Zombywoof, Matcom, Nothingshocksmeanymore

[hunter]

9. Zombywoof likes the Los Angeles Dodgers and Thousand Oaks California.

Not my favorite cups of tea.

There may still exist a Don Drysdale autograph I acquired as a young person, stashed away in the family steel shipping container archives my brother keeps scattered about his small farm. But I don't care.

My parents are escaped refugee artists of Hollywood. They met working in Hollywood. Then they decided to be something other than Hollywood artists for much less lucrative work, of the starving artist sort.

At one point we were all living as indigent U.S.A. citizens in a public park in France. I was a young teen. The local French community was so disturbed that they bought us Ferry tickets to England. Go away. Now.

My memory of that time is the worst public restroom on earth. Women and girls required male escorts lest they encounter drunk men masturbating for them. The hole in the floor toilet itself was equally unpleasant.

These days my parents live in a tropical rain forest, drinking and bathing in water that falls on their roof, and buying their food from local farmers. I've never visited this retirement home of theirs. I hate flying and haven't yet made the opportunity to sail. But they do have phone and internet service, most days.

Two of my siblings have big screen and television credits, SAG, but are many years past that sordid business.

I flunked out early from Hollywood as a little kid who would stare at various "important" people the same way I'd stare at interesting insects. I'm fascinated by insects, but not always various "important" people, with or without coaching. I think I scared the Hollywood Bozo, maybe Sheriff John too. Hobo Kelley thought I was sort of cool.

Little Hunter sees all, and never forgets...

My grandma's wild bad-girl-and-frequently-Hollywood-married-and-divorced-sister, and my once-married grandma loved Hollywood so much they both ran away to it as teens. I have the photos. Dangerous young women.

Their dad, my great grandfather, was a dreamer of motion pictures and airplanes and electricity, but he bet wrong and then he died of cancer in the the Great Depression. My grandma married an Army Air Force Officer her mom hated, even when he was honorably discharged and making bits of metal that landed men on the moon.

I was taking a picture of my great grandfather's home in San Francisco one day, the home my grandma and her sister were born in, and where they lived as children, a home long lost to our family. One resident simply couldn't believe it was once a single family home. Now it's multiple apartments. When my grandma was a little girl it was a big house with two front doors, one door for family, one door opening to stairs up and down for the hired help because in that neighborhood there was no back door. My grandma's personal childhood bedroom is now an expensive apartment that my wife and I couldn't afford, the rent twice our own mortgage payment.

My wife and I met as Los Angeles public school science teachers.

It's probably a sin, but we fled Los Angeles. Or maybe not a sin. The U.S.A we've landed in is much as difficult. We just don't have to commute by automobile so much.

We live in a place with roads burdened by a few names of my ancestors, those ancestors sketchy, a few of them nasty.

One of my grandfathers freaked out when I was marrying, in his words, "A Mexican Girl" and he boycotted our Big Catholic Wedding. To his credit he got over that before he died. Maybe because he'd suffered a stoke and gone blind, but i like to think better of him than that.

Amusingly, to me anyways, a few of his male ancestors had married Irish Catholic girls, were maybe covert Catholic or other religious dissidents themselves which is how they ended up fleeing for America, landing on the beach or docks, running for the wilderness.

My wife's family is Native American and Irish Catholic, similar history, surviving by avoiding troubles, mostly by avoiding the hot spots of human history. One of my my wife's uncle who didn't survive is buried in Arlington National Cemetery, killed in France the very last days of World War II.

My wife's grandma never really recovered from that.