jimmy

Getting out of the LA Kings’ Hockey Fest at STAPLES Center, I decided I wanted to ramen in Little Tokyo. A very pretty Chairman Mao was on my walk there.

I think I’m going to pass out now.

Last year I discovered London Preppy’s blog. Naturally I was three, four years too late to ingest it as it was created. But I was obsessed with it and started from the first post and made my way chronologically forward.

It had the perfect mix of cynicism, nihilism, self-obsession and humor that is everything I strive for. All of this was wrapped in a hot body and the ubiquitous red bars covering the eyes on the photos that gave the hint of anonymity that was intriguing.

Reading through the blog it was clear that it was either fiction or that the details were fictionalized. But it didn’t matter because it was so well written.

What else do you do but hate him?

So he wrote a novel Exit through the Wound, and fucking hell it’s good. It was so good I was compelled to write a stupid Amazon review:

I hate North Morgan. London Preppy. Whoever the hell he is. He crafted a wonderful piece of prose that embodies all aspects of the disembodied drones that go to work, come home, rinse, lather and repeat day after day. It’s a work trying to break away from the confines of disillusionment, cynicism, resignation and monotony while being absolutely hilarious.

What’s fascinating was how seamlessly the blog fit into a narrative form. Gone were the daily tracking of what outfits were worn. Gone were the text message dispatches from a night of clubbing. Some characters were moved around notably All American Girl who is now Sadie. But reading the string of words page after page, what made the blog an enjoyable read was still there.

So I hate him like I hate all good writers.

While reading the novel there were plenty of moments where I distinctly remember reading certain sections from the blog. But it didn’t feel stale or contrived in an attempt to fit it in a novel form. It just fit. It worked.

Like I hinted at in the Amazon review, the characters are different from the blog. Maine pines for Sadie whereas in the blog London Preppy and All-American Girl were co-conspirators at work. Perhaps that what made the recycling of blog posts refreshing, to see how it fit in a different context.

Reading the blog it is clear that there is a huge dose of Bret Easton Ellis in the work. However there is a tinge of humanity laced in the words that salvage it from being an abject wrist slitting work of depression.

Basically all I’m saying is that it’s a fucking good book to read.

Perhaps the most disappointing part about the novel has nothing to do with the novel. To promote the book, Mr. Preppy read excerpts of the book on YouTube eyes fully exposed. The enigma and intrigue of the London Preppy aura died just a little bit. But that’s my only complaint, a minor one at that.

I still hate him.

Wednesday night, a fellow media conspirator Gann Matsuda from Frozen Royalty sent me an email. The subject line was, “Are you contributing to this site?” Immediately my stomach fell.

Are you contibuting to this site, or are they just stealing your/LAIst’s content?

I omitted the URL of this site for obvious reasons.

This website took my piece “Summer of Sorrow Continues for Hockey”, HTML and all, and published it on their site. My anger might have been mitigated somewhat if they gave me a byline. But no. The byline reads, “September 7 | Posted by admin | NHL News Tags: hockey news.” All there was was a crummy link at the bottom of the story with the heading, “Article Source”.

I was sitting at a coffeehouse in Redondo Beach when this discovery was made since it was hotter than a pair of trapped balls in a jockstrap. My immediate reaction was a string of expletives that caused more than a few people to look at me. I responded to their looks by saying I was plagiarized.

Once the first wave of anger left, then came the bewilderment. Of all the pieces written that day about the tragedy in Russia, why did this person choose this one? I really didn’t like the piece and thought it was too slap-and-dash, had continuity problems, was overwrought and had a piss-poor ending.

Writing as much as I do, not everything is going to be a gem. I’ve come to live with that reality. I just hope to throw in a jewel somewhere in there every now and again.

So for a bit I was oddly flattered that such a piss-poor piece would be pilfered.

That moment of peace left very quickly when I realized that this motherfucker has stolen my intellectual property. Well perhaps intellectual should be put in quotation marks since I do write about sports — how intellectual can it be?

I tried contacting the person or people that run the site, but the link that says, “Contact Us” directs you to another page. I did a /WHOIS search on the domain name which leads to Toronto. Then I realized that maybe I shouldn’t be doing this alone. I should have the weight of Gothamist handle this.

So I got my editor on it, but as of noon pacific time today the piece is still up.

This is unacceptable.

So I am declaring war on Canada for harboring these heisters. I want a written apology, the piece to be taken down and the people who are responsible for this nonsense brought to me.

But it is sort of amazing that I have written things on the Internet in one form or another since 1997, and this is the first time I’ve encountered this problem. I guess I’m lucky.

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So here’s some pictures of the headstones of some famous people.

Edit: Two things. First aaaak! That distended image of me is horrible. And I’m too lazy to find something to change it. So forever it will be.

Second, I know it’s not downloadable like my first run of 19 podcasts. Unfortunately I don’t have all of the old ones. I think I have five or six of the 19, but oh well.

