The Old Man

... I really am an insensitive piece of shit.

I went to see the Old Man today. It's always difficult with the Old Man.

I like him--

--I can remember, a few years back--sitting in his office, crammed with books, and light filtering through the dust in the air. We were doing an independent study, and I'd bring--frequently late, and often a little jumbled--the week's findings in, as small essay, to discuss.

And he'd listen and nod and ask a question--not always to the point and he didn't always agree with me. But he *listened*, as if it were important. Like, really, the future of the world... or at least the nation state... was hanging right there, in the balance.

Old Man's been getting older--I can see it. 

The Bright Hills of Boston

I went down to Jamaica Plain, one morning--which is a neighborhood to the south and west of the city, away from the peninsula.

I walked there, past several colleges (I swear, Boston has more institutions of higher learning per capita than--well, anywhere...), following a line of park the wound (and several times, nearly disappeared) past Fenway Park and down around the edge of the city.

Jamaica Plain has something of a reputation for being a "lesbian neighborhood"--which I wanted to see, because I'd never really seen one. One of the first people I saw was an exceptionally large, exceptionally butch young lady, walking two very small terriers. I smiled at her. She glowered at me.

... is the visual equivalent of testing someone else's grip. I looked down--but I bet I've got better forearms. Scratch. I know I do...

... terriers don't have a lot of torque, if you know what I mean.

Jamaica Plain was not quite the oasis of organic produce and pastries that I was hoping for (thus problematizing the lesbian-cupcake nexus I've been theorizing. more cases and a broader comparative approach, I think. including, I suppose, one from Africa--always throw in one from Africa...) I did manage a decent cup of coffee...

What was truly fantastic about that area, though--was the spur of hills rising between the main street and the railroad tracks. Steep and twisting, they rose to a high point above the city--so that, from the summit, you could see the streets falling away towards the city-center, to the north. And rising and falling, with the hills--was a fantastic collection of houses. Some of them had been completely renovated, and some were a few steps away from derilection. Most of them were somewhere in between, and as I walked up and down the side-walk, I could smell the scent of wood dust and oil, mixing with the smell of pine-needles and wet dirt.

I circled a few cul-de-sacs, making furtive eye contact with people leaning over hobby-horses in the open garages, or hanging out of the windows. Jamaica Plain is a neighborhood on the move.

It reminded me, as I was really stretching my legs--for the first time in months--a bit of Silverlake. Silverlake is just off the center of Los Angeles, off Sunset Boulevard, when Sunset Boulevard turns south and east. With the tall buildings and the clubs off in the distance (sometimes you catch a disoriented club-kid, who has come too far--wandering the sidewalks in flash of skin and befuddled glitter)--Silverlake is still money, but it's arts-and-entertainment mid-level industry professional money. And some of the money goes into the houses...

... which rise up and down the green hills and ridges encircling the valley. There are differences--in Boston, it is more modernizing victorian and in California, much more strongly mid-century, with its askew squarishness and tendency to thrust various bits of itself off into the ether. And Silverlake has been "renovated" for longer, and so has been subject to that accretion of additions and porches and odd bits of landscaping (terraces) that builds up over time in places like that.

Still though--what I like about both places is the sense of possibility. Something very utilitarian about a city, and something a little alienating (I'm not the first, not the last...) about that usefulness. But in places like this, you see all the oddments--both intellectual and sensual--of the human mind made "flesh", architecturally-speaking. If great buildings, really well-thought out--masterpieces--are music, then places like Jamaica Plain and Silverlake are conversation. Chatter, in fact, within a large group of friends (some of whom hate each other)--comfortable and easy-going, and really, not so important, but out of the whole mess you get something like that weird sense of the "spirit" that rests in, you know, most people. Rather than being raised and abstracted so far from the seething mass (it's not really seething--more like milling, aimlessly. ambling masses!) that it sits apart from them.

Clutter. The very best of clutter.

Los Angeles

... this is the most beautiful city on earth.

And whatever divides us--we witness, collectively, this beauty.

This is what draws us together. This is what sets us apart.

Tank Gardens of the Mojave

... as stated previously, the really is very little between Phoenix and LA.

