Dear Selection of Sympathy Cards at the Rite Aid at the corner of Sunset and Fairfax:
Rite Aid at Sunset and Fairfax, first of all, your store is the size of a Wal-Mart. If Sir Alexander Fleming were alive today, and he saw his beloved penicillin being hocked in a pharmacy in such close proximity to pool toys, vodka, and most likely carcinogenic eaux de parfum, he'd take his mortar and pessel and chuck them right up the dairy aisle, saddened that there was one. Perhaps you could devote slightly more of your energies to the selection of items in which drug stores generally specialize.
And second of all, in a store of over three dozen haphazardly-placed aisles, (laid out in a pattern designed to keep you imprisoned in the store until you break down and buy a Hefty-sized bag of Doritos), you'd think that more than one measly section of one aisle could be dedicated to greeting cards. And WHAT cards they are. It's clear, Rite Aid, that you got in bed with a sub-par greeting card company, and decided to tell more established, erudite companies such as Hallmark and Shoebox to take a big, fat hike.
Why, Selection of Sympathy Cards at Rite Aid, are you so epically horrible? And why are your sentiments so long? And why, on that note, do you need to specify WHO we're sending sympathy for? "My condolences on the loss of your father / mother / podiatrist." Unless a particularly heinous streak of bad luck has hit you in the past week, don't you think you generally have a pretty good idea for whom you're receiving sympathy? "My sister tragically died last Tuesday, but my plumber died on Thursday - thanks to the specificity of this card, now I know whose death to feel sorry for!"
With sympathy cards, the less said, the better. Selection of cards, where are the SIMPLE missives? The concise, brief, "In sympathy" sentiments? Sending a card urging the bereaved to "Take comfort in the solace of the lord" or "cherish the blessed moments" and "Follow Jesus under the bridge over troubled water" makes me feel like a church-goin' lady in pantyhose and a big hat.
Selection of Sympathy Cards at Rite-Aid, you fail to impress. Next time someone I know kicks, I'll suck it up and go to the Papyrus store and spend $7 on a card as thick as my fist. In the meantime, I'll be in aisle 17; I need some cat food.
Best regards,
Dear Crabby
Monday, August 30, 2010
Wednesday, August 4, 2010
Dear Roads In The City of Los Angeles
Dear Roads In The City Of Los Angeles:
You owe me somewhere in the neighborhood of five to eight hundred dollars, according to an estimate from my mechanic.
"Your shocks are leaking" said the diminutive Raffi, Swedish car savant of Hollywood Boulevard, the last time I stopped in for an oil change. "All four of 'em."
"I didn't even know shocks had fluid," I responded.
"They're pneumatic," he explained to me.
"Isn't that the thing you use to remember something?" I asked. We eyed each other for a while as the Larry David stare music from "Curb Your Enthusiasm" ambiently played. Then I took out my credit card.
Newly shorn of any excess funds, I pulled out of the tiny alley next to my mechanic's. Then I hit a bump so huge, I think I peed a little.
Roads of Los Angeles, you are a war zone. Never mind the, Eurotrash-sunglassed BMW drivers who troll you, the be-SUVed, flat-ironed West LA Moms in their Escalade and the blue-haired elderly in their enormous Lexus sedans who congest you. Never mind the windup Toyota pickups crammed full of lawn-mowing equipment and gardeners alike sputtering along that are, by law, at least 25 years old. Navigating you is already enough of a challenge without your surfaces resembling the pattern of varicose veins on a heavy woman's thigh. You possess a positively uncommon series of bumps of Hindenburgian proportions; teeth-rattling potholes and recessed manholes that figuratively chap my ass and literally bruise my skull. You are in such terrible condition, I'm convinced that D.W. Griffith himself paved you sometime in the early 1920s, and no one has paid attention to you since.
There are obviously a catalogued list of prominent offenders; black holes of misery capable of swallowing even the heartiest of Korean cars, and unique drainage situations found nowhere else in these United States clearly tossed in as an afterthought in lieu of the more traditional "sewers." These disastrous elements combine to proffer an infrastructure rivaling many countries whose names end with "stan."
