Monthly Archives: January 2010

i told you so

the day lee, things i worry about,

ever since the Northridge earthquake in 1994 i have had the fear of being inside a porta pottie, peeing into the plastic echo… and then along comes an aftershock, a giant gust of wind, or shockwaves from an asteroid crashing into the moon and BOOM! down goes the porta pottie on its side. and that’s BOOM! on the side that the door is located, mind you. so not only am i trapped inside, sloshing around, but there’s no way out other than through the roof. check those ventilator shafts!

ha ha ha everyone says, it’s not going to happen. relax, all my friends tell me. (meanwhile i’ve written a huge book about this very thing happening to the CEO of the world’s most popular ice cream company.)

so today at Drummond Ranch where our pups do their sheepherding i find out that during the storm last week the wind BLEW the porta pottie over on its side, BOOM! Ha! SEE??

the noise spooked one of the horses so badly it freaked/bolted/had a kanipshit and did this number to the fencing.

notice the amazing view beyond, snow capped peaks!

in search of terrain

the day lee, why artists need math

after 2 weeks of blowy snowy conditions in NM, two days traveling in the car, ten-foot high snow drifts in Flagstaff, dinner at Bun Boy, Barstow, and getting busted by the LAPD, we are back in LA in search of the bowl of posole, the hot sopapilla and the quiet forested arroyo for taking pups on their morning walks.

some friends recommended Bronson Canyon to us but they failed to say how cool it looks! there’s altitude, bat caves and SHADE!

but let’s not get carried away. can’t forget this is LA afterall.

art on/with

the day lee, things i worry about, why artists need math,

a few years ago an artist friend of mine moved to Oregon from Los Angeles slightly against her will and best judgment. after several gloomy months she developed a severe small-town depression and started admiring the local gourds. not wanting to be a crafts-fair artist she starting painting the gourds rather than ON them, but this soon turned into a really big worry: what, then, is the difference between painting a gourd and painting on a gourd? really.
and so, here’s the rice farmer’s answer to Rykovanov’s portrait of Pushkin en riz.

greenish glow of a jail cell

the day lee, things i worry about

it’s just a sneaking suspicion BUT… it seems like our lovely city/state is so broke a missive went out from someone high up telling the cops to run people down for spare change.
this morning we got a visit from a cop for having our dogs off leash in Pan Pacific Park. there are used condoms in another part of the park and homeless people tossing their empties and random acts of shooting and some guy BBQ-ing his mail and the cop has to come bother us. i didn’t drive so i didn’t have my license so the cop asked me for my info. it went a little something like this:

last name?
lee.
first name?
angie
is that the name that’s on your license? your full name?
yes
do you have a middle name?
nope
(pause)
(…)
all i’m saying is that if i don’t find a match…
that’s my real name
all i’m saying is that there are a lot of angie lee’s in LA county

(i wanted to say the other angie lee’s were probably all korean so they were certainly NOT me. apparently he was checking to see if there were warrants on us. negative, said the lady on the walkie talkie. 10-4.)

there was another weird moment where he looked right at me and asked me my hair color. funny.

he did let us off with a warning, (thank you LAPD – as we were three people with four dogs, we didn’t know whether we were going to get four tickets or three, or even possibly two), and he did toss off the COP attitude after a few minutes and become a real person and we did have a nice chat. BUT – he claimed the ball field we were in had a sign that said “no animals” which isn’t true. then he said “the signs are coming.” (yeah, as soon as we collect some more spare change.)
his other complaint was that kids played baseball here, and he didn’t want kids playing in dog pee and “feces residue.” OK mister, but what part of having dogs on a leash protects kids from said residue? and besides, what about those yoga/kung-fu/kick-boxing fitness trainers doing private lessons in the park? oh, he replied, the city is in a lawsuit about that right now.

after he indirectly asked us to pass the word to other dog-off-leash-park-goers (“do you have friends who hang out here? no.) we suggested him posting flyers at Park La Brea telling the residents about the new crackdown. (there’s a regular gaggle of unnerved apartment dogs from Park LB that gather in PP Park everyday at 6pm.) he was quite excited about this idea (although i neglected to offer to design him a flyer) and we parted ways.

spare some change anyone??

sunny and hot

things i worry about, writings

i’ve been noodling about the idea of whether or not to start a Tumblr account. if i could only figure out when i’m serious and when i’m a jackass i could probably separate my blogging from my tumbling but until then…
the thing i like about blogging is that i actually “own” it. it’s mine, all mine. what that means and why that matters is a small, personal thing, the sort of small, personal thing like bringing your favorite jacket to the beach. you get there and it’s so blazingly hot you want very much to ditch the thing, like it’s no longer your favorite anymore and no one else in their right mind has anything thicker than lycra on. it’s thick and heavy and super annoying and the crook of your elbow where it’s tucked is sweating something fierce. on top of that Unified Desires and all these other corporations keep tossing toys in your direction, genuinely interesting toys requiring both hands to be free in order to catch them. what to do?

meanwhile, the wonderful folks at Witness have posted the cover of their next issue of which i am a contributor! The story they published is called “Eupcaccia,” named after a fecal-eating bug from Kobo Abe’s The Ark Sakura. It’s an excerpt from my novel called “A Drink With Clarity More” and is about dear old Malchicken Chicken. They’ve also posted the entire thing online.

|| Update ||
The wonderful folks at Chamber Four are going to put my story “Eupcaccia” in their fiction anthology. GO MALCHICKEN!