Category: Life

I’m sitting in Golden Gate Park[1], having consumed a fine smoothie and cookie from down the Haight. I’ve been trying to figure out how best to convey San Francisco, and I really can’t do it. There are too many angles. I may as well just make a list of things that have shaded my perceptions of this town:

Multitudes of mentally ill homeless folk
“Chronic inebriates” (as the newspaper so eloquently described them)
Panhandlers and their vast ranges of age, dress and cleverness
An apparently unsuccessful hooker at 7AM, yelling at her pimp (“I don’t have your money”)
The food and drink
The grandeur of the Golden Gate
Fisherman’s Wharf and its tourists (worst fish and chips ever!)
Leg pain from walking all over town
Demanding parking meters
I just saw a burrowing varmint of some kind
Brave skateboarders

My experience in Tenderloin stood in stark contrast with my evening in Bernal Heights with Amy. The neighborhood has a quaint, small-town feel to it. There’s a nice little bookstore[2] around the corner from Amy’s place, and lots of great places to eat. Plus, the scenic vistas of Bernal Hill. I stayed with Amy for a night because Erika had to travel to LA on Tuesday for work. I’m so glad I had that opportunity. That whole neighborhood really made me wonder if SF is a place where I could live. Very tempting.

1.) Actually I’m sitting at Ben and Heather‘s in Seattle now, but this blog entry was begun in Golden Gate Park, and then I procrastinated for several days before its completion.
2.) I picked up a copy of This Is Your Brain on Music which is thus far excessively enlightening.

On Wednesday Meredith and I ran errands. When she moved from Little Rock back to California in July, she left behind a few things, paintings mostly, that wouldn’t fit comfortably in her U-Haul truck, so I brought them to her. After dropping all that off at her new place (she moves in on Sunday), we mostly wandered aimlessly. Having seen LA a few times I was kind of at a loss for what to do. We walked up the Sunset Strip for a bit, had a beer at the Rainbow Bar & Grill, and dinner at an Irish pub in Santa Monica before heading back to the downtown loft apartment she’s been sharing with her friend and co-worker at Tiffany’s, Tracy.

Thursday I went to guitar stores and Amoeba Records. I met up with my cousin David at the Apple Store in the Westfield mall in Century City. He hooked me up with a 160 gig iPod at a fine discount. Yes, my first iPod. I’m finally joining the revolution. After that we had dinner at a nice little Italian place in Culver City run by South Americans.

Friday I went to the LACMA’s big Dali exhibit, which was amazing. I was surprised how small “Persistence of Memory” is in real life. After that I went back to the Apple store for a car adapter. David and I hung out at his place a bit and grabbed a snack at Baja Fresh. After that I met up with Meredith for the best-kept secret in bargain dining in Beverly Hills: the $2 Happy Hour menu at at McCormick and Schmick’s. Between 6 and 8 you can get a variety of items super-cheap, including a big burger and fries for just $1.97. This is at the corner of Rodeo Drive and Wilshire Boulevard, mind you, in the same shopping plaza as Tiffany’s.

Saturday I had lunch with Mary and Nikki in Sherman Oaks. After that I set out on the 101 for San Francisco. This 7-hour drive went considerably faster than the previous miles, or at least seemed to, thanks to the iPod and its shuffle feature, which essentially gave me my own radio station.

Arriving in San Francisco’s rough-and-tumble Tenderloin district, I was forced by necessity to perform the same procedure that staying in downtown Dallas required of me: cleaning out my car in its entirety, in anticipation of homeless and/or crackheads looking for anything worth breaking a window to get. My first lesson in big city living. Erika and I grabbed some dinner at a deliciously spartan Pakistani joint and found a hospitable dive bar at which to drink.

Pictures updated at Flickr.

Austin was the usual hoot. I got in around 2:30 and Tara and I grabbed some really good Mexican food before goofing off at Waterloo Records where I bought the new (already!) Nellie McKay CD featuring a big band. It’s fantastic. I also got the most recent Boom Boom Satellites (Japanese electronica, hard to find anywhere else), and Thought for Food by The Books. We also went to a big sale at South Austin Music[1] where I am proud to say I bought absolutely nothing!

We were going to go out that night to see Holly Golightly, but we succumbed to laziness and ended up watching Pushing Tin. Jamie eventually demanded we meet her up the street for some music and drinking, and we rallied enough energy to make it.

Sunday we dive-bar crawled. The primary rule for defining a “dive bar” was that it should not serve liquor. Beer only. Also, a jukebox must be present. And the fewer windows the better. We found four, and one of these featured chicken sh*t bingo. Tara wagered on a square, and we all waited for what seemed like an hour for the chicken to do its business. It never did, and we had more itinerant drinking to do, so we left without the satisfaction of knowing who won. After all the drinking was done, Tara and I retired her place with a pizza and a rented VHS copy of Beetlejuice[2].

I left Monday morning, and drove 621 desolate miles to Las Cruces, New Mexico. Some facts in brief about this stretch of road:

Number of dead armadillos: 0
Number of dead raccoons: several
Number of dead bugs on my windshield: countless
% of which where butterflies: an unfortunately high number
Ratio of goat farms to cattle farms: 20 to 1

I had dinner at a sports bar in El Paso[3] to wait out rush hour traffic, and made my way to Las Cruces, where I checked in to a Motel 6. I fell asleep to the comforting sounds of highway traffic and people yelling in Spanish outside my door.

