ordinarily go to the gym every day.'

'Why? Do you work there' I really just want to toast my bagel and bounce back to my desk, but you started this, 'No, I'm serious. Every day?'

'Yeah, well, when you get old, your bones and stuff.'

'Oh, yeah.' Is there any way I can hide from this conversation? Like I am actually standing here wishing the ground would just swallow me up. 'My mom goes to the gym a lot and I always wonder why. She's quite active anyway and it just seems superfluous.'  I just called the guy old to his face, but again I didn't start this, and in my defense this man has done little else than actively try to irritate me since we met last Friday.

He's an entertainer, a performer, and like most performers , like the sad sad Sarah Silverman, craves adulation and acceptance, and most of the time I just hand it over because it is polite. Being polite is easy. Being rude is true freedom. I wonder how many entertainers are self-aware enough to realize that most of their careers are built upon polite laughs and recognition? Certainly not this lout standing in the break room offering impertinent details about his life. I did not start it.

This is why Instagram is down.

Disposable Frgament Reimagined.

 

The sun is hanging like a tine red dot in the sky and one feels small. But there aren't that many people at work on this Saturday mornings, and all three seem to be normals with the perhaps exception of the 'entertainer'.

The heat in Los Angeles is neigh inescapable. Luckily I will be working in a climate controlled office for 10 hours today. One works to live, not the other way around.

Working so much has begun to place every day mundane obstacles in my way. Where do I find clean undergarments after I have exhausted even my supply of baseball team branded boxers? What am I suppose to have for me tea when I haven't been to a proper store in weeks? It has become so desperate that last night I nestled up to a can of olives and chickpeas.  I may as well have eaten tomato salad.

There is a Gelson's near the office, but Gelson's makes Whole Foods look like Smart and Final and almost lost consciousness in the produce isle when I saw they were peddling avocados for $3.49. You could have knocked me over with a feather so I am just going to have to make to with vegan noodle pot and oat bread. Our survival requires nothing less than total resilience to these petty little challenges.

The Coming And The Goings.

 

 

It is a rather warm morning. I don't think I will need my furs. These were my initial thoughts the morning after waking from a sexual flowering.

And the morning did prove warm. And daunting. One carriage and one only and that one nine minutes from my front door. I had to rush.Once at work the only thoughts that make any sense are concerned with what I will be having for breakfast or lunch or possibly dinner. People are already talking about the Republican National Convention and I'm just like bitch please. I got interesting things going on up in here which is in no way actually true, but it is a good way to navigate the more diffy mornings.

 

On the subject of diffy mornings. If you haven't watched the new Mapp & Lucia series on BBC/PBS. Do the devil out of it.

One Of Many Possible Outcomes.

 

I'm sure the bus drivers that smile as they roll off & leave people behind are the first to vacantly wonder why some damaged gentleman takes an entire bus hostage one day, stabs the driver in the face 18 times and then lets everyone else leave quietly through the rear exits.

No point even mentioning how my day went. On Friday there was a damaged person holding another bus hostage. It was the local bus I let roll by earlier in Century City. I didn't stop to ask why, or make a scene. I just walked away Rene. And now this morning happens. Like I just somehow knew where my future would be. Turning around and returning to my flat for vegan cream cheese and then consequently missing my carriage of shame.

Puddles.

Possible Intermittent Distractions.

K 

The clickety clackety carriage of shame carried me down Santa Monica Boulevard whether I willed it or no. At first I was engrossed in my Edward IV biography, but then I started to look around and all seemed strange, A little unreal and perhaps supernatural. Not in the Darby O'Gill And The Little People sense, but more like Neverending Story supernatural sense. The Soundcloud playlist shielded me from all but the loudest of speech impediments, yet I remained curiously distracted.

The one I had a mild interest in because he reminded me of Podrick from Game of Thrones exited the carriage as though he had been fucked a bit too hard last night or had been roughed up the Thai mafia so that was all but dashed. I don't 'date' men I can outrun while wearing heals.

It goes without saying I am back at work in the Century City cesspool of over starched shirts and scrunchy fitting suits with high-water pants and sleeves. Like Hedi Slimane on a bad day I am counting the days before I can go back to spending my days on the beach and recovering from sunburn and jetlag.

