"It's funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you viddy them on the screen."*

   Hello, gentle reader. Things are dicey in these parts of the world. Having just narrowly escaped with my life from the virus that attacked first my bowels and then my chest, esophagus, throat, nose, ears and brain (in ascending order), I am happy to report that things are creeping their way back to normal. I woke up this morning with the sensation that air was squeezing its way up into my nostrils. Which is sort of the opposite of a sensation and more of a return to normalcy. Sweet, sweet nose-breathing!

   It’s unfortunate that my body decided to attack me just before Mike arrived in town for a fun visit and catch-up. Drinking alcohol and staying up until three in the morning do not make for a swift recovery, it turns out. Who’d have thunk it?

   So, because I’ve been M.I.A. for the past few days, I’ve decided to do a recap post, as opposed to waxing philosophical about any one point, because, quite simply, my brain has been hibernating for a good 5 days.

1. Mike and I went Friday to the Stanley Kubrick exhibit at LACMA. It was pretty expansive and both amazing and intense. I like most of Kubrick’s films, but some of them make me squeamish just by remembering mere snippets from them and others (Eyes Wide Shut comes to mind immediately) I cannot manage to watch for more than 4 minutes. But nobody's got a perfect track record, right? And this guy not only directed but actually filmed huge chunks of his movies.

When you first enter the exhibit, they have a 15-minute montage of clips of all his films. I’m a huge fan of 2001: A Space Odyssey (which I’ve mentioned both here and here) and also of Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. But this reel gave a bit of everything, including some of the most cringe-inducing moments of A Clockwork Orange and some of the most gut-wrenchingly scary moments of The Shining: neither of which I had ever planned to view again. Thank you, LACMA for showing me Malcolm McDowell’s eyes clamped open and the part in The Shining where Danny goes to Room 217 (oddly room 237 in the movie). Oh yeah and Private Pyle blowing his brains out in Full Metal Jacket. No warnings here: they just threw it right at our faces. And that’s fine. You know how it is with art exhibits. As a cineast, I found the exhibit magnificent. As a person, I found it scary and disturbing. But in a good way. 

Some of the more harrowing nights of my life happened whilst reading The Shining. It was nice to have all the lights on while I perused items from the movie.

[Cool side note: my dear friend Judie is the widow of Leonard Rosenman who won an Academy Award for the adapted score of Kubrick’s nod to Napoleon: Barry Lyndon. Leonard is more famous for his original composing for Rebel Without a Cause and East of Eden, among others. Barry Lyndon is more famous for being lit entirely with natural light and/or candles, and for having Ryan O’Neal move really slowly everywhere he goes for no apparent reason.]

And the Kubrick exhibit wasn’t nearly as disturbing as the tiny Robert Maplethorpe exhibit they had going on in the main building. If I were a more mature person, I would’ve tried to find the “art” in all the images of anuses accepting objects they were most likely never meant to accept (I won’t tell you what, but if you use your imagination, no matter what you think of is probably right). But since I’m not very mature, and since I’ve seen most of his stuff before (in books! Not in person), I just giggled a bunch. That prompted a docent to ask us if we had tickets (we did), but made us also feel like naughty schoolchildren who'd snuck into a dirty picture(/mutliple pictures).

2. I stayed in last night to drink soup while Mike went to visit some friends in Santa Monica. It was a good choice, as I’m pretty sure it’s responsible for the fact that I felt somewhat human today. In the course of said soup drinking, I watched a couple of Barbara Stanwyck movies that I’d never seen before: No Man of Her Own (Mitchell Leisen, 1950) and Crime of Passion (Gerd Oswald, 1957). I’ve always loved Barbara Stanwyk as I feel that she’s the sane person’s version of Bette Davis, i.e. she’s no Ginger Rogers-looking broad but she’s sexy; and she gets into a ton a of trouble but she doesn’t seem to be intentionally causing it all the time. It was wonderful. And while I watched her do that, I drew you a picture that has nothing to do with anything. I was just really sick and had nothing better to do.

I drew a peacock! Neat-o!

3. Mike and I walked to brunch in Los Feliz village today. On our way home we saw a guy in a white BMW stop his car a block ahead of us an then proceed to speed down four blocks in reverse going close to 60 miles-per-hour. He finished by rear-ending up onto a curb and into someone’s side yard. Then he put the car back into drive and tore up the street in front of us. I couldn’t help but think of the shenanigans I got into when I reversed in the Runza parking lot…but this guy had no license plates, so I couldn’t really do anything about it. Even if I could've wrapped my mind around it. Which I couldn't. I actually thought for a moment that Mike and I oughta get off the sidewalk in case he was planning to back up again. What a shit.

