Money Gets You Honey, or Where Have You Gone Johnny Cash?

Money is on my mind these days. The girlfriend is going to get that Paris job, after all. That means that I've got to come up with enough money to cover airfare, place of residence, and spending money for a month of semi-vacation. Right. So after doing some bills the other day and the crunching what few numbers remain in my checkbook, I basically panicked. I need work. Real hard.

I spent the better part of yesterday afternoon looking for jobs online. Funny, but ain't shit happening in August. Only thing mildly intruiging was a post from the end of July that was for AOL, who is looking for restaurant reviewers for their citysearch-equivalent feature on the LA site. If I read it correctly, they pay $30 for a 150-word review, which seems a little counterintuitive, since $30 is about what it would cost to have enough meals at a place to sufficiently give it a review (excluding a real high-pricer of a place, in which case $30 won't even cover the wine). But broke, looking to procrastinate, and feeling a pang of desire - to live the charmed life of a food critic, that is - I decided to give it a try. I thought, at the very least it would be a $30 investment in my potential future career.

I went to Echo Park's The Bright Spot, for which there is no website otherwise I would provide a link, and determined to think like a restaurant critic as soon as I pulled into the parking lot. Great pains went into describing the sensations on my palette as I ate my chorizo and goat cheese omelette, but I think I most enjoyed trying to capture the detail of the people and the place at 8:15 in the morning. As I sat jotting notes in my restaurant critic's notebook, it dawned on me that I was being a professional people watcher. And if there's one thing a writer must do, it's people watch. So even though I was footing the bill myself, even though I should have been cracking away at a screenplay at that hour, and even though I was hoping to get a gig that didn't promise to be very lucrative, it felt good to be working.

If I could only parlay that into a little Johnny Cash.