Tritch Hardware in Eagle Rock, or, a Yuppie Reflects

Sometimes, Eagle Rock has a real Riverdale, Archie & Jughead feel about it: you're driving down Colorado, past all these businesses that have been here since the 40's or so (Cindy's Diner, Casa Bianca, Colombo's, etc.), you see the "Historic Route 66" signs, and you feel a bit like you're in BACK TO THE FUTURE or something. Nowhere is this blast-from-the-past feeling more pronounced than in the venerable Tritch Hardware in Eagle Rock (SW corner of Colorado and Townsend).

Tritch Hardware is the kind of place where an American flag is hung up with no irony, where most of the grizzled staff probably spent some time in either Vietname or Korea at some point, and where people really care how the Eagle Rock high school football team is doing. It's a throwback.

I've purchased the following items at Tritch Hardware in the three years we've lived in Eagle Rock: a shovel, six tomato cages, several bags of potting soil, a hammer, nails, hooks, duct tape, a hand juicer, and a wheelbarrow. The people in Tritch Hardware are famously helpful. They'll answer all sorts of questions in detail, and will always help you find the stuff you need. A French friend of mine was in there yesterday, asking them about how to restore the finish on aluminum. The guy helping him, an older guy, carefully went over my friend's project, and what he wanted to accomplish, and pointed him in exactly the right direction.

The staff at Tritch are not all bubbly and fake-friendly, but more sort of the gruff and to-the-point helpful types: you'll come out of there with the stuff you need and will probably feel like you learned something useful about hardware/home repair/the American way. You might also feel like going and having a Miller and watching the Dodgers. And changing your own oil and filter.

They've got basically all the hardware you might need, in addition to other random household stuff (appliances, kitchen stuff, etc.). They also have a cooler full of ice cream bars. Behind the counter they've usually got a baseball, football, or basketball game on on the tiny TV they have next to the register.

I might have to agree with those who argue that Tritch Hardware, and not the car-accident-prone Swork (which I love), is the true heart of Eagle Rock. Of course, Tritch Hardware is often posited as some kind of touchstone of "realness" and "real people" against which the invading yuppie hordes are juxtaposed: see the NYT article comparing the now-defunct Regeneration shop vs. Tritch (the faint odor you detect as you read the article is the sickly sweet musk of Schadenfreude).

Tritch Hardware and the other businesses that have been in Eagle Rock for the past sixty years are what make this neighborhood what it is. They are the core of the place. Newer places (Swork, Colorado Wine Company, The Oinkster, Señor Fish, etc.) are inexorably becoming part of the fabric of neighborhood as well, but Eagle Rock likely never will be a copy of Silverlake or Los Feliz: the set up and the nature of the place are too different.

Young and old are working out a happy medium in this neighborhood. The new places that will go up over the coming years as we come out of the current downturn will all go to the same place for the tools they need to start building: Tritch Hardware.

All Star Lanes in Eagle Rock

After a nice dinner at Mia Sushi on Eagle Rock Boulevard tonight, Mrs. Octopus and I continued our evening at All Star Lanes in Eagle Rock. Mrs. Octopus won two out of three games, with a high score of 134 in the second game. In my three games I bowled 109, 59, and 78. Not my best night of bowling.

All Star Lanes is a lot of fun on the weekends. It's full of families, teens on dates, groups of friends. It's got a bar, a full Chinese restaurant (The Red Dragon) attached to the bowling alley -- so you can get a beer and some dumplings to snack on while you wait your turn to bowl. After nine or so, they dim the lights and turn on the black lights and every gets all freaky and day-glo. The music is good, too. I did a little Hammer dance to "Can't Touch This" and waved my hands in the air to "Insane in the Membrane".

The technology of bowling has come a long way since I used to go duck pin bowling as a kid. Everything at All Star Lanes is totally computerized. You get speed and direction information on your bowls, and goofy computer-animated sequences after gutter balls, spares, and strikes. The scoring (the rules of which are still sort of a mystery to me) is completely automated.