Tuesday I drove the 760 miles from Las Cruces to Los Angeles. I don’t remember much beyond the undifferentiated, yet oddly beautiful desolation (pictures here, as usual). I also drove through a massive sandstorm from Coachella to Palm Springs the likes of which I have never experienced nor do I ever want to again. My fingers were tired from gripping the wheel so tightly. And the final stretch into LA was interminable. I felt like an asymptote – a line that keeps getting ever closer to its destination, but never arrives.

But of course I finally did, and Meredith took me to Ralph’s grocery store, where she bought me a sandwich and chocolate cake and beer. A happy ending to a very long day.

1.) Where I bought this thing last March.
2.) Because she had never seen it and her orchestra was working on playing the theme music for an upcoming performance.
3.) I’ve made a rule that I will not eat in any nationwide restaurant chains during this trip, and I wanted to see how the Red Sox were doing. The bartender gave me chicken strips on special, which was super nice, assuming that wasn’t a synonym for “wow these are old, let’s get rid of them.” They were tasty enough, though.

I’ve made it past the departure threshold. My house is squared away. Kathy is taking care of the cats and bills. When I return next month the house will no longer be “mine” in a certain sense; Trey will have taken over and installed himself. In fact I’m not even sure where I’ll stay that week, as the extra bedroom will belong to my niece, at least on weekends.

Currently I’m sitting in Torrey and Liz’s loft in Deep Ellum, in downtown Dallas, drinking Pinot Noir and listening to ambient radio station on iTunes. A bunch of us have just come back from eating the most consciousness-altering desserts at Rush Patisserie. I had a transcendent éclair myself. I had dinner with Tim and Mona over in Arlington, and lunch up in Lewisville with Allison and Rodney and the new baby. So far everything has gone exceedingly well. I’ve uploaded a few pictures to Flickr, but they’re all from Torrey’s camera. More to come later.

Tomorrow I head to Austin.

If you ever use Freecycle for getting rid of large things like, say, a couch or mattresses, allow for at least a week for people to come and get your stuff. I made a huge mistake by offering my couch, two mattresses and two box springs, and expecting people to take them away in just a day or two. Now I’m stuck in a grueling limbo where people won’t even email me back! To paraphrase Jean-Paul Sartre, hell is waiting for other people. I’m dying to hit the road and stupid little errors have me pinned down like so many Lilliputians.

I’m also waiting to hear from DeLaine about whether or not she can get off work to join me on my trip.

The last several months have been a study in uncertain departures. I never knew when I was going to be able to leave work, so I had to impose a deadline on my boss. Now I don’t know when I’m leaving on my trip and I don’t have anyone onto whom I can impose a deadline. This is insanely frustrating, especially given the fact that I have nothing to do for an unforeseeable amount of time.

It’s already Friday. An entire week of joblessness has passed. I went to Harrison on Monday to drop off guitars at mom’s for storage. I took the scenic route home on Tuesday through Mountain View – a great little town in the middle of nowhere. It’s a bluegrass music destination, though. Nice place to escape or retire to[1], if you don’t mind the homogeneity.

I’ve packed up most everything that I know Trey won’t need in the house, which doesn’t look like much, actually. I need to Freecycle the couch[2] and the mattresses, move the dining table into the garage, and a few other small items and figure out what stays and what goes kitchen-wise. Hopefully I can get everything squared away by Wednesday, my intended departure date.

I was taking down the posters from my music room yesterday and was briefly overcome by the sensation that this is all so much sooner than I had intended. I always knew this house wasn’t permanent, but I had assumed that I would leave it only when I had a family to outgrow it (i.e. a second child). The death of that small unconscious dream bummed me out for some time, before I shook myself out with the realization that it could still happen, and if not there are plenty more little dreams yet to be born.

1.) Or escape from, if you were born there.
2.) I’ve had this couch since senior year of college. It’s gone through several couch covers and remains the most comfortable, if moderately gross, couch ever.

I’d heard horror stories of people trying to fast-track their passport renewals, only to be held up by things like subtle differences in signature, etc. Given the price difference of $100+ between the fast-track and slow-boat methods, I opted for slow-boat since I’m not in any hurry to leave the country. They said I should have my passport by December.

I got it in the mail yesterday.

Sometimes, not often but sometimes…the federal bureaucracy surprises you with its efficiency.

If this keeps up I’ll have to add a new category.

Last night’s scary dream took place high above the backyard of my mom’s house. I was clinging to the top of a very tall, very flimsy tree. The location changed to a full forest, and I transferred precariously to various other thin, unsupportive trees. I don’t remember how I got down, but I was under a very thick canopy with lots of leaves on the ground. I needed directions on how to get somewhere, and Brad Brown told me which way to go. I went deeper into the forest and found a barbecue shack. So, happy ending I guess.

The other dream consisted of me being stuck in an elevator with Stephen King. I told him I’ve never read any of his books, but that I really enjoyed Stand By Me and Shawshank Redemption. We then proceeded to talk about guitars. He was a cool guy.

I didn’t sleep well last night. I had a series of turbulent dreams. The first and longest of which consisted of me and my friend Torrey living in some secluded house on a high ridge with a view of the Buffalo River. But we were the only people left; zombies had taken over the world.

The next batch took place at my house. I had committed a murder. I forget who it was that I killed, but it was an accident (this undoubtedly came from having watched Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player before bedtime). That storyline faded into me finding all my mail opened and scattered across my front yard, ants crawling all over my legs, and the driver’s side doors of my car being unable to lock.

Apparently I’m stressed out. My last day of work is a week from today. I’m about to experience the single biggest shift in my life since maybe moving to college. Or moving to Little Rock after college. Either way it’s something I haven’t had to do in over eight years. I don’t feel outwardly antsy; but apparently there’s a lot going on underneath my hood.

Anyone care to offer me some dime-store psychoanalysis?