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I hate to dwell on the L.A. Times, but here we go again. In this morning's article on depressed liberal Democrats:

"I had a client who wanted to watch Fox News while we were working together, and I had to walk away," says Kate Schmidt, a 50-year-old personal trainer from Eagle Rock. In the wake of the election, Schmidt said she was "just palpably, physically ill" and battling a storm of emotion. "I'm not a fearful person, not hysterical. It takes a lot to bother me," said Schmidt. "But this is really upsetting me. I'm trying to figure out things to tell myself to calm myself down, and it's hard."

That sounded familiar. And, yes, exactly one week ago, in the Times, an article about the passions of the campaign:

Kate Schmidt, a personal trainer in Eagle Rock, said she knows those feelings.

"I'm in a 12-step program and have been meeting with this group of women for six years, and I thought we knew each other," said Schmidt. When she learned secondhand that one of the members was voting for Bush, she was stunned at the vehemence of her reaction.

"I'm 50 years old and I've never felt this way about a presidential election," she said. "There's not one single thing about Bush that's good in my opinion, and for people not to see that is confusing to me."

Can't they find someone else to interview? Who the hell is Kate Schmidt to be interviewed not once, but twice as the representative unbalanced Kerry fan? And why would anyone want someone like this as a personal trainer?

I guess I just don't have the same Rolodex of sources as the Times does. I don't have a section for Depressed Fanatic Liberal Democrat Personal Trainers in 12 Step Programs.

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I'm not going to be one of those people lining up to offer unsolicited advice to the Democrats on how to recover from last Tuesday night. I'm no expert, they don't need me, and I don't have a dog in that race.

Oh, okay, one thing. It's a message, actually, to the recently-unearthed breed of liberal radio talker on your local Air America Radio affiliate, whether on the network itself or one of the separately-syndicated hosts or even the local folks. I heard the same talk on Stephanie Miller's show, Al Franken's show, Greg Palast guesting on Stacy Taylor's local San Diego show, Randi Rhodes' show, same page from the same playbook. They, or their callers, or both, are saying the same thing: we wuz robbed. Again. The Ohio vote was rigged. The voting machines were rigged. Karl Rove stole the election. Kerry COULDN'T have lost himself. Stolen.

Er, no, sorry, kids. You lost. That dog won't hunt. Game over. Next.

The reaction from these folks is the kind of thing you get from really committed, fanatical sports fans when their team loses a close one- it's the ref's fault. The guy in charge of keeping time screwed up. The basket moved. Something happened- ANYTHING but the simple fact that their team lost. They try to find some sliver of hope that they can hold onto, something that will comfort them through the long winter ahead- it's not our fault, we really won.

No, you didn't. And insisting that you did not only turns everyone else, even those sympathetic to your cause, off, it keeps you from examining the real problems with which you need to be dealing.

Not that I care if you do that or not. But if you want my advice, and there's no reason to think you do, the whole "stolen election" thing won't get you anywhere. It's amusing for a few minutes on the radio- hey, honey, c'mere, listen to these nutcases!- but even that wears off. You know what to do. Move on, folks, just like your web site URL says. MoveOn.org, everybody.

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No time tonight, unless you want yet another L.A. Times rant.

You do? Well, I don't, so here, if you're a subscriber, read this one, Patrick Goldstein's typically condescending anti-Fox News article in which he does a "Super Size Me" act allegedly watching nothing but Fox News for several days, and apparently fails to distinguish between news, commentary, and talk shows. Ha ha! Fox is conservative-leaning! How shocking and unpleasant! And it's hazardous to this poor liberal reporter's health because his blood pressure, it's rising!

Yes, he got paid for that.

I could write about the effect a week of reading the L.A. Times would have on someone who thinks for himself, but then I'd actually have to read the whole paper, even Robert Scheer and Patttttttttttt the Hatttttttttttt and Michael Kinsley, and I'm just not willing to do that. Besides, I told you, I have no time. And nobody would pay me for it.

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They kept shutting down the main road today to make a Jim Carrey movie. If you were heading from my neighborhood towards the top of the hill or Torrance or Redondo Beach, you were just going to have to wait while a truck with cameras towed Jim Carrey in a car several times to get that just-right shot of Jim Carrey driving a car, except that he wasn't actually driving.

