It was a routine check-up, and thank goodness, Richard’s doctor gave him a clean bill of health. “You’re in excellent shape, Richard. The only concern I have is that your cholesterol is a little high, about 280mg/dl. What’s your diet like, these days?”
“Eggs for breakfast, eggs for lunch, eggs for dinner,” Richard proclaimed proudly as if his egg diet were a sign of bravery.
“My God, Richard , why do you eat eggs three times a day?”
With his right index finger pointing to the three fingers on…
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Added by Brad Rose on December 4, 2009 at 8:30pm —
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Because of his English parentage—his father was an English-born professor who taught history at UCLA and his mother a West-end Londoner who had scraped her way into the journalism profession and had written for the Guardian, before marrying Buck’s father and moving to LA---Buck had the faint accent of someone who sounded like they grew up in California, but who occasionally let slip a phrase in “the received pronunciation,” the Queen’s English.
Occasionally, while traveling, Buck had been mista…
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Added by Brad Rose on December 2, 2009 at 9:00pm —
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Richard observed, although without noticing at first, that Lola was standing at her kitchen sink, staring vacantly out the window, and eating chocolate chip cookies from a large bag. At first, he barely noticed as she dipped into the bag and pulled a cookie out, but then, as he watched her successive movements, he gradually became aware that she was separating the chips from the host cookie, and only eating the chips.
“Lola, you’re just eating the chips. Why aren’t you eating the cookie?”
Lola…
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Added by Brad Rose on November 30, 2009 at 10:30pm —
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With the calculator on her I-phone, Jackie did a quick computation.
Let’s see, the average life expectancy in the U.S, is 77.7 years. That equals 28,360.5 days of life--average life. I am 38 years old, and some change. So I’ve lived 13, 870 days, already—almost half a life. Of course, no matter how long I live, each day represents a larger percentage of the time I have left on earth. And like the doctor said, ‘We’re all going to die sometime…most of us just don’t know when or where.”
Jac…
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Added by Brad Rose on November 29, 2009 at 8:00pm —
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The approaching five-foot wave had initially looked as if it would pass by and break safely behind him, but unexpectedly, as if it had been hit by a sudden surge of backwash or riptide, had peaked, and broken directly in front of Buck. To avoid being caught inside the break zone, where he knew he would be pushed violently back toward shore, Buck immediately thrust the sharp nose of his surfboard down beneath the on-coming avalanche of roiling whitewater, as he frantically attempted to press the…
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Added by Brad Rose on November 29, 2009 at 10:00am —
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A: I am Alexander the Great
D: I am Diogenes, the dog.
A: The dog?
D: I nuzzle the kind, bark at the greedy, and bite louts.
A: What can I do for you?
D: Stand out of my light.”
Diogenes,
Seven Greeks: Translation by Guy Davenport., p175.
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Added by Brad Rose on November 29, 2009 at 12:56am —
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“I think you’ve had some challenges with men,” Jackie clinically observed to Lola, who sat staring, wide-eyed and incredulous at the pedestrian understatement of her therapist. “The stories you’ve told me since our first meeting, a few months ago, the stories about your father and about being a young woman in Hollywood, make me wonder if this is the best place for you, especially given your history?”
Is this, Lola wondered,
what I am paying her 150 dollars an hour to tell me?
Lol…
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Added by Brad Rose on November 28, 2009 at 11:30pm —
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Announcement: All of the "Lola Loves Richard" series are now posted at
http://lola-loves-richard.blogspot.com/ I think there are now about 100 "episodes."
I will continue to debut each installment here and, as always, appreciate your feedback.
The new "home" (or maybe it's a warehouse? gulp) for Richard and Lola, and Jackie and Buck is intended as a place where all of the episodes are consolidated and can be found with ease From "Roosters First Kiss," to "Fish Dreaming."
Thanks to all who have…
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Added by Brad Rose on November 28, 2009 at 6:06pm —
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Buck finished-up writing his 2000 world article for
Travel and Leisure. He despised the fact that he needed to write for these upscale "glamor" mags, the ones who targeted the well-heeled, the affluent. He hated to write chatty little stories that made the “underdeveloped world” “come alive” in a way that would entice the moneyed reader to visit the often impoverished and destitute landscape that appeared so quaint and beautiful in the magazine’s full color spreads. But Buck had to make a…
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Added by Brad Rose on November 27, 2009 at 2:30pm —
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The small aquarium in Lola’s living room shone like a dazzling TV screen that inadvertently had been left on in the middle of the otherwise unlit night. The Yellow Damsels and Emperor Angel Fish darted about, like colorful bolts of lightning under the uninterrupted light. The air filter hummed unerringly.
Lola, shuffled through the midnight on the way to the kitchen to get one spoonful of Hagan Daz. She had a craving.
“Go to bed Olie, go to sleep Diablo,” she whispered as she headed back to he…
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Added by Brad Rose on November 27, 2009 at 11:00am —
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It had been a year since Jackie had received the diagnosis.
