sometimes i’ll shoot the wrong bad guy, or smack some motherfucker in the head before reading him his rights. little things. civil rights, human rights, blah blah blah. but im serious, most of these people are the scummiest scumdogs of the universe, people that even i have a hard time finding good in.

some of the bad guys are actually sorta clever. or they are fearless. or they are innovative. but very few of them are. the smart ones i like to shoot “by accident” just to balance everything out. it’s what got me booted from the bureau. i tried to explain that they do that in bullfighting but noone would listen. maybe it was because i was cleaning my gun while i was explaining.

see, in bullfighting they get a guy on a horse to stab the bulls in the shoulders to weak it. then the bullfighter comes out with his gay little pink satin muleta and everything is sorta even. sorta.

anyhow, i like to make things even. the xbi are the equalizers in the whole grand scheme of things. we are the horses and the picadors and the swords. but sometimes we butcher that fucking beast before the matadors can get to them. the bureau and the cops and the justice department don’t like that, but you know what? they have learned to deal.

i bring this all up because some joker thought it was a good idea to take chopper one up last night without my knowledge for “training.” of course everything was approved, behind my back. and this morning i arrived and everyone said that it was decided that someone else should be just as trained as i am in case i got sick or went on vacation.

they said that they didnt tell me because they knew that i would get upset.

like im not more upset now.

some people, i swear.

anyhow, junior took out a building by accident as he was landing. and it wasn’t just any old building, he took out a big chunk of a hospital.

turns out he was working on his landings on the top of the children’s hospital’s helipad and accidently shot off one of the larger rockets thinking it was something else.

lucky for him the building that he hit across the street, kaiser hospital, was red flagged for demolition as they continue their expansion. but still.

i told the people responsible that i understood that chopper one isn’t mine, even if i act like it is, and even though its a black copter and super easy to fly, and comes with a team and is super hard to crash, it’s not accident proof, and it’s not really like any other bird, and it’s computer is a little psycho since everyone keeps trying to make it a “thinking” computer.

i told them that if they want me to train people i would be happy to, but let me pick the people because you cant be some fucking straight edge dude who’s all perfect all the time because this isn’t any straight edge machine. it fits well with the quirky qids, so don’t fight it.

everyone fights everything, unfortunately and even though i emailed them a list of five people who i would be happy to train, i haven’t gotten any emails back which mean they’re probably still trying to figure out how to get junior back in my seat even though i have never fucked up that bad, ever, not in a million years.

and sometimes i just think they don’t like me cuz i don’t wear abercrombie.

even though i sometimes do undercover. but please don’t tell anybody.

oish + nay + chelle

that always makes me happy. when we were watching “catch me if you can” we cracked up when kids were asking pilots for their autographs.

my first autograph was of bill buckner the year that he got traded from the dodgers to the Cubs.

after that i was hooked and i would get lots of athlete’s autographs, and then sometime in college i thought that i had all these signatures of all these people who i didn’t know, but i didn’t have any of the people who i knew, and loved.

so i got a baseball and had all of my exgirlfriends sign it for me.

eventually it ended up being all the girls i had sex with, which wasn’t the plan, but it was sorta the same theme.

the idea was that on a dreary day where i was feeling low i could look at that ball and think, “hmmm, these people actually loved me for at least a little while.”

even though ive done a pretty good job of maintaining that baseball i don’t really look at that baseball the same way any more.

some of the names make me wince, some of them make me really happy. some of them make me wonder how i ever got *that* girl to sign it. and a few of the names are now fading.

but the ball has sorta helped calm me down a little. you really don’t want names on there that you will wince at in the future. you rally don’t want names of people who you barely know. you really want names of people who are super special so that when you see the autograph it will spark a memory and you will think nice things, not sad things or icky things.

one girl wasn’t really my girlfriend, but it was pretty hot sex. so i let her sign her own ball. i was almost as surprised that she signed it as i was that she did it with me.

those are the happy little surprises that balance out the sad little suprises in life. i do my best to remember that they all pretty much even each other out.

anyhow, when i sold hotdogs at candlestick, all the people i worked with signed a stray foul ball on my last day.

weirdly that ball means just as much as all the other autographs that i have too.

see, another little happy suprise.

3rd leg + dog named clipper + dc

she’d just cut her bangs and i probably shoulda taken a picture cuz she looked pretty cute.

tight gray college sweatshirt, jeans, pink pumas, hair in a pony tail. i told her she looked like laura petrie and she said that shes too young to know about her.

the greyhounds howled and i saw two girls in a kompressor waving at me. one of them was holding up a video tape.

karisa fixed our plates as i told the girls to come back tomorrow at noon.

we put in “catch me if you can” and were so entranced that we didnt talk to each other for a good twenty minutes.

is it the brass monkey? she asked me.

no. i think this is a good movie, i told her.

then i asked her how she liked tom hanks’ boston accent and she gave me a dirty look.

nobody i know talks like that, she informed me.

she she liked my haircut. she looked at it for a long time at first, soaking it all in.

ever fondue before, she asked me.

nope. i said.

me neither, she said, and then told me about a fondue place she saw in hollywood.

earlier in the day my boss at the xbi said that he thought i should take a vacation in a few weeks.

i said that i didnt want to take any vacation cuz i had nowhere to go and no one to go with.

he said i should just chill out for a week.

i walked home thinking about what he meant by that, then nearly fell asleep on the train, and then decided at wilshire vermont to take the new rapid line up to los feliz and get a pie from the house of pies.

maybe id clean out the closets one day, paint the bathtub one day, hang out with chris one day, and just sleep and sleep and sleep the other days.

maybe jeanine would let me lay in her hot tub with her.

maybe i’ll just bowl every day.

dan + sarah + bathtub girl