Foot Bone Connected to the Head Bone

No one can make me happy about working at my crummy job.

For the past few months, due to mismanagement and bad planning, my job has been a brutal nightmare. If I were not already highly skilled and efficient at what I do, I would surely have fallen apart. But the fact that I can make up for failures elsewhere in The Corporation doesn't mean I want to, or that I enjoy it, or that I should have to. I have complained about this all I dare in previous posts, so some who are reading this now are aware of my attitude. I'm a little grumpy.

Now, things are more or less back to normal and I don't have to use my super powers to get the work done, and this annoys me, too. Mind you, I don't take credit for this turn of events - it was just a happy accident. The various managers, supervisors, vice presidents and directors forgot to screw things up this month.

I refuse to act busy, so I find myself going around looking for things to do. At the Post Office or on a Teamster job, this might get me killed, but at my job they already think I'm a crazy misfit, so they barely notice.

I ran out of things to do by mid-afternoon, so I checked my email a thousand times, redesigned a form I want to start using, read a bunch of blogs and commented on a few, and then I just sat in my office for a while, sort of becoming one with the furniture. I tried to make my mind a blank, and it seemed to be working. But I looked in there and the thought that I found was this: I wonder if I can touch the top of my head with my big toe.

Think about it: The lowly foot getting to meet the head, home of the brain. They probably haven't seen each other since I was a very little baby, made of some kind of highly flexible rubber. The only communication they've had for all these years would be the brain sending down orders to walk, or run, or stop. One-way orders, no discussion, no compromise, no warning. The only way the foot would have had any input is if it sent pain signals, or if it simply broke. If I could touch my head with my foot it would be like a chauffeur getting a sit-down with the CEO. Who knows what good might come of it?

Remembering my psychocybernetics, though, I thought it would be the better part of valor to simply imagine vividly that I was touching the top of my head with my foot. Because as you know, the mind cannot distinguish between a real event and one vividly imagined, and besides, I didn't want to be carried out by my colleagues and driven to a hospital.

So I looked at my foot, gauged the distance and the bending that would be involved, and it only took a few seconds for me to say "Damn! I could actually do this."

Of course, that was just a theory, and it had to be tested. So I closed my office door, took off my shoes and got down on the floor, and yes, it turns out that I can touch the top of my head with my big toe. Not only that, but I can do it with either foot. OK, I admit I had to grab my ankle and drag my foot up there, and I can't put both feet up there at the same time, but what do you want? I'm putting it on my resume.

Sadly, the foot-brain conference did not take place. The foot got one look at the hideous haircut I got the other day, and went back to the garage, laughing.

Promised Land, Chapter 1

...continued from here. The story starts here.

The third bus dropped him off in the city of Venice.

He'd been riding and changing buses for nearly three hours, inching his way across the endless city toward Jake's place at the beach. He was surprised to discover that he wasn't the only person in Los Angeles who didn't know where the hell he was. Even the people who lived here didn't know anything. He'd given the first driver Jake's address, and the guy had glanced at him for a split second, then turned back to his driving.

"Where is that?" Friendly, but stupid.

"I don't know. I was hoping you'd tell me." No sense pissing him off so soon. "Venice?"

That was the magic word. The bus rumbled twenty or thirty blocks while the guy hashed out a plan, talking to himself the whole time, working through the possibilities. Eventually he came up with an itinerary, involving a couple of transfers. It was barely comprehensible, but it worked.

By the time the kid got off at Pacific Avenue it was early afternoon and the sky had turned a bright, hazy gray, fading to brown at the horizon, when you could see it. It was hot, but there was no visible sun. There was a taste in the air that the kid had never known before, since he had never been less than a thousand miles from the sea, and now he was just two blocks from it. The bus lumbered away, and he stood there and looked after it.

