There's alot of ground to cover, so bear with me..

The 4th of July had ended in a cavalcade of fiery light shows at the harbor, chased with massive amounts of alcohol. It was a delirious time of little thinking and not a small amount of groaning, from the lamb and general indigestion. Imagine my surprise, then, when I got on AIM and saw The Captain there. We chatted in our usual ways about nothing in particular, but then he mentioned that he and his college cadre of friends were going to see Spiderman 2 the next day.

Now alcohol does many things for a person, but being motivated to move around alot isn't one of them. In the end I decided 'what the hell' and agreed.

The first half of the day focussed on meandering down to Irvine and the usual sprawling orgazmo-plex, that jewel of MTV capitalism behind the Orange County curtain of conservatism. The Captain and I made it out with little time to spare, rushing through throngs (and thongs) of middrifts, dangerously permed hair and human road blocks. As usual, though, we arrived on time to greet the wondrous group o' people and went in.

So far as the movie went, I loved it. I was expecting the same naked visual ranting about patriotism: citizens throwing rocks at the villain in post 9/11 hysteria, that sequence at the end with the giant American flag. Instead, you had a well-crafted story that was only moderately implausible at parts--and surprisingly innovative in some cases.

Afterwards, we ate Americana at one of the plaza eateries, with me contemplating what sweet-sick bastard thought up of fries as being the before meal bread. I didn't care much, though. The lot of us were having fun with puns, cultural references, and just being silly in general. Things were going so well, in fact, that we decided to head over to Kel and K's place for conversation and other stuff that tickles fancies sometimes.

I think my highlight, post-meal, was the shake conversation that I started on the way back to the car. Lazily connected by some comment about dead babies, I'd started thinking about combining lean pork, ice-cream, and blending it into a drink. Sirius looked at me funny and The Captain was his nonplussed British-like self. And suddenly it occurred to me that you could call it the Meshugana Shake. At this point Sirius stopped walking and doubled over in laughter. I even got an 'you did just say that, my god' chuckle from The Captain.

Score for me.

And as far as group conversational sitting stuff goes, I greatly enjoyed spending time with everyone; kinda made me nostalgic about the group I used to hang out with in college. It's too bad I don't see them more often, but the times I do always kick ass.

Say what you will about Los Angeles allegedly being a soulless, over-expensive wastehole of superficial tit jobs and gay latte-drinking liberals, but you can't deny it: the 'E' network and the entertainment press love this town like no other.

And starting out along the 110 to the 405 at 6pm, I didn't think anything of this fact, making more or less steady progress toward that nucleus of bastards and bad drivers, Westwood.

So picture with me, if you will, what happened next. I was looking at my directions, nodding through the intimately familiar Veteran St. and up through Wilshire. I turned right, slowed down, and saw the street where Attila suggested I get parking. The news vans with satellite links like palm trees should've warned me, but there I was--caught in a snarl of traffic. The sidewalks of the street were jam-packed with bouncing organisms, rung in by metal dividers, tens of high hot flourescent lights starring down at tens of police and security detail, all simultaneously ushering, shouting, waving. There was a massive stage, and ground cover, and cameras, a fat black man giggling with other fat black men and sounding authentically 'dope as all get out'.

All of this for 'I, Robot' and the chance of glimpsing stars. This was LA at the peak of quitch.

I would have none of this Hollywood horseshit. I hastened forward and slid into the first public parking lot I could find. The flat rate was 10 bucks. On my budget, that sucked, but not out loud. An oval-eyed attendant named Diego told me to leave my keys in my car, that he'd take care of everything. I was not thrilled about just leaving my beast like that, but I had no choice.

So at first I tried to make my way along the sidewalks of the premiere toward to the other side, since Attila was going to wait for me in front of the parking structure he suggested I take. That plan was a no go, since noone could get through the entrance to the theatre. I ended up walking through the alley, heading to the parking structure, waiting, crossing to the other side to see if Attila meant the other public parking place, and so forth. I settled on waiting and watching for Attila along the outskirts of the premiere crowd, considering the heavy security.

Eventually, though, I came across him and we had sushi. The place was decent to good, I thought--same price as Fusion Sushi, but not as good. The conversation was the same line as usual: life with him wasn't going so hot, things at the lab were a disastrous mess without me being ringleader, people were leaving there. Besides the lab, really, we had nothing to talk about--and we'd talked about the lab before.