The guy I am working with works 'in the industry' and he waited all of 10 minutes before he told me, and there is nothing wrong with that, but I have, and I think this has been clear from the moment I emerged on this world a startling problem with people who are a bit too familiar.

That being said….

Everything One Needs To Succeed.

Nonstop flight from Idaho Falls to Los Angeles which only operates twice a week and then only in the extreme summer months was nothing less than a cattle call of overfed breeder big mac slayers, overdressed try-hards and of course the adorable cutie who sat next to me in row 10. The seat between us was unoccupied and our hand collided several times reaching for what we had stowed there. The decent into Los Angeles was filthy, blood-curdling but mercifully climate controlled.

I have to spend two days in this cesspool we like to call home before returning to the great white north hopefully for a little fishing hiking and whatnot. My initial visit was so short I scarcely got to do anything. One round of gold, one measly trip to the park and an unfortunate incident of an exploding jar of pickles in the middle of the parking lot at WinCo were a few tepid highlights. Fiesta Ole was closed on July 4th, and I told someone I know not who that a Mexican restaurant that closes on the Fourth of July is about as useful as an Irish bar that closes on Cinco de Mayo.

And there were fireworks on the Fourth. We didn't go of course. But we were treated to the sounds of concussive blasts and artillery fire. I imagined that it must be what life is like in Fallujah. But it's all part of the merry making and America hurrahing that we of course must all unquestionably engage in otherwise be branded unpatriotic or worse traitorous.

Military fetishism continues unabated and the militarization of the police forces continues with almost unseemly haste and relish and when the hunters seemingly become the hunted we inch closer to that which what was intended all along. A government that fears the governed. Or some such thing I'm quite sure I read somewhere on the way to achieving one of those meddlesome degrees of mine. Luckily, and like most Americans, I need not waste my overpriced education on a single for the news media is more than happy to tell me how I should feel about current events. So reassuring to know I need not even make up my mind on any issue of consequence.

And all the pretty flags.

Waving as they do.

A Very Affected Gentleman Part III

His Instagram feed is only filled with images of 'exotic' places he visits. Nothing prosaic or ordinary permeates his feed for people may, by extension, view him as prosaic and ordinary and of course he views himself as quite the opposite despite using Instagram in exactly the same way everyone else seems to.

In furtherance of that point, he has made concerted efforts to elevate his snapchat profile because that is what is 'new' and 'fresh' and what all the young people are doing. Eager to appear 'on it' he takes the plunge not realizing that his heritage fetishizing, double monk wearing, horse race attending readership still 'updates' their Facebook relationship statuses daily. It's a well learned lesson in the limits of social media as well as his personal appeal, or rather the appeal of things he finds aspirational and 'grail worthy'. Bro.

Social media is also used, rather unashamedly, to secure invitations to events he would otherwise be unable to acquire on his own. He of course 'makes hay' (and yes of course he just discovered this phrase and drops it as relentlessly as a cockney drops consonants in daily conversation and acts as though it has interlaced his conversation for decades) and his social media reflects his 'newly acquired status'.

In fact, a wordsmith his isn't, nor will he ever be, but it is the one thing he desperately wants you to think he is so he has taken to employing others to do his writing on his behalf. Unfortunately, his assessment of other's writing is about as keen as his assessment of his own. As such, the content has become spotty, self-consciously elitist, and repetitive.

Yes, he has visited Phillipe's and Santa Anita's, but is yet to venture into Cole's or Clifton's or the Beverly Hills Hotel, but when he does he will tell you about it, he will ruminate on it, he will convince you that everything you knew or will know about these places came from him. He will do this without shame, artifice or hesitation.

An expensive Leica camera he in fact owns or would like you to think he does. A photography course is, of course, something his copious talents do not require.

His tweets are intertwined with bon mots of the most varied kind provided they adhere to a theme of status consciousness and luxury brand awareness. This is of course until Cleveland wins the NBA finals and his feed breaks down to a series of bro-town taunts and drunken hectorings which are promptly deleted in the morning and replaced with his latest thoughts on the Cartier tank watch.

And in a way it is sad that his website has become a tired list of links to his FriendsFace Page, but there it is. And then you are forced to read one of his tweets blandly dismissing websites as 'So 2007' and any trace of sympathy evaporates in the harsh sun of reality. In the end there is one life lesson he is yet to learn. The more you try to convince people what you know, the more they become aware of what you don't know. Silence is ever one's friend.