Brenda was back and I was glad to see her, selling her art on the Avenue. I set up my table near as I could to hers, cuz she’s probably my best buddy in Berkeley.

Brenda talks true, knows what’s what about everything, never drones on with long-winded political opinions, and never minds when I do. She’d spent the past several weeks on the east coast, and she had a few stories about that but not so many as to be boring.

Barbara stopped by, too. She lives way up in Santa Cruz and doesn’t have a car, so I was surprised to see her huge smile for the second consecutive month. I introduced her to Brenda, and the three of us talked for a while, mostly about weird movies and our overbearing mothers.

Mothers, man. Brenda had seen hers while she was away, and said she’d need 6-8 weeks to regain her sanity. Barbara’s mom sounds like a haughty chimera, and they’re completely disconnected, haven’t spoken in years. So Brenda and Barbara swapped horror stories I couldn’t match.

Makes me wonder if I haven’t been too harsh about my dear old mum. After all, she’s merely prying, intrusive, very Christian, queen of the guilt trips, and repeats the same stories and nagging endlessly — but she’s not abusive, not cruel and mean and awful like Brenda and Barbara’s moms.

Mother’s Day is coming up. Maybe I’ll send my mom a card.

♦ ♦ ♦   

Directly behind me on Telegraph, waiting for the light to change, was a snazzy TV news van with a satellite dish on the roof. Channel 7, said the logo painted on the side.

The driver had his window down, his elbow at my eye level, not six feet from my table, and TV news is so vacuous, I had to toss him a sarcastic comment. “Ooooh,” I said, loudly, snidely, rudely. “It’s a professional journalist.”

“Yeah, and you’re a professional street salesman,” he said, smiling and unperturbed. “Which is OK,” he added, “long as we both have our professional credentials.”

The light changed to green and I heard him chuckle as he drove away. That was a quality retort. It left me speechless but eager to argue, but I couldn’t — he was gone.

The man’s face hadn’t been familiar from billboards advertising happy anchors, and he wasn’t handsome enough. Kinda ugly, honestly, so I’m sure he works behind the cameras, not in front.

In typical TV news fashion, though, he’d gotten the facts wrong. I’m not a street salesman — I don’t sell streets. The term is ‘street vendor’, ya schmuck.

♦ ♦ ♦  

Most jobs, at least most jobs I’ve had, you see the same people every day, and hate most of them. Working on Telegraph Ave is different. You see the same vendors every day, yeah, and hate most of them of course, and there’s the recurring theme of Christians offended by fish, merchants offended by hippies, and city bureaucrats hoping to find offense against the dumbest rules imaginable.

But there’s also someone in a passing van you can trade insults with, and braless bimbos selling incense, dropouts and debutantes might dance on the sidewalk, anyone walking by might be talking about anarchy or atheism or the summers on Saturn, and yesterday’s panhandler was (literally) selling hash today. Strangers sometimes kiss on Telegraph, and the woman shouting angrily on the sidewalk might be a philosopher worth listening to. Or she might just be drunk.

Humanity is highly overrated, and generally I hate the entire species, especially when large numbers of them gather together. There’s always large numbers on Telegraph, but it’s a weirdly welcoming, wholesome kind of crowded craziness, and it soaks into you.

I’d rather be alone in my room, sure, but that doesn’t pay. If I have to earn a living by being around people, the people I want to be around are on Telegraph.

It’s taken ten months for me to truly figure out the scene, the characters, and this one simple fact: For all my complaining, a guy’s gotta work somewhere to survive, and selling sacrilege in Berkeley has to be one of the greatest jobs in the world.

Suck it, Channel 7 van man — I’m a street vendor, and I love it.

Pathetic Life
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every movie ever made, in alphabetical order
(we’re in the K’s, with anti-alphabetical cheats)

Killer Crocodile (1989)

A giant crocodile is hungry and angry. That’s the movie, and everything about it is cribbed from Jaws. The first victim is a young dame swimming alone. Even the music sounds like an imitation, and the script is noteworthy for its complete lack of creativity, imagination, characterization, or general giving of any damns.

Science Lady runs tests on the water, and explains before being eaten, “Mother Nature didn’t do this. This is waste from a chemical plant!” In other words, this was no boating accident!

Richard Anthony Crenna (yes, son of Richard Crenna) stars adequately, considering the material, with Van Johnson long past his prime as some vague abuse-of-authority figure called simply “The Judge.”

Watchable only for its awfulness.

Verdict: NO.

♦ ♦ ♦

The Killer Eye (1999)

A mad scientist conducts experiments with people’s eyeballs, and one of the eyeballs turns into a Buick-sized monster that gets away while the scientist is arguing with his wife.

Bad acting, bad effects, slow pacing, so-so crocodile, and the women sure do like the giant eyeball’s tentacles, but unlike Killer Crocodile (above), this is schlock that’s at least sometimes sort of original.

Verdict: MAYBE.

♦ ♦ ♦

The Killer Nun (1979)

“This film is based on actual events that took place in a Central European country not many years ago.” Yeah, right, and I have a girlfriend, but she’s in a different nursing home so you wouldn’t know her.

