Hey what’s up.

Friday! It is definitely a popular day for people and restaurants, one of which specifically thanks (god) for IT. I certainly enjoyed mine today, and I work all day tomorrow. How am I emboldened to feel free on the day before my abject employment??

I spent the morning writing. Then ole Bradford said he wanted to go check a pool in Pasadena, it’s a barge, Pat and Olen are coming too. TIGHT CRUE. We pile in a car and find our way to this joint. We skate. We leave. In a nod to gender stereotypes, Brad takes a wrong turn and when I say we should have gone the other way, the whole car of dudes disagrees with me and when it’s discovered I was right NO ONE comes forth and kisses my ring. Chivalry is dead.

I got home, ate a carton of cherries on my couch in a pool of my own filth, and then showered to go to the Maddy wrap party. I met Kristina there. We each drank a margarita and agreed that was a good choice. But we were starving! So we went to one of our favorite eateries, Zankou Chicken. There was one less than a mile away, in East Hollywood. Instead of going farther afield to a familiar rendition of this popular song, we went to this close one.

WELL. No one is regulating the brand at this joint. The lighting was like if you were in a dentist’s chair that was put inside a copy machine. Shadow was obliterated. I could detect Kristina’s eyes and hair and navy blue shirt but the rest disappeared into the glare. I think there is more mood lighting in prison. We got our food and it was in large styrofoam containers, which is very common in Los Angeles, but not at other locations of this Armenian food dispensary. Every element of the food we got was a garbage version of its proper incarnation. Soggy pickled veggies, gnarly rice (usually it is fluffy basmati but this was yellow-ish box rice. Someone is skimming off the top here and buying jewel-encrusted iphone cases or whatever, Lamborghinis, something.) The security guard at the door…kept something at bay? Homeless people? I don’t know. A pack of feral adult men who live in a cave with foil over the windows and eat cases of squeeze cheese for breakfast came in to dine. They were pasty in a way I didn’t think was possible among whites anymore. They all wore flip flops/house shoes and tear-away off-brand gym pants (I truly don’t know what those are called but whatever the pants are that if you cut them off they would be basketball shorts, billowing and stupid). They made noises and their movements were just controlled enough for me to think they weren’t meth heads (their choice to eat contradicted that too), but they still felt jangly and erratic. They arrived in a black Prius.

After dinner we had to agree not to talk about it for a full day until the food was completely digested because we knew if we talked about it we would both ralph so violently that new problems would open up like esophageal burning and pronounced malaise. We are all a sum of our choices.