Thinking now, about the scene that had occurred in her doctor’s office, Jackie still felt both despairing and angry.
She recalled that when she had responded to the disastrous news by saying to her doctor, “So we don’t know when or where it will happen, but basically you’re handing me a death sentence,” her doctor had retorted, “We’re all going to die sometime, Jackie, and most us don’t know when or where.”
Jackie remembered the mome…
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Added by Brad Rose on November 26, 2009 at 2:30pm —
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Los Angeles is an immense city, sprawling over hundreds of square miles, a seemingly endless urban blanket of “built environment,” where automobiles are the de facto native population, and people seem like an added afterthought, a slapdash attempt to humanize an otherwise non-human landscape. Except in occasional incongruous patches of nearly treeless parks, which seemingly hevbe been placed haphazardly about the city, L.A. is unrelieved by any connection to what could be construed as the ‘natur…
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Added by Brad Rose on November 25, 2009 at 1:00pm —
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Yes, it’s true, she’d written the ‘poison pen’ e-mail, but she intended to obey the cardinal rule of e-mail: DON’T’ SEND death threats, confessions, flaming attacks, or love letters for complete strangers, until you WAIT for 24 HOURS and carefully consider all of the consequences, all the ramifications.
ALWAYS WAIT 24 HOURS!
She hated her boss—that arrogant mother @#^%#!, and she had the dirt that she knew would ruin his reputation--- with his employer AND with his wife.
Fuming, she sat at he…
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Added by Brad Rose on November 23, 2009 at 4:00pm —
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It wasn’t that she was naturally a criminal; she wasn’t. It’s just that ever since she had received the results of the genetic test, her knowledge about her future sometimes became too much for her to bear. It sometimes drove her to do things she wouldn’t otherwise do.
The car theft, picking up a handsome stranger after drinking all morning in a bar—what had these meant to her?
Jackie was an excellent therapist. She knew that sooner or later she would get to the bottom of her own issues—whethe…
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Added by Brad Rose on November 23, 2009 at 8:30am —
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Almost Lucky
From the 13th floor window of the Beverly Wilshire hotel, he watched as the late afternoon smog settled over LA, like clay-white concrete; air so thick it was impossible to imagine that it wouldn’t crush the hearts of everyone caught beneath its mass.
Why, he wondered,
do we learn the most from the things we shouldn’t do?
Turning now, from the window, and surveying the graying room, he could see that she looked so beautiful as she lie there, asleep, her breathing ne…
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Added by Brad Rose on November 19, 2009 at 2:21pm —
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Buck was eager to see Jackie again. He was a little surprised at this desire, because he never expected to be so attracted to a woman who was a car thief, and one who began drinking in downtown bars well before noon. He certainly never expected to be attracted to a woman whose profession was “getting inside” the heads of others.
Buck knew therapy was a strange practice, even stranger than auto theft. But that didn’t matter now; he wanted to see Jackie one more time. Even if she were a “shrink.”
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Added by Brad Rose on November 17, 2009 at 7:30pm —
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Lola, of course, didn’t want to confess that the reason she was here meeting with Jackie was to ferret out information, any information, about this attractive woman who now sat across form her, the woman whom she thought may be having an affair with her boyfriend. No, the last thing Lola wanted to mention today, was anything having to do with Richard. Tempted as she was to confront Jackie, she knew she couldn’t just come out and say, “So you’re the one who Richard is sleeping with!”
“So what br…
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Added by Brad Rose on November 16, 2009 at 10:00pm —
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The police were astonishingly polite. They knocked at Richard’s front door, waited patiently for Richard to answer their knock, and when he answered, explained that they were conducting a routine investigation of an auto theft, and wanted ask him “just a few questions.” They even called him “sir.”
As one officer, a lumbering man who looked as if he had killed many criminals in his career, began to ask Richard if he had any knowledge of a couple that he may have seen walking along Mulholland on…
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Added by Brad Rose on November 14, 2009 at 10:30pm —
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Lola parked her car outside Jackie’s small, Spanish style home, just south of Melrose. She had found the address with no trouble, and after she got out of the car, she walked along a small cement path that led to the back of the house, where she entered Jackie’s small, but quite comfortably furnished office.
“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” Jackie said, as she extended her hand and looked Lola directly in the eye for a second longer than was entirely comfortable for Lola.
Jackie was warm, but no…
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Added by Brad Rose on November 13, 2009 at 9:00am —
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On the way to her first therapy appointment with Jackie Weston, Lola found that, for some inexplicable reason, scenes from her childhood were now popping into her head. Although the day was sunny and the Santa Monica freeway was crowded with traffic, in her mind’s eye, she had been transported to her parents’ house in Boston, years ago, when she was about 13.
Letting herself drift, now, Lola recalled the times when, to escape the mid-summer heat and humidity, she would descend the house’s stair…
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Added by Brad Rose on November 12, 2009 at 10:30pm —
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