Mike Milo's Journal

So this morning I wake up in a pretty decent mood. I trudge out to the kitchen to kiss my wife who got up early to make me pot luck stuff for my Christmas party at work. On my way I stumble on the carpet mat for my desk chair and my foot gets caught under it and I scrape my entire foot across its sharp spikes that prevent it from sliding. Now if I can manage to mame myself in the first 30 seconds of waking up,
its gonna be a good day ladies and gentlemen!

Error Resizing Image: error_loading_image
Original Image Path: "/home/.dexter/milowerx/blog.milowerx.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/palisades_interstate_parkway.jpg"
File doesn’t exist?

Error Resizing Image: error_loading_image
Original Image Path: "/home/.dexter/milowerx/blog.milowerx.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/palisades_interstate_parkway.jpg"
File doesn’t exist?

Anyone who knows me will tell you I have a terrible sense of direction. One time it nearly killed me.

It was late one Friday night that I decided to pack it in and go home from the local bar we all hung out at; The Grill. I had driven myself that night having arrived late due to work. The Grill was an old Irish Pub and we were kings there. We acted as bouncers when it got too rowdy and were allowed to grab our own beer from time to time from behind the bar. The bartender Jimmy was about as Irish as they come. Reddish hair, an Irish lilt  an almost finished cigar perpetually stuck into the side of his mouth as well as a beer gut and chubby face surrounding squinty eyes due to years peering through the smoke and haze of a late night bar pouring drinks for the wasted brethren. Now I won’t say I was drunk when I left The Grill but at 3 in the morning your brain doesn’t work as well as during the day regardless and as I hopped into the car for the trip home I probably should have paid more attention. (more…)

When I was about 15 I lied to my parents. It didn’t turn out so well as you’ll soon find out.

When I was Freshman in High School I hung out with a group of about 6 guys. We were all misguided, wreckless troublemakers but were for the most part harmless. Recently we had discovered beer, however and that was our main focus every Saturday night… how to get some.

We used to hang out on the corner next to a convenience store where my friends and I would cut it up and tell jokes as well as try to out do each other with insults. I usually won.

One night my friend Russell had this great idea that we would tell each others parents that we were sleeping over each others houses and then we could stay out all night and drink beer.

Wooo! What a genius idea! We all went home to try this genius tactic, and it didn’t’ work on our friend’s parents. It did however work on mine and Russell’s. We had no idea what to do and jeered on by our friends that ‘they would soooo do it if they could…” and that we were “chicken if we didn’t” we elected to stay out all night.

So it was Russell and me against the world for one night… we were too stupid to think anything might happen… (more…)

With such an unlucky numbered story, it had to have a story to show my unluckiness ( or my luckiness depending on your P.O.V.)

When I was a twenty-something I used to work for my father as a cook helping him in his business which was industrial catering. We had the concessions at Pepsi, Coke, Lipton, ADP, Prentice Hall (now Simon and Schuster) and the Academy of Medicine in Harlem. My job was to cook the recipes from my dad’s cook book guided by my uncle Larry. It was an interesting job but one that I grew tired of because as the youngster in the crowd my uncle and my dad would make me do all the work and I’d find myself cooking lunch for 500 people and my dad and uncle not around due to hangovers or what have you. I understand now that it’s just the ‘way of the world’ but at the time it pissed me off to do all the work while others sat by.

So I quit.

As luck would have it, I was putting the garbage out one morning at home just as the trash guy came up to get the trash. In my day there was none of those wussy forklift trucks that pick up the garbage on their own. All the trash collecting was done manually. (more on that later).

Anyway, the trash collector, who’s name was Ambrose worked for Buldo Bros. Sanitation which held the trash collection contract of my town along with three other towns. Ambrose asked why a young fella was home during the day and I told him I had just quit my job with my dad and was looking for a new one. He hired me on the spot and so began my venture into the world of sanitation. (more…)

After I graduated Art School, I went to work off and on at a small studio in NYC called Broadcast Arts which made animated commercials. I was luckily enough to work on a Honey Nut Cheerios commercial, a Flintstone’s Pushups commercial, a Battleship commercial as well as a TNT commercial and a Indonesian seasoning ad. trouble was there was not much work in NYC and from what I’ve heard there still isn’t so I could not work steadily and began to think that I had to find another job. I was kinda depressing because I had just gone to school for three full years to learn how to animate and there was no work to be had. At the time I was living with a girl who as none to happy about my lack of employment and we broke up as a result which is ironic. I had gone to the school I did in Jersey to stay with her (I had wanted to go to a school called Cal Arts in L.A.) and now that I had graduated we were breaking up. Funny how life works out.

