Good Times

What a good weekend. It started late Saturday afternoon when I grabbed my overnighter, hit the 15 outta town and arrived at my friend Becky's apartment in Long Beach.

It was so good to catch up with an old friend, to have a conversation over homemade guac & chips that could mention and accommodate children, and yet not revolve solely around talk of their care and feeding. It was so good, as Becky brilliantly termed it, to not have to constantly recalibrate myself -- to talk about books and movies and politics as ideas that matter and not have to shrug and feign mere lukewarm, passing interest in things dear to me.

Also: really good to be able to be totally snarky about the Twilight series and the droves of grown women reading such crap.

Saturday night was spent celebrating Becky's birthday (a milestone one that I myself might be familiar with, but I'm done saying that word over and over in some compulsive need to self-reveal) at a very cool and trendy Kareoke club in Koreatown called the Orchid Club. Their web site claims that they've been listed as one of the top 3 Kareoke clubs in all of L.A., so how cool did that make us, sitting in an awesome private room for six hours? We closed the place down, baby.

My throat was raw from shouting along with the assembled group to Bohemian Rhapsody and Copacabana and (Fill Me Up) Buttercup. My thigh has a small bruise thanks to my enthusiastic and (quite inspired, if I do say) whacking of the tambourine. Still, the highlight was hands-down Becky's and my thunderous rendition of Dio's "Last in Line:"

"We'll know for the first time
If we're EVIL or DIVINE
We're the last in line!"

Truly, we sounded just. like. Dio. (Or was it Tenacious D?)

Sunday morning found me at the coffee shop in the above picture, sitting right where that empty chair is, near the car's front tire, as we waited for our table. I sipped my coffee under skies just that blue, watching cars pass on Ocean Blvd. and the breeze move through the palms and thought of those freezing all over the rest of the country and felt truly grateful just to be in that moment.

Thanks Becky, for a great time, for letting me crash with you, and for conversations that included mentions of Gilmour Girls and Ellen Gilchrist, Harpers magazine and writing, and, as ever, the conundrum that is So Cal real estate.

Rock on.