Dead Man's Honda

This was written Thursday but forgot to post it until today....sigh....

In between yesterday and today I’ve come across a few oddities that have captured my attention. Thursday in general is odd just because it’s so neglected---it’s as if people want to close their eyes and just time travel to Friday without even giving the day its proper due. Except for the guy who got into the elevator with me this morning, looked at me (while wearing a biker leather jacket but being about 6’2’ with a mushroom haircut and printed happy tee underneath which made him seem altogether unusual) and said:

“Thursday.”

And then nothing. Hmm…yup…it is….thanks for the warning?

As weird as that is it was only toward the end several hours of oddities like these:

- Last night I was in the shower and picked up a facial cleansing product belonging to my sister that read, “If product is not suitable for skin, discontinue use.”

Gee thank you O Wise Wizards of Dermatology. Cause, if it was unsuitable for my skin and you HADN’T said that, I’d just keep using it and using it and….

- An African American fellow in a tanning salon. Because??

- A woman at work needs a “foster care home” for five baby kittens. I live in a one bedroom with my two other sisters and a cat and my older sister’s turtle. All signs point to --- FULL HOUSE. [and agreed, CRAZY too, but meh, whatever.] So did I say “Sure! Bring ‘em on!”? Why yes I did. Because I’m hoping to be a certifiable grade-a single-woman cliche with ten cats to whom I will leave my beat-up Honda when I die.

- One of my sister Lindsey’s clients thought that I was Lindsey’s daughter. Considering she’s two years YOUNGER that’s just mathematically problematic.

- Also on the odd radar: When you ask someone what their daily life is like in a developing country, they respond: “Well that’s a loaded question.” Loaded with WHAT? Curiousity? Isn’t that the case with questions in general?

It really is a toss-up for me. I can’t decide what alternative titles I’d give to the movie, Lucky You. There’s: Rounders With Ugly People And No Plot, Parade of the Random Funny Characters That Do Nothing For the Story, Asinine A-holes, or perhaps Drew Barrymore Acting Like She’s Imitating Drew Barrymore, or Drew Barrymore with That Guy No One Knows, or my favorite: The Only Romantic Comedy Where You Pray, For the Love of God, The Characters Don’t Get Back Together.

And that would be because it’s about gambling addicts who are not only emotionally immature but also completely void of any moral compass whatsoever. When one of them, a character named Huckleberry (and no, I’m not kidding) played by an actor, Eric Bana, who LOOKS like he’s acting stumbles upon one of my favorite actresses, Drew Barrymore, whose character is a female named Billie from Bakersfield—you want to laugh but you can’t because it's so awful your face is twisted like someone dug their finger nails in and rotated their wrist 360 degrees. And it’s not because Billie is from Bakersfield—so am I. (And PS: that’s not Bakersfield where they did the small section of filming—we don’t have curbs like that.)

It’s because Billie proceeds to fall for an immature gambling addict with paternal issues, no real friends (or furniture)and doesn’t fail to cut him out of her life even after he lies and steals from her. Several times. And I guess Huckleberry falls for her too, but you wouldn’t really know that from his placid facial expressions. Women will gravitate to Barrymore’s character, however, because what woman alive today has not, at one point, pined after a man who neither deserved her nor was worth pining after? Miserable over a douche bag? Yeah—so is she. But in this movie no handsome prince rides in to rescue her from her own weakness. Instead she ends the movie saying something about his childhood in a way that sounds like she's being dirty. And it sounds so twisted and f-d up I had to look at Lindsey with an expression of horror. If you WINCE when the characters kiss at the end of the film-- there's probably a good chance it didn't accomplish what it's supposed to.

In the middle of this frustrating and appalling parade of desperation and dysfunction there is an endless stream of inventive, slightly entertaining curious characters who filter in and out of monotonous scenes of card-playing. Their only purpose, it seems, is to provide a bit of levity as you stare at hands flipping cards and knocking the table and really ugly people staring each other down. It’s as if the writer tried too hard to get a laugh though—one such superfluous character is a man with breast implants who hops across a casino room on a chair.

Umm….yeah. Seriously.

While the card playing drones on and multiple nutjob characters filter in and out (ok, a few are pretty funny) there is a father and son emotional stand-off. This is probably the only redeeming element of the movie. The father, played by Robert Duvall, is excellent. That’s because it’s Robert Duvall and he’s playing a role he frequently plays— himself. He does it really well, however.Why wouldn't he?