Yesterday on Facebook I asked if anyone wanted to go graveyard hopping. I know, how very goth of me. Blah blah blah.

Well instead of graveyard hopping, I just went to one: the Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery. Yes, it’s the one with Marilyn Monroe, John Cassavetes, Billy Wilder, Farrah Fawcett, Don Knotts, Mel Torme, Mr. Howell and his real live Lovie, etc etc etc. And yes that is one of the main reasons I went. And no I wasn’t wearing a stitch of black.

As I walked through looking at the headstones surrounded by the skyscrapers of Westwood, I couldn’t help but notice the old headstones. The oldest graves I found here dated back to 1906. I don’t know whether they were buried somewhere else then moved to this cemetery at a later date, but I doubt that. There were also quite a few undated headstones.

These people lived through the Civil War, Spanish-American War, the Gilded Age, Reconstruction. These people died before WWI. They might have never owned a car. What’s a telephone to them? Freeway? F. Scott Fitzgerald?

I kept walking around looking at these old headstones. And as I tried to reconstruct their histories, what they might have seen it got me thinking what exactly were their stories. Which side of the Civil War were they on? Did they come out west to get in on the gold?

It’s easy to know the histories of Eva Gabor, Eve Arden, Rodney Dangerfield and Minnie Riperton. But what of Emily Ball? Eunice Wetherel? Frank L. Smith? Did they have a lot of kids? How bad was the smog in those days?

Being a megalomaniac (after all I do maintain a personal blog), I wondered about what happens to my own story when I die. Will I have annoying megalomaniacal assholes walking six feet above of my decayed body in a box wondering how I survived the Reagan and both Bush eras?

I know, it’s not terribly profound. It’s nothing like the where-do-people-go-after-they-die sort of tripe you expect from New Age-y cunts or ignorant religious asswipes. Being a devout atheist, I really don’t care about an afterlife.

But what is a life if not a narrative? And without a narrative what is a life?

This is getting very close to being a bunch of solipsistic mess.

Anyhow that’s what was coming to my mind as waves upon waves of tourists descended into the cemetery looking for Marilyn and Janis.

I just hope my final resting place won’t look like this forgotten grave. Then again, they just ran the sprinklers so that’s why it looks like a mess. But still.

Then again I’m dead so gives a fuck?

One other thing I noticed that was less self-serving: Persians really treat their dead well. Those were some of the gaudiest gravestones I have ever seen. I could hear the funerals for each of them.

Another more self-serving thought: There are a lot of people my age who have died in the last five years. Aren’t I supposed to the feeling of an impending scythe when I’m 70 and not when I’m 32?

By the way, the rose garden at the very beginning of this post is where the great Edith Massey resides.

Went traipsing around the dead this afternoon, and saw the perfect tombstone. Don’t worry. I have more.

Now this is one for the memory banks. Seth at Dingers Blog tweeted earlier tonight about a new Hella album Tripper.

Eh? They’re still around?

Now talk about one for the memory banks, this takes me back to 2003, 2004 where Hella, Lightning Bolt, XBXRX, Arab on Radar and other noisy avant-garde bands went all around the country deafening the youth bit by bit. Whether it is age that has crept up on me unwittingly, time commitments elsewhere that has taken my attention away from the music scene or just a complete disintegration of that scene, I completely lost touch. Don’t even ask me who’s where much less active and still touring.

But it’s good to see they’re back to a two-piece and making good music again. After all it’s a familiar name in a sea of unfamiliarity for someone that’s been out of it for quite some time.

It’s also making me think I should have gone to FYF Fest this year. Oh well.

I decided to take a quick little jaunt to the Ocean Trails Ecological Preserve this morning. After watching tons of college football yesterday, I was feeling a bit sedentary to say the very least.

Overall it’s an easy jaunt. After parking right where Palos Verdes Drive South turns into 25th Street there’s a trailhead clearly visible. Head towards the ocean, hook a right at the edge of the cliff and you’re off.

There is a nice little vista with benches to look at the scenery. From there is where things get difficult. Continuing along the trail, there are stairs lined with cacti. Up and up and up and my chest was burning going up and up and up those stairs.

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But that’s the only real challenge. No big whoop.

Whenever I go on these jaunts, I always stupidly imagine the man of my dreams to just stumble into me. Instead there are old men trying to keep active and women what I imagine escaping from their men for a little bit. Like I said, it’s stupid.

The trail goes on behind Trump National Golf Club — a blight on the serenity of nature however contrived it may be. I eventually turned around and went back to the car.

One thing that was a bit troublesome were the cacti lining the trails. Being a bit of a klutz, I was paranoid about falling into the bed of cacti. Fortunately it never happened, but it was something that weighed heavily on my mind.

It’s the first day of college football, and I’m not writing because of it. Okay, it’s not for this game in particular. But football has started!