This is the front counter by the first shop to rent out computers by the minute. There was no serious Internet back then, but the computers still had to be networked (to the printers that you can just make out in the background). In those days, anybody who knew anything about computers was making big bucks, so I was considered a real find--somebody who would work cheap and could teach customers the basics. (I was drawing my full $5,166 monthly pay from the phone company all the time, but that is another story.)
I became the resident expert in business cards and resumes. This was a fascinating place to work, but as usually I was the one who wound up doing almost everything for the same pay as the rest. This location is near the corner of Laurel Canyon and Ventura, so my customers included Eddie Van Halen, Michael Jackson, Gene Hackman, and a host of screen and script writers that scroll past too fast to read. Like Al Vicki. I made excellent money in the evenings with my laptop, charging them a fortune to enter scripts onto disks. Since I made many suggestions and corrections, chances are if you heard the perfect script in those days, I ghosted it.
The daughter, I forget her name, took a real shine to me. Well, who wouldn’t, ladies, I mean just look at what a darling I can be. She had this preoccupation all the men in the place were staring at her butt just because they were. She was Lebanese and by that standard a real beauty, but you know me and non-blondes. She was actually only distantly related to the two owners so she’s a metaphorical daughter. This photo was in August, Robynette and I began our breakup (which dragged on for another
I awoke woozy and had to spend the day quietly indoors. Mostly me, the cat, and the dog. Wallace did his rounds to the Panera but I didn’t even feel up to that. I’ll be fine in another day but this is a lesson to me that there are no more “routine” hospital stays for the rest of my days. Wallace is sure chirping around these days, mark my words, he’s met another gal. And I have a touch of food poisoning.
We’ve got another unseasonal heat wave, but we have the nicest outdoor patio in town. I’m sure I mentioned how it grew back with a vengeance after the 20 some barrow loads of cutting, underbrush and dried leaves I hauled out of there last year. The high point of the day so far is that we cleaned the torpedo barbeque. That was more than a treat, working that thing with the coals and ashes. Let me say a bit about that.
I told you we’d never barbequed before. Now all those TV commercials and such make sense. Even those commercials for steak houses, well, now we look at them and say, “We can do that.” I made a huge batch of barbeque sauce, noting that in many ways it is similar to sweet and sour sauce. This could be my imagination, but it appears that meat cooked on the barbeque is not as “fussy” as the same thing on the stove. That is, you can leave it for unattended at times without much trouble.
Speaking of trouble, there is talk of sending another 40,000 troops to Iraq. Let me get out the old calculator. It costs $5,000 per week per soldier over there, roughly twenty times what they’ll make begging at intersections when they get back. The war tab zooms to a thousand dollars per year for each American who still has a job, that is, $66 billion per year.
We’ve forgotten nothing but we’ve learned nothing either. The American system that pits million-dollar crime labs against penniless defendants and similar ingrained social injustices mean soldiers no longer enlist for patriotic reasons, but because they can’t get a job or afford school. Although the angle is extremely media-friendly, we just know they are not willing to die for such a country. “We, the unwilling….”
The good news is they will be sending mostly $5,000 men. The bases on Antarctica tell us if they send women, it will cost each $35,000 per week. That's your trivia. It costs seven times as much to keep a woman in the field as it does a man. Remember to include ALL costs.
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