25 Apr 2012

Look at this: Classic film noir period New York City! No glass boxes. Looking at these I can almost hear Richard Rodgers' "Slaughter on Tenth Avenue" playing in my head. Cool.

Also interesting: The Grizzly Bear Chair.

My son pointed out this delightful country music video to me: Lisa Gail Allred's "The Three Second Rule". He says it's a rationale for nuking Texas; I say you don't really need one. This causes me to want to jam icepicks into my eardrums, which, I suppose, is an Oedipal reaction.

Last night Cari and I watched another Rick Sebak PBS documentary, this one about flea markets. Sebak's work is always fun Americana... a goal of mine this summer is to see them all. One of the flea markets featured was the one in D.C., Eastern Market. As long as we've lived here in the East, 28 years in June, we've never visited this place - mainly because I dislike going into D.C. because the parking almost always sucks. I supposed it was just a name on a Metro stop, not an actual market. We'll have to visit some Saturday.

By request, I scanned and posted my sixth grade composition book for a Monterey Avenue Elementary School (Burbank) Facebook page; I'm probably one of the very few who kept his all these years. It's here. You can see what an out of control hellion I was as a twelve year-old and what a martinet my teacher was, but only with the boys - she was a lesbian who apparently had problems with males. (I had the great misfortune to have her for both fifth and sixth grades.) Yet another teacher who expects boys to act like girls... good thing they didn't start prescribing Ritalin back then or she might have convinced my parents to drug me into submission (which is what I'm convinced is happening to boys all across the country).

Anyway, my health record says it all: by the time Miss Johnson was done with me I was neurotic and recommended for psychiatric counseling at UCLA. In junior high I'd develop further problems resulting in gastric reflux, daily stomach pains and an ulcer I'd find out about years later. School pretty much sucked until high school.

It's funny... sixth grade was 44 years ago, but when I reread these composition book pages to comment upon, I began to seethe with anger. There's no slight like a childhood slight, I guess.

I was delighted to see that I have lost 1.8 pounds since I last stepped on the scale Friday morning (all that garage attic work must have expended some extra calories); this takes me to 30.2 pounds lost since January 6th. Time for another celebratory banana split!

The challenge, now, will be not to add any weight for the next week or so. I'm taking time off from work and will probably not be doing any updates here until I return. Or I will! I don't know.

Vaya con Dios.

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