Today, as our benevolent Captain David was giving us a rapid passenger seat tour of his native city, our nations capital, we were stopped by Homeland Security boys and issued a warning for taking photographs of the Pentagon from out of the window of his rental car whilst driving down the freeway, and for “that little bit of attitude” David bravely took with the officers about being Glad to Still Have his Freedoms.
In conclusion Washington DC is crowded and ridiculous. We are leaving tomorrow.
Thursday, July 19, 2007
Saturday, July 14, 2007
Learning what 'Life' is all about... Pheonix - Denver.
Hey everyone,
So I am in Denver, Colorado right now. We got in yesterday evening after a very long, very silly rideshare with a man named Life, a slight misunderstanding about where we were going, and then a nice busride from Colorado Springs. We decided to go to Colorado rather then Texas as planned at the last minute for a multitude of reasons including but not limited to our inability to find a suitable ride east, and the fact that the heat seemed to be making us expand. As in, our calfs and ankles had joined into cankles. Maybe it was just our imagination, but regaurdless, the heat was getting to us.
So we found a ride for three up to Denver with a man who's real name was Bryan, but had somehow been deemed "Life" at Burning Man, and from then on had referred to himself as such. "Hello Life, so nice to meet you." He told us that he would be leaving Tuscon around 8 pm, so we should expect him to pick us up in Pheonix about an hour or two after that, but, he warned, he wasnt the best at estimating these sorts of things. Five and a half hours later, 2 hours after the coffee shop we were waiting at closed, he arrived, wearing a 'Life is Good' t-shirt, rearrainging all his drums in the trunk to make room for our backpacks. He had just gotten his PHD in sociology from ASU, and taught African American studies. He had dreadlocks and a fake sunflower dangling from his rear view mirror. He listened to electro-Hindu chants when he drove and talked about collective consciousness, oneness, energy, and how he was the spiritual avatar of the hindu concept of creation. He would respond to questions by saying "no, thats the CAPITALISTS way of thinking... " but then had us pay for ALL of the gas on the raod. He meditated at gas stations. Like, full on "Saluting the Sun" yoga move meditation. He was going to colorado to meet with his spiritual brother, who was an avatar of the hindu concept of destruction whom he had met at burning man for his 42nd birthday. He was excited about it because "42 is the meaning of life!" Get it? like hitchhikers guide to the galaxy! We talked about religion, science and philosophy. When he talked about Plato and his theory of forms, I imagined 'Life' being Plato's perfect form of the North-American-Eco-Hippy-Stereotypeous who had just decided to decend from heaven to give us a ride to Denver. "Denver? actually my spiritual brother just called and said he was in Colorado springs instead... so I'll get you guys to a bus station or something? Maybe you could get someone you know in Denver to drive down to Colorado Springs instead? Its only like 45 minutes! (AAA guide: Colorado Springs-Denver: 80 Miles, 1.2 hours) It took us about three hours by bus.
In the end, I would say we enjoyed our 15 hours of Life-time. Despite his gross underestimation of how long anything took, his sudden changes of plans, and the whole us paying for all the gas thing. He was smart, fun to talk to and a good enough driver. He danced in the drivers seat and and sang along to the Dave Mathews Band and Spearhead and everything you might expect a guy named Life to dance and sing along to. And despite the fact that we made him buy us the bus tickets to denver since we had just filled up his tank, he gave us all goodbye hugs and good wishes.
When we arrived in Denver we all jumped with delight at how NOT scortching hot the night air was compared to Pheonix, and contimplated putting on sweaters, just for kicks.
