After our disastrous, non-relaxing relaxation session at the Zen Zone, we headed up the way at Universal City Walk to our next destination: The Saddle Ranch.

The Saddle Ranch is as much a western bar as Pizza Hut is a fine Italian eatery. Instead, it is a place for aspiring hollywood actors with pre-distressed woven cowboy hats to wear them. Every person who worked there looked as if he or she had a headshot, just waiting to whip out if the opportunity arose. In continuing with my theme of crankiness today, I was cranky.

We sat down for a beer and the “Monster Appetizer Platter” - a dish of different items all fried to such a degree that the chicken strips tasted exactly like the fried mushrooms. Understanding the bland nature of their food, the Saddle Ranch was kind enough to provide four different dipping sauces, which added a different dimension of bland.

We were merely killing time, of course, before the main event: The mechanical bull. It sat out front, unused, daring us to climb aboard. With my cranky level nearing high, I considered blowing it off altogether, but I didn’t want to have sat through the saddle ranch “food” for no reason. So we paid our four bucks a pop and signed a release that said the Saddle Ranch was not responsible if I broke a bone, died, or accidentally was thrown on the bull so vigorously that I landed and accidentally impregnated a passing tourist.

As I climbed aboard the mechanically bull, a small crowd gathered. A couple of fratty boys from the bar wandered over. Before I even started, they began yelling what can politely be called “encouragements”.

“Yeah,” said one guy, “Ride it! Ride it hard!”

“Fuckin’ A!” said the other, and then noticed the small child a few feet away. “F’n A, I mean, sorry.”

The operator pushed a button and the bull spun around several times, like a compass trying to find magnetic north. Then, just as suddenly, it stopped. Was that it? Had I beaten the bull?

“Can you take your glasses off?” asked the operator woman.

“Yeah, take it off!” yelled a fratty guy.

My glasses came off, and we started over. The bull began to buck forward and back, and spin wildly.

“Oh, yeah, get that!” cried a frat boy lustily.

“Dude,” I said, trying to speak his language, “Your sex talk is not helping!”

Then, after 21 seconds of bucking and shifting, I felt myself getting tossed and rather than risk a sprained wrist (or a paternity lawsuit from a passerby) I let go and came crashing to the mat below.

“It was a very graceful fall,” said the ride operator, using an adjective I think no cowboy wants to have applied to him. My sister went next, and the fratty guys continued their catcalls, so at least they were equal-opportunity. And despite not jumping off a mountain, and wading through a sea of cheerleaders and getting suprise-massaged by a stranger, I found myself smiling and laughing. Against my better judgment, I was having a good time.

I awoke with the sun this morning, and got dressed in comfortable, loose layers of clothes suitable for jumping off a mountain. My sister Kate came in from New York late last night, and we were both ready to go Hang-Gliding. As we were preparing to make the trek out to Sylmar (town motto: “When you can’t afford Los Angeles, there’s always Sylmar”) I did the recommended thing, call the flight instructor to make sure we were cleared for takeoff.

“Hi,” I said, with the bright, chipper voice of a person excited to jump off a mountain, “I’m Opus, and me and my sister are about to head out to go hang-gliding with you, and I’m calling to check to make sure the weather’s okay!”

“Where do you live?” came the weary answer.

“Um, I’m in Los Angeles.” I said, a little uncertain where this was going.

“Look out your window. How does it look?”

“Um… a little overcast?” I replied.

“Yeah. Exactly.”

So, much like my attempt to fly a small airplane last weekend, it that hang-gliding was called on account of inclement weather. It was as if even God was sick of me trying new things.

I broke the news to Kate and we sat down to figure out Plan B. We briefly entertained the idea of visiting every food-shaped building we could find in Los Angeles (there are a surprising amount - three donut-shaped donut shops and at least one hot-dog shaped hot dog stand) but I thought of a few ideas I had meant to get around to and never did. I may not be able to go hang-gliding but I could head up to Universal City Walk and go to an oxygen bar, and then ride a mechanical bull.

A word about Universal City Walk. Universal Studios already had a hit on their hands with their theme park, but some wise mind thought, “What if we took the amusement park and took out all the rides? Leaving just the crowds and the over-priced stores and restaurants? If we added enough neon signs and flashing lights, perhaps people won’t notice that there’s not actually anything to do?” Thus, Universal City Walk was born.

Also, they charge eleven bucks for parking.

So, it was with a huge and weighty chip on my shoulder than I strolled into Universal City Walk with my sister Kate. Immediately, I noticed something unusual. There were cheerleaders everywhere. Squealing, shrieking cheerleaders. There was, apparently, some sort of Squealing Shrieking Cheerleader Convention in town.

