in high school my brother and i had a friend named Dean who was obsessed (on alternating weeks) with brown dogs and when Boston’s third album was coming out. in those days OCD was rarely diagnosed, especially in New Mexico, and we took his did-i-lock-the-car did-i-lock-the-car did-i-lock-the-car neurosis in stride, like we did his musical odes to brown dogs. Boston had just finished their 7xPlatinum second album and every station in New Mexico promised a soon-to-be-released THIRD album followed by a visit to Tingley Auditorium. the wait for poor Dean grew from two years (the unfathomable time that had elapsed between the first and the second album) to forever, where we all got a little older and went to college and forgot (at least me) about the whole thing. only every time i hear a Boston song (which is every half hour in New Mexico, and i just spent two weeks there) i always think i should google to see if that third album ever came out.“So many people have come and gone…Their faces fade as the years go by…”

today i finally did it (ok, truth is that i heard a Foreigner song, which reminded me of Boston) and discovered lo! that third album did come out! whoa! 8 years!

and so here, 20+ years later, is my ode to Dean. Boston and a brown dog: pure love. pure love.

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??

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!