Apple TV: More Cult Hype or the Future of Home Entertainment?

By Pauly
Los Angeles, CA

 
So the big deal with Apple TV is that you're able to watch Netflix on your TV instead of your laptop? Am I missing anything else? I guess that's worth something, especially if we rotate the small device between the living room and bedroom. Watching Netflix in bed is a lot easier with the TV instead of a searing-hot laptop sitting awkwardly in the middle of your bed.

Nicky dropped $99 for Apple TV, which is not a TV, but a tiny little black box. It's a state of the art gizmo that I'm convinced Dick Cheney and his cohorts at the NSA uses to spy on everyone. She'll probably use 99% of it to stream Netflix and Hulu. I will probably use the other features more than her, such as access to MLB.TV and NBA Season Pass. I have subscriptions to both services, so I have an added bonus of streaming games on our TV without hooking up my laptop. I previous watched baseball games on my laptop and once in a while I'd hook up my laptop to the TV during NBA season, usually if I had two or more games I wanted to sweat. The quad box (displays four simultaneous games) should be renamed the "sweat box." It is a fucking amazing invention and it's one of those advancements in technology that gamblers adore.

We finally embraced Apple TV after Nicky used some birthday money to buy it. That's the future right there. Netflix and Hulu (or a new streaming site like those) will eventually dominate the entertainment market and become bigger than TV companies and film studios combined. That's a scary prospect, but it's theirs to dominate so long as they don't fuck it up.

Like radio, conventional TV is dying off. In a decade, we'll be watching all our TV shows on demand via the internet. Only old people will still be watching the TV to get their news. With the exception of sports or any sort of national tragedy, there's no reason to watch TV in real time unless you want to be bombarded with commercials. Of course, if you live in LA, then you get every car chase broadcast on local TV. Some day there will be a special station dedicated to live police chases from around the world. There's a Twitter feed devoted to live car chases and they send out a tweet whenever there's one on TV somewhere in America. In the last few months I watched chases from Dallas, Miami, Phoenix, and somewhere in Kansas.

Movie theatres will never die off because there's something exciting about the big screen experience. More indie films are being made and big studios are making fewer films, but those few films are raking in most of the dough.  In the next decade or so, we'll have ginormous thousand seat mini-coliseums to see Fast and Furious 16, or they'll be tiny little theatres for low-budget indie flicks that cater to the artsy fartsy crowd.

Today, you have the plenty of options to see a big budget blockbuster (think 3-D flicks or sequels), whereas unless you live in a hip city, you have limited options to view indie flicks. Theatres are either a multiplex a part of a corporate chain, or its super tiny indie theatres that are relics of the past. When we lived in San Francisco, our apartment was around the corner from the Vogue, tiny neighborhood theatre that opened in 1910. Holy shitballs, it was a small one screen theatre and the seats were stiff and uncomfortable, but they changed films every week and it was awesome to walk around the corner to see a flick. I caught over a dozen movies in the short time I lived nearby. A couple of times I was one of three or four people in the theatre.

I wish I had a similar theatre here in LA, but instead I have to go to a fucking mall to see a flick (either Century City or The Grove). When I was a kid growing up in NYC, I had access to two different theatres -- The Dale and Riverdale Twin -- neither of which are around. One was turned into a porn theatre for a brief stint in the 1980s before it became a bingo parlor. I saw Rocky IV at that theatre. I also smelled weed for the first time in that theatre. The local hoods would sit in the balcony and blaze up. The Twin was shutdown due to lack of customers. I hung out there a lot and saw Ferris Bueller and Wargames like a dozen times at that particular theatre.

Nicky and I dropped our movies package on cable. We had everything, but barely watched those channels. Like we had a hundred versions of HBO, Cinemaz, SHO, Starz, etc. We trimmed our cable bill by 1/3. I love being able to stick it to major corporations, especially ones that profit off of other people's boredom. Let's face it... fucking Time Warner is not going to miss my $50 a month.

