Being Patriotic Just Ain’t Cool Man

Can you imagine the kind of balls It takes to move 1000 miles away, into a foreign country where you don’t even speak the language? I imagine it takes about the same kind of balls as it does to follow a man you barely know to said country, illegally, where you know no one, and raise a family. It’s like you or I dropping everything and moving to Romania with someone we met on the plane. And that’s what my parents did, I marvel at that every day, and yet their story is not unique.

I am an American, and one thing all Americans have in common is an immigration story somewhere in their ancestry. Even Native Americans, their parents came from somewhere too. I’m lucky in the sense that I know the generation that immigrated. It’s a real privilege to be raised by them. A century from now, my parents will be known to my offspring as the people that brought us here and really did change our lives. They fought, they struggled, they worked their asses off and now here we all are.

And it really is a great country where something like this can happen. I think we all forget that sometimes. We forget it when we stop thinking of the struggles every new immigrant goes through upon reaching this place, and every new immigrant had the same struggles to be sure. We need to stop thinking of ourselves as natives, with an entitlement to everything this country has to offer us. We have to remember what our ancestors had to do to get us here, what they had to endure, and that the only reason we have what we have is because of that hard work. We need to remember that the best thing about this country is that nothing is promised, and everything has to be earned. I think that when we see the new immigrant with their heavy accents and weird customs we scoff, because we forget these things, and that does all of us a disservice.

So when I see the flag, or hear the star spangled banner or some other cliché like that, I think of my parents, and how what they did made my life possible, and I think that’s pretty cool.

You Know Cyndi Lauper Still Tours?

It’s a strange thing when rock stars get old.

One day Mos Def will be old. One day JayZ will be old, just like Whodini and Slick Rick.


I remember when the Rolling Stones got back together for their Steel Wheels tour. Why would people pay solid money to watch a group of old men gyrate to old music. I still feel that way about them.

I got a glimpse of our future a while back when I caught Cut Chemist performing at the Disney Concert Hall. In the audience no one danced, rather they sat in their chairs and clapped, much like they do with Beethoven.


I hate to watch my music idols become old men. As they grow old I grow old.

Seeing Debbie Gibson sing Electric Youth at the tender age of 40 is somewhat of an oxymoron.


A few years ago I watched Joan Jett sing “I Love Rock and Roll” and Juan pointed out we just saw an icon performing an iconic song, live.

More and more I find that I go to the Hollywood Bowl for concerts, and less and less to the Forum, Staples Center or Dodger Stadium. My next concert is also at the Bowl, after that it’s to the Cerritos Center for Performing Arts.


Depeche Mode had to cancel several tour dates for reasons of old age, and Robert Smith of the Cure looks ridiculous in makeup these days. Even so, both bands are still amazing live.


I’ve been going to Depeche Mode concerts for 19 years, and this was my first Cure concert.


Life is long enough that I’ve met Dave Gahan, Martin Gore and Andy Fletcher once. I almost met Martin Gore again last week. Man that would have been sweet!

A Whale's Tail

The best time to go whale watching is usually in the summer. The whales get tired of their lousy local weather and come to Los Angeles for some fun in the sun. It’s kinda like spring break: the whales cruise around the ocean boulevards getting drunk, picking up on whale chicks (which whale biologists call Marys). As you can see from these pictures, we decided to go whale watching in late July, the late July of 1992 to be precise. Sure enough, thousands of whales came to have a gander at our red and green party boat. The Marys even flashed us their breasts in return for sea beads, those photos were too scandalous for my family spun blog here. But we did decide to feed them.

Now whales typically eat between 4-5 thousand chickens a day, but they will gladly substitute poultry for some pork chops, as long as they’re fresh. We had brought neither, woefully unprepared, luckily the boat sold CornNuts by the barrel and so we fed them that. It turns out whales LOVE CornNuts! Especially the sour cream and onion kind! We fed them for about an hour speaking to them in their native tongue: Portuguese which is close enough to Swahili that Danny could translate. As the sun went down we harpooned a couple of them and ate whale-burgers which surprisingly taste like jelly donuts.

What a day!