Wilshire Boulevard between the sadly defunct Robinsons-May and Westwood, you are if not the most acute thoroughfare of misery, at least the longest and most consistently fraught. On no other road in the city is there such a flagrant disregard for the integrity of vehicular undercarriage. Strange, speed bump-esque goiters in the middle of a road where one can comfortably drive at 50 MPH rise out of nowhere, jacking up even the most staid of Mercedes', wantonly skipping CDs and sending latte lids flying. My own standard transmission has even been known to be jounced into neutral over one particular bump just east of Glendon.
Wilshire, driving on you is an exercise in alertness. Is it this one of four lanes with the bump constructed of almost right angles, or is it the one to the right? Is it in front of this garish mid-rise that the pothole is as deep as the middle-eastern oil wells that paid for the Maybach of the driver next to me, or the next one? Occasionally, you realize you've miscalculated, and the bump looms before you. A high-pitched wail of fear that starts in your muffler and ends in your wallet shrieks from your mouth as you careen, blinker madly flashing, across the better part of three lanes in hopes that maybe, just maybe, this time, you'll save your oil pan, exhaust pipe, or whatever the hell else down there you've already blown to hell.
Sunset Boulevard in Bel-Air, you are equally malignant. In order to make any kind of headway, one is forced to travel in the right lane around the lumbering Bellagio Road impresarios who see fit to drive at 30 MPH, but by doing so you dance a frightening tango of doom with not only the narrowness of the lane, but the gashes that riddle the already recessed drainage trough in which some portion of your wheels are forced to travel that some paragon of civil engineering saw fit to install several decades ago. You can lead the tango, rose in teeth, passing the slow-moving cars in the middle willy-nilly, until you land in a cavernous pothole that you can't help but enter, as a last minute swerve will place you in contact with the business end of a Range Rover in the left lane. You leave behind not only your dignity, but pieces of one or more of your right tires. It's hard to believe the zip code with what must be some of the highest property taxes in the country can have a main thoroughfare this poorly and illogically surfaced. Curious as I once was at the popularity of SUVs in a climate devoid of snow, now I understand; it's not for the four-wheel drive, it's for the ground clearance.
And, Roads of Los Angeles, there are so many, many more. Hollywood Boulevard between La Brea and Fairfax? A minefield. Moorpark in Valley Village? Ghastly. Laurel Canyon south of Mulholland? You should be condemned. And the 405? The 405 and your awful, AWFUL striations? There are just no words in the English language.
WHY, roads, are you so decimated? Why have you been so egregiously neglected in a city so reliant on cars that buses, rather than being lauded and revered as our only form of public transport, are instead as derided and viewed as mere obstacles, the Manatees of our already congested roadways? Granted, the city is already overextended, and happens to be in a state involved in one of the most highly publicized budget brouhahas in the country. Granted, somebody zoned the shit out of LA back in the day, erecting apartment buildings spewing forth vehicle upon vehicle rather than the two or so cars that would've come from a house in its stead. And granted, any road construction project would interrupt the flow of traffic to the point that the ambulances needing to make their way to treat the self-inflicted gunshot wounds of miserable commuters would fail to reach their victims.
But, perhaps, the sage urban planners of this great City of Angels have decided to let you, its roads, languish with such pronouncement that in the rare event ONE of you is repaved, it is as if God himself reached his steamrolling finger out and parted the black, yellow and white seas. The newly repaved stretch of Fairfax? A revelation. The stimulus package-funded San Vicente in Santa Monica? Heaven on Earth. Coldwater Canyon in Beverly Hills? Be still my fluttering heart. These projects were well-worth whatever gunshot casualties that inevitably resulted from the misery of people stuck in horrific repaving-based traffic jams.
Roads of Los Angeles, I will try to honor the freshly-smoothed among you. I will obey the speed limits you mandate, I will yield to the pedestrians crossing you, I will not run the last seconds of your yellow lights. I will treat you with the reverence you deserve, honor the beauty you possess, and wait patiently for the invitations you extend to your brethren to follow you to the Promised Land; a Canaan of the newly-paved, a kingdom of pothole-free smooth sailing.
