You have the right to remain in the car like a scared little girl

It's L.A. Money talks. And tonight it said I get to ride along with the L.A.P.D. on the night shift in South Los Angeles.

My kid's school has an annual fundraising auction. Every year, we spend a perfectly good Saturday night looking at baskets of shampoo and body washes, pictures of cabins in Mammoth, inflatable backyard movie screens and other items we can silently bid on. Usually there's not much I'm interested in.

Although don't get me wrong - I do love a nice body wash.

But this year, I saw this little item and for several reasons I knew I had to have it.

One is I grew up on the mean streets of West Los Angeles (north of Wilshire). The city is my beat (see what I did there?). Also, I love watching COPS. Every episode there's a drunk guy in a beer-stained, white tank top tripping over his tongue trying to explain to the incredibly patient officer why he's not the guy they're after.

Comedy at its finest.

I've always had tremendous respect and admiration for the job the police do. Sure, we all hear about the bad ones. But every day, in cities all over the country they're putting their lives on the line to protect us.

Over the years I've had a few occasions to call the police in our city in the middle of the night when we thought someone was on our property. They were here in less than 30 seconds. When it turned out to be nothing, I apologized for wasting their time, saying they probably had real crimes to solve. They insisted they'd rather I call and have it turn out to be nothing than not call and actually have some criminal to deal with.

While I'm sitting at my desk trying to think of some clever little tagline for a car or fast food company, they're on the streets wondering if the jacked up guy they're stopping for speeding is going to pull out a gun and make it their last day on the job. And on earth.

I think if I ever told a cop about how rough I thought my day was they'd double over laughing.

Besides being a fan of the police, I'm also a fan of high speed chases. If I catch one on the news, or if one of my friends calls me and tells me there's one on, I drop everything and sit glued to the television until it's over. Every time I ask the same question: how does this guy think it's going to end? Does he think the cops and helicopters will just get tired and let him go? My favorite part, besides when they stop and come out with their hands up, is when the cop car does that maneuver where they tap the bumper and the suspect's car goes spinning out of control. Very entertaining.

I'm sure my ride-along will be extremely interesting. And I'm sure since it's in one of the tougher parts of L.A. I'll see a few things I wouldn't normally get exposed to.

Right now I'm hoping we're in hot pursuit in a high speed chase.

But my guess is when I'm sitting in the police car, I'll be hoping for an uneventful night where we both return safely and I have a great story to tell my kids.

Blackhawk down

Sometimes you read a story that hits so hard the sadness is more than you can bear.

That's what happened to me today when I read about Wes Leonard.

Wes was a 16-year old high school student and star athlete at Fennville High in Michigan. He'd just scored the winning basket at a championship game, putting his team - the Fennville Blackhawks - at an undefeated 20 - 0 for the season.

Seconds after the winning shot and the ensuing celebration, the crowd watched in horror as Wes collapsed on the court and died. He'd gone into cardiac arrest from an enlarged heart, had a massive heart attack and was likely gone before he hit the floor.

I don't know any other way to see this except through the eyes of his parents. I have a son. I know how anxious I feel when he's not home. I can't even comprehend him never coming home again.

I never want to.

Anxiety is the by-product of having kids that they don't tell you about. It's the one you don't read about in "What To Expect When You're Expecting", or Dr. Spock.

It's not in the small print.

We want our kids to be safe in the world, and realize that for the most part they are. But there's always a soundtrack, a white noise playing in the background of your thoughts that something horrible will happen or is happening to them when they're out of your sight.

Of course, we all have to live with a certain amount of denial or we could never get through the day. We'd never be able to cross a street for fear of getting hit by a car, or plug in a toaster for fear of being electrocuted. We choose to ignore the noise because it's just a silly thought. And it'll never happen.

Until it does.

I used to enjoy movies like Ransom or Without A Trace. Now I can't even watch them, because when I do all I think about is how my kids could disappear that fast.

From all accounts, Wes Leonard was a great kid on and off the court. My heart goes out to his friends and family, but most of all his parents.

