Tuesday, February 14, 2006

Two Days After The Day After tomorrow

If Jake Gyllenhaal and Dennis Quaid show up in New York ...it's time to evacuate New York!

I almost felt guilty (but almost isn't good enough!) that the temps hit 90 degrees again in LA while the New York Times reports the storm across the eastern seaboard was 1200 miles by 500 miles...

I remember sledding at recess in kindergarten behind our one room school house (can you get more f-n American than that?) the winter of the big blizzard in Cheyenne. Yes, that was 1963. I think our family went through Sage (the home of Ennis del Mar in the original Annie Proulx story of Brokeback Mountain) in order to get to Utah, as it was on the main highway. I'm pretty sure though that we never made it up to Lightning Flat (the hamlet where Jack Twist was born and raised).

Sunday was the 30th anniversary of Sal Mineo's murder. I recall one night about 10 years ago walking down Holloway Drive and realizing it was Feb. 12th. It was creepy enough that I'd never do it again. I'm not one for those macabre 'graveline tours' of the sites of Hollywood tragedies that have become so popular in recent years. The traffic jam to get around the Hollywood Forever cemetery on the nights of their movie series are bad enough.

It was fun back in high school to drive with my friends up Sunset Plaza Drive to Wonderland Avenue in dense fog while telling ghost stories. For atmosphere that will electrify the hairs on the back of your neck, nothing in my book beats a nocturnal foggy drive on either Highway One through Big Sur or along the lanes through Golden Gate Park.

Oh, how my mom could read "the bogeyman will get you if you don't watch out!" She was a one woman old-time radio show, breathing life into every character in every bedtime story she ever read. I've heard literally thousands of writers read over the years; while their delivery may have been eloquent or mesmerizing, they could never hold a candle to Mom. My love of literature --both reading and writing-- I owe to her. It's things like that I think of now, on the day before what would have been her birthday on Feb. 15th.

Well, whatever else I was going to write was lost as my mind drifted back in time. I wanted to search for the best hunting-with-Dick Cheney jokes, but I'm just not in the mood now.

Bad enough, I have to get around town with all this Valentine's Day crap everywhere. Whoopee. I regaled my neighbors with Billy Holliday this morning singing "Good Morning, Heartache." Funny thing though... before I left home, I found myself putting on Vince Guaraldi's "Linus and Lucy" --what I refer to as the 'Snoopy dance song.' It has to be about the most subconsciously uplifting song for those of us baby boomers who came of age back in the day. It's pretty hard not to be assailed with a barrage of happy memories of childhood and an outpouring of hope from some unseen source while listening to that song.

I wonder which one drives the neighbors crazy more...

Given that you can see where Peggy Entwhistle took her leap off the Hollywood sign back in 1932 from the window at the end of the hall, the Snoopy dance song is pretty cheap therapy if you ask me-- although I don't know what all that thumping around may sound like to the poor folks in the apartment under me.

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