Laurie Perry's Blog, page 13

Monday notes

1) Discovered this little gem at the supermarket:

Although it tastes a lot like a carton of mashed-up fudgesicles, I love any food item that gives you the calorie count for the entire container. This is truth in advertising.

2) No matter the location or size or cost, all my Los Angeles apartments seem to go through the same boring ritual. First, the garbage disposal dies (this usually happens the first week I move in.) Shortly thereafter the A/C dies. It was really hot on Friday and my air conditioning sputtered out around 5 p.m., just in time for everyone to be closed and unavailable to fix it. By a complete stroke of luck I was heading out the door on Saturday morning to buy another fan and I saw the maintenance guy -- the same one who fixed my garbage disposal. He fixed the air conditioning, he is magic. Thank goodness, since this apartment is quite the little heatbox. If I ever decide to leave this crazy city I'm going somewhere cold.

3) Which brings me to hiberknitting. I've been on a hipster hat binge lately, and just last night completed my fourth hat while watching streaming episodes of Friday Night Lights. Jennifer got me irrevocably hooked on that show and it's perfect summer hibernation viewing.

4) The sweater, on the other hand... is stalled. I wanted a really open weave looking sweater which is a much looser gauge than the pattern and so I'm off on my row gauge (obviously) and it was too much headache for me to manipulate the math of the pattern right now. I'll figure it out some other time. Plus the yarn I picked was awfully shiny. I'm not giving up on this project but I'm not sure what I will do next on it, so for now it's on hiatus.

5) Speaking of hiatus, The Closer is back from break and starts the seventh season tonight. I didn't realize this was the final season. Oh, Brenda Leigh Johnson. I'll miss you. I have watched you in four residences at all different weird ass stages of life and you have not disappointed.

6) I think I might knit another pair of Noro gloves. I still have yarn left and I remember how much I loved that project last summer. Those gloves have probably gotten the most wear of all my handknit items, I wore them all winter long whether I needed them or not.

7) Summer also means hibernation for the bears (cats):

BOB NEEDS PEACE AND QUIET NOW.

Florida, part 2

Hello from sweaty Los Angeles which today feels more like Florida than I care to admit. Humidity -- you are no friend of mine. My hair loves you, though.

Today we have more pictures from my vacation to Florida where I visited with my brother and his family, chased their dog around the living room, tried new and unfamiliar things such as fried chicken sushi. I forgot to take a picture of it so you'll have to trust me on this, but one night we went out to dinner and there was sweet potato sushi (which was actually delicious) and fried chicken sushi, which was oddly confusing to my tastebuds. My brain was wondering why there was soy sauce instead of gravy. Old-fashioned brain!

But before sushi and after our drive on the beach where we DROVE A VEHICLE ON THE BEACH right next to human beings and it kind of freaked me out because it's so wrong and so right all at the same time, where was I? Oh yes, we were off to visit Ponce Inlet, Florida where we passed the beautiful Ponce De Leon Inlet Lighthouse:

IT WAS THAT BIG.

As we were driving past the lighthouse I thought I noticed people walking around the tee-tiny-far-away top, so I asked my nephew Andrew if visitors were allowed up the lighthouse. He looked at me for half a second, then yelled, "YES!" with the excitement only ten-year-old boys and dorky aunts get about such things. My brother was a good sport, ready to see the attractions in his home turf and we were off.

Guy and Andrew, looking cute.

The lighthouse has over 200 stairs that wind up in a tight little spiral. I'm not sure you can tell what a climb it is from this picture, but this was taken at the half-way point of the climb:

Just for a moment in our travelogue I want to take a personal detour and tell you how excited and happy I was that I could haul my butt up 200+ stairs in a cramped little room with no air conditioning in the middle of a Florida summer day and not die. In fact I not only lived, I was perfectly fine climbing those stairs at a pretty good clip. I was a little out of breath at the top but it was the normal stuff any person should feel after climbing up a ton of stairs all at one time. I sweated like I was a human waterfall, and that was gross, but I wasn't any more winded or worked up than the average Joe and I cannot tell you how EXCITED I was about this triumph of body over couch potato nature.

It reminded me in big bold letters why I wake up every day and go for a walk no matter what: I love being able to participate in life instead of watching from the sidelines.