In the meantime, I'll be on the bus. My shocks are getting fixed.
Best regards,
Dear Crabby
You owe me somewhere in the neighborhood of five to eight hundred dollars, according to an estimate from my mechanic.
"Your shocks are leaking" said the diminutive Raffi, Swedish car savant of Hollywood Boulevard, the last time I stopped in for an oil change. "All four of 'em."
"I didn't even know shocks had fluid," I responded.
"They're pneumatic," he explained to me.
"Isn't that the thing you use to remember something?" I asked. We eyed each other for a while as the Larry David stare music from "Curb Your Enthusiasm" ambiently played. Then I took out my credit card.
Newly shorn of any excess funds, I pulled out of the tiny alley next to my mechanic's. Then I hit a bump so huge, I think I peed a little.
Roads of Los Angeles, you are a war zone. Never mind the, Eurotrash-sunglassed BMW drivers who troll you, the be-SUVed, flat-ironed West LA Moms in their Escalade and the blue-haired elderly in their enormous Lexus sedans who congest you. Never mind the windup Toyota pickups crammed full of lawn-mowing equipment and gardeners alike sputtering along that are, by law, at least 25 years old. Navigating you is already enough of a challenge without your surfaces resembling the pattern of varicose veins on a heavy woman's thigh. You possess a positively uncommon series of bumps of Hindenburgian proportions; teeth-rattling potholes and recessed manholes that figuratively chap my ass and literally bruise my skull. You are in such terrible condition, I'm convinced that D.W. Griffith himself paved you sometime in the early 1920s, and no one has paid attention to you since.
There are obviously a catalogued list of prominent offenders; black holes of misery capable of swallowing even the heartiest of Korean cars, and unique drainage situations found nowhere else in these United States clearly tossed in as an afterthought in lieu of the more traditional "sewers." These disastrous elements combine to proffer an infrastructure rivaling many countries whose names end with "stan."
Wilshire Boulevard between the sadly defunct Robinsons-May and Westwood, you are if not the most acute thoroughfare of misery, at least the longest and most consistently fraught. On no other road in the city is there such a flagrant disregard for the integrity of vehicular undercarriage. Strange, speed bump-esque goiters in the middle of a road where one can comfortably drive at 50 MPH rise out of nowhere, jacking up even the most staid of Mercedes', wantonly skipping CDs and sending latte lids flying. My own standard transmission has even been known to be jounced into neutral over one particular bump just east of Glendon.
Wilshire, driving on you is an exercise in alertness. Is it this one of four lanes with the bump constructed of almost right angles, or is it the one to the right? Is it in front of this garish mid-rise that the pothole is as deep as the middle-eastern oil wells that paid for the Maybach of the driver next to me, or the next one? Occasionally, you realize you've miscalculated, and the bump looms before you. A high-pitched wail of fear that starts in your muffler and ends in your wallet shrieks from your mouth as you careen, blinker madly flashing, across the better part of three lanes in hopes that maybe, just maybe, this time, you'll save your oil pan, exhaust pipe, or whatever the hell else down there you've already blown to hell.
Sunset Boulevard in Bel-Air, you are equally malignant. In order to make any kind of headway, one is forced to travel in the right lane around the lumbering Bellagio Road impresarios who see fit to drive at 30 MPH, but by doing so you dance a frightening tango of doom with not only the narrowness of the lane, but the gashes that riddle the already recessed drainage trough in which some portion of your wheels are forced to travel that some paragon of civil engineering saw fit to install several decades ago. You can lead the tango, rose in teeth, passing the slow-moving cars in the middle willy-nilly, until you land in a cavernous pothole that you can't help but enter, as a last minute swerve will place you in contact with the business end of a Range Rover in the left lane. You leave behind not only your dignity, but pieces of one or more of your right tires. It's hard to believe the zip code with what must be some of the highest property taxes in the country can have a main thoroughfare this poorly and illogically surfaced. Curious as I once was at the popularity of SUVs in a climate devoid of snow, now I understand; it's not for the four-wheel drive, it's for the ground clearance.
