Day 2: 630 miles stopping place Mexican Hat

Pieces of pie eaten: 2 (both apple)
Burgers eaten: 1
number of clouds seen: 0
things that scared me: pack of vultures tearing apart a coyote

Once again a day of straight empty roads. While I had to take a detour to get over the mountains, the detour took me past Yucca mountain and through several desert basins. I love desert & mountain scenery. I love empty roads. Don't know why. Maybe it's the Mexican in me. I'm listening to all sorts of college history lectures on my ipod. So far I've covered about a thousand years of Egyptian history and Byzantium. Later I will do 10 hours of geology. Maybe I'll arrive back home super smart. Oddly enough all these scenes reminded me of places I had seen in China (Death Valley looks like Xinjiang, the Yucca Mountain area looks like Gansu, northern Nevada looks like Qinhai...etc). I arrived to Mexican Hat/ Monument Valley right at sunset.

Our stuff hits the road.

This guy was talking about living 'off the grid' in the Angeles National Forest.

I always stop for roadside memorials.

If you need a lighted fish lamp. The truck stop in the Mojave is a good bet.

The roads were virtually empty. From 5-7 I passed a single car. I chased mountain shadows across the desert and watched the sky fade to black. After sunset on roads this empty I like to drive with the headlights off just using the sky glow which is plenty bright. The windows were open...the dry 90 degree air felt nice across my face. The hotel here in Furnace Creek is empty except for a couple of Germans. Lousy restaurant. Depressing bar. The road up into the mountains has washed out so tomorrow I'll have to backtrack. Finding nothing to do here at the hotel, I drove down the a road and turned off onto an unpaved path up a hill. Up on a little ridge I parked the Mini and hung out on the roof with a pillow stargazing. The milky way stands out in high relief in this kind of dark. The Pleides stand out to the naked eye. I was out there for a good long time and got a nice shower of shooting stars just as I was getting ready to drive back. Invariably my inner transcendentalist comes out on these drives.

Tomorrow I hope to get an early start out of here.

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Today is my mom's birthday. She would have been 59.

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Day 1:
miles driven: 300
scariest thing seen: burnt volcanic landscape around Cinder Road
best road candy: all chocolate Nekko Wafers

Jenn reports that her belly button is on the verge of flipping. The inversion has been a hotly anticipated event in our household... missing the show is a minor tragedy. Jenn if you are reading this today, I want pictures!

Neither Leon nor Tiny materialized. Instead I got recently-released-from-the-state-pen Dennis "Big Bad D" and Norman who went by "Quiet Norm". A third guy known only as "Sloppy" showed up, decided it was too hot and left. The temperature was hovering just over 100. Work started 8 hours late and the 18 wheeler only was half loaded. So tomorrow we start over at 7am. I wonder if Quiet Norm will again don a USPS uniform and combat boots. I just want to hit the road.

Has anyone noticed LA has more than it's fair share of scary dentists?

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The moving van arrives at the storage facility today and then I'll start driving... The phone call this morning was less than encouraging.

The moving guy: "Leon and Tiny, well you know, they were partying last night, so we'll be late man."

me: "How late."

The moving guy: "Maybe 4 hours maybe 6. I'll call your cell."

me: "4 to 6 hours?!"

The moving guy: "Tiny, man, he's an animal. Good guy though. Don't worry man."

The first picture was taken on the day I moved to LA. Feb 94 I think. The second was taken today.

In my 10 years in LA I lived in 7 houses from Santa Monica to Silverlake. Today in Santa Monica I happened to drive past house #3, my little cottage on 12th and Idaho. It was tiny but was smartly designed and strangely soothing. Even twelve blocks away from the beach I could always smell the sea air in the morning. I have nothing but fond memories of the place. Today I was pleased to discover the plants I put in have virtually taken over the façade and the tree is a decent size. When I moved in there were no plantings whatsoever.

I try to plant trees wherever I live. I like seeing how the trees I've planted along the way have grown. It gives me a yardstick with which to measure my life. The first tree I planted was in Houston at the age of 5, a red oak. In a picture I wear a NASA jumpsuit and am proudly holding a shovel. I went back and visited a few years ago. That tree dwarfs the house and shades the entire lawn.

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This mornings house visit made me feel like I should visit all the houses before I go, so tonight I visited house #4 which I shared with several friends up on Lincoln Terrace. It was owned by Rick Rubin and featured incredible views (and an attic filled with perfectly aged rock & roll t-shirts). From my desk I looked out over the Chateau Marmont, the Marlboro Man, and the city itself. I am about as anti-smoker as a man can be (I'm not proud of it, and know it's not rational, but I judge most all smokers harshly and think they are weak.), but I miss that Marlboro Man sign. Sunset just isn't Sunset without it.