There's Coachella--which comes up as a puddle of green at the end of a fifty percent grade--and the exit for Palm Springs. Which looks, from the freeway, like a small aggregation of strip malls extending in two directions, and lacks... for future reference... a Starbucks.

But, aside from that, there is just the Mojave--which is empty and flat in a way that is slightly claustrophobic. Like you'd like to rush across it as quickly as possible--and not stop--because leaving your car, and exposing yourself to such openness, might just drive you mad. I had a similar experience in Northern Nevada, once, and five minutes after I had left the gas station parking lot--to stretch my legs--I was turning and rushing for the safety of my Subaru. Too much sky. Burning sidewalk.

So, just the Mojave then--and Blythe, I went through Blythe... where two old friends from school live... and so, notable in that respect...but not really any other. And there is the Tank Garden.

I was looking for a place to get gas, and as I was turning into the last gas station for who knows how many miles--I noticed that the off-ramp went curving behind a collection of minature tanks and desert plants behind a chain-link fence. There was a sign, under the out-stretched guns, asking drivers to "Keep Our Desert Clean".

What I thought I had run into was a deep desert art installation--constructed by hold-over hippies, who had fled into the wilderness and somehow gone the wrong direction (north, in California--very seldom east). Very striking way of stressing the importance of low impact travel. I was still, probably, in a Phoenix state of mind.

What it turned out to be was the William S. Patton Museum--the location stemming from its proximity to Twenty-Nine Palms--where most of the tactical testing for American tank warfare in World War Two was done. There was a bronze statue of him out front, just a few yards from the semi-permanent trailer settlement (it had its own chapel)--the burger restaurant, and one of the nicest gas stations I'd run across on this particular trip (almost as good as a Flying J).

I didn't go into the museum--less than two hundred miles from LA--and I wanted to be home by sundown. But spent a really excellent five minutes staring at the little monsters through the fence. They weren't full-scale--just about large enough for a single operator--and somehow that made them seem even more vicious. The smaller size let you really take in all the nasty little details--and I think, for the first time, I understood how terrifying tanks must have been when they were first released onto the battlefield. Imagine being a solider, yes, and there's a zippy little piece of artillery (at least--zippy compared to, like, an emplacement) that can follow you around, and which you can't really--by yourself--do anything to stop. Ghastly. And there they were--a whole little fleet surrounded by some nice landscaping--white flowers growing around the wheels, turrets rising out of the manzanita...

...

... I've been having an odd experience recently. I think it has to do with having left at 23 and coming back at 25. Here's the thing, though--when you're in school, before you and your friends have been thrust out into the murky murk of reality--you're nearly certain that you, collectively, will one day come to rule the world. The first year or two after you graduate, too, the illusion persists. Because, you think, it takes some time for people to stoke their fires, to marshal their resources in preparation--for the time when they will go screaming across the face of everything.

--go away. Go away for awhile. Go away and come back to find your friends as powerful and vicious as they ever were, but--like the tanks--in miniature, and still.

It seems that that promise, which seemed so obvious... but we had one of everything... so you can pardon the mistake. There was the fallen genius (now on a leave of absence at his parent's house out in the desert), the Doyenne (who managed various peoples' relationships with a kind of beneficent malice--think Emma, the Early Years), the Prima Donna (who everybody wanted to screw, more or less expected), the Burgher (he's actually on his way to becoming one)... and me. Who I think... I liked to think, at the time, that I was "the practical philosopher". But my manners were much worse back then--so possibly "the critic"...

You do not come to rule the world.

I was at a Thing. There's a thing at the end of every week--where a varying set of folks come to talk. It's held at house in the neighborhood by a nice pair of older folks, who provide the setting and some of the food. We all know each other through somebody (LA is like this, a bit), and the point is to eat a bit and drink a bit and shoot the shit. It's not quite, y'know, a salon--but it's a good way of getting out and meeting some new people... salon-esque, say.

So, yesterday, I was at the thing--and some of the people I had known before, and some were new to me. And what struck me, what finally became clear is--most folks rise, you know, during their teens and early twenties--and then you get the start of a gradual declension as folks begin to "come down to where they ought to be"... start to settle into their lives.

What I was seeing were the effects of this "settling" process. And especially in contrast to those who were a bit younger--the people I'd known before seemed a bit... rounded off? Blunt, maybe.

