ham fisted theatrics

There is a shopping center near us whose façade is made of interlocking blue-and-white glass panels. At some point yesterday I notice that part of this façade is bubbling in the wind. Then I realize that some of the building is that pattern of glass but some of is just a tarp made to look like that pattern.

The area around our building seems like it’s going to be the epicenter of the coming age war. On Wednesday afternoon I see no less than two fights between young men and very old men. Nothing physical, but lots of screaming, and in one case, honking from passing motorists as a young guy has his enormous pickup half-hanging-out into traffic as he’s insisting that an old guy in Blue Blockers move his boat of a car from where it’s parallel parked, or something. When The Age War comes you will know what side of the casino buffet table you’ve been standing on. I am not looking forward to it.

I am pulling out of the Baja Fresh parking lot and I think, I can’t remember what they’re called, those little concrete parking dividers, the things your front wheels sometimes bump up against to let you know, “Hey, stop,” but I can’t remember if there is one in the parking space I’m parked in. If there isn’t, it would be an easy thing to just pull forward and into the lane that will take me out of here. I will probably save a good eight seconds, and I have nowhere to be, so shaving that time off is critical. I decide not to open my car door and look. I decide to just go. It turns out there is one of those concrete divider things that I can’t remember what they’re called, and it makes a horrible noise when my car mounts it. I reverse and go out the way I always should have. I’m trying to turn on to a very busy street and no one is letting me in until an old lady slows down and waves me in. An olive branch from the elderly to the youth. Perhaps we have averted the eruption of age-ist violence for another day. Back in the parking garage at our building, I inspect the front part of my car. I got away clean.

Dom and I are in the car on the way to see Gethard and Joe Mande’s shows at UCB when we see, stopped next to us at a stoplight, a fully-done-up Ed Hardy vehicle. An old grey open-top Ford truck, with a thrumming engine and a pit bull in the driver’s seat. Behind the wheel is a guy dressed mostly in pink and purple scarves. Skeletons and roses chase each other around his car, in between URLS in gothic lettering.

I look in the passenger-side mirror when we’re on Sunset and hey: The sunset! And a corridor of palm trees. And lots of neon. I look at this for as long as possible. Near the In-N-Out, two guys in their fifties stare up at a parking sign outside of their Honda Element for a good long while and then approach the parking meter like it’s alien technology. When the war comes they could go either way, old or young, but the old will probably win them to their side with promises of abolishing technology altogether, both the confusing kind and the kind that are thermostats that go below 80.

I love the radio. Something that hasn’t gotten any less fun since high school: singing the real dirty lyrics over the clean radio edit of a song.

Every time you are driving here you see somebody pull the most egregious maneuver you’ve ever seen, and they are punished by getting where they need to be before you. I try to make myself feel better by assuring myself that those drivers probably take “The Pick-Up Artist” literally. Then I think, like the traffic maneuvers, that shit probably actually works for them. Then I think of the Ed Hardy vehicle and I toy with the idea of quitting society.

The Scientology Celebrity Center is across from UCB, a big Cinderella castle where all the windows are always lit and disconcertingly easy to see into. Parking around UCB is a bitch and I think the Scientologists should offer free parking to the whole neighborhood. They could flier my car. They could test my car’s stress. After my car had parked there enough times they could tell my car what kind of alien car it had been in a past life. I would not care.

Standing outside of UCB after the show, I see the LA equivalents of six or seven people I know from New York and I wonder when I will stop seeing people’s LA equivalents. When I go back to New York and see LA people’s New York equivalents, then I will know I have arrived.

At the valet waiting for Donald’s car to come around, an old Benz pulls up and an attractive woman leaps out. Another woman runs up from the outdoor seating area of a nearby restaurant and kisses her, hard. This is great. I have a (pretty unconventional I realize) pro-public-displays-of-affection-by-smokin’-lesbians policy, and West Hollywood will be receiving a positive write-up in my guidebook on the subject.

Later, we are up in Dan, Meggie and Donald’s apartment. The TV is on. Their TV is mounted on the wall above the fireplace at an awkward angle, which is bad for just watching but good for standing next to and craning your neck to look at like you’re watching TV on “The West Wing.” I feel like we should all have rolls of white paper in our hands and be clucking our tongues as we watch troubling world events unfold, until one of us says the pithy or grave (or both) thing that’s going to trigger the title sequence.

Much later, Dan and I are still up, and the TV’s still on, on mute. The super-early-morning local news begins, and across the bottom of the screen is a non-stop crawl with the names of freeways and whether or not there are any accidents on them. At this hour pretty much every freeway is followed by the words “No Accidents” but I am kind of overwhelmed by the number of freeways. I grew up in Phoenix and I was pretty sure we invented the overpass, the interchange, the loop, but I guess not. I guess I was in the minors all those years and I’ve just been called up to the big leagues, the big leagues of sitting there as everything crawls along at rush hour, fucking with the radio, checking your phone.