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.

Once upon a time a city was erected, and when the neon lights were turned on, the people came in droves. Their dreams were advertised to them wholesale and everyone clamored over each other to buy them. When they realized these were not the dreams they wanted, the people turned to each other for meaning. But before they could embrace, fault-lines in the earth tore apart, separating them, and these chasms were filled-in with highways roaring with traffic. Alas, the people found themselves isolated on concrete islands with no way to reach each other. They now make up the permanent and wounded infrastructure of this city. They had loved and destroyed Los Angeles. . . and Los Angeles had returned the favor.

There is a Band-Aid for the love-impoverished, but it costs about $36 and it doesn’t include a martini. Our quick-fixing society has found yet another way to cut the bullshit to under five minutes with the advent of speed dating. But while the bandage may stick at first, it ends up just sliding off with nothing much to hold on to. We either need better adhesives or we will just have to keep dating the old fashioned way. I vote for Velcro: it sticks but there’s no commitment, and it’s flexible enough for a fickle city like LA.

Blasting across America at three in the morning on a Delta flight to Cincinnati and then onwards to Hartford. I hate red-eyes because being thrown across a continent at 30,000 feet in pitch darkness unnerves me for some reason. Despite my irrational fear of sudden oblivion, I am glad to be on this flight. Behind us L.A. is burning, like Rome before it, and the “moderate” air-quality was getting to me (along with a lot of other things). My official motive for being on this commuter rocket is to officiate one of my best friend’s weddings as an ordained Reverend. But my ulterior-motive is to get the hell out of Dodge for a few days and breath some fresh air and let my brain cool off and my soul heal.

Security was tight at the Republican National Concession, like it always is. But I found a way in, like I always do. I flew into Phoenix on the afternoon hilt from L.A. Popped two Vicodin and didn’t notice the plane was actually moving until we touched down under a hazy midday glow, silhouetting the high tower of Sky Harbor Int’l Airport. Not that I needed the Vicodin for a one‐hour plane flight, but I’d been up for almost 32 hours at that point, scrambling without luck to find a pass into John McCain’s predictable concession speech at the Arizona Biltmore Resort & Spa. And besides, metal detectors have always made me nervous. Upon landing, it was clear that I needed more sleep, certainly, but it was already two p.m. and there was no time for that now.