All posts by eachnee

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!

the dead are not troubled

the day lee, things i worry about


a few days ago i found out my mother’s brother in law, a plastic surgeon, keeled over and died in the midst of an operation, scalpel in hand. RIP. i don’t know what kind of surgery he was doing and what happened to the poor person he was working on. lots of questions go unanswered in my mother’s family.
what gets weird is that my mother’s brother has stated that it’s against his religion to go to any kind of memorial service. i won’t even say what kind of religion he claims to follow, since whatever it is, in reality it’s his own brand of assholology.
it gets weirder – the immediate family can’t get it together to organize any kind of memorial (and so the religious brother is glad). my aunt is holed up in her house not speaking to anyone and her kids have withdrawn from any kind of responsibility. this seems kind of sad and pathetic, not to mention slightly selfish and sort of wallowing in self-pity, since i think a memorial service allows friends and family to laugh and to mourn, which is HEALTHY. laughing is good as it reminds everyone that life will continue, and mourning is good as it opens the channels to allow grief to pass.
so instead of a memorial, someone in the family tries to schedule a viewing of the dead body but this event is completely and utterly thwarted by the tornado/rain/wind storm that hit California! ha!

good old fashioned elbow grease

the day lee, why artists need math, ,

some things that google just can’t help you with:
– one of the pup’s had a poo explosion in the car 20 minutes from destination: subsequent clean up and bath
– one of the pups went up the hill in the backyard and came back down walking like a retard; her paws were covered with giant cacti: subsequent thorn removal and building of a barricade to the upper part of the backyard

some things that google can help with:
– finding the Santa Fe Border Collie Club and arranging a hike the in phenomenal Galisteo Basin Preserve. not sure if google can help or not, but there are acres of this preserve for sale and we would like to buy some please.
also, one of the pups got a stickler in her paw and needed manual help to remove.

– finding the Charlton’s herd of lovely sheep to chase around in the snow.

here we are where are we going

food, the day lee, why artists need math, ,

there’s never a day without google: packing up two dogs for a road trip from Los Angeles to New Mexico started with finding a nice place just outside of town for a quick hike, then we had the realization that the car seemed so nicely packed because we forgot the dog food (doh!). so google comes to the rescue again to hunt for stores nearby that carry our brand of dog food (and yes we did take one look at the traffic going back into town and decided against driving home for the kibble bucket).

needless to say the pet-friendly La Quinta in Flagstaff was super accommodating (found via http://bringfido.com) and no google necessary at all once we crossed the border into NM where Sonic green chili cheeseburgers await you at every turn.

back before the trip we exchanged emails with a guy who sells dog wax and dog booties and suggested we drop by the shop where he works. he wasn’t working on the day that we went, but the parking lot had a security guard who used to own a blue heeler that he used to take on secret cow herding missions, so he took a fancy to guarding our car plus the pups. he also told us about Santa Fe’s weird phenomena—which comes in the form of weird lighting—native and local to Santa Fe because the people who had first crossed onto the land where we were standing were the same people that had witnessed burial ceremonies in Egypt. we just couldn’t argue with that kind of logic, and the light does seem super weird at times.

from there we wandered to the farmer’s market, and after asking if i was from Tibet the lady selling yak meat at the farmer’s market offered us two free yak ribs. we ate one, along with a sample of green chili goat cheese from the lesbian goatherders: “it’s all about the girls!” their goat yogurt is the best i have ever had, but since it’s January it’s definitely out of season.