We're used to that- not Jim Carrey fake-driving, but the shutting-down-the-roads-to-make-a-movie thing. This is, after all, a Company Town, and the studios tend to get their way. Shut down the only access road for a few hundred people right in the middle of the afternoon? No problem. Here's a permit. You locals shut up- this is Good For The City.

Except that it isn't, not really. In a decade's worth of movie and TV shoots in this neighborhood- "Charlie's Angels," "Inspector Gadget," "Hidalgo," MTV's "Motel California," "The Aviator," "Life As a House," "The O.C.," and many more- I've never seen anyone from the cast or crew in any local shops, patronizing any local businesses, doing much of anything except driving directly onto the set, staying all day, then leaving. You don't even see any PA's at Starbucks fetching Frappucinos for the higher-ups. They have craft services on the set- no need to go anywhere off the lot. No need to encounter the locals. Locals- eeewwwww. (It's the same attitude Hollywood's taking with Red Staters- take their money, but don't actually talk to them or come in contact with them, because they're stupid or evil or insignificant. "Nobody WE know lives in Palos Verdes or votes Republican....")

And when they have to come into the real world to shoot, they don't really ask us if it's OK. Well, once or twice, a movie shoot left flyers in our mailbox warning that they'd be setting off gunfire and bombs and flying choppers low overhead all day, but that hasn't been the case for several years. Instead, they just, you know, DO it- show up at the corner of Hawthorne and PV Drive, set up fake phone booths, shoot for a while, then dismantle, with lanes shut down and sometimes all traffic cut off by the friendly Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, eager to please. Got an appointment? An emergency? Need to get someplace without delay? Is your name Jim Carrey? No? Well, then, you'll have to wait right here. And what do you get out of it? Well, in a year or so, you'll be able to go to the Regal Cinemas and plunk down nine or ten bucks and go in and watch as your neighborhood plays "generic suburban neighborhood" or "windswept seaside retreat" or "impenetrable clifftop fortress."

Uncredited, of course.

Pardon me for being somewhat underwhelmed. But, then again, this IS the neighborhood where they shot the "Big W" scene in "It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World" AND TWO episodes of "The Beverly Hillbillies" (Episode 59, "The Clampetts Go Fishing" and Episode 79, "Back to Marineland"). You'll have to do better than Jim Carrey in a phone booth to top that.

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I made it out of the house for lunch in Burbank today. This was a significant achievement, and it didn't even require my usual excuse (a Dodger game) to break free of the restraints imposed by my cardinal rule: never under any circumstances pass north of the 405 freeway. The occasion was, well, no occasion at all, just lunch with a friend, but I hadn't done that in ages and I couldn't keep stalling so I wouldn't have to leave the womb of the South Bay, so lunch it was, up in Burbank near where Fran and I used to work. I kept looking for omens, but other than a guy in a Steve Harvey hat tailgating me on the 110 North, nothing happened. (Note: nobody but Steve Harvey should ever go rocking the Steve Harvey hat. Steve Harvey shouldn't go rocking the Steve Harvey hat. Nobody looks good in a big white hat. Steve probably thinks he's stylin', but he looks as ridiculous as the guy who was on my bumper. I assume it wasn't Steve Harvey- Steve has to make enough money from KKBT alone to afford better than a damaged '91 Corolla)

So after remembering too late that the credit union would be closed for Veterans Day and then searching for parking because the garage was filled with people parking there to catch shuttle buses to an "Everybody Loves Raymond" taping, I had lunch and then got a tour of the new Clear Channel Los Angeles facility across the street. I'd been warned that it wasn't what I was used to- I usually worked at radio stations that were dumps. This definitely isn't a dump. It doesn't feel like a radio station, either. I'd seen this before, though- Clear Channel Miami is in a new building a lot like this one- and I decided that it wasn't necessarily a bad thing to work in a clean, safe building where everything actually works. The equipment's all modern, there are big screen flat panel TVs and monitors everywhere, there appear to be about 3 billion separate studios... this was definitely not the way it was when I was programming. Where's the worn carpet? Where are the coffee stains, the broken chairs, the cart machines? Radio's different now. It's not the worn-down, grungy-but-homey thing it used to be. The future is here, and it's corporate clean. It IS antiseptic. But... but... but I didn't feel like I was going to catch something when I touched a desk or counter, I didn't feel like I would be mugged in the lobby like Dr. Demento was at the ATM outside KLSX not too long before I worked there (or so everyone took pains to tell me when I arrived). Everything was clean, everything seemed to work.