But before you and Chris Hansen get any ideas in your head, let me put it to you plainly. There was not an attractive cheerleader in the bunch. They all wore make-up like they were trying to hide something, and had the sort of severe pony-tails that doubled as cheap facelifts. Each of them was texting or camera-phoning or clinging to one another as if life weren’t happening without a third party to view it. They were Schroedinger’s Cheerleaders.

Of course, as one who has written about every day in the past year, I am not one to talk. But this is the cranky attitude I had coming into it.

Kate and I made our way to Zen Zoo, the last remaining oxygen bar that I could find in Los Angeles. The oxygen bar was a brief trend a few years ago - a place where, for a fee, you could inhale flavored oxygen. The trend died out as quickly as an unattended jar of Sea Monkeys, and now only preyed on the curious tourists looking for something, anything to do at Universal City Walk.

To that end, Kate and I had to wait for gaggles of giggling cheerleaders to finish their turn on the tanks before we could have our turn.

I am cranky, waiting. Note the cheerleaders behind me.

Finally we were summoned, and individual rubber tubes were unwrapped and attached to the machine. A man handed me the tube and told me to put it in my nose, and then walked away. I looked at the machine, which had four flavors and four switches. The flavors were “Chillin’” “Calming” “Zen Blend” and “Tranquility.” These were all synonyms.

A woman approached us from behind. “Hi!” she said, happily, “can I show you our Happy Hands massager?”

“Wait a minute,” I said. I will admit, at this point, i was a little testy. “Some guy just told me to put this in my nose. I have no idea how to work this machien or what it’s supposed to do. What’s going on?”

She patiently explained the different “aromatherapy flavors” and showed how switches could turn each one on or off. She then proceeded to explain the massager, and give both of us a demonstration.

This is another part of the Zen Zone experience that gave me the opposite of comfort. Every few minutes, a person would approach and use a different “calming” product on you, often without warning. This is how my sister Kate was attacked with a vibrating scalp massager which, she explained later, put her on the verge of tears with how uncomfortable it made her.

Worse than that on myself or my family members was the guy who was massaging the teenage cheerleaders. Apparently an employee of the Zen Zone (though I never saw any definitive proof) he was taking his sweet time massaging the shoulders, necks, and lower backs of a row of young girls. If that is not a creepy enough image, then let me add this to it: He had a mustache. Yeah.

And how was the oxygen? I fiddled with the switches and had various blends, but overall, as my sister pointed it out, it smelled mostly of rubber tubing. Probably because of the rubber tubing that I had stuck up my nose.

Between the creepy inches-away-from-molestation massages, the near-dog-frequency shrieks of cheerleaders, the rubbery smell in my nose and the constant sales pitches to buy another kind of relaxation device, I left the Zen Zone more stressed than when I entered. More stressed, in fact, than I had been in ages. So much for zen.

Next stop: The mechanical bull!

i was excited about tonight’s event - my friend Jackie was having a birthday party at a bar that offers Turtle Racing. Yes, that’s right. Wee little turtles you can “rent” and race against friends. I was looking forward to this. I planned to call my turtle “Jockamo,” as in, “Go, Jackamo, go!”

(As a side note, I’d like to point out that during my all new year, I have watched the races of horses, dachshunds, and pigs. Must investigate further.)

Unfortunately, at the last minute, the party plans were changed from the turtled racing bar, to a bar where the only racing involved to the bottle of a mug of beer. Which actually was okay with me - i was feeling a bit under the weather and staying home seemed to be a good idea.

When I was broken into last month, a bunch of stuff got stolen, and even more stuff got tossed around. I am guessing the robbers held out at sack, threw my stuff into the air, and kept whatever landed inside. One of the tossed-but-not-taken items was an external hard drive that I kept my backups on. So for today’s new thing, boring though it may be, I got a new hard drive and using apple fancy-ass new “Time Machine” backup system, I backed up my hard drive. I think we can all be grateful that my 8th grade poetry files are now safe and secure.

And I’m going back for turtle racing. Have no doubt about that.

–opus

Today’s all new thing was to bake beer bread. My sisters sent me a bottle of beer bread dough (just add beer!) and i figured it was worth a shot. I took copious amounts of photos but then discovered that in the Great Opus Apartment Breakin of 2007, one of the random items snagged by nefarious n’er-do-wells was the USB cable for my camera.

So as proof of my my breadbaking, I present to you the following photos, taken on my computer’s built-in camera. Revel in the glory. it tasted pretty damn good with my clam chowder.

I rushed back from my east cost tour because I was excited about one thing: Comicon. It’s an annual geek-fest that started as a comic book show but has since expanded to cover all things nerdy. Music, movies, television, video games - if there were a market in “living in your mom’s basement” I’m sure that would have a booth there, too.

I had been asked to be on a panel on Censorship in Animation. Now, to be honest, I’ve only worked on one animated show - Lil’ Bush. And while we ran into some problems here and there, let’s be honest, the network let us have Barbara Bush hump Lil’ Dick Cheney so hard that he got lodged in her vagina. So they weren’t exactly squeamish.

