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If aliens could trigger an eclipse with a wearable device back in the 40’s, surely the technology is not out of reach for us? BTW, Lynda Carter was fire in that cape.

Define it as the perception of sound without a corresponding external source, and I’ve had it all my life, that noise I’d just assumed was from the pressure exerted upon my skull I could hear in the silence, caused either by the tides within or the radiation that’s only become more pervasive since the Zenith in the other room. But last week I woke and it was louder, I couldn’t yawn it away, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t afraid the cracks were finally starting to show… What am I saying, they’ve been here all along, it’s the damn burst I should be expecting. The soundtrack I had always imagined to be from Curb Your Enthusiasm (or Joker) was instead replaced by the low hum of machinery in the background at a deserted facility, designed by David Lynch. It’s let up somewhat, I’ve noticed it dissipates almost entirely after exercise or orgasm, or I’ve grown to accept its symphony with the computer fan, cracked skylight, WiFi and what I presume are the reverberations of my crumbling reality.

Somehow it was this incomplete response to an interview about Larry David that ingratiated myself as a cast member on his show and score a scene at the end of the episode where everyone looks to me for a line I can’t remember. Being part of the entourage meant hanging out in a mansion full of assistants and extras, and one of the Korean-speaking kids came to ask me if I knew Japanese and could translate for a new arrival, a colorfully-clad pretty young woman. Our awkward conversation went nowhere and next thing I knew I was escorting a Black guest celebrity back home; his flaky girlfriend was ahead on the street and expected us to wait on her, though I turned to him and said we didn’t even have a car to pick her up, what was she thinking, and he understood. When I did obtain one it was a fast and sporty but I took a turn onto long stretch of road without an off-ramp to come back for my passengers. They became a White couple upon reuniting with them and were interested in a thrill-ride where a giant tree trunk laid above a thousand-foot chasm and another was attached to it perpendicularly, released when a hammer struck the top like a nail and let swing in an 90° arc below.

Not so much the fear of seeing rocks, feeling them, petting them nor even being pelted or crushed by them, but walking across them, as we saw this morning: I was part of a team that seemed to consist of co-workers from both current and previous jobs wrapping up an onsite client visit to a warehouse. The manager there offered me one of their uniforms for me to wear next time, so I waited for him to fetch it for me while my party left for the car, and surprisingly through all the commotion at the end of day (as well as typical disappointment from my dreams), he came back with a new green/navy reversible down vest. It was cold outside and I put it on over my own coat, which was probably the hooded Uniqlo one I’ve been wearing around the house this month. My wallet and phone were in my back pockets, too, also unexpected since I usually lose them. The parking lot was way off in the distance from the building exit, past a ravine-like field which had to be crossed by rock formations along the edges. People were still coming and going, and to avoid one oncoming fellow I opted for a lower path to his left that I soon realized wasn’t going to get me to the other side as all the jagged boulders ran out and sank into the dark pool below. I leaped to an abutment to the side but it wasn’t stable enough to support my weight, gave way like rock shouldn’t and I had to grab hold of one flimsy attachment after another. Onlookers gasped while I relied on my pull-up strength to stay above water, but as I inevitably felt my butt submerge—no wonder I was left with my things—the lesson of this short segment dawned upon me, always to take the high road.

After the bathroom break, I was driving the XTerra again and exited off a freeway intersection into an elongated entrance to one of our gated communities. (Last I swear I saw Sylvilagus was along this path to CPE on an early lockdown run before the Asics mask, but surely my two signature bandanas was a giveaway…?) I asked John Chen if he wanted to be picked up, but he wasn’t interested, no surprise.