Always waiting for "one day" in the future to do anything, waiting until you lose a few more pounds, waiting until next year, waiting until you have more money, waiting until you meet the right person, right job, right pair of jeans -- it's all a lie! It never comes. It's just an easy way to pretend you aren't who you are right now. I did it for years, just hibernating inside my one and only life. It becomes a habit, after a while it became my lifestyle. But I am here to tell you it's possible to turn that ship around. It doesn't happen overnight, and it requires effort but it's worth every minute. There's something indescribably satisfying about saying I WANT TO CLIMB UP THAT LIGHTHOUSE AND SEE THE VIEW! and knowing that you can actually do it. And then doing it.

This is personal stuff and not my most comfortable area of conversation. But I tell you all this because as long as you are breathing there is still time. If you had seen me this time last year you would have bet cash money on my dying by stairstep #14. I had become a spectator in my own life and there are all kinds of reasons, there are all sorts of twisted-up emotions and scared things, but after a while the root cause gets lost and just being fat and unhealthy becomes a problem of its own. I'm certainly not all the way sorted out. I still fantasize about "one day" out of habit, mostly. I still need some work under the hood. But dammit, I am not giving up. I'm not a total spectator anymore.

So I figure this is why God gave me a human body, to use it to climb up a metric buttload of stairs and see the beauty of nature and feel good about being alive and then go off and eat fried chicken sushi and tell you all about it.

Back to the travelogue! Here is the view from the top of the lighthouse, so worth it:

You get rewarded for the climb -- not just with a breathtaking view -- but with a big ol' breeze that cools you off:

Guy and Andrew, trying not to blow away.

"I've seen this lighthouse a hundred times from my boat," said Guy. "But I've never been inside it until just today. This is pretty darn cool, sis."

I agreed!

We stayed up there for a long while just enjoying the day. On the climb down you really notice how crazy steep the stairs are. I made the dudes pause midway so I could take a picture:

So it was a perfect vacation, a vacation full of laughing and talking and eating great food and conquering lighthouses and, just in case I didn't already mention it, driving a vehicle on a beach.

Oh, lonely traffic cone.

Can't leave without one last look at the Puff:

WHY COME NOBODY LOVE PUFF ENOUGH TO GIVE PUFF BACON SANDWICH?

FOUND IT

After a week of having no idea at all where my camera had run off to with my beautiful pictures of vacation and family, I discovered it hiding in the bottom of my shoe bowl.

So many exciting things about that sentence, including "shoe bowl."

Some years ago I acquired a huge rattan bowl sculpture thingy that I originally tried to make into a cat bed with no success. Eventually it became my shoe bowl and I keep it by the front door to hold all my orangutans shoes. How my camera came to rest at the bottom of it is a mystery to all of us, even the flip flops.

And now the camera is making some weird mechanical noises when the lens opens and shuts, nice!, but nevermind all that, because I have vacation pictures to share.

For my birthday my brother Guy gave me all his frequent flier miles and I went out to visit him and his wife Kelli and their kids, Brett and Andrew. It was so much fun! Everyone scoffed at me, "Florida in June! You so crazy!" but it was a great little vacation and fun was had by all.

Many shenanigans transpired between yours truly and one Prince Andrew:

He's ten, the perfect age. One cannot be depressed or lethargic or dumbstruck over one's momentous stupid birthday when one is clowning around and discussing Mortal Kombat with a ten year old boy. IMPOSSIBLE.

And I met Puff! This is Puff:

Behind the scenes, Puff silently endured some beautifying for the photo shoot:

My brother and his family live in this amazing beautiful home that would cost one bazillion dollars in Los Angeles County. Their pool has a waterfall, and it's all screened in so you don't have mosquitoes or dust or interlopers, which I think is brilliant:

Basically it was like staying at a five-star resort without the tedious little hassle of having to pay for it. And they drove me around everywhere. By my citified "I have a view of an alley" standards, their home is out in the lush countryside. How do I know this? I present to you their intersection:

Turtle, dude. At a crossroads. So much metaphor.

While I was there Guy took a day off work to show me the sights in Daytona Beach, which includes a beach that you can DRIVE ON. In a CAR. I don't need to tell you the forty-nine hundred reasons this is a bad idea and why it could never be legal in Los Angeles and how much traffic there would be here while people literally drove into the ocean and honked at seagulls and stuff, so I am just going to show you the pretty and also CRAZY pictures of my brother driving his enormous truck on THE BEACH.