Tonight I'll be saying a prayer for all of them. While his life was cut tragically short, his memory will live on forever in the hearts of everyone who knew him.

And every parent who didn't.

Short story

Our house, like most homes, has one thing in common with Disneyland: It’ll never be finished. There’s always something to spend money on.

But for some strange reason I'm sure has nothing to do with the fact I live a freelance life instead of having a real job, the funds aren’t always there. Even though the opportunities to spend them are.

So by necessity we’ve always taken a triage approach to the house. Stop the bleeding first.

Oh yeah, and don’t let a short in a plug burn the house down.

If you follow this blog (and really, shouldn’t you have better things to do with your time?), you’ll remember my joy about our new garbage disposal.

That came to a screeching halt over the weekend when my wife informed me it’d stopped working. Knowing the shape the power source lurking under the sink was in, I was pretty sure it wasn't the disposal's fault.

As you can see, the plug under the sink is really the monster under the bed you don't want to think about. At least I didn't, until the plumber that installed the disposal came back two days later to install filters for the ice-maker, and bumped the outlet box which was hanging by a thread. The (live)wires barely holding it became disconnected, and power was lost.

By the way, just FYI, you're supposed to change those ice-maker filters every six months. Not every three years. Turns out "black ice" is actually a driving term.

Anyway, we all have our own special set of skills. For example, if you need someone to write about fixing things in the house, I'm your guy. But if you need someone to actually fix them, not so much.

Because of my complete lack of skill (interest?) in repairing things around the house, I have a go-to list of people who are my home support system. So I went to it. I called our electrician, who repaired the outlet in about 20 minutes. I thought it would be a much bigger operation, but then I always think that. I was fully expecting he'd be ripping out drywall, rerouting conduits and waiting for inspectors.

None of that happened.

Instead he stripped the wires, replaced the outlet and secured the square box to the round hole in an almost upright position (coincidentally the same one I'm in most of the day).

Now when we throw the switch, the disposal happily grinds away. And once again I'm free not to think about the seamy underbelly of the kitchen sink.

Until six months from now when it's time to change the ice-maker filters again.

 

Many happy returns

Where does the time go?

Seems like only yesterday I was asking my accountant to take enough deductions on my tax returns to walk me right up to the jailhouse door, but not actually take me inside.

Every year I promise myself I'll be better at keeping records, receipts and my story straight when it comes to tax deductions. And every year, I just throw everything in an extremely well organized file, then pull it all together about a week before I go see my tax guy.

I suppose by that measure I'm ahead of the game, since I'm already thinking about it and I'm not having my taxes done until the end of March.

Lots of well-meaning friends (aren't they all?) have told me to use Quicken or Excel to keep track of my expenses. Then when this time of year rears its ugly head, I could just press a key and print out everything all neatly categorized. The problem is to do that would require the discipline of inputting all the information on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.

That's just crazy talk.

Why do that when I can have a perfectly good time procrastinating until the last minute.

It's both a blessing and a curse that because I'm on the creative side in advertising, I can write off a great many things the average taxpayer can't. It just makes record-keeping that much more complex.

And by complex I mean work for me.

It's a good thing this blog doesn't make any money or I'd have to write it off.

Something I think a lot of people are doing already.

"Sometimes life is gonna hit you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith."

It just seemed like a good time to repost this.

Money down the drain. (Or what a glass hole).

Garbage disposals are great for grinding up leftover food off dirty dishes, eggshells, broccoli the kids don't eat, orange peels, things like that.

Glass? Not so much.

Two nights ago, while hand-washing a large, expensive, Pyrex glass storage dish in soapy water, my wife lost her grip on it and it shattered into a bazillion pieces in the sink.

I was in the next room when I heard it shatter, and immediately went running into the kitchen screaming the one question any concerned husband would ask, "Did the dog get hurt?"

Unfortunately, it broke over the side of the sink with the disposal, and a ton of glass went in.

I know what you're thinking: hand-washing? Downright primitive, right? What's next? Pounding laundry on rocks? You're preaching to the choir.

