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Apologies for the long silence. You know how it is: you take the train down to L.A. for the weekend, and the next thing you know, you’re at this party in West Hollywood at a mansion formerly owned by Slash (formerly of Guns ‘n’ Roses) where your friends in the up-and-coming band Super Duper are playing on the balcony overlooking the massive, terraced, candlelit back yard where hundreds of L.A.’s pretty young things are eating and drinking and soaking in the hot tub and jumping out of the hot tub down the waterfall to the swimming pool below, and you get back to the couch you’re sleeping on in Burbank not too long before 4 in the morning, and then it’s Tuesday and you’re back in Ojai and you haven’t posted anything to the blog for days and days.
Seriously: all that happened. It was monumental.
I’m a terrible party guest, especially if I’m attending a party alone. I have neither the ability nor the desire to mingle well, so I always end up standing by myself with a drink in my hand, watching the drama unfold from a distance. But when it’s something as worth watching as this party was, I don’t mind so much.
All of us involved in the Friday night shenanigans got a slow start on Saturday. My friends Dan and Aaron (vocalist and bassist, respectively, for Super Duper) and I hit up vintage Burbank sandwich shop Giamela’s for afternoon sustenance. The sub I ate wasn’t up to my exceedingly picky sub standards–though it wasn’t a bad sandwich–but the establishment itself didn’t disappoint. Small and dingy, with a bare-bones menu of maybe half a dozen sandwiches, Giamela’s earns a spot on my personal places-worth-knowing-about map of L.A.
We returned then to the scene of the night before to retrieve the band’s gear; from there, we made our way over to Hollywood proper to wander around Amoeba Music until dusk. Restorative coffees were consumed, and some time after that we found ourselves back in Burbank, eating a moderately late supper of what claimed to be Japanese food. The sushi and tempura looked orthodox enough, but the oyakodon I ordered turned out to be something more along the lines of teriyaki chicken atop egg fu yung atop rice: edible, but not oyakodon. I was disappointed and confused until I realized that the proprietors of the restaurant were Korean-American, at which point I was merely disappointed.
On Sunday morning, Aaron–whose couch I was surfing–and I went out for a cripplingly large breakfast and then retreated to his living room to watch football and digest. Dan appeared by and by, and he and I paid a visit to UCLA’s Fowler museum to see the “Art of Tea” exhibit currently showing there. I had the chance to talk at tedious length for awhile about Japanese tea, and I got to see lots of pretty things I didn’t know anything about, mostly Chinese and English pieces.
What we learned after that was that the Burger King in Westwood is perhaps the most soul-crushing of the franchise’s locations worldwide. Not dirty but very, very dark, the restaurant’s decor absorbs both light and enthusiasm. It looks like an airport bar from the early ’80s. It is a bad, bad place. Also the two-Whoppers-for-three-bucks deal running at every other Burger King I’ve passed lately is fifty cents more expensive in Westwood; apparently they’re charging extra for the (literally) crazy blind guy they’ve got yelling in there.
With burgers and more caffeine in us, Dan and I met the rest of Super Duper at a rehearsal space in some undistinguished backwater of the city: a complex that may once, long ago, have been a medical park or some such. Now it’s just a smoky labyrinth of rock ‘n’ roll posters and beat-up sofas and ashtrays and doors through which leaked the muffled din of half a dozen bands without futures. (And Super Duper, the future of which I hope will justify my enthusiasm.) I sat–well, stood–in on the band’s rehearsal and had a fine time of it.
Later, E., one of Aaron’s three housemates, treated me and Aaron and Aaron’s girlfriend to a late supper at Zankou Chicken. And I retired to my last night–of that trip–on the couch in Burbank.
On Monday, I met my old friend J. at crazy popular Porto’s Bakery. We grabbed coffees for the road, and she did me a solid by driving me down to Anaheim. I thanked her with lunch at the La Palma Chicken Pie Shop. (Unchanged; magnificent as ever.)
J. dropped me off at L.’s, and what followed doesn’t bear close recounting. Imagine, if you must, two cranky, poisonously discontent, unemployed men rocketing toward middle age without families or careers; put them together with no money and nothing to do but air their grievances; and you’ve got the idea. I did eventually buy us some beer, and L.’s girlfriend sprang for carne asada fries, and there were several episodes of Huell Howser on the television, so not all was lost–but still, it wasn’t pretty.
We’d wanted to go to Disneyland to take in the seasonal offerings (Space Mountain overlay and Halloween fireworks), but have to postpone the outing until later this month–if it happens at all–when a little more cash might be available to one or all. So I packed up this morning, made my way back to Ojai through a rain that fell all the way from there to here, and spent my afternoon clicking fruitlessly through job listings online.
