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My Profile
Retro-retrospection - 2008-10-06
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12:23 p.m. - 2003-07-28
You know, I think this thing is going to get a lot more interesting after Alex leaves for school. See, I get lots of funny ideas at night or the bed talk* with Mike will inspire a rant, but Alex and I have a deal where I am the computer hog during daylight hours and he takes over after Wolf goes to bed. I sit here in the mornings and sift through the brain sludge, but most of the time the funnies and piss-offs from the previous the night have vanished in the morning sun like dew. *Bed Talk- Not THAT kind of talk, that's none of your business. I'm talking about the nightly convos we have about clients, current events, and such. After Alex leaves I will have computer access 24/7 and can dash into the office to limn some of the funniest nighttime bits and snag those rants while in full throttle rage. Every once in a while I DO boot Alex off and take over the mouse, but even waiting for him to shut down his 9 million screens, exit from 14 conversations and at least 2 on-line RPGs takes a lot of the immediacy out of it and when I finally sit down usually all I have left is a gag with no punch line. I just don't have any kind of short term memory anymore. It seems as though the long term memory is going too. At the birthday on Sunday one guest's mother kept eyeballing me. Not minutes before I had gotten made yet again, this time by the bowling counter lady who recognized me from the Pearlman's Girl days. (God! I get recognized more these days than when the ads were running!) I figured the mom "knew" me from those old adverts too. Wrong-o! She finally says to me, "Didn't you go to Hometown High?" I admitted I had. She grinned and said she had too. Class of 81 no less. Oh really? And what was her maiden name? Zoinks! She and I had been in homeroom together! I swear to God, I sat in a room with this chick every school day for 5 years (jr high and senior high) and I didn't know her from Adam. I told her I was drawing a blank and she must forgive me. Most of high school was spent in a benign ganja haze and back then I was lucky to remember my own name, let alone those of my classmates. She laughed. We shot the shit for a few, searching for friends in common and gassing a bit about what had become of some of our more well known classmates. Turns out this woman, M.J., was from one of the farther flung ends of our multi-town consolidated school district and it would have been highly unlikely we would have hung out together anyhow. I was from one of the “good” towns and she was a Laker. Not as in the NBA team, but from a small town set hard on a lake which spans the border between NY and NJ. The Lakers were notorious. All tarred with the same juvenile delinquent brush, it was just assumed every Laker was a bad seed. Certainly the most visible Lakers did nothing to dispel the stereotype. Scuzzy guys with catastrophic acne who drove primer covered, but lethally fast cars and frequently impregnated their neighbors, hard faced girls with sewer mouths and slutty clothes, the Lakers were a sub-strata all to themselves in the complex layering of high school society. If John Bender from “The Breakfast Club” had attended Hometown High, he’d have been a Laker. I flat out told her I’d have been shipped directly to the nearest convent school if my mother found out I was hanging out with Lakers, and she nodded and said she had to keep her college ambitions a secret from her crowd for fear of being ostracized. We laughed together over how important all that crap had been then. Then she sighed and told me that high school hadn’t really been the end of it for her. Turns out she married a local guy, one from my end of the world, and it was only because she and he had met at college which slightly ameliorated her MIL to the reality that her son had fallen for a Laker. That M.J. is an accomplished pediatric surgical nurse makes very little never mind, to this day her MIL mutters half heard sneers about her daughter-in-law’s trashy Laker background. Heh. And to think I believed I had it rough because my MIL is a card carrying member of the “We Hate NYers” club. Mike’s mom eventually forgave me for my ‘unfortunate’ accident of birth, if only because two of her other kids married Texans and she hates the natives of the Lone Star State even more than NYers. And to add insult to grievous injury, her one last chick, the good son who attended college in The Only Place To Be From, Washington State, up and married yet another NYer instead of the home town girl she was hoping he would! It’s not so far down the road that I can’t imagine Alex’s future bride. While I hope my son stays close by after he’s wed, I really don’t care where she’s from or who her people are. All I care about is whether she’s good to him and loves him with all heart. If Alex’s wife is good enough for him, she’ll be good enough for me. Yes, even if she’s a Laker. In a geographic state of mind, ~LA Today’s Pick: “Poor Side of Town” by Johnny Rivers
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