rants, reports, raves, and embarrassments from eric trules

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Family & Christmas. Like Love & Marriage, rrrrright?

December 24, 2013 Family and Christmas go together, right? Like love and marriage. Like horse and carriage, right? Well, I won’t disagree. But growing up in a mostly non-practicing Jewish family, I didn’t know much about it. Sure, we had Christmas in Salisbury Elementary School and W. Tresper Clarke High School in the 1950s and 60s suburbs of Long Island, New York. Of course, the other-side-of-the tracks O’Farrells and the D’Agostinos let us upper middle class Jewish kids know all about their Irish and Italian blue collar ways, with their anti-Semitic middle school harassment and their Catholic jock-swearing braggadocio. “Fuck…

The Big Day, 6th Grade Graduation

The big day. Exsel graduates elementary school! He is in the last 6th grade class in Elysian Heights Elementary School’s 100 year history. (It will become a K-5 arts magnet next year) I remember the 1st day we got there, May 2015, the very end of the school year. I found out that I HAD to bring him to school, otherwise he would be “truant”! So we arrived just down the street from us on Baxter & Echo Park – to this sweet old school, elementary school. He would get to attend the last 2 weeks of 2nd grade –…

July 4th: Re-Discovering America Through Immigrant Eyes

Re-posted from The Huff Post, June 21, 2014 I brought my wife-to-be here to Los Angeles from Indonesia on August 3, 2001. We’d met on the magical island of Bali, “Island of the Gods”, a little over a year before in the early summer of 2000. After I’d returned to LA, we e-mailed each other for several months, she in “broken English”, after which I went back to visit her for almost a month around Christmas and New Years. We traveled across the island of Java together, taking night buses through the drenched green rain forests for 10 hours at…

the klown, the motorbike, 9 lives times 2, and good karma

about 90 seconds after my first hill climb and descent, i confront my 1st fellow motor biker, a brown-skinned local dude puttering uphill with a fellow passenger on back. i’m heading down, he’s coming up, and i pull over to the right. so does he. that is, he swerves to his left, my right. what the hell? we’re heading right at each other. we simultaneously swerve to avoid one another. in the mili-seconds before impact, my life doesn’t flash before me. i think something like, “what the fuck, man… you idiot, you’re gonna run right into me. don’t you know the rules of the road? it’s your country, you boneheaded yokel, what the…?

crash! bang. head-on. i go down. he goes down.

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