a guide to survival.

My system:

1) Wait for an earthquake, windstorm, riot, or terrorist attack.

2) Take another First Aid course. Put together emergency kits for car, desk at the office, home. Mentally given yourself a Merit Badge for preparedness.

3) Get bored. Get tired of lugging a backpack around in the car, and having to move hiking boots around under the desk at work. Begin to take stuff back home, stash it into the back of a closet, and forget where it is.

4) Misplace even the main flashlight that lives on each story at home. Eat the canned soup in the 72-hour kit, and fail to replace it. Throw away those little cans of Vienna sausage in a fit of pique.

5) Wait for next earthquake, windstorm, riot, or terrorist attack. Get annoyed at self when flashlight is nowhere to be found and the matches are miles away from the candles. Stare dolefully at the old gallon-sized plastic bottles of supermarket water in the garage, and wish they hadn't sprunk leaks and somehow achieved an interesting sort of rust-color on the inside. Wonder how thirsty one would have to be to actually drink that.

6) Repeat.

Who knew that those Cat Eyes had such great focus?

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are idiots.

No exceptions.

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This one is from the Montana Cafe:

Redhead: So I ask him, "Oh, for crying out loud: must you be such a guy? How about some details?—your girlfriend's name, which part of the state you're living in, what kinds of projects you're taking these days, what your aspirations are for the future, how the pieces of your life fit together, how much ass-sex you're getting, stuff like that . . ."

Blonde: But he is a guy.

Redhead: Exactly. And I kind of get that. But must a girl dig for everything?

Blonde: With that type of man—with most men—yes.

Redhead: That's what he told me. It's like, "If we were having coffee, or if you'd start giving up the goods, I'd have no problem in talking about my life. I avoid, however, doing that via e-mail. I really don't mean to be such 'a guy,' but that is, after all, what I am. And of course I'm not getting enough ass-sex for my tastes."

Blonde: For a macho guy, that's a lot of disclosure.

Redhead: Doesn't count. It's about sex. They're allowed to talk about that.

Blonde: You should consider playing for the other team.

Redhead: Again? Anyway, I can't stand women. They talk too much.

Blonde: Then it's time to jump the species bar.

Redhead: I hear dolphins are smart. Hm. How much do they talk?

And I thought I was messed up.

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"Relentless analysis and overthinking are sexy. And, as for me, I like to be the least intelligent person in the room. It alleviates the need to think."

"Has that ever happened to you, Buddy? Just askin'. And, by the way: how fucking easy do you think I am?"

Why do girls at the 17th St. Cafe ask questions like this? Surely they don't really want to know the answers . . .

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. . . about Boogie Nights.

One is the one about how it's my husband's fault that I never saw it, because men are relentless channel-surfers, and will not go upstairs to announce that an interesting movie is about to start in fifteen minutes, so grab your driving glasses, some gin/water/both and a lap blanket, and come on down. And I promise not to change the channel in the middle of the movie, because I value my . . .

. . . where the fuck was I?

Ah, yes. Here's my good story about Boogie Nights. When it was in the second-run theatres my mom was still living in the hoity-toity part of Santa Monica, California, for fairly arcane legal reasons. She had an elderly, shiftless roommate at the time. This gal was in her 70s at that point, whereas Mom was only in her 60s. But the movie was playing on Montana Avenue at the Aero Theater on Montana Avenue one afternoon, and these two old ladies drove down a few blocks to see it one day.

My mother handed their tickets to the young man in the lobby with the pierced (nearly) everything, who asked them quite soberly, "should I be letting you in her e to see this?"

"Yes," my mother assured him. "It's fine."

After all, she is a scientist. And her friend is a doctor.

Apparently, it was fine. Thank G-d for science.

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are having a perfectly normal, wholesome conversation about how many dead bodies get ditched in the area around the Rose Bowl every year, when my sister-in-law calls in from the other room to suggest that if we're going to talk late at night, we might pick a less-lurid topic.

Ah—the sacrifices one makes for family.

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I missed this place.

Hanging out with the Irish. I duck a lot when they fight.

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But it's not like, cold-cold.

That honor is reserved for Southwestern homes wherein one only turns on the heat if one really cannot stand it, in the dead of winter, after putting on all the clothing one owns.

And one only turns on the a/c in the summer when one is about to pass out.

Frost on the ground? Yawn. I'm pretty bundled up when we go outside, and I sort of stomp around a lot and clap my gloved hands together when I have to.

It isn't anything to write home about. After all, it ain't like my sister-in-law's place in Phoenix around Christmastime: here, the house is heated 24/7 with an ultra-efficient fireplace.

Though I must admit that it was odd, the way people talked all over town about winter sunshine, and how wonderful it is. One might almost be tempted to think that it's rare in Washington State.

Almost.

