Non-fiction

“I Don’t Know, Man.”

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Confusing times on a Sunday. Was driving through the 111 from the 10 Friday night. It’s a speed trap, miles of lengthy road, just two lanes with no cars in sight, in the middle of the desert. Was going seventy, eighty, kept my eyes off the speedometer. Was stuck in la-la land, thinking about work and rock bands to keep my mind off work all through the ride back from LA.

The 111 has spaces between both two-lane roads where cars can turn around and go the other way. Passed one of them and there was a bike cop, just waiting there. I saw it in my rearview, him turning around and following me. “Oh fuck,” I thought. So I did what every civilian would do and hit the brakes, suddenly trying to obey the law. There were no speed limit signs in sight, so I guessed the limit was fifty-five. I slowed to that. The cop rode my tail for about a mile before he turned his red and blue lights on in the rearview mirror. That was my signal to pull over to the shoulder.

Once the car was in park and I saw him climb off his bike, I thought, “What the hell is he gonna tell me? Maybe he’ll just give me a warning. Yeah. I’m a nice guy. I’ll just act politely toward him, and he’ll appreciate the respect I’m giving.”

He stopped at my passenger side, so I pressed the button for the automatic window to slide down. He didn’t reach his head in or nothing like that. He just stood straight, wearing his cop uniform of course, but also some kind of heavy vest that looked as if it carried a mase canister and a taser, but I wasn’t sure. I didn’t usually see cops wear vests, but they do around here. He kept his helmet on naturally and said, “I’m Officer Martin. I stopped you because you were going eighty-seven in a sixty-five.”

Eighty-seven in a sixty-five? I knew I was going fast but nothing that egregious. Maybe he’d radared the wrong car. Either way, I knew I was screwed. No talking my way out of this one. I just said. “Okay.”

“Your driver’s license, registration, and insurance please,” he said.

I handed over my driver’s license and fumbled around in the glove compartment for the registration paper and handed it to him. Then he looked annoyed and said, “Your insurance?”

“Oh right. Sorry,” I said

I was so nervous and caught in the moment that I forgot that he needed that. I forgot where it was for a second and remembered I kept it in my wallet. So I pulled that little card out and handed it over.

“Give me a few minutes. Don’t go anywhere,” he said, as if I was gonna drive off without my license, registration, and insurance.

I waited for him as he filled out the citation, watching him do it in my rearview, and just thinking how shitty this was. A lot of self-loathing after speeding so fast down the 111 I tell you. It’s a speed trap. I’m never gonna take that road again, but I have to if I want to reach the 10 freeway. There is no other route there from Palm Springs. “Come on. Just hurry up and give me my license and stuff so I can leave,” I thought. “I’m so screwed. How much is the ticket gonna be? What’s all the crap I’m gonna have to do to make up for speeding?”

He gave me my stuff back and spoke so quickly that I couldn’t register what he’d said. He handed me my citation and said, “Drive safely” before he walked back to his bike.

What did he say? I looked in my wallet because I didn’t think he’d given me my insurance card back, but it was there. I was so nervously caught in the moment that I didn’t remember him giving it back to me. But anyway, he’d also written my old Hollywood address on the citation because it was still on my driver’s license. So now I would have to straighten that out with the court. What a headache. Speeding tickets are a bitch, not because of the steep fines but because of all the other nonsense that you have to put up with, such as traffic school. Gotta do that to keep the points off my driving record. My insurance will skyrocket.

I yelled for the cop to come back, but no sir. He drove off, left me there stranded. I also noticed in my rearview another car that was pulled over and a cop bike behind that one too. Those vultures were trying to meet their quotas by the end of the month. It felt better knowing I wasn’t the only one. So I drove off carefully as if another cop was lurking in the bushes somewhere, ready to pop out and write me another citation. I was in the outskirts, right outside of Palm Springs, about five miles from home. It ruined my weekend and will probably ruin my month as I worry about where the speeding ticket will go. To my old Hollywood address? I hope the post office somehow figures their shit out and mails it back to me, or else I’m never gonna get it. And they’ll sting me with late fees. Not to mention having to sign up for traffic school. Who has time for that? I sure don’t. I don’t know, man.