But shedding those extra movie channels comes down to not giving into the fear that you'll miss something (FOMO) and reducing the amount of time you waste watching cable. It's hard not to find something to watch on those superfluous channels (like I have a theory that one of the Matrix movies or a Robert DeNiro movie is playing at any given time on cable). But sometimes you get sucked in and its a dangerous drug and you cannot turn away and the next thing you know it... you wasted six hours getting blazed while watching Pineapple Express and one of the Bourne Identity flicks for the 237th time.

Swimming in Books, Donnie Back Pain, and Foggy Benders

By Pauly
Los Angeles, CA

Four weeks. Excruciating pain.

I threw out my back a month ago. One of my childhood heroes -- Don "Donnie Baseball" Mattingly -- was plagued with back problems. His career ended prematurely. Long before Mattingly became head skipper of the Los Angeles Dodgers, he was one of the best first basemen in all of baseball during the 80s, but he was plagued with a bum back. With modern sports-medicine technology, he might have squeezed out a couple of more seasons and posted enough statistics that would warrant a nod to the Hall of Fame. Alas, Mattingly currently holds the dubious distinction of being the best player in pinstipes to never make the Hall of Fame. Then again, if fucking Scooter Rizzuto is in Cooperstown, then maybe in a couple of decades Mattingly's peers will vote him in?

Long month dealing with Mattingly-esque back woes. The shortcut is eating a jar of pain pills, but I am gutting it out with the long-term plan of bed rest. That non-narcotic gameplan put a damper on freelance work. I don't have a 9-to-5 office gig that I can hide out in, nor do I have paid sick days. If I don't write, then I don't get paid. Instead of doubling up (or tripling up) with freelance work which I originally intended so I could take off 4-week vacation to travel and follow Phish, I was forced to strip down my schedule down and focus on essential work. The rest of my down time was spent in bed reading books and resting my back. The extra money is not flowing in, but I can't complain because I enjoy reading. I always secretly wanted to be inflicted by a strange disease (non-deadly) that requires a lengthy period of bed rest so I could finally be able to make a dent in the massive pile of books I started to read, yet never finished. Plus, I binge-watched the new season of Arrested Development and have a long, winding queue of 20-30 different documentaries, plus hundreds of hours of unlistened podcasts.

I'm addicted to writing, the one solitary activity that causes me the most pleasure, but at the present moment, it also causes me the most physical pain. Every morning I have to strategically figure out when I'll be in the best shape to write and then I have to dedicate that time to any freelance work, which take priority. But sometimes that's like trying to hit a moving target. I have a small window of time to write every day. I actually have two windows -- one large and one tiny. The first window is as soon as I get up and before my back starts to stiffen up. At that point I wait until I'm nearly crying from pain before I end the session and crawl back into bed and take whatever I need to ease the pain mostly anti-inflammatory meds which is not very strong. I save the harder stuff for nighttime so I can sleep. I spend a few hours resting up and then I take a short walk around the block to see if I can gut out another writing session. But those late-afternoon sessions are shorter and I never know how long I can last.

When I don't get to finish what I wanted to do (I'm waaaaay behind in multiple projects), it puts me in a foul mood. If I don't create something, then I feel utterly worthless and then the day is wasted. I tried to fill in some of that idle time with painting (I'm on a minimalist kick), but I can only really paint standing up which doesn't  put a lot of strain on my back. Sometimes during the afternoon writing sessions, I work while standing up at a makeshift desk. If you spend a lot of time at major poker tournaments, you'll see pros with habitual back problems getting massages for hours at a time. It's almost got to a point when I need someone to give me massages while I write.

Maybe it's time to pull a Kramer and get an "intern" like he did for Kramerica? I'm sure there has to be an over-achiever at UCLA who wants to get credit working for a writer and part-time sportsbettor. I can dictate stuff and get that kid to write it up for me. Or better yet, I'd probably be sending him out to In & Out Burger or the local weed store everyday.

