Yesterday was one of those days when you really need to get out of the house. It was just one of those days anyway. You know, those days when you aren’t really sure where you stand with yourself or with anyone else? We have them every now and then. I’ve decided that there are two kinds of people, mainly, here in America. I can’t really speak for people anywhere else. I can’t even speak for people here actually. I can’t speak for anyone. What I do know is this: some people live life with their emotions exposed. They are not “normal” by society’s standards and life is uncomfortable most of the time, but especially so when they are trying to conform to some kind of “normal” role. Weird, I know. I am one of the non-normal people. I have never fit in with the “normal” people. I am much more comfortable with people who aren’t “normal,” that’s the truth. I think, in general, we live against our natural inclination as a species, this, I believe, is the cause of our all of our neuroses.

But that isn’t what I’m talking about today. Except to say that one of the reasons I like Marc Maron’s podcast so much is because he isn’t one of those “normal” people either. Moreover, he spends, it seems to me, every second of every day just trying to get through it without losing his mind. That is what makes his podcast so compelling: he struggles with it every second of every day. As do most of us non-normal people.

And so it was with my friend (fake podcast person friend) Marc Maron that I set out on one of the different long walks, or sometimes runs, I like to take – and that’s near a golf course in Encino. Depending on which route you take you can do a three mile or a five mile walk or run. It is mostly populated with other fitness-minded people, but also cranes, coyotes, squirrels, lizards, colorful birds, geese, ducks…lots of fauna. In the summer it is also a favorite picnic spot for families to get out of their hotbox apartments and onto the grass for a time. Little barbecues with sizzling chorizo sausages, tortillas…I’ve been reading too much of TC Boyle’s Tortilla Curtain I’m afraid.

It was already an emotional day for me – the kind I knew getting out in the fresh air and sunshine would really help. In the post-Oscar haze of the months in between the Oscar race and the start of the new season is usually a time to decompress. For reasons I won’t get into I was feeling really down. I kind of felt like I just wanted to feel “normal.” Routine is the way to feel normal, I figure. So a walk was definitely in order.

Marc Maron always opens his podcast with his funny intro (WHAT THE FUCK!), usually a product endorsement — hopefully the one about vibrators — and then he’ll talk about something for a little while. I podcast every week with Jeff Wells of Hollywood-Elsewhere so I know how hard it is to be entertaining on your own. You really need someone to talk to usually. But Maron is one of those guys who can really do it alone. I think it gets back to that undeniable thing about him that he is working hard every second of every day not to lose his mind. And that makes him a great speaker, comedian and interviewer. After he talks a while he has a guest on. Men, women, mostly comedians.

So I put on his latest podcast and I started walking. But you know, I noticed that the ground was kind of muddy, a little muddy from the recent rains here. They had closed Burbank Blvd. because the train blockers had broken and were dangling in the road. They also put up a sign that said “Road closed.” This, to hopefully keep walkers and joggers off of the main trail. But did I listen to it? Did I stop and say, oh, maybe they put that there for a reason. No. I did not. I simply looked to see if anyone else was doing it. Okay, he was doing it, that guy was jogging right on in.

And that, I guess, was good enough for me. So off I went. It wasn’t so bad at first. A few fallen trees here, a downed fence line there. But it wasn’t long before I got to the mud part. Slosh slosh slosh. It was bad but not so bad that I felt like I had to turn around. There were plenty of footprints already in the mud – how did these people manage to get through it? So I kept slogging. A guy jogger in front of me was already calf-deep in it and he said to turn back. But did I listen?

I saw one of the closer exits that would take me to the sidewalk outside of the dirt path. And to the left the trail continued. Looking back on it, that would have been the way to go — get to the dirt path. Apparently, where I was walking was part of a wetland. They had built a golf course over a whole wetland — had there been protests to this way back when? Was this nature’s brutal payback? But I didn’t know if it would continue to be so muddy on down the trail and decided to take my chances to get to the exit. But half-way through my two shoes got stuck in the mud. I literally couldn’t take another step. So I unplugged my two feet and simply left my boots there. They are still there as we speak. Not soon after that, I pulled off my muddy socks. Once my feet were free of the socks and shoes, walking through the mud was a piece of cake. The easiest thing imaginable. The natural thing.

I flap flapped my feet through the mud to the entrance and made it on the sidewalk. The sidewalk, though, was covered with mud too and I almost slipped and fell several times. The workers there with bulldozers had closed the road. One of them waved me off, “this is closed!” he pantomimed. I held up my socks and pointed to my feet – please just let me through, I silently pleaded to the face behind the Plexiglass. Nope, that was the answer. Nope.

So I flap flapped my muddy feet back inside, where the mud continued to be deeper than I could ever imagine. And there wasn’t a soul crazy enough to take this trek, although enough people had that the footprints were like the Laetoli footprints – those ancient fossils that proved how mankind walked upright. It was a family walking there whose footprints had been trapped in volcanic ash, discovered many years later by Mary Leakey, and it was really the first real evidence of primates walking upright.

