...now I understand why James Bond ("Shaken, not stirred.") drove an Aston Martin...
...and now I understand why some people say the Roman Catholics don't have the sense to come in out of the rain...
...and I doubt I'll EVER understand this, but I promise to continue trying...
Your Pope is giving some consideration to running for President.
...(several minutes pass while the hysterical laughter dies down)...
That's not funny.
Why wouldn't your Pope Guy be a good President, huh? Americans seem to want their leaders to be male, tall, good-looking, somewhat articulate and charismatic as hell.
Okay, let's take them one at a time:
*Male...last time I looked.
*Tall...duh, check out my name.
*Good-looking...hey, it's all in the eyes of the beholder.
*Somewhat articulate...please.
*Charismatic...what, are you kidding, I have boatloads of charisma, I have super-tankers of charisma.
So why wouldn't I make a good president? Anyway, I said I was just considering running for President, I didn't say I'd made up my mind to do it. Geez.
We'll talk more about this later. (Boy, that sounds ominous.)
I will tell you that I, like so many of my fellow Left Coast residents, particularly those of us who live in and around the environs of Southern California, made light of the recent distress of our East Coast friends and neighbors, in their response to a 5.8 magnitude earthquake that hit parts of Virginia, Maryland, Washington, D.C., and New York earlier this week and was said to have been felt as far west as Chicago.
If the news reports are any indication, and in this instance, since there's so many of them telling the same story, I'm pretty sure they got it right, it was chaos and terror all over the Eastern Seaboard, as folks who had never had the unique experience of living through an earthquake poured into the streets, basically scared shitless.
Now Left Coast folks, SoCal area veterans especially, don't even begin to acknowledge an earthquake until it's at least a 6.5 or better. Yeah, 5.8 on the Richter scale, that's nothing to mess with, but after you've been through a half-dozen or so of these things, anything under 6.5 is a yawner. (Ever see the movie "Independence Day"? Think of the scene where Will Smith wakes up suddenly in bed next to Vivica J. Fox, and believe me, that's somebody I would love to wake up next to, thinking they're having an earthquake in their neighborhood of LA (pronounced LAH), and when he says, "Hey, I think we're having an earthquake", and oh yes, thank you, Mr. Obvious Man, Vivica Fox puts her head up and says, "Not even a 4.0, baby, go back to sleep.")
Yeah, it takes more than a 5.8 to get our attention out here.
So, and I'm a little ashamed to admit this, like so many of my fellow LaLaLand residents, I chuckled a little maliciously at the sight of all those battle-tested veterans from the front lines of the daily political and financial market wars, running around looking like they didn't know whether to shit or go blind. (I have no idea what that means, but I like the sound of it. My old man had one even stranger: "Put his brain in a pee-wee's ass and it would fly backwards." I have NO idea what that means, but you have to admit, it's evocative as hell.)
This derision from we veterans of the "Quake Wars" here in SoCal towards our terrified brethren in New York, Washington, et al. is based, I believe, on two factors:
a) East Coasters in general, and New Yorkers in particular, have always cast a jaundiced eye downwards towards residents of LA; the East Coast has the nation's capital, the country's seat of power, the financial markets, media giants and corporations of New York, the intelligentsia of Boston, the Terrapins of Maryland (what the hell else is in Maryland?) and the beauty of New Jersey (???); we have Miley and Charlie and Paris and Lindsay and the 236 Kardashians and Disneyland, so there's an inferiority thing going on here, and;
b) we have just as many assholes out here as they have back there.
But just as I was getting some good chucks from watching NYC execs running around the streets of Manhattan in their Armani suits and Hermes ties and Prada handbags, trying to find a place to hide from Mother Nature, I started thinking about my first experience with the phenomena of an earthquake.
(You hear a story coming?)
