Miller Time

UNITED STATES—A good pandemic is not being wasted: it is sending science racing for answers and fresh ideas are not only being heard, but being implemented. For instance, on busy thoroughfares like Sunset with heavy foot traffic, pedestrian crosswalk buttons were suddenly phased out. Something I'd been dreaming about, especially as in recent times, as you'd have groups of...

UNITED STATES—Upon the purple divan under a pile of fleeces, the erstwhile ‘80s star, Rhett Thornton, sat propped up on front of the tryptich of three massive widescreen TVs. He was wound up. Sleep happens when there is no life. And having no life, he had taken three Corvalis trying vainly to woo sleep and all it did was...

UNITED STATES—Meet Eliza’s accomplice: Roger worked for a production house in Hollywood and had slickly edited together breaking news flashes about a terrorist group that was going to release a geriatric bomb in different parts of the globe. From the Hollywood Hills to Lake Cuomo, in Italy. Flashes appeared of people in black ski-masks that revealed only their eye-holes...

Author’s note: This continuation of the unfinished story “Lost” is the order of the day. Even as we are thrust by brave new times into deeply moving explorations of the new and near, as we are keeping close to that seldom enjoyed place home, I take it upon myself to carry on also with the old and dear and...

UNITED STATES—Listen, I’m wearing a mask, er bandana until I can find a mask. It’s been weird and amazing these last eight days of quarantine. I see it all from my pinhole, onto the world, Hollywood, USA. Weird times. Like I wouldn’t be surprised if somebody stopped me at Hollywood and Vine and offered to sell me a circus. But I...

UNITED STATES—A phone call came at the least appropriate moment from Rhett Thornton. “Rats,” she gasped. She knew better than to take that call. Rhett would go off on some tangent or tirade. She would be stuck on the island of traffic, frantic over horn honks, being gifted the finger and besieged by mean sneers. There could be no more...

UNITED STATES—Doing a good deed in poor conscience really sucks. Eliza knew. She was crossing the city on a Friday night, after being held hostage by a motor mouth on a phone, either too drugged or oblivious to get the drift. Eliza was squirming, she detested procrastination, even to use the term implied a kind of compromise. And that...

UNITED STATES—Now the object of Jeremy’s final gran-slam charity, blubbered. “You must think I’m scum, hovering here all day scamming tourists. I don’t wish this. Believe me. I’m trying to go clean. You know my addiction got me into this dark rocky place. You’re too kind sir, you’re too kind. Giving me 50 dollars to buy all the java...

UNITED STATES—Jeremy was content to watch the passing parade. He eyed a crow that lighted on a fence and stared at the crow. He watched its golden eyes dart around. Now an attractive middle-aged woman and an older man got out of their seat. She had pale yellow hair that gave her an aura of youth, and he was...

UNITED STATES—It seemed like a cool thing to do: to go to a reenactment of scenes from a schlock horror movie meister in a gallery on the West Side. Brick walls and minimalistic setting. The event was a belated wake was organized to celebrate the passing of bargain-basement Ed Wood, Samuel X. Argos, who died last month, a day...