Sometimes I feel better later in the evening after dinner and a very small dose of pain pills. If I can squeeze in a rare third writing session, I'm all for it because it puts me in a good mood. Several downsides to the Midnight sessions: 1) those opportunities are rare (like once or twice a week), 2) the window is incredibly small, and 3) I'm heavily inebriated so I can't do work-related things, so I'm usually dicking around here or on other blogs that I have neglected.

Based on the current circumstances, I gladly take what I can get. Three smaller writing sessions are better than none. Pre-back woes, I completed the same amount of work in a single day that is currently taking me a week to do. Yikes. Productivity reduced by 85%. Yeah, I try not to think about that math side of having a bad back, because the lack of productivity is very depressing. One project is way past due and I have three looming deadlines screaming and haunting at me right now.

Oh, well. This is what my 40s is going to look like. It's only going to get worse. Even surgery isn't a guarantee. I'm trying to figure out ways around this. "Adapt and overcome when faced with adversity", is something my old man drilled into my head. I know my back troubles will eventually alleviate but I'm getting a glimpse of what my writing sessions will be like a decade or two decades from now if I can make it that long.

I got a second chance at life, so this is all gravy. That's why you can't sweat the small stuff and have to find quick solutions to problems and keep moving forward instead of bitching about a bad beat. "Injury is opportunity," Pat Riley once said when he was coach of the Lakers. Injuries gave scrubs a chance to get playing time. My attitude is simple -- it sucks about the back, but I need to look at the positives like the opportunity to read for several hours every day, listen to podcasts, and even finish a few paintings. I got lucky and found some really fucking great (non-gambling) podcasts that I never had the time to listen to before.

Time allocation can be a bitch. I lost a ton of valuable work time, but I'm filling in the rest time with another favorite pastime -- books. Thank God we don't have a cable box in the bedroom, otherwise I'd be zoning out to the boob tube.

Of course, this problem could all be solved if I ate painkillers and blazed my way through this rough patch. That's what I would have done in the past, but I'm trying to be less of a junkie and trying a more natural route (rest, exercise, Tai Chi, medicinal marijuana alternatives etc.). The problem with Big Pharma's pain pills is you instantly build up a tolerance and have to take more and more. When you quit, it's a bitch to withdraw. That's why I'm taking very little at present moment and relying more on medicinal marijuana (strong pot brownies mimic the overall body sensation as opiates). Yeah, the last thing I want is to be hooked hard on pills again. It was a bitch to kick.

After four weeks my back is still out-of-whack. I made big strides last week, but this past weekend was incredibly tough especially after sitting through a 3.5 hour baseball game. By Saturday night I was a wreck. Sunday was tough. I was jacked up on pain pills on Sunday evening. It took a strong dose and flirted with Requiem for a Dream territory of schwastedness, but finally felt painless for the first time in a month.

It's been a year since I was that faded.

On Sunday night, I cleaned some dirty paint brushes and caught up on emails. I have a huge backlog and had like 20+ emails from one assclown who keeps sending me passive-aggressive emails about removing links from sites that I don't even own (they were actually owned by friends but I have no clue why he kept sending threatening emails). I fired off a few snippy emails calling him out for being a shady fucker for buying links in the first place and then called him for being lazy fuckatrd because he didn't even bother taking the time to see if the email addy matched up with the site he supposedly sold a link to. I should post his angry responses. I then offered to solve his problems for a nominal fee. He has yet to respond to that. See... these are the stupid things I do when crocked to the tits.