It almost made me want to... no, actually, it didn't make me want to go back to working every day at an office, commuting all that way and spending the day in a place that isn't home. But if you have to do that, it might as well be a place where the smell of sewage doesn't permeate the halls and the equipment doesn't suddenly short out at random intervals. If there's one positive thing to come from media ownership consolidation, I guess this is it. Might not help the programming, but at least the studios are clean.

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It's happening again, and I'm not sure how to cure it. Every morning- EVERY morning, with rare exceptions- I wake up well before the alarm goes off. It's set for 5 Pacific, but I'm up before that, several times. 2:30. 3:15. 4:08. 4:21. 4:27. 4:33. 4:41, and that's when I give up and get up. Each time my eyes open, I stare at the clock and calculate how long until I'm supposed to be awake, how long I have left to try and snooze. And that little action drives me crazy and prevents me from really resting. It's just a succession of fitful, brief rests punctuated by the dread of having to get up, spiced with the occasional visit from Ella the World's Most Famous Cat, who sometimes gets into my face to see if I'm awake enough to pay attention to her.

Al of this is to say that there's a reason for my incoherence. It may not be a good excuse, but it is an excuse.

I promise I'll try to get back in gear later today. No guarantees, though.

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Time to see if I'm any more lucid than I was earlier.

(checks brain)

Ah, nope. I think there was a little bit of melt while reading the Arafat obituaries that softpedal what the guy really did. Statesman, my ass. He was responsible for killing innocent people and he led his supporters down the wrong path. Oh, and he stole from them, too.

But I'm incoherent right now. I'll go watch "Green Acres" or something.

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Dick Cheney's still kicking and O.D.B.'s dead.

Not that any of this is all that surprising, but it does tell you something. What it says, I don't know. But it's something.

Wait. Maybe it says that if you don't take care of yourself... nah, you can work out and eat right and stay trim and get hit by a bus, or you can be Keith Richards.

On second thought, it doesn't mean anything. You're born, you live, you die. There are some things you can do to minimize problems, but they don't always work. Best not to think about it too much.

Pass the Skittles.

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Here's a kid who left his "I'm gonna kill Buckwheat" in his high school yearbook entry: he wrote that his “plans for world supremacy are in order. They entail taking over Somalia and working outward, but I should not divulge the exact details of my cunning strategy.” He also referred to his "future heroic death." And now he's been arrested and charged with trying to sell night vision goggles and bulletproof vests to a Somalian terrorist group.

Well, he DID tell everyone.

I don't remember exactly what I wrote for my high school yearbook, but I know it wasn't much. I was on the staff of the yearbook, and I made sure I was barely in it. I was so not in it that not too long after I graduated, I threw it away. I think I threw away my college yearbook, too. But I'm relatively certain that if they dig those up, there's nothing too embarrassing there. I believe all I did was list the things I worked on- the school newspaper, the school yearbook, the school literary magazine. That's it. What could you tell from that? I suppose you could divine that I was a geek, and, well, I still am, so that's no surprise.

But I think I did the right thing, not putting in too much information. (Later on, for college reunion yearbooks, I violated that rule, but that's a different story) You don't necessarily want to leave a paper trail where people can look back and say yeah, we knew he was gonna kill Buckwheat/embezzle millions/become a raging untreated alcoholic because his yearbook entry read "I'm gonna kill Buckwheat"/"I will embezzle millions"/"I like Budweiser." You want people to look at it and go right past you, because they don't remember you and don't care. That's the way to do things. I'm guessing- I don't know, because I'm not in touch with anyone but one friend from those days- that nobody in my class can even quite place my face or recall anything I did. I was hiding in plain sight for four years, then I graduated, leaving no marks.

And now I can do anything and be relatively secure that if I become notorious for something, there won't be any screaming tabloid headlines holding my high school days up for ridicule, no pages from the yearbook ripped out and used as evidence against me, posted on The Smoking Gun. At least, I don't think so. Not that I plan on becoming notorious, anyway. I'm not even quite sure where Somalia is.

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