Yes! It's finally here. I can't afford it, you can't afford it, but after a lifetime of empty promises, the flying car has arrived.



How many comic books, how many science fiction movies, how many episodes of "The Jetsons" did I watch, drooling for the flying car? An infinity minus one. And here it is.

In the Neiman-Marcus Christmas catalog, for a mere 3.5 million, and with a list of caveats as long as one's arm, but still. This is only the prototype, and they are swearing that more will follow, at a reasonable price.

Well, I don't care if reasonable is the price of a fully tricked-out Hummer, I'm starting to save up today.

I love me that Bob Dylan. This week, with the release of Martin Scorsese's documentary, I've been in deep Bob mode. All Bob, all the time on the i-pod. Obscure releases, bootlegs, new stuff, old stuff. But something came to me as I was watching "No Direction Home", and that is this: if they ever make a bio-pic of the Bob, there is only one man who could play the part... Johnny Depp.

No. Really. Look at these two photos, and tell me that this isn't another case of separated at birth.


You see?

Or, failing that, Johnny could play Jack Barron in the film version (never to be made, I'm afraid) of "Bug Jack Baron" and Laurence Fishburne could play his friend who's the president of the Black United States. And Christopher Walken could play the creepy old guy who's using the pituitary glands from little kids to remain young for ever.

This morning, someone making an illegal turn attempted to cut in front of me to access the Metrorail parking tower. And boy howdee was she pissed that I wouldn't let her in to my turn lane. She gesticulated wildly with the hand not holding either the steering wheel or her early morning cigarette and made rude faces at me as she slammed on her brakes to avoid plowing into my side.
Since there was no one behind me in that lane, she was able to get where she wanted to be a nanosecond or two later than she prefered. This meant that she got to enjoy dogging me as I went around and around the spiral ramp...in second gear. I actually had to drop it into first on the first ramp, because people were stopping at the top.

That made nanosecond bitch go crazy, for sure, and she was up in my tailpipe for the next six rounds. She actually honked at me! To go faster. Up a spiral ramp. For what? When I finally found a parking spot (and I had to pass by at least a dozen because she was so close that I couldn't brake for them) the bitch roared past me and honked again, gesturing with the middle finger.

I responded in kind, along with a shout out to her: You are an idiot!

It was that kind of day, all day.

The printer was possessed. The boss had a millionty-two things for me to scan into Word. The purchasing tsar had a favor to ask (and you always say yes to purchasing). My mac couldn't get connected to the web. The Other Boss (and you better believe that I'm thinking up a name for her) was on my case about our "non-working" fax machine.

Except it works fine. The problem is, as the techies are wont to say, between the device and the chair. But she won't hear of that, and so I've had to call in a tech support call on a perfectly fine fax so that I can tell her that it's her problem. Maybe if she didn't jam 20 pages into the machine and walk away, it would work.... or if she fanned her pages first. Or whatever.

But I am just a secretary, and it isn't for me to tell a director that she doesn't know how to operate a fax. So I just call tech support.

And then I work. And work. And work. And then I come home and cook dinner. And drink. And pass out.

And in the imortal words of Jackson Browne, do it again, amen.

On another note, my mummy is playing best three out of five with death. She's back in her nursing home, and doing well. If by "well" you mean eating and breathing. But, hey! that's an improvement over her condition in the hospital.

I am reminded of the scene in "Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey" where they are playing Twister and Battleship with death, and beating him. It's a lovely send-up of Bergman's chess match. Or the badminton match in The Dove, which was itself a send-up of Bergman.

Whatever. I've had enough tonight. I'm off to watch Marty's Bob documentary.

Brought to you by the Talent Show

Rules:

1. Go into your archive.

2. Find your 23rd post (or closest to).

3. Find the fifth sentence (or closest to).

4. Post the text of the sentence in your blog along with these instructions.
From January 13, 2003 we have:

"Granted, it's been a few years since my high school Americanism vs Communism class, but I seem to recall that elected officials are supposed to govern in accordance with the wishes of those being governed."

Bwahahahahahahah.

That wouldn't be so funny if it weren't so tragically out of date and hopelessly naive. I still hate the Bush family. All of them. The Idiot, the idiot's brother (my governor... who's really packing on the poundage lately), the idiot's brother's children: the coke whore and the drunken, abusive frat boy, the Marie Antoinette clone of their mother, and the desicated old husk of their father. I don't like Marvin, or the fuck puppet twins of the Idiot In Chief. I don't like their wives, and if I could figure out their mistresses, I wouldn't care much for them, either.

Today, I am home, sitting out another series of orange radar blobs as yet another hurricane passes through my end of town. It's ok. It's Mother Nature exhaling the poison from her lungs. The poison being suburban sprawl and humans, and the lungs being the wetlands.

And since everyone knows that Mother Nature is a bitch, I'm letting out my own inner, and too-long-supressed, bitch to tell off a couple of the younger members of my tribe. I don't know if Surrogate Daughter #1 still reads my blog, but if she doesn't want her pride and our relationship permanently scorched, she won't read this entry.
To my Surrogate Daughter #1: I figured out today why I've been wanting to bitch-slap some sense into you for the past year or so. You have become exactly what you scorn: a patronizing and annoyingly self-aware bop poseur rich snot. Your writing, in which you have such pride, if your Live Journal is any indication, is merely jejeune and pretentious. You cannot commit to anything: not your supposed and adopted poverty, not your family wealth, not your vocation, nor even your various facial and body piercings. You sport an impressive sports injury scar, but it came from doing a black diamond run on your first day of your annual Aspen ski trip. If you haven't seen the e-mail joke about the subject, you cannot sing the blues in Aspen.