   Um…so it kind of seems like all of this stuff is incredibly boring. That happens, you know. Just know this: if you start getting gastrointestinal disturbances in the next couple of weeks, start taking your Zicam right away, even though it sounds counter-intuitive (how can cold medicine stop diarrhea?!?). This disease will creep up your bowels (not literally, of course) into your chest and nose and throat and give you heinous reflux and a nose that just won’t operate. It’s not kidding around. It’s disgusting and virulent and foul.

   I will try to write a better post tomorrow, but my life has sort of spiraled into a shit-show and I can’t guarantee anything. Stay healthy, gentle reader.

*Quote is from the absurdly creepy A Clockwork Orange, which I attempted to revisit the other night but could only stand for about 30 minutes. But isn't Malcolm McDowell** a wonderful actor then and forever? (Stanley Kubrick, 1971).  

**I did a bunch of research on A Clockwork Orange and per imdb.com I learned this: Malcolm did, in fact, have to have his eyes wrenched open for that scene and his corneas were anesthetized so he could film for longer chunks of time, but that didn't prevent near-constant cornea scratches. Also, the man putting drops in his eyes to keep them lubricated was a real M.D. Good lord that's disgusting.

"And these children that you spit on, as they try to change their worlds, are immune to your consulatations. They're quite aware of what they're going through."*

              Ahoy, Mateys! My blog is under construction, as you may have guessed based on its ever-changing and yet still strange format. I have several brilliant minds on the project, however, so never ye fear. I promised something good would happen to my layout in the New Year, and several of my smartest colleagues are working on it. Don’t think about it, is what I recommend. And I try not to think about it, either.

            Tonight was sort of bittersweet, as Mike (whom you may remember from here and here) came in town for a “business trip” (I guess he’s a real grown-up now) and we sat out on what used to be our balcony when we were mere children right out of undergrad and reminisced a bit about “the past” and “yore” and “ye olden times.”

            You see: I’m leaving my apartment.

            I’ve been in this place for almost eight years and I feel like I’m getting divorced. Down have come all the (not-so-expertly) stained wine crates in which I so artfully ensconced my books and DVDs and random tchotchkes (yep, definitely had to look up the spelling on that one, and Word still isn’t having it…maybe Word is an anti-Semite?) and into the walls have gone little rolls of putty and lots of cursing and slabs of primer. I took all my beloved maps down from the walls. My precious book and play collection is in boxes. My series of bathroom action figures is packed away.  All that remains is….the other 90% of my shit. Clothes, shoes, bags, (blazers), kitchen stuff, tools, towels, board games (of which I have many), furniture, furniture, more furniture, all the light bulbs I hoarded before the government outlawed the old ones in favor of the new long-lasting (mercury-ridden) ones, crafts, artworks, bathroom stuff….oh fudruckers! I’m having a panic attack. I better stop while I’m (somewhat) ahead.

            Change is hard for me. But it usually happens in my life in giant leaps and bounds, rather than in gradual baby steps. If all I had to contend with right now was moving, I think I’d be in excellent shape. But this past month and the two months ahead have packed themselves (okay, I’m partially, perhaps totally, responsible) full of enormous troughs of change.

1.     I’m moving.

2.     I’m considering going back to school for a Master’s degree (in what? Who knows?! Maybe Animal Husbandry. I want to find husbands for all the unwed animals!). This involves re-learning math starting from what I’m going to guess, based on my practice tests, is the 4^th-grade level. (On a positive note, the math I do understand—which is precious little— is quite fun and entertaining.) Lesson: stay in school. Forever, if you can.

3.     I promised quite a few people that I would edit their manuscripts, plays, screenplays, etc…And it’s sad, because I truly enjoy editing. But why would I agree to these things when I can’t even remember the Pythagorean theorem? (Question: how did I get through the last 10-12 years without ever using math aside from leaving tips and figuring out how much something would cost on sale? But, along those same lines, my expertise in fractions and percentages remains undiminished!)