A seagull wheeled far overhead. A siren howled in the distance. But for that there was no sound and no movement on the street. The Pacific Ocean lurked unseen just on the other side of some buildings to his left, and the lack of anything beyond it made him feel as if he were standing at the end of the world. The corner he was on featured two broken down apartment buildings, an empty lot and a corner grocery. He went into the little shop to buy cigarettes and a Coke and to ask about the address he was looking for. The guy at the counter was 40, completely bald and muscled like Marciano. His chest rippled under his shirt when he pushed the change across the counter. He shrugged at the address. "It's down Pacific." The kid borrowed an opener for the Coke, drained most of the bottle, then set out to find Jake.

It was a neighborhood of flaky stucco apartments, four and eight to a building, jammed side by side and all of them touching the sidewalk. The street curved gently to the right and disappeared a few blocks ahead. Parked cars lined both sides. As he rounded the curve, things started to happen.

An ambulance overtook him from behind and raced past. Two boys on bicycles followed, and behind that a police black-and-white went by, too fast for the narrow, curving street. Rounding the curve himself, he saw the official vehicles parked all over the street. Ambulance, couple of squad cars, paramedics, fire truck. Uniforms all over the place. As always, the cops had drawn a small crowd, and now they were engaged in crowd control. They were standing in various heroic poses around the scene, refusing to speak to the curious neighbors. The kid had been looking at addresses, and now he saw that he must be very near his destination.

The cops seemed to be guarding one of the apartment buildings, and they seemed to be too late. The windows on the ground floor were smashed, glass and pieces of the frames blown outward and strewn on the sidewalk. The front door was hanging by one hinge. The kid couldn't see the address on the building, and then he had gone as far as he could without knocking down one of the cops.

Through the broken doorway came the ambulance attendants rolling a stretcher, it's occupant under a sheet and showing only a bloody face. As they rushed past the dangling door it twisted off it's remaining hinge and fell face up on the sidewalk, revealing the four tin numbers tacked there. It was Jake's address. As the stretcher went by, the bloody face looked up at the kid.

"Hey Alvin," it said. "When did you hit town?" Then Jake was gone, stuffed into the waiting ambulance.

Holding the Phone

Paper towels, huh? What would we do without them?

If I had been a pioneer I would have stolen a bunch of land from whoever was there ahead of me, and I would have tamed that land, and planted it, or mined it, or raised cattle. Whatever the hell I was doing outside, the little woman would have to be in the kitchen, cooking for me and the men. And when she spilled something she'd have to clean it up with a rag, which would then have to be washed. Until it was washed, it would sit around and stink, or perhaps get moldy. Jeez, what a mess!

But not if you have paper towels. If you have a lot of big, sturdy paper towels, you can wipe up any mess you make, and then just throw them away! Spill some beans on the wood-fired cookstove? No problem. OK, I think we're all on the same page now. Let's move on.

I went to Supercuts this morning, a chain of haircutting shops where English is a second language. You never know when you tell them how to cut your hair if they get it or not. "Take a half-inch off" might mean "leave a half-inch on." They always act like they know what you're saying, but I don't understand anything they say, so why should I expect them to understand me? And let me just tell you right now that I have nothing but the highest regard for those who have immigrated to the U.S. from other places and are making their way in this strange land, getting jobs, buying houses, learning a new culture. Greatest respect. But now I am sporting perhaps the worst haircut of my life. It could be the worst one in Los Angeles, although - and I can't verify this - I might be very hip in Cambodia. I don't know how such a small amount of hair can be made to stick out so forcefully in all directions.

But I am not proud. I took my weird haircut like a man and went on to the rest of my errands. The main one was I had to exchange a telephone that I bought at Radio Shack. Since I bought it at Radio Shack, I saved all the packaging and the receipt, because I figured I might have to take it back.

This was not a cell phone, but a regular wireless home phone. It has big buttons, though, and a volume control, stuff that's hard to find. I took the phone in to the store, where two pleasant-looking young people were standing behind the counter. This is what I told them:

"I bought this phone four days ago, and it seems to have a problem. I charged it for 12 hours, and it went completely dead in less than an hour. I charged it for another 12 hours, and it lasted a bit longer, but I have never gottten even four hours of use out of a charge. So I think it's defective, and I'd like to exchange it for another one just like it."

