Situation Normal

America turns 250 today, although the country doesn’t look a day over 200, if you ask me. Some Americans celebrate the 4th of July with zero reflection. For them, this holiday is hamburgers and hotdogs, parades, beer, pool parties, baseball, and fireworks. Other Americans, perhaps after too much reflection, say they can’t celebrate the 4th of July.

Next to my desk is a chair. The chair is big enough for one human, or two small dogs. This is the source of the quotidian dog drama. The chair belongs to Mortimer, who claims it under the “first in time, first in right” legal doctrine. For those without the benefit detriment of a legal education, the doctrine is best understood as: I got here first, so you’re shit outta luck.

The big news this week is that Spencer Pratt’s bid to become the next mayor of Los Angeles has failed. This is exciting for two reasons. First, Los Angeles dodged a big, dumb bullet. Second, Pratt is leaving Los Angeles, assuming he keeps his campaign promise to schlep his crystal-peddling ass out of town. In a related story, the grifters running the right-wing echo chamber formerly known as Twitter have convinced their marks that the election was stolen.

My fellow situation normies, our long local / regional nightmare is over. I’m kidding. It takes weeks to count all of the ballots in California. This is because every registered voter in California gets a mail-in ballot, and ballots are valid as long as they’re postmarked by Election Day and arrive at county elections offices within seven days of the election.

Hey there, situation normies. You usually don’t hear from me on a Monday, but I wanted to share this conversation I had with my friend Amran Gowani (see video / audio player above). If you’re curious about my writing career, where my comedic voice comes from, and what compels me to write fiction, this is the conversation for you.

Bad behavior, social norms, and the LA mayor's race If there are two lines, I usually pick the slower one. Chalk it up to bad judgement. Like Walter Donovan, the Nazi-curious antiquities collector from Indian Jones and the Last Crusade — my brand is poor choices. Last weekend provided another entry in my long catalogue of poor choices when it comes to lines. As we were leaving a parking lot, I picked the shorter line because it appeared … shorter. It wasn’t. The problem?

The case of the drowned squirrel I found a dead squirrel floating in our pool. I thought it might have been foul play, so I called the cops. They had questions. Was I high on narcotics? No, just life, officer. Was this a prank? No, squirrels don’t play possum, they’re squirrels. Was the phone call a prank? No, caller ID killed prank calls shortly after video killed the radio star, but unlike the murder of Biggie Smalls, the cops actually solved those cases.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Spencer Pratt this week. That’s not a sentence I ever thought I’d write, but these are dark times. Ideas that were once considered absurd are now meant to be taken seriously, while serious ideas now come across as absurd. To exist in this moment is to confront a relentless shit show wrapped inside a clusterfuck that continues to upstage life’s regularly scheduled goat rodeo. In other words, the situation is very bad.

On Friday nights, Christina and I go to The Stand, a local restaurant chain that serves burgers and salads, without infringing on Stephen King’s post-apocalyptic novel of the same name. Or, so I thought. Because while I was waiting in line for the soda fountain, I witnessed the collapse of civilization. OK, maybe that’s a bit hyperbolic. But after waiting in an unusually long line, I was all set to pour myself a Diet Cherry Dr. Pepper — if you know, you know — when a teenage girl cut in front of me.

The plumber told me he never wanted to be a plumber. He learned the trade from his father, before embarking on a career as a sound editor. “I used to do small jobs on big movies and big jobs on small movies.” “Anything I’d know?” He named a few films I’d never heard of and a few more I hadn’t seen. “Back in the day, I worked on the DVD for Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest.” “Which one was that?” “The second one.