I love L.A. I never get tired of telling people that. Things just feel right when I’m there, even when things are clearly wrong. I don’t know if that means I’m southward bound or not; a lot now depends on where I can find paying work. It means at least that you probably won’t see me straying too far from the City of Angels. I’ll be back in town at the end of this month for Super Duper’s next big gig: Drac Studios’ Halloween party at Santa Monica’s super-swank Dakota Lounge. I’ll be on roadie/merch table/puppet wrangling detail. Hope I see you there.
I’m just having a bit of fun here.
Squarespace is a fairly brilliant web hosting platform, but blogging to it isn’t the easiest conceivable procedure. Not as easy as posting stuff to Tumblr is, say–which is what I was playing with yesterday. Today I’ve moved on to Posterous. Advantage: really, really, really easy to blog anything and everything. Disadvantage: the cool image gallery functionality doesn’t get auto-posted over here to Squarespace; everything’s a lot prettier if you look at the Posterous site itself. But no way am I gonna point my domain name over there. In the final equation, Squarespace is just more powerful and flexible. I’ll stay here for the time being, thank you very much. But I’ll probably do most of my posting through Posterous, and just put up with the mildly obtrusive footer text, etc.
I was toying with the idea of setting up two blogs: one for more carefully thought-out essay-type entries, and one for the quick pictures and links and so forth that I like to imagine people are interested in. And maybe it’ll come to that if I ever find myself writing more than I currently do. For now, I’ll just post everything together, and leave it to you to try to make sense of it.
This is exciting.
To begin with, I’m always excited when I do something I’d said I was going to do. Makes me feel like a genuine grown-up or something.
Also, this is just something that needed to happen that I’ve been waiting quite some time for the right time to make happen. (Don’t worry: that sentence lost me, too.)
I’ve made contact with the Urasenke teacher in Santa Barbara.
And this Saturday, I’ll be going to tea practice for the first time since early April.
I’ll embarrass myself. I’ve forgotten everything. My knees will be desperately unhappy.
I don’t care. I’m going back to okeiko. A part of me that went missing when I left Japan will be restored.
I hope.
I am 32 years old and a man, and I think that outings with my mother are just about the best thing ever. This is not just because they usually involve her supplying my needs for food and/or caffeine. She’s just fun to hang out with, and she likes to go cool places.
That’s “cool” as in “less than the pushing-100 degrees F Ojai air.” On Sunday, just after L. dropped me off at my new digs, Mom and I drove back out to the coast to escape the heat. A drive of half an hour yielded a difference in temperature of easily ten, and probably more like twenty, degrees; in Ojai, the sun beat on the mountains from a cloudless sky, while in Ventura, cool winds whipped along the hazy coastline.
There’s a parking lot in the shadow of the system of ramps that lead onto highway 33, the route inland from the 101 in Ventura to Ojai. A few hundred yards of the bicycle path that descends from the mountains before bending east toward Oxnard leads to the ocean: just to the west of the Ventura County Fairgrounds hides the Seaside Wilderness Park, 24 acres of sand dunes, salt marsh, and bird sanctuary tucked between the fairgrounds and Emma Wood State Beach. Mom and I picknicked; watched fishing terns; napped; walked.
Then I suggested ice cream, and I suggested getting it back in Ojai, where the heat would help us enjoy it. We drove the first segment of the trip inland along old Ventura Avenue, the main drag before the 33 was built. I’m disappointed in myself–for all the dozens, maybe hundreds, of times I drove from Ventura to Ojai when I lived there a decade ago, I never thought to get off the beaten path to explore what was hidden almost in plain sight. Ventura Avenue is a treat: a stretch of cute vintage houses and respectable, mostly blue-collar businesses. It’s neither high class nor low; humble but not depressed. I could live there.
Ojai was, as expected, still cooking when we got back into town and stopped at the Rite Aid. Really, of course, we were stopping at the Thrifty; though the drug stores were all renamed when Rite Aid acquired them, the brand lives on in the ice cream that’s still sold in the old locations. And it was the ice cream we stopped for.
Thrifty ice cream is yet another thing that gives me nostalgic feelings, even though it’s still readily available and even though I didn’t exactly grow up with it. I have fine memories of eating the stuff on family vacations to Southern California–specifically to the Canyon Country desert where my grandparents lived. Vacations happened in the summer, and the summer meant furnace heat. Into the Thrifty through the automatic door. Sudden prickles on the skin and the glorious flavor of refrigerated air in the nose and throat. Up to the ice cream counter to make the all-important decision–and then out comes the unique Thrifty ice cream scoop, a gun-shaped contraption pressed into a bucket of ice cream to take a cylindrical puck out and eject it atop a cone. That fascinated me as a child, and still does. It wasn’t shaped like other ice cream; it was the ice cream world’s analog to square burger patties from Wendy’s or White Castle, which I also got rarely as a boy and so was obsessed with.