To my surprise, tboth clerks agreed, and one of them went into the stockroom to get me a new phone, while the other one started to ring up the transaction. Alas, the price of the phone had gone up in the few days since I had made my purchase. This was a serious issue for the Radio Shack Kids. They huddled over the register for a few minutes discussing this impossible customer service conundrum: How can we charge this guy an extra 20 bucks now that we've agreed that his phone is defective?

They had to call tech support. I'm not kidding. They had to make three phone calls and wait on hold for five minutes each time. One of the calls was because they had forgotten to ask something on the previous call. But I was patient. I was in the right and God was on my side, it was a beautiful day and I wasn't going to ruin it by pulling out a weapon and demanding justice.

It turns out the issue was that the phone had gone up twenty dollars, but there was a twenty-dollar mail-in rebate on it. If they changed the price for me, the computer would still have printed out my rebate form, thus I might get away with something. Rule Number One in modern corporate sales: Never let the customer get away with anything. The solution, no doubt provided by the president of the company was this: Change the price for the man, and keep the rebate slip. The clerk who finally did this for me and handed me my new phone actually tried to convince me that he had wanted to do it that way from the start.

Why then, did he have to talk on the phone for twenty minutes while I stood there cooling my heels? Then it hit me: The hidden cameras in the store were taking pictures of my grotesque haircut, and it was being emailed to all the stores so the schmoes who had to work on Sunday could have a laugh.

Promised Land, Prologue

The kid hit town on the Super Chief from Kansas City, mid-morning in L.A.

Union Station, maybe he'd get back there some day, look around. Some kind of museum, nothing like it back home. He'd never ride the train again, though. Fucking snooty porters. A buck for a pillow. He'd rolled up his heavy coat and slept on that. Never wear that fucking thing again, either. Not in the promised land.

First day of summer in Los Angeles, and you could hardly see the end of the block, fucking air was so thick. It burned, too. Old timers would tell him You shoulda been here in fifty-seven, fifty-eight. Air was so bad it'd chip your teeth. Fuck them. This was bad enough. He could barely open his eyes. It felt like he was in a burning house. He walked out the front, past the cab stand, dropped his duffel bag and guitar case and hung the coat on a parking meter. Dug through the pockets for the phone number he had written down, found it, and went looking for a pay phone, leaving the coat behind. Who needed it here? He'd get something nice in L.A., something with some eyeball, who needs the farmer suit?

First things first, though. Call Jake. Jake had been out here for a year, knew the ropes, said he had a gig for the kid, make some real money for a change. Hah. Money for a change. Tired of working for change, those dives in K.C. Fucking drunks didn't know their butts from page eight, comes to good music. Night after night in those dives, he couldn't play bad enough to bother anybody. He tried, too, at first a wrong note in an old standard, then whole wrong chords. Nobody noticed, fucking drunks puttin' their cheap hustles on each other, telling him tone it down, man, people are tryin' ta talk.

Fuck you, he thought. People are tryin' to play music. No more of that shit out here. They had good clubs here on the coast, famous places, clean places, where people came to listen. Places like Shelley's, and The Lighthouse, and up north The Hungry i. He was already thinking the coast, trying it on, rolling it around in his mind. I'm on the coast.

He found a phone booth, went in and dialed, his eyes burning and watering. Five rings, six. He fished a Lucky out of his shirt pocket, lit it with the old Zippo. Eight rings. He hadn't told Jake he was coming, and now he started to regret it. He thought he'd surprise his big brother. Hey, man, I'm here! Maybe it wasn't such a hot idea. Ten rings. He hung up the phone. He was sweating now, and the muggy brown air felt good when he opened the door of the booth.