Non-fiction

The Carwash

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I have fond memories. Who doesn’t enjoy it? My favorites are the ones you drive into. Slide a few coins inside the machine. Or these days, pay the cashier with your card. They give you a code. Drive in. Watch the rotating brushes wipe the windshield, the roof, the back window, hood, bumpers, lastly the tires. An adventure, sitting in that dark tunnel with just you and the brushes, as the car rides a mechanical track all the way to the dryers, where heavy winds blow water beads off the windshield and the rest of the car. Damn near therapeutic before the car slides off the track. You shift from neutral to drive. Drive out of there. Come back soon. Always pleasant to smell the soap suds from the car, the bubble gum smell from the pink and blue foam that had blanketed your windshield. You drive off knowing you’ll see that place again at the gas station or on its own somewhere.

Some people prefer places where humans wash the car with rags. They use lots of elbow grease to wipe the dirt off the windshield, the doors, the tires. You sit on a bleacher outside, watch them wipe your car down in a long line of other cars. Takes about a half hour. Everyone is patient at the carwash. Nowhere to go on a Saturday. Costs twenty bucks these days. Dudes expect a tip of at least twenty dollars more.

Went a few times there to get my car spiffy clean for a job as a rideshare driver way back when, over ten years ago. They buffed my interior with vacuums and dry rags. Waved their rags in the air to show they were done. Went over there, got in my car. Dude started yelling at me for not giving him a tip. Didn’t have anything on me. Said, “Next time, buddy.” Drove off. Never drove there again, fearing they might recognize me and do something to my car. Wasn’t a good experience.

Lasted a few weeks at the job for a supplemental income. Too many complaints from customers that my car had a funky smell. The company let me go. Didn’t care about that job anyway. Can’t keep my car clean. Life is too busy for that.

But still go through the drive-thru carwash because the machine doesn’t ask for tips. Love the ride inside, like I said. I might go this weekend if I have time. Only takes about five minutes before I’m out the other end. My car gets dirty quickly out in this desert. Too many bugs and too much dirt flying in the wind. Need to clean the interior. Too much dust has collected.

The carwash used to be a party many decades ago. Music blaring. I thought I saw a movie where attendants wore rollerskates, but that could’ve been fictional. That would’ve been cool to see. Someone washing my car with them on. I would’ve given him a good tip for his effort. I drive off and feel better like after a trip to the barber, where my head feels lighter and cleaner after they’ve washed my hair.

Non-fiction

As I Look into My Past…

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I see what truly awful jobs I had. This was after I earned my Bachelor’s degree. I thought the good days would come.

It began when I was a Hollywood intern at a movie studio. There was nowhere else to look but up until the internship was over and they weren’t hiring. Fast-forward to a few months later when I met a nice guy at a film festival who said he could get me a job for a TV show as a production assistant on another studio lot. That job lasted for four days because I wasn’t proactive enough. The check for that week was under five hundred dollars because the salary back then was a hundred dollars a day. That was my last crack at Hollywood.

Then I moved back in with my parents for three years in the small hometown where I’d attended high school. I went through a temp agency that got me hired at a hospital, where I worked inside a trailer and filed medical records inside dusty folders that were sharp around the edges. They gave me stinging paper cuts. I was working with only one other person, and he was a kid, about nineteen, who would harass me, calling me insulting names about my sexual orientation and stuff. I worked for two weeks before I quit and turned that bastard in.

Then I became a substitute teacher for a few years and dealt with the worst kids possible: junior high school kids who had no respect for authority. They would get out of their desks and leave the classroom without my permission. They would write bad things about me in their textbooks as I’d discovered. I left those schools feeling defeated each day.

I also worked a job selling air-conditioners. My supervisor kept his cigarettes in his shirt pocket and wore a cowboy hat. His teeth were metal. He would do this thing where he would lick the end of the cigarette before he stuffed it in his mouth, and all he talked about was commission.

“I’m not a good salesman,” I told him.

“You’re not a salesman,” he said. “You’re an air-conditioner specialist.”

Yeah, okay. I didn’t make it past training, which was over eight hours a day through the weekends.

This was before I moved to Hollywood to try to become a screenwriter, a pipe dream but a dream nonetheless. I needed something to look forward to because it’s all about the journey, not the destination. So while I was writing and revising endlessly, I took on jobs that no one else wanted.

I remember one job where I had to stand outside of a Walgreens in Northridge and sell trinkets to people walking by. As you would imagine, people ignored me all day. And to remind you, I have a college degree. None of it mattered. I couldn’t go a second day at that job.