Tomorrow I have more pictures of beautiful coastal Florida (seriously, Florida, your beaches are pretty terrific, even though you can apparently DRIVE on them, which is nuts) and I have pictures of a lighthouse which we climbed, my first ever. It had something like seven million stairs and I was completely fine with that but did not realize until too late that very old lighthouses in Florida are not air conditioned. Whoops.

But before I go... MORE PUFF.

Oh, the cute.

Bob

This photo was taken at my old apartment.

Back when I lived there. So sad.

But the picture is so Bob-a-riffic!

Humans at the zoo

This morning I was out early for a walk, it's supposed to warm up today and I like the cool mornings for walking. Later it will be near ninety degrees to welcome summer properly for the first official day of summer.

About midway through my walk I was at a corner waiting for the light to turn and I could hear sirens. There was a guy waiting at the light with me, and we watched as a police car with lights and sirens blazing went through the intersection followed by an ambulance, followed then by a mad rush of drivers who decided to just run the now-red light anyway, because by God, it was their turn! My turn, my turn, my turn!

I heard the guy waiting at the corner with me swear a little under his breath, then we both tried to cross the street but some lady in an SUV that she couldn't quite drive was doing some weird maneuver across three lanes and we had to wait in the middle of the street for her to figure out there were pedestrians in front of her car.

And I laughed. Because people here are crazy. And the guy heard me and started laughing too.

"I'm from Anchorage," he said. "I'm just in town for a few more days and, you know, I was gonna rent a car but no way. No way am I getting on the road with these people. I've seen people drive better in a blinding snowstorm."

We walked along the sidewalk for a few more steps and chatted about the traffic and the insane drivers and then he was back at his hotel and I was off on my walk. But this little conversation reminded me of something I saw on Friday.

On Friday afternoon I was driving down the boulevard, where it turns into Cahuenga and dips into Hollywood. There was traffic. Usually you don't come to a dead stop right there unless there's an accident or something, so as we all came to a crawl then a stop, I looked up ahead and I could see the flashing lights. Something in a store or restaurant must have been on fire, there were firemen and firetrucks everywhere.

Traffic was being funneled into one lane on the southbound side. In the big scheme of things this is not a crisis of traffic. Closing the 405 for Carmageddon is a crisis. Overpasses falling down is a crisis. Traffic momentarily diverted into one lane is not a crisis. But I watched in utter fascination as drivers in the cars ahead of me started freaking the hell out, "No! I am sitting still! Must be in constant motion! Fast! Because movement! is life!" and so a few of them honked (that did not help, by the way) and several just started doing weird shit like backing up, trying to flip a u-turn into oncoming traffic.

I glanced in my rearview mirror and just as I did there was a heavy thud as two cars about 50 yards back in traffic collided while both trying to make illegal u-turns. It was unfreakingbelievable.

Of all the animals in the animal kingdom, I think humans must be the most daffy. Here we had two people in two different cars, both so hurried and so unwilling to wait for three or even five minutes that they had to zip out, whip around and beat traffic. Except they crunched into each other and that little shortcut to save two minutes cost them so much. Having to pull over and wait for the police. Getting a police report. Filing a claim. Getting an estimate. Taking the car in for repairs. The five thousand envelopes that will arrive from the insurance company. Filling out the forms at the DMV. Paying the deductible.

All because they were too impatient to wait two or three or five minutes.

This is what happened last month when that lady hit my Jeep. After the crash she sat in her car, writing out her phone number for me, saying, "I was late for work." I remember looking at her with absolute disbelief, thinking You almost killed me because you were late for work?

That line keeps coming back to me at the oddest times. I'll see someone blow through a red light and hear that lady saying, I was late for work. And then I think, I hope they don't kill someone just because they couldn't bother to leave on time for work today. I've been walking almost everywhere since that lady hit my Jeep, sometimes I know consciously that I walk because I can, because if I hadn't seen her and if I hadn't been going the posted speed limit and if I hadn't slammed the breaks just when I did our collision would have ended a very different way. I go for my walks and I am so pleased my legs move. I don't even care that they're chubby legs or that I'm still short. I'm alive, I'm well, I'm walking. I've logged over a hundred miles on my shoes this month alone and it's only the 21st. Walk. Walk simply because I can.

