My Wife Was Late Picking My Son Up From School. She Had the Most Interesting Excuse Ever.
Apr 25, 2025
For the first 20 minutes, my 15-year-old son was angry at my lovely wife Cassandra, assuming she left the house late to pick him up from school. After an hour of waiting at school and getting a text from her, he was angry that while she was stuck in traffic, at least she could look at Instagram, which his school has ingeniously blocked on their grounds. After two and a half hours, he was angry at the entire world, which made him like everyone else in 2025.
We live in Los Angeles, so the obvious thing to blame her lateness on is traffic. And sure, yes, it was traffic. But because we live in L.A., there are many more interesting things to blame. And it was those things that caused the traffic. All of them.
Just minutes before she would have arrived at my son’s school, a driver ahead of my wife on the 134 East freeway hit a car to his right and then yanked his car to the left across three lanes, seemingly on purpose, and took out another car. Which caused several more cars behind them to crash. One of the totaled cars was a Tesla that David Gonzalez bought two weeks ago.
Which means that while everyone was selling or burning their Teslas, David Gonzalez decided this was a great time to lease a new one. More insane, David said about the accident, “It’s amazing how one man can cause so much damage” as if this idea hadn’t occurred to him every day since Trump’s inauguration. The only possible conclusion to these data points is that David Gonzalez hasn’t watched the news since 2015.
The man who swerved the car was driving with two passengers. All three of them abandoned the vehicle and ran across the highway in different directions, as if they had trained at Ringling Bros. One of them jogged away holding his clothes in one hand and an electric guitar in another.
https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/3ogXoxLqjcY?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0
He was chased by a very normal seeming brother and sister, the kind who refer to a person who runs away from an accident with his clothes in one hand and an electric guitar in another as “the gentleman.” The brother fully committed to this chase, going across both sides of the highway, over a divider, and down an embankment. These are siblings who must have spent so much of their childhood watching sitcoms that their first reaction to a man in his underwear fleeing an accident is “citizen’s arrest!”
The wily guitarist fell but, bleeding from his knees and face, evaded the brother-sister team.
He then attempted to blend into the posh L.A. neighborhood by stripping down to his boxers and jumping into someone’s swimming pool. After he figured the heat had dissipated both from the area and his body, he started watering the plants in their backyard with a hose, figuring he’d blend in with all the neighbors watering their plants in their underwear next to their electric guitars.
Meanwhile, police had blocked off much of the neighborhood while they searched backyards. At one of these backyards, a 51-year-old mother of two came out of her house with a 9mm handgun and pointed it at the police.
This was Jillian Lauren, the wife of the bassist of the band Weezer, Scott Shriner.
For those not familiar with Weezer, they are not associated with danger. They are associated with a Saturday Night Live sketch in which middle-aged couples at a dinner party argue passionately about the band’s best albums.1 I once accompanied Weezer frontman and former Harvard student Rivers Cuomo to a local production of William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, which was exciting in a different way than an armed face off with police.
My friend, however, has met Jillian Lauren. Jillian wanted my friend to help her write a one-woman show about her life. Which is a pretty interesting life.
Jillian grew up in Livingston, New Jersey, not far from where I did. She went to a great private school, and then studied acting at NYU. Then she became a writer, publishing pieces in Vanity Fair, The New York Times, and The Paris Review. She did a story for The Moth and gave a TEDx speech about being adopted and then adopting her two sons. She wrote two New York Times best-selling memoirs and a novel. I wrote this paragraph without feeling any jealousy. You will soon see why.
Perhaps Jillian’s most interesting story was about dropping out of NYU when she was 18 to spend several years as a prostitute who was part of a 25-woman harem of Jefri Bolkiah, a prince of Brunei.
More recently she wrote a book and made a five-part documentary for Starz about the serial killer Samuel Little, whom she interviewed for 40 hours and got to confess to many more murders. Little, who has confessed to murdering the most people in American history, has both the innocuous nickname “Mr. Sam” and the less innocuous nickname “The Choke-and-Stroke Killer.”
My friend ultimately turned down the gig, finding Jillian a little too intense and Scott, who was lurking around in the house during their meeting, a little too much of a dick.
When the police asked Jillian to lower her weapon, she refused and the cops shot her in the shoulder. She then went inside her house. For thirty minutes. And re-appeared, along with the family babysitter and holding – I assume in her good arm – an overnight bag. She surrendered to police and was charged with attempted murder.
This was a Tuesday. On Saturday, Weezer played at Coachella. With Shriner. And they announced from the stage that they’re starring in a comedy mockumentary about the band, in the style of Weird: The Al Yankovic Story. The cast includes Keanu Reeves, Johnny Knoxville, Ben Schwartz and Juliette Lewis, who I’m guessing is now playing a much better part than she originally signed up for.
Still, if Cassandra had left ten minutes earlier she would have been on time.
[And how else to end today’s post in Silverback Digest but to show Weezer performing Toto’s song Africa featuring Weird Al Yankovic? Until tomorrow … that’s all from The Jungle.]
OK, ok … I couldn’t resist: Here’s the Saturday Night Live sketch about Weezer.