Sun deck. Yeah, the ferry had a sun deck. And I went up there to do battle with the wind and the cold. A snippet of sun floated out from over the water, taunting me for my weakness and reminding me that this wasn't like skiing—there was nothing I could do,exactly, to make things feel warmer. So I took pictures, hatless. (I hadn't wanted to lose my favorite, and warmest, hat, should it be blown off of my stupid head and into Puget Sound.) I shivered.

And I hustled inside the ferry room again to warm up, amusing myself by reading real estate listings from the suburbs of Seattle, wherein one can buy large single-family dwellings for about $10 apiece.

The disadvantage being that one has to live in Washington State. Where, you know . . . it's brisk. Chilly, even.

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and then I'm off to the suburbs of Seattle to see the many Irish in-laws. (There are a lot of them, and they circulate.)

I'll check in from the Great Northwest at some point soon. I haven't been there in nearly 11 years. Not since my honeymoon.

Don't do anything silly while I'm in the air, okay?

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"Are you fucking kidding me? She took an overdose of Klonopin* after having a mildly disturbing conversation with her ex-boyfriend."

"Well, she had a prescription for that."

"She took the whole bottle! And it wasn't the first time she's attempted her life, or pretended to!"

"Well, it wasn't the best way to handle the situation, I guess."

"She should either get health insurance, or finish the job next time!"

Men. You can't live with 'em, and you can't bury them all in your backyard.

* Spelling fixed; thanks, Hog. I committed the Sin Against Editorial Standards of using Google to spell-check. And, of course, every spelling under the sun is out there, somewhere, for every word. Lost my phone, so I couldn't find my personal pharmacist/father.

Also, there were four of them, and the sun was in my eyes, and they were fighting dirty.

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After my mother picked me up at the airport, I petted Mandy one more time, and got into my car. My precious. Then I drove home from Westchester, avoiding subways and strangers and confusingly labeled streets.

The wind blew through the hills, almost blowing the car out of its lane at a certain point, but I used to take a VW bug up and down the Grapevine, so I can handle that.

Elvis Costello in the CD player; Gatorade in the drink cup. Just me, inside a lovable chunk of glass and steel, accelerating through the curving freeways and winding roads in East L.A. on a dark Wednesday night.

I may never leave Los Angeles again.

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It might be time to work on your signage.

And your subway maps.

BTW, whose idea was it to use numbers for both the streets and the avenues? Sounds like something my mom would come up with—like, as a mnemonic device. (You'll recall that my mother is a math teacher.)

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to talk to my friends' teenagers. Mostly because the first twenty things that are likely to come out of my mouth are stipid remarks like "you are older now than your parents were when I met them," and "the last time I saw you, you were this tall" (with appropriate hand gestures).

And partly because I can't stop staring at them; they're so good-looking. "Wow. Even nicer-looking than you two are," I tell their parents—both of whom I dated, back in the day.

Finally, I ask the teens what they do and don't like about their parents. The older boy smiles at me. When I ask him what he doesn't like about his dad, his father prompts him, "starts with an a . . . ." And when I ask the same thing about his mom, his dad jumps in again with "starts with a b . . . "

When I pull out my camera, the younger, fiercer one says, "that ain't gonna happen," which I take as the same sort of challenge it is when my younger nephew dodges the camera.

"Yeah, well," I follow him around his house, snapping occasional frames as he ducks and weaves.

"Really. Why are you doing this?" he asks me with the tired sophistication one sees in the young.

I could reply that someday he might actually want a picture of himself at this strange, awkward almost-a-man stage, but it would be too easy. Instead, I just say, "well, I'm a friend of your dad's, and I'm just as much of an asshole as he is."

Which seems to satisfy him.

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I'm in New York City—specifically, Brooklyn. It's beautiful here, and the air is crisp. It even snowed last night. A little. Enough to put a little magic in the air.

My friends' faces are starting to look a bit like those of their parents when I first met them. They all look like they're in their forties, for reasons that remain obscure to me.

They are, to a woman/man, thrilled that I'm drinking again, although when I hang out with the Scottish side of the family I drink good black tea.

Everyone's taking great care of me, and I'm spending very little of my own money. Though this city is hard to get around in, and getting lost is a different experience without a car to provide a protective bubble.

But I'm not sure I'd want to live here. Why would you want to live somewhere that looks like a movie set? I'm sure it would get tiresome.

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is no longer the haven for amateur pornographers that it used to be. I'm sure there are those who feel pretty wistful about that.

And perhaps it depends upon whom one knows.

As one might expect, Reynolds and his trusty blender are on the case (jumpt to his main page, and keep on scrolling for more). The main Popular Mechanics site has a fair amount about it, too. And here is the Consumer Electronics Show's own blog.

Of course, the SHOT Show isn't until next month (February 2-5), and I probably ain't going, since I must make it to CPAC this year (February 7-9), and I like to be home part of the time. (I did once go straight from Las Vegas to the East Coast, though it was a bit of a shock to the system. That was back when I was still working evil staff jobs in Old Media. Early mornings! Sixty/seventy-hour weeks! Low pay! Yippee!)

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