I found their ads in the Los Angeles Times way back when. One job was in a basement somewhere in the valley. It was another sales job from so long ago that I forgot what it was that I was selling. But I was stuck in a dim basement with a bunch of young people wearing suits and ties, the women in dresses, the type of overzealous people who wore their smiles to bed. And I remember a pyramid diagram on a chalkboard and an acronym that stood for something related to sales and the pitch. No one wants to hear pitches. I’ve never tried to sell a product that sold itself. It was always something no one wanted. I came home that night beat up and tired in North Hollywood and told my parents what I was doing now for a job. I told them the name of the company, and my father got on the phone.

“Don’t go back there,” he said. “There was a story about them on 60 Minutes. It’s a pyramid scheme.”

Oh, great. I was too young and inexperienced to really know how a pyramid scheme worked. But the proof was in the details, as the grand puba of the company had drawn the pyramid on the chalkboard.

So life was giving me a clear and present message: that I was only cut out for the jobs that no one wanted. I didn’t try hard enough in college, so this would be my life’s calling.

Anyway, I finally gave in and found a job that would trap me for the next decade and a half, a job that I’d worked during the summer in my college years: food delivery. It was an easy job when traffic wasn’t so bad in Los Angeles. I delivered in the busiest parts of the city: Hollywood, West Hollywood, Miracle Mile, Century City, Westwood, Brentwood. And I had to commute all the way from North Hollywood at first before I moved to Hollywood in 2004. I stayed with that job because I didn’t want to work for another pyramid scheme or any temp jobs with predators who would harass me. Those were brutal days, sweating in traffic when I delivered food, living from paycheck to paycheck. But it sure beat sales. I quit delivering food close to ten years ago because the company said I had to pick either delivery or office work. I chose the office because I’d driven too many cars into the ground. So then I worked for a corporation and had medical and dental benefits. It was the only reason I stuck around at that job. But the cost was misery, not that any of the other jobs brought me fulfillment.

I remember my old boss from my delivery job, a real jerk who said, “The only people who deliver for us are either freaks or losers.”

I couldn’t figure out which one I was.

Non-fiction

Set My Bed on Fire

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I remember mornings in Los Angeles when bugs took over my bed. It happened three or four times when I lived there. The first time was a smaller issue. My landlord called all the tenants to a meeting in the middle of the day and announced we had a bedbug infestation throughout the entire building. A friend of mine who lived on the third floor wore a bug costume for the occasion. The landlord didn’t find it the least bit funny. She said we had to bag up everything in our rooms, from clothes to books, before the exterminator came. We had to wash all of our clothes in the hottest water and dry them in the hottest temperature.

The bugs hid everywhere, even in the books on my shelf, so I had to wrap all those books up in a trash bag and tie it shut for the exterminator to turn on the heat lamps in each room to kill the bugs.

I never got bitten that first time, but the bugs returned many years later at the same apartment. And that time, they’d infested my mattress, although I never saw them. I itched everywhere and discovered the bites all on my hands and ankles. The itching was most intense in the mornings and went away after I took a hot shower. The bites would scab up and disappear in about a week, only for new ones to appear. I was in denial that they were bed bug bites because of how much of an ordeal it was to prepare for the exterminator and his heat lamp.

So I went to the doctor to have the bites checked out.

“Those are bed bug bites,” he said.

“How do you know?” I asked.

“Because there are three of them together,” he said. He pointed at each one. “Breakfast, lunch, and dinner.”

So I knew I had to tell my landlord. I was getting bitten every night but never saw them. It got to a point where I had to move out after seventeen years in Hollywood. I moved to Culver City, and the bugs followed me there. When I discovered a single bug on my comforter, I knew then that they looked like apple seeds with legs, and they were slow. I could crush one with my fingers, and blood would squirt out. I smelled my fingers and smelled my own blood. The fatter they were, the more blood they’d swallowed.

I told my new landlord, and he sent their exterminator over to spray the apartment. That was in 2020.

I thought the problem was solved, but the bugs came back three years later. And this time it was its worst. No wonder the apartment was available for me. No one wanted to live in a place where there had been an infestation. The landlord had to warn me before I moved in, but I thought it wouldn’t be a problem.

The third time around, I actually saw them crawling throughout my apartment, all over my bed, beneath the mattress, along the boxspring where they’d dug a hole for a place to live and hatch eggs. I saw the bloody eggs and the blood stains all along the mattress. They were biting me every night and giving me nightmares. I would wake up itching all over. I thought I could handle it, in other words live with it without telling the landlord because I feared that I would get in trouble. But I was supposed to report it and I finally did after waiting too long.

