THESE ARE A FEW OF MY LEAST FAVORITE THINGS

There was an incident on the lot a few weeks ago involving a fellow employee who had gone missing. The last time anyone saw her was on when she left work on a late Friday afternoon. Not one to usually to keep her supervisors in the dark on whether or not she'd be in work and family members calling in inquiring her whereabouts- suspicion immediately set in that something indeed was awry. Her car was discoverd missing, but most of her personal belongings were found in her apartment. Candlelight vigils were held for her and nothing was heard for two weeks.

Well, last week they found her missing car in Chinatown....with her strangled, bound and gagged in the trunk. Nobody knows what happened beyond that. No follow up reports showed up on the eleven o'clock news. Last I heard, the suspects are either jilted lovers and boyfriends - and I don't know if any arrests were ever made.

Got a e-mail from a major studio head that a condolence book has been set up in the main lobby of the building of where she worked for all her employees to sign. Her family will be conducting funeral services tomorrow morning. I was fortunate not to know her - otherwise, I'd be out kicking the shit of the perpretrator.

On a level

of a personal scale, last Friday night was one hell of a adventure- and it just goes to show that nightmares can come true. Ever since my move to a new lower class structure in Van Nuys a few months ago, I've been having these sort of dream like premonition of someone jumping through my open bedroom and slashing either my throat or my eyeballs out with a box cutter or something similiar to it's ilk. I'm on the ground level now and my window faces a fenced in alley, but it looks like the gate lock can be easily jimmied. Since now our true Southern California brutal weather has hit us hard with triple digits, it's hard not to sleep with your window wide open, even if you have a Honeywell fan blowing at high speed in your face while you sleep. Aproximately at 1 in the morning- I'm still up chain smoking Parlies and reading Batman comics until I hear the weird heavy crackle outside my window.

Now that's way too heavy to be sounding like a stray cat or posseum. So in the glare of my reading light, I inch up the window to peek outside the window- just ever so slightly and sure enough....

there's some illegal nutjob trying to scope out some hot peepshow action that I assume is happening in the neighboring couple's bedroom ( I gotta admit the wife is indeed a knockout - and this leads to my conclusion that this freako who hopped over the fence without paying a quarter was probably scoping her out all day. I'm not surprised if that were to be the case ).

Amazingly enough, I didn't panic, or let on that I was there observing him observing them, so I quietly tiptoed across my room to the door, with a little thought that maybe he hasn't caught on that I spotted him and ends up putting a cap in my back while I was creaked my way through the hallway, out my front door and rushed my ass over to my apartment manager's apartment and started pounding away on his door. Because that thought was exactly causing me to nearly

shit a brick in my pants.

Sure enough, my manger was sleeping and disoriented- his dog barking up a storm. He thought I was shittin' him when I told him- but I distinctively remember him telling me that if you see someone in the alley that doesn't belong there, to let him know immediately. So he takes the flashlight to investigate, and sure enough after I hear some yelling exchanged do I see my manager running to the opposite gate in trying to head the guy off. I tell my manager as he runs by me, 'hey, was I right?' - ' Yeah, you weren't imagining things ' .

But my manager didn't catch him and soon enough, the neighbors who were being spied upon are talking to me asking questions and thanking me for keeping my eyes and ears open ( I think the reason why the peeping tom didn't see me catching him was because my reading lamp casts a faint green glow and was probably not enough to be a distraction to him while he conducted unscrupious activities) and the police stopped by to ask for a description of the guy, but I couldn't give them one, because the most I saw of the guy was in engulfed in shadows.

Anyway, I'm off for a special preview sceening of Sky Captain & The World of Tomorrow- of which should be heralded as the official last of the big summer blockbuster. It does reach your nearby multiplex on the 'official' last weekend before Autumn is declared.

~

Coat