Sister Gertrude (Anita Ekberg) has been raped, and her priest tells her to forgive and pray for the rapist. She’d rather seek out and kill men as vengeance, but she’s also willing to torture and maim women, so I’m confused. And also bored.

Weird, tuneless elevator-music is all over the soundtrack.

Verdict: NO.

♦ ♦ ♦

The Killer Reserved Nine Seats (1974)

Buncha folks who all hate each other gather at an abandoned theater, where there’s murder and intrigue. The dialogue randomly, inexplicably switches from Italian with English subtitles to English dubbed, then back again, then back again, then back again…

All the murder victims are women, usually with their blouses ripped off first, and I gave up when the killer’s next murder involved repeatedly stabbing a woman in her special unhappy spot.

Verdict: NO.

♦ ♦ ♦

The Killers (1964)
a/k/a Ernest Hemingway’s The Killers

Lee Marvin plays Charlie Strom, the coldest hit man who ever hit men. Angie Dickinson is Sheila Farr, and she’s trouble. John Cassavetes is Johnny North, superstar of greenscreen auto racing. Ronald Reagan brings everything to a screeching halt every time he’s on screen, partly because of everything Reagan became after show biz, and partly because, whoa, he’s bad in this role.

Might’ve enjoyed this more without the auto-racing motif — it’s loud and phony as hell, with every race sequence greenscreened absurdly. Marvin and Dickinson are great, but it’s a long wait before they interact much.

Screenplay by Star Trek‘s Gene L Coon. Produced and directed by Don Siegel (Invasion of the Body Snatchers ’56).

Verdict: MAYBE, but probably not.

♦ ♦ ♦

Project Hail Mary (2026)

It’s been years since I’ve seen a first-run mainstream movie, but an old friend wanted a get-together and suggested Project Hail Mary, so there we were.

A science teacher is plucked from public school obscurity to head a NASA emergency project trying to figgur out some ecological catastrophe. Long story short — and it is a long story — he’s sent on a spaceship to the outer neversphere.

Based on a novel by Andy Weir, whose The Martian I read and loved, and also dug the movie, about a potato farmer on Mars. This one, I haven’t read the book, and the movie’s not bad for what it is, but it’s a completely commercial venture, with every moment calculated for emotional response.

The story offers nothing difficult, challenging, or unexplained for an audience — it’s spoon-fed and the moviemakers assume you’re wearing a bib — but I was in the audience and had a good time. It ain’t great sci-fi or great art, but it’s a fun popcorn-chewer. Ryan Gosling stars, and I’d go gay for him if he’d go gay for me.

The first time the movie showed the NASA logo, it triggered a surprising moment of sadness, at least for me. Among the many damages Trump has done to all things with any potential for good, he’s shivved NASA with bloody budget cuts and thousands of careers ended. If we needed to send a spaceship to the outer neversphere in 2026, I’d turn to the European Space Agency before calling NASA.

Verdict: YES.

4/21/2026

Logo illustration by Jeff Meyer.
— — —
If you can’t find a movie I’ve reviewed, or if you have recommendations, please drop me a note.
— — —
No talking once the lights dim, and only real butter on the popcorn, not that fake yellow stuff.

Three weeks I’ve been living here, and if anything really bugs me about this rez hotel, it’s that there’s not much that bugs me about this rez hotel.

I thought there’d be endless material for mockery — barely-there drunks, crackheads on the stairs, fistfights in the halls, noises all night long, insane people screaming at gnats… That’s the way it’s been at other rez hotels where I’ve lived.

At the Hotel McMillan, it’s fairly quiet, unless the guy in the next room is watching Sábado Gigante on Saturday nights, or Spanish-language soaps and sitcoms Sundays through Thursdays. When his TV gets annoying, I switch my electric fan on, face it toward the wall, and the hum drowns out the sound.

There are roaches in the sink sometimes when I get up to pee, but I enjoy killing roaches so that’s not really a complaint. I’ve killed 18 so far — seven by hand, seven by Lysol, one by shoe, one by scissors, one in the toaster, and one by microwave. Three have gotten away. Still, that’s only one roach daily, which is fewer than El Castillito.

My room isn’t on the sunny side of the building, so it probably won’t be a simmering sweatbox come summertime.

Going up four flights of stairs every time I come home is exhausting, but it buys silence from the front-door buzzer. That buzzer is so loud you can hear it all day and through the night on the second and third floors, but not here on the fourth.

The Hotel McMillan is the tallest building on the block, so for my sweaty ascent, at least there’s a nice view from the fire escape. I can see the Bay Bridge out the toilet window, if I twist my head just so.

When I’m energetic enough to climb even higher, there’s a sign at the top of the last flight that says “Keep Out.” The door is locked, but the lock is old. Jiggle the knob a few times, the door will open, and you can step onto the tar-covered roof for a grand view — buildings and buildings for blocks and blocks, traffic and life below, Twin Peaks behind me, skyscrapers in the distance the other way.

Really, what’s to complain? This hotel is reasonably priced, reasonably quiet, and I doubt there’ll be any good stories to tell about it…

Pathetic Life
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