The one thing that hasn't changed is that you still have to figure out what weight ball, with what type of finger holes, works for you. You have to figure out how many steps you want to take before you release. You have to figure out if you stand straight on, to the right, if you're going to have a long windup, or a tight, compact motion. And you have to figure out why no matter how hard you try to make the ball go straight down the middle, it ends up going everywhere else.

Blue Dot in Eagle Rock

I'm excited about Blue Dot, the new yogurt and acai place that recently opened here in Eagle Rock. It's on Townsend, just off Colorado (north), next to the Loft hair salon and Pollen, in the same building as Cardio Barre. The landlord of that entire building is the guy that owns the framing place next to Cardio Barre (the one that never seems to be open). He's done a really nice job with the building: all of the businesses that have opened there are great.

Blue Dot is run by a brother and sister team. I believe Mike is the brother's name (I don't know the sister's name yet). They're both very nice.

The store has a very interesting interior. It's very 2001: stark white and minimalist, with a bare bones menu on the wall behind the yogurt and acai equipment. (All they're missing is a glowing red eye somewhere in the wall.) Right now, Blue Dot has tables set up with pictures of people who sit on the various boards that had to give them approvals to open up the store. On the walls, they've taped up, with blue electrical tape, the original forms (dozens of them) of various permits and approvals they obtained, along with the receipts showing how much they had to pay for the various permits and licenses. The effect is one of an art gallery, with the shop itself as a type of kooky (edible) performance art. This must be sort of the idea the owners of Blue Dot have: on their Twitter account they're inviting local artists to hold their openings at the store.



The yogurt is tangy and tastier than Pinkberry's, in my opinion. The acai is a bit more expensive that the yogurt, but very good (and apparently good for you). You have the same general set of toppings for the yogurt that you would expect, based on the ubiquitous Pinkberry model (i.e., kiwi chunks, Capt. Crunch, Fruity Pebbles, blueberries, etc.). The acai comes in different pre-set varieties involving granola, strawberries, and other stuff. I tried "The Original" acai, and it was very tasty.

Blue Dot is open from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. every day. I was curious about the early opening time, so I asked the sister (will have to remember to get her name next time) if they had a lot of people come in in the mornings. She said that was their busiest time, as a lot of people came in to get a big order of acai. I'll have to try that some morning. (Would beat my standard routine of eating dry cereal by hand out of the box as I drive the two miles to Pasadena.)

Cash only for now.

Money I$ Magic

I was buying some food today, holding a ratty $5 bill that I was about to hand over for some fries and a sandwich. Let me make clear that I was not high. But as I was handing over the bill, I was struck with a thought that overwhelms me from time to time: money is really fucking weird.

I was standing there, able to convert my ratty, purposeless piece of paper into food because of a magical belief system. I believed in the efficacy of money, as did the guy at the cash register; we believed in money because everyone else believed in money. Our collective faith in the floating signified signifier of the dollar (I WENT TO COLLEGE IN THE 90'S) infused it with power over all of us. It becomes the ultimate measure of all things. As Marx said, money "transforms fidelity into infidelity, love into hate, hate into love, virtue into vice, vice into virtue, servant into master, master into servant, idiocy into intelligence, and intelligence into idiocy." (Marx, 1844) And thus it enslaves us, and holds us in its thrall.

The practical effect of this: my willingness to sit in an office all day typing things for other people so they would give me magical paper that I could convert into things I needed to live (and things I didn't necessarily need to live).

That, of course, is just one view of money. Another view is that money is simply a shorthand, a way to translate values, a way to allow complicated transactions to be measured by one all-purpose measure of value -- the only way to conduct business in a complicated economy.

Ron-Ron Comes To Town

Watching the Lakers pick up Artest, I feel somewhat like a kid in Yemen or Pakistan watching the U.S. elect Barack Obama: it makes them a whole lot harder to hate.

Artest completes Kobe. Kobe is a silent void from which no light escapes. Artest is bursting with earnest, crazy-ass humanity.

Or, Artest is pure id to Kobe's pure superego. Let's see if Jackson can manage in his role as the ego, riding the wild horse of the id, tormented by a swarm of bees above (the superego). (Metaphor via Peter Gay, building on Freud's image of the ego riding the id.)

It's like the Marx Brothers. That would make Jackson Chico.

