sweetheart redux

I Hardly Ever Did I watched TV Through birth, death and taxes When I was the addendum Or when it was my own mother Or my own uterus An organ saddled with far-reaching expectations And sickness I watched TV. People came and people went and still I watched TV. In the hospital, a woman named Holly and I watched Hours of this thing called Special Victims Unit Every day Even though a Vietnam Vet with delusions of grandeur Begged us to change the station. I watched TV every day of Summer Vacation for pretty much My entire childhood but I vowed that the next day I Would stop, That I would take a walk or something, But I hardly ever did. Special Victims Unit

  jill crane obituary

    Above - both sides of a valentine mom made me  in 1993 or 1994 Pages from one of the magazines mom and I used to make for ourselves in like the early nineties.   The hand is mine and the pretty stargirl hippie drawing is hers:

Well, it's going to be my mother Jill's birthday this Sunday, September 18th.  She died May 2, 2016.  I'm going to post things that remind me of her this weekend.  this (above) is one of our favorite scenes in the 1991 film Dogfight .  The first time we saw it was shortly after River Phoenix died.  We turned to each other simultaneously when this part came on and started crying because it was so sad that River was dead. This was another movie we loved, Housekeeping (1987):   My mom and I loved Guns N' Roses.  We had the video for Patience (above) on VHS and both loved the scene (at 5:19 - 5:21) where he's watching TV in his hotel room and looks disenchanted and handsome.  We rewound the tape just to see that part once or twice and even had it on "pause" at that scene before, and took a picture of the TV screen.     us in front of her apartment, garage sale, 1997  one of her many (possibly over a thousand ...

If you are a frequent reader of the blog, you know that much of what appears on here is an exploration of two of the main characters of my life, my mom Jill Crane and her best friend Bill Tunilla , and the years spent with them in Pasadena.   Whenever I walk around my old Pasadena stomping grounds (often), I take note of the changes versus all the things that have stayed the same, and I take it all so personally, thinking things like “When I was a kid, I had no idea they would build a Target on this block someday.”   I have a hard time keeping up, and often give Geof (who is unfamiliar with the area) directions that apply to the Pasadena of two decades ago, like the other night when we went to a movie at a Pasadena theater he hadn’t been to before and that I guess I hadn’t been to since I saw “Me and You and Everyone We Know ,” which seems like just last year or something but was actually released in 2005 (I looked it up).   I told him “Just park behind this bui...

  "cheer up, son":  Apocalypse Now Death Cards scene Sad: -In fourth grade my teacher was a flamboyant gay drama coach whom I adored even though sometimes he was high-maintenance, requiring constant attention and adoration from his students.  He had a very lesbianish friend he'd known for forever who was a part-time flight attendant - because she loved adventure - and also a substitute teacher; she taught our class whenever our teacher was out sick.  They were probably both in their forties.  He wore a professorial cardigan and a goatee.  She was tiny, with thinning short hair and an appealingly ugly face, and when I saw Rocky Horror years later I was reminded of her by the character of Columbia.  I was very attached to them and always imagining what they were like in their regular lives outside of school, just hanging out with their friends, and what their respective apartments may have looked like and what music each listened to.  One day, ...