Anyway, my lucky break came in the form of a call from our school principal (more…)

On the left side is Lover’s Beach and the right
side is Divorce Beach.

This one is about saving a man instead of almost killing myself…

About 5 years ago my wife and I bought a time share down in Cabo San Lucas which was where I had proposed to her about 9 years prior to that. Now something I did not know about Cabo at the time we bought the time share was that because it sits on the edge of the Baha peninsula it has extremely strong currents from both the Sea of Cortez and the Pacific Ocean. The first year we went down there the beach was nice and the waves wer small. Apparently that winter a hurricane came in and destroyed much of the beach and when we next went there for a visit (and bought the time share) there was not much beach at all. Still we thought nothing of it because it was still the same beach. Or so we thought. Somehow the hurricane had changed the tide there and as we soon found out it was not the calm beach we had known in previous years. (more…)

Sometimes life has a way of nudging you to show how lucky you are. One day on Hwy 101 I got shoved.

I was driving my friend James home one evening after some jamming and drawing and we were gabbing it up having a good ol’ time. I got onto the 101 freeway and started the long trek to his house. In L.A. a trip to the market is a long trek.

Trust me on this.

Anyway, so we’re driving along in the fast lane and I cracked a joke which James found particularly funny and he got the giggles. For some reason I turned to look at him and it was then I noticed right past him out the window two lanes away,  a tractor trailer was just beginning to jackknife and come towards me!

No I’m not kidding.

Suddenly time slowed down…

You know how in movies when an important moment happens and the film switches to slow-mo?

I can tell you that there’s a reason for that. It does actually happen in real life or at least it appears to happen.

At least to me. (more…)

The town Old Tappan, where I lived as a teenager, was settled in 1664 which granted is not old according to European standards but it’s pretty old for the US and played a large part in the revolutionary war. George Washington slept in my town numerous times and we even had a few traitors hung in a large oak tree in what was the center of town at the time. Behind my home we had at least 20 acres of woods which has now sadly been turned into condos and homes. At the time people didn’t worry so much about perverts, terrorists and murderers and our parents felt safe letting us be away from home for hours on end.

My friend Jimmy and I would get up on a Saturday morning and go hiking in the woods to explore like Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer from sunup to sundown. the Horse trails which used to be the main thoroughfair in my town ran behind my house and although it had clearly been abandoned many years ago it still had remnants of life along it’s winding path. Many foundations of old businesses and homes dotted the path and sometimes would dig around them hoping to find a way into a still usable cellar. (more…)

L.A. is a huge sprawling metropolis that never seems to end and exploring can be a full time gig. It’s amazing that you can drive a few blocks and suddenly be in a completely different vibe than you were moments ago. I learned that very quickly one Saturday afternoon in 1990.
When I first moved down from Yosemite I was not even in the city a full week when an old college roomate of mine from art school wanted to know if he could come out to ‘visit’ and look for a job. I was fine with it actually because L.A. is a lonely place and the third day I was here my trusty pickup truck that I drove off the cliff  finally gave up the ghost and died so I had no car. Trust me when I tell you it’s not easy having a social life in L.A. with no car. (more…)

Unfortunately I once fancied myself as handy. I found out I had no skill at it one day quite abruptly.

In 1983 I turned 17 which is the legal age to drive in New Jersey. My first ‘car’ was actually a hand-me-down from my father; a customized van with swivel seats and carpeting on the floor and fabric on the ceilings. I thought it was the coolest thing ever and set about customizing it even more which was a big fad during the 80′s. This was made easier by the fact that I when to vocational school ( where they send all kids who do crappy in school) where I took classes in carpentry, plumbing, horticulture and masonry. My friends and I yanked out the interior that was already in the van and proceeded to put a bed in the back, as well as a radio and cabinets and an overhead console. Now just for reference these are the same fellas I canoed down the Delaware with so you know we were going to be messing it up in many ways. For the most part it came out pretty cool and when all was said and done I had a monster machine worthy of some serious coolness. I had one last jewel to put on my crown of coolness and it came in the form of a steering wheel. I got myself a chromed one with a soft rubber cushion around it’s perimeter. It’s center looked like it was made of chrome chain.

It was the coolest steering wheel ever to grace a van. (more…)