GARGOZO MANUSCRIPT

Image from penny4nasa,org As far as anyone knows, no one from Earth has ever stood on the dark side of the moon.  To date, the U.S. is the only country to have successfully put people onto the lunar surface but those landings were all made on the side of the moon that faces our planet.   The U.S. lunar landings resulted from a furious national scramble to catch up with the USSR who, early on, was way ahead of us in the space race.   Russia had thrown down the gauntlet in 1957 by launching Sputnik into orbit.   The beach ball-sized satellite circled the earth every 92 minutes until it fell from its orbit three months later, burning up in the Earth’s atmosphere.   This rattled everybody’s cage; creating an instant crisis for American politicians, scientists, our military and us plain folks.   I remember being on a camping trip near the Salton Sea , lying in my sleeping bag, looking up and watching Sputnik drift slowly across the night sky above. ...

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 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 whe...

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. ...

Ed Van Straten on the left; circa 1975. (photo from Highland Park News Herald) Every day about 7:00 a.m. Ed Van Straten would pick up the two newspapers that had been tossed onto his driveway, climb into his Cadillac, light his first cigarette of the day, stuff three packs of Marboro Red above the driver’s side visor, and ride down the hill to the Jack In The Box drive-thru for his morning coffee.  Ed was phenomenal when it came to real estate.  He enjoyed every minute of the fourteen hours he put in nearly every day.  Before he passed away Ed bought and sold more houses in northeast Los Angeles than anyone, then or now.  In 1972 Ingrid and I hoped to become first time home buyers and were in deed fortunate to make friends with Ed.  We had no savings, a pitiful income and poor prospects - none of which discouraged Ed in the least.  He took us out looking at houses twice a month for nine months until we finally found something that we could qualify...