Guard Your Unplanned Minutes Like The Loose Diamonds They Are

never forget the million little ways you win

Back on Thursday, June 5th (an impossibly innocent time that we will never experience again) my daughter had an orthodontist appointment. Early morning. We went. We were done by 10am. What do you wanna do now?

She said, …well, let’s go get breakfast at Little Dom’s. Little Doms was her first “favorite place,” when we were living in Los Feliz in the early teens. Now she’s in her early teens but no one escapes blueberry ricotta pancakes. Going back there feels like touching base in the game of Slow Motion Tag that we all play until we die.

So off we go. Yummy brekky. Pancakes all around, and some eggs, and a cup of gasoline-fire-in-my-guts coffee. We talked about music and comedy and our favorite memories of the neighborhood.

Now what? Should we go home?

She said, …nah, let’s walk around.

And we did! Up and down Hillhurst. We took pics of graffiti and petted cute dogs and she told me about a book she was reading and I teased her about how she said, last summer, that she planned to read all of Stephen King’s books in order, and she said she was gonna do it there were just so many good books. We worried about a sweaty Goth couple tramping up the hot pavement. They looked like black licorice on a skillet. I forget which one of us said that.

Wanna keep going? Sure! We crossed over to Vermont and stopped in at a knitting store where she bought supplies to knit a scarf, and we also went to Skylight Books and I showed her all the cool decor inside of Loupiette Kitchen and we also stopped inside that little shop on Kingswell that was Walt Disney’s first studio. I’d taken her there when she was REALLY young so it was a whole new experience, and we also passed by The Dresden (closed during the day) and I regaled her with tales of being in my mid-20s and going out with friends and I said I was excited for her to get to do stuff like that too. She’d discover her own haunts — she’d have her versions of Ye Rustic and The Drawing Room and The Dresden and The Cat & The Fiddle and a lot of those nights would be “wasted hours” until you got older and realized how crucial they were, every second of them.

Does this story seem like it’s going nowhere? Hang with me just a little longer, I’m about to land on something. Seven super-short paragraphs and we’re gonna land on something. Here we go.

So we keep walking down Hillhurst until we find ourselves at Pam’s Coffy, next to the Vista. And we sit in the air conditioning and get waters and I thiiiiiiink I bought myself a cookie? I remember that we watched The T.A.M.I. Show on the little TV behind the counter and talked about The Rolling Stones and James Brown and she told me about bands she liked — Fonda, Lucy Dacus, TV Girl and Laufey. She’s played Laufey for me while we’ve driven around and I like her stuff. It felt like a thank-you for all of the bands I’ve introduced her to — The Beatles when she was a baby, Bowie when she was 8, R.E.M and The Pixies when she was 10 and Bleached and Bikini Kill when she was 13. There’s a little two seat “micro theater” inside Pam’s Coffy where they show movies on video and lo and behold I noticed they were showing Labyrinth so I told her to go peek at the screen so she could see Bowie dressed up like a goblin. She did, and came back, and rolled her eyes at me.

We also talked all about Pam Grier. She agreed that Pam sounded “really cool.”

Oh shit — I noticed that Sinners was playing next door at 3pm! I’d already seen it, but here was a chance to see it again in 70mm. You wanna go? She said, …sure!

And we did! I was stripped clean the first time I saw Sinners and a second viewing, now in 70mm? Details and dimensions leapt out at me I’d missed the first time. Sinners is going to be one of those films, like Jaws and The Candidate and Repo Man and Pulp Fiction and The Conversation and Hoop Dreams (and TV shows like The Wire and The Thick Of It and the BBC adaptation of Tinker, Tailor Soldier Spy) that I’ll watch over and over again just to see which new details jump out at me. Because something will, every time. You know when you’re in the hands of a master.

And my daughter noticed stuff I missed. Stuff I’m not going to write about here in case you’re lucky enough to have not seen Sinners and will get to do something I’ll never get to do — experience it for the first time.

And afterward we drove home. I played her a couple of Robert Johnson tunes from my iPhone before ceding the playlist to her Spotify.

We get home that I realize I haven’t looked at my phone all day. I took it out a couple times to take pics of things in the neighborhood:

But otherwise I spent the day looking at the world and talking with my daughter. And seeing Sinners.

And keep in mind, this was Thursday, June 5th. This was the day Trump and Musk had their all-day Mean Girl Online Spat. “He’s a drug addict!” “He’s a pedophile!” All day, posting and counter-posting and hunched over their phones like gargoyles made of spoiled ham, trying to get in the last word.

These men have billions of dollars. Each. Each of them have billions of dollars. They have have families. They have many, many children. They have, objectively, achieved great things and objectively changed the world they live in.

And they will never have a day like the one I had on June 5th, 2025. The kind of day millions of people have every day — with their families, or with their friends, or just by themselves, when they relax and tune into the world or a book or a piece of music or another person, and don’t have to waste energy on “winning” an encounter, “crushing” another person, “owning” at life. If you described the day I had to either of them they’d recoil in horror. If you showed them a person meditatively re-building an engine, or cooking a pot pie from scratch, or melting into a music-raptured crowd at a concert and just being? It would terrify and confuse them. The kind of sadness they live with can only be remedied if they can spread that sadness and discontent and frustration into the wider world.

Why aren’t you hustling? Why aren’t you trying to game the algorithm and increase your views and clicks and followers and engagement? Why are you happy with “just enough”?

Don’t let them take your unplanned days and idle moments. ‘Cause they want ‘em. They’re in constant pain, like the zombies in Return of the Living Dead, and the only (temporary) relief for their pain is to eat our brains.

Going back through my photos, I found a final, delicious irony: the “competing tip jars” at Pam’s Coffee on Thursday, June 5th 2025. Did the employees know, when they were setting up the counter that morning, that they’d erected a mini-monument to that sad, ugly moment the wider world was living in?

(We tipped Bette).

OZ DON’T SLEEP

STAND UP

I’m recording a new album for Audible in NYC Friday, July 11th and Saturday, July 12th. One show Friday, two shows Saturday. Most of the early show tickets are gone — there are still some for the late show. Go to pattonoswalt.com and grab what’s left. Very excited for this one:

My monthly show at Largo at The Coronet — PATTON OSWALT AND FRIENDS — has dates through September. Great line-ups, surprise drop-ins, loose and fun:

COMIC BOOKS

The first issue of Volume 3 of Minor Threats is now ready for pre-order from Dark Horse Comics. Frankie Follis, aka Playtime, is taking it all down, and she doesn’t care if she has to work with villains and (ex) heroes to do it:

Want more Minor Threats? Want one of the weirdest crossovers ever? Asked and answered:

Also, from Vault Comics, my collaboration with Tim Seeley on Money Shot continues. Can the XXX-plorers save the universe from an anti-sex despot? Weirdly timely!

RECOMMENDATIONS

I got to see early screenings of two extraordinary films. First is Ari Aster’s Eddington, a horrifying, hilarious time capsule of the COVID shutdown. It’s a tense Western, a brilliant neo-noir, a tragic character study and, finally, an apocalypse. Loved loved loved it:

Next is Tatami, co-directed by Zar Amir Ebrahimi & Guy Nattiv, with two Oscar-worthy performances from Ebrahami and Arienne Mandi. Seek this one out, it’s not getting a big release:

Oh, and the NYTimes asked me to do a top ten list for their 100 Best Movies of the 21st Century:

I pre-agree with your disappointment in me.