Jake lived in Venice. The kid still had the postcard, a couple of broads in skimpy bikinis, Greetings From Venice Beach, California! Fucking Venice, like that place in Italy. Nothing was real out here. Those broads looked real, though. The address on Pacific Avenue. It's not much, Jake had said, but I'm never home anyway. Never home. Probably should have picked up on that, he thought now. He dropped the cigarette on the curb, put the sun at his back, and started walking.

In no time he was lost. The streets wouldn't let him keep the sun at his back, and soon the sun was straight overhead anyway. Good thing he'd dumped the coat. He rubbed his eyes for the hundredth time with his sweaty hands, and cursed the heat and the filthy air. A city bus lurched toward him, spewing black smoke. He had fifty bucks or so left in his pocket, lucky those porters had let him keep that much, a half pack of Lucky Strikes, his eyes and his feet burned and he had no idea where the hell he was. The bus door opened and the driver looked out at him, bored. The kid looked up and down the street, but there was no one coming to his rescue. He stepped aboard, heading for the promised land.

Continued here.

Lesbian Love Slaves Who Like It Both Ways!

That ought to bring in a little traffic.

I know what you're thinking: Both ways? Doesn't he know there are more than two ways? I thought Larry Jones was a man of the world. How is it possible that he thinks that both ways would cover it?

OK, you got me. I was planning to write about just two ways tonight, in lascivious detail, until you were drooling on the edge of your seat, begging for more. Then I was going to give you more! Sure, I know about those other ways. I may even have tried a few of them. Or at least in a psychocybernetics kind of way, I might have imagined them so vividly that I now believe I actually did them.

Did you know the brain has a hard time telling the difference between things that really happened to you and things that you have vividly imagined? Makes sense, when you think about it. The arms and legs, and, uh, other parts are out there taking care of business, walking, sky-diving, getting in fights, getting laid, shooting baskets, and what does the brain know? It has to believe what it's being told about what's going on "out there." If you tell it (by vividly imagining it) that you are shooting a thousand jump shots a day, and you're hitting most them, your brain will eventually start to think "Damn, I'm getting good at this! I'll bet I could join a team and be the star player!" The brain would start to "remember" hitting all those shots, exactly as it remembers real stuff that happened, like going to the bathroom a thousand times a day (if you do that, although I don't recommend it).

Sometimes I wonder how much of my past really happened, and how much I just made up and told myself the story so many times that my brain is totally convinced. Like, was I really on Apollo 13? Did I ever perform at The Apollo? I don't know anymore.

One thing I'm sure of is that the babe I saw at the grocery store tonight was looking at me. I know because I was looking at her, and I didn't want her to feel uncomfortable at me checking her out, so whenever she caught me I pretended I was just looking at something else that happened to be right over her shoulder, like the boxes of soup. Did you know that soup comes in boxes now?

Anyway after a while I realized that she was catching me way too many times for it to be a coincidence. Then I started to feel all cocky and cool: Hey, she's checking me out. So, as we're pushing our carts up and down the aisles and we keep being in the same department at the same time, I got bolder and let her catch me red-handed, as it were, a couple of times, and I gave her my shy smile. It had to be another crazy coincidence that she headed straight for the checkout counter right after that.

But now I'm wondering if I really have lesbian love slaves, how many ways I've given it to them, if they like it, and what's on for tomorrow. Hey! Wipe that drool off the edge of your seat.

Not In My Back Yard

My back yard, in fact my entire neighborhood, is alive with springtime.

Trees which have been bare for months are undergoing their annual rebirth, sprouting the sweetest bright green leaves. Feral tomcats are feeling amorous and serenading the domestic females up and down the block. The asphalt skateboarders are out in force, methodically practicing the same tricks over and over, pressing daylight hours to the very limit and daring passing motorists to run them down. These surly boys were just toddlers last fall, weren't they?

Now that Daylight Time has gone into effect, I hear the many nesting birds outside my bedroom window, chattering excitedly while I am trying to stretch my all-too-short nights' sleep a few more minutes. This morning I heard a couple of starlings going at it over location, location, location.

She: There's a cat in this yard. I just don't feel good about building here.