That girl was there. God--that girl. I think I had to have loved her--I must have. Because after she went away (it was interesting how that happened) I felt like I'd lost something crucial. I'd wake up, and then--at those times during the day when I'd used to see her, there'd be... phantom limb syndrome, more or less.

So. I saw that girl. And she has also begun to settle. No longer at the height of her powers (she was "the Doyenne")--and reft of the intricate web of interpersonal relations she manipulated so adeptly--she expends her excess energy on hobbies. (I'm beginning to hate "hobbies". As form of self-actualization.)

And it didn't matter. Because just seeing her, just talking to her, a little--I felt that same old sense of peace, that stillness in the soul. An unwinding. So there is this:

I hate Nancy ("nan-see"... French.). Nancy writes that people are constituted by their connections with other people--and that only love creates between an individual and the multitude of ties of which they are made up--a break. (And I will never be comfortable with a philosopher that denies the existence of an autonomous, independent, transcendent self...)

But where I agree is this: love is a unique for the effect it has on the self. It's the seating of the self in another--reaching. And the process of reaching out--"dedicated" interaction between two independent entities... is liberation in a sense. Or expansion. There's a way in which loving someone else makes you more yourself...

... and changes, perhaps, how you construct the world around you and your place in it. Is the back door out of the scrum of everyday existence--and gives you a view on the subtle sanctity of things. A window.

And for all she's changed, this thing remained the same. I could feel the echo.

...there's hope, yes?--some.

Phoenix Rising

... Phoenix is a difficult city to get into.

I'm not sure why, exactly. It may have just been contrast, after a relatively easy ride into Tucson--and a quick shot up the 10 across the Oro Valley--that the sudden nest of interchanges and tunnels may have caught me by surprise. Or it may have been the drivers--most of the Zonies I met told me that Arizona drivers are crazy. They certainly go a little fast. But on the other hand--in 'Bama they took the slow lane like they were on the Talladega Speedway. And the folks in Atlanta drove like Parisians--like Angelenos with half the sense.

Or maybe I was just tired--but, for whatever reason, the thirty minutes between Tempe and the city center were some of the most hair-raising of the entire trip. And I did, mind you, hit an ice storm in Louisiana, snow in the Smokies, and a hellish strip of black ice--glistening in the moonlight--most of the way from Dallas to Odessa.

The car skidded out on a bridge, and I nearly swerved into the only other car for a half-mile in either direction. Somewhere about an hour outside of Forth Worth, the semi's started to appear. At the point, I was driving a tooth-clenced fifty-five, and the trucks went howling past me. The truck-driver I met in Tucson explained that trucks can drive faster on ice, because they're heavier--so that they get better traction. I though that might have been it--he said that no one thought that I was lame for being cautious. It's expected, he said, by professional drivers. It's nice to know that the semi-folks--who own the roads everywhere it runs beyond the sprawl--weren't *judging* my.... ah... "skills".

... at any rate, in some ways, getting into Phoenix was worse. Although, I did see my first sign for "Los Angeles" halfway through the greater metro area. Which says quite a bit about what's between Phoenix and the coast--nothing, more or less.

The 10 eventually belched me out into the sweltering desolation of Down Town. Two days ago, when I woke up in El Paso, it was 26 degrees at 7:30 in the morning. Early afternoon in Phoenix was 85. And bright. And dry.

In some ways, this part of the city reminded me off some of the housing divisions that grew up in the further suburbs out of San Diego. A complex of massive buildings surrounded by dusty emptiness. In this case, the large complex of stores and hotels gave way into empty lots, and then a little island of "artistically" decorated buildings... and then subsided into a gradually denser neighborhood of one-story houses backing onto the freeway. About half-a-mile down, it could have been any semi-urban neighborhood in a southwest city with a large Latino population. There was a Ranch 99 Market--with dubious canned goods and an excellent hot bar.

I was looking for the hostel, which I finally found--tucked into the nest of houses, and empty--so early in the afternoon, of guests. Except for one quiet, rather drawn (in that healthy way) gentleman who was there for a marathon. He had a duffel bag and a pair of really excellent hiking boots, and was polite in a way that made think that he, too, was probably gay.