Reminded me of some of those foggy days that stretched into week-long benders when I lived in San Francisco. The partying commenced on Friday evening after meeting a deadlines for work (usually handicapping football games) and things went insta-fuzzy during the next two days and then all of a sudden it's Sunday morning and time for football! I should be sleeping it off like mostly everyone else, but since NFL games start at 10am on the West Coast, I extended the party a little longer. I had a routine that began around 6am (mostly monitoring injury reports and line moves). Around 8am, I grabbed breakfast and big-ass iced tea while avoiding some of the most annoying people on the planet -- yuppies from Pacific Heights who went slumming in my neighborhood Lower Pacific Heights to run their errands. I'd be faded to the tits and looked like a vampire with Oxy-juiced glassy eyes. Then again, totally shitfaced is the only way to deal with self-absorbed chipper yuppie couples in Lululemon yoga pants and vintage Dead Kennedys t-shirt ($150 retail) pushing a state-of-the art baby stroller that cost the equivalent of a half-a-year salary for a sportswriter at the Chronicle.

Sundays in San Francisco were a whirlwind of betting and high-stakes fantasy football. I hung out in the back of the apartment until the girls woke up by the start of the afternoon game (1pm). Then, I had two different viewing stations at opposite ends of the Victorian with the big screen in the living room and an ad hoc mini-sportsbook in the backroom with at least two laptops. It's fun to think about now, but some of those afternoons were super stressful (the afternoon games gave me an opportunity to get unstuck) which is why I would pace up and down Halli's long hallways while occasionally peeking at the scores.

This past NFL season (in L.A.), I was zapped and drained by the time the Sunday Night Football game ended. I was working anywhere from 80-100 hours depending on the week. Sometimes I'd pass out before the 4Q was over. I learned a ton of stuff the last two seasons, but it this past one was too psychically demanding. The adage is true -- it's a hard way to make an easy living.

In San Francisco, if I had a profitable weekend, then I wanted to celebrate. If it was a bad weekend and lost money, then I wanted to drown my sorrows. Didn't matter... win or lose, I kept the party going on Sunday nights. I forced myself to take a break and get some rest on Monday because we always played poker on Monday nights and those games always went late late late. Halli and Skye hosted the Ice Palace game, which ran at least until 4am, but we regularly played short-handed until sunrise. A few instances we played until noon the next day. We'd jokingly tell friends to stop over the next morning and bring us meatball sandwiches and an 8-ball. I didn't care about the blow. I was just fucking starving. Besides, that's what Adderall is for -- much cheaper and it lasts longer.

The record for longest game was a 28-hour session that began at 9pm on Monday and ended around 1am on Wednesday. I crashed around 6am and re-joined the game at 10am, while a couple of friends left the game at 3am, crashed and went to work, then returned to the game after work on Tuesday.

If you're doing the math... I was partying hard Friday night through Tuesday morning with a short rest. I'd finally crash on Tuesday morning (or sometimes afternoon). I was back to "work" for an intense three-day writing session. After a somewhat sober Wednesday-Thursday-Friday  handicapping games and tweaking lineups, I was ready to resume a weekend bender on Friday night.  Foggy, hazy rage-fests. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.Every fucking week for a few months.

It was an unhealthy lifestyle, but tons of fun. No regrets. Wish I could still do that! It's hard to imagine a sustained buzz for long stretches of time, which is why sometimes I look back at SF and my memories are as fuzzy and murky like the fog that rolled in every morning and flew over our house.

Anyway, flashbacks to late 2011 were over. For a couple of hours late Sunday, I remembered what it was like to be riding the crest of an intoxicating tidal wave. It's that supreme "high" that junkies chase every single day. I felt better both physically and mentally. The physical pain subdued for a few hours, but more importantly, I forgot that "down in the dumps" feeling I got when going through creative withdrawal. When I can't achieve that buzz, I get moody and grumpy and I feel lost and aimless. Just ask Nicky. She has to endure those hurricanes. I'm surprised I haven't blown the roof off our apartment.

I get my rocks off by writing. Cheaper than a therapist. My favorite drug. It's inexpensive too (free) and I can actually make money off of it (not much, mind you but almost enough to get by). In the meantime, the doctor(s) said only time and rest can heal me. In the meantime, I'm swimming in books.