You tell your mother that being in debt is "liberating". For you, perhaps, because for the past 21 years, you have never had to face the consequences of your actions. You have been lifted over every puddle, had every bill paid.

I told you when you went off to college that school is a four-year experiment in discovery of self. What have you discovered other than that you are a head and an incipient lush? Have you discovered any inner passion? Strength of will? Potential? No. You've discovered cheap beer and dope. Kind of like discovering America, sweetiedarling: there were already plenty of people there. I can't believe you turned into your father.

So just fucking grow up. Pick a persona. Try to pick one a little more original than a beat poet or post-modern, new-wave slacker.

I love you, your other mother.

To my nephew: I cannot believe that you would be such an ass as to ask me, by e-fucking-mail, for an interest-free loan from your grandfather's estate so that you can buy an engagement ring for cheap and end the note with a PS about football without even, in passing, ask how your grandmother might be doing after a week in the hospital.

Maybe your father, my brother, Biggus Dickus, neglected to mention to you that the woman who practically raised you, who gave you everything your greedy-grabby little heart ever desired, has been declining rapidly this past week. How would he know, anyway, since he hasn't been to see her, and has announced that he has no intention of it, either? But either way, the woman is in a nursing home, and a casual "Oh, how's Amma doin'?" wouldn't be amiss.

But no. All you want is the fucking money. I remember all the times you promised your Amma that you'd take care of her when she and Gruffy got old. Gruffy let you out of the bargain, by dying quickly. Your grandmother, however, has been in this home here in Miami since last December. You haven't come to see her once, although you've been in Florida visiting your father. You haven't called me to ask about her. You felt free to take more "souvenirs" from her home, though; her antiques are more than enough to remember her by, I suppose.

I can't believe you. You have turned into your father, and he is a defective throw back to some recessive eddy in our gene pool.

Love, your doting little auntie.

Unlike Lake Wobegon, where every week is a quiet week, it's been a bitch of a week here at the Casa De Zapatos. It started on Monday morning, when I got a call from the home where my mother lives. She'd collapsed in the shower and they wanted me to take her to a doctor.
So I did. Not without some effort however, since I take the train to work and on Mondays and Wednesdays the RLA rides in with me, because this semester he's teaching at the mothership: Wolfson Campus. That means he also takes the car home from the train, about five hours before I leave work. It also means that I don't have the car keys, and thus had no way of getting from the train to the house.

Thanks and a shout out to TADTS (the artist down the street) who gave me a lift from point A to point B.

With my mother's health insurance cards in hand, I jumped into the PT Cruiser and tore down to her group home, picked up her and an aide, then back north to the doctor's office, where upon hearing the details of her "collapse" decided it was more of a seizure and sent me off to the hospital.

I could have taken her to the place I used to work. I could have. I could have eaten a lot of crow and listened to a lot of two-faced platitudes and gotten her put on a VIP list. I could have. But fuck that hell hole, I did not. Instead I took her to the very clean and nice opposition hospital nearer to my house.

It has a much less busy emergency room, and so I was only there for six hours before we finally got into an exam room. Only by then it was shift change so we sat in the exam room (to be acurate, I sat and she lay in a bed, plucking at her blood pressure cuff and her blood oxygen finger thingy) for another hour or so until she had another seizure and I pounded the nurse call button (astutely figuring out that turning red, going rigid and shrieking like a banshee were not normal condititions) until the cavalry came and threw me out of the room. This second seizure had the added benefit of expediting her admittance.

The result of her CT scan showed that she has a "suspicious area" in her brain. Ya think? The woman has end stage Alzheimer's. I should fucking think there's some funky looking spots in there. She isn't really responsive, they tell me. Hmmm? Less so than before or more? Can we tell? She has a lot of bruises. Yeah, that'd be right, seeing as how she's 87 years old and spent 80 of those years in the Florida sun before anybody figured out that that was a pretty bad idea, skin-wise. She's more delicate than onion skin paper and if you look at her harshly, she bruises. The doctors wanted to do more neuro testing, but I said no. Look, if she has a brain tumor, what are we going to do? Operate? I don't think so. Let's just make her comfortable, OK, guys? OK.

That was my Monday. The rest of the week was occupied by the pressing rush of getting together the swag and documenting materials for an executive retreat, the process of which was hampered by the fact that the executives in question kept changing their documents right up until the moment we sealed the cardboard boxes on Friday around 11 am. Every binder was stuffed at least twice, and sometimes more.

Today is the special dog Jojo's first birthday. By Purina standards, that means she's not a puppy any more. But Jojo is special, like round nosed scissors and blunt forks kind of special, and I suspect she'll be a puppy for much longer.

Remember in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, the character that Michael Caine develops for Steve Martin to play when they are scamming the rich old ladies? The less-than-gently bewildered younger brother, Ruprecht? That's my Jojo. She's just... special. And fwench. I'm going to give her a birthday treat of doggie ice cream, carrot and cheddar cheese flavor.

My mom? She's going back to her group home Monday. Thanks for asking. That's more than my brother, Biggus Dickus, did.