Son of muggy day

Another muggy, sultry, humid day. One in which the atmosphere seems to have slipped into the skull and taken over the brain cells. The smallest task takes hours. Fulfillment becomes an abstraction.

At lunch, I was seated facing a balding man, wearing a pink dress shirt with a paisley tie and tan khaki-looking pants, a couple of booths away. From bits and pieces of the conversation that drifted my way, I could tell he was ordering an egg dish and being precise about how he wanted it. His body language conveyed a sense of bottled agitation. When the server left, he began to examine photo slides: quickly holding up one to the window, then moving to the next. Lunch arrived, and within a minute he scooted from the booth and headed for the server. (Although at first, I thought he was waiting for someone, and had just seen them come in.) As he exited and returned, he was muttering that a breakfast place should be able to make a decent breakfast. The next I noticed he'd turned his attention to the newspaper: ruffling and folding pages. A new dish was delivered, and he began nibbling away. The server returned later and asked how were the eggs. He indicated they were much better.

This was certainly not one of life's traumatic events. But just a curious one. And I wondered what this person was truly like. Explosive? Temperamental? Stoic? Depressed? Kinetic?

After lunch I moseyed down the frontage road, slipped under the Interstate, maneuvered several turns and popped out at Office Depot. I have been trying to come up with a worthwhile lighting situation for my windowless, basement office. Trying to view the computer monitor all day under the bright glare of the overhead fluorescent bulbs is a headache - literally! Yesterday, I bought a halogen-bulbed floor lamp. This works fine for viewing the monitor, but it was hard to read anything on the desk. Today, I got a very compact, folded desk lamp that come on when you unfold it. Works great! Seems to be just enough but not too much light. A side benefit of not having the overheads on is the absence of the dreaded fluorescent hum.

A comment on the word "mosey" is due. One of the best lines in "Buffy" was earlier in the year. Scott, the short-lived, boyfriend-in-training for Buffy, uses the word to the Scooby Gang. A few minutes later, someone sez they like Scott, and Oz comments something to the effect, "and extra points for use of the word 'mosey'."

The lighting experiments make me feel like one of the characters in a Kubrick movie. Stan had a fixation for lighting! Super bright bits in "2001," "Platoon" and "The Shining." Candlelight in "Barry Lyndon." Dim, shadowy light in "Strangelove." Have yet to see "EYS," so I don't know about it.

Had a terrible time going to sleep last night. Headache! Wound up using a nasal spray. Later a Claratin. Then Advil! At 1:30 or so, I was still up. Set on the couch looking through a book called "Landmarks of Los Angeles." There are far more than one would think. One of the most intriguing is the Samuel / Novarro house built by Lloyd Wright, Frank's son, in 1926, for Louis Samuel, agent to Ramon Novarro of "Ben Hur fame" (the silent one). But apparently, they never lived there together, and Novarro shortly became the owner. It is a very striking building of off white and green stucco. It also the place in which Novarro was murdered by some rough trade in the late '60s. (***I received an e-mail from someone long after making this entry, that it was not this house in which Novarro was murdered. And I then remembered that it was a house in the hills or canyons.) And now it is owned by Diane Keaton. All in all, a Hollywood house if there ever was one. Has anyone ever considered a movie of Novarro's life?

PAX!