The bugs had made it to my couch and my floor. It’s hard to believe that I had such a problem with them. They would crawl onto my hand, and I would quickly crush them. It was something from a horror film. The same exterminator showed up and sprayed the place, but he was cheap and used cheap equipment.

The bedbugs remained and hatched more eggs. I saw them along the floorboards and had to call a better company to spray the place down. They made me do more than what I did in the first apartment. I had to take out all my clothes and wash them, including the comforter, which I brought to a coin-op and spent over twenty dollars to wash and dry. I had to remove all furniture from the walls so the exterminator could spray along the floorboard all across the apartment.

I look back and think what hell to endure. It’s hard to imagine that I lived in such dire conditions that I had to sleep with a can of bedbug spray next to my bed, and that they crawled on my hands and along my legs for so many months.

Non-fiction

The Middle of the Week

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The sun has risen in the distance as I type this slowly, trying not to miss a key. It’s the middle of the week, and I’m hoping for the best to come before the weekend. Now that I have found a path to get there, I can gather the ability to relate to others and their passions. They seem so furtive as if I’d found them out, except I can’t. I’m not that observational.

But anyway, the middle of the week is like a dog that scratches itself. I watch him as he works his ear and shakes his head at what has gotten to him. It’s the dead of summer. I say “dead” between my gums with emphasis. The heat has weakened me. I drink my water like it’s never going to last. Just like the weekend is too short, so is water. And the heat dehydrates me. What else is there to do but stay inside until the summer ends? And that won’t be for at least another several months. September rolls along just like a train that coasts down the track too slowly. And I’ll be stuck in August with a job that breaks my back. My new supervisor told me she wasn’t a micromanager, which isn’t always good. I mean, no one loves a micromanager. Except I think we all need someone who can watch us for what we’re missing.

A lot has happened since the newest development. I’m working on a salary, not hourly. No longer do I have to punch the clock. Now some people may say that that’s a good thing, but that’s them talking. I have to hold myself accountable, except I’m a different person when it comes to my job. I go a steady pace which doesn’t work for everyone, and that can bring a lot of stress to me. I worry about what will happen next.

I see a woman with a dog in the shop who ordered coffee. Her shirt says, “All I need is coffee and my dog”. That’s like me wearing a shirt that says, “All I need is coffee and my laptop” as people see me at this table. She should wear that every time she comes in here with her dog. It’s a K-9 police dog. Yesterday she wore a collared shirt that didn’t say anything. She should buy seven shirts that say the same thing. They can be different colors. I wouldn’t be pedantic about that. I wear shirts with nothing on them, no statements, no letters or numbers, just plain shirts that don’t bring attention to me, or unwanted attention that is.

The dog is panting, and he looks around as the lady chats with the older men at the long round table. I adjust to the sun shining through the window. They pull the shades down in here to keep it away. She left with her coffee now. I have nothing to look at. The shades come down. I take a break.

Non-fiction

Encounters in the Coffeeshop

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I’m sitting in the coffee shop this morning behind a man who blows his nose too often. I know because he sits behind me every morning and talks to his little dog and sings to whatever music is playing in here. I put my headphones on so I can’t be distracted.

The other day, I think it was Sunday, a man whom I’d seen sitting on the sidewalk several times asked to use my smartphone to make a call to his wife. He didn’t look like a husband. And where was his phone? Who would marry a guy without a phone? These thoughts ran through my mind while he was in my face, and I felt pressured enough to where I let him use it, which was foolish of me. I should’ve said no, but he was desperate and forceful.

“You gonna be here?” I asked him.

“Yes, I’ll be right over here.”

So I dialed the number for him and recognized the area code as being local. He took my smartphone and used it near me. I watched him the whole time to make sure he wouldn’t do anything funny with my phone, such as walk away with it or do something malicious that would get me in trouble. I’m never going to loan him or anyone else my phone again. He had the real audacity to ask me in the first place, but I figured this was a friendly town. I’m no longer living in Los Angeles, where I was so used to shady people.

I wrote about cell phones a few weeks ago and how payphones don’t exist anymore. This dude could’ve really used one instead of asking me to use mine. This is the problem with society: no payphones anywhere anymore. So desperate people have to ask to use my phone. It isn’t cool.

