Night Watch

I am in the habit of taking Audrey for a walk before going to bed. Just so she won't wake me up any earlier than is absolutely necessary. Which means I was walking my dog at five a.m., wondering if anyone on my street was up yet. And then, when I ran into a slew of pesky postscript errors, I ended up continuing to be up, which is the state I am in right now. I've got the local news on. Cartoon Network came up out of Adult Swim and plunged right into edifying children's fare, and boo for that. The plot of the episode of whatever the show was that I passively heard was chock full of information about how farm subsidies work and about the environmental impacts of some of the governmental meddling that takes place in the agricultural industry. It's a superhero type show. The team of empowered youngsters were battling a "Villain" who had sinister agricultural plans. It was hard not to be amused by that. I remember seeing a vintage issue of a Popeye comic at a booth at Comic-Con a couple of years back, and the entire book was about the environment. Popeye was really just a spokesperson for some very green message. And it was all very boring and educational. And I still almost bought it. You know. Just because.

Local news really annoys me, though. Like today, there is frequent coverage of the progress in the investigation of a murder that happened on Friday. Some poor kid in Whittier got shot working in a Subway sandwich shop. He gave the robbers the money, and they shot him anyway. And now he's dead. And every time this somber story was covered, it was followed -- without a beat -- by the cheery-but-bumbling correspondence of the lady reporter covering the announcements of the Golden Globe nominations. I realize it's just one guy and life goes on and all of that, and I further realize that newscasters truly are soulless automatons who can't feel anything that isn't typed in brackets on the teleprompter, but it just seems all too plain that human life is cheap cheap cheap when compared with the money that gets made by the picture show. Seven marines from San Diego died in Iraq today, too. But I'm sure their families would much rather know whether Leonardo di Caprio has a shot at Best Actor. I know I would.

I'm so tired. This past few days have been a vortex of performances and county-to-county commuting and having to ante up in order to make plans. I have the marks of violin playing on my fingertips and my neck. And I have a few more comedy shows under my figurative belt (I really don't wear them that much). And Jessie and I went and signed up for an improv workshop today. And I'm really glad about that. In addition, as we were leaving the theater, we saw a homeless man kneeling Mecca-style, with his forehead down on a star on the Walk of Fame. He was praying to it. And I was especially curious to know which star he might be praying to. As we passed, I nearly burst a blood vessel in my eye with the ridiculous thrill I got from learning he was praying to Lassie. I think that rules all over the place. And I'm not kidding. I don't think that scenario could have been more quintessentially ironic if he had been praying to an anthropomorphized can of fruit.

There's no real reason for my saying so, but I'm really surprised Elizabeth Taylor isn't dead yet.

I took Josh to "A John Waters Christmas" at Royce Hall last week. It was pretty great. At least it was when it stopped being the opening performances of Vaginal Davis (who wasn't as clever as drag queens are expected to be), Phranc (who wasn't bad but only did one number), and Marga Gomez (who wasn't funny for nearly her entire set). John Waters himself is peerless in his ability to inspire me to aspire to the horrible and base. I took a few notes down during the show with the intention of writing it all up. But my weekend and I got into a tiff. Off the top of my head, I can recount that he charged the audience in the following fashion: If you know someone who doesn't want books as gifts, don't fuck them. And if your significant other doesn't have books and doesn't want them and won't get them for you, don't fuck them, either. He followed that with the list of books he would like to receive for Xmas, and the list alone was enormously entertaining. Josh recognized Mink Stole sitting right in front of us. We didn't do anything about it. I wouldn't have recognized her on my own. I'm not as well-versed in the seminal works of John Waters as nearly anyone else in the world. But I sure do think he's clever. And I'm jealous of everyone who gets invited to his annual Xmas party. He told us where he receives his fan mail, and I was tempted to send him dirty pictures, but I've since forgotten the name of the bookstore, and I'm almost sure there's nothing I could photograph that would really pique his interest.

My eyes are burning, and I have an appointment in a few hours, so I'm going to shut my PowerBook and tuck my dog in and see what happens when I hit the sheets. When I resurface, I will likely apologize for the lack of inspiration in everything I have just written. I'm tempted to do it now and get it out of the way. But I'm afraid I won't have anything to say later on if I don't reserve that. Which is truly disheartening.