And, Roads of Los Angeles, there are so many, many more. Hollywood Boulevard between La Brea and Fairfax? A minefield. Moorpark in Valley Village? Ghastly. Laurel Canyon south of Mulholland? You should be condemned. And the 405? The 405 and your awful, AWFUL striations? There are just no words in the English language.
WHY, roads, are you so decimated? Why have you been so egregiously neglected in a city so reliant on cars that buses, rather than being lauded and revered as our only form of public transport, are instead as derided and viewed as mere obstacles, the Manatees of our already congested roadways? Granted, the city is already overextended, and happens to be in a state involved in one of the most highly publicized budget brouhahas in the country. Granted, somebody zoned the shit out of LA back in the day, erecting apartment buildings spewing forth vehicle upon vehicle rather than the two or so cars that would've come from a house in its stead. And granted, any road construction project would interrupt the flow of traffic to the point that the ambulances needing to make their way to treat the self-inflicted gunshot wounds of miserable commuters would fail to reach their victims.
But, perhaps, the sage urban planners of this great City of Angels have decided to let you, its roads, languish with such pronouncement that in the rare event ONE of you is repaved, it is as if God himself reached his steamrolling finger out and parted the black, yellow and white seas. The newly repaved stretch of Fairfax? A revelation. The stimulus package-funded San Vicente in Santa Monica? Heaven on Earth. Coldwater Canyon in Beverly Hills? Be still my fluttering heart. These projects were well-worth whatever gunshot casualties that inevitably resulted from the misery of people stuck in horrific repaving-based traffic jams.
Roads of Los Angeles, I will try to honor the freshly-smoothed among you. I will obey the speed limits you mandate, I will yield to the pedestrians crossing you, I will not run the last seconds of your yellow lights. I will treat you with the reverence you deserve, honor the beauty you possess, and wait patiently for the invitations you extend to your brethren to follow you to the Promised Land; a Canaan of the newly-paved, a kingdom of pothole-free smooth sailing.
In the meantime, I'll be on the bus. My shocks are getting fixed.
Best regards,
Dear Crabby
Sunday, August 1, 2010
Dear Woman Who Jogs on San Vicente
Dear Woman Who Jogs Every Afternoon on San Vicente in Brentwood:
For months now, without fail, whenever I'm on the stretch of San Vicente between Bundy and Ocean, there you are; weekends, weekdays, West LA-ocean effect-partial cloud-cover or shine.
Your sunglassed appearance is, frankly, a little freakish; your fried, bleached hair is gathered together and held in place by a mammoth black clip, the likes of which I couldn't fathom having affixed to my person while attempting to engage in any kind of exercise. Your wardrobe is a throwback to the 80s; your brightly colored, skin-tight shorts' rise a little too high, your pantyline disarmingly intimate for a family neighborhood. Rather then blending into the parade of runners moving up and down the grass boulevard divider, you choose to run on the street, your stride unlike any I've ever seen, your arms and legs unnaturally forced away from your body, look like they're working against physics. You move in an exaggerated, running goose-step, as if you're permanently attached to an invisible Nordic-Track, not unlike an aggressive robot with a yeast infection.
In my head, you're Cassandra, or Victoria or Tracy-Ann; but who are you, really? A Jane Fonda wannabe? A cast-off B-movie actress from back in the day? A once-promiscuous former Heidi Fleiss escort? All three? Or in the words of Dominick Dunne in Another City, Not My Own simply "One of those women who goes jogging on San Vicente?" Or are you just an aging trophy wife invested in in the late 1980s as Los Angeles crested its wave, heyday squarely in the rearview along with its days of evenly surfaced streets.
And though I wish you'd invest in some new workout gear, too familiar as I am with your dangerous flirtation with a camel toe situation, I admire your consistency; your tenacity in maintaining your health, your general level of fitness. Your body is thin and lithe, and while on a woman meandering up the front walk of 60 this isn't always a great look, your thighs are less flabby than that of the average woman of any age, your years of uniformly-paced NordicTracking back and forth from Brentwood to Santa Monica are certainly paying off.