R.I.P. the King of Pop

At his best, Michael Jackson was the best ever.

View from the Tank: Valu-Pak

What follows is essentially a compilation of my recent movie review tweets, with some elaboration beyond 140 characters (elaboration on tweets and/or multiple tweets indicated by long dashes).



At screenin[g] of THE GRADUATE at Hollywood Forever cemetery. Crazy crowded. People love watching movies while picnicking. --- The movie is still sort of funny, after all these years. Is Michael Cera doing a young Dustin Hoffman mumbly dreamboat thing? Some of the flashy editing seemed a little dated. Also, only in Los Angeles does the line about driving in "all the way from Tarzana" get a laugh. Four tentacles.

Tempted to give DOUBLE INDEMNITY five tentacles. Can't think of a better movie I've seen. Wilder & Chandler double each other's powers. --- Barbara Stanwyck is a pretty hot femme fatale. And how can you not love a movie where the protagonist/villain is an insurance salesman?



ENTER THE DRAGON 3.5 tentacles - a little stupid, but still a must-see for everyone. "There is no I." --- I had forgotten that the black dude gets killed in ENTER THE DRAGON. Lame, but par for the course at the time. Also, the 70's loved turtlenecks. --- The famous Hall of Mirrors scene in ETD - most literal interpretation of a Shaolin master's teaching ever. --- The Hall of Mirrors scene is high art.

CITIZEN KANE is overrated. Acting and story are better today. It may have been groundbreaking, but I don't care-still boring. 3 tentacles.

ROMAN HOLIDAY is a fantastic film. Seeing it again, ending is much sadder than I remember. Understand finality better now that I'm old. 4.5 tentacles



They were definitely not hypermiling in MAD MAX. --- MAD MAX may have been Detroit's finest hour. --- Re final scene of MAD MAX: lucky thing the Interceptor is an automatic. 4 tentacles.

UP was almost uniformly fantastic and pretty moving at points. The most human Pixar film to date. 4 tentacles. No need to see in 3D. --- On my second viewing I was less sanguine. The movie does become sort of pedestrian and prefab after the characters land in South America. Too many ideas tossed in (the rare bird, the talking dogs, the old explorer, etc.). Still good, but probably closer to 3.5 tentacles.



DRAG ME TO HELL was a lot of goofy, campy, gross fun. Not a classic, but thoroughly entertaining. 3.5 tentacles.

So, there it is: I gave DRAG ME TO HELL a better review than CITIZEN KANE. OCTOPUS GRIGORI, your source for accurate movie criticism.

A quick thought about driving

Blue car with a snub nose driving all around Los Angeles. Up the upramps, down the downramps, into traffic, waiting its turn, patiently, driving west on the 10, driving north on the 101, driving south on the 110, a computer code of pathways under the June gloom.

Remembering being in Madrid in 1999

Dragging bags down to a train station to put them in a locker while we visited the Prado. In a full hall of people moving around looking at Las Meninas. The photo I took shows everyone in the hall moving and the figures in the painting standing still. Poking our heads into galleries and wings full of vases and sculptures and deciding they were boring. Sitting down looking at paintings and not really knowing where they were from. Buying postcards from the gift shop. A very dry-feeling city, no waterfront, no big bridge over water.

General Motors

This was my first car: my dad's old 1984 Cadillac Eldorado, silver hardtop with red leather interior. You read that correctly: red leather. (This picture is just one I found on the web, but our car looked exactly like this.) I remember the midsummer day when we drove down to the Potemkin dealership in New York City. My dad spent a few hours working out the transaction. My brother and I passed the time sitting in all the Cadillac models in the showroom, messing with the windows and knobs.



My dad bought this car during his period of automotive nationalism, when he strongly believed that all Americans should buy American cars. We bought two Caprice Classic station wagons in a row during this period. Much of my childhood was spent hanging out in the back of those station wagons, sleeping, reading, listening to a Walkman, staring out at the scenery in Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maine, New York, New Jersey, Rhode Island.

