So I was eating lunch at work today, talking to my friend Greg about how I wish I could be a professional camper. You know, just like when I was in boy scouts, taking off once a month to venture into the wild frontier, canoe down a river, and later get all jacked up on marshmallows and chocolate. After cursing a world that holds a man down, depriving him of his innate desires and instead making him settle for a diluted version of what he’d really like to be, I thought “hey, I can still go camping, it’s not like I need to do it for a living.” In fact, I’m learning that the very act of making something my livelihood seems to leech the fun right out of it. Now don’t worry, I’m not going to run off and make myself miserable 8 hours a day just so I can enjoy my off time. A wise man once taught me the downfall of falling prey to that frame of mind. Instead I decided to start a club. I might call it, the Los Angeles Camping Society. No, that’s not right...how about the Westside Outing Club. Yeah, that has a nice ring to it. Since there are several distinctions that separate westside L.A. (Santa Monica, Venice, Marina Del Rey) from the rest of this sprawling city. We could meet together every two or three months and take a trip together, splitting the cost of gas and food. It would be a good way to see the rest of California that I’ve been hearing so much about...

Tonight after dinner, I went out to move my car for street cleaning. (it happens every Monday and Tuesday, and if you forget and leave your car there, you get a $45 ticket.) As I was walking back down our alley, I saw one of those foil helium birthday balloons with the plastic weight at the bottom of its string. It was haning out of a garbage can and looking kind of lonely, so I grabbed it and brought it inside...As soon as the cats saw it, the hair on their back bristled and they sort of took turns rotating around it. It was like the opening scene of Space Odyssey 2001 where the monkey men wake up to find a huge black monolith sitting in their dining/groping area. Josie, being the older and smarter one, was the first to approach it, she sniffed it for a while, and then tried dragging it around our bedroom. I could tell that Tiger wanted to have a go at it, but Josie took so damn long that they both soon lost interest.
Aside from that, everything has been well here in L.A. We went to a birthday party in the ghetto last night. It was actually for the girlfriend of a coworker of Jen's, but it was in a parking lot behind a house located somewhere near Compton (not really, but I'll say that there were squad cars and several liquor stores nearby.) Anyway, the boyfriend of the birthday girl bought her a pinata, which she smashed, sending chicklets all over the place. We also bought 40's before we went, but the place didn't have paper bags to put them in, so we went somewhere else to find them so that we cold look like true gangstas chillin with our malt liquor. Holla.

Matt