The score: 77-0. This is why I hate college football. The two teams aren’t important, but one was the almost inhuman Oklahoma Sooners who are unbeaten and are giving the beating of a lifetime to every team they run into. The other poor suckers were Texas A&M who were humiliated on national television and will have to live with the shame of having been beaten by 11 touchdowns. Think about that…what are they supposed to say? Well, it was much closer than it looked? What about the people watching a crap game like this? This must be the equivalent of watching Jessica Simpson competing on Jeopardy. I’m thinking a mercy rule needs to be enforced by the time a team goes up by 50…which is sad in and of itself.

This Friday I had to redo a signing that I brought up last week with these three asian ladies. It didn’t go so well last time as the company screwed up about 5 things. They sent me a new package with a week to have taken care of all the problems. Would you like to wager a guess on whether or not they fixed everything? It’s quite sad, really. I wrote detailed directions concerning the corrections which were pretty simple yet they couldn’t even correct the biggest screw up; the lady’s name was still spelled wrong. Needless to say, the signors were not in a good mood…of course, this could also have resulted from a mix up on the time and the fact that I was given a contact phone number that could contact nobody involved in the signing. Just another day in the life of an independent notary, really.

Once I finished this little task up, I headed over to my friend Jimmy’s place. I had nothing to do for the evening and I figured I’d wait out the Friday night traffic watching basketball. Fitting in with my predictions this week, the Lakers lost their first game in a real stinker of a performance by almost 20 points. Personally, I’m not sold on the greatness of the team just yet. They’ve improved in some ways as they have a real point guard for once, but their defense is a mirror image of the Dallas Mavericks; score more points than the other team. You’d think their defense would be drastically improved just by making Derek Fisher, their usual point guard, sit down. He’s the type of player who helps other point guards look like superstars in the playoffs as he ineffectually attempts to guard them. I will say he spends a lot of time on the floor; not that he plays a lot, but that he spends more time on his back than a 20 dollar hooker. I’ve theorized that he has an inner ear problem which keeps him from being able to stay on his feet for more than 2 minute of playing time as he seems to just fall down for seemingly no reason. I’m not sure he would even be good enough to back up most point guards in the league, but hey, he is the best third string point guard in the league. It makes you marvel at how the Lakers have managed to win 3 championships with this Albatross around their necks.

After the game, my friend Mr. T had a pot luck to go to which was being held for people involved in a Vietnamese film festival and he asked if I would like to come. Being that I’m not Vietnamese, could never even hope to pass as even Asian in a dark room and last was involved in theater back in high school, I could expect to stand out as much as Ben Stein at a rock concert. Of course I said yes…you don’t pass up opportunities like this. We picked up his friend, the K-man and being as it was a pot luck, K-man and I had to go pick up something to bring. We ended up just buying a 12 pack of Corona. A word on K-man…he’s a very positive guy. He talks like a salesman and is supportive of any idea that comes out of your mouth. He could probably find something positive about me telling him the earth was about to crash into the sun…I guess I wouldn’t have to return those overdue movies I rented. Hey, I can play this game too! Anyways, being I’ve gotten lost in my own backyard, I was depending on either of them to get us to the location. They weren’t so good at directions either. It was literally the blind leading the blind. After about a hour of wandering about aimlessly through the city, I finally broke down and asked Mr. T for a map book so I could find where we were going. Of all my learned skills, very few have come in as handy as being able to read a Thomas Guide. Of course, I had to look for his in the trunk. I can say that Mr. T is ready to play any sport you can think of…he had a tennis racket and a basketball, a glove and a baseball; the guy is prepared for any spontaneous play he’s likely to stumble upon. He did actually have a Thomas Guide…from 1983. I have no idea how he had a map book almost as old as we were, but luckily the area we were in was even older. It only took 10 minutes to get to where we were going as it turned out we had passed it at least 3 or 4 times in our wanderings.

We finally arrived and I was introduced to some very interesting people. There was the girl throwing the pot luck, who, with two other girls make up a spoken word performance trio named Mai Piece. They even performed a couple of poems for us. Pretty dirty, too. Watching three giggling asian girls reading poetry about sex was about as bizarre as it gets for me on a Friday night, anyways. They told us that they normally do better with more rehearsals and the lightings and their guitars and a stage…blah blah blah. I’m sure even with that they still would have sucked. The only way it would have been salvaged was if they performed it naked…it wouldn’t have made the poetry better, but at least we’d have something to distract us from listening to it. They were very nice as was everybody else there. It was a surprise for me as I’ve ran into my fair share of “artists” and they usually are so caught up in themselves that they hardly notice anybody else.

I have to bring up one of the strangest characters that was at this little shindig. His name was Val, I believe, and he was quite a card. First off, he was a very slight, effeminate looking asian guy with very graceful movements and a habit for striking a girly pose. He liked to say things to get a rise out of people, such as he liked it when people pulled his hair. He had a whole soliloquy on how he hated showering as it affected the smell of his hair and took away the natural style that it received as he slept on it. To be honest, I don’t think he was as weird as he acted; he seemed to just like to see how far he could push people. Either way, he was pretty effective in convincing most everyone that he was…well, to put it bluntly, a weirdo.

I also had a discussion with another guy named Tony about his art. You see, Tony is in a fine arts school and was working on sculpting at the time. I’ve always been fascinated by this particular field so I asked him what he was using…Clay, perhaps? Maybe metal? Playdoh even? No…the most I could get out of him was he was using television monitors to display fire. I hope he isn’t paying a lot of money for this school, because that is not sculpting. That’s wasting your fucking time. I know fashion art has really pushed out all the actual skill that people used to learn in order to paint or what have you, but t.v. monitors in a sculpture? What kind of a crap is that? Whatever happened to making a guy on a horse, or just a horse even? Where is the skill in playing a video of flames on a monitor? Andy Warhol once said, “Art is whatever you can get away with.” In this day and age, that seems to be the case. Nobody wants to see a beautiful painting of a landscape or a person that actually looks like the subject…no, they’d rather look at an unmade bed, a blank canvas or feces smeared on a backdrop. I hope Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns pay for what they’ve wrecked on these poor, impressionable young artists.