two weeks.

swoosh. my two week anniversary nearly passed by without any mention. well, here it is. i have been "on the road" for two weeks now, officially. i have only been to two states and two countries in that time, but what can you expect? the two states i have been to, i have been to twice. figure that out.

and still i am in san diego. it is very nice here. tonight, while ricky and i were at the bar we watched as two people nearly got into a fight. it was interesting, especially because one of them was friends with ricky and they were right behind us.

also, earlier today, randomly, i received a phone call from pete wojcik. pete, whom i havent seen since 2002. pete who lived with me and my parents in high school. pete who was a great friend at one time. it was interesting.

this whole meeting people from my past is very interesting. i think i like it and will keep on with it. for now, san diego.

tijuana.

the border

well, i have completed the state of california. i am still here, but from north to south, it is done. today i entered mexico for the first time.

i was told repeatedly that it wasnt worth it, pretty much by everyone i asked. it was too dangerous, the border towns arent really mexico, etc. i went anyway. i am here for a couple of days and it seemed like something to do, something to say that i have done.

so i crossed around 10am, and as soon as i made my way through the gates i was inundated with taxi drivers that would take me wherever i wanted, and get me whatever i wanted. drugs, girls, food, whatever. however, 10am was very early. i took a cab to revolucion ave and walked up and down it, many things were closed or just opening. i was one of very very few white faces.

the tijuana arch

becasue of that, i was quite the target, every shop owner tried to entice me into their shop, i diligently refused. mostly i just walked and looked. i did stop and have some lunch, i got the deal that i have been looking for! i had six tacos and two beers for $4! that was pretty sweet.

something i was surprised to see was the military. just driving randomly down the streets were military jeeps patrolling the streets. i thought maybe something was in the air, but nothing seemed to be amiss.

around 2pm i caught a cab back to the border and got in a long line to walk back into the us. i was amazed at how long the line was. eventually i made it back over and am safe and sound.

san diego.

well, here i am. after the ocean escapade, i found a laundromat and proceeded to make clean underwear. very nice. when i started my laundry, i called arturo, to see what he could tell me about being in san diego, because i was thinking of just bypassing it.

i sat and read my book as the clothes tumbled in the dryer, contemplating my next move. then i get a text message. from an old friend, ricky smith. ricky and i havent seen each other for 10 or 11 years, since around the end of high school, but we were part of a pretty close group of friends. as with tiffany, after a few minutes of catch up, it is almost like nothings changed.

i was planning on bypassing san diego altogether and i am being offered to stay here for a party on saturday. amazing, this whole life thing.

ricky lives in ocean beach, a (you guessed it) beachside community in san diego, with his girlfriend, amy. we are a literal stones throw from the ocean, it is beautiful. shortly after i got here we walked to the farmers market to see it, and to get some food. as we walked, ricky introduced me to his world now, and to some of his people. it was a really fun and interesting voyage.

we would walk a couple of stalls in the farmers market and then we would be stopped again by someone wanting to talk to ricky, like the king of the neighborhood. a very good effect.

it was a good session of catch up and there was a really good atmosphere to the whole thing. we got some food and some beers, went back to his house and sat on the porch watching the ocean and talking. it is always so amazing how great people are, just how people are always there and ready to re-welcome you into their lives.

me 1, pacific ocean 0

but it was a close fight. i have been putting off getting into the ocean, for what? a little place where you can wash your feet after you come up from the beach. petty, i know, but i dont like sand on my feet.

so, i dont believe i have ever swam in the pacific ocean, in santa barbara years ago i am sure i dipped my feet, but submerged completely...i dont believe. i have wanted to and have been planning my time. bradley suggested zuma beach but it was too crowded, i thought maybe la but it wasnt very pretty, here i am on the historic 101 mere miles from san diego and a small public beach calls my name.

i turn off and see they have a foot washing station. check. they have public bathroom for changing. check. i ask one of the workers and he says the water is 67 degrees, very agreeable for being in the ocean. i am convinced. i change and head to the water. i wade a while with my shirt on, debating if i should take the plunge. then a typical surfer looking dude comes running from behind me, surfboard in hand and dives right in, swimming out to greet the waves.

i am convinced. i take off my shirt and sunglasses, place them on a cliff ledge, and go for it. at first i am struck by how salty my entire body feels from the water surging around me, it is chilly but more diving evens it out and it becomes normal. i am having fun. running out the the waves and jumping into them, diving under them, letting my body be carried by them.

i start trying to run alongside the waves and let my body ride them, i am moving away from the sanctioned beach area. i run out to a large wave and jump into it. on the other side, my feet cannot touch the ground. i start trying to swim towards shore by there is some force that is pulling me away from the shore. i hear the loudspeaker from the beach, but i cannot understand what it is saying.