This is what the place looked like tonight:

And this is what the little street looked like when we were there:

LA is full of secret places hard for someone outside to see.

A recent issue of Harpers turned me on to a book titled Sebastian's Arrows: Letters and Mementos of Salvador Dali and Federico Garcia Lorca. I happened to find an advance copy. While Surrealist writings don't usually do it for me, Lorca's lecture "Imagination, Inspiration, Evasion" alone is worth the cost of admission.

I arrived early into Burbank having slept virtually the entire flight. As I took a cab to a friend's house I noticed this liquor store. Years ago I spent three nights in the parking lot. We were shooting the scene in Clueless where Alicia Silverstone gets mugged. Back then I thought this was a "bad" part of town. It's in Burbank for god's sake.

After collecting my car I made the mistake of driving back to the old house out of morbid curiosity. I shouldn't have gone. The new owner has done some very depressing things to the back yard. He's building an ugly modern looking wall and has cut all the lush trees way back. I'm sure it will look better when it's all done, but it will be years before the cypress trees recover.

Most sad for me: The plum tree was chopped down. More on this after I've had some sleep.

As I said I shouldn't have gone. Afterwards I went to In & Out and had a #3 to recover. From there I headed to Pasedena to run a few errands and then to Silverlake to look at a baby store and finally to Little Tokyo. I love Little Tokyo and wish there was something analogous in New York. It's small scale, friendly and has all sorts of neat shops and restaurants (including a new Marukai Forum 98 cent store). But one thing I don't understand. What's the deal with the Colonel Ellison Shoji Onizuka obsession? There are no less than 7 plaques and memorials scattered around as well as a 2 streets named for him.

I ended the day watching Warriors of Heaven and Earth. Give it a miss. This film is horrible. One thing I've been noticing: If a director keeps using fades instead of cuts, it's because he doesn't have something to cut to. Amateurish.

I've pulled all-nighters the last four or five times I've flown. Jenn hates this behavior and I don't like it myself, but there is always so much to be done.... The last couple of times I was in hell, but last night zipped by... and I'm sitting here at LaGuardia at 5:36am feeling fine, even kind of awake. I'm sure this won't last and I'll drool all the way to Burbank.

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I'm sitting in an airport lounge in front of the windows under a TV screen. There are about 30 people here and most are watching the set. Two rows in front of me sit four young Marines headed to a base in San Antonio and then Iraq. Until a few minutes ago they were joking loudly about the awful conditions over there. They are just kids. I am facing them and they are now watching a long CNN report on the 1000 servicemen and women killed in Iraq. One of the Marines is choked up and his emotion is rubbing off on everyone else here. One woman had to leave and an older gentleman has tears on his face. The marines have gone quiet I expect they will stay quiet for some time.

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I woke up this morning to a phone call from the painters telling me that some water from last nights downpour had come into our new place because he had left the windows open last night. I hung up and as I blinked my eyes open I saw water streaming through the terrace door of the apartment I'm staying in here in the city. The room was soaked. Terrace drain problems apparently. The floor was already warping and the fancy (ugly) European carpet had to be pulled out and dried before it shrinks and gets mouldy. I wet-vacced up almost 7 gallons of water. Not good. I've spent all day dealing with mess. Later I will go down to Brooklyn and see what the situation is there.

Tomorrow I fly back to LA to collect my car and get the movers rolling.

I'm glad Jenn is at her Mom's house and was spared dealing with all of this.

I think this random image was taken as I fiddled with the camera. It captures my mood.

Our Venezuelan landlady in Brooklyn seems to be using the six months of rent we paid her to dig a very large hole in the back yard. You can't tell from this image, but the hole is now almost seven feet deep in some places. One theory is that since she has a basement room, she decided to dig out the back yard so that it is on level with the basement. Another theory is that she is going to build a room down there. A third theory is that she is insane.

All the work is being done by three underage kids from the Mexican state of Tabasco using buckets picks and shovels.

Every time I visit Jenn's family, I realize that at some point I will have to do a detailed photographic study of the homes of Koreans of a certain age. The homes tend to be in planned developments, and they tend to be both super Korean and unmistakably American in ways that are weird and wonderful. Framed jigsaw puzzles of the Last Supper. Poo bear merchandise and koo-koo clocks feature prominently.

Also it seems that every house must have a Jesus calendar (usually a year or two out of date) with almost surrealistic imagery. These calendars are usually found on the back doors of bathrooms. My Mexican family has similar calendars although they tend to feature saints and tend to be five to ten years out of date.

Our friends Amy and Travis have just set up a new blog from Kazakhstan. I've been through Almaty twice and have to say I'm jealous. While the city itself is a bit Soviet, it is surrounded by spectacular mountains and villages. Should be an interesting year for them.