Anticipation better not get the best of me. An hour before my partner in XXX crime arrives to pick me up to go to Sardo’s Grill & Lounge, the so-called home of the San Fernando Valley’s Tuesday night Porn Star Karaoke, expectations are flying around, having a heyday. We have both been assigned to check out where the valley’s living exhibits go after a long, hard day at work to relax and hang loose, no pun intended. I repeatedly tell myself there’s no point in all this anticipating, that thinking too much about what will be will kill it. But in all fairness to myself, fantasizing about it is half the fun. All I can think about is having to sing “Physical” or “She’ll Be Cuming ‘Round the Mountain” to a crowd of drunken adult film stars while my arm is draped around Roxanne Hall and the new Jenna Jameson.

Adam Szymczak was born in the year One Thousand Nine Hundred and Eighty Seven. He was raised in a quaint New England town, and studied English at Suffolk University. He has always drawn and doodled, but only recently became truly interested in it. His comic book fury can be witnessed at: http://www.goodshowsir.com.

During parties, especially ones in designer-conscious downtown Los Angeles lofts, the couch is coveted territory. People have just spent twenty minutes making polite non-committal remarks around the kitchen island, and all anyone wants to do, at this point, is rest on the cushions and maybe squeeze an end pillow. However, the same competitive drive that applies to every other aspect of life in the city is amplified here. The people on the couch are ruthless motherfuckers.

In the spirit of the obsessive list-making that has become the traditional way to mark the end to calendar years in the first world, here is a guide to the previous 3 years ending in 9 (in no particular order). Happy 2010!

In the past, personal information existed in dusty file cabinets, spread across multiple Midwestern states. People were ashamed to be file clerks, or if they weren’t ashamed, they at least had the decency to be drunk whenever possible. The notion of privacy—something which we eagerly gave up about a decade ago, but are only now starting to miss—was sacrosanct. You could actually talk about how something was ‘an invasion of privacy’ and people would not think you were aiming to shack up in the woods and pen a manifesto.