Instead, we decided, in celebration of our last few hours together before Leslie left us to see her brother in Central City and then head back west, to get dressed to the nines and have a nice, quiet dinner together. Now, you have to understand that since high school, the three of us have practiced the sacred ritual of getting ready to go out together before any special occasion, which was especially fun in the cramped underground bathrooms of Denver's central bus station. We used the reflective surfaces on the hand-dryers to put on mascarra and eye shadow, and dug our classiest outfits out of our giant backpacks in tiny bathroom stalls. Despite having driven all night and all day, not having slept in the Arizona/New Mexico heat, I dont think a fancier-looking group of people have ever been seen wearing backpacking gear before in history. You should have seen us trying to find a place to stash our massive packs, sleeping bags and all, in the fancy little italian place where we decided to eat.
So we said goodbye to Leslie at the casino-shuttle stop and went off to find my first cousin once removed, who seems a lot more like an unkle, so we've taken to calling him my cunkle. He is everything a cunkle should be: kind, generous, and funny funny funny. we talked for a bit, checked out his amazing new house, and then he showed us to what he called the "freeloaders room" and we were sound asleep about five minutes.
Tomorrow we are off to the Twin Cities, Minneapolis and St. Paul Minnesota. It's a 15 hour drive. Till then!
So I am in Denver, Colorado right now. We got in yesterday evening after a very long, very silly rideshare with a man named Life, a slight misunderstanding about where we were going, and then a nice busride from Colorado Springs. We decided to go to Colorado rather then Texas as planned at the last minute for a multitude of reasons including but not limited to our inability to find a suitable ride east, and the fact that the heat seemed to be making us expand. As in, our calfs and ankles had joined into cankles. Maybe it was just our imagination, but regaurdless, the heat was getting to us.
So we found a ride for three up to Denver with a man who's real name was Bryan, but had somehow been deemed "Life" at Burning Man, and from then on had referred to himself as such. "Hello Life, so nice to meet you." He told us that he would be leaving Tuscon around 8 pm, so we should expect him to pick us up in Pheonix about an hour or two after that, but, he warned, he wasnt the best at estimating these sorts of things. Five and a half hours later, 2 hours after the coffee shop we were waiting at closed, he arrived, wearing a 'Life is Good' t-shirt, rearrainging all his drums in the trunk to make room for our backpacks. He had just gotten his PHD in sociology from ASU, and taught African American studies. He had dreadlocks and a fake sunflower dangling from his rear view mirror. He listened to electro-Hindu chants when he drove and talked about collective consciousness, oneness, energy, and how he was the spiritual avatar of the hindu concept of creation. He would respond to questions by saying "no, thats the CAPITALISTS way of thinking... " but then had us pay for ALL of the gas on the raod. He meditated at gas stations. Like, full on "Saluting the Sun" yoga move meditation. He was going to colorado to meet with his spiritual brother, who was an avatar of the hindu concept of destruction whom he had met at burning man for his 42nd birthday. He was excited about it because "42 is the meaning of life!" Get it? like hitchhikers guide to the galaxy! We talked about religion, science and philosophy. When he talked about Plato and his theory of forms, I imagined 'Life' being Plato's perfect form of the North-American-Eco-Hippy-Stereotypeous who had just decided to decend from heaven to give us a ride to Denver. "Denver? actually my spiritual brother just called and said he was in Colorado springs instead... so I'll get you guys to a bus station or something? Maybe you could get someone you know in Denver to drive down to Colorado Springs instead? Its only like 45 minutes! (AAA guide: Colorado Springs-Denver: 80 Miles, 1.2 hours) It took us about three hours by bus.
In the end, I would say we enjoyed our 15 hours of Life-time. Despite his gross underestimation of how long anything took, his sudden changes of plans, and the whole us paying for all the gas thing. He was smart, fun to talk to and a good enough driver. He danced in the drivers seat and and sang along to the Dave Mathews Band and Spearhead and everything you might expect a guy named Life to dance and sing along to. And despite the fact that we made him buy us the bus tickets to denver since we had just filled up his tank, he gave us all goodbye hugs and good wishes.
When we arrived in Denver we all jumped with delight at how NOT scortching hot the night air was compared to Pheonix, and contimplated putting on sweaters, just for kicks.
