The Parking Lot

            It occurred to me the other day while trying to pull into a parking lot, that perhaps it wouldn’t be all that bad to grow old and lose my short-term memory. 

            A man had pulled into the parking lot going the wrong way. He was stupidly blocking traffic. There was somebody else waiting for a spot and he too was blocking traffic. It was mayhem. My temperature rose a point or two just sitting there as a witness. If I didn’t have a short-term memory my anger would last but a minute or two and then my problems would dissipate into thin air. That sounds promising to me. I’d hardly have resentment, because I couldn’t remember my resentment. Old and in bliss, that's what I'd be. 

Jury Duty

            I talked to Bill the smog guru yesterday. He told me a story about his stint with jury duty. He was a juror on a domestic abuse case. A man came home drunk from a bar and tried to force his lady to perform oral sex, to which the lady responded by hitting the man over the head with a frying pan. The man socked the lady in the eye before he passed out on the floor.

            The lady went to work the next day with a black eye. Her workmates, upon seeing the black eye, asked how she got it. They convinced the lady to report her boyfriend to the police. The police arrested the boyfriend later that day. He was still asleep on the floor in the same position.

            Three felony counts later there was Bill deliberating with the other jurors who had unanimously voted to send the man up the river to San Quentin for the thirty odd years. 

            Fry him was the popular sentiment.

            Bill thought it a waste of taxpayer money to send the man to prison for thirty years. He said his neck twitched to the left when he realized how the jurors were leaning. Bill was the lone holdout. 
            After much deliberation the jurors convicted the man on a couple of misdemeanor charges. He did time served. 

Juan

            It turns out that the weird guy on the boardwalk that dances around with sacks of pinto beans on his head is an ex-history professor. There is an intelligent aspect to his pageantry, and now it makes perfect sense. He’s an academic. Supposedly he’s done interviews for TMZ. Even the freaks on the boardwalk are trying to be discovered. It is Los Angeles. It seems like a circuitous route to discovery, or on the other hand, it could be sheer public relations genius. I'm not sure.

            I have one more gig with the band before it’s all over, and to tell you the truth, I’m a little worried about a lack of blogging content without Venice. Venice the pearl, the slime, the ocean.