He also asked me what time it was. I figure you’re in a bad place if you can’t find out for yourself, and you have to ask someone else. Decades ago, people used to ask other people for the time, and it was a polite gesture to give it to them. But that politeness doesn’t fly anymore. It’s considered harassment now if you ask someone. Like the saying goes, she wouldn’t give you the time of day. Just how many people would go through the trouble of giving the time to an absolute stranger? It’s rare. I wouldn’t have the nerve to ask someone.

I’m pretty good at guessing the time, with a highly-functional internal clock, without needing to look at my watch. I don’t even need a watch, but I wear it to count my steps. It syncs with my phone, so my phone can record all my activity. I’m married to this thing. I can’t live without it when it runs out of battery power. I get anxious. It needs to track what I’m doing all the time or my day is ruined. It has happened on multiple occasions, and I have to wait until the next day to charge it again if I forget my charger, usually on trips such as the last time I went out of town. I stayed in Santa Barbara and realized I’d left my watch charger back in Palm Springs. They didn’t use to be this way. I never used to worry about charging my watch. The batteries would last much longer than a day, which is how long this one lasts.

Non-fiction

Noisy Eaters

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If there’s one thing that I hate, it’s listening to the sounds of other people eating: the slurping, smacking, crunching for several minutes as they eat their soup or sandwiches. Some people are polite about it and eat quietly, while others can’t control the way they eat. They’re totally oblivious to how obnoxious they sound, and I have to sit there and hear it.

I used to work with a guy who ate constantly. He loved Chinese food, so he always picked up Panda Express and brought it to the office. Not only did he make disgusting sounds with his mouth–the slurping, smacking, crunching–but he also held his fork like a Neanderthal, like how kids hold their spoons when they’re eating cereal. I had to tell him over and over again to keep his mouth closed as he was eating.

“Sorry,” he would say and commence to slurp, smack, and crunch his food.

I couldn’t wear headphones either because I had to answer calls from angry people while the eating was entering my other ear. He would also comment about the food: “Mmmm, this food is so good” with a mouthful.

He didn’t have to tell us. The noises he was making were evidence enough about how much he enjoyed it.

The office was much more peaceful when he wasn’t there, but I worked with him on most night shifts, when he and I were alone, and I couldn’t stand it anymore.

But anyway, those are my thoughts on disgusting eaters. They rank right up there with people who call me “Boss” or people who say, “It’s all good,” although I don’t know if those people exist any longer. It has been years since I’ve heard that phrase. It usually comes out of the mouth of someone with a low IQ.

The annoyance factor also depends on what kind of food those savages are eating. Soup eaters are their own breed who sip from their spoons loudly. Tea drinkers are just as guilty. The aforementioned savage, whom I worked with, would eat egg drop soup from another Chinese place, and I had to hear him slurp from his spoon as his head was close to the bowl at his desk. I would hear the big slurp every time he raised his spoon to his mouth.

“Could you please not slurp the soup?” I would say.

“Oh, my bad.”

The guy thought it was funny, so he kept slurping even louder after I asked him politely to stop doing it.

Noisy eaters are as bad as people who scrape their knife and fork against the ceramic plate and make that screeching sound, or people who make screeching sounds in general. I remember having to sit in class where the teachers used the chalkboard. Every time they would rub the chalk against the surface of the board, my teeth would hurt. I know teeth don’t have feelings, but when they did that, I swear a pain would surge through them. I would picture my teeth scraping against the chalkboard. A different pain would arise every time that guy would smack his lips to the food. It was like sloshing waves in the ocean in his mouth. The wet mouth drowning the orange chicken, which is getting smaller and smaller from his saliva. Yuck. I could picture it all while he was eating.

I don’t work with him anymore, not since the beginning of COVID when we had to leave the office. Now I work from home, away from noisy eaters. But who knows? Maybe I’m one of them, and I’m not aware of it, just like other noisy eaters aren’t aware of how annoying they are either. But if I am, I would love for someone to tell me so I can correct my disorder. I really do think it’s a disorder that should be documented in a medical book somewhere. So where is that guy now? Is he annoying other people with the sounds coming out of his mouth or was it just me?

Non-fiction

Worry

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We’ve all been there. You can’t get your mind off something that’s been troubling you for days, weeks, even months. The worry machine keeps running at night in bed, where your worst fears come to life. The bed is a torture chamber of thoughts, evil thoughts that control you, and you can’t get out of it no matter how hard you try to will away the worry.

