Here's some news:

My honey is no longer taking blood thinners. So that means a kind of closure to the whole nightmare episode of the rib. Which I, for one, am not going to be too nostalgic about.

Here's some other news:

My trip to LA was uneventful, both because I was only there for a few hours, but also because it was raining out. I have an incredible track record for rain in LA, having had something like 75% rain for my time there, and that is in a place where it only rains 5 days a year. So go figure on that one.

It was kind of sad and awful to see the collapsed houses in Laurel Canyon, which I drove by on the way to the hotel.

Oh, here's some other news: It turns out someone I am related to has built a huge fortune testing urine. I am going to a party at his house this weekend. I am told his house is more like a castle, and not just in the way the old expression about your home is your castle. But more like what a king lives in. Somehow a wing of the family has emerged I was unaware of, and one guy is coming in from Holland for this party. It also seems as if I am related in some way to Mancow, the horribly offensive Howard Stern imitator in Chicago. He's someone's nephew or something, somehow related to me. Personally, I think once you get past cousins, the whole I'm related thing starts to blend with the Family of Man, where we are all related through having evolved up from tadpoles.

But somehow, even though we are all family, when the corn-rowed black teenagers who were standing in the middle of Sunset Blvd stopping cars said to me, as I passed, "What's up, brother?" I wasn't inclined to think of them as my family, and I doubt they were, either. I was walking around LA, just because I like to be the only guy who walks around LA, but also I had to get to the studio, and I saw these guys. Sunset is a wide street, I think three lanes each way, with cars going about 50-60. And these four guys were just jumping in front of cars, holding up their hands like police do at road blocks. Which I interpreted as just another way of a disenfranchised, marginalized group asserting power over the world, a.k.a a bunch of hoodlums making mischief, maybe looking to break chops, maybe carjacking. But since I was the only guy on the street, they called me their brother. And if you subscribe to the whole primordial swamp idea, where once we were all long protien chains until lightening struck and we got rearranged by a miracle and turned into a one celled creature, then yes, we all have a common ancestor in that proto-frog, and I probably should have offered them the Whole Foods Pink Lady organic apples I had in my bag. Because as gay as that apple's name is, I'm sure they would have appreciated it as a snack, rather than hitting me over the head and taking my wallet. Or maybe they were just having innocent fun playing in traffic stopping cars and intimidating people. Only there was an air of extra menace, since the whole thing was taking place around 9 in the morning, which sort of cancels out the innocent fun bit, since no rowdy teen is playing games that early in the morning.