He: I'm telling you, honey, I've checked it out, and the lady across the alley throws birdseed out every day. We'll build the nest in a tree. No cat can catch us, and we'll have free food. What could be better?

She: That's what you said last year about the eaves of that Mexican restaurant. Free tortilla chips, you said! But you didn't think about the busboy with the BB gun, did you? I still have a pellet in my butt!

He: Nag, nag, nag. I'm the one who has to go get the twigs and the grass and the gum wrappers to bulid this thing, while you just sit here and complain.

She: Complain?! That's a good one, Mister I-don't-want-to-sit-on-those-eggs! I ask one little favor and you act like you can't be bothered.

He: You have no idea how hard it is to find worms in this town. You'd think grass seed would be good enough for you, and the occasional crust of bread, but no, not for The Princess. I fry my feathers flying all over the place looking for extra special treats for you, and all I want when I come back to the nest is a little appreciation --

She: -- Appreciate THIS, Mr. Big Shot! YOU stay here all day guarding the eggs and watching for that damned cat, and I'll cruise around town, wasting time with my NO-GOOD FRIENDS!

He: You leave my friends out of this.

She: I'd like to. If you spent half the time here taking care of things as you do out on the telephone wire by the pool hall -- get away from me!

He: Aw, c'mon, baby. You want me to "take care of things," don't you?

She: Mmmm, yeah, Big Boy...

So goes the circle of life in the trees. But a more alarming conversation seems to be getting underway in the back yard - that between Molly the Cat and a couple of mockingbirds who may be moving in.

Last spring, mockingbirds built a nest somewhere in our vicinity - we never found the damned thing - and proceeded to claim as their own the entire region in the name of the Mockingbird King and all of Mockingbirdland. They perched on various trees, on wires, on rooftops and weathervanes, and every time they saw Molly the Cat they attacked.

At first, the attacks were verbal. Scurrilous they were, but as I told Molly the Cat, words will never hurt you. Upon spotting the cat, one of the birds would fly down from God knows where to the nearest perch that was out of reach and issue the first warning, a one-syllable epithet that sounded an awful lot like the word "SHIT!" all the while giving M the C the old mockingbird stinkeye. "SHIT!" they would shout, followed by a low-pitched, scary call reminiscent of an angry old man saying "crap," but drawing it out real long for effect: "Craaaaaaaaap. Cra-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-p!"

The verbal attacks went on for several weeks. Molly the Cat started to develop a nervous tick, and she would never go outside without standing in the doorway for a minute or so, staring out in fear.

I did some pissed-off bird research, and I discovered that mockingbirds are known not only as beautiful singers, but they have an uncanny ability to learn the songs of other birds, that they seem to have an abiding love for music, often staying up late, drinking and singing as many as fifty songs that they have learned, just for the pure joy of learning. And drinking and singing, I assume.

But, ominously, I also learned that mockingbirds are highly territorial, and will go up against almost any animal who ventures near the area they have claimed as their own.

Sure enough, one day I walked out the back door with M. (she had gotten so she wouldn't go outside without an escort), and I heard a sharp "SHIT!" from the garage roof. Then from next door the other mockingbird came swooping in, while the first one said "Craaaaaaaaap" in that threatening way. While I was distracted by that, the second bird came buzzing down at me, flapping and squawking and missing me by about an arm's length. Then they both went up to a nearby overhead wire and glared down at us, cursing "SHIT!" and "Cra-a-a-a-a-a-a-p...." Molly the Cat bolted for some bushes, and got buzzed by both birds before she made it to shelter.

This went on for SIX WEEKS, while the mockingbabies were incubated, then hatched, then weaned, making the back yard pretty miserable for me, and totally uninhabitable for Molly the Cat. I don't mind saying that I was getting pretty exasperated. I went back to my internet research, to see if there was some humane way I could get rid of these little bullies, and that's when I discovered to my horror that mockingbirds will sometimes raise TWO BROODS IN A ROW in the same location in one season. Sometimes.