Instead of fighting it, it would be better if you accepted it and rode the worry. For example, you worry about your job and whether you’re doing it well enough, and you worry that you’ll lose your job for several reasons. Maybe in actuality you hate your job and you’re trying to get out of it, so you begin making mistakes at work so they can terminate you and give you severance pay. Rather than fighting that thought, admit to yourself that you’re trying to get out. You hate your job so much. There. The worry lessens. You’ve been honest with yourself. You’re still losing sleep though. It’s a mental struggle for what’s right.

Anyway, it’s Sunday, and I have all the free time in the world. What should I do besides worry about things I can’t control? Now when I go for walks, the worry follows me for five miles before I get back home. The only time I’m not worrying is when I’m eating a cheeseburger, a big greasy cheeseburger with onions, tomatoes, pickles, mayo, and a sesame seed bun. It takes fewer than five minutes to eat one, and after I’ve digested it, the worry comes back to life. The cheeseburger was just a brief departure from that worry. I also lose my worry when I’m eating pizza, but I can’t eat those things every day or else I’ll gain weight, and I don’t want that either. I just eat those things once a week on a cheat day.

If you don’t worry, you’ll lose control. That’s what you tell yourself, although people say it’s a fallacy, that worry really has no function. Then why does it exist? What’s the purpose of worry when people tell you that? You know fear is a real thing. If there’s an imminent threat, it’s more than natural to fear it. That’s human instinct. And worry is a component of fear. Worry is just fear looping in your head like a broken record. It drives you insane. You wish you had an answer against worry, but it’s always there. If you’re not worried about something, you’ll worry about something else. You constantly have to have something to worry about. Your mind tells you that you have to be alert to any possible danger. It torments me as I stare out the window at a fern and an empty city bench with nothing on my mind but worry.

I want to take a train to Portland and never come back, but the worry will always be there no matter where I am. So Portland isn’t a viable escape. I suppose the only way to stop the worry is to accept it. I could be wrong. People tell me to quit worrying, which is easier said than done. I grew up as a worrywart and stayed that way through adulthood. And here I am, at my age, with worry controlling what I think and feel. I wish there was an answer to this all. Otherwise I would be better off. I can’t share what I worry about. It’s private. Just know that the worry is there and as persistent as always.

I’ve tried mindfulness techniques and breath control, but worry breaks through the thin fabric. When the actual threat is resolved, of course the fear and worry dissipate from my nervous system, only for a new worry to come about. Worry is an endless radio station that Anne Lamott calls KFKD or K-Fucked. I remember reading her book, Bird by Bird, where she explains that the mind races and never shuts off. All a writer wants is mental silence, which is not easy to come by. You just stare into space and hope that the worry fades. It stays in your mind permanently like ink and overrides the capacity a writer needs to compose. I wish I had the answer to this, but all I can do is help the reader relate to what’s being written here.

Non-fiction

Space Plumbing

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It’s Saturday. Oh, what a Saturday. I played tennis with the ball machine and my mother after a rough week of work, after they laid off six people, and I remain like it’s musical chairs or something. I’ve worked for them for twenty years but not really. The company was sold to another company. So in reality, I worked for two companies, and the newer company is like the Death Star in Star Wars.

By the way, I’ve been thinking a lot about spaceships in movies or TV shows, even in books. Don’t they have a bathroom? And if they do, wouldn’t they suffer from bad plumbing, such as the toilet overflowing? I’m sure at some point Darth Vader has to take a piss, or the other form of relief that I really can’t write on here because there’s a picture of a delicate flower up above. Anyway, there has to be a plumber onboard the Death Star or the other spaceship in Star Wars that’s shaped like a slice of pizza called the Executor Super Star Destroyer, which sounds like a name an eight-year-old made up. Might as well call it the Space Destroyer Thingy. But yes, a plumber must be onboard. But if he isn’t, he must be nearby, perhaps on another spaceship, waiting for a job because he’s most likely an independent contractor who must submit a 1099 to whoever. I don’t think the IRS is in space, but I wouldn’t put it past them. And I would think if he couldn’t fix the plumbing in the Death Star, then Darth would’ve given him the Jedi mind chokehold to his death. Goodbye, Mr. Plumber.