Instead, we decided, in celebration of our last few hours together before Leslie left us to see her brother in Central City and then head back west, to get dressed to the nines and have a nice, quiet dinner together. Now, you have to understand that since high school, the three of us have practiced the sacred ritual of getting ready to go out together before any special occasion, which was especially fun in the cramped underground bathrooms of Denver's central bus station. We used the reflective surfaces on the hand-dryers to put on mascarra and eye shadow, and dug our classiest outfits out of our giant backpacks in tiny bathroom stalls. Despite having driven all night and all day, not having slept in the Arizona/New Mexico heat, I dont think a fancier-looking group of people have ever been seen wearing backpacking gear before in history. You should have seen us trying to find a place to stash our massive packs, sleeping bags and all, in the fancy little italian place where we decided to eat.
So we said goodbye to Leslie at the casino-shuttle stop and went off to find my first cousin once removed, who seems a lot more like an unkle, so we've taken to calling him my cunkle. He is everything a cunkle should be: kind, generous, and funny funny funny. we talked for a bit, checked out his amazing new house, and then he showed us to what he called the "freeloaders room" and we were sound asleep about five minutes.
Tomorrow we are off to the Twin Cities, Minneapolis and St. Paul Minnesota. It's a 15 hour drive. Till then!
Thursday, July 12, 2007
Cities of angels, origin, and endless heat ("But it's a DRY heat.")
So I'm backpacking cross-country with two best friends I've known since high school, Andrea O (as she will be referred to as until she decides what she would rather change her name to) and Leslie "the" Hammer. We are on a somewhat meandering, uncharted course, aiming for expirience above expidience, although all three of us are here for differant reasons:
Leslie has some time off and wants to visit her brother in Colorado and her family in Pheonix, but has to head back west to California soon, so our paths will split once we head for Texas and she for Denver. Andrea's final destination is Montreal. As for me, I am kind of just along for the ride, because I just finished college and there is nothing I would rather do, and because I want to do this little project of mine, the psuedo-ethnography/art project about the people who pick up riders on Craigslist.com Ridesharing.
Our first day on the road, July 6th 2007, I had been up all night packing, fretting about leaving so soon because I hardley felt ready, only having graduated and gone home a week and a half before. Because we didnt have much money, because I everyone else seemed to think it was dangerous and insane, because I didn’t know when I would ever come back. Our first rideshare was a 23 year old girl named Autumn. She was beautiful, loved the beach, drove a Jetta, went to UCLA. The kind of girl I, having gone to UC Santa Barbara,thought I knew all about just by looking at her, but the best thing about our trip with her was how quickly she made me realize what absolute bunk that was. That and the fact that we got to LA in less then five hours and $40 worth of gas. She told us about how she used to swindle old men gambling on the ohio river, how her life plan was to move to Central America and start an NGO based on AIDS education and releif, how she was nothing like my narrow little assumptions would have pinned her as. Wonderful.
She dropped us off on the corner of Venice and something in Culver city, where my friend Chris, an all-around fun chem grad student lived, who actually might have been the first person to ever buy art from me several years ago. He came and met us on the stoop of his apartment, hung out for about half an hour and then gave us the key to his apartment and went off to a previous engagement. The three of us spent the night walking the streets of LA, eating ridiculous attempts at vegetarian food from Fatburger and standing in line for half an hour to go inside a 711 that had been converted into a Kwik-E-Mart in promotion of The Simpsons movie. They had redone the outside completley to look like a cartoon, and had Duff and Buzz cola, Krusty-Os and big pink sprinkled Simpsons donuts, which Andrea, Leslie and I all enjoyed. They even had clerks in Kwik-E-mart uniforms. Half the fun was seeing all the over the top Simpson enthusiasts in line in front of us. The lady behind us had already stood in line four times. hah.