OK, you know what happened, right? Right. A second brood. More squacking, cursing, swooping and pecking. Six more weeks, effectively ruining the whole summer before they finally left, sometime in September, although they didn't say goodbye, so I don't remember exactly.

Who the fuck do these mockingbirds think they are, anyway? We were here first. We are PAYING for this land, these trees, this house, the very garbage they eat. It got to the point where they would spot Molly the Cat when she was just looking out the window, and yell "SHIT!" at her. She was in counseling until January.

And now it looks like they are back. They must have liked it last year. Maybe I was too gentle. Maybe I was a sucker. Yeah, that's it. I was a chump. Well, this year - No more Mr. Nice Guy! If they yell "SHIT!" at me...

Who am I kidding? I couldn't even find their nest last year, and even if I could, I'm probably too soft to take any irrevocable action.

Besides, those little bastrds are badass. SHIT!

...Same As the Old Boss

Now I have no boss at all.

The place where I work has always been pretty loose. We are now part of a huge corporation, having been bought out a few years ago, but we get our part of the job done, so we have mostly been allowed to do it our own way. The main difference is we now have to report every breath we take on poorly-designed Microsoft Excel spreadsheet forms that we get from headquarters. It took them two years to figure out how to protect the cells with formulas in them. For all that time the spreadsheets came with warnings: "DO NOT TYPE IN THE CELLS WITH FORMULAS!!"

This laissez faire mindset has extended to the relationship between the worker bees and the local management. Basically, management is ignored, unless they threaten to fire you, and then you kiss enough ass to keep your job, and soon you can go back to ignoring them. In general, this suits the managers OK, since they don't know anything about hiring, firing, training or motivating anyway, and being ignored relieves them of having to either learn something about managing or act like they know something about it, and gives them more time to check the horse racing results on the internet.

The good thing about a really big corporation (I think this is true, although this is my first experience with this sort of thing), is that nobody you meet in the halls knows exactly who you are, or, more importantly, who you know. You might be friends with the Regional Vice President. So if you maintain the right attitude and a certain swagger in walk and talk, most of the suits will leave you alone, because what if you're important? At the same time, of course, I don't get to browbeat anyone I meet in the halls, for much the same reason. So there's good news and bad news, I guess.

Much of the way things work is like an army. No one knows what you're doing, and you don't know what they're doing, and none of you have been told exactly why you're doing it, and it has to be done that way because, goddamnit, that's the way it has to be done. In an army, though, everyone wears uniforms and insignia, so you know who gets to boss whom, thus taking away the natural camouflage we in corporate life enjoy. We have the same confusion as they do in the army, but we also don't know who's in charge.

So now the Big Guy at our location has been moved Somewhere Else, and he has not been replaced. Essentially, there is no one at the helm. We don't know when or if a new Big Guy will be appointed. We know that The Corporation has a penchant for hiring young, eager college grads for jobs that they might be ready for in ten years. We assume it's because they cost less than people who actually know what they are doing. But we don't even have a whiff of a taste of a water-cooler rumor as to what the fuck is going to happen.

So now, as might be expected when there is no leadership whatsoever, everybody is ignoring everybody else, no one knows if the new Big Guy is already among us, or even if it's one of us, and the miracle is that the place still functions pretty much as it always has. But I actually have no one to report to. I have to think up work, assign it to myself, with a deadline, complain about the workload (to myself), miss the deadline, give myself some shit and promise it'll never happen again.

Sa-weeet.

You Don't Owe Me Nothing

It was wrong of me, I know, to think I could know you, any part of you that you did not reveal.

Foolish to think I could tell what you were telling, to feel any real friendship, to sense any camaraderie. Not your fault that I tried, probably not my fault, either. I'm just wired that way. A little pseudo soul-baring, and certain synapses fire. The feeling is as real as a dream. I carry it along from sleeping to waking, and it is part of me, like I know my phone number, like I know what drawer contains the knives. For a little while it is scribbled on a scrap of paper and pulled out when needed; for a little while I have to pull out all the drawers, looking for the knives. But then it is second nature, my fingers know the number, I go instinctively for the correct drawer, and the knife is in my hand.