I’m sure the Death Star has had to go through renovations multiple times, but they don’t show that in the Star Wars movies. We just assume that the construction workers, who live off of Big Gulps from 7-11, worked on building this massive spaceship that hangs in space like a planet. That or they built it on the closest habitable planet before the Death Star took off to outer space somehow. I can’t picture that large moon-shaped object fitting on another planet and having rocket fuel or the proper aerodynamics to take off. Not to spoil it for anyone who hasn’t seen it, but in Return of the Jedi the Death Star is a little over half there because it blew up. I forgot what happened. It has been decades since I’ve watched those movies. But parts of it are gone from what I can remember. The good Jedis, in their spaceplanes called the Jedi starfighters, shot lasers at the Death Star to make it explode. And the Death Star can shoot lasers of its own. Why would a behemoth space station such as that shoot little lasers at the spaceplanes? You would think it would shoot space cannonballs from a space cannon, and they detonate when they make contact with one of those starfighters or anything really.

There could be other internal problems with the Death Star besides the plumbing. What happens when the power goes out? Is there an electrician nearby who can fix it? And what about the ginormous bill for electricity or water when Darth has to take a shower? Who’s paying for it? The emperor? And how difficult is it for Darth or Anakin to remove his armor before washing himself? He needs the helmet with the mask to breathe, so Darth must take showers with the helmet on. What a ridiculous visual.

These questions run through my mind as I’m watching any space movie or television show which takes place in another galaxy. For instance, Star Trek. There are so many episodes and movies, and I never once saw Captain Kirk taking a bathroom break. I assume there’s a toilet and shower in the USS Enterprise. They spend way too much time in the control room. These are just random thoughts on a lazy Saturday, and I wish I had these thoughts more often.

Non-fiction

Malls

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My sanctuary from home, when I was just a young buck, was the shopping mall in the eighties and nineties in the small town that I lived in. From what I can tell, they’re hardly around anymore. Where do kids wander to these days to escape? Where can they get away from their families when they’ve had enough of them? It was where I went with my friends through junior high and high school. We would spend a good hour at the record store, even when they didn’t sell records. They sold tapes and compact discs. I would usually buy a cassette for ten dollars before sales tax.

Then we would eat in the food court. The food court had a Taco Bell, a Sbarro, a Hot Dog On a Stick, a deli, and a restaurant that sold cheesesteaks. I usually ate at Taco Bell with my friend.

We would venture to a gag store with dirty gifts and spend about an hour in there, making fun of the items they sold.

The shopping mall progressed as we got older, with more restaurants to fit in there. I remember Red Robin sold hamburgers of all types, and a restaurant called Jolly Roger served old people. I imagine they served a lot of soup.

Anyway, we would spend hours in the mall, just walking around, looking for somewhere to kill time before we had to trek back home on the city bus that picked us up out front.

I can’t forget the Cinnabon across from JC Penney. I always felt like a huge glutton after eating a large cinnamon roll with icing on top of it, so I barely ate there.

Eventually they took away one of the music stores and replaced it with a video store where I could rent VHS tapes and DVDs. I never thought Netflix would arrive. It was long before it became a streaming service, and I definitely didn’t think it would come to that.

There was a movie theater right outside of the mall that my friend and I used to drive to at midnight when we were adults to watch movies on the first night when they came out. Or we would take the city bus when we were teenagers when the sun was out to watch cheap matinees. We did that trick where we would buy a ticket for a PG film but sneak into an R-rated theater when the staff wasn’t looking. That was always fun.

The bus stop was always a sketchy place for kids to hang out. One time, my friend had bought baseball cards, and we were looking at them in front of a lady who kept shifting her weight left and right on her hands, sitting on the bus bench. “My husband has every baseball card in the world,” she said. She looked as if she lived there. It was impossible to believe her.

I don’t know what I would’ve done with myself if the mall never existed–probably play basketball or baseball with other kids before dinner. But we preferred to go shopping and eat out, my friend and I. Malls were their own amusement parks in a way, without expensive admission tickets and huge rollercoasters, just the shopping aspect with stuff that wasn’t overpriced. Yeah, my friend and I would get lost in the mall.

There was one time when an adult followed us around. We couldn’t find a mall cop anywhere to help us. The weird man followed us into the music store and stared at us with his hand on his crotch. We figured there was something mentally wrong with him. He followed us to other shops, I can’t remember which ones, but somehow he disappeared as if he was never there. My friend couldn’t figure it out and neither could I, that he’d suddenly vanished. I never told my mother. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have let me go to the mall without being supervised, and I couldn’t let that happen. The mall was the one place to get away from her.