(The one story I do have is that the network was very sensitive about our backstory on Barbara Bush - that she was actually the reanimated corpse of George Washington with female sex organs sewn on. They didn’t want to imply that she was a transvestite - so they asked if we could make her more of a Frankenstein monster. So we changed it to the head of George Washington, the body of William Howard Taft, and the lady-parts from a dead hooker. They didn’t like the hooker part and asked us to use the vagina of Betsy Ross instead. I’m not sure why digging up the reproductive parts of the lady who sewed the first American Flag is somehow less offensive than taking them off of a hooker, but we obliged.)

Even though I was jet lagged and cranky, I booked tickets on the first train to San Diego Saturday morning. I had heard from a variety of sources that driving was inadvisable - with 140,000 converging on the city it could take two to three times as long as usual. I was up at 5am to catch my 7am flight.

What I didn’t count on was Amtrak’s long and revered history of incompetence. After being given faulty directions several times to a (clearly unmarked) parking lot, I arrived in the station to find that the “easy ticket printing kiosks” were, in fact, not very easy at all - they were out of order. And the line to talk to one of the two bleary-eyed Amtrak wage slaves behind glass was a half-hour long. I missed the train - and with it the panel, and all of Comicon.

Perhaps next year I’ll wade through the nerds. This year, I just cursed Amtrak under my breath, then cursed them again over my breath, and then got brunch.

I write this while nursing a far-too-expensive beer and paying for far-too-expensive wifi access at Los Angeles International Airport. My flight has been delayed over three hours, with no end in sight. The computer system which processes incoming international flights in immigration is broken. Thusly, they can’t let people off the planes for fear they may run into America and cause havok. And because of that, I cannot board my plane to Bulgaria.

Yes, i said Bulgaria. We’ll get to that in a minute.

The point is, I’m thinking about delays. They’re delaying my plane. And I’ve been delaying updating the site. So I can’t rightly get too mad at Lufthansa.

The thing is, I’ve been doing new things (albeit often lame, weak new things), it’s just that I’ve been so incredibly busy I haven’t often been able to write/post/edit video/upload photos regarding them. It’s something I didn’t really take into account - that the doing of the thing isn’t what would swallow my life, it’s the posting about it.

That being said, I am going to make a real effort to get up to date. This might mean that I will be posting some lean explanations of my new things for the past few weeks. But the sooner I can get that out of the way, the sooner I can get back on track. We’re coming up on the six month anniversary of All New Year - the halfway mark. I can’t give up now.

Oh, and I’m going to Bulgaria. Told you I’d cover that.

–opus

The “wet paint” sign is the set-up to a thousand vaudeville routines and silent film schtick. So when I saw one today on the wall at work, I figured, why not make it a part of the All New Year as well? With no turpentine in sight I strode up boldly and, with only a moment’s hesitation slapped my bare palm on the wall.

Alas, it proved anticlimactic. The sign lied to me - the paint had long since dried. Which is probably for the best, since I had no way of cleaning a wet painted hand. As those who have done nothing often say, it was the thought that counts.

Tune in tomorrow for the taste test of the All New Beer.

–opus

I feel this may be one of many “Best Laid Plans” posts I’ll be putting up in the next 50 weeks.

I write this with my ass planted firmly on the attractively patterned floor of LAX. My ass should be somewhere in mid-air at this point, were it not for the supreme ineptitude of Frontier Airlines. Their motto is “Frontier Air: Much Like The Real Frontiers, We Expect To Lose A Lot Of You To Rickets.”

When checking in, the Friendly Robot Kiosk told me my date was delayed a half an hour. Never one to make a fuss, I smiled wide and got myself what technically was a Quesadilla in the way that non-toxic playdoh is technically edible. Neither are theories you want to put to the test.

When I returned from the alleged mexican meal to my gate I found that the flight was somehow, magically, un-delayed. And that I had missed it. But I smiled wide and asked the woman what I could do about this.

She said for twenty five dollars she could print my ticket out and send me to Alaska Airlines. So I smiled wide and let her, but when I got to the Alaska Airlines counter, they sent me back to Frontier. The Frontier woman cursed me under my breath and scribbed something on my ticket and sent me back to the Alaska Airlines counter.

I could not read it, but apparently it said something like “Take this wandering waif under your wing or our airlines will be forced to duel at dawn” because the Alaska Airlines woman begrudgingly accepted me. By “accepted me” i mean, of course, sent me to another counter.

So I went to that counter and, if I must be honest, yet another. And now I sit, assured that they will call my name and that, eventually, I will get to San Fransisco. I’m still doing my best to smile wide, but if the people here are not careful, my All New Thing today will be pitching a huge hissy fit in the middle of LAX.

Your cranky correspondent,

–opus