Battle of the Garrish Christmas Displays

A few houses down the street, the neighbors have an unattractively decorated house that blares synthesized Christmas music, seemingly out of sync with the blinking lights that hang from the house in a sparse and disorderly fashion. Directly across from them, another family has decorated their house with some positively bizarre light-up aluminum pole Christmas trees and more blaring Christmas music. When you stand in between them, you get to experience the spirit of Christmas, channeled through a surround-sound cacophony of seasonal joy. I wasn't here on Christmas Eve, but my room mate tells me that they engaged in a kind of passive-aggressive volume war with each other that resulted in both houses turning their music up to the point where you could hear them from anywhere on the street.

The Erotic Dragon Poster Table

When I first moved to LA I stayed with a high school friend who, at the time, was living in Burbank. I'll call him Greg, since that's his name. One day Greg comes home and tells me about this bizarre table he saw lying by the curb a little ways down the street. There was, apparently, a dragon painted on its surface. We go to inspect it and as promised, there is some elaborate dragon artwork on the table, though it turns out that it's little more than a large poster that had been affixed to its surface and then coated in some sort of finish to disguise this fact. No matter, the table itself was pretty cool: the legs and edges had been carved out in such a way as to suggest that it had been forged by the hands of fantastical creatures with wood from the ancient growth of an enchanted forest. Some nerd had probably spent most of the 80's playing Dungeons and Dragons on this thing's sacred surface.

But then I saw the nipple. It's difficult to explain why this is so, but it's not immediately obvious to onlookers that the dragon depicted on the table is in the process of engaging in some sort of sexual activity with another creature that looks not unlike a venus fly trap with breasts. If you've read this far you'll probably understand why I say that at this point we couldn't have not taken it home with us.

Fast forward several months and I'm living elsewhere and Greg is preparing to leave Southern California. Naturally, he bequeaths the Erotic Dragon Poster Table (as it has since become known) to myself and my room mates. We live in a crowded abode in North Hollywood: three humans and three dogs. And so, the table, being far too amazing to discard, was earmarked for storage in the garage behind the house--except that there was no storage space available--and the table languished for months and months in the sun out in the backyard while we promised ourselves repeatedly that we'd clear space for it soon.

Needless to say, the table's ancient magic was no defense against SoCal's cruel sun. The imagery rapidly faded to the point where it was hardly recognizable. At some point, two of the legs, which were already in need of repair, gave way. Eventually, my room mate decided to use its sad remains as a surface for painting.

I am not a religious man, but if there is one thing that I'm going to hell for, it's allowing the destruction of this thing of beauty. The Erotic Dragon Table sits there still, a miserable carcass and a testament to my inaction. It screams "please let me die," but neither my room mates nor I have the heart.

Almost Famous

This has been going on for some time now, but thanks to a recent haircut, the number of people who approach me to tell me that I look like "that guy from Grey's Anatomy" has increased dramatically. They're referring to actor T.R. Knight, who plays Dr. George O'Malley on the show, but not once have I gotten anything more specific than "that guy." On one particularly amusing occasion, a fully grown man accosted me in a Ralph's parking lot and then paraded me in front of his disinterested wife. More recently, I overheard a duo of gabbing girls at the gym in North Hollywood where I work out: "Hey, he looks like that guy from Grey's anatomy. Wait, is he that guy from Grey's Anatomy?!"

I can only assume that there are untold masses who say nothing and silently believe that I actually am that guy and take my general, unfriendly demeanor--or possibly my presumed status as B-list celebrity whose name no one can ever recall--as a sign that they shouldn't approach me.

In actuality, T.R. Knight is pudgier, less attractive, and 10 years older than me.