Chris asked the trivia question, “What three people in the history of history have had the most books written about them?” I answered this correctly, however, it should be noted that Matt wins. His guess:

1) Charles Nelson Reilley
2) Aleister Crowley
3) Wayne Kramer

Quite funny, this.

A Very Personalish Afternoon With Jason King
Part III
Interview by Diamond David Lee Roth.

Diamond David Lee Roth: Good afternoon Jason.
Jason King: Diamond David, a gentleman never wears a baseball cap indoors. Especially not one that is embroidered with the words “China Doll’s Rub & Tug”.

DDLR: (removes hat)
JK: Jesus H. Christ! That is the biggest bald spot I have ever seen, put it back on.

DDLR: (replaces hat, looks irritated) So, Jason, you have had this award-winning website for just about one month now. How do you handle the pressure? And how is fame treating you?
JK: Do you remember what fame feels like? It’s really, really fun. People telling you how wonderful you are; People buying you terrific bottles of champagne; People offering you their clone-babies. It’s fantastic, it really is. There is quite a bit of pressure. The way I am dealing with that is by always staying on top of current events, staying so hot right now. And when I’m not hot anymore, I will kick myself out and replace me with Sammy Hagar.

DDLR: (visibly upset by the previous comment) Let’s talk about my favorite subject: The Ladies. Are you a ladies man?
JK: God, it just sounds so sad. Everything you say. But to answer your question, I was just having a conversation about women with Steven (Patrick Morrissey) the other day; I was asking him how he does it. I asked him, how does he practice celibacy, and abstain from all of the advances of admiring women? He said it’s easy, he’s a homosexual and he has sex with men.

DDLR: I’m not sure you answered my question.
JK: (sighs) I have been in love with one woman, and only one woman for a long time. Her initials are Avril Lavigne.

DDLR: A long time? isn’t she only 17?
JK: Don’t you judge me, Diamond David. How was that reunion tour you did with Van Halen a couple of years ago?

DDLR: Oh, Jason. It was fantastic, exhilarating. The energy in the air from all of the fans just made me feel like I was twent…
JK: (interrupting) Yes, I do feel that my website touches people. I pour my heart and soul into it, and I think that comes through in my work.

DDLR: (sad) Yes. People have said that you are to Photoshopping and Web Designing what Michelangelo was to painting.
JK: (sighs) They said I was to these things as Michelangelo was to Sculpture, you moron. There is only one Michelangelo panel-painting in existence (fresco is an entirely different beast). It’s called the Tondo Doni. I am much more prolific of a Photoshopper than Michelangelo was a painter. Thank you very much.

DDLR: I’m sorry to have offended you. I never studied art history.
JK: Yeah, well Michelangelo isn’t exactly that deep into art history. Next question.

DDLR: I just wanted to comment on something else that you are fantastic at. [Ed. There are many, many other things that could be included right here. One of them is library science.] You are really one of my favorite writers.
JK: (smirking and talking through laughter) Really? (still giggling) Who are your other favorite writers?

DDLR: (nervous) Um. Dave Barry, Barbara De Angelis, and Othello…
JK: Did you just say Othello? Othello isn’t a person. Othello is the title of, and a character in one of Shakespeare’s tragedies.

DDLR: I was just trying to sound smart.
JK: Well. It worked pretty well for you.

DDLR: (leans forward and puts his hands to the floor)
JK: What in the fuck are you doing?

DDLR: I’m just gonna reach down between my legs, and, uh, ease the seat back…
JK: That was the worst attempt at humor that I have ever heard.

DDLR: You wrote it, you prick.
JK: Diamond Dave, you can’t say that. You cannot ruin the mock interview by revealing that I am actually writing for both of us. Not only does it distract the reader and take him/her out of the story. It also turns this into meta-fiction, which is considered postmodern drivel this month. It’s passé, and I won’t have any part of it.

DDLR: Okay, well I think that is a wrap. Do you want to get high and go to the strip club?
JK: (standing up, motioning to his assistant) Call someone and tell them to get this man out of my building. And get me Sammy Hagar on my mobile.

