I just found these on my computer . . . my skeleton buds and me . . .

DID YOU KNOW?

. . . those skeletons in my logo are from a back-alley mural in Los Angeles? It’s on the side of a bar called the Cha Cha Lounge at 2375 Glendale Avenue, a few blocks from Silver Lake Reservoir.

My cousin Jack and I discovered it by accident during one of our impromptu drug-fueled midnight LA road trips. Feeling fed up with the world, we hopped in our decommissioned police car and drove down to LA to get away from it all for a little while. We got in so late that we ended up sleeping in the backseat (and trunk) of the car next to the reservoir. In the morning, we drove to the nearest coffeeshop, which apparently no longer exists, and which was across the street from the Cha Cha Lounge. We brushed our teeth and washed our faces in the restroom there. I flirted with the barista a little and then we both sat down and drank black coffee until we felt insane enough to HIT THE STREETS again.

Standing on the patio of that now long-gone coffeeshop with arms akimbo, I saw from behind my big white sunglasses that skeleton mural across the street and my brain lit up like a slot machine:

I said to Jack: “We gotta go take some pictures over there.” We parked the police car alongside it and did just that. One of those pictures ended up serving as the cover to a novella I wrote about that trip:

Jack is holding a wooden pizza shovel. I have no idea where we got that. Our trunk was full of weird stuff we collected and/or stole, including multiple traffic cones we intended to use for mischief. But the pizza shovel, along with the traffic cones and a majority of whatever the hell else was back there, were stolen along with the car about four months later. (We got the car back . . . but the car was stolen an additional three times over the next year. It was cursed. I’ll write more about that some other time . . .)

Anyway: I try to visit that wall every time I’m in LA. And I always take pictures to document its continued existence:

However: despite having visited LA about a dozen times in the last two years, I have not been back to see it, but I often dream of it. I just never feel like making the long drive from Amissa or Cera’s place to Silver Lake. And in case you didn’t know, every drive in LA is a “long drive” because it takes like an hour to move a single mile.

I don’t know how old this photo is, but according to Google Maps, The Skeleton Wall has so far survived the slow decay of the world:

There is something I really like about it . . . it’s both ominous and cheerful in a way, just like me. You got 20-foot-tall skeletons marching with a bunch of guys in yellow hazmat suits and Devo hats while fireworks (or bombs) bloom overhead. And they’re all living in perfect harmony. Where are they going? Into the dark future . . . Together.

Personally, I would love to be friends with a 20-foot-tall walking skeleton, let alone a dozen of them.

Well! There it is. Now you know. If you’re ever in Los Angeles and want to pay tribute to your favorite Weird Internet Guy, go see it. Say hello to the boys for me. If it’s still there, send me a picture. If it’s gone, don’t tell me . . . I’m just going to go the rest of my life believing it is still there, even if it isn’t. They can paint over the mural in the real world, but they can’t ever touch the image of it in my mind. They’d have to kill me to make it go away, and even then its memory would persist in the starry ether of eternity . . .