GARGOZO MANUSCRIPT

Image from la.eater.com What in God’s name have they done to Mr. T’s?    Can’t they yuppie up Highland Park with at least some discretion?   Where am I supposed to go  now when I want to be depressed or Charles Bukowski; Image from salon.com score cocaine?   When there’s a long-standing black hole of a dive that would make Bukowski’s skin crawl, it should be left the hell alone.   There can be no yin and yang if you truncate one end of the spectrum.   It’s important to know what clinical depraved indifference looks like.   My first time in the place was during the 1950s when I went there with my dad to bowl.  Fifty years later I went again with my son Michael  and was glad to see  they had gotten rid of the   bowling and rededicated  the place to proper alcohol and substance abuse. Mr. T's interior; Image from justared.com Following Michael into the place my first thought was that they weren’t open.  It took twenty minutes for my eyes to adjust t

Image from goodreads.com I read a book a few months back that made me want to quit writing.  I am forever looking for something enjoyable to read.  It doesn’t have to be a best seller, and usually isn’t, but it is damn hard to find a winner.  Why are there so many books that are so mediocre?  I can only assume publishers are dumping mass quantities of new books onto the market in the hopes that from somewhere within this morass the next Harry Potter will emerge.   I found a New York Times suggested summer reading list online and took it with me to the public library.  Since it was now spring it seemed reasonable that I might find some of the titles.  I found a few to take home but can recall only  Night at the Fiestas by Kirstin Valdez Quade.  When I finished reading her book of short stories I was so awestruck that I couldn't see any point in my writing anything ever again.  It was clear beyond words that Kristin was where she deserved to be and it was time for me to fi

Photo from Slate.com Last September an article in Mother Jones by Julia Lurie reported that “thanks to the drought, many people in East Porterville can't cook, shower, or flush the toilet”.   The part of Ms. Lurie’s opening sentence that caught my attention was “ East Porterville ”.   As far as I recall t he entire town of Porterville is slightly larger in area than my backyard and I was puzzled why there was a need to officially designate a portion of it as being east of the rest of it.   The City of Los Angeles consists of 503 square miles so I can see the practicality of referring to part of it as East Los Angeles .   With Porterville taking up a mere 17 square miles it seemed like a stretch.   I read further and discovered that East Porterville is an unincorporated suburb adjacent to the City of Porterville which did not exist the one and only time I was there in 1975 doing a one-day consulting gig for the Porterville Police Department.  The drive up from Los An