In the morning, our friends Josh and Rebecca Redman drove down from Thousand Oaks to pick us up on the way to the 10 east. They pulled up on the street under Chris's balcony playing the ukelele from the drivers seat of their minivan, with both doors open. With them, we drove for several hours into the desert until we got to the Salten Sea, which apparently is California's largest lake, hidden out in the flat, arrid desert of south-eastern California. It comes at you out of nowhere, a vast, clear blue sea out in the badlands, bordered mainly by boarded-up motels and deserted gas stations. Outside the van, the air was hot and thick and smelled aggressivley like fish. A few miles up the road we stopped at Bombay Beach: a well-below-sea level town famous for a flooding that happened in the 1950s, where the Salton Sea buried an entire neighborhood of trailors, completely submerging them in water, and as it evaporated over time, left an eery, post-apocolyptic feeling wasteland, once half submerged in water and now just deep in dry cracked mud. The heat and the smell were overbearing, but the stop was well worth checking out.
After that we went a few more miles down the road to Salvation Mountain, which I have already written about previously on this blog, and it was once again amazing and inspiring, except it was SO HOT. Something about July during a heatwave in the desert makes walking even the smallest distance seem like murder. That night Andrea, Leslie and I went back to Indio, the town where Andrea was born, but hadn’t been to in years and years and where her aunt still lived. We stayed one night with her Aunt Toni, enjoying her air conditioning, her gatoraide, and her outragously generosity. In the morning, she treated us to a Del Taco breakfast, loaded us up with snacks for the road, and bought us 3 greyhound tickets to Pheonix... for safety’s sake. And Andrea left the state of California for good through the same city she entered it.
In Pheonix we stayed most the time with Leslie’s extended family, and one night with my good friend Zach (of the band iji)
The last few days in Pheonix (three days? four days?) have all sort of a blurred together in the heat. The things that stick out to me the most are, in list form:
-Reuniting with an old best friend of mine, seeing that despite the rather unbeleiveable things the eight years since we’ve seen each other have brought, she is still the same glittering one-of-a-kind personality I remember her as
-hanging out for hours at Pheonix’s two finest social establishments, being the Willow House and the Trunk Space, both all-ages cafe-turned music venue/art gallery type places where Andrea did spoken-word for the first time, and where we saw, over the course of several nights, The Teeth, Andrew Jackson Jihad, and Visions of a Dying World, Polka Dot Dot Dot, Jordan O’ Jordan, and lots of other good bands and good people
-Going to Crafts and Conversations with Leslie’s indomitable 90 year old grandmother and a feirce crew of other old ladies at their local church
-The amazing breakfast we ate at the Zach’s house
-Playing lots of Guitar Hero with Leslie’s fantastic cousins
-Being really hot
-eating soooo much Mexican food.
Thats about it for now, I guess. Til next time.
home is a time not a place.
Leslie has some time off and wants to visit her brother in Colorado and her family in Pheonix, but has to head back west to California soon, so our paths will split once we head for Texas and she for Denver. Andrea's final destination is Montreal. As for me, I am kind of just along for the ride, because I just finished college and there is nothing I would rather do, and because I want to do this little project of mine, the psuedo-ethnography/art project about the people who pick up riders on Craigslist.com Ridesharing.
Our first day on the road, July 6th 2007, I had been up all night packing, fretting about leaving so soon because I hardley felt ready, only having graduated and gone home a week and a half before. Because we didnt have much money, because I everyone else seemed to think it was dangerous and insane, because I didn’t know when I would ever come back. Our first rideshare was a 23 year old girl named Autumn. She was beautiful, loved the beach, drove a Jetta, went to UCLA. The kind of girl I, having gone to UC Santa Barbara,thought I knew all about just by looking at her, but the best thing about our trip with her was how quickly she made me realize what absolute bunk that was. That and the fact that we got to LA in less then five hours and $40 worth of gas. She told us about how she used to swindle old men gambling on the ohio river, how her life plan was to move to Central America and start an NGO based on AIDS education and releif, how she was nothing like my narrow little assumptions would have pinned her as. Wonderful.
