It's Not Tundra

I have to tell you that it's not paradise here. We have morons here, too. It's just that there aren't as many of them but those that we have are trying harder to be more annoying. There's also, I suppose, a certain freedom in knowing that you are blazing a new trail of douchebaggery, going where no asshat has gone before. I'm riding my bike home from the gym and I turn down a quiet street so that I can ride though the park. The school on the street, a church school, is letting out for the end of the year. If you look back at the stuff I've written, I should have learned by now that people can be especially dopey around schools. It should be no surprise. But every time I've gone by there and it was any kind of school event, it's a madhouse. 1/4 the madhouse as in Tarzana, but there are fewer folks around. So I'm tooling down the road on my bike. And here comes a woman holding hands with her son. Awwwww. Walking down the middle of the street. And by ...

We hardly had a spike in showings after the change in companies. And now the clock was really ticking. It was the middle of September. Where our initial questions had covered if we would have enough time to get our stuff together and let the kids finish school if we sold the house. Now we were looking at the calendar and thinking: 1) Would we EVER get outta there? 2) Would we have to move the kids out of their school and into a new one at some really shitty time? Like, March. I’d done it that way. My parents moved in November of seventh grade and again November of eighth grade. If you would really like to screw your kid up, do this to them. I won’t go into details about my childhood out of a Pete Hamil novel, but let’s say that I would have been a mess without moving. The moving made it a really prosaic mess and sent me into a period of isolation where I totally shut down and lived in books. [1] My kids [2] were popular and well liked. They had friends and their...

The kids finished school in June, Connor finishing Third Grade and Lauren finishing Fifth. It was a pretty good year. Lauren was finishing elementary in the L.A. school system and would be gong into middle school the next September. We didn’t think we’d be there in September, but we filled out the paperwork anyway, just in case. Being in the magnet program meant that if we hadn’t filled it out, she would have to go to the home school, which was just down the block and we didn’t like that. We didn’t like the kids we saw coming out of that school. Maybe the kids around the corner WERE just kids. Maybe kids are just kids and I’ve read enough to know that kids in the 30’s, 40s and 50s, 60s and so one really weren’t THAT different than kids are today. Perhaps the language was coarser, perhaps not. One has to think that kids who grew up in an agrarian world were better informed on sex and that kids who were a few years away from the draft probably either knew cuss words they’d learned fr...

What the hell, right? She was in a crosswalk at a school. She backed into a crosswalk, saw people in it and then drove by close enough that putting my arms out, I hit her car. Let her take her lumps and maybe learn a lesson. And to use the word “Car” or “Van”. She wouldn’t let it go, she thinks she’s in her rights. Let the guys with the badge handle it. So we sit down to wait. It’s midafternoon and it’s getting hotter, probably in the nineties. I buy the kids water. I’m hungry and I’d like to get home and do some work. I call the guy I’m working for to see if there’s anything pressing. I know there are some animation models waiting for me but being a freelance producer, I could work my own hours most of the time. He’s aghast when I tell him the story and wants me to call him back and tell him what the police do. I call Patricia and tell her what went on. She’s not aghast, just tired of the sum of the shitty parts of living there. I see the Odyssey. It drives back and forth a ...