The ice cream wasn’t, and isn’t, particularly distinguished; just sort of basically tasty ice cream. Besides the unique shape, the main draw was, and is, the price. Back in the ’80s, when I tasted my first Thrifty ice cream, it cost ten cents a scoop. Rite Aid jacked the prices when the chain was purchased, but at 98 cents, the scoop I had yesterday was still cheaper than one from Baskin Robbins would have been, I think.
And the ice cream counter was just perfect: tucked away in a corner of the dim Ojai Rite Aid, looking more or less like I imagine it’s looked for decades, the Thrifty logo still displayed proudly here at least. Mom and I took our cones outside to eat them in the heat, which was exactly the right thing to do. I had black cherry ice cream on a sugar cone. It made me happy.
Then we were off, as I detailed in my last post, on a bit of a meander around town, on which I reacquainted myself with my home of ten-plus years ago. It was surreal, but I think that just pushing through it got the weirdness out of my system for the most part. A few more days or weeks of being here, driving here, shopping here, and it’ll be my home of the present instead of my home of the past.
When’s the last time you had that much fun with your mom, huh?
Here we go–for real this time, I think.
I’m sitting at my desk on the second floor of the back half of a nondescript building in a nondescript industrial park in a suburb of Santa Barbara, California. It’s the start of my second day of work here. Nothing was accomplished the first day, yesterday, except for a lot of inevitable wrestling with computers and software.
Just a few steps away is the desk that was mine when I worked here a decade ago–now in use by someone who actually collects a paycheck here. (My own mother, oddly enough.) On the one hand, I miss being near the window. On the other hand, the view out of the window is only of the junkyard next door.
Memories of a decade ago have been very present for the last few days. On Sunday, after the briefest of vacation stops in Orange County–most of it spent helping a friend move–I was driven by L. up to Ojai, retracing the route I followed when I first moved there in January of 1998. After an afternoon trip with my mom down to the beach in Ventura, I took a drive through downtown Ojai, looking at what’s changed and what hasn’t. I poked around the streets off the main drag until I found a restaurant I remember frequenting for Saturday morning breakfasts with the girl I got engaged to, then disengaged from. I drove up to the Ojai Valley lookout point on the road that winds and climbs out of the back of the valley.
So it’s the start of my second day of work, and precisely because I don’t draw a paycheck here, I get to start it by blogging. Now that I’m well connected to the Internet tubes once again, I expect to exercise that freedom often.
It was the most remarkable occurrence. You wouldn’t understand, were I to elaborate, but I can tell you that Signs and Wonders were vouchsafed unto us. We don’t know what any of it means, but we suspect that things are about to get either a whole lot better or much, much worse.
What, exactly? I can’t say. But today’s unremarkable trip down the coast–I’m changing planes in Sacramento right now–feels significant. Some new stage is about to start. Yeah, yeah–I know: when is that not the case for me? But really: I’ve been in limbo since returning from Japan almost half a year ago. I think–hope–that’s about to change.
Let me get this straight: Disneyland closed its Skyway out of (as is commonly believed) liability concerns, yet the Puyallup freakin’ Fair continues to operate one seasonally without a problem.
Like Slim Pickens in “Blazing Saddles,” *I am depressed*.
I find myself hoping sincerely that nobody actually looks forward to updates here. The reader who did would be an often disappointed one.
At least my bad blogging habits of late aren’t entirely my fault. I’m still without Internet, at my parents’ house in Washington. I spent most of my week finishing the painting project I mentioned in my last post.
Weekend fun starts this afternoon with a trip to the Puyallup Fair, and continues tomorrow with a night on Vashon.
I’m six days from California and a week from Pie Night. And close, I hope, to resuming a halfway respectable writing schedule.
 Briefly: I finished a fine stretch of days staying with my friends in Seattle–complete with beer-making and the brand-new Beatles Rock Band game–and was off almost without a break to spend two days in Mt. Rainier National Park with my father.
Under other circumstances I’d write at some length about the trip, but as it is, I’m now without Internet except for what my iPhone can provide. Short version: we backpacked in, hiked long and hard, slept uncomfortably, hiked more. Had a great time and earned stunning views like the one above: me atop the Tolmie Peak fire lookout tower, with Eunice Lake and mighty Rainier in the background.
Tomorrow I’ll begin a short painting project for an aunt who wants to change the color of a certain room in her house. That’ll put a little much-needed cash in my pocket ahead of my return to California, which I’ve planned for Thursday, the 24th of this month.
I don’t expect to be able to get much time properly online before then, so certain of the promises I’ve made here will continue to await fulfillment, but I’ll try to keep up a trickle of mini-updates from the phone. Wouldn’t want you to think I’d forgotten about you, after all.
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Midorikai book progress 2009.11.19: 4798 words of first draft written.
2009.11.18: 4559 words. |