But you are so annoyed at what A-holes he and the son are to each other and other people, and what an idiot Billie is, and how confusing the Debra Messing’s character is, that you don’t want the father and son to resolve their issues or Billie and Huck to get together—you want to get the heck out of the theatre and leave them be. Instead you have to beat your head against the back of the seat because you’re in the middle seats. The NY Times and Dan Morehead were right— this movie SHOULD have been billed as a poker movie, not a romantic comedy. A BORING poker movie, but still, a poker movie nonetheless.

I should add, though, that the music was excellent and the writing was probably good before the actors butchered their lines. Sigh. Oh well...next time folks.

This morning I groggily awoke to the sound of someone beating the living heck out of something in the lot behind our apartment.

Who thinks: “Hey, it’s 7 am—time to go outside and beat the crap out of something in my backyard.”?

People who steal cars, that’s who. They’ve got a deadline to get the goods out of the vehicles before the ghetto birds (read: police helicopters) fly overhead and spot the vehicles.

This is my theory, anyway. On our palm-lined street there are lovely houses with high hedges (as I’ve noted before) as well as dumpy apartment complexes someone spackled together with super glue and gave to the Section 8 people. It’s a pity, really. Because most of the crime (the SWAT Team has our street on speed dial) actually comes from the high hedged houses and not the tenement housing like people seem to think. In fact, the house across the street is operating as either a brothel for the wealthy or a drug den for the elite. Every morning extremely nice cars (that wouldn’t be caught dead on our street at any other time) are parked out front of it for up to an hour at most. They go in. They go out. They don’t stay long.

But then there are these lots—quite large, actually--- BEHIND the spackled buildings. These lots are overgrown with bamboo or high grass or trash, probably a cannabis farm or two, or in the case of the lot behind us---odd vehicles.

Odd because they appear and disappear almost as frequently as the band of middle-aged men who sit outside near the cars at one in the morning, blasting mariachi music and drinking themselves into a rousing chorus of something choked out through the junk food they stuff in their mouths.

If I were younger, back in my school-girl days, I would be so intrigued by this lot behind my house that I would have faked being sick so that I could stay home an entire day to observe what I would assume were dangerous and sneaky criminals (not simply car thieves, like they probably are). I would probably assume there was some form of buried treasure back there, a mystery that needed to be solved, a murder that needed to be witnessed and then reported, or some other imaginative but exciting plot line. Why?

Because I was tainted by Trixie Belden and had a massively unhealthy imagination, that’s why.

Trixie Belden was the tom-boy, farm-girl, middle-class equivalent to Nancy Drew. I didn’t like Nancy Drew. She was blonde and her dad adored her and she figured out every mystery just as smoothly as her little skirted suits hung over her perfect figure.

Trixie, on the other hand, was always in trouble (kindred spirit), had freckles and red hair (don’t I know what THAT’S about), was always messy and dirty (pitter patter my heart) and had a fantastic group of friends—one of which included a girl with raven black hair and violet eyes (could there BE anything more beautiful?). Unlike Nancy Drew (whose book covers were that ghastly green sometimes—or painful yellow) Trixie would make dinner, take care of her little brother, tend the garden and placate her parents and STILL manage to get out of the house, solve a mystery, save the day and be back before bedtime.

I, however, could only manage the….hmm..none of the above.

Anyway—if I were back in my Trixie days I would definitely fake being sick. This would involve burning my head on a lightbulb, sticking a white lipstick tube (yeah they had those in the eighties) down my throat to see if I couldn’t make it look like strep throat, screaming into my pillow at night so that in the morning I had a hoarse throat or better yet—no voice at all, or somehow making myself throw up so that I could stay away from the place where they made you sit still for hours and hours on end. I.E. – School. I liked the socializing part for sure—my friends were the best. It was the sitting still and doing one thing part that got under my fingernails.

But if now were then, I would stay home, and I would spy through our bamboo on whatever is going on behind our apartment, and then I would anonymously call the police (we don’t want them to track us down and kill us) when the car-stealers remove parts from one of the lovely BMW’s parked out front whilst its driver commits his crime across the street. The police would fail at their job, for sure, and I would have to sneak over the fence, pull some risky, impressive maneuver, steal a gun from a beat-up cop, hold the people at gun point and then…and then…..do something else ridiculously amazing before the scenario was resolved peacefully and no one got hurt.

And afterwards I would make myself some lemonade—Trixie always had lemonade—sit back and congratulate myself on keeping our street a little safer for vehicles. Granted, Trixie would have drunk lemonade while looking out over her farm and I would drink it while looking at the graffiti on our fence—but we would still be one in spirit.

But then I would have to do this again the next day for the drug dealers next door and the prostitution ring on the other side of that building…and then there’s the domestic violence issue on the upper side of the….

