I miss vinyl. I miss TEAC turntable needles. I miss analog. I miss spending a whole day simply listening to one album.

After cat cleanup this Saturday morning, I drive home on a crowded freeway with what seems like an overabundance of SUVs, pickup trucks with crammed picnic gear, every other car driving much more aggressively than usual, most driving faster, more anxious, more stressed. Malls are crowded and regional parks are packed with parties and more cars.

I come home and the house is rumbling because there’s loud music in the neighbor’s backyard, the top of a red bounce house jutting out over the backyard fence.

I know that families need to allow their children to play and enjoy Easter weekend, maybe having their Easter egg hunts on Friday or Saturday. I know that it’s difficult enough to see family members when they’re living so far away, and so many people extend their Easter Sunday celebrations to include Good Friday as well as Saturday.

But then I remember that, as of today, Jesus hasn’t risen yet. That happens tomorrow. And then I remember that there might be an Easter blockbuster sale at Best Buy, and so I think about joining the fray.

When the pinata broke and the candy fell to the ground below, all the children, as they are supposed to do, scrambled to grab as much of the fallen candy as their hands and arms and pockets could hold. If you’ve ever seen documentary footage of piranhas swarming over a wounded animal, it’s similar to that, except it’s a swarm of screaming kids.

Because I was the birthday boy, the camera followed me wherever I went. It followed me as I joined in and jumped into the pile of kids and candy. But soon after I jumped into the pile, something peculiar happened. The film shows me leaving the pile of kids, walking away and waving my arm in an “Ah, forget it!” attitude. Back then, when the grownups saw that movie, they asked me, “Why did you not get the candy like the other kids? Why did you give up?”

What the camera didn’t show was me, two hours before the party, sitting at the kitchen table and watching as my dad loaded the pinata with three bags of candy. What the camera didn’t show was me seeing that my dad had bought SIX bags of candy to fill the pinata, and because the pinata didn’t have any more room, my dad had left the other three unopened bags of candy on the kitchen table.

Back at the broken pinata and pile of kids, as I jumped into the fray, I was already thinking to myself, “Why am I scrounging for dirty candy when there are three bags of it sitting in the kitchen?”

As a twenty-one year old college intern, I worked on a project where my employer charged the client $100/hour. I did all the work, and I was making $9/hour. At that moment, I thought to myself, “Why am I making $9/hour if I can do the same work and charge $50/hour, and still charge only half what my employer was charging?”

As a twenty-five year old at a Dodger game, I was in the middle of a scramble for a foul ball. People were spilling $20 worth of hot dogs, nachos and beer, to get at a $7 baseball.

There are pinata opportunities, and then there are outside the pinata opportunities. Thinking outside the pinata usually requires a bit more thinking, a bit more patience, and a bit less impulsive action.

It also helps knowing that there are three bags of candy sitting on the kitchen table.

Some say that Los Angeles—unlike Japan and its citizens of collective-minded, non-looting, orderly, courteous folks—that L.A. couldn’t survive the same series of disasters that the Japanese just went through. Some say that Angelenos are too selfish, too independent to want to work together or sacrifice certain things in order to benefit the larger group. It would take forever for first responders to get anything done because they’d be too busy signing legal waivers that indemnify themselves from lawsuits, in case they infringe upon someone else’s “space” while trying to pull that same someone away from their burning Escalade parked in their overleveraged McMansion.

This is why I think Los Angeles is the SAFEST place to live when the almighty shit hits the fan. Just as God only places the greatest burden on those who are best equipped to handle it, that same God wouldn’t dare touch L.A. for that same reason. Even with the best weather in the world, the most resources available, and every single thing (sand, snow, ocean, mountains, amusement parks, In-N-Out drivethroughs) within arm’s reach, Los Angeles is still just a slight breeze (or an unpopular verdict) away from utter collapse. Hell, if we can’t even handle two straight days of rain, how are we supposed to cope with a tsunami?

And do I think we’ll get radiation poisoning from Japan? No, because any radiation cloud that forms over the Pacific Ocean would take one good look at our sewage-stained coastlines, our crane-infested docks, our half-plastic people, our pretentious love of sushi and our hot, sweaty, farty yoga, and that radiation cloud would take pity on us and leave us alone to mire in our own, uh, mire.

If you want to experience a natural disaster, go live somewhere else, where people don’t mind helping one another shovel snow from their driveways. Go where a high school kid is thankful to have a part-time job, and where a car, any car, is a cherished item that doesn’t get replaced every five years just because that color isn’t in fashion anymore. Go where a person’s last name is more important than his first name.

But if you want nothing to happen to you, stay right here. Nothing’s happening here. And even if it did, we probably wouldn’t notice it. And if, for some reason, it did bother us, there would probably be a pill, a procedure, or an iPhone app that would get rid of it.

I’ll remember that Tiger Woods’ conscience kept him from winning anything since last Thanksgiving, when he drove his SUV into a tree. I’ll remember that gas prices kept going up and down and up again, and we weren’t really sure who to blame for it anymore. It snowed and rained a lot everywhere, and so the TV weather people got to wear a lot more different outfits for their Stormwatch segments.

By the way, I’ll tell the kid, there was this democratic revolution that happened in the Middle East, a whole bunch of countries that all of a sudden decided they didn’t like dictators anymore, and so they stood in public to say so. Many of them got shot and died, and a bunch more got the crap beat out of them, and others went to prison and were never seen again. And even after all of this, these Middle Eastern people didn’t give up and they kept revolting, using the Internet and their cellphones to spread the word. News crews from around the world got a hold of their stories and spread the word out even more, so much so that even news people got the crap beat out of them when they showed up in the wrong place at the wrong time. Anderson Cooper got punched a dozen times and Katie Couric got shoved around, but I’m not sure if she got hit.