4.     Turning 30. I haven’t quite done it yet, but I’m staring down the barrel. My three best friends, Emily, Gabe and Regan, all turned 30 in the last few months (I doubt my girls would mind me saying so here). They’re all handling it like it’s no big whoop, but they’re also more elegant and together than I am (unsurprisingly—that’s why I want to be friends with them).  I feel like I’m supposed to have done something or that maybe I have only 6 more months to do something or I’m going to drop dead on my 30^th birthday from mis- or disuse. It’s not that 30 is old, it’s that it’s significant, somehow. And I really can’t wrap my head around it. Maybe if I could be 29 for one more year, I could get it together…

5.     Turning 30, when I think about it, seems to be more about figuring out a life plan (which I went into a bit here). To that end, I must say that I’m baffled. I’ve had lots of hopes and dreams, but most of them seem sort of ephemeral at this point in my life, and I don’t know how to redirect my ambitions. Does this even make sense? (Is this destined to be one of those things I write about and then I'll look back on it in 10 years and chuckle knowingly while rolling around naked on piles of money?)

6.     I’m pregnant. (Just kidding! You have to have sex to get pregnant! Right?) I only said that because it's listed as one of the most stressful of life's changes.

7.     The Hunger Games. I started reading it because my roommate, Ron, recommended it and then I was useless for three days because all I could do was read The Hunger Games, eat (The Hunger Games makes you feel famished, I kid you not), and go to the bathroom. I’ve missed out on lots of valuable time. I haven’t exercised in days or vacuumed or packed or planned my life. DO NOT READ THIS BOOK. Unless you want to have your mind blown, that is. Seriously.

            It’s super late for me to be writing, but I worked all weekend, and this is the first time I’ve had alone, especially since Mike went to bed because he has a big important, grown-up, business meeting tomorrow. Because that’s what we are, or are supposed to be: grown-ups. And so, I guess I’ll find a new and different and maybe even better apartment (hopefully something anywhere near as nice as Mary Tyler Moore’s). But part of me will always think of this one as mine.

Emily took this picture from my balcony at sunset. Sigh.

            This is where I spent the first part of my “real” life—my post-college twenties. I learned how to pay bills and get to know my amazing neighbors and bitch at the landlord and order in delivery and grow a plant and (occasionally) have it live. It’s really hard, I’m not gonna lie. But I think it’s going to be a good year. Fingers crossed.

*The legendary David Bowie, "Changes."

"But no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time in the world. Whatever it meant."*

Road Trip Part II           

              This is the story about how  my dear friend Mike and I continued our journey to the Grand Canyon and Las Vegas. You can find the first part here. And yeah, you're gonna wanna read that.

**************************************************************

             Mike and I scooted in under the wire and moved our In-and-Out fattened butts over to the edge of the Canyon in record time.

            I have to take a moment to explain how awe-inspiringly beautiful The Grand Canyon is. It actually brought out emotions in me that were totally unexpected. It’s like as if the world held all of these sort-of sub-par moments and then you experienced one that was just beyond all of that and you saw something that was so much greater than any painting or book or piece of music and it just left you utterly stunned and moved in a way you never thought possible. 

The Grand Canyon just after sunset.

            It hits you in the solar plexus and bleeds out your eyeballs. 

            Also, the air is a bit nippy at night, so you might start looking like you’re tearing up, even if you’re just having an awesome time and you’re not crying at all. You ARE NOT crying, okay?

Still doesn't capture it.

         

         So we immediately set about taking a gazillion pictures of ourselves from every angle imaginable and ended up looking so cute in one that I almost proposed to Mike right there on the spot. (If you look good in a picture together, what difficultly can the world hold for you, even if you are not at all in love romantically? A story that illustrates this point: I was dating a guy one time and someone took a picture of us kissing and it was so gross, I wanted to break up with him when I saw it. See? You gotta look good in the pictures.)

My lord, aren't we adorable?

            But then we realized a bunch of things needed to happen if we were going to be happy for one more minute: we had to pee, we had to find our digs, and we had to eat.

            So Mike busted out his incredible navigational skills while I popped on my driving glasses (which I keep in the glove compartment and which he kept insisting I should keep over by my door, probably because the glove compartment door kept hitting the knees of his tremendously long legs. But I explained that I don’t drive at night all that often so maybe he could keep his big mouth shut), and we wrangled our way to our lodgings.

            (Bossy Mike had made me the person in charge of lodgings all along the trip, so this was destined to be the first in a series of letdowns for him. But he was a butthead to leave it to me in the first place! I’m poor! And I’m horrible at planning things!)

