The Chicken

This morning on my drive to work I saw a chicken walking down Airport Boulevard through the morning fog. Not a pigeon. Not a seagull. A real-life red chicken like you might see on a farm somewhere in one of those red states. It was the highlight of my day.

Is that how it goes?

Is that how it goes?

In a private karaoke room with friends, co-workers, and (oddly) co-workers' mothers there was enough laughter and joy and ham-titude to make all the follies of this week seem ridiculously small. The Stevies, the Brittanys, the Mariahs... it's strange, how singing along to these pop songs with a microphone can be so much more satisfying than singing along to them in your car. Forget about the LA recording scene, in our tiny room, everyone was a star. Especially Paul. He can sing them all, but when Eminem's 'Forget About Dre' started coming out of his mouth, the look on the faces of my co-workers' mothers nearly sent me out of the room. Paul wasn't the only one who knew all the lyrics - now Lana was chiming in and the two of them together were throwing their arms around like the real Dre and the real Slim Shady. Having tried to avoid eye contact with anyone, I finally turned to Justin who was in stitches and laughing so hard that he had to literally lay down. I wasn't sure what was more inappropriate - the obscenities flying around the room like fireworks, or Justin's (and my own) inability to contain our hysterics. Is that how it goes? That situations that are already awkward are made more-so by our laughter? Or does laughter mitigate the silence that surrounds situations in which we do not know how to act? Soon we moved on to more culturally appropriate power-ballads, but I'll still wonder what was going through the heads of the mothers, and whether their embarrassment was greater than my own.

Is that how it goes?

Five friends sitting around a table, gilded by bare bulbs on a Friday night. One friend on the verge of leaving as we silently contemplate melting a plastic monkeys tail. Did I say leaving? I think I meant going. When does leaving become going somewhere else - is it half-way between here and the destination point? Is it that walking away from Bar Marmont (Adieu, Adieu, he said) he was leaving, and as he pulls onto the 405 one last time, he is going? Going home, going somewhere exotic, going to grad school. My friend Oscar is going, now gone. And so are the afternoons meticulously interpreting the scribblings of children and evenings drinking cocktails out of tea cups. Don't people know it is so much harder to leave than to go? With friends like mine, I guess I'm just a lucky so and so.

thus spoke jet

The concept of starting a blog has perplexed me for some time. I distinctly recall having a conversation with a friend of mine about a year and a half ago where we scoffed at those incessant bloggers and vowed to never submit to the shameless self promotion. Aren't there any aspects of our lives that are still sacred? we asked. Aren't there certain things better left unsaid and kept to ourselves for no one else to know? I wondered...

Why then, you might ask, have I opened myself to accusations of hypocrisy? Is it that I have gone against my principles? After all, I have been known to do so in the past - I bought a cell phone despite my promise that I never would. I drive my car to work everyday despite my cries that we are killing the earth with every rotation of the wheel. I eat meat when I know in my heart that the vegans are probably right. But these are the sacrifices I make to live in the modern world (or because I am too lazy to do otherwise). However, perhaps this is not so much a sacrifice as it is a realization. A realization that if I am ever to become the writer I ought to be, I need to write and summon the courage to let others read my words.

and thus spoke jet...