Next thing you know we'll get rid of our microwave and start cooking hot dogs in a toaster oven.

Oh, wait, we did that. Crap, I thought I dreamt it.

Anyway, after I cleaned all the shards of glass out of the sink, I decided reaching into a disposal full of broken glass to get the pieces out might not be the best idea. I also thought grinding it up and washing the glass down the drain probably wasn't much better.

But with Plan B I got to keep my fingers. So I turned on the disposal.

Besides Gilbert Gottfried and Fergie there aren't a lot of things that sound like glass being ground up by a garbage disposal. It jammed up almost instantly, and I knew we'd have to get a new one.

So today, Raphael the plumber was here to install the new Insinkerator. I would've done it myself, but as I've said before the only tool I know how to use is the Yellow Pages.

Raphael has been here before. When the faucet on our bathtub sounded like we were going to need a crucifix and Father Karras to fix it, Raphael did his magic - not with an entire new pipe and stem like we thought, but with a 99 cent washer.

An honest plumber. A man of integrity. There's a lot of love for Raphael in our house.

Our new glass-free Insinkerator is awesome. More compact than its predecessor, we now have room to lose old sponges and store more almost-empty cans of Comet under the sink. It's also considerably quieter, and not just because it's not grinding glass.

So, what can we take away from all this?

Don't hand wash the dishes. Nothing good comes from it. Ever.

There are honest plumbers in the world. Well, at least one.

And finally, don't ever trade in the microwave on a toaster oven. Making hot dogs is okay, but you won't have popcorn nearly as often as you used to.

Borders line sadness

This isn't the Borders bookstore near me. But it may as well be.

The company has filed bankruptcy, and as part of the restructuring is closing 200 of 659 stores nationwide. Including all the ones in my beachside city.

Now I'm the first to admit I'm completely old school about things like books and newspapers. And by old school, I mean I still enjoy reading them. That's the reason this makes me very sad.

I went in to my Borders today, the first day of its going out of business sale, and the line of about 150 people snaked throughout the store. The place was jammed in a way that ironically it never was when it was doing fine.

People were crashing into each other, grabbing everything they could just to save 20 to 50% off books they probably wouldn't have read if the store were not in this situation. They'll be back when the mark downs go to 50 to 75%, then 75 to 90% once inventory dwindles to nothing in the coming days.

I know many people think this is payback for them - along with Barnes & Noble - for putting so many mom and pop bookstores out of business. And it's easy to understand that sentiment. But somewhere along the way, the same public supporting that theory decided to stop supporting mom and pop, and instead shop where they'd get 20 to 40% off everyday hardcover prices. So the argument rings a bit hollow.

Besides, Costco and Target have discounted books almost from the beginning. And before Borders and Barnes & Noble there was Crown Books ("If you paid full price, you didn't buy it at Crown!"). Book discounting isn't new.

But there's a larger sadness for me, and it didn't just start with Borders closing. It started with eReaders.

I can't imagine giving up the tangible, visceral experience of holding a book in my hands while reading it. The texture of the binding, the smell of the print, the sound of the spine cracking when it's first opened. To me it's a deeper, richer and more satisfying experience than reading on a Kindle or iPad (as bitchin' as the iPad is). And since I've read books one at a time my whole life, I've never seen the need to carry a thousand of them with me wherever I go.

Even though sometimes I read the L.A. Times online, for the most part I'm also set in my ways with newspapers.

In one of my versions of heaven - not the one where Halle Berry stops pretending she doesn't know I'm alive, the other one - there's a coffee shop and the Sunday paper fresh off the presses waiting for me. I know some news has happened since the paper was delivered, but not enough to make it not worth spending time with.

If I want up to the minute, I know where to find it.

It'd be an ironic twist that as these giant bookstores begin disappearing, and people like me still want published, physical books, a resurgence of mom and pop stores suddenly start springing up to carry them.

Hopefully it won't be an either/or situation, and there'll be room for brick and mortar as well as digital bookstores to coexist.

We'll see what the next chapter holds.