5x5 7/24/26
- Behind me in line at the grocery store checkout, she said, "You've only got one life, you have to do something with it. Our brains were made to absorb infinite information. The scientists say we're meant to live eternally. Well, the ones who are Christians say that. We should live forever." I chose not to turn around. Was she talking to me? I chose not to know. I am not to be involved in your every thought.
- Twenty years ago this month I was in Paris for two days because there was a Duralde family event taking place in Spain and that's a long story you don't care about. It was during the World Cup and that Zidane fellow headbutted a guy at the same time I was eating a gyro stuffed with fries in one of the arrondissements, I don't know which one, but I had to write that word because it's fun to write. Anyway, if somehow you wind up in Paris in the second half of the summer you're going to find a lot of things are closed. As a tourist with a brief window of opportunity, maybe this should have annoyed me. What it did was give me the idea to bring the concept of "summer hours" home to our Los Angeles apartment. It's not like either of us work in an office. We boss us. If it's good enough for people who work at a sandwich kiosk then it's good enough for us. So between Memorial Day and Labor Day, we stop work sometime after lunch on Fridays and do whatever we want, usually the laundry. And now I just had another great idea: going to the Farmer's Market – it's 15 minutes away – and hitting that place with the crepes, getting one with Nutella in it, and pretending we're the Young Girls of Rochefort.
- Nicole Kidman's AMC is refusing to let me click on seat L2. How am I supposed to get my advance ticket to Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma and sit next to my spouse if this fucking portal won't let me? Getting mad at a website is not an activity I imagined for myself when I was young.
- I heard 808 State this morning for the first time in a while, and it reminded me that in 1990, as music director of a college radio station, I put 808 State's "Pacific" on the playlist, and I was simultaneously aghast and amused by dummies who got on the mic and accidentally said, "Bob State." It happened more than a few times, even after I posted a note about it in the on-air room. Anyway, Wilson Phillips' "Give It Up" is the best song of the 90s. These three women took their genetic advantages and used them for the right harmonic purpose. I know this little paragraph started with something not at all related to Wilson Phillips, but sometimes YouTube just knows that it's time to remind me that I love something, and there it was. The video where all three of them are gabbing on landline phones, fully dressed up and thrilled to be doing that, their excitement matched only by group-enticing the video's oily Hot Guy to "come on, come on, come on, come on, give it up," is one for the ages. It's not as majestic as the "Hold On" video, with its vertiginous and seemingly quite dangerous ladies-perched-on-jagged-rocks-on-cliffs shots, but it is still Cinema.
- It started with a physical-therapy referral document for the friend with the broken arm. Then there was official confusion over whether or not that referral meant anything, as the two doctors who should have been communicating were not in the same insurance network that's always a big problem for no one except the patient. Who needed the document? Anyone? And when? Some day? Never? HOW ABOUT RIGHT NOW NOW NOW WITHIN THE NEXT 30 MINUTES BY 2PM URGENT. I was the one in possession of the document just in case somehow some moment arrived when it would need to be back in the hands of a medical professional. I had 25 minutes to make a 20-minute drive and then find parking, so I trotted to my car as fast as my tortoise body could go and drove to the clinic, somewhat faster than the speed limit, at one point navigating both a parked tow truck and a confused older woman who panicked, I guess because of the tow truck, and who had just stopped so that traffic was blocked in both lanes. Cars lining up behind me, I forced the issue and aimed myself directly at her, not moving, so she decided to get out of the way. I got to the clinic and to the receptionist and to the doctor's assistant, and that document was in the man's hands at 1:57. Apologies for loading up this post with film references, but that's my job, and it's how I arrange my world, and I am Joan Cusack racing down hallways in Broadcast News, and I want to be hoisted up on some sturdy shoulders like the hero I am.
