Trip to Oakland was fabulous - my inner baseball nerd was satiated like never before.

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My girlfriend is taking me to Oakland for three days for my birthday.
She got the hotel and planned the itinerary, I got the rental car.
Red convertible.
You’d think I’d approach turning 41 in a less-obvious mid-life crisis appearance.

So last week I was at a poker game and had told everyone that I had to leave at 1:30 a.m. The magic hour arrived and I called my girlfriend and she said ”It is 1:30…” And I told her I would be right up (luckily the game was close to our place – close as in three doors down). So I got up and told everyone that I had to split. Well, it was a tournament. There was no leaving allowed. I told them to let Wayne – who had been taken out of the game by yours truly – play my chips. They said NO, so I said “Then I don’t care, keep my ten bucks, I had fun, but I gotta go.”

So Wayne calls me the next day and says he has my $35, a fifty-fifty split from his winning of the tournament.

So then a few days later, they are having another ten dollar tournament. So a friend of mine comes by just as I am sitting down to the poker table. I had told this guy ”Let’s get together Saturday Afternoon…” and here it was, and here he was, and that was it – he split, I felt like shit and they dealt the first hand. King Queen, suited – so I played recklessly. Went all in. Lost to a straight, got up, called my friend and we hung out, me ten dollars poorer.

So there are things in life more important than poker. Good friends, my lover, commitments. But my poker buddies are sure scratching their heads wondering what has gotten into me.

Here is a cool Charles Bukowski Poem that I’ve never seen published.

I parked my car under an overhang here in the big parking lot by where I live. I didn’t drive for about four or five days - just stayed here and got work done, lots of work to do. When i did go out, mah Girlfriend took the wheel of her ride.

So when I would go get my mail I would pass my car - it was there, everything was alright. So on Saturday we were scheduled to go out with another couple and I am to drive. No surprise there. I was going to go get my mail and then drive the car up to near my place in order to windex the windows.

I walked past my car and turned for a closer inspection. It was caked in birdshit. Not a little drop here or there, but a thick dried layer of it. And all over the car. The hood, the driver’s side of the windshield, the roof, the side windows and part of the back window. The trunk was spared - it looked like a slice of unfrosted cake waiting for the return of the mixing bowl.

I chipped away at the gobs on the driver’s window and took it to a local Lincoln Heights car wash on Broadway across the street from Carnitas Michoacan. It took an hour of waiting with many people spending their weekend watching a group of guys clean someone else’s car, but when they finished, it was well worth it – my car looked brand spanking new. It was 10.99, so I tipped them ten bucks – if they had shaken me down for $50 I would have had no choice, woulda paid it – the car was an embarrassment, a health hazard and as disgusting an object as one could imagine driving around. Actually, my inner punk-rocker wanted to keep things as they were, but he gets out-voted most of the time these days.

So of course, it rains yesterday (rain in September being a rare thing in LA.) and what would ordinarily be the closest thing to my car getting washed turns out to be my perfect car wash getting smudged.

Same old Dear Sir shit…

I have been actlvely searching for a gallery to represent me especially in New York only to be disappointed. Most galleries will not represent me because of the controversial work l do. l also learned that most of those artists who are in the galleries of nyc is because they know the owners, somone or do a lot of ass kissing—which l am NOT about to do.

Thanks and have a great weekend.

What did we do before email?

We went to Culver City’s George Billis Gallery and then to the grand opening of Sixspace Gallery.

Both shows were very good. It was a relief to see good art. So we quit while we were ahead.

We made it back in time to donate to Barbara West’s Hurricane Katrina Buffet fundraiser. It was all-you-can-eat barbecue and I basically pigged out like I rarely do. My lovely girlfriend’s non-meat eating cramped her style this time, but she had some tilapia to make up for it - lucky she eats seafood.

On Sunday we went to Ace’s Beverly Hills space for a big opening. i was not enamored with the large abstract paintings, but the live feed of Lauren Bon’s Not A Cornfield project made the art venture worth it - actually Ace is right around the corner form where I had a desk job in 2000-01 in BH, so I knew the neighborhood and we parked for free, got a jamba juice and ate at a fabulous health restaurant after the exhibit.

So then we decided a big rearrangement of our living situation - she is going to be using some of the space that I don’t use in my loft and I am going to move in more of my stuff to her (our) bedroom. So that is a big step, but she has a retail web business and also needs studio space to do her art, meanwhile I only require the creature comforts of cyberspace and storage for magazine publishing detritus/apparatus and i am set.

So my G.F. hired our cleaning lady to help her with the retail web business and so I was eating Cheerios and drinking coffee when the employee of the month showed up. GF was still drying her hair so the Cleaning Lady and I watched cable teevee, i would stop on each Spanish Station and she would explain things, like the newscaster is also a soap opera star and the guy selling potency pills for erections is a famous singer, like a Mexican Lionel Richie or something, and then there is the Jerry Springer type show of a gay guy who ives with his mom, but now a gay man who loves him is mothering him and the mother is being abandoned. Kinda all the same, two cultures melting into one.

So then me and a friend, Alex, go to visit a friend, Coco, in the hospital who had his stomach removed. Yes, he was in quite good spirits for a guy who just lost his stomach, but he told us that the stomach really just holds the food, that the small intestine does most of the digesting. He’d had stomach cancer, a total shock really. We left him for his morphine and as we are walking down the hall at Kaiser, they announce Code Orange. What the hell is that?

I joke - Maybe it means the elevators don’t work. Sure enough They Don’t!

So Code Orange means power blackout. We walked down seven flights of stairs and made it out of a maze of panicked parking structure madness, turned on the news radio and they had decided it was a malfunction in Burbank, not terrorism and we headed downtown for food. I forgot to ask Alex if she recalled what Coco ordered at the restaurant. Ya never know.