When I first sat in the driver's seat of the Eldorado, I couldn't imagine ever being able to actually steer the thing. The hood seemed to run on for miles. The first few times I drove the car, I would steer by using the hood ornament as a target that I would aim where I wanted to go, since the absurdly long hood made it hard to actually see the road. Luckily, the Eldorado handled like an aircraft carrier. Everything was soft and plush: the brake pedal, the steering wheel, and especially the hydraulic car leveling system.

The Eldorado met its end flying off an icy road into a telephone pole in the winter of 1992. Middle Brother Octopus was at the wheel, and luckily was unhurt. But before the end, the Eldorado was a vehicle for fantastic memories: eating Pop Tarts and shaving with an electric razor as I rolled into our prep school in Connecticut blasting Public Enemy and EPMD while Middle Brother Octopus slept under a blanket on the massive back seat, tearing down dark streets in Manchester, South Windsor, and Glastonbury trying to get home before my 11 p.m curfew, driving up to a mountain in Vermont, which I climbed with a friend, and the name of which I've forgotten, and could never find again.



The American auto industry as we knew it is over. It'll continue, but it likely will never be the same industry we all grew up with.

I loved that Eldorado, and I still like American cars. The 2003 Dodge Intrepid I'm still driving has to be one of the most reliable and comfortable cars I've ever had, even now at over 110,000 miles. I know it's past time to let go of car culture as we've known it in America. But today, for me, is a day to remember American cars we've all loved. I know it's stupid and sentimental, but I grew up largely in American cars, and for much of my childhood I buckled a seat belt with that blue GM logo across my lap. Some dumb part of me, the same infantile part that pledged loyalty to the Mets in 1985, still feels that if I do buy a car, it should be American -- though what it means to "buy American" is not such an easy question these days.

I had an American childhood, and was driven through that childhood in gigantic American cars. Those cars will always be with me.

Audio View from the Tank: DOOM, Born Like This (2009)

By special request. (Shout out to Upstate NY!)

I had been waiting a while for the return of MF DOOM (now just DOOM), filling the time by playing his previous albums over and over. DOOM has ruined most other rap for me: everything and everyone else sounds stale, tired, bogus. Is there anyone else out there in hip hop as funny, as vibrant, or as mind-blowingly clever as DOOM/MF DOOM/King Geedorah/Victor Vaughn?

First, sighs of relief: Born Like This is mostly awesome and miles better than the misbegotten The Mouse and the Mask. DOOM has somehow managed to stay fresh and compelling over more than a decade now. His longevity is probably due to his humor and his unwillingness to ever grow up: the samples from Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Star Trek, The Fantastic Four and all other manner of Saturday morning and afternoon detritus are served up here.

There are some uneven patches here: the excessively long samples of police reports, the litany of disaster from Charles Bukowski at the beginning of "Cellz" (which is interesting only the first couple of times you hear it), etc.

But these minor bumps in the road aren't enough to take away from the joy of the ride. There are several tracks I wanted to go on forever -- especially "Yessir!" (featuring Raekwon in fine, energetic, mid-90's form and DOOM production consisting of a sick ESG sample), "Angelz" (with Ghostface Killah and some very fine late-70's action-drama production from DOOM), and "Still Dope" (with a shockingly good staHHR). There are some interesting experiments, most notably the collaborations with Thom Yorke on the "Gazillion Ear" remix. And the late great J Dilla makes a couple triumphant appearances.

Perhaps not DOOM's greatest album ever, but featuring flashes of extreme brilliance. DOOM is still "in effect like alternative side of the street parking rules." 3 1/2 tentacles.

When Trekkies Attack

An open letter to the New Yorker:

Re "Highly Illogical" by Anthony Lane (a review of Star Trek)

I'm quite sure this letter will end up a thick file labeled "Angry Trekkies," but I will send it anyway. Anthony Lane gets Lieutenant Uhura, the Enterprise's linguist, quite wrong, in an amusingly ironic way. He says that she is "said to have 'exceptional oral sensitivity.'" Uhura is a linguist who spends most of her time listening to faint transmissions in alien languages: her exceptional sensitivity is "aural" -- not "oral."

Unfortunately for Lane, his aural sensitivity isn't quite as exceptional as Lieutenant Uhura's. Subtitles might help him with those confusing English homonyms.

Octopus Grigori
Los Angeles, California

Yeah, I know. I wouldn't publish it either.