            We pulled in to the cheapest of all possible venues: The Maswik Lodge, on the south rim of the Canyon. On first glance it looked like the summer camp I attended as a kid, but on second glance it proved to be much awesomer. (Yeah, I said awesomer. Suck it.)

            Maswik Lodge is essentially a lobby with a big cafeteria inside and a bunch of little cabin-style rooms scattered out around the premises. We retrieved our key and headed over to our cabin with mixed expectations.

            I opened the door and turned on the light.

            “Oh my god, Mike! It’s just like a regular room in here!”

            He laughed and followed me in. We settled ourselves and picked beds and took turns in the WC. His turn was running a little long so I stepped onto the porch to call my mom.

            It was an obliterating view. Pitch blackness and smothered in stars.

            After I talked to Mom, Mike met me on the stairs and we got in the car. The woman on the phone at the Bright Angel Lodge said it would be a quick drive, but it was definitely not walk-able, and this was where we planned to eat dinner. We followed her directions and found ourselves taking a series of left-hand turns and ended up in front of the Bright Angel approximately 2 minutes later (with traffic).

            There was no parking and it was one block from our hotel room anyway, so we took the car back and parked again.

            So then we set out on foot, but found it difficult to navigate because it was so utterly dark outside. He lives in San Francisco and I live in Los Angeles, so neither of us had seen stars in some time, let alone experienced darkness so profound as to allow for stars of this abundance.

            Mike, ever resourceful, pulled out his iPhone and used the LED light as a flashlight. He pointed at the sky and said that he could see the Milky Way. I pretended to know what he was talking about.

            Then I made a confession.

            “Mike, I’ve been known to fake constellations before.”

            “What?”

            “I pretend to know what people are pointing to, but the only thing I’ve ever seen is the Little Dipper. Or maybe the Big Dipper. I can’t tell them apart.”

            “Yeah, I can’t really see too many, either. Except Orion’s Belt. And the Seven Sisters.”

            “Oh, where are they?”

            “Um…”

            Mike craned his neck up at the sky.

            “Yeah, I don’t really know,” he finally acquiesced. “Do you think I can take a picture of these stars?”

            He tried. It didn’t work. We walked on. It was black. (It occurred to me later that mountain lions or bears or even aliens could be standing three feet away from the pitiful light from his phone and we would be none the wiser.)

            As we approached the Bright Angel Lodge (which is settled right on the rim of the Canyon, on the south side), Mike pointed up at the sky.

            “There’s Venus!” 

            “I thought Venus was the morning star?”

            “Nope, Venus is the evening star and that’s it. Right there.”

            (Okay, I did a little research and in a way we were both right: Venus is known both as the morning star and the evening star.)

            “Okay.” I lied and pretended to believe him because I was hungry.

            We sauntered into the Bright Angel.

            It wasn’t that much fancier than the Maswik Lodge, but it smelled like tourists and old people. And the Bright Angel turned out to be named after a scary, Native-American themed bird sculpture hanging over a large fireplace. And it was neither bright nor angelic, but sort of...hmmm, hideous?

            So we rerouted and put our names in for a forty minute wait at the more unassuming restaurant in the lodge. We then wandered down the hall and found ourselves in a quaint little bar with a man playing endless covers of Van Morrison songs (with a huge tip jar in front of him) and ordered some strong, fortifying cocktails.

            There was nowhere to sit, but a nice couple offered to share their table with us. Our butts were too sore from sitting all day so we passed, and stood there in the middle of the bar sucking back our cocktails.

            Ugh…this is long, so I’m stopping.

            More later…
*More from Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

“We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like, ‘I feel a bit lightheaded. Maybe you should drive.’”*

Road Trip Part I         

A Joshua tree, though not a fair likeness because this picture makes them look tall and most of them are really short.

            Mike and I were nowhere near the edge of the desert because we were in the desert because the desert pretty much starts four minutes away from East Los Angeles. We were still feeling pretty friendly towards one another because we always get along for the first 24 to 36 hours we spend together and then the casual nit-pickery begins.

            He’ll say something like, “Maybe we should plug in my iPhone and listen to some tunes.”

            As though the rocking-ass tunes I’m playing from my iPod aren’t really doing it for him.

            Then I’ll say something like, “Maybe we can revert the temperature from 64 degrees to a more temperate 78 degrees.”

            As though I would rather live ON THE FACE OF THE SUN than in the freezer he’s turned my car into.

            Sigh.