This changed the world much like the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Soviet Union back in the early nineties. I remember back then, all the TV and radio stations were glued to what was happening in Europe and Russia, and nobody wanted to see or hear about anything else, because it was a big deal. Then there was Desert Shield which became Desert Storm. That had Schwarzkopf with his camouflage uniform, Rumsfeld with his podium updates, George Bush Senior getting a standing ovation from everybody in Congress, and Colin Powell looking like he was going to run for president one day, but he never did. I remember the first time they showed a stealth fighter and a stealth bomber, and how friggin’ accurate those things were, and how when they bombed a tank or a bunker where people were hiding, it looked like an old video game.

But yeah, in 2011, people played Angry Birds on their iPads and iPods and iPhones because Sudoku was already getting boring. Robert Rizzo from the city of Bell got caught paying himself and his city council members too much money, and then other officials from other cities got caught for the same thing, even though it’s been happening for decades. This snowballed into other cities and states, and pretty soon every government office was being audited. It’s like a trend, just like when Egypt started with their revolution, then Libya and the other countries followed.

I’ll tell the kid that I still read whatever newspaper I could get my hands on, the Times or Wall Street Journal, whatever was around, even though most newspapers had already gone out of business. I’d get a whiff of the story from someone on TV saying something quick about it, then I’d check it on the Internet, then I’d get the complete story by reading the paper. I usually only get to read the whole story every other day or so, because the newspaper vending machine is always out of the L.A. Times, or I don’t have three quarters on me and it’s too far to walk to the bookstore a block away. I get to read the paper when I’m having my toasted wheat bagel with honey almond shmear, and my French roasted coffee, four sugars and four creams.

I always finish my bagel and coffee, but I don’t always finish reading the paper.

“If you have honor and dignity as a man, come and protect me, and other girls in the protest. If you stay home, you deserve what’s being done to you, and you will be guilty before your nation and your people. Go down to the street, send SMSes, post it on the internet, make people aware.”

I heard about this woman on The Charlie Rose Show. Asmaa Mahfouz posted this video on YouTube, then went to Tahrir Square and protested in person. She told everyone who she was, how she could be contacted, and challenged her people to join her. She is credited for helping spark the Egyptian uprising. She is credited as being a revolutionary.

I very much doubt that I could be this brave. I very much doubt that I would want to be tested like she has. I think I will do everything in my power to run away from any conflict that may result in my having anything like this happen in my life. I think that I will tow the line. I think that I will not rock the boat. I think that I will remain quiet. I will internalize everything. And when my life is over, like that famous quote says, I will have regretted doing nothing.

Out from under your beds
C’mon, ye people
Stand up for your love
–”Stand Up Comedy”, U2

BUCKET LIST

Be healthy enough to hike Machu Picchu.

Spend three nonconsecutive days inside the Louvre with a sketchbook and my old 35mm camera with TMAX film. Every other day, visit the rest of Paris.

Create a sketchbook of my friends and family portraits with notes on my good memories of them.

Drive through Germany’s Romantic Road in a Maserati Quattroporte.

Discuss Buddhism with Jet Li while walking the compound of the Forbidden City.

Give a million dollars to a charity.

Convince a small restaurant owner in Venice to let me pay for my meal by writing a song for his family. Learn the language so the lyrics could be in Italian.

Have breakfast at Cancale in Brittany, then walk the lowered tide to the castle at Mont Saint Michel with some friends, pretending that we are the cast of the movie Mindwalk.

Walk the rest of Descanso Gardens when the flowers are in full bloom.

Have dim sum at a crowded, sweaty restaurant in Beijing.

Watch a Boston Red sox game with Stephen King.

Walk through Chicago with a Carl Sandburg historian.

Read the poem on Raymond Carver’s tombstone with a loved one.

Perhaps I dreamt it, perhaps it actually happened, or perhaps a little of both. When I was very young, my mother took me aside during a party and told me something.

She pointed to one of the partygoers, a middle-aged man, very thin, who wore a brown button-front short sleeve shirt, pomade in his hair, whose skin cracked from nicotine and whose eyes yellowed from alcohol and heavy living. He looked as if he was always poised to borrow some money from somebody, and everyone who approached him knew it.

My mother said, “Look at him. Look at the way he is. You already know his story. Study him, son. Make sure you know everything about him. Do not be anything like him.”

Even though I followed my mother’s advice as an obedient son is supposed to do, I never really thought about it until I got older. Why did I study so hard in school? Why did I do my best to stay out of trouble? Why did I stay away from drugs, alcohol, and cigarettes?

Because I didn’t want them to win.

Throughout a person’s life, throughout the histories of civilizations, sooner or later something or someone will come along that will try to break that civilization, break that person’s spirit. We all know the stories so I won’t go into them. And in the wake of most, if not every, oppression is an addiction. There is alcohol, opium, violence, eating disorder, tobacco, something that marked and reminded the oppressed as being that, oppressed.

Whenever something goes wrong in life, there is always the temptation to addiction, that immediate release and numbing of the senses. There are people and forces that revel in the fact that people are addicted, desperate. There are people and forces that profit from it, that are enriched somehow by it, that would like nothing more than to get others addicted. And the only way that they will win is if I lose myself to them. The only way that they will be happy is if I lose my spirit.

And I don’t want to lose my spirit.

If they are able to convince me that engorging myself in food to the point of exhaustion and fleeting euphoria is a good way to go, they win. If they are able to convince me that enough booze in my system will give me six hours of not feeling anything at all, they win. If they are able to convince me to immerse myself in noise and confusion that drown my sensibilities in exchange for a moment of illusion, they win. If they are able to convince me to give up, they win.

Whether they kill me because they got tired of trying to break me has yet to be decided.