A Civil Service

So here I am in court, and I’m looking around at my fellow traffic criminals as we wait in the gallery for the judge, and I do a little counting. As it turns out, in a room of about 50 people, about 22 were black, 18 Latino, about 8 were various other minorities, and just 2 people in that whole big ol’ room were white.

I have to believe that white people forget or don’t care to fix their fix-it tickets at the same rate as all other races. We’re all human! We all hate having to deal with stupid shit like driving with one headlight. I also have to believe that all drivers, regardless of race or color, break these minor traffic laws with the same frequency. If both these things are true then the obvious conclusion is African Americans get pulled over and cited the most for the routine traffic violations we all commit, then it’s the Latinos, then the“others” and lastly Caucasians.

Why?

No one wants to believe in racial profiling, but then again we all know it happens. If you knew me as a teenager you would know that there was never a reason for a police officer to push me onto the hood of his patrol car and search my pockets because he got a report that some Mexicans were throwing water balloons at cars. Yet there I was.

Hell, not more than three weeks ago Henry Louis Gates Jr., was arrested for breaking into his own home. And Obama was right, Cambridge police acted stupidly. I don’t care what color a suspect is, if you arrest a man breaking into his own home you acted stupidly.

We would like to think that racism doesn’t exist especially in our great city of Los Angeles, that we’re too metropolitan and sophisticated. Well we’re not. I envy my friends of European descent who can look at the police and feel safe, and I hate the fact that when I see a cop I eye him with the same suspicion that he eyes me. It sucks. But when you realize that half the people getting pulled over for the same crime that everyone is committing are one minority closely followed by a second minority, well then I think the suspicion is deserved, especially when you belong to the latter.

But firemen are cool. Props yo!

The Gorgeous Girl

For more than two and a half years I’ve had the privilege to love and to be loved by this most wonderful of women.


She’s my soul and my reason for breathing. I am truly the luckiest man in the world.

Momogram

A burning in the lungs is expected when one is running from the police. And why not run? -assuming you’re guilty. They may not even be aware of it yet, or you for that matter, although, suspicion that a law you’ve never heard of might be broken accidentally, without either party being aware is good enough reason to run in the first place.

The story goes easy if you’re willing to listen.

A criminal has to be told that he is one. No that’s not always true, there are some lifers out there hustling, but in this case Yacoub was just doing what he felt was normal: reading a book and watching a ball game. But that’s illegal in most states, you can’t even BUY a book without breaking a law or two. So he was guilty. Everyone saw him do it, hell he didn’t deny it; he was not ashamed. He was in fact nothing at all about the ordeal. But he ran.

He ran because deep down he knew, that in the end it wasn’t the reading of the book that made him have to flee, but it was the mere act of there being a cop to run from in the first place which was enough to make him feel like he was being smothered in a pillow. And in the end, he ran from the cops because he felt happier this way, so he never looked back.

Tyrone

This one year I was jealous of my friend Margarito because he was more romantic then me. As a gift to get a girl to notice him he stole the sign of the street which bared the same name as her. I don’t remember what her name was, so let’s just say it was Marylou Wy. Now I’m pretty sure Marylou didn’t like Margarito and this was a mere token of unrequited love, but to me, it was Loyd Dobler. I must make this idea mine! So I did. I was to steal the street sign that bore true love’s name, Rosecrans Blvd.

I recruited the help of my best available friends, Raymond, and Tyrone. Now Ray and I had gone way back, I mean we had a real kinship towards each other. He was the cool guy and I was the guy that wanted to hang out with the cool guy. We were tight. Tyrone I had met the year before, he was a pity friend I made as a favor to my ex-girlfriend, but he was cool and fun to be around. The “mission” was to start at 3AM, Saturday morning; a good hour I thought to get away with a crime. I still think it’s probably the best time to commit a robbery, you just have to avoid looking creepy, which is harder than it sounds at that hour.
Now I trusted Ray to show up but Tyrone, not so much. No disrespect, I’d played Walter’s Joe Montana at his house but I mean, I just didn’t think the guy had much interest in going. Ray though, gave me his word.


