Other ladies probably get raccoons for spirit animals and I get Iggy Pop and a panda bear.

So I just came off of a work week that had way too many days of work in a row without a day off. I know. LOTS of you do this all the time. Who needs stinkin' days off when you're a rugged sea captain in a jaunty sea cap doing important work? You have a vocation, a calling, a horribly troubling boss and suck it up, dog lady. Too tired to even snively whine on the blog this week because you had extra hours in your self employed days filled with people paying you for rainbows and ponies decorated with ribbons and flowers in their flowing manes?

Can you see me here? I am sighing and leaning back in my chair and, yes. Because of my sensitive constitution, if I do not have some blank spots here and there to wander aimlessly about, this thing happens to me where I start talking about stainless steel appliances and sports bras and personal growth and then gets so bad I wake up one day up in a Julia Roberts massive tooth induced panic attack during an Eat Pray Love matinee, slathered in house brand CVS moisturizer wearing an acrylic sweater and eating sushi and if it got that bad, then, yeah, I'd probably have to change my name and cast off all my pens in lieu of killing myself and either way, no Team Small Dog. I am already 3 pairs of Gap jeans closer to this nightmarish apparition and it is only the safety of vision quest that keeps that trigger in check.

I saw this vision of my no day off self driving to work the other morning. I was stuck behind her, and she was in a hunter green Toyota Camry with it's back window full of stuffed bears in a funereal diorama surrounding a decorative kleenex box. The wake included a panda, in what may have been a daring inclusion of other races or maybe just a panda. I admit, I'll never know. And the Camry was driving really slow. Really, really, really slow and all I could think about was that I needed some more coffee and by this point, plain coffee wasn't going to do it and I was going to need to contribute to global warming and child slavery and god knows what else by going to the Starbucks and getting a skinny vanilla latte in a paper Starbucks cup and first of all having to say that word, skinnyvanillalatte, then drinking the horror and thinking about dying and going to hell the entire time. Every last 100 calorie/zero fat drop.

But the thing was, if I hadn't been stuck behind the slow moving Camry, I wouldn't have seen Iggy Pop. There he was. Right there on Mission Street. In my very own neighborhood. Teetering on the curb. Like about to jump into traffic, which probably wouldn't have killed him if he had jumped into my lane because of the freakishly careful driving of what may have been a sweet grandma but could just as easily have been a raving bitch who terrorized her kids their whole lives and is the secretly hated one at water aerobics class. The fact that I don't know which still makes me squint my eyes a lot and screw up my face in more new forehead wrinkles and bolt awake in the middle of the night.

But there he was. Rock star sighting. Just like when once when I was in LA and Flea almost drove into my lane in his giant SUV. I used to see rock stars all the time, or at least occasionally, when I was down there and having a day off. Back when I had time to have days off and time to do a day of errands in Hollywood that might end wandering around the maze that is Fred Segal and bumping to Jordan Catalano in the mens pants. Iggy Pop was in a down jacket and no shirt, because Iggy Pop never wears a shirt and because it's really cold here in the mornings now. Global warming apocalypse is upon us and in the morning in the summer it always rains a slow damp drizzle and this is something we have to buck up and learn to accept. Because we know cannibalism isn't far behind. And if we haven't bred, then at least we don't have to connive to save our spawn but our dogs are certainly not safe.

Iggy Pop was teetering and ready to leap into traffic. His jeans were skinny and coated in years of sludge and his hair was stiff with that orange Sun-in product and his buddy pulled him back from the brink. Iggy Pop backed up and threw up his hands in that universal sign of, WHATEVER Dude, with buggy eyes and frantic shaking head and his buddy had a big mustache and I'm guessing was his agent or his manager or maybe his personal finance director. Who was really trying to help him out, but apparently, that was an issue. They were both really slim. Either personal trainer slim or skinny vanilla latte slim or the lean look of meth and a life spent outdoors with a bottom shelf clear liquid. A lifestyle they've learned to accept, like it or not.

So I'm always hoping for this spirit animal vision to enlighten me and drop a winning lottery ticket in my lap, in a little plastic easter basket with those flowing bike handlebar things streaming from the handle, plastic easter grass flying out as it plummets down from the sky and nearly missing the deserving neighborhood children to drop down into my lap. And instead I get an elderly driver who is probably going to have her license tearfully ripped from her grasp any day and Iggy Pop in his downward spiral and a Toyota Camry. I knew this was an important message and I wrote it down at once in my reporter's notebook which I use to write stuff down when I drive, which means, don't drive near me, probably. And in thinking about this message, I can see that it's grave. Very grave. In a vampires like Bill Compton who sleep in the dirt and yet speak so beautifully kind of grave way.

You see these wakeup call vision quests, kittens? They make you freakout and get the dogs to the park really fast, for at least the shortest of walks in the crappiest of fields, but to make sure to count them and be sure they're all there and that you didn't go nearly brain dead in the blink of an eye? Maybe yours look different, but I bet they scare you just as much, down to the shivering core, to where you're on your knees, scrubbing the black bits out of the floor cracks, and trying to remember all the words to that song you used to know, a really long time ago.