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1. Beer.
   
   I drank a lot of beer in my early adulthood. At first it was Corona, which was cheap and at the time not bad. A good hot-weather beer. In college we'd guzzle it by the case. Later on, all us hip kids started drinking Rolling Rock. It's not actually very good, but it seemed cool at the time because it was new out West and wasn't one of those normal beers like Mom & Dad had. Near the end of my twenties I became a beer snob and drank microbrews and imports and knew too much about beer. By this time I was drinking less and had more money so that was okay. I don't drink very much at all any more. I see the kids drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon in a self-consciously slumming hipster way and think "right! we did that with Rolling Rock". I think beer culture is in a loop in this country along with pop culture. Lately I drink Fat Tire and Wittekerke and the Unibroue stuff, but none of it in excess. I still like beer.
   
   
2. Cockroaches.
   
   I never saw cockroaches until I moved to Los Angeles. I have always been messy, and as my life drifted out of control after college the messiness became annoying, then disturbing, then pathological, and finally just mind-blowingly disgusting. I got real familiar with cockroaches. I remember leaving the house to go to work and shaking one out of my pants leg, or lying awake and night and listening to them moving around the place. Since my downward spiral took me to bad neighborhoods, I lived in apartment buildings that were owned by roaches. There's a particular smell in a building that's at war with these creatures. It's part insecticide, part boric acid, and partly the scent of the insects themselves. It's a triggering smell for me, both nauseating and depressing.
   
   
3. Coffee.
   
   The first time I recall having coffee was in Venice, Italy. I was seven years old and spending a summer there with my parents. Sometimes in the evenings after dinner we'd go to the Piazza San Marco and sit for a while at one of the famous cafés there. It was a carnival at night, with people selling mechanical flying doves and glowing neon-like tiaras and candy and weird little toys. I would get either a sundae of some kind (oh God Italian ice cream) or granita. You may have had a tasty iced coffee beverage here called granita. The real Italian stuff is basically crushed ice, sugar, and espresso frozen together just so, with lots of smashing the ice up and letting it refreeze repeatedly. The result is frozen pleasure. My small body took the caffeine and sugar and rocketed me to the moon. I was hooked.
   
   I had coffee of various kinds a lot when we were living in Europe, because kids have it earlier there. Café au lait in a bowl in the morning, etc. Back in the States I didn't have coffee much through the rest of my childhood. When I arrived at UCLA, though, the second phase began. The Kerckhoff Coffee House there served double cappuccinos for $0.85. I had between 6 and 10 of those a day for four years. By the time I left college I was a hobbled wreck of a man with a $10/day espresso habit.
   
   When I make my coffee in the morning (which by the way is now half caf), I grind the beans fresh. When they're ground just right I take the container and pour it into the filter cone. If I get a good breath of the fresh ground coffee something about it affects me poorly and I have to cough, every time. Then I take another big sniff of it because it smells so damned good.

Char siu YAO!!!

The owner of a pretty decent dim sum and noodle joint here apparently flipped out and shot at some beach partiers. Way to handle your noise complaint, Mr. O'Neill. I wonder what working for him at Ho Sum Bistro is like?

George Bush doesn't like midgets.

1. The people who got these tattoos will really Never Forget.
   
   
2. Rice rocket culture + whiteboy rap through a U.K. filter = my subaru. (not work safe)
   
   
3. Orange County's own local terrorist dude's story in his own words.
   
   
4. Happy Patriot Day. Pass the Let's Rolls, genericus!

We were just talking the other day about how unsexy food sex is...

Oh those patio nights in those patio hills?

Got stuck with Flip-Top Peg-Leg tonight on the patio. He came and sat at my table and talked at me about his home electronics. Listening to a known Peeping Tom/psycho girlwatcher go on and on about his video setup makes me want to sleep in an autoclave tonight. Also, boring. Very, very boring. I gave up on getting rid of him and concentrated on admiring his toupée, which is a perfectly oiled 1963 pompadour in steel grey.

He also showed me what high-quality video you can get on his camphone. OH CHRIST I did not want to know that.

Movie Guy Dan showed up later and we traded punk rock stories. I guess he booked Club Fetish around the time I was working for the Reader. I must have met him back then. I told him this story: The other day I was entering the supermarket and a guy coming out had a Hell Comes To Your House II T-shirt. I almost physically stopped him. "What the hell is that shirt? That was a GREAT album!" He smiled delightedly and told me there were only 75 of the shirts ever made, and that his friends who had them all kept them in collections, but he liked to wear his. We traded a couple of stories and shook hands warmly.