A little something for my favorite sisters.

Today started out just like any other. I woke up with an intense hangover and practiced my 30-minute deep thinking session. Fast forward to this afternoon. My friend (well, ex-fiance who has my last name in caricature above her Vagina. Oddly enough, my last name is Neatly Trimmed Pubic Hair) was here and around 4:23 PM touched my head and said the words I dread more than several other words, “You have gum in your hair.” I shrieked and ran to the bathroom. I touched my hair and my first thought was that it was just an unmassaged globule of Frederic Fekkai Cristal Pomade. This is highly unlikely due to my half hour intense pomade massaging I practice every morning. I smelled my fingers; spearmint, the most evil of all mints.

This is disconcerting on many levels, not the least of which being that I don’t chew gum. I sat for an hour and tried to think when and where this could have possibly happened.

Today: The Back Story

My friend Heather called me last night and said she was driving to LA, and then could I please “take her to the airport?” I assumed this was slang for sex, so I woke up very early this morning to sex up the place:
a) light the candles which are in the shape of Barry White
b) put the Magnum Condoms on the nightstand, and the ones that really fit into the drawer beneath, this way she gets excited by the condom size and by the time the rufies kick in she won’t know the difference
c) shave my pubic hair into the shape of Venezuela
d) restock the astroglide
e) litter the room with foliage

So, Heather shows up 3 hours later with luggage in her hands. “What’s with the foliage and the Magnums? Oh, I have these candles too, only mine are in the shape of the Rev. Al Sharpton, ” she says.

Girls, listen. It’s hard enough for us guys without girls being vague. So if you need to go to the airport please don’t say it with quotation marks around it.

So, off to LAX. I was outside for about 15 seconds on the way to my car. No gum around. No gum in my car, because I don’t allow it. We talk about politics all the way to the airport, still no gum. I drop her off and we hug. This is one of the events I am suspicious of. Did my good friend Heather need to get rid of her gum when we hugged and put it in my hair? I requested the security camera videotape from LAX terminal 3, but was denied. I was outside 45 seconds at LAX. Back in my car.

My next stop was Tanner’s Coffee Shop on Sepulveda. Park, order coffee and bagel with low fat cream cheese. Pay, overtip, leave. Back in car. Outside for about two minutes, in the coffee shop for about three minutes. I do not remember anything being suspicious there.

Then I drove home, read the newspaper, mumbled the words “say it isn’t so, Kobe” and ate my bagel and drank my coffee. No gum.

Then Becca called and asked could I “help her with her website?” Here we go again. I redistributed the foliage, relit Barry White, shaved Venezuela into Guatemala and emptied the magnum that I was using as a watermelon holder…

Becca knocks on my door. I open it very sexily and see her standing there with CD-R’s and various drawings to scan for her website. Since when does “help me with my website” mean to help with a website? Come on girls, don’t play with my lowering testosterone levels.

We worked on the website for an hour or two, she commented on my Barry White candles, “Cool candles. I have the ones in the shape of Carlos Santana.”

And then the darkness fell…

I hate gum. When I smell my fingers and smell spearmint, I can’t help but think of how many molecules of a strangers saliva that I am smelling also. It’s dirty, dirty stuff and it goes against my Atkin’s Diet.

I don’t think Heather would willingly introduce this tragedy upon me, which leaves many questions unanswered. How long was this shit in my hair? Whose saliva did I smell? Do I need to get a shot?

Everyone has told me to put peanut butter in my hair. I want peanut butter in my hair about as much as I want spearmint flavored saliva gum in my hair. Someone else told me that when she sat in gum she put her jeans in the freezer and could then chip away at the frozen saliva. Thanks for the advice, but there are no first class flights to Antarctica and there is SARS there still.

I have set up a tip line if anyone has any information in this case. It is 323-578-5584 (that seems like a bad idea) I must get to the bottom of this. I must know who the perpetrator is, so that I can take the proper actions. These actions will consist of myself giving fruit stripes gum to my friends cat (again, I don’t chew gum) until it is good and cat saliva-d, remove from the cats mouth and rub into perpetrators eyebrows while sleeping.

