 17 april 2000 i'm so stoopid ----- ------- -----
Rain. It sounds like endless urination on back-alley pavement.
The rainy season was supposed to be over. No more precipitation until October, at least, I thought. I thought wrong.
Good thing I didn't wash my car.
Dragged myself out of bed at 8 this morning, muttered the usual "Oh, Fuck" to myself (some things will never change) and prepared for what I thought would be my first full day on the new job. It wasn't to be.
The morning was filled with meetings all over Santa Monica, and I sat, smiling, looking interested as the same points were repeated by different people who like the sound of their own voices so much they'll risk looking like idiots just to hear it. Around lunch my new boss and I went over to the MacMall store to price out a G4 for me. Mailed my taxes, and headed back to the office. Plugged in the iBook and got no internet connection. Oh yeah, that's right, the big news of the morning was that GTE lost one of their OC3s and a lot of service was suspended on the Westside. Great. The thought of going home and using my cable modem popped through my head, but that was disconnected sometime on Saturday night, while I was busy getting drunk at that waste-of-a-time luau party...
And I was _so_ hungover yesterday. And it wasn't even one of those hangovers where you can just puke and be over with it. No, I had to deal with incessant nausea and an all-day whopper of a headache. It should teach me never to mix so many different liqours together, but I'll probably never learn. I'm just happy it only happens about once-a-year these days.
The worst part was that the CEO of our new company called me at 9am yesterday morning to finalize the details of my new salary and bonus schedule. Needless to say, I wasn't in the best of negotiating moods. I wondered if I had mentioned the party to him, and if he purposely called at that time just to catch me hungover. Nah, he doesn't know me that well yet. I think I did ok, though. Nice salary, much better than I had, though hardly commensurate with my new 'executive' position ... yet. It'll pay the rent, though.
Today, I called MediaOne from the office and paid my cable modem bill, and came home to finish up the workday. But the service isn't turned back on yet (the modem is blinking rather epilectically at the moment), which makes life rather difficult. I haven't been online since Saturday afternoon, and this little blueberry computer seems incredibly impotent in absence of internet access.
(Wish I could say the same about myself -- I seem to get hornier by the hour -- and now I'm wondering why I felt compelled to write that, as if anyone reading this is going to help me sort the whole thing out. How fucking sick is that? And no, I take all that back. I do _not_ wish I was impotent. Um ... ok, back to our irregularly scheduled whatever...)
It's a truly dreary day. A rainy monday. Everybody in the city has two reasons to be pissed off, since precipitation is the Achilles Heel of the City of Angels. It turns tinseltown into a sogging wet mass of pissed-off people, already in a monday blue (j - still don't know about that as a song title, sticking with amababa for now), waking to clouds, and now soaking and unumbrella'd, because it never rains in LA after March. Add to that the comparative beauty of this past weekend's weather, and the whole day seems that much worse.
8 hours later...
There are moments of incredible stupidity in life that you just wish you can keep to yourself, because the associated embarassment and "if only I had ..."-induced headbanging is too much to handle. It's even worse when such a moment is accompanied by a great deal of physical and financial pain, as it was tonight.
I was returning home from band practice (a _really_ good band practice, I might add) and I pulled into the carport. Just as I drove up, a bird decided to drop a turd on my windshield. Now, I've heard that's supposed to be good luck...
I sat in the carport for a while, working the wipers and washer fluid to get the offending matter off before it dried and got all crusty. What I didn't realize was that this whole process was upsetting my entire subconscious "getting home and parking the car" routine.
Engine off, get out of the car, close door, set alarm ... it hit me halfway to the back door that I had forgotten a crucial step: set the parking brake.
I didn't know our carport had a slope to it until tonight, when something seemed "off" and I looked over my shoulder and saw my car rolling ever-so-slowly backwards out of its spot.
Without thinking (and had I stopped to think, this whole evening might have turned out differently) I hit the alarm button and ran to the driver-side door (first mistake) in a desparate attempt to stop the car from rolling (second mistake). I opened the door and reached in for the brake just as I remembered the giant column that supports my bedroom, perched rather precariously above the carport. Next thing I know I'm being pinned between the door and the column. In a split second I chose my life over my car and somehow oozed out of the quickly-closing vise, diving for safety on the other side of the carport.
The giant "crunch" I heard behind me wasn't reassuring at all.
It took me a good thirty seconds to extricate the door from the pole, and another minute to get the bent-backwards door back to a normal position. Thankfully, the door closed and the damage, while quite extensive, is mostly cosmetic. The door doesn't line up with the front fender anymore, the faux-leather on the inside armrest is torn and covered with stucco powder, and the door feels very strange when I close it. But the power windows and side-view mirrors still work (yay) and I'm feeling quite lucky to be alive, albeit with a bruised upper rib or two from the initial crush -- I just hope it doesn't affect my singing.
Looking back, I figure the worst that could have happened is that I would have gotten my ribcage crushed between the door and the column, maybe a punctured lung, and if entropy really wanted to fuck with me, the column could have buckled as well, sending my entire bedroom and its contents crashing down on me. Well, at least it would have saved me the trouble of boxing up all of my belongings and carrying them down the stairs when I move to Malibu...
Frankly, I just feel incredibly stupid.
Good thing I didn't wash my car.
*sigh*
Anybody out there reading? If so, answer me a question. Any way in hell my car insurance would cover something like this? I didn't see an "imbecile's clause" on my policy, so I figured I'd ask. Email addy's below...
(almost) one year ago: under the sun: The sun disappeared, and the clouds began their own lightshow in the star's absence. "Sleepwalk" gave way to "Riders on the Storm," and Jim Morrison eased us back to everyday.
two years ago: pressure off: I'm gonna take myself out to the living room couch, throw in a laserdisc, suck on an ice pop, and chill. Tonight I'll enjoy my own company for a change.
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