GARGOZO MANUSCRIPT

The Boards Across Hermosa organizers had received 70 surfboards as donations for artists to paint.  The same email that told me that I was one of the participants indicated the boards were "first-come, first-serve".  I immediately drove to Hermosa in a panic hoping there would still be a board small enough to fit in my Honda Civic and proceeded due to my ignorance, to select one based on size rather than condition.  I didn't see the damage until I set it up in the backyard.  I soon  returned to YouTube videos, this time for tutorials on repairing surfboards.   This latest development was quite disturbing.  Had I any inkling that the board might need to be repaired as well as painted, I would never have tried to wiggle my way into this.  The most depressing thought was that this was surely just the first of many unexpected pitfalls that lay ahead.  I struggled with the obvious question - press on or quit?   Normally, I find grea...

I walked into a gallery in the South Bay a few months ago, never suspecting it would lead to a series of poor decisions and psychological trauma.  The gallery displays mostly jumbo-sized photographs that I found to be pretty special.  I met and spoke with Monica the owner for a bit.  It was one of those rare times where I abandon my antisocial norm and babble on like a jackass.  It's similar to a grand mal seizure - I never know when it's going to happen, and when it's over I have only a vague notion of what took place.  Evidently there was an exchange of contact info as the following day I received an email from Monica encouraging me to sign up for an upcoming event involving painting surfboards.   The link she provided took me to a site that invited Hermosa Beach artists to sign up to paint surfboards that would be displayed in and around The City of Hermosa Beach for a few months prior to being auctioned off at some extravaganza at the start of summ...

Over the last few years I was aware of a series called Yellowstone that was very popular but I figured I'd just wait to see it after it was picked up on YouTube.  Last week a friend of mine urged me to make an effort to find it.  I discovered that I could see the first episode "Daybreak" on my laptop for free on a site called "Peacock".  I settled in, turned it on and before 15 seconds had gone by, watched Kevin Costner use one hand to grab a horse by its ear and with his other hand, place a pistol under its jawbone and blow its brains out.  One assumes the horse needed to be put down as the scene took place on a highway with the horse sticking its head out of one of the handful of vehicles scattered topsy-turvy up and down the road.  Although one can't be sure as no mention of the incident was ever provided - unless perhaps details were revealed during the fast-forwarding approach I soon began to rely on. Costner plays the owner of the largest ranch in Mo...

The chirps started a little after 2 am. They were spaced about 15 seconds apart.  I recognized it as the sound that smoke alarms emit when batteries need replacing. The chirps were coming from the living room but it was hard to pinpoint as the sound seamed muffled.  As much as I wanted to go back to sleep, I found myself waiting every 15 seconds for the next chirp, hoping it would stop of its own accord.  When I got to the living room  Ingrid was pointing to a round plastic smoke alarm 12 feet up the side of one wall slightly above a built-in cabinet that extended 3 feet out from the wall.  I first tried standing on a chair but when failing to even reach the top of the cabinet, it became clear that it would require retrieving a ladder from the garage.  Keeping this a short story prevents me from including a description of the current state of our garage.  After 15 minutes and a rather punishing experience, I positioned the 5-foot-high ladder at the b...

I can't recall why we drove out to Red Rock Park but it's on the list of things to do when visiting Sedona Arizona.  It's a  286-acre nature preserve and environmental education center with stunning scenery. Trails throughout the park wind through red rock formations and along side Oak Creek banked by green meadows and native vegetation. As we wound our way through the park, rounding each bend in the road revealed a new and different sweeping panorama with colorful mesas and cliffs lit up by the sun. At the northeast area of the park, things got weird. You know how you sometimes see a speck on the computer screen and not knowing if it's on your screen or a flaw in the video you are watching, you swipe the screen with your finger to try and get rid of it? I suddenly had the same urge to reach up and swat the black and red beetle suspended in front of me. Then I realized the beetle was sitting on top of a distant mesa and was bigger than Godzilla. "What the he...

  I was struggling with some ugly thoughts on the ride up to the Catalina airport.   Sue was driving us to the top of the island, some 2,000 feet above Avalon for breakfast at the restaurant she’d taken over several decades ago.   It had all started out innocently enough, a seemingly tame one-lane road with hardly any traffic but as we continued to climb the severity of the drop off from the edge of the all too narrow road began to grab my full attention.   It wasn’t just at an occasional spot where one became alarmed, every inch of the road was poised atop a deadly chasm – the sort of terrain where rope bridges are deployed. Having travelled this route thousands of times, Sue was of course annoyingly nonchalant, spinning entertaining tales about the old days, the details of which I am unable to recall.   Despite my polite acknowledgements at the time (“really”, “you don’t say”) I could only focus on what I feared would be featured on the news that evening as ...

Eagle Rock 1905  In the wee hours at the age of five, I would lay in my bed and listen to the distant shrill sound of steel scraping against steel coming from the railroad yard on San Fernando Road.   The house we lived in was three miles from the yard but with the Los Angles population at less than a third of today, there was little to dampen the eerie music.   The railroad was the southern boundary of what I was aware of at the time as the physical world.   Our house was on a hill and from the second story I could see the hills that formed the other three sides of the shallow valley where sat our suburb of Eagle Rock.   It wasn’t until years later that I realized how comforting it had been as a child to have my known world so nicely framed.   The first time I drove through the San Fernando Valley I remember thinking what a nightmare it would have been to grow up in such an infinite flat and featureless wasteland. My grand kids now live in a hous...

In 1949, my parents and I moved into a house they bought in Eagle Rock.  It had 2 stories, a red-tile roof, a big fire place in the living room and at that time was described as "Spanish style."  At 5 years of age, what captivated me the most were the second story balconies on both the front and back of the house.  The house was above the level of the street with a climb of 35 steps from the sidewalk to reach the front door.  This put the street-side balcony completely above the field of vision of drivers passing by.  They never could figure out the source of the water-filed Xmas ornaments that hit their car.   The ornaments I refer to are the delicate glass ball-shaped ones coated with shiny metallic  colors on the outside and a silver coating inside.  They can be hung from the branches of a Xmas tree if you have the patience and dexterity to deal with the little wire thingamajig that fits into the stem at the top of the ornament.  ...

I was on my way to a small village in the rural highlands of Guatemala to make chicken coops for Mayan families.  While the bus was making its way to Quetzaltenango, I was glancing through some documents sent to me several months earlier.  Included was a list of items that was described as  "essential" and additional words to the effect that should you neglect to bring any of these things with you, a living hell awaited.  The list was full of the sorts of things that as a kid, my family viewed as concocted by Madison Avenue, and completely unnecessary.  We never once bought insect repellent, chap stick, sunscreen, sun glasses, rain gear, security whistle, water bottle or a fanny pack.  My father viewed as frivolous anything the neanderthals had gone without. There was one item on the list that caught my eye because of the wording - "sandals (for showers)."  When I first saw this I had the distinct impression that this was less than forthco...