It's like that, but it's not that.

We never knew each other. We never were friends. The whole thing is - not a sham, exactly. Just... not anything. Like Los Angeles, there is no there there. I can't blame you, because in a way you weren't in on it. It all happened inside me, flecks of matter flying through my empty universe, pieces falling into other pieces, exploding apart and coming back together again under the spell of gravity, circling each other until something began to take shape. I should have known it wasn't real, because it never settled down, kept changing shape in a way that real things do not. Real things come into focus and let you get a good look at them, let you return to them and find them essentially unchanged.

Evolving, but the same inside.

And you said from the start it wasn't real, that it was all imagined. I just didn't know how much of the imagining was mine.

Bad Day on the River

I think I know how Charlie Allnut felt.

Humphrey Bogart and Kate Hepburn starred in The African Queen in 1951. He plays drunken riverboat Captain Charlie Allnut, she's prim and proper spinster missionary Rose Sayer, and they are in Africa. His boat is a filthy, decrepit, 30-foot tub called The African Queen. In 1914, as World War 1 gets underway, they begin a journey, alone together, down the river. All I can say about the story is that they must get down the river to the lake at the end. It's a matter of life and death. They must overcome many obstacles, but there is one scene in particular I am thinking of today.

On it's way down river, the Queen becomes mired in weeds and muck, and surely they will die in the jungle if they don't get moving. The broken down old steam engine can't make any headway in the shallow, overgrown river, and the current isn't strong enough to move the boat. Reluctantly, Charlie climbs overboard, attaches a line to the boat, and slowly begins to tow it himself, trudging slowly through the muddy river, a surly anti-hero, doing the right thing in spite of himself.

Eventually he climbs back into the boat for a break, and in a moment they both notice that he is covered with leeches!! They are all over his body, black, slimy slugs, tightly attached to his flesh and -- say it with me -- sucking his blood. He cries and dances in horror and revulsion, slapping at himself and begging Rose to "get 'em off me, get 'em off me!!" Together they peel the disgusting things off, and Charlie's near-psychotic episode gradually subsides. When he can stop shaking from fear, Charlie and Rose must reassess their situation. The boat is still dead in the water, and there is still no current. It is clear what has to happen. Charlie, a look of infinite sorrow on his face, takes up the rope, slips over the side into the leech-infested river, and begins towing again. Only this time he knows what will happen to him while he is in the water.

That's how I'll feel when I go to my job tomorrow.

What Are the Odds?

I'm going to be in a car wreck.

I'm a good driver and I drive all over Southern California. Contrary to what the rest of the nation might surmise from other evidence, we are mostly good drivers here. We're not as aggressive and feisty as those in New York or Iowa - you know who you are. When arriving at a traffic jam, we are aware that leaning on the horn will not make the problem go away. We are familiar with the concept of "joining the queue," and we do so, not happily, but with a resignation born of experience, and the knowledge that, what the fuck, we're on the freeway and we can't get off and go around the mess.

Oh, sure, there were a few bizarre incidents in the early nineties, road rage things where people would pull over to discuss some real or imagined slight, and wind up throwing down on each other with automatic pistols and sawed-off shotguns. There was a bumper sticker going around in those days that said "Don't shoot! I'll pull over." But that craziness notwithstanding (and yes, that is the first time I've ever used that word, and I'm not really sure what it means), we are a pretty sane, stay-in-the-lane bunch of motorists here.

We have to be, because there is no public transportaion to speak of -- no buses, streetcars, subways, monorails, taxis or trains. And walking is just... weird. Plus, everything is twenty miles away. So if you want to go anywhere, you have to drive. And we have embraced this concept since Day One and with such gusto that now there's like three cars for every person in Los Angeles. If you have a party and invite forty people, you'd better hire valet parkers because your guests will bring a hundred cars. You can see what a mess L.A. would be if we weren't patient, courteous and skilled behind the wheel.

