A Prone Body at the Gas Station

(Would 1 out of every three people please let me know you got this e-mail so I can tell if the new mailing list software is working correctly?)

You know that bit at the bottom of each e-mail where I say there are old journals available at my web site? A bald-faced lie.

But they're in the works, I assure you.

In the mean time, let me share with you some recent discoveries:

o A body lying prone in the gas station booth I walked up to last night at 1:30 a.m. to pay for gas in my car with cash because I'm trying to avoid running up huge credit card bills. It's not that I've got credit problems, it's more that I resent Citibank being able to tell when I'm bingeing on fast food or buying another useless watch ("Hey, Earl, lookee here -- what's this feller need so many watches fer? I better call over to Fraud....") The body wasn't actually shot dead as I initially feared. I guess I was just the first person in hours to actually come up to the booth, and she was taking a nap. Quite the far cry from "Can I check under the hood for you?" eh?

o The knowledge that my birthday is that same as P.G. Wodehouse's, if you add 91 years to his. He's a funny funny guy. So funny, that on my most recent trip to Paris with George, he (George, not P.) bought 7 of his (P.'s) books. And carried them around in his pockets all day. They were labeled pocketbooks, but I kind of think the publisher didn't mean all at one time.

o A point of dissension between me and the Eudora's spell checker. It thinks "Oreos's" is a good substitute for "Wodehouse's." I think it doesn't capture the writer's original intent.

o A fashion truism, specifically, you can dress nice but still look gross. An older man was crossing the street in front of me yesterday. He had on a nice dark blue suit, shiny shoes, well-combed thinning hair. I would have applied for a loan from him, or perhaps asked to board his yacht. He was chewing on the stub of a cigar and paused in his walk to let out a stream of brown drool that extended about a foot in length before breaking off. He didn't get a speck on his nice suit, and kept walking.

o A funny story. An editor at Variety told a story at a news meeting recently that he had attended a conference for little people. He's not himself a little person, and it wasn't made clear to me why he was there. I wasn't taking notes, so I may have some facts wrong, but I think it was a yearly conference, it was in Nevada (Reno, perhaps?), and it was attended by two groups, dwarves and midgets. Apparently, he related, these two groups hate each other. Midgets think dwarves are grotesque and subhuman (because midgets are perfectly proportioned little people), while dwarves think midgets are tiny and weak, and like to point out the deficits of being "perfectly" proportioned -- penile jokes were rampant, apparently. The story ended with a plea for unity: why can't they all just get along? They're all little people. I thought if I worked at it I could make this story into a metaphor for spaceship earth or the peace processes going on in various hot spots around the world, but then I thought, naw, just spread a funny story.

o That there is such thing as too much truth in advertising. At the corner of Wilshire and La Cienega across from the Flynt Publishing building, there's a car store that sells Jaguars, Rolls Royces, Ferraris, etc. The store is called "Symbolic Autos." Well, sure, they're symbols, but do you really want to be reminded of that?

That's all for now, more as events develop.

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