On Green Dolphin Shit (Fiction)

By Pauly
Los Angeles, CA

EXT. BEVERLY HILLS - DAY

Lazy Sunday morning. Empty street in Beverly Hills. Three twenty-something post-beohemian hipster (PBH) types slowly pedal their bicycles. The FEMALE PBH #2 on the far left is silent and heavily medicated. The other two  -- FEMALE PBH #1 WITH TINA FEY GLASSES and UNSHAVEN MALE PBH -- were pontificating about nothing for several blocks.

"I don't know how many times I've taken the same photo."

"Imagine how many people took the same photo before you?"

"My mom said she used to work in a Fotomat when she was in college."

"What the hell is that?"

"It was like a drive thru photo store. But very tiny. Like the size of a food truck. This was before digital cameras. People dropped off film things. I dunno what are they call?"

"Umm... Film cartridges?"

"Film reels? You know the film film? Old school film, like tape. You see that shit in old movies."

"Yeah. Film tape."

"So people drove up to Fotomat and dropped off their film tape. When pictures were developed, they picked them up."

"Where did they develop it?"

"I dunno. Some darkroom somewhere. Doesn't matter. The thing is that my mom said she looked at a lot of the photos. She said when people came back from their summer vacations, if they went to Europe, they always took pictures of the same things. Like the Effiel Tower. Or Notre Dame."

"Right were the Hunchback lives."

"Same photo. Different people. Same photo."

"Imagine how many people take the same photo of the same Eiffel Tower?"

"Day after day. Thousands every day. Tens of thousands. Over one hundred thousand a week."

"No way. I saw more. Like a half a million a week."

"That's like 26 million people a year."

"Same picture. Same tower. Different people. So what's the point of taking pictures?

"That's what I'm wondering. I guess as a personal memento."

"But you can just Google that shit. You'd find a better one. No doubt. By a real photographer. Or someone who took a shot with better light. I went to film school. It's all about light."

"I thought you dropped out?"
'
"Whatevs. Just Google pics. You don't need to take 'em."

"Selfies in front of the Eiffel Tower is the new postcard. Except you don't actually have to go through the trouble of sending an actual overpriced card that will take a month to get to where its supposed to go, and by then you're already home and told everyone about your trip."

"What's the point of even going? You can just Photoshop yourself into a picture of you with the Hunchback of Notre Dame, or hanging with Beibs in Rome with 2 Chainz's entourage."

"Food is temporary. It's unique and something worth preserving."

"Now you see it. Then it's gone."

"Disappears. Digested. Shat out. Flushed away. Into the bowels of the city's sewers."

"Then flushed out to the ocean, so whales and dolphins will eventually eat it. You shit out dolphin food. That's pretty rad. You can't do that with the Eiffel Tower... eat it bit by bit and shit it out for Euro-trash dolphins as dessert."

"You ever think that when you take a picture of food, that you're capturing it's last breath of life before it gets consumed?"

"And then turned into dolphin shit."

"Yeah. You capture the food at the height of its essence. Someone prepares that dish pulling in different ingredients and it went from nothing to something in a short time. But once you get served, that's the beginning of the end. The dish reaches its pinnacle of existence as its being set down in front of you. Once you start eating, it's over. Death. When you take a photo of food, you capture the moment before it dies."

"That's some really serious deep thinking. Like Nobel Prize winning philosophy and shit."

"Thanks. And I didn't have to get thrown out of NYU film school to learn that."

"So how did you learn that? You know, the essence of food and dying and shit?"

"Xanax. I take one but before I drift off to dreamland, I look at food photos on Instagram. It's easy to think about death when all you think about all day is hiding from real life. So I look at a couple hundred of food pics every night. Relaxes me. Meals by friends and strangers alike."

"That's a lot of dolphin shit."