It's hard to tell what you're getting into when you pick a hostel. Some are small and inviting, some are large and buzzing--some are sketchy and impersonal, some are claustrophobic. The one in Phoenix seemed a little... elitist? Like you might be staying with some people, who are much cooler than you, and who you don't know very well. But that may have been my mood. I was not getting into Phoenix. Too flat. Too dry. Alien and alienating.

I'd picked this particular place because it was cheap--but also because it was supposed to be in an "arty" part of town. As it happened, the arty bit was the rectangle of interestingly decorated buildings--surrounded by lots--that I had passed by looking for the hostel.

... usually areas like this grow up on the edges of cities, in neighborhoods were the rent is cheap--or in run-down areas of down-town. But this particular cluster seemed to grow straight out of the dirt--like a little oasis of flax-seed muffins and bespoke espresso. Very strange.

The next day, when I was talking with the owner of one of the little cottage-shops--selling a variety of off-the-wall knick knacks. I was particularly drawn to a purple tie, silk-screened with yellow octopi--but was there, really (and running low on funds), to pick up a hostess gift for my sister.

As it turned out, she and her husband had had a lot to do with the "rejuvenation" of this particular area. Things were going swimmingly, and they had just cleared out the trannie hookers and meth-heads--and gotten some good contracts for mixed development--when the city decided to build a stadium in the district which they were currently inhabiting. Most of the surrounding building were razed, but this little area--just a rectangle of three or fours streets really--fought the city. And won. With the end result that these cafes and galleries persists--but that the little neighborhood which nourished them was destroyed. The "hip" part of Tucson felt like a busy town on the edge of the frontier--this part of Phoenix felt like part of a post-apocalyptic landscape.

... I'm not sure how well places like this thrive on too much reality. You almost need a greater concentration of activity--or, at least, a little more shade.

Arriving too early--I made good time out of Tucson, Zonies *do* drive fast--I went looking for a cup of coffee--to wait out the afternoon until the hostel opened. I went through a few cafes, looking for a real coffee shop--until finally, a soft-eyed burnette, working the counter in a converted cottage, covered with vines and with a great deal of brightly painted plywood in the back, took pity on me and directed me towards a place serving espresso. It was, as it turns out, just a few "houses" down. Places like this can be hard to navigate unless you're a local...

... I settled in with an iced Americano, at a table out front. Not a bad place--there were other people working on lap-tops, in the red dust of the yard. And an exuberant pit-bull which managed to tangle itself its legs, the leash and the table it was attached to in its attempts to obtain human contact. Nice doggie.

I thought it might be good to take in a little local color--so when the owner and his friend--each in varying stages of "beard", settled down with their coffee, I waved at them.

"Hey! Hey--I'm from out of town... what's good around here?"

"Oh--where from?"

"DC. I'm driving cross country..."

"... damn." A whistle. "What are you into?"

"Ah. I'm only here for the night but--some coffee... music?"

They thought it over--and then the owner spoke up.

"This is pretty much it, actually. Coffee... food... there's a venue down the street in a converted garage--it's cool, though. There's a show there tonight... my friend's band--they're really good..."

"Yeah?--maybe I'll have a look."

"Yeah? Maybe I'll see you there."

"Would be cool--thanks a lot, man."

Would have been cool--but in the end, I finished up the evening with a sandwich made of Mexican canned tuna and a conversation with a semi-autistic man about trolleys, back at the hostel. I was tired. I sank into my bunk in the semi-twitchy silence of the common dorm with my boots still on--and woke up at six the next morning, with a headache and an uncommon craving for Mexican food.

And this, at least, Phoenix excels in. It was a Sunday morning, and the Ranch 99 was bustling with family's getting a good hot breakfast. After two years away from all the good things that come out of the Mexican kitchen--pan dulce, chilaques, tortas--I spent a good long time just staring at the menu. So long in fact that a dignified older gent came up to me and asked me if I needed help.

"No, man--thanks. There's just so many choices..." With a gusty sigh.

And so, finally, a chile relleno plate--covered with chopped onion and cilantro and tomato and salsa from the self-server condiment bar... and gigantic tub of watermelon. And another excellent iced coffee in the dust and early morning light. There are worse ways, yes--to begin your trip across the Mojave.