So yesterday, totally exhausted from my late-night bicycle shenanigans, I managed to get up and drag myself as far as the couch to watch USC play Notre Dame. Yeah, I finally gave in and watched a game. I mean, you can hear the whole neighborhood cheering every time there’s a good play, so it’s kind of hard to focus on anything else. As far as football games go, it was pretty amazing. I’d still get bored just watching football though, so at the same time I also listened to the rest of Back in Action by David Rozelle, about an army captain who gets his foot blown off by an anti-tank mine in Iraq but then returns to combat with a prosthetic. I’ve been listening to a bunch of memoirs by soldiers recently to try to improve the versimilitude of my military/combat scenes and characters. (I also recently listened to The Last True Story I’ll Ever Tell, Shooter, and One Bullet Away.) The thing that’s struck me most so far is how incompetent many U.S. commanding officers seem (which surprised me). These books make being in a war sound kind of like Dilbert, except that the dumb ideas your out-of-touch boss wants you to implement are likely to get you killed.
Today I had to get up at 7:00 a.m. That was no mean feat, considering I couldn’t get to sleep last night until 4:00 a.m. I took part in an AIDS charity walk up in West Hollywood. There was a huge turnout — it seemed like thousands of people. Parking was a nightmare. We spent half an hour driving into and then out of the Cedar Sinai parking garage without finding a place. I went with a bunch of people from USC College Democrats. They all had snazzy blue shirts with the name of the club on the back, and on the front was printed, “If you can read this you’re probably a Democrat.” Those shirts attracted a lot of admiring comments from the crowd. As we approached the end of the (7 mile) walk, one of the volunteers saw us and cheered, “Yeah! Yeah! USC!” and then added bitterly, “I just got my rejection.” Afterward, we went to The Hard Rock Cafe. I don’t think I’ve ever been to one before, and I really don’t see why so many people I’ve known over the years have been so proud to wear the T-shirt. It seemed like mediocre food at absurdly inflated prices. I’m still pissed because they charged me $10 for a draft beer. But oh yeah, that did somehow include a souvenir glass with the Hard Rock logo on it, so now every time I use that glass it’ll bring back memories of the Hard Rock cafe and how I was frikkin’ gouged there.
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