Thank you Lauren from up the street! You are such a wonderful friend for making a donation to the page, and as I said earlier, I owe you and Nick a lunch at Soy Cafe. Thank you Michael from Brooklyn! You are one of the good guys, and good guys always win at life while bad guys always lose. I feel like with another two or three good-sized donations, I’ll be within shouting distance of my goal. There are six days left to donate. If you have not already, please do, dear readers. Why? My roommates are moving out and taking their turntable with them, and I don’t have money to buy a new one and the new phone/contract I have to purchase next week. If you love the music you hear on this page, and want to continue hearing it (that’s not a threat, it just means I will not be able to rip weird, rare, vinyl-only releases anymore), you should donate a few dollars to this page so that I can purchase a new turntable and phone. There is a Paypal link at the top left corner of this page. Or, you can bid on one of my eBay auctions. Or, you can e-mail me and I’ll provide you with a mailing address if you want to send a check instead of using Paypal. Thank you. Remember, each donor will be rewarded with a personal “Thank You” gift that I will be tailoring to each person once the web-a-thon has ended (I hope you like disease-ridden needles!).

Today being an off-day from work, I awoke early. I was asked to run an errand for Lindsey’s law firm back in New Jersey. After showering and finding clean clothes, I received my instructions: go to the Los Angeles City Offices on Ramirez Street to locate and copy important legal documents. Sounds exciting right? It’s not, but when you have an overactive imagination like I do, even the most mundane errands becomes a matter of life and death, where one false step could be the difference between walking through an clearly-marked entranceway and falling down an open elevator shaft. Sometimes I pretend that grocery shopping is a plot twist in my mundane existence, that items on shelves are wires connected to an armed explosive, and if I don’t get all the bagels and microwave dinners and beer quick enough my stomach will blow up.

The building was a new one for me; normally the errands I run for Lindsey bring me to Whittier or the surrounding neighborhoods. This time I was going to a part of downtown I’d never before visited. Seriously, the building was like a police fortress. I’m not even kidding — I was at the very same building with the helipad that services all those bell helicopters that fly around this half of the city. I parked on the roof, right below the helipad, and it felt like I could reach out and touch a police chopper if I wanted to. Good luck trying that. To get into the parking complex you have to go through a security gate, and the complex is crawling with police officers. I guess that’s where everyone goes to have their cop cars serviced, and where they pick up all their weapons…at least, I imagine there’s a room in there with a huge cache of weaponry. Really crazy shit too, like police-issued crossbows and maces and shit. Oh, and I parked like 20 yards from a fucking mobile command unit. Like in the movies!

It took more than a few minutes to find the room, because the layout was very unusual. When I walked into the office, I announced my arrival by saying, “My name is Evan…you’re supposed to be holding a box for me.” I could have sworn I saw the girl behind the front desk reach for a hidden silent alarm button, but instead she calmly said that she did not recognize my name, and could I please tell her the box number. Whoops. Forgot to write down the box number. I called Lindsey, who laughed at me for writing down the case number but not the box number. As we spoke, she asked me if everybody was staring at me on the phone. I said yes. This wasn’t true, until I nervously started playing with a staple remover on an unoccupied desk. I tried to dislodge a staple from the device, and it shot across the desk and hit a bellhop bell. The ring startled the girl behind the desk. I guess she decided she’d seen enough monkeying around, and took some initiative by calling somebody and asking what the box number was for the case file I was requesting. The first one they brought out was wrong, but the second box contained the file I needed. I quickly removed all the pages that needed to be photocopied, copied them, and paid the receptionist $1 and change for my troubles.

Lunch at Aroma Cafe and now the Mets game (which just became official as they pulled out the tarp for a rain delay. All in all, a good day off! Except for my becoming totally disillusioned with Touch & Go / Quarterstick Records, but that’s another rant for another day.

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