Around the Horn: Death of Radio, Dirty Blvds, Possum Fights, and Haunted by Numbers

By Pauly
Los Angeles, CA

Another weird and busy week. Here's what you may have missed...

Lizze, Stef, and Hugh Freeze - What's in a name? I like power names. But in today's social media age, it's not as easy to use a mysterious stage name, lie you could get away with 60 years ago.

Full Moon Fever and Dirty Blvds. - Three albums dominated the summer I was 16 years old. Tom Petty. The Pixies. Lou Reed. The soundtrack to a crazy summer in NYC.

Southern Fried Radio and Rise of the Machines - Radio is dead. I had mixed emotions about the radio stations in different cities where I lived. The future of music (distribution) is in the hands of tech geeks and other internet innovators.

Police Helicopters, Beiber's Monkey, Alley Possums - A helicopter woke my ass up. What te hell was going on in the slums of Beverly Hills?

Chasing Numbers - Do numbers chase you around? Haunt you? Do you see weird numerical signs everywhere?

Obey Shepard Fairey Lecture - Street artist Shepard Fairey gave a great lecture.

Over at some of the other places I write...

Bronx Bums Report: Steaming Cleveland and Beating King Felix [Ocelot Sports]
Monday Morning Key Bumps: Jake Bugg [Coventry Music]
Sunshine Daydream: Veneta, Oregon [Coventry Music]
Levon Helm Documentary: Ain't In It for My Health [Coventry Music]
Friday Night UNTZ: The Beastles [Coventry Music]

Obey: Shepard Fairey Lecture

By Pauly
Los Angeles, CA

Too busy today to write anything of substance (although that has never stopped be before). Here is a good interview/lecture given by Shepard Fairey, who discusses the themes of his artwork -- over-consumption, guerrilla marketing, questioning authority, and scuzzy politics. Wish I had the time to write about some of the things Shepard discusses during this lecture (like how people interpret images and how the powers that be manipulate images). Maybe next month?

Chasing Numbers

By Pauly
Los Angeles, CA

Do numbers chase you around like a ghost that you see everywhere?

When I was a teenager, I kept seeing the same numbers. It would be on a digital clock radio, or on VCRs, or mi my grandma's microwave when I stopped over to visit. Those numbers chased me to college. I'd see those four digits everywhere. I'm sure I saw different specific number combinations more often, but those were not on my radar. I can't recall when I stopped seeing those numbers. But every now and then it pops up and I chuckle.

When I first met the Joker over a decade ago, he told me about his affinity for the number 4. He felt as though whenever he saw a 4, it was a positive message, and any groupings of 4 like 44 or 444 were a symbol of good things to come. We went on a major road trip together in 2004 to see some of the last Phish tour before they broke up. We saw tons of 4s in different states and for some reason, I found that number comforting.

I'm well aware about the sanctity of the number 8, especially in Chinese cultures. I know a fair share of superstitious Asian gamblers Eight is more than great. It's stupendous. In August of 2008, Vegas was overbooked by people trying to get married on 8/8/08, while gamblers (of Asian and non-Asian descent) flooded Vegas hoping that gambling on 8/8/08 would provide them with a little extra good luck.

After a while, you start seeing groupings of numbers differently. Whenever I see five numbers I think of a zip code. When I see a grouping of six different (double digit) numbers, I think of lotto numbers. When I see three numbers behind a decimal point, I think batting average.