View from the Tank: Star Trek (2009)

I was worried about this movie, and hesitant to embrace it, especially as everyone began raving about how exciting, sexy, and action-packed it was. I was, in fact, like the fanboys The Onion parodied, worried that it was a thrilling, accessible blockbuster.

But I had no reason to fear. Star Trek is the best film in the series, with the possible -- possible -- exception of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. It is thrilling, it is slick, and it's even sort of sexy. But it is also true to the essence of the series, to Gene Roddenberry's vision, to what makes Star Trek the most important and influential science fiction series in American television history. The film captures the optimistic vision of the universe so many of us were entranced by in the Original Series, The Next Generation, and the other progeny of Star Trek. At its heart, Star Trek is about the hope that logic and ethical actions will win out in the end and that we must approach the universe with an openness to new ideas and new ways of thinking.

After seeing this film twice in four days, I appreciate this film most for its faith in the fans of of the series. J.J. Abrams and the screenwriters recognized something that maybe some of us had forgotten as Star Trek became steadily ossified in an endless series of lifeless museum pieces in films numbers three through ten: Star Trek is about accepting new ideas and new realities. This film has the faith in its fans to take away (almost) everything we know. The arrival of a Romulan ship from the future (and a very special Vulcan ambassador) fundamentally alters the course of Trek history at the very beginning of the story of James T. Kirk, Spock, and crew. As Spock explains mid-way through the movie, the arrival of the Romulan ship has changed the course of history and set them all on an alternative timeline: as he says, their destinies have changed. The Original Series, the Next Generation, etc. -- none of these "exist" any longer as we know them. The new series can go anywhere it wants, almost entirely unconstrained by any of the previous Trek series.

What is especially wonderful is that this creation of an entirely new "reality" for the crew of the Enterprise is done in a way that honors the very best of TOS: the greatest episode in the original series, City on the Edge of Forever (written by the great (and litigious) Harlan Ellison) featured a similar diversion of history, when McCoy travelled back to 1930's America and accidentally prevented the entry of the U.S. into W.W.II. There are other ingenious quotations from earlier Trek: e.g., Kirk's goading of Spock, straight out of This Side of Paradise, the upgrading of Uhura's abilities to expertise in xenolinguistics (from Hoshi Sato in Enterprise), etc. And don't miss the tribble hidden in the film. (Hint: you'll hear the tribble cooing and purring before you see it.)

The casting is phenomenal -- as in perfect. I liked the controversial casting for Chekhov quite a bit: the whiz-kid math genius angle works. John Cho as Sulu seemed a little shaky to me at first, but you will be won over once he pulls out his sword -- I almost jumped out of my seat cheering. Zoe Saldana as Uhura is a revelation, and I do appreciate the efforts of the filmmakers to add some depth to this crucial character. Simon Pegg is delightful and appropriately zany as Scottie (I even liked his ewok-like sidekick as a frivolous add-on). Karl Urban is phenomenal in capturing McCoy, and his performance is the closest to impersonation, though it's much richer than that. Chris Pine won me over, despite my initial impulse to dislike him, with his thoughtful balance of Kirk's narcissism, cocksureness, and comic side, while avoiding falling into easy caricature. Finally, Zack Quinto has offered us a deeply textured Spock, bringing his emotional torment to just below the surface -- constantly simmering. (Never before have the words "Live long and prosper" so clearly meant "fuck off" as they do in a key scene here.)

Eric Bana does what he can with the Romulan villain Nero: he's got no real story and no real depth to work with. The much ballyhooed presence of Leonard Nimoy is just okay: I found some of his lines a bit cheesy and manipulative. (I thought the use of the line "I have been and always will be your friend" was an unforgivable abuse of that historic and moving line.) There are some stupid and cheesy monsters, and more than a few holes in the plot. And perhaps you will be as put off as I was by the less than convincing reaction of some of the characters to the destruction of an entire planet. Finally, what was with all the lens flare?

It's not a perfect movie -- but it's pretty damn good. It's a fresh and thrilling reboot (paging Daniel Craig), opening the door to a new chapter of Trek. Oh, and the opening scene may be the single greatest scene that I know of in all of Star Trek.