Perhaps it is better that I went to work today. In my neighborhood I’d have to be a full-time Trixie and that would never do…..sigh…

“OH MY GOD- those people are such bastards!” she yelled in her lilting Latin accent from the office down the hall. “Did you even get that guy’s name? Juan Carlos De Metrio Ortex Garcia? TORTILLA? BURRITO? Could he HAVE any more f-ing names?!”

Excuuuuuse me? I thought as I glanced at the placard on the door. Pretty sure there are like four names there, but fine, freaking out on the phone (however hypocritical) slightly cracked me up. It at least made me feel (for a moment) less dull than I have been feeling lately. People aren’t making me laugh like they used to—is it me? Or have people stopped being so indescribably weird?

Oh wait. No. I did go to church this weekend. And weird was definitely happening. Not that the two are direct correlates, mind you.

It was Missions Sunday and my sisters and I had been wrangled into dragging…ahem…I mean proudly carrying flags (like other such volunteers did) from every nation down the aisle at church so the congregation could see a bunch of fabric in a bunch of different colors waving above the pews. And we had to be there at 7:30 am to do this.

Yeah. Seriously. 7:30 AM on a SUNDAY MORNING. Recover for a moment and track with me as I continue. (I realize I will receive no pity for this from the church workers out there but everyone else will understand the pain)

I thought perhaps it was the early morning that was making the entire experience blurry—but no, the flamboyant and seriously gay (but married) gentleman playing the piano at the front was giving us one of those classic Barney rounds of applause. Oh. Wow. He was also discussing he and his wife's bi-coastal marriage.

Bi-coastal? Don't you mean bi- something else? I thought, quite rudely.

Before the service there was a lull where we sat at the back and just watched the morning activities. People fight a lot before church services, we noted. And fight about the most ridiculous things.

“Did you set that paper there? Nothing goes there. We have to leave that section of the pulpit clear. Absolutely clear.”

“I didn’t mean to leave it there, I was just thinking…”

“Well you can’t. So just move it.”

That was the interchange between two elderly men who…god love ‘em…had to bicker about a misplaced bulletin.

Next we turned our heads to notice the only under 80 person (besides us, of course) standing in the foyer— handing out bulletins of all things.

“I really didn’t think anyone but elderly did that,” Desiree remarked. We just grunted back because we were too tired to speak.

Soon we learned that yes, in fact, only elderly do that. An old man walked up to the young, normal-looking guy and thanked him for his (odd) help, but that HE was in fact the bulletin hander-outer that morning. So the young man came over to us.

“Hi, I’m A.” he said and shook our hands. We introduced ourselves. Young. Good looking. This is a rare and wonderful thing.

“So I just took this shirt out of the dryer and wore it here without ironing it because I was like, well, just rolling out of bed. I’m from Oklahoma but I want to get into acting but right now I just got out of this rehab place and now I live in another place….and yeah…so that’s what’s going on but I’m going to move to another place probably while I’m doing this acting thing…”

Crazy. That explains it.

He paused for a breath.

“So how was Easter?”

WHAT?!

Not long after that we were in the Missions luncheon which was fabulous, actually, when people started going a bit bonkers about their kebabs.

“Are these kosher?” one man asked Lindsey who was in the assembly line handing out food next to me.

“Uh, I don’t know. You should probably go check with the kitchen staff.” She answered.

He turned to Desiree, who was next to her in the very same assembly line, handing out the very same food, and said:

“Are these kosher? I have to have kosher.”

Yup, buddy. Remarkably-- same answer AGAIN.

After that a dear little woman informed me that Saturday had been an exhausting day for her because she moved shopping carts around ALL DAY in Burbank.

Talk about making work for yourself. I wanted to hug the poor woman.

At our table a woman remarked casually about her husband seated next to her, “we met in September.”

“And you’re married?” Sam inquired since she already introduced us to him as her husband.

“Yes. We met in September, got married in January.”

This would have seemed almost ridiculously romantic if my sisters and I had not already known her from other events as the Woman With Severe Anxiety Issues. No event was too small to escape her attention if it was a derivation from HER norm WHATSOEVER.

“I think you guys moved that pebble on the centerpiece!” she FREAKED out at one such event. "Just stop everything and hand it back to me. I know where it goes and I just need to FIX these!"

Her rapid marriage must have gone off without ANY type of hitch. That, or her husband may have some scars to document said glitches.

Although weird was definitely occurring at our lovely little church, it was also a wonderful day. It was made more so by this remarkable fellow who spoke at every service. He’s fantastic.