When I played a lot of online poker, a specific hand used to chase me around all the time (Queen-8). When I lived in Vegas, I rarely saw clocks but I saw numbers everywhere else. Alas those numbers and symbols were disingenuous. More like marks of the beast. The entire reason Vegas became Vegas is that many self-destructive people are driven by their addictions and they're tantalized by numbers... especially big numbers... which translates into millions of junkies chasing mega-jackpots. It's easy to fleece someone who is blinded by fortune and intoxicated by big numbers, which cloud their judgement. Casinos generate billions in revenue a little at a time. Sheer volume. Amateur gamblers in Vegas are the fools because they're blinded by the bling and susceptible to get rich quick schemes like winning a huge score in Vegas by a slots jackpot, or a heater at the craps table, or by binking a poker tournament. The house always wins because they stack the math on their side and offer up table games with bad odds. But the public isn't aware of those edges and if they are, they don't care because they're "on vacation." Compulsive gamblers tend to donk off their savings in one batch and eventually evolve into degens who run up massive debts and spend every dollar they can get their hands on. Casinos don't need to think big and opt for big score; they'll gladly grind out billions in revenue by one slot pull at a time, one blackjack hand at a time, one Keno game at a time.

Numbers are hidden everywhere. In NYC, you can't ride the subway without seeing numbers of stops, or you can't work in a skyscraper without being guided by numbers in elevators to indicate how high up in the air you really are. In San Francisco, the city went through so many different building and renovation cycles, that you'll see a vast array of fonts depicting numbers. After a while I got good at recognizing when a building was renovated based on narrowing down popular fonts to specific eras. In L.A., they sometimes paint address numbers on the curb, but you always see random numbers whizzing by on billboards and awnings.

Numerologists say there's more to numbers than we think. There's thousands of hours of "conspiracy" type videos about secret societies that hide numerical codes and scared geometry in plain sight. Your name is important to numerologists because it can be broken down into a specific number(s) and those numbers indicate if you will have a good life or a bad life. Numerologists also speak highly about the importance of "life path numbers" which is a combination of hokey mysticism and something that a shady astrologist trying to scam you would say. In case you were wondering, I'm a "3"... which is funny because I wanted #3 on my uniform in high school because Rex Champan wore #3 for Kentucky and he was one of the best three-point shooters in America. According to some rudimentary research (I lazily looked on the first page of Google), I discovered that a life path number of 3 is specifically slotted to "creative types." Truth, or just a coincidence?

A bunch of math wizards and rabbis broke down the Bible using a numerical code. Some of them apply those codes to beating the sock market (e.g. the indie film "Pi") or even betting on sports.

"Mathematics is the science of nature," according to the trailer...


Yet, it's tough to see numbers and letters in your dreams. It's like newspapers are blurry. Next time you're dreaming... try and pay attention and see if you can recognize numbers/letters. That's how I usually can tell if I'm dreaming -- all the numbers get fuzzy -- and that's what I use to try and trigger a lucid dream. Those only happen once in a blue moon and I'm lucky if I get one a year. It's so hard to differentiate reality from dream state when you're dreaming. Time slows down (I think scientists determined dream time is like 1/8th of real time, but it seems much lower because who can have a dream that takes place over several hours, when in fact it transpired in between nine-minute snooze alarms). It's damn near impossible to realize and then convince yourself you're dreaming and then try to control the situations like a scene out of Inception.

Reality is a mind fuck anyway.

Sometimes life seems too weird and absurd. Maybe we're living in a glitch the Matrix? Or reality is just a hologram? Sometimes I wonder if my real life is just a dream and my dream life is my real life. Sometimes I think I ate much acid because I get stuck in a loop thinking about unanswerable concepts like "what is reality." Sometimes I think I didn't do enough because I don't have a good answer.

Sometimes you see vivid numbers in your dreams, but for me, they are usually on huge banners along side a building, or so obvious that it's hard to miss. Usually numbers are fuzzy in my dreams.  I have a recurring dream about getting lost in a hotel and resort and one of the obstacles is trying to find my way around because all the signs and room numbers are fuzzy. So, any time I have a dream featuring a distinct number, and if I wake up to recall that specific number, then I spend most of that day trying to figure out what the fuck my subconscious is trying to tell me. Those numbers must represent something and my brain is flashing that number(s) for a reason. But what? 

Then again, maybe a "cigar is just a cigar" and these numbers are utterly meaningless.