Every day when I walk I see drivers who don't look into intersections before they turn. They speed into the crosswalk in their cars and the pedestrians have to scramble to get out of the way. I watch drivers zip through lights, there are lots of accidents on the boulevard. Lots of people are late, I guess, or just can't imagine sitting still for thirty whole seconds. I used to be like that a few years ago. Then I made the simple and life-changing decision to leave my house five minutes earlier. That's all. Every day I would simply leave five minutes earlier and then I didn't have to speed or run lights or be rushed or almost kill people every morning.

Five minutes can change your life. I walk almost everywhere now, but there are still days when I have to drive. I leave five minutes early, I take my time, I don't run red lights. I'm not in a panicked rush. That's my idea of hell, you know, always being in a rush, always having to be in constant motion, zipping past, honking at people, waving your tiny fist of rage at an old lady in a Prius. It's such a waste of energy. Crazy, daffy humans.

List

Lightpost art in L.A.

So far this morning I...

1) walked 8.21 miles. Took me 2 hours, 16 minutes.

2) drank one liter of water.

3) ate 1/4 of a watermelon.

4) smelled bad.

5) showered.

6) packed up some stuff to take to the post office.

7) petted six dogs. I love walking in L.A.

8) emailed everyone I know to tell them I walked eight miles in one go and lived to tell.

9) contemplated going back to bed, having already accomplished something.

10) wrote this ditty as a placeholder.

I do have actual things to tell you about breakfasts and sweater progress and beer but all of that has to wait until I go to the post office, run some errands and buy cat litter.

Poop waits for no man, or woman.

Some Friday Stuff

Day before yesterday when they were jackhammering away to China I was so frazzled and unnerved I grabbed my bag and left the apartment in a fluster. I was in my car and headed up the road before I even knew where I was going. Going to the movies was a spur of the moment decision, I picked "Beginners," it started at noon and the line was short. I sat alone in a row in the dark movie theater, the only other people near me were in the row just below, a man and a woman in their 60s.

We sat in that movie theater and cried a lot. I loved the movie but I had a few moments when I worried I was falling into the ugly, guffawing, snot cry. It's that kind of movie. I felt so self-conscious about crying then I looked at the man in the row ahead of me, I assumed he was there with his wife but I don't know, maybe she wasn't his wife, maybe I just assume everyone is paired off except me, and I saw this man remove his glasses and slowly wipe away his tears. I felt better. I felt like it was okay to just be a blathering mess right there in my popcorn.

After the movie I sat in my seat and felt a little worn out in a good way.

- - -

Mysteriously enough the entire construction crew did not show up yesterday and so there was no jackhammering next door, no whining tile saw piercing into my arteries all day. It was a remarkably good day. Even with the opera enthusiast in the building across the alley playing Sonata of Depression and Killing all afternoon at the highest possible volume, even with the helicopters and airplanes and car alarms and the ambulances and sirens it felt downright quiet here. So that was the purpose of the jackhammer, perhaps. It was put on this earth to make me appreciate the ambient noise of my neighborhood.

I had a list of errands to run yesterday and I did none of them, I opened the windows and stayed home all day, no radio, no TV, just the sound of typing, an occasional meow from a cat letting me know I was a boring companion. I listened to secondhand opera from across the alleyway, music which I kind of like though you have to admit it's a really weird soundtrack to an uncertain time in your life. If you were feeling at a crossroads in a big crazy city and found yourself in some temporary apartment with all your stuff piled up in a corner and opera was the soundtrack running beneath it all you might think, Okay. Are we about to see a scene from The Godfather or is the war about to start or the disaster about to hit or is this the hipster heartbreak scene or are the neighbors going to be revealed as vampires?

Or maybe you wouldn't think that. Maybe you would just be happy your neighbor isn't playing Ranchero music all day.

The crew is back today. The tile saw started up at 6:45 a.m.

- - -

I love Los Angeles in the June gloom. In the mornings it's so gray and dreary and heavy outside, and it's chilly like winter. People wear hoodies and sweaters and jackets and there's mist. The mist feels like a rainstorm because any kind of moisture feels significant here, that's what it's like to live in a place where it only rains eight days a year.

Today and tomorrow are probably the last of the June gloom. Soon summer will start and the morning fog will be long gone and the sun will bake everything dry and the wind will kick up leaves and dust and topple big trucks in the Cajon Pass. The hillsides will catch on fire.