I've decided to bump up my rating after my second viewing: four and 1/2 tentacles.

More than 140 characters -- but not much more

Looking back at the weekend now that I've reached the very end again: reading Less Than Zero, watching several episodes of Star Trek TOS, going for a hike in Runyon Canyon with all the dogs and beautiful people, window shopping for a new car, swimming at the Rose Bowl, visiting Mrs. Octopus' parents in Orange County, seeing Star Trek (the new movie) again, and now heading off to bed. There were many things I forgot to get around to doing. That'll all have to wait until next weekend.

My sunflowers are starting to get a bit taller, and the leaves on the plants are getting huge. There's still nothing resembling a flower on any of the plants yet -- maybe by June. The vegetables in the back are doing fine; we'll probably have some vegetables ready to eat by July or August. Plants were not made for the age of the blog post or twitter update.

We visited a model home near Mrs. Octopus' parents' house this afternoon, just for kicks; it was my first time inside a model home. I found it kind of creepy and fascinating how the real estate marketers chose to decorate the model home: they had decided that the fake family inhabiting the model home was Asian, and filled the house with seemingly random pictures of Asian people. I was also fascinated by the choice of books they placed around the house. In the "teenage boy's room" there was a copy of Modern Electroanalytical Chemistry and The Real Anita Hill. The master bedroom featured a copy of Modern Physics. The plants in the model home were, to my surprise, real. It was a strange touch. There were jars filled with cereal, goldfish crackers, etc. I thought about eating from them, but didn't. I checked the fridge: it was empty, except for a box of Arm & Hammer.

You Are a Reaction

What is memory? And by that, I mean, what is it made of? If consciousness is a set of chemical and electrical reactions and impulses, memory itself must be nothing more than certain chemical compounds and reactions in the brain. Human memory is undoubtedly a material thing, stored in wet, slimy, material form.

It's beyond debate, but still feels strange, somehow. Perhaps because memory seems like such a ghostly, spectral thing -- appearing in visions in our dreams, in our minds as we recall faces, views, words. Memory -- like consciousness itself -- seems too elevated and ethereal -- too incorporeal -- to be nothing more than simple chemical compounds. In the end, everything is something -- as in something physical. My physics professors always used to lord it over their colleagues in biology and chemistry: because, in the end, everything boils down to physics. I guess the question is whether that is depressing or liberating.

Update 5/6/09: Better living through chemistry: BBC reports that scientists at the Alzheimer's Research Trust have had success with a drug that apparently reverses the effects of Alzheimer's disease by boosting the chemical processes involved in memory formation and retention.

Save a Prayer

Washing my hands a lot lately. Thinking twice before taking some gummy bears offered by someone at the office. Who knows who’s touched those gummies a very simple way of thinking paranoia very simple desire pleasurable in some ways even to want to keep perfectly clean to be extra mindful of one’s hands and fingers not touching things you don’t need to keeping an extra foot or two between people L.A. is probably a good place to avoid catching anything as you can just stay in your car stay in your house keep your distance all the time some guy in my office building spending his lunch hour in his car in the parking garage listening to the radio and eating a sandwich the safety of being totally alone and not having to touch or rub up against anyone normally the people in New York sneer at the selfish Los Angelenos but how must it feel now to be riding a packed 9 train uptown with someone sneezing in your face of course we can’t live like we do in L.A. forever and the world would collapse faster than it already is if everyplace became more like L.A. it’s times like these when you become extra conscious of how few opportunities for face-to-face contact one actually has in L.A. and how easily almost all such interactions can be avoided there are no crowded sidewalks most people don’t take public transport times like this you sort of want to pack your car with provisions and head to some place in Idaho or Wyoming and just wait it out what bugs me is people who get off on aestheticizing disaster people who invariably have good health care and all sorts of financial and social safety nets and who can get off on the pornography of disaster from their secured locations and they are in their perverse way loving the current situation because it’s so dystopian and awesome just a high-brow form of sensationalism and more than a little titillation felt in being able to describe death and destruction while knowing that the privileged describer faces little chance of being affected by said death and destruction. Wash your hands and say a prayer.

"The earth laughs in flowers."

