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American culture has two obsessions that always bite us in the ass, personally and collectively: answers and endings, a&e. There’s a cable station named that. Even though the name was “arts ...

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Just to be clear, none of this is to say I hate Los Angeles. That’s far from the case. It’s beautiful. It might be the most gorgeous place under all the blues of heaven. But that’s sort of the p...

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“About your coworker who busks as Elvis?” I asked, to change our subject from myself and my bottomless personal failings. “My friend Tony.” Frank corrected knowingly, “What about him?” “Did yo...

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When Frank was the yeti equivalent of boy-hood and early teens, safely ensconced in the enclave of dense trees and subtle glamours he called home from birth, the fact he had anger issues wasn’t ...

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Amongst Frank’s peoples, and in every other sasquatch culture he had ever heard of, there was a tradition more ancient than written language, more holy than any red-wood stand, the sacrament the...

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“Well,” Frank reasoned, hoping to get me out from under my bottomless self-pity for a moment. “Look at it this way. At least you’re not Adam Sandler.” To someone who has never been in or in l...

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Distance does funny things to your mind, to your experience of reality. There was this band, this perfectly-mediocre fine-in-the-background dumb-if-you-listen-closely white-boy funk jam band cal...

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One of Frank’s co-workers on the Walk of Fame, busking photos to wide-eyed tourists as well as hipsters trolling for cheap irony, was a guy they all called “Hollywood Superman”, for relatively o...

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“I mean, all mystic traditions go back to the same source,” the Amazing Mitzi once told Frank in The Magic Castle near closing time, “I can’t say I don’t believe my way is the closest to true, bu...

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There’s nothing sexy or narratively compelling to being “discovered” when you’re thirty-eight and fat. No one near the reins of our current media culture believes there is, anyway. If you are twe...

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“Aged cheese, I can mostly handle,” Frank said, picking at a veggie omelet with a fork his hand made look comically under-sized, “anything with a lot of unconverted lactose, however?” Frank opene...

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Iowa existed, once. It really did. There were places in America, on the Earth, where you couldn’t be part of the celebrity-industrial complex, no matter how hard you tried. You were too far away,...

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California’s earthquakes have nothing to do with the curse, of course, earthquakes are just plate tectonics reminding us there are far weirder things lying beneath than what looms above. We’re al...

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The Curse of the Thirty Mile Zone existed long before Cinema, is centuries older than motion pictures, and will exist for eons hence. Perhaps less obviously than it does now, but it suffused the ...

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According to The Amazing Mitzi, while many of Hollywood’s ironies are indeed side-effects of The Thirty-Mile-Zone’s obfuscating enchantment, it’s far from all. Some are geographical, some climato...

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Pain is not art, of course, and is not where art comes from. It’s understandably confused, though, don’t beat yourself up about it. They manifest in similar places, at similar times. It is easy t...

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“What left you so cynical, anyway? What broke your heart so terribly that The Curse collapsed, revealing the floorboards underneath the glamour?” Frank considered. “You’re alive, you aren’t starv...

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The vast majority of history’s greatest monsters were born into fortune and fame, but we mustn’t draw too many conclusions from that, lest we fall into a survivorship bias fallacy. Concentrating ...

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It was a helluva thing, of course, for Frank to wake from his coma and find his entire species had disappeared off the face of the Earth. The loneliness and existential dread of discovering himse...

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“If you’re the last of your kind,” I asked tentatively, gently as I could, “and it’s been that way for ages?” “Both of which I’m,” Frank interposed, “reasonably certain.” “So why do so many rando...

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FRANK THE SASQUATCH: But you have to admit, though, if you overlook the Curse of the Thirty Mile Zone, if you didn’t come here to get famous, Southern California’s gut-wrenching beautiful. Possib...

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“So,” Frank asked the Amazing Mitzi, sitting in a Starbucks between a Hooters and Disney’s El Capitan Theatre, across from Mann’s Chinese, “what makes you so certain that your god exists?” “The G...

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“I’ve never seen anyone do that before,” he said. “Do what?” I asked, squirting ketchup onto my mozzarella sticks. “Put ketchup on mozzarella sticks. That’s a new one on me.” “Well, I’m part-Ital...

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Movie-theater butter, of course, isn’t actually butter at all. It’s “topping”. That stuff they put on popped corn at your local multiplex (if you still have one, if yours wasn’t put out of busine...

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Fighting entropy, with this universe’s grim deterministic physics, is a lot like playing skeeball in a beachside arcade. You can practice and practice, but no matter how skilled you’ve become, th...

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