But I live on a quiet residential street in an old part of town, old meaning the houses were built in the 1940's. (Hey, this ain't Europe.) In my neighborhood we don't have driveways along the sides of our houses, leading into our spacious three-car garages. We don't have driveways anywhere, and we don't have three-car garages. What we have is alleys, behind the backyards, and clunky old one-car garages that open onto the alleys.

Alleys are cool. You can find neat stuff out there. If you want to scavenge aluminum cans to sell to the recycler, the alley's your hangout. You can find old broken-down office furniture, corrugated fiberglass deck awnings, brushed aluminum Melitta coffeemakers that might work, if you can find the matching stainless steel carafe. And the fronts of the houses have a cleaner look, having virtually disavowed all knowledge of the automobile culture of Southern California. Lawn transitions gently into lawn and the sidewalks are unbroken by driveway entrances. Very upper class. (One drawback is that if you're a beginning extreme skateboarder, there are no driveway entrances on which to practice your jumps. Personally I don't see this as a drawback.)

My neighborhood can be described as "sleepy." My street is only wide enough for one car to pass if there are cars parked on either side, and no one complains. We are not trying to get the city to widen our street. We are happy with our street. We look way down the block as we're driving, and if we see a neighbor approaching in the opposite direction, we find a place to pull over, or they do, and we inch past each other, waving and smiling like the good, happy neighbors we are. And mind you, this vehicular face-off hardly ever happens, in our sleepy neighborhood.

The alley, however, is another story. By now you're wishing it's a story I would tell some other time, and you are thinking of clicking that "Next Blog" button, aren't you? Well, go ahead. I'll just tell it to myself, like I do so many things.

In the alley, people forget that they live in a sleepy neighborhood. Instead, they think they are in the chase scene from "The French Connection." Or maybe "Bullitt." They careen down the alleys, swerving left and right around the trash cans and scaring the living daylights out of the pigeons that my neighbor-across-the-alley feeds. The alleys, they think, are deserted. The alleys are made for speed. There is, to be fair, almost no traffic in my alley. But what there is goes by mighty quickly.

I am one of the few people in California (maybe anywhere, can I get some feedback on this?) who uses his garage for his car. The garages up and down my back alley are used variously as storage units, workshops, home gyms, rumpus rooms and guest houses. My garage has my car in it, and it sports almost completely blind access to the alley, due to the high brick walls that form the boundaries of my back yard. When backing out of my garage, I can't see what's going on in the alley until I am well out into it.

And here is where I have to ask, "What are the fucking odds?"

I inch glacially back out of the garage once or twice every day, so let's call it 45 times a month. I haven't done the math on this, but from the number of cars in my town, and the amount of alley traffic I have observed, it seems to me that maybe once every million times I leave my garage, another vehicle would be driving - careening - down the alley and arrive at the point in space where the back of my car is at the same time that I do.

And yet, despite the overwhelming odds against this happening, it happens at least once a month. The garage door opens, I start to back out, and just as I do, someone comes blasting down the alley at about fifty miles per hour. Because I have been inching slowly, they have seen me and somehow manage to miss me, much as they manage to miss the pigeons and the trash cans. But they don't slow down (maybe because Popeye Doyle is in hot pursuit). I know I could sit on the wall back there all day and not see a single car go by. So really, what are the odds of a near-miss like this happening even once in my life? And yet it happens all the time.

So I have resigned myself to the belief that I am going to be in an accident. Due to it's inevitability I'm not sure I can actually call it an accident. I mean, if you know something is going to happen, can it be accidental? And now that I know it's going to happen, will I unconsciously do things to make it happen, like back out faster? Maybe I should just panel the garage and put a refrigerator and a television out there, park on the street and save myself the insurance deductible, not to mention the uncomfortable deposition and three years of legal wrangling, all the while wearing a huge neck brace that makes me the object of derision at restaurants.

What are the odds of that happening?