Still, it was fun to see him again and have an allibi for sneaking down into Discordia over at Mt. St. University.

My objective was simple: walk to the psychology building, sneak in unnoticed to the restricted floor that Discordia was on, get into the corner office, download and print alot of research articles, get out undetected, then get back to my car before the public parking closed.

Total time to do all this: 1 hour and 20 minutes.

The walk there was more tiring than I remembered, but thankfully the building was still opened. I used the usual stairwell. Noone should have been there at 8:30 at night--and thankfully I was right. I clicked through the door code, snapped the corner office door, and abruptly shut it behind me.

The article hunting went very well in the short amount of time I had. I know an hour seems like alot of time just to skim stuff, but with stuff like this summary/abstract, it's not easy. Plus, the printer wasn't working (imagine my surprise), and there was no paper (again, imagine that).

Since Yahoo has that huge mailbox storage space now, though, I just sent off the .PDF files there, all 23 of them. Splendid little collection, that one.

I even made it in time to get my car from the lot and get the hell out of that town.

Of course, I dutifully did nothing the rest of the night. I earned it.

Since I had to go back to Gran's to do more yardwork for her and get my final deep cleaning at the dentist's place, The Captain called me and gave the usual proposition. I accepted.

And so, in our usual tradition stretching back more than half a decade, The Captain and I decided on going to Ruby's for dinner, then head to the other side of the Promenade and get tickets for King Arthur. The reviews had been mixed to mostly unkind, but The Captain had convinced me to try anyway.

Some sequences did drag on for too long in the first half of the movie, true, but I liked the Roman feel to the usual action movie goings-on. I can't really tell you about the second half, though. Here I'd been sitting and watching the film, and all of the sudden I feel this constant bumping on my right arm rest. I look over. It's a hyperactive child that couldn't sit still if a gun was trained on his head. And when I say hyperactive, I mean moving, kicking, squirming, constantly leaning over to his fuckwit father/uncle and asking him question after question, more kicking and random babbling.

Oh, I tried being patient and understanding, but that failed pretty much miserably. By the end sequence I was pointedly starring at him, telling him to be quiet, pointedly starring at his father--but it didn't help. As the credits rolled I loudly commented that his child needed medication--lots of medication. The kid seemed to notice the barb but he sure didn't. I wanted to strangle the little bastard, quite frankly. It took me several hours afterwards to fully calm down.

So that night was mostly a wash, but I always enjoy The Captain's company. Considering we've been friends since 1996, it'd be kinda weird if I didn't.

So, moral of the story: if your child has ADD/ADHD, medicate him/her or get a friend who owes you a favor to babysit them. I'm not the only one a kick away from calling the usher.

Finally, there was my brush with giant garage critters. Since I usually go to bed at 3-4:30am, I have to find someplace where the electric toothbrush hum won't drive sleeping people mad. So far, I'd done this right inside the door to the garage, right by the automatic door opener.

And as usual, I finished, turned around, and noticed something odd: the fuses to the garage door opener looked like spider legs. I thought this was very trippy and decided to get a flashlight. I was wrong. It was a spider. We are not talking your garden spider, your black widow spider, or anything small.

The fucker was this big:

Not the cartoon spider size, the whole circle size.

The fucker had been 6 inches behind my right shoulder. It had that bloated corpse color of grey-white to it, with a swollen and distended abdomen, thick hairs bristled along its legs. It looked like an anemic balding tarantula, or the biggest brown recluse I've ever seen.

And sources just now, I think, confirm the brown recluse theory, since this spider looks alot like what I saw:

.

Since Ma has been bitten by alot of highly poisonous spiders in her life, we agreed that it was probably better for her to spray the thing with windew. We both would have liked to use spray adhesive, but you use what you can find. A little before the spraying, though, I noticed a thick cluster of what looked like eggs on the back of the garage door.

Hopefully the thing is dead. Hopefully there aren't 30-40 others like him/her, since brown recluses like to cluster where they find suitable digs.

Good thing I was brushing my teeth in the garage, eh?

No new photography stuff yet, but I'm working on it.

And with that, I get back to slashing things in the 'LOTR: Return of the King' game. Or coffee. One of those.

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