Sometimes I wonder if I should leave Los Angeles and find someplace cool and gray and quiet. Then I wonder how do you leave a city like L.A.? Once you make it here and survive here and live here, love it here, how do you ever leave it? People probably feel that way about any place they call home. Even if the underlying soundtrack is opera.

In the jungle, the noisy jungle, the calico sleeps tonight

And finally here at 7:46 p.m. the jackhammer rests for the evening, the cement saw sits in its darkened truck, awaiting another day.

I explained to my brother Guy last week that I have a new appreciation for the torture techniques used at Guantanamo Bay -- particularly the use of loud, continuous noises. Today by 11 a.m. I was ready to convert to the church of Reggaeton and sell my first born and tell all my family secrets and even reveal the covert and well-protected hiding location of my one most valuable and prized skein of Tilli Thomas (with Austrian crystals, mind you) if only they would please please PLEASE make the noises stop.

In order to avoid selling my soul to the church of Marley, I took a 22-minute shower and listened to I GOT A POCKET GOT A POCKET FULL OF SUNSHINE on a loop. Loud enough to drown on the cement saw but not the jackhammer. Boy they are not messing around building their tunnel to China in the apartment complex. When actual magma starts spouting out and the dude wielding the jackhammer yells out for human assistance before he becomes trapped in the oozing fiery magma, I will bring my boombox to the scene and I will play:

I GOT A POCKET GOT A POCKET FULL OF SUNSHINE!I GOT A LOVE AN I KNOW THAT IT'S ALL MINE!

Tomorrow I am again waking at 4 a.m. to write for a few hours before the jackhammering starts, and the sawing. Oh the constant high-pitched whine of the tile saw has nothing on today's high-pitched scream of the metal tubing saw.

Sometimes I have to leave because it is making. me. crazy. The real crazy, not the funny, charming crazy which we'll one day start calling "eccentric" when I finally make some serious money.I'm talking Unabomber crazy over here. But when I try to leave my apartment the entire work crew of men -- about ten or twelve men --who seem plucked right out of a novel set at the day laborers section of the Reseda Home Depot -- all stop whatever they were doing loudly, and then simultaneously every man turns to stare at me as I walk by on the sidewalk.

It has this mysterious effect on me: I want to tear out their eyeballs with their jackhammers and then throw them down in a pit of frothing, molten hot magma. Is that so wrong?

Last week I tried writing at a coffee shop. I tried five coffee shops and one weird bakery/ice cream parlor that has a bathtub in the hallway. The point here is that these are not quiet places in Hollywood. These are places for homeless smells, panhandling, and lots of men and women talking about their screenplays, their craft, their headshots, who is booking a national right now, their agents, their dog's agents.

Truly it makes for wonderful anthropological outings but isn't productive writing time. Finally I resorted to writing in my car. I parked at a large, leafy quiet park and the weather was nice and cool last week so as long as my laptop battery lasted it was the next best thing to home. This week is too hot, though.

I will not be defeated. I will wake up early, write in the wee and quiet hours, go out for a long walk the moment they start their symphony of ear-splitting noises. When I walk past them I will be on my "phone" discussing "a terrible flare-up of Mucho Bad Y Mucho Contagioso Fiebre! So Sad!"

And maybe later if we're lucky they'll hit an underground volcano -- a scientific fact, duh! Just watch any movie called "Volcano" set in Los Angeles! -- and the magma will begin to ooze and Tommy Lee Jones will have to instruct everyone to abandon the construction site and let the magma seal it in for good. And after a few days of reporters and news helicopters and well, magma, the neighborhood will go back to whatever passes as "quiet" in this crazymaking, loud-ass, constantly pulsating city. AND I WILL GET SOME WRITING DONE. I got a pocket got a pocket full of sunshine!

- - -

This next portion is brought to you by Apple Computers which are so easy even a cat can use the webcam!

ONE: SOBA APPROACHES THE WEBCAM



"Is this thing ON?"

- - -

TWO: SOBA HAS AN IDEA

"I'm having a thought. A wonderful thought...."

- - -

THREE: SOBA CAMERA FRONT, CLOSE-UP, SPEAKS:

"Do we have a time machine? With GPS? I NEED A TIME MACHINE."

Pillowtop Cat Is Comfortable

Pillowtop cat would like breakfast in bed, please.