5x5 10/29/26

• In two days, we will experience the second night of the year where our neighborhood becomes very loud (the other one is the 48-hour night of Pride weekend). There's a big Halloween street festival a few blocks down Santa Monica Boulevard, very close to our home. It's when people dress up as sex versions of pop culture iconography. I always promise to be the Kool-Aid Man because he's already the sexiest corporate mascot of the 20th century and nothing needs to be added to or subtracted from the costume to make it horny. I never do this, though, because I'm lazy. Instead I'll make sure I'm safely in my home no later than about 6pm and I do not leave. No children live in our building and, besides, there's a security gate, so we don't get trick-or-treaters. I'll eat two pieces of See's candy. I'll let Alonso choose an old horror movie that won't harm him. It's not curmudgeonly, it's cozy. Do not come to my neighborhood and assume you'll find a place to park. Do not come to my neighborhood and assume you'll drive freely and without obstacles. Do take a Lyft, have them drop you nine blocks away, and walk in your uncomfortable costume shoes to the action. On your way back out, do leave gifts littering the sidewalks. In past years, here is what I've found on the ground (but never touched) on November 1: used condoms, a baby shoe, an open and empty DVD box for some sort of gay twink porn, nail polish, vape accessories, a single cheerleader pom-pom, a carton of cigarettes, numerous half-full bottles of various liquor drinks, a purple cape, a VHS copy of Rock-a-Doodle.
• The makeout dudes are making out at the corner of my block. They are leaning against a building and they are making out. It's about three o'clock in the afternoon. They're wearing the kinds of clothes one puts on for the gym. Shorts and tanks made of synthetic materials. Did they meet at the gym and decide to make out after? Did they see each other before going to the gym, decide against the gym, and then make out? Are they already a couple who cannot stop making out? Whoever they are and whatever their reasons, I support this. A woman is staring at them as she walks past. She's upset about them. She's scowling as loudly as she can. To her I'd say, "Fuck you, let them kiss it up all day, go tend to your own life, stay unhappy about it." I do not let Alonso Duralde even touch my hand in public.
• I had to move from my seat at the new 2026 Sense and Sensibility because the audience – lots of young women and lots of very old* people – were chatting in full voice throughout the film. You can try, but you can't shout down a crowd. You can't stop a tidal wave by holding up your hand and yelling, "No!" You could be like that guy in the news who pepper-sprayed a whole row of people. But it's easier just to move your seat. I wound up on the third row and remembered my young life in movie theaters when I sat as close to the screen as I could, looking up, craning my neck. It reminded me of something I read recently, about how it's good to sit close to the screen so that the film dominates you. I decided that the incessant out-loud talking is probably tied to the way people often watch films now: on TV screens, on laptops, tablets, and phones. You can stop the movie and start it up when you like. You can ignore it while you answer a text. You can fold laundry to it. You control it the entire time. But in a theater, you can't control anything. You just have to stay as far away from people and their shitty behavior as possible and let the movie do what it's going to do. Anyway, those talking people at Sense and Sensibility suck and I hope all of them get hit by a truck.
• "Hey, man, do you know how the gift cards work?" The young man asked me this in World Market on the international biscuit aisle. He was missing more than a few of his teeth, and he was too young for that to have been a naturally occurring situation. "Any gift card questions you may have will be answered at the counter over there and--" then he interrupted me and said, "No, see, I have this card and--" then I interrupted him and said, "Then just go use it?" That's when he pulled out a slip of paper that he said had $34 credit on it "but I want $20 for it and--" then I interrupted him again and said, "Dude, I'm not buying that from you." He thanked me for my time, which, honestly, I deserved, because he did interrupt my special moment with the international biscuits. Then he told me to have a nice day and I told him that he should also have a nice day. So at least we parted as friends.
• I'm reading Pat Blashill's book Someday All the Adults Will Die! which is about Texas punk rock in the 1980s, and it's a charming bit of oral history. I'm enjoying it because it's very Austin-focused and has nothing much to do with me or any of my friends or experiences as an 80s punk rock person in Lubbock and sometimes Dallas. Maybe someone else will be infused with that Big Boys spirit of "go start your own band" and they'll write their own book about their particular punk rock pocket of Texas. And now a story about seeing the band Live Skull at Theatre Gallery in the winter of... 1986? 87? Roughly then. I drove from my parents' home in Garland to the downtown area of Dallas where unpopular bands performed for weirdos. It was snowing. When I reached downtown, while waiting for a red light to change, an old Cutlass Supreme rear-ended me, backed up, and drove off quickly. I got out to see what they'd done, and somehow there was no damage to my car, so I kept driving. Theatre Gallery was cold inside, and a dumpy place in general, and my memory is that people enjoyed it for those reasons. There were leaks in its roof and puddles on the floor, so it was the first and last time I was ever snowed upon while seeing a show. The band played but their equipment kept shorting out and I worried that someone might get electrocuted because of all the snow inside the building. It very much appeared to be making them angry. But the angrier they became, the noisier they were. Consequently, I was very happy.

*I am 62 but if we consider old age to be a version of high school, then let's call one's 50s the freshman year, 60s the sophomore year and so on. If you hit your 90s or you are Norman Lloyd (who died at age 106) then you're post-grad and the world owes you a daily allotment of special treats.