Two months ago I got the bill for the taxes on a little piece of farmland. If you pay by a certain date, you get a discount. Which is a nice way of pretending the first date isn’t the due date and the second date isn’t the penalty date. I noted the early date, wrote it on the envelope, and put it on my desk. I figured that I would pay it on a few days before it was due, but as that date approached I thought no, I'll do a direct deposit for the first time instead of sending a check. The check might not get there in time.
That was Friday.
Today being the date that I had written on the envelope, I decided that I should pay it before the close of business day. I looked in my backpack – the bill wasn't there. I needed it for the property tax ID number. I know that it was in my backpack when I went to work last week, intending to mail it. This meant that it had fallen out, somehow, or was in a drawer, and either case was bad because it was attached to the checkbook. I had that sudden feeling you get when you realize that your checkbook, that archaic sheaf, is out in the world somehow, beyond your control. Who knows what mayhem will result.
I conducted a search around the house to see where it might be, checking other pockets in other coats, before I decided that I would go into the office and get it. I hadn't planned on going in, a rare thing. Usually every day there’s no question: I go in. I I changed into suitable clothing, got my keys and went down to the car – but then I remembered there was something else I needed to bring, so I went back upstairs. Birch was bothering me so I paused, and gave him a few bits of kibble to occupy him while I left.
I drove to work by surface streets, since the highway was getting thick. I got stuck behind some poker – and wondered why oh WHY they did not feel the same compulsion, no, the rational need to make the light. But I was flanked by people going under the speed limit, so there was nothing I could do. I drove along into downtown, and got stuck behind another car – but I was able to swing around it and assume the proper pace to the place where I intended to park.
I had all green lights. As I passed through one green light
I noticed from the corner of my eye
The periphery of the periphery where nothing should be
There was a car hurtling into the intersection. It swerved and it did not hit me.
I continued on without my heart rate rising in the slightest. And I thought: from the moment I got that piece of paper, to this moment here, there have been all of these little decisions and details and hesitations that combined to put me one second ahead of an object that would've T-boned me, and done me poorly.
I hadn't intended to be at that spot. I had chose to go to that spot when I left at 2:30. If I chosen to leave at 2:29, or a car in front had done 27 instead of 22, who knows. If I hadn't looked through one pocket, if I had taken longer or shorter to give Birch's kibble, who knows. All I know is that I was very nearly in the wrong place at the worst time.
You never know the place, or the time, eh?
Anyway. This isn’t one of those “bad things happen and then all of a sudden you think about these existential matters,” because I generally pencil in time for the existential matters a few times a day. (If I don’t, they barge through the door and sit down and start yammering away with the same old, same old.) The story above is literally death and taxes, the oldest tale.
But a bad thing did happen. A death in the family. The funeral is no imminent so I’ll just leave everything at that.
It is generally and specifically horrible in most cases and more so in this one.
And now, the things that were written before the news. A cheerier tone.
(Oh: the taxes are actually due on the 18th. I made the trip in vain.)

This week on TV Tuesday Dragnet Festival, it's opening sequences. Or rather short excerpts of the short opening sequences. The music varies according to the mood and plot. I'm sure Webb had a hand in approving, jazzman that he was. Although if he'd been really involved we might have gotten Dixieland.
Here's the generic happy-city-on-the-move open:
AND THE OLD, he said next. That's the famous Dragnet Lake Bench, which we will meet again.
Next, we state a banal and obvious truth while the soundtrack plays a sexier version of Star Trek: Next Generation-style music.
Next, a little Herb-Alpert for the modern swinging sound. (Short clip.)
I want to know more about that building on the right. Googling about, here and there . . . ah. It was the Hall of Records. Deemed unsafe after the 1971 earthquake, supposedly. I looked up stories in the newspaper, and they say it demolished to provide more parking. Not many stories about it at all, really.
One of the clips I didn't use talks about the jobs people can have, and how they range from menial to brainy.
I wonder if any of those are actual computers, or something from props. The machine in the middle is probably real.
Then there's Wilshire Boulevard:
I have looked and looked. I think it's gone. I can find the building on the far left, and it lines up with an opportunity to shoot the street in the late 60s.
Oh, the actual TV show? Rather silly.
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