Tragedy does not usually happen in front of you. Tragedy is a television show. Tragedy is usually a section of the nightly news sandwiched between the arrested athlete and the pictures of people fighting on the other side of the world. Tragedy is usually about as real as the Reality TV in the timeslot following the news. I had never seen tragedy in three dimensions. Until today.

I have seen dead bodies before. Three times in car wrecks and then at the normal places like funerals. I didn’t expect to see several of them today.

I was returning to my office on a sunny Santa Monica afternoon with $200 worth of blueprints in my hand. I was walking towards Arizona Avenue on 2nd Street, the same walk that I make 10 times a week from my parking lot to my desk. I saw and heard commotion that was about 50 ft in front of me. I couldn’t tell exactly what was going on because there is construction next door to my building and because there are tents on Arizona, as there is every Wednesday for the Farmers Market. The screaming grew louder and louder, and then there was kind of a blur that crossed 2nd Street on Arizona. I now know that this was a speeding car, bowling over bodies and killing many people in its path.

I saw a mob of people running after the car, no doubt to take revenge on the driver of the car. Thankfully, they realized it was a disoriented old man and held back their urges to pummel the life out of him. Chaos. Cell phones don’t work. Network busy. Everyone is calling everyone. I didn’t know what to do. How do you help someone who is dying, what do you do? This is the scariest, and last moment of their lives. They were buying fruit and now they are surrounded by strangers who have absolutely no idea what to do. I looked around and saw several people dead and dying. Children. Overturned baby strollers. There was debris everywhere. The sunny day literally and figuratively turned cloudy and about 5 minutes after the car had taken the lives from these people the rain came hard. It was odd, a heavenly metaphor of sorts. Raining. Crying. Screaming. Running. Bleeding. Dying.

Police and paramedics were there in what seemed like seconds, but I don’t have any clue how long it really was. I don’t know how they do it. How is this their job? How can these people stay under control in the midst of real madness? My hat is off to them. They had the injured to hospitals quickly and undoubtedly saved their lives. It is comforting to know that there is such a quick response when you need it most.

I stood on the corner for over an hour; watching, wanting to help, but knowing there was nothing that I could do. I saw where the car had finally stopped. It was totaled. Imagine how fast it would have to be going to get that beat up from hitting just bodies. Two of these bodies were lifeless on the ground in front of it. The windshield was busted, it was covered in blood and I think I remember there being a shoe on the roof.

Shock. Everyone was in shock. The first thought on everyone’s mind was that this was a malicious action. How could it not be? How could you drive from 4th to 2nd during a Farmers Market where there are hundreds of people on accident? It is looking now like it is an accident, though that is still hard to believe.

The driver of the car was 86-year-old Russell Weller, by all accounts a sweet old man. He was on no medicine, not drunk, didn’t have a seizure, stroke or heart attack. How did this happen? 4th to 2nd is further than it sounds. It’s reported that he may have pressed the gas instead of the brake; for 2 1/2 blocks? If this is the case, then there needs to be better regulation of the driving elderly. Eight people are dead because someone with declining motor skills made a mistake. I feel bad for the sweet old man, if this truly was an accident. He will live with the memory of killing a three-year-old girl for the rest of his life. He shouldn’t have been driving… He fucking shouldn’t have been driving.

At about 4:30 it dawned on me that I had been carrying $200 blueprints around in the rain for two hours. I took them into my office sat down at my desk and noticed white peaches and a loaf of bread on my desk. I had bought them from one of the stands at the Farmers Market just a few hours earlier.

I truly feel for anyone who lost a loved one today. Get well soon to all of those who are injured. People throw the word “hero” around a lot, but today I saw the nice construction workers who work next door lift the car off of a critically injured woman and pull her to safety. I know that a lot more people would be dead had it not been for the police and paramedics who do the job that most of us could never handle. This was the most terrible thing I have ever seen.