I moved to LA in late 2000, after spending the bulk of my life in the Chicago area, and mostly I moved out here because I was sick to death of freezing my ass off every winter. So like so many before me, I heeded the words of Horace Greeley and migrated west, along with six oxen, a covered wagon, my wife Bess and my good Sharps rifle at my side, and as we moved over the plains where Indians...whoa, did I wander off or what? (I really hate when that happens.)
On a Saturday afternoon in February is when it happened to me the first time, and it was an experience I will not likely forget soon.
It was a pretty much a typical day here in the Southland; the weather was in the 60s as I remember, and it was sunny and pleasant outside. I had done some shopping and run some errands earlier in the day (hey, this was before my Pope gig with the All John All The Time World Church, so there was no staff to haul your water or bake your bread), and was settling in for a couple of hours of NBA basketball, because for some reason, there was an early Saturday afternoon Lakers' game on the tube that day, and I was all over it.
Now I'm about to admit to something illegal, and I hope that all my loyal followers will allow their Pope his little peccadilloes, and not call the local constabulary: I find that a couple of good hits off the ol' pipe enhances the "Laker Experience" considerably.
Especially the Laker Girls part.
So there I sat, in my lovely home here in the bucolic and generally misunderstood San Fernando Valley, basking in the warm glow of marijuana, Lakers basketball and an In N' Out Double Burger with cheese, a large order of fries and a Diet Pepsi, (have to watch the old waist line), watching as Kobe pours in about 20 in the first quarter when, very suddenly, I noticed one of my hanging plants was swaying in the breeze...
...inside my apartment, with no windows open.
Even stranger, my "swivel rocker" across the room was doing both, swiveling and rocking, like someone walking by had bumped into it.
Except that I was the only one home, and hadn't moved from my chair in the last half-hour, and Harley hadn't budged off his spot on the floor for at least a millenia.
Then I felt it; my chair moved, with me in it. Not much, but it moved.
No, wait, that's not quite right, the floor moved, not the chair.
No, wait, that's not quite right, the floor didn't move, the building moved.
Ah, excuse me, ah, anyone, THE FUCKING BUILDING IS SWAYING BACK AND FORTH LIKE A WILLOW IN THE BREEZE, THANK YOU, WOULD SOMEONE PLEASE, PLEASE TELL ME WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON?!?
Now I have been through numerous earthquakes since that first one; typically, and I think this is the reaction of most SoCalers, it's oh, we're having an earthquake, what time does the Dodgers game start?
Sorry, but no biggie.
But the first one, your first time, whoa; I was scared shitless.
No, actually, that's not accurate; I'll explain that in a moment.
Now I admit that being half way to I'mBakedLand does have a way of enhancing your first experience with an earthquake in a very scary manner; I believe straight it would have been much less frightening. But Mother Nature had not consulted me as to the most convenient time to start shaking the crap out of Southern California, so there I was, stuck in an unfortunate situation.
Putting it mildly.
Fifteen or twenty seconds into Bedlam, I realized what was happening, and I started to calm down. Hell, I had slept through tornadoes that took half the roof off our next-store neighbor's house when I was a kid, so I was pretty sure I would live through this as well, once I understood what it was that was, as Richard Pryor once put it, "making everything go gibbety-gibbety-gibbety".
So when everything settled down, and after I had taken a shower and changed my underwear, I called my sister, who also lives here in Valley, to ask if she had felt the quake. (This is my older sister, who came to LA back in the 60's; 18, not 19.)
"Yo, big sis, did you feel that?" I asked rather breathlessly.
"Feel what?" she responded.
Sorry, East Coast sissies, 5.8 is just no big deal, pretty much like Times Square, Fenway Park and Carmelo Anthony.
And did you see the pictures of the lavish wedding that Kim and Kris threw over the weekend, gush, gush? (Oh, and FYI, that "change underwear" thing was just literary license; I wasn't THAT scared.)
But I was pretty scared.
Love and natural disasters,
PJTT
copyright 2011 Krissongs Inc.
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