Do not adjust your sets, people! No need to fiddle with your settings and you don’t have to get your eyes checked. That is indeed the one-and-only Johnny Cotton wearing a Rams tee shirt. Blasphemous, right? How could anyone who grew up in the 70s worshipping Tom Landry and those great Cowboys teams be meat-riding our hated rivals? (Well technically, about half the teams in the NFL are Dallas’ rivals. When you’re “America’s Team”, you make a lot of enemies!) But seriously, between 1973 and 1985, the ‘Boys and the Rams met EIGHT times in the playoffs, both going 4-4. I mean, Jack Youngblood, Vince Ferragamo, Wendell Tyler: Imagine how many more Super Bowls we would have won were it not for that crew!
But that doesn’t mean I can’t show my support for the city of Los Angeles during this time of need. Like everyone else back on January 8, I was running around like a chicken with my head cut off when the fires broke out. The previous two nights were some of the best nights of my life, with my 1st ever Red Carpet appearance followed by the return of my GrubHub job (more on that later). So there I was on Wednesday morning, basking, when my roommate came in and said, “You know we’re in Hell, right?” And I turn on the news to find all four corners of the CITY on fire! Our area specifically didn’t have any evacuation orders, but that didn’t stop me from panicking. Like any respectable cross-dresser, I stuffed my tiny Elantra with my vintage mags, jewelry collection and every pair of shoes I could get my hands on.
My roommates didn’t seem to be in much of a panic, tho. I actually had to wake one of them up, even after he was already awake! And I’m like, “Don’t you guys want to get the cats in a cage or something?” But no, no panic at all. (I could go into this further, but let’s just drop it for now! 🙄🙄🙄)
And I’m not gonna bombard you with images of people’s houses burning, and ash and sparks flying all over the place. If you’ve got a TV or a phone and you live on Planet Earth, you’ve already seen the destruction across my beloved city. And yes, you heard me right. I said beloved! ❤️❤️❤️❤️ As much as I complain about this town, She’s been my home for close to 30 years. This is where I got my first speaking role on TV; this is where I came out of the closet in 1998. Back in the late 2000s, I thought the grass was greener in Las Vegas, but I eventually came to my senses and moved back. Nope, they just don’t build ‘em like LA anymore.
But it’s gonna take a lot of work to get Her back on Her feet. Even though I gave some food to L.A. Regional Food Bank, I haven’t gotten around to giving to the Red Cross yet. Truthfully, I’m not completely sure I’M out of the woods yet…literally or figuratively. We’ve certainly got plenty of trees and hills around us…and plenty of homeless people to set fire to them! 🤬🤬🤬🖕🖕🖕 But this whole experience has taught me to keep a large U-Haul box folded up underneath my mattress. Good preparedness for the next time, yeah? I might also help with LA’s cleanup, but that’s gonna be for professional reasons, not out of the goodness of my heart. I’m thinking of getting my O.S.H.A. card and going back to doing temporary construction jobs. And what a sight that’ll be: A middle-aged Black man stepping out of a forklift wearing heels and a cocktail dress! 🤣🤣🤣🤣
Besides all that, life has been pretty good. Like I said earlier, I seemed to have found a way around the GrubHub app glitch. There’s a neat little trick you can do at the Installation screen that will allow you to catch an order right before it disappears. But your timing has to be perfect down to the millisecond. It’s a glitch within a glitch, like a video game cheat code or something. I also got to see my friends in the Inland Empire for the first time in a year-and-a-half, and their family has grown since I last saw them 🙏🙏🙏😍😍😍. Oh, and if you’re wondering why I look bigger than a horse now, I also gave up caffeine and carbonated beverages too. That means more room in my stomach, which means more 🍽️🍽️!
Any-who, that’s all I got for now. The next time you see me, I’ll be “Thanged Up” for the Grammy Awards. Until then, Love, Peace and 👡👡👡!
Johnny