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Revisiting Hell, a short story; Mother's Day; Photographs

2004-05-11 - 1:37 a.m.

All I can say is THANK GOD..and whatever else.

Now, I doubt most of you remember The Short Story That Would Not End. I started this thing a little over a year ago and promptly got stuck on page 13 (i.e. around 5,000 words). This was my first mystery story--and I was gonna be damned good and clever about it.

Trouble is, I didn't know how to tie in or end the thing--until about now. I came up with two great ideas that not only circumsize the ending, but make it deliciously ironic.

The first five installments have since been re-arranged and edited to, well, Hell and back...but soon I'll be done with the thing. Done! Then I can finally move on to completing the other unnecessarily covoluted half-stories I've written.

If I fucked like I finished short stories, I'd be in porn. Beautiful visual, yes? Good morning. Ahhh I'm so excited!

* * *

So, we last left me walking fast on the heels of a gong echo. At the end of it was Ma, offering up conversation and a chance to eat out at IHOP. I grabbed at the chance, driving there and getting a reasonable order of chicken strips with barbeque sauce.

Mom switched over to driving as we made our way from Torrance all the way to the San Fernando Valley--all 2 hours and countless merging idiots worth. We did finally touch down, though, and had our usual 10 minutes of conversation with Gran before the lot of us went out to eat. Our family is straight and to the point about stuff like that.

We decided on PF Chang's, a godless, up-scale Chinese food mecca for all of the flotsam washing in from The Promenade mall. Fake tits abounded in this low-lit National Geographic special, complete with those slim and slightly too perfect hostesses dressed in black. You also had your token gay-as-all-get-out host, of course.

Since this place wasn't known for great service, we'd decided to wait for Jeff's section. Jeff and Ma go back about 7-8 years, when he started to work at La Frite and she helped to break him in (as she did with all the new servers..and cooks on a few occasions). He'd since decided to take on working at Chang's as well, and he was all smiles and tastefully spiky blonde hair when he saw her. Gay as the day is long, he escorted us to our table after only a 20 minute wait.

Now, since I don't torture you much with "this is what I ate" kinds of paragraphs, I'll just say that we enjoyed our usual crab wantons and I had some "spicy chinese chicken". It was more tangy-sweet than anything, but then again I regularly eat jalapenos. I also ate desert, which only mildly felt like a cardinal sin (since I'm still sticking to losing weight and exercising).

When all was said and done, Jeff wished us well and said that we'd see him tomorrow.

At this you might ask, "Why's that?"

* * *

Cleverly, for Mother's Day, Gran and Ma had reserved a spot over at La Frite for a special champagne brunch. I'd come along because I missed Gran..and their italian sausage over angel hair pasta. It was a two-birds-with-one-stone match made in heaven.

So off we go at 10:30am to chow--with me done up in an old red silk shirt of mine, still sporting sandals. The place was only slightly less pretentious than I'd imagined it.

We sat down for the usual La Frite brunch routine, where I'd snack on one of the almond croissants that Ma or Gran got with their brunch. Jeff was courteous and on-top of things, just like he had been that past night.

I only had two gripes with the situation:

1) Being that the pretentious factor was sorta high up there, something compelled me to press my ram-rod straight posture button. Ma or Gran likely didn't care, but for some reason I did it anyway.

2) The sourdough bread was burnt and the italian sausage overdone. I wasn't bitchy since I knew the chefs had bigger fish to fry that Mother's Day, but it was a disappointment. The lot of us--Gran, Ma, myself--might not have had much cash most of our lives, but we appreciated good food. Besides, we liked to joke around with the servers about the snooty fucks that occasionally came in from 'the other side of Ventura'.

After all that, we went back home and engaged in family bonding. We each did this by reading our books in the living room: Gran and Ma at the kitchen table with their fantasy novels, and me on the couch reading Spider Robinson's "The Callahan Cronicals (sic)". At around 3 or so, I was beginning to desperately need a nap..and reading a book for several hours was boring the hell out of me. Ma felt similarly, so we packed stuff up, bade Gran goodbye and headed out through Topanga Canyon to go back home--snagging some Oxnard Strawberries from a vendor at the Top O' Topanga.

This entry is getting long so I'll stow how metaphorically gorgeous the canyon and coastline were. We landed back at the house in the early evening and went about our usual routines.

Since then, it's been editing photographs and epiphanies in writing.

* * *

Speaking of the former, here's my latest:

Bweeeeee

Comment: This is Dork's cat that I came to adore back when I was in Detroit. This was shot at 5am, so close to dawn that some of the later shots had that 'God is Dead' color of morning to it.

I repeat: I adore this cat.

I'd originally thought about putting that black border first and THEN the thin white strip--for the illusion that you were looking into a window at a window--but it was too boxy.


And a hell of alot more where that came from, including another red orgasm shot. Up soon.

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