Oh, Joseph, I'm So Tired

Okay, this is the title of one of my favorite stories by Richard Yates, and if you haven't read his short stories, you are missing something.

But this post is to rant, because I'm so tired, tired of waiting, tired of waiting for these damn magazines that take for freaking ever to respond to story submissions. You send out your work and then wait and wait and wait, often to be rewarded months later by a fucking form rejection. Every morning I open my computer breathlessly to check my email (all my submissions at the moment are electronic) and all I get are Facebook things and bill statements and ads from Land's End or Amazon.

But it's going to rain in L.A.! Yay! Yay!

Sometimes You Just Have to Pee in the Sink

Bukowski a Nazi sympathizer?
Charles Bukowski lived in a bungalow on DeLongpre in Hollywood from 1963 to 1972, and now the city of Los Angeles wants to make it a cultural landmark, much to the chagrin of the current owners, who were trying to sell it as a $1.3 million tear-down.

Co-owner Victoria Gureyeva, who is Jewish, says Bukowski "loved Hitler" and she's not going to let L.A. turn the property into a landmark. She says she will enlist the help of local Jewish activists to prevent it. Read the details here.

Maybe turning it into a dive bar would be a more appropriate homage. I'd raise a glass or six to that.

Kalifornia

So. A friend of a friend of mine, an insufferable, reckless woman, or so I hear, decided to conduct a social experiment and investigate Medical Marijuana. California has approved the "medical" use of marijuana, a Compassionate Use Act, but the Feds still say pot's illegal, even though the state says it's fine, and we have the Kalifornia Konundrum.

Here's the deal:
To obtain medical marijuana you have to go to a health professional, usually an MD, who "recommends" your use of marijuana for Whatever Ails You. Whatever Ails You can be just about anything, and in my FOAF's case, what ailed her was arthritis. The doctor, a thirty-something, very serious, stocky man who explained he would never, ever recommend cannabis for recreational use, only for What Ails You, spent a long time with my FOAF, so I hear, explaining the many ways to manage pain, and just when she thought he was going to turn her down for not taking enough Aleve, he wrote the recommendation, an officially sealed document on good ecru colored stock, and valid for 1 year. For this, the reckless arthritic woman paid $150 cash. She told my friend that the clinic waiting room was teeming. She said it was a diverse group, from the elderly and the rickety to another MD (attired in a suit and tie) patiently awaiting his "recommendation", as well as the usual friendly-if-skanky types you might expect in such a "joint" (so to speak). She also said that the cult classic Reefer Madness was playing on a television set in the waiting room, providing ironic ambience.

So then, recommendation in arthritic hand, the plucky, reckless and enterprising woman sought out a "pharmacy", and this is where the story gets good. This FOAF went to one of the many "pharmacies" advertised in the clinic (the clinic is only to get recommendations). Outside at the given address, the signage indicated a nail shop, the windows covered and a security gate in place. She rang the buzzer, she told my friend, and was buzzed in to a clean, well-lighted place that reeked of slaughtered skunk. She signed in and sat to wait. When her turn came, she was ushered into another, private room filled with jars and jars of fine, perfumed sinsemilla, as well as cookies, brownies, and other products. "We just moved here," the cheerful clerk reportedly told her. "We'll be getting more stock soon: edibles, hashish and lollypops by next week.

LOLLYPOPS!

She bought a half ounce of OG Kush for $175, and my friend hasn't seen her since.

The BF

He's a baaaadass mo fo, and this here's the proof.

Saturday Night Fever

Last night the BF and I went out on a date. We hit Zono Sushi for dinner, and I had the Seafood Soba Salad, an artful presentation of freshly cooked-to-order buckwheat noodles and mixed greens in a pungent wasabi/soy/lemon dressing and studded with tide pool shit, dee-licious always. The BF ordered the weekend special with teriyaki salmon and sashimi, and we kept to green tea in interest of staying awake (our beloved Sapporo is super but soporific).

Then we hied on down through Hollywood, but first, we hit the drive-thru Baskin Robbins for sugar cones of Jamoca Almond Fudge. Happily slurping these in the BF's shiny new Prius, we got to the Farmer's Market and walked around, incorporating the adjacent The Grove in our evening promenade. If you're not familiar with The Grove, it's a mega mall, Disneyland's Main Street, USA meets Shopping America. It's all done up for Christmas, complete with hordes and hordes of holiday shoppers of the white, affluent persuasion, and we got some coffee and people watched, feeling festive and even a little gay. We bought tangerines and pears and bananas (pomegranates were $3.98 each, why, you could buy a gallon of gasoline for that. Unlike Persephone, we passed on the 'granates), and then:

We hied our asses to the Regency Theater on Beverly and Fairfax to see He Was a Quiet Man starring Christian Slater, who plays a sick nerd, the kind that goes beserk and goes on shooting rampages, and that's pretty much what happens. I'm a jerk for quirk, but this one, this one, no.

Then we went home. The BF was horny, I wasn't, that was the end of that.

New Books!

Two new additions arrived today to grace the piles on my bed, the stacks on my dressers :

• The New Granta Book of the American Short Story edited and intro'd by Richard "Ol' Blue Eyes Hisself" Ford, a 750 page monster, and
• Who I Was Supposed to Be, a slim collection of short stories by Susan Perabo.

Happy happy joy joy.

Ode to the Pomegranate Martini

It's a thing of beauty, this drink, made with the beautifully perfumed Pama Pomegranate liqueur. Friday night the BF and I went out and I consumed not one, not two, but three of these beauties at Woktano, along with some miso soup and a sashimi salad. After, we wandered over to the dollar book store for drunken book-browsing. We capped off the night at Granville with beautiful glass of Five Rivers Pinot Noir, and a fresh berry shortcake.

Alas, I slept in my clothes that night, and woke up to a disturbing, whirling headache, but it was gone by noon.