Dont Mince Words

The first time I heard the word cucamonga, I believe I was in third grade and it was a derogatory term of unknown origin or meaning. Nearly 31 years later, I heard the word again, except it was Rancho Cucamonga and the area was on fire.

On Friday, October 24th, my Venice skies became yellow, then dark and overcast. By 4 p.m., I could not see the stop light two blocks away. I discovered that the Santa Ana winds were blowing the smoke and ash 60 miles west to my Venice coastline. It kind of felt like 9/11 all over again, except I wasn’t drunk in Brooklyn watching burned memos land in my backyard.

Saturday was less overcast. I took a bike ride up to the beach and could barely see the end of the Venice Pier. Things weren’t much better a few miles north in Santa Monica. I could hear the kids yelling on the Ferris wheel, but they were a little fuzzy in the distance. There are usually dozens of sail boats in the bay on the weekend. The smoky visibility didn’t make for a good day of sailing.

A 9/11 flashback isn’t what I signed up for when I moved to California. The end result is the same: some asshole has ruined a good place for a lot of people.

Then again, we might all be saying the same thing after Arnold takes office. Who knows.

If we were to judge our nation by the type of spam emails we receive, what would we learn? A 48-hour analysis of my inbox spam reveals that Americans love drugs that begin with the letter V. If you drill down farther, we are a nation in pain and we can’t get it up.

Valium. Vicodin. Viagra.

I received 97 unsolicited emails in a 48-hour period this week. I don’t have an AOL, Hotmail, Yahoo, or another major internet service provider email account where you expect spam. The Bungers.com domain may sound like a German porn site, but it is a server in California that hosts for my brother and me (thus Bunger plural=bungers.com). Our spam email has increased three-fold since the beginning of the year.

Last week, 40 percent of my spam was for prescription drugs, 18 percent was for mortgages and loans, and 13 percent was for software/hardware or consumer electronics. There are some interesting new categories of spam. Automotive devices to increase gas mileage are now popular. Those types of emails comprised five percent of my inbox spam. Our nation must also have issues with insurance judging by my inbox. Approximately five percent of my spam offers were for health or life insurance and only four percent were work-from-home offers.

The most disturbing statistic was sex site spams. Only eight percent of all my unsolicited email in 48-hour period was for sex sites. Remember when it seemed like all your spam subject likes were ‘girls girls girls’? That was back in the old days when Gore had just invented the internet. It looks like the V-drugs are pinching out the Vagina spam market now.

What can I change about this picture? If the drug companies made more affordable drugs, would I receive fewer V-spams? If we developed a national DO-NOT-SPAM list, would my inbox become uncluttered? Would I miss laughing daily at stupid subject lines with umlauts and miscellaneous characters designed to trick spam filters?

While I wait for the answers to these hard questions, I’m going to pop some pills to help me sleep. If I’m lucky, the Viagra I slipped my boyfriend should be kicking in any minute now and my home loan will be approved.

Act now while V-supplies last.

I’m back on the subject of LA and cars, but before we go there, let me immediately digress.

I had the usual, traditional conflicted childhood. I was an individual who was different and didn’t blend in and yet I wanted to be like everyone else. And I didn’t. My parents’ delivered the usual fucked-up conflicted messages, “Why can’t you be like everyone else.” Or, “Why do you want to be like everyone else?” (That one they used during back-to-school clothes shopping season). All this was sorted out in college and grad school when I realized I got along with all types of people, but I was, indeed, very much an individual.

So here I am in LA. I’ve never really cared about fashion and usual err on the side of comfort. I’ve never been a conspicuous consumer. No bling-bling. No gottahaveit now. I’m pretty low maintenance. Cars in LA… that’s a subject a standup comic could analyze for days.

I am currently an owner of a 2001 Honda Accord. Is it the car I really wanted? Nah, not really, but I didn’t know what I wanted either. It is a reliable car and it will do for now. It is bigger than I’m used to (four scraped hubcaps to prove it) and CPA-conservative. When I open the trunk in the grocery store parking lot, I feel like I should be putting some cases of Similac in there too.

But I digress.

Today I went to a networking luncheon meeting for the International Association of Business Communicators in West Hollywood. I immediately bonded w/a graphic design agency sales guy named Joseph. I looked at his portfolio while I nibbled on my Mexican salad (“Would you like tofu or grilled chicken on that?” You know you are in Hollywood when tofu is first in the meat order). He’s also doing a short movie on the side about nuclear bomb testing in Utah. So, I immediately went into Pentagon mode and grilled him about the interviews and story line.

After we all paid the check, Joseph and I walked in the same direction together and he invited me to a rough cut screening of his film. We made it to my car and exchanged cards.

“Oh, this is you?” he said, looking deeply into my Honda’s headlights.

“Yes, as you can tell by my parking job, I’m relearning how to drive,” I said.

He walked away, promising to email when he knew the screening time. I knew he wasn’t going to email. I drove a Honda. He strikes me as the kind of guy that likes a girl that drives a Lexus SC430. When you see a woman in a 430, you think, “she must like anal sex.”

I drove down Santa Monica Boulevard chuckling when Joseph happened to pass me in his Cadillac Escalade. WITH A GOLD PACKAGE. A white guy with a gold package? Where I come from this means NO penis instead of small penis and you have a posse of “girls” working for you.

Do you think anyone will notice my new tires?