January 24, 2003

           The picture is unrelated to the article, but you know I like to get your attention. This is the one-of-a-kind David Janss, from Aventura, CA. I crashed at his place for six months in 1991. He had a condo just down the road from Never Never Land. It was constantly being renovated by a husband-wife team that just got out of jail. I referred to them as “Bonnie and Clyde”. He spent a fortune on Mexican tile.
           We belonged to a small organization that fed the homeless in downtown LA on Sundays. David has just made the last payment on his condo when an earthquake move the walls and doors nearly a foot away from all his plumbing. The city said he had to replace it with earthquake-proof piping, so he had to take out another mortgage ($26,000). I’d place this picture in October, 1991. He married a 54 year old Jewish girl in 1992 and I’ve never heard of him since.
           I got my hands on some new reading material. Everything else I own has been read five times or more. [Therefore] no reading is listed today for fear of repeating myself [I must have thought this was funny in 2003.]
           Okay, I read The Claren [local Spanish publication, literally “The Bugle”], which had a side-effect. The [café] “Faraya” is just across the street from work [W58th St., Doral, FL], and I guess (now that I think about it), I’ve always been served by an English-speaking waitress. Today I grabbed the Claren and started highlighting apartments for rent. Soon I was distracted by complete silence, an unknown in Spanish restaurants. I looked up and everyone in the place was staring at me. [They’d never seen a gringo reading Spanish.]
           The last of my tax info arrived, now I wait for the official forms. Due to the local confusion between an exemption and a dependent, I get a $772 refund, which I’d rather not do. Yet if I declare dependents on the company form, the only thing they seem to understand, I may lose my license. Figure that out.
           [Author’s note: this refers to the withholding tax form. If you read it closely, and most people do not, you declare yourself as a dependent. The form is worded funny and it is legal to misdeclare it in away that minimizes your own tax return, another thing most people can’t grasp. The practice was frowned upon by the accounting society I belonged to at the time.]
           Rachita, the (increasingly strange-acting) waitress at IHOP was robbed at gunpoint, she says. Two masked men at 5:30 some morning last week. They got $800. According to her, they marched in right across the parking lot without notice by anyone, as the restaurant was expecting two regulars about that time. So much for their open 24 hours experiment.
           [Author’s note: refers to the IHOP on Biscayne Blvd. and around 20th Street in Miami, now torn down. This is the place where we counted one million toothpicks between January 1 and September 22.]
           Last, I still say the crossword puzzle gets progressively harder as the week ends. [At the time, nobody believed me but this has since been revealed in the media.]