Leaving California
Hey everybody,
First off, I want to thank Jessica for giving me a road trip soundtrack that makes me feel like I’m starring in an indie film. Every time I put on that CD I feel like I’m heading to/from a dramatic confrontation involving a girl. We will say incredibly clever and insightful things at an unrealistically rapid-fire clip, interspersed with periods of silence that involve staring either at each other or at some kind of scenery. A quirky friend will make a pivotal observation. The ending will be ambiguous but hopeful.
I’ve had a couple of weeks to adjust to unemployment, and let me tell you that it’s exactly as awesome as you feared if you can get over the anxieties. One of the best things about it is that it gives you the luxury of time. You can take your time with everything. It takes a little while to get used to it because you’re so conditioned to rush. Having a job that takes up 40 or 50 or more hours of your week naturally compresses everything else that you need to squeeze into your schedule. It takes conscious effort to stop and realize that you don’t have anyplace else to be. You have time to savor the little things, or to walk instead of drive, or to actually spend time with someone and listen to them without thinking about where you have to be next. The downside is that you end up realizing that there are things you do or people you hang out with that you really don’t give a crap about and almost wishing you had someplace else to be.
I spent my first night on the road camping in Big Sur on the coast and if you’ve never been there before then I strongly suggest you go. Even if all you do is drive up and down Hwy 1 for a few hours, if you catch it on a sunny day it’s spectacular. You’re driving on a windy road through a redwood forest then right up to the rocky coastline overlooking azure water… and this keeps happening over and over again. This is not a bad thing. I have much better Big Sur pictures from a camping trip I took with Sean and Jessica last year here (https://picasaweb.google.com/106688898407073055469/CoastCampin?authuser=0&feat=directlink). Oh, and here’s an overview of my road gear in case you’re interested:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXoWbs2CRa4
The last few days I’ve been bouncing back and forth staying at my buddy Felix’s and then over in Manhattan Beach at my buddy Max’s place. Felix just turned 40 so there was a big party at his house, which is why I extended my stay. That and the price was right. The theme of Felix’s birthday bash was southern/country, which is understandable because no couple I know represents antebellum more than Felix Woo and An Nguyen. In case you’re in Los Angeles and need a bale of hay, they’re $9 each. And Max… well, everybody knows Max. Max isn’t even his name, it’s his description. I still can’t believe we partied with the legendary M.D.B.
I went to San Diego for a day, mostly because I wanted to go on the Stone Brewery tour and to pay a return visit to the Alesmith tasting room. I came down to San Diego on a brew tour a couple of years ago where we visited about a dozen micro breweries in 4 days and I discovered a surprising amount of fantastic beer in this area. I didn’t get to see much of the city outside of the tasting rooms and a couple of restaurants so this time I wanted to stay in town and walk around for an evening. I had a chance to have dinner with my buddy Tony who I hadn’t seen in 7 years, which was great, then the desk guy at the hostel recommended that I walk up 5th Street through the Gaslamp district, apparently one of the main social attractions of downtown San Diego. Now I’m no anthropologist but I found this place mesmerizing in sort of a grotesquely manufactured way. I imagine this entire street being prefabricated somewhere and dropped whole into this neighborhood, shiny and new, with its boutique stores and restaurants whose clever, culturally ambiguous names surely involved some intensive market research. Walking up 5th street is the consumerist equivalent of navigating the river in Heart of Darkness except at the end instead of heads on spikes you find a Hard Rock Hotel and a Spaghetti Factory.
The next day I took a drive out to Coronado, a cute, high-end beach community where gas is already $5 a gallon, then south to Imperial Beach. The beach was lined with surfers, the pier with fishermen, and were beachfront studios are available for $800 a month. George… think about it. We could surf all day and live off the fish. Just sayin’.
Yes, I spent almost a week in southern California. I have to be honest… I have long had this sort of curious fascination with southern California, especially with Los Angeles. The warm weather, beautiful, occasionally plastic people, the sprawly concrete conquest of man over nature… it’s definitely the anti-San Francisco. I used to come down occasionally when my brother was at UCLA and ever since then I’ve always felt this strange anticipation in the air when I’m here, as if there’s something really cool going on that I don’t know about. I’ll probably have to live here at some point in my life if only to realize that there’s nothing going on that’s any cooler than anywhere else. I’ve never really told anybody that. I don’t know why I’m telling you. Go on about your business.
Once I finally headed east my intent was to stop somewhere on the CA/AZ border but I decided to drive through the Joshua Tree National Park instead, which as you all know was named after the famous U2 album. I don’t know that anything I would say about the desert landscape and the rock formations would do it justice so maybe it’s best to simply browse through the pictures. There is definitely a clear delineation when the park transitions from the Mojave to the Colorado desert as the whole vegetation as well as the geological landscape shifts from large, tan rock and yucca to shrubs, cacti and black rock. When I stopped at one of the rock formations called Skull Rock, I heard this woman complaining to her partner “How many more rocks do we have to stop and see?” Though I can’t sympathize in this particular case, I get it. She reminded me about how we started feeling about cathedrals when I spent 5 days driving through central Italy with the Brits. “Oh, what’s there to see in this town? Let me guess… a cathedral?” We had to resort to desecrating a tomb for entertainment. Not really. Sort of.
The campsite where I stayed had only three other occupants and no one within a hundred yards of me. As night fell I became engrossed by the solitude and the silence. It wasn’t lonely in any way, it was very peaceful. There were no sounds from animals either, in fact I could hear my pen as I was scribbling across my notebook. Also, maybe someone else could confirm this, but there must have been a lunar eclipse because the moon went from a sliver to being gone the next time I looked. So when you take the desert sky plus a moonless night… I mean… holy freakin’ stars. I almost had to call bullshit on nature.
So now I’m in Arizona and am camped out in Sedona, home of red rocks and “aura photos.” I’ll try to get another update out sometime next week where I’ll either be in Texas or Oklahoma or Arkansas. Basically somewhere that I can wear a cowboy hat.
Take ‘er easy,
Dave