Police Helicopters, Bieber's Monkey, Alley Possums, and Cat-Killing Raccoons

By Pauly
Los Angeles, CA

 
A fucking helicopter woke me up.

What the fuck was a copter doing at 6:30 in the morning? It kept circling my block. For almost a half hour. Over and over and over.

Paparazzi? News copter? Traffic copter? LAPD?

Did Justin Bieber's monkey escape again?

Did I miss a high-speed chase and the suspect ditched his vehicle and tried to hide out in the different alleys in the Slums of Beverly Hills?

Did Lindsay Lohan crash her Mercedes? Again?

I always have a morbid fear that one day I'll see a scene out of Point Break and my alley will be one of the chase routes by an undercover cop chasing after a bankrobber in a Ronald Reagan mask.

It was too early to be a traffic copter, besides we don't exactly live near a freeway. It had to be a newsworthy event or LAPD was chasing someone. Fire? Building collapse? Bieber's monkey?

I never found out what happened. The copter split around 7am. Nicky eventually woke up (with no copters buzzzing, just the echo of dumpster divers looking for empty bottles) and heard me muttering something about copters swirling around our block. I'm sure she thought I was being paranoid. Again.

I did not fall asleep until late. Super late. I tried to crash early, but I was stuck in bed catching up with podcasts and unable to drift off asleep. I was hoping to squeeze an extra hour or so of rest in before Nicky's alarm went off, but the copter woke me up for good.

Doesn't matter how late I crash, I pretty much get up roughly the same time my girlfriend wakes up. Her alarm is a last-case scenario for me. I'm usually awake by the time the first wave of can fairies are done digging through my dumpster and the building next door.

Nicky has the ugly commute. One Los Angeles freeway is a pain in the ass. She has to navigate two of them in order to get to her office on the other side of the Hollywood Hills. Sheesh. I'm lucky that I work at home. My project manager is based in Europe, so by the time I'm waking up, he's done with his work day. By the time I'm crashing or turning in work, he's getting to the office. It could be a lot worse... like a hovering boss... sitting in the same cubicle! Hey, it's only a matter of time before the Big Brother installs cameras in every room in your humble abodes, so get used to the privacy while it lasts.

I rotate my emergency earthquake supplies, particularly food and water. I noticed a few cans of soup, tuna, beans and tea bags had almost expired, so I left them next to the dumpster. Within a few hours, everything was taken except the tea bags. I purposely left them out because I caught one of the dumpster divers literally eating out of the trash. I guess one of my neighbors tossed some edible scraps or leftovers. This one old guy always has a small portable radio with him that plays salsa music. I can tell when he's coming through the alley, because he's tipped off by the static-filled broken sounds of salsa. Anyway, he's the guy I found digging through my neighbor's trash. He takes a sharp stick and breaks open the bottoms of the trash bags. Trash flies out everywhere. He grabs what he can eat. Hey, it's not the worst place in the world to be homeless. The denizens of the Slums of Beverly Hills throw away a lot of random stuff... including food. If you're persistent and adhere to the "early bird gets the worm" mantra, then there might be enough scraps to get by.

Unless the possums get there first.

Yes, there's possums in our neighborhood. Nicky saw a possum the other night lurking around in the alley. I heard a fight between a cat and a non-cat (based on the sounds it was making). It was some other critter that I can only assume is a member of the local neighborhood possum population.

When I was a kid, my neighborhood had a slight raccoon infestation. Yes, raccoons in NYC. Those nocturnal creatures came out during the night and dug through the trash. Those clever creatures knew how to open up trash can handles. Some random late nights, you could hear blood-curdling screams, which were vicious altercations between stray cats and raccoons. Nothing is quite as disturbing as a raccoon clawing apart a cat. You never got to see the dead cat carcass. Raccoons hauled them off and ate them as well. Fresh cat meats trumps human leftovers every day of the week.