Mark Maron was saying something profound about the Coca Cola company, touching on moments of insight and brilliance as usual, struggling to stay sane. It wasn’t until I saw a mud-caked lizard lying dead that I stopped feeling sorry for myself. He had it way worse than I did. And I wondered how many little creatures had been killed by this storm. I also saw a dead bird. It couldn’t have been pretty; the storm had downed the entire fence around the golf course which had to mean something overflowed and flash-flooded the area.

I was walking on terrain that I had walked so many times before but this time doing it barefoot, making me look like a crack addict homeless hooker. My only redeeming detail was my iPhone 4 and my expensive down jacket. I had to look like a freak otherwise. Believe me, no one ever walks barefoot on jogger trails unless they’re a partying meth head who somehow disappeared out of a house somewhere without their shoes. Or else some weird European or Eastern European who thinks this is how they do things in California. But did I care? No, I didn’t. I was Laetoli-ing it, my friends, primate style, animal style, real human being style. Our feet are little miracles, I’m telling you, by far one of the best things ever to evolve. They can take us very far over varying terrain. No problem in mud or dirt or grass or gravel.

I kept walking, all three miles out. At some point it stopped being muddy and became harder earth. And that’s when it all felt semi-sane again, and when I looked the crazier. What happened to my shoes? Should I have dug them out and carried them dripping in mud to a trash can at least? Was I a filthy litterer on top of just being filthy? Yes, probably.

The Laetoli family that walked through the mud so long ago, in the Olduvai Gorge in what is now Nigeria, they were just getting on with it, you know, getting on with life. They didn’t have the same kind of problems we have now. They didn’t have to worry about leading a “normal” life, being or appearing happily married and all of that. Or maybe they did. Maybe it was more about having to appear as a strong and brave hunter. Or an attractive pre-teen mate? Hard to say. What I do know is this: it felt good walking through that mud in my bare feet. And it was funny. It was ridiculous and crazy and absurd. But it helped me get through that day, that hard hard day.

Marc Maron helped too.

Yeah, I know. I SUCK at Photoshop. I don’t pretend otherwise. The Los Angeles Zoo is always a place to see humans acting badly as much as it is a place to oggle the lazy, indifferent wild animals who sit or sleep or weave back and forth in place, as the lone elephant does every time we visit. Two things happen with the animals. The first is that they’re mostly sleeping. The second is that, if it’s the afternoon, they anticipate their feeding as the one bright spot in their day. They probably don’t do much mating, they can’t hunt, their lives are no longer threatened, they can’t fly (oh, the poor Red Tail Hawk) and so, like most of us humans, they have narrowed life’s pleasures down to sitting around and waiting for food.

Emma and two of her pals (all three now wear specs, poor near-sighted dears) experienced Spring Fling, as Easter event that drew such a big crowd, we were forced to stand in line for an hour just to buy tickets. Once inside, it was the usual hoard of annoyed parents and their screaming children. I witnessed a spanking. Just one this time. It involved cotton candy. What must the animals think of us?

They made bunny ears and waited to pat real rabbits, after which the youngest girl of the three kept repeating “okay, now let’s go wash our hands,” as if they were seconds from succumbing to a flesh eating virus you only get from touching live rabbits, “okay, let’s go wash our hands!” After the very disappointing Spring Fling event, we wandered our usual trek around the zoo but this time the brand new Gorilla habitat was finished. It is as nice as the new one for the chimps and the orangutans. The gorillas are a sight to behold. There was at least one male silverback and a female. The male was up in the female’s grill, naturally, not really letting her do much. When it came time for feeding, however, both the silverback and the female stood on their legs to look over the fence in hopes of catching a glimpse of the food person. No such luck. So they’d stand around and try to avoid the gawking humans. Moments later they’d water out, stand up on their legs like the bipeds they were born to evolve into, and check things out. Nope, no feeding guy. We never saw them get fed but were content with having glimpsed that rare event of bipedalism among the great apes.

This brings me to my number one pet peeve (so to speak) at the zoo. People who scream at the animals without using proper pronouns or correct terms. This includes “look at the monkey” when referring to apes of any kind. But it also includes, “hey, swim sea lion!” Or “Hi Mr. Monkey! HI!!! Hey, monkey! Hey!” The yelling and screaming thing at animals should be discouraged at all costs. It is annoying and embarrassing.

This poor little creature seems to say it all.

Meanwhile, I probably almost killed the three kids by letting them have an all junk foods day. It was a disaster in the end because, my god, look at what candy can do.

We have so much in common with our cousins, the chimps. Think about this. Have you ever had someone groom you as a chimp might groom another chimp? It feels really good and is quite soothing yet because we are mostly ignorant to our nature no one has ever really unearthed the whole grooming for comfort thing. But they have gotten to the gestures thing:

As they reveal today in the U.S. journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) the pair found that the use of gestures is highly flexible, complex, and difficult to link to specific contexts. The use of gestures even varied widely between different groups of chimps and bonobos.

“The way they use gestures is extremely variable, especially compared with other forms of communication,” said de Waal. “This makes gesture a possible candidate for symbolic communication in our shared ancestor.”

Pretty cool story

Meanwhile, here is my favorite gesture:

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Translated into human language as: