THE JO-TEL …believes some of what Nathaniel and John say, but believes England is still our sovreign

One of the best things about my new job (which I might have gotten fired from on Friday. More on that next week.) is that I can walk to work. It’s 2.5 miles from my house, which is the perfect distance in my opinion. If I wake up early, it’s a 40 minute walk. Wake up a little later, 10-15 minutes by bike. Sleep through my alarm and it’s a 5 minute drive.

I’m sitting here now think about how not funny this post is going to be. Shark got all up in my dome by telling me I’ve been on a comedy tear and the pressure is just too great now.

Anyhow … shit. So I was walking home on Wednesday and I happened upon this flyer stapled to a tree:

Man … wow. I really pictured this post being totally awesome in my mind before I sat down to write it. Now that I’ve started I’m just going to try and get through this as painlessly as possible. Ugh.

So … I was thinking about how it would be cool to find someone’s pet … but cats are pretty stupid. And I couldn’t really see myself chasing one through the bushes, only to have him scratch the shit out of me for a reward represented by only two dollar signs. Does this person even want their cat back? Even so, I resolved to keep an eye peeled.

Then, on Thursday, I was walking home and I saw this flyer:

I looked around to make sure I hadn’t inadvertently become the male lead in a romantic comedy. No cameras anywhere … and I didn’t see Jennifer Aniston or Cameron Diaz running around, frantically calling out “Paco! Here Paco!” I grabbed the flyer off the tree and made my way back across La Brea to the area where I had seen the other flyer the day before, about 12 blocks away. I called the number on the first flyer and left a message with the number from the second.

Friday afternoon, after I’d gotten fired, I got a call from the girl on the first flyer thanking me for my message, because the people on the second flyer had indeed found Paco.

That’s pretty cool right? Worth posting about at least. I didn’t mention the reward, since I’m a classy guy. But I admit, I was kind of surprised that she didn’t ask me out to dinner, a dinner at which we no doubt would have been oddly attracted to each other, despite being from two totally different worlds. And after discussing how totally hard it is to meet people in LA, we would move onto something quirky, like say, cereal, and how we both used to love Trix, and remember how the pieces used to be little balls, and not fruit shaped, and how when we first poured a bowl of the new, fruit-shaped Trix we were confused because the yellow, lemon-flavored pieces

PETE ” … didn’t look like lemons at all—”

PETE and Cat Girl, simultaneously: “THEY LOOKED LIKE BANANAS!!”

Then our eyes would meet. Surely this was fate. But what would happen when she took me to meet her crazy, yet endearing, Puerto Rican family? Would they accept me?

(Phew! Way to pull that one out of nowhere.)

-PETE