So Friday night rolled into Saturday morning and it’s like 2AM. My dad’s still awake. That bastard loves to stay awake and he never goes to sleep. You knew if it was 2AM he was just thinking about going to bed. I used to wake him up at 6:45 on school mornings too, and I’d do it with an attitude. What a punk, if I could go back in time I’d kick my high school self in the balls. Anyway, I get the idea that if I pretend to go to sleep then he would probably go to sleep soon after. Some strange father son competition to see who can stay up longer. You win pop, I’m dog tired. And it worked too because he went right to bed afterwards. Success! Now all I had to do was stay awake in a completely dark room. It wasn’t easy but I lay in bed with my arms strapped around the alarm clock.

3AM, time to bounce. I crept out of the house avoiding the creek in the floor. I got in my car, and rolled it like half a block with my lights turned off so I can start it without my parents hearing. And just like that I was off. I drove to Ray’s house, the lights were off. I went to his window and called his name, nothing. There were no cell phones back then, so that was all I could do. I did it for like 15 minutes, but there was no answer. He fell asleep and short of breaking into his house and shaking him awake there was nothing I could do. And if you know the layout of Raymond’s old house you can totally see yourself doing it, it was a piece of cake in fact. But this was Paramount, and those sorts of things aren’t done there unless you’re in the mood for at bare minimum, a shovel to the head. So I left.

To Tyrone’s house, empty handed. Now you don’t understand, without Raymond this caper is impossible for me emotionally, but unrequited love being what it is, I had no choice. Now Tyrone was the youngest bachelor I had ever met. For reals. His parent’s house had a little bachelor apartment attached to the garage. It was small and I’m sure, cold in the winter but it was all his. And there wasn’t much in there that I can remember. Just a messed up bed and a T.V. I walked through his gate, went to the back room and the light was on in his room. I peered in the window and his TV was on. He was awake! I knocked on the window, nothing. I called his name, nothing. The son of a bitch had fallen asleep watching TV. Fuck it, I banged on his window. That woke him up. And that’s how two dumb, sleepy, idiot teenagers found themselves out in the streets of suburban Los Angeles at 3:30 on a Saturday morning way back in the Winter of 1991.


Now I found the sign, which was no easy task, and I was disappointed ultimately because I had failed to bring a ladder. Almost 4 in the morning and two high school Latinos loitering around a street sign. So we gave up. I drove us back an utter failure. I came down Imperial, making a right onto Wright and just after the Shell station, just before that first light, a woman with spandex pants and no top came running into the middle of the street and flagged my car to a stop. She was ranting about how her boyfriend was trying to beat her and she jumped out the bathroom window. She was like, mid twenties, pale skin too much makeup and definitely fresh off the boat. I let her in. It was a two door so Ty had to get out in order for her to jump in the back. I gave her a jacket I happened to have in the back seat and my high school mind thought about how her bare breasts were rubbing the inside of my jacket. Tyrone got back in the car, he didn’t blink. This whole ordeal as far as I could tell, didn’t faze him in the slightest.

I drove her back to the shell station and we called the cops, they came in a flash. Our job is done; we can go home, but not so fast. The cops spoke no Spanish, and she of course spoke no English, I would have to translate. Looking back on it now that makes no sense. Ty knows infinitely more Spanish then I do. Now about this time I am starting to notice on my little Casio that it’s 5AM and about 56 degrees Fahrenheit. I gotta get home, but the next thing I know I’m in the front seat of a Police cruiser with the girl in the back, part of me thinking that being in the front seat of a police car is kinda cool. Siren, shotgun, SCMOD, neat! At this point I have no idea where Tyrone went. I think he stayed back at the gas station with more cops. We drive back from where we picked her up and this wiry brown figure dashes across the street and down the road. “That’s him!” She shrieks from the backseat. We lose him but the other squad car picks him up.

We translate some more for them and then the cops let us go home, never once thinking twice what two teenage kids are doing on the road at that hour with pruning shears and a half naked lady in their backseat.


Nowadays I consider Tyrone a close personal friend. One of my favorites in fact. We play golf and talk baseball. Ray, I have no idea what ever happened to him.

That’s the story I think of when I think of my friend Tyrone.