Update: Rained like it does here once a year today and during whatever is the opposite of sleight of hand that happens getting into the car (namely, the transfer of the contents of my back pockets to my front rather than sit on them, hindered by anything I’m already carrying, in this case a wet umbrella mid-collapse), my wallet fell into a puddle as premonitioned earlier. I picked it up out of the water quickly enough that the last of the paper inside would be unscathed, maybe because I knew I was better off it dropping than my phone, there was no pause for misery. It was almost comical, too, the first time ever in the drought-stricken Southland when I remember driving through Texas torrents that made the windshield look like aquarium glass, like the surfeit of silly storylines on this season of Curb that required suspension of disbelief in our annual precipitation.

“I can’t sit in traffic. I’m—I’m too smart. I’m not like these people. You have to have done something stupid to be in traffic. I don’t belong here.” With every season and three or four years that passes, the laughs come fewer and further between, more forced and familiar as ever, but there’s an occasional banger from him even at this advanced age. It’s nowhere near one of his most original or insightful grievances, and he did just admit being responsible for his very own predicament, though of course what sets Larry apart from the rest of us who might have the same thought is that he can so easily extricate himself from it (keywords in this week’s Doctor Who were “quantum extraction”), walk the fuck away and not give any, he’s got the money, fallout with a half-life of only an episode, and above all, the willingness to do so without compunction.

Thursday night we “took advantage” of Disneyland’s failure to scan our third and last ticket use, so we went in for another miserable wonderful few hours, most of them spent in line for annual passes for the family fan and her companion; it was finally our turn for the next window, and a Black fellow about a foot taller than me whose name tag read ERIN, Grand Marshall, demonstrated a glaring breach of queue etiquette by pulling us to continue waiting at newly-opened kiosks on the other side, behind at least four more groups of people. I held myself back from going Larry David on him for fear of getting us banned from the park for life, at least until our transaction was settled, but by then they stopped accepting customers, and I just wanted out of there.

The next night when the boy got the first of what’s sure to be a lifetime of stitches, his ER doctor was the almost too-good-to-be-true-sounding Erin Prince, M.D. And so conscious was I of this coincidence going into my slumber Sunday, I dreamed of being reunited with old 大姐 Ellen (close enough) Liao.

My sad long weekend came to a close with Yahoo! Screen’s Other Space, which I can’t tell is meant to be centered around the MST3K reunion or Milana Vayntrub’s tight uniform, but either way isn’t sustaining the programming once Community’s done, not with jokes like this, where the robot doesn’t get Karen’s name right:

I think “Daddy Dearest” was the only episode I actually saw during its short-lived run in 1989, because with only eight of them, it probably wasn’t ever syndicated afterward. (Then again.) And after all these years, serial killers several times a week, this first experiment in primetime profiling still came to a jarring end.

My favorite of the lot, however, was the mysteriously-titled “And They Swam Right over the Dam”, where a couple of pediatricians set out to liberate their patients from overindulgent parents. Richard Kind (Larry’s cousin Andy one DVD ago on Curb Your Enthusiasm), the all-White team’s gopher, takes them down without so much as a fight, and reminds us how much stranger things were back then.

Struck me again while browsing the menu for the first disc of Larry David’s last (but not last) season that I didn’t like it very much.  The show’s development almost mirrors House’s, doesn’t it: Cheryl leaves him as abruptly as Kutner did, and the show wraps up (rather poignantly, I felt) with the Blacks; maybe it should’ve just ended there, too.  But no, Loretta’s written out like so much Seinfeld Susan—with cancer, no less—and while there’s some funny, e.g., “Denise Handicapped”, the rest of the arc is disappointing. So I’m a killjoy’s killjoy.

Before:

Now:

…And yet I don’t think the problem’s been solved. I could supply a dozen reasons why, from the inevitable uneven weight distribution to cramped quarters dictating one side swiveled over the other, but it’s more a matter of the conflict behind it sustaining itself. After all, would a ménage à trois really sort out Ginger v. Mary Ann? Regardless of your place in the dialectic, petulant Larry David-types like me need this to justify our natures—and distinguish them from everybody else’s. Like the cup analogy, some may see one, half-full or empty, and say, I’ll have what they’re having; I ask, what kind of person would leave it that way in the first place?