            But really, it was fun. Mike had his laptop and his iPhone (and thus, thank the lord, a map of where we were going, which I hadn’t bothered to calculate) and a bunch of tunes.

             I had a cooler packed with healthy snacks that would prevent us from falling prey to fast food temptation along the road, a suitcase full of wardrobe changes, a couple of bags full of board games, my laptop, some movies, a basketball, a tent, a hat rack, a magic lantern, and a house plant. Just in case.

            We were heading to The Grand Canyon and then to Las Vegas.

            Mike has been my friend since we were both five-years-old. He is probably the closest thing I have to a brother. That means this: I compare myself to him, he makes more money than I do, he’s smarter than I am, he tells me how to do stuff, he tells me when I’m “wrong,” we fight sometimes, and, maybe most importantly, I love him a whole lot, even when he’s being a butthead.

            That said, we were only 40 minutes into the desert when he started to piss me off. (Mike if you read this, I wasn’t really pissed off: I was irritated. Totally different!)

            I could tell the feeling was mutual.

            We were both sipping our $5 coffee drinks and agreeing—for the most part—on what to listen to, but we were both irritable and somewhat sleep-deprived and it made for a bit of hyper-sensitivity in the car.

            My theory is this: road trips are actually kind of boring.

            Before anyone gets the wrong idea, I’d like to point out the fact that I used to be something of a road trip aficionado. 

            I love to travel and I love maps (though, as it turns out, I’m hopelessly inept at reading maps. Short segue: I used to score abominably in the map skills portions of the ITBS standardized test they made us take each year. The fact that we took that test at all was bizarre because the “I” in “ITBS” stands for Iowa and we lived in Nebraska. Okay, two segues! But the mere sight of a map just enthralls me! I’m sure that’s somehow indicative of a psychological disorder.).

            But back in my road trip days I used to smoke like Humphrey Bogart (i.e. profusely), stop at a whim to sample the various chicken fried steaks of the great U.S. of A., and be perfectly willing to veer 200 miles off course to see an unknown “marvel” of the United States. (I’ve been to Carhenge three times, for instance.)

Carhenge. Alliance, NE.

            But now that my time is money and most of my trips involve getting to the destination rather than enjoying the journey, I’m kind of over the whole “road trip” thing. Also, I’m not a pothead or an acid freak, so what’s fun about driving in the desert for eight hours? “Look! Another Joshua tree!” It’s just miles and miles of desert. And it’s mostly a truly hideous sight, reminiscent of that movie Mac and Me (you know, the E.T. rip off about the aliens who drink Coke in Palm Desert by the windmills? My sister and I used to love that creepy movie). 

So creepy. Or good? I don't remember.

            And yet I’ve always romanticized road trips, likening them to the times when Jack Kerouac wrote that boring book about his road trips or when I actually liked Tom Robbins’ novels or when Laura Ingalls Wilder kept having to get back in the covered wagon and go farther into the unknown with all her pathetic crap in one tiny, little trunk.

            I have four times her luggage and none of her patience.

            So, in order to prevent you all from having to read the poetry journal I wrote under the rainbow skies that are America, I will fast forward to our actual arrival at Grand Canyon National Park.

            We were really eager, toward the end of our eight-plus hour journey, to just get to the damn park. We were bored with each other and bored with the scenery and bored with driving. And, despite all our better-laid plans, we’d eaten lunch at In-n-Out! So we also felt like a pair of fat assholes who’d lied to ourselves about how this whole trip was going to go down.

             At Grand Canyon’s south rim, there’s a stretch of highway where there are only two lanes and one is prevented from exceeding the 60-mile-per-hour speed limit. And after exceeding speeds of 75-miles-per hour to get there, it’s torturous.

            But we arrived and filed into one of the multiple lines for entry into the park.

            Dusk was setting and I was dying to see the Canyon before the sun went down. But, just like my mother before me, I have a habit of picking whichever lane wants to move the slowest.

            There must’ve been an RV-load of morons in front of us because every line filed through in no time but ours and the sun waits for no man. So we finally made it through the line and were tempted to bee-line it through the three or so miles of forest at the entrance of the park, but since, apparently, there are deer and such all around the woods, we kept it real and hit the park just as the sun was setting.

            And it was breathtakingly beautiful.

Grand Canyon. More on that later.

            But this has gotten a bit long, so I’ll regale you with the rest at a later date.

Find Road Trip Part II here.

*Quote from Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.