April coming to an end. We have vegetable beds now -- four of them, sitting in the backyard. They're made of cedar or something like that. They're now filled with 81 cubic feet of compost and soil. We've planted beans, tomatoes, zucchini, scallions, lettuce, melons, pak choi, sugar snap peas, and other stuff. There's a black tarp laid out under the beds, and various bamboo structures placed on top of the beds for the climbing plants to attach themselves to: the whole set up looks like a large science project.

My role in our gardening project has mostly involved moving a lot of dirt and digging holes for trees. I enjoy that kind of work outside: it feels like good exercise and I find it relaxing to dig into the ground and move dirt around.

I have complete control over one patch of territory -- a strip near the driveway where I've planted several kinds of sunflowers. I'm especially excited about the giant sunflowers I've planted there, which are supposed to grow to twelve or fourteen feet. I've got seven or eight sunflowers growing there now; many of the seeds I planted were unearthed and eaten by birds or squirrels. I was initially impatient with the sunflowers, but I've learned to accept that I just have to wait for the little fuckers to do their thing -- at their own rate. Nature.

Automatic Transmission

Riding in the backseat of a car through the hills over the Rose Bowl in Pasadena I used to have these dreams all the time of being in the back of a car that was rolling along usually down a hill with no one driving the origin of these dreams probably had something to do with my crashing a car when I was two my mother had left me sleeping in a car seat in the back seat as she took my baby brother into the house the car was parked on our street at the top of a long steep hill while she was taking my brother in I somehow got out of my car seat got into the front seat and shifted the car into neutral and it started rolling backwards down the hill my mom saw this dropped my brother on the lawn and started chasing after the car which started picking up speed as it rolled down the hill perhaps taking out a mailbox or garbage can here and there with my mom screaming and reaching out for the car I don't remember any of this and then the story goes the car fell off the road into a ditch or a small stream -- I can't remember exactly which -- and my mom got to the car and pulled open the door and I was a little confused and scared but unhurt someone had called my dad and he raced back from his office at eighty or ninety miles an hour down the streets of Windsor, Connecticut later the back seat held happier memories as I would ride in a carpool to Montessori school with my friends and the parents would leave little picture books in the back for us to look at to acquaint and familiarize us with books to encourage us to hold and enjoy books because that would be important for us to become good students later which would be important for us to obtain positions of prestige and comfort so that we would live good lives and crashing cars before we could read was not part of that plan -- the ambitious plan for the children looking through picture books in the back seat though the thing I remember most clearly from that house in Windsor was being lifted into a tree sometime in the spring by my neighbor a girl a few years older than me named Nancy and there alone up in the tree I looked into a nest and saw the startling sky blue eggs of a robin

There ain't no Florida deal

What is the rush to end every week? Racing to Friday afternoon, waking up on Thursday thinking it's Friday Mrs. Octopus on the phone with her parents speaking in Vietnamese I can understand a bit here and there and I'm watching the St. Louis Blues vs. the Vancouver Canucks in the Stanley Cup Playoffs though I haven't watched hockey much since the Whalers left Hartford in the nineties which was deeply traumatic for most people in or from Connecticut I had gone to dozens of Whalers games growing up with my uncle who had season tickets through his company behind one of the goals every time we went someone got hit or nearly hit with a puck flying off an errant slapshot there were a couple die-hard fans -- they were sort of fat and scruffy and always wore their Whalers jerseys -- who had seats behind my uncle's and apparently went to every single game and knew all the staff at the Hartford Civic Center now the XL Center and were apparently allowed to bring in their own snacks and I respected them because of their commitment it was very pure and focused at least they could really commit to something they loved I wonder why I can't do that the Civic Center caved in after a huge snowstorm in 1978 and today it's an empty husk the sun has gone down Old Time Hockey eh like Eddie Shore the days are deliciously long again spring is wonderful I was thinking as I took the long Colorado St./Eagle Rock exit ramp of the 134 admiring the young trees in bloom with tiny pink blossoms in the median spring is here the Blues and Canucks are shoving each other and falling down on top of each other even though the period's over and here comes the Zamboni

Jettisoned like a spent booster rocket, tumbling to earth, burning up.