Do you enjoy the running? Or is it a daily chore. a burdensome nuisance that you stick with for fear of total atrophy, both mental and physical? A safeguard from old age, a willful incubation from the cracked roads and cracked faces of your surroundings?
Perhaps, though, you're happy. Perhaps your husband, paunchy and bald, a lawyer or a retired agent, dressed in a faded Missoni sweater, takes you out for dinner on Saturday nights. Perhaps he's hung onto the SL he had in the 80s, and maybe, as you drive into Beverly Hills to Spago or The Polo Lounge for an overpriced steak, he puts the top down. Perhaps as you thunder down Sunset, he reaches his hand across the fussily teutonic center console and puts his hand on your thigh, feeling, beneath the layers of cellulite, the firm muscles in your legs that you've worked to cultivate, for an hour a day, for years. Perhaps he gives it a squeeze, and smiles at you. Perhaps that's a reason, among others, you never miss a day.
So, see you next Saturday, when we will invariably pass between 26th and 14th streets. And while I'm grateful to you for being so consistent a touchstone in my week, please, do a civic-minded favor, and treat yourself to some new shorts.
Best regards,
Dear Crabby
For months now, without fail, whenever I'm on the stretch of San Vicente between Bundy and Ocean, there you are; weekends, weekdays, West LA-ocean effect-partial cloud-cover or shine.
Your sunglassed appearance is, frankly, a little freakish; your fried, bleached hair is gathered together and held in place by a mammoth black clip, the likes of which I couldn't fathom having affixed to my person while attempting to engage in any kind of exercise. Your wardrobe is a throwback to the 80s; your brightly colored, skin-tight shorts' rise a little too high, your pantyline disarmingly intimate for a family neighborhood. Rather then blending into the parade of runners moving up and down the grass boulevard divider, you choose to run on the street, your stride unlike any I've ever seen, your arms and legs unnaturally forced away from your body, look like they're working against physics. You move in an exaggerated, running goose-step, as if you're permanently attached to an invisible Nordic-Track, not unlike an aggressive robot with a yeast infection.
In my head, you're Cassandra, or Victoria or Tracy-Ann; but who are you, really? A Jane Fonda wannabe? A cast-off B-movie actress from back in the day? A once-promiscuous former Heidi Fleiss escort? All three? Or in the words of Dominick Dunne in Another City, Not My Own simply "One of those women who goes jogging on San Vicente?" Or are you just an aging trophy wife invested in in the late 1980s as Los Angeles crested its wave, heyday squarely in the rearview along with its days of evenly surfaced streets.
And though I wish you'd invest in some new workout gear, too familiar as I am with your dangerous flirtation with a camel toe situation, I admire your consistency; your tenacity in maintaining your health, your general level of fitness. Your body is thin and lithe, and while on a woman meandering up the front walk of 60 this isn't always a great look, your thighs are less flabby than that of the average woman of any age, your years of uniformly-paced NordicTracking back and forth from Brentwood to Santa Monica are certainly paying off.
Do you enjoy the running? Or is it a daily chore. a burdensome nuisance that you stick with for fear of total atrophy, both mental and physical? A safeguard from old age, a willful incubation from the cracked roads and cracked faces of your surroundings?
Perhaps, though, you're happy. Perhaps your husband, paunchy and bald, a lawyer or a retired agent, dressed in a faded Missoni sweater, takes you out for dinner on Saturday nights. Perhaps he's hung onto the SL he had in the 80s, and maybe, as you drive into Beverly Hills to Spago or The Polo Lounge for an overpriced steak, he puts the top down. Perhaps as you thunder down Sunset, he reaches his hand across the fussily teutonic center console and puts his hand on your thigh, feeling, beneath the layers of cellulite, the firm muscles in your legs that you've worked to cultivate, for an hour a day, for years. Perhaps he gives it a squeeze, and smiles at you. Perhaps that's a reason, among others, you never miss a day.
So, see you next Saturday, when we will invariably pass between 26th and 14th streets. And while I'm grateful to you for being so consistent a touchstone in my week, please, do a civic-minded favor, and treat yourself to some new shorts.
Best regards,
Dear Crabby
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