She dropped us off on the corner of Venice and something in Culver city, where my friend Chris, an all-around fun chem grad student lived, who actually might have been the first person to ever buy art from me several years ago. He came and met us on the stoop of his apartment, hung out for about half an hour and then gave us the key to his apartment and went off to a previous engagement. The three of us spent the night walking the streets of LA, eating ridiculous attempts at vegetarian food from Fatburger and standing in line for half an hour to go inside a 711 that had been converted into a Kwik-E-Mart in promotion of The Simpsons movie. They had redone the outside completley to look like a cartoon, and had Duff and Buzz cola, Krusty-Os and big pink sprinkled Simpsons donuts, which Andrea, Leslie and I all enjoyed. They even had clerks in Kwik-E-mart uniforms. Half the fun was seeing all the over the top Simpson enthusiasts in line in front of us. The lady behind us had already stood in line four times. hah.
In the morning, our friends Josh and Rebecca Redman drove down from Thousand Oaks to pick us up on the way to the 10 east. They pulled up on the street under Chris's balcony playing the ukelele from the drivers seat of their minivan, with both doors open. With them, we drove for several hours into the desert until we got to the Salten Sea, which apparently is California's largest lake, hidden out in the flat, arrid desert of south-eastern California. It comes at you out of nowhere, a vast, clear blue sea out in the badlands, bordered mainly by boarded-up motels and deserted gas stations. Outside the van, the air was hot and thick and smelled aggressivley like fish. A few miles up the road we stopped at Bombay Beach: a well-below-sea level town famous for a flooding that happened in the 1950s, where the Salton Sea buried an entire neighborhood of trailors, completely submerging them in water, and as it evaporated over time, left an eery, post-apocolyptic feeling wasteland, once half submerged in water and now just deep in dry cracked mud. The heat and the smell were overbearing, but the stop was well worth checking out.
After that we went a few more miles down the road to Salvation Mountain, which I have already written about previously on this blog, and it was once again amazing and inspiring, except it was SO HOT. Something about July during a heatwave in the desert makes walking even the smallest distance seem like murder. That night Andrea, Leslie and I went back to Indio, the town where Andrea was born, but hadn’t been to in years and years and where her aunt still lived. We stayed one night with her Aunt Toni, enjoying her air conditioning, her gatoraide, and her outragously generosity. In the morning, she treated us to a Del Taco breakfast, loaded us up with snacks for the road, and bought us 3 greyhound tickets to Pheonix... for safety’s sake. And Andrea left the state of California for good through the same city she entered it.
In Pheonix we stayed most the time with Leslie’s extended family, and one night with my good friend Zach (of the band iji)
The last few days in Pheonix (three days? four days?) have all sort of a blurred together in the heat. The things that stick out to me the most are, in list form:
-Reuniting with an old best friend of mine, seeing that despite the rather unbeleiveable things the eight years since we’ve seen each other have brought, she is still the same glittering one-of-a-kind personality I remember her as
-hanging out for hours at Pheonix’s two finest social establishments, being the Willow House and the Trunk Space, both all-ages cafe-turned music venue/art gallery type places where Andrea did spoken-word for the first time, and where we saw, over the course of several nights, The Teeth, Andrew Jackson Jihad, and Visions of a Dying World, Polka Dot Dot Dot, Jordan O’ Jordan, and lots of other good bands and good people
-Going to Crafts and Conversations with Leslie’s indomitable 90 year old grandmother and a feirce crew of other old ladies at their local church
-The amazing breakfast we ate at the Zach’s house
-Playing lots of Guitar Hero with Leslie’s fantastic cousins
-Being really hot
-eating soooo much Mexican food.
Thats about it for now, I guess. Til next time.
home is a time not a place.
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