i am starting to panic a little bit. i have known someone that died in this ocean. i paddle harder and angle my body so i am not going directly into the current, i am making progress and suddenly i can put my feet on the sandy floor. i look around, proud of making it, and i start to make out what the loudspeaker is saying, i see someone running toward me.

the lifeguard said that i had gotten caught in an ocean river and was being pulled out to sea. when he saw me he ran straight down, the loudspeaker was calling all swimmers to the beach and advising swimmers not to leave the immediate beach area, it is dangerous. i thank the lifeguard profusely. he praises my effort and points me towards the safe area.

shortly after i feel that my experience in the ocean is over for the day, i come up and wash my feet. get my towel and dry off, change in the bathroom and contemplate for a bit.

its a wrap!

at 9:07 am i decide to leave la. i give some hugs, wish some luck and am out the door. at 11:37 i am convincing myself to take the freeway after being lost on the surface roads for the past 2 and a half hours. this is what i have heard about la, traffic and the smog. today they both make themselves real.

at first i thought this layer of "fog" would just burn off, a general haze which kept it a bit cooler in the morning, but by 11am the sun starts to burn through and a scorching starts to happen. today i can see the smog as if for the first time, it disgusts me. it is why i dont like la.

but, being lost for a couple hours on surface streets, always thinking i knew were i was and where i was going was kind of nice. it was the self guided tourist tour. drive by things of interest at a slightly slower rate. i was able to go to venice beach, mar vista, crenshaw boulevard, inglewood, historic filipinotown, and was just a stones throw away from compton.

this all happened because i wanted to take highway 1 through long beach and not have to take the expressway until, well, now. i just got off the expressway but on highway 1 north, this is where i would have had to merge onto i-5 had i my way. everything has worked out. so, let me take this time to wrap up some things, with pictures!

hello kitty land.

hello kitty land.

something striking about tiffany that i had kind of forgotten was her love for hello kitty. upon entering the door of her house a visitor is greeted with a four shelf bookcase chock full of hello kitty paraphenelia. it is a striking entrance. after our memorial day bash we entertained ourselves with some poses around hello kitty land, now presented for your pleasure:

a happy couple

a sad couple

a mean couple

wooly mammoth / tourist trap

after hiking with annie on tuesday, i came back to tiffanys. we (her, austin, and me) hung out for a bit at the house, then took austin back to van nuys. van nuys is a neighborhood in la that is about 30 minutes away on the freeway. then we had the day. one thing i wanted to do but felt a bit silly was see the la brea tarpits. i have seen them in movies, they looked moderately interesting and everyone we had met assured us it wasnt worth it.

they probably meant to museum. we did not attempt an entrance to the museum, but we did stroll through the park and poke sticks into random tar islands that appear all around the park. while i had planned to write 3000 words about our experiences in the pits, i will let these pictures do all the talking:

los angeles, you devil. i am leaving you.

well. i have been in la now for three days, it feels like the days have just blown by, everything just kind of fell into place and was normal. i thought that there would be some awkwardness with hanging out with people that i havent seen for a very long time, but i was wrong.

it felt to me like tiffany and i never skipped a beat. aside from catching up on some things from the past 7 years it was kind of like we never fell out of communication. its strange how that works.

she was a huge part of me becoming a real person. we met (online) when i was 17 or 18, i dont know if she encouraged me to to come see her in new york or if i took it upon myself, but i went to visit her and at that moment started a new life for myself.

reinvention number 1, grow out of where you came from. for me it took stealing my parents car and ditching town without telling anyone, driving to new york and arriving on tiffanys doorstep like a lost puppy and asking if i can stay there.

call it southern hospitality, or maybe she was just crazy, but she let me stay there and eventually i just moved in and got a job and eventually called my parents told them where i was and that i wasnt coming back...sorry about the car.

that initial jolt, that acceptance and harboring was like a springboard. and here we are now, old (er), and things still work great.

this morning i went hiking with annie. i went to high school with annie, my first high school, and i had a crush on her then. the was a short alternative/goth looking girl that unsuspectingly hung around with the more preppy popular girls. i never felt i had a chance, but from the thoughts i had and the way she dressed, to me we were a match.

the only time that we actually talked to each other was in europe. it was some high school trip that my parents sent me on probably because i was depressed and not assimilating well to being a teenager. i was the only boy from our school, traveling with 15 girls. let the awkwardness ensue.

i wont get into that trip, partially because i dont remember much of it (you could drink in europe at 15). but annie and i chatted some during that trip, and apparently had good conversations for 15 year olds. if only we could take it back in the day.

but we came back and she moved to alabama, i changed schools, and i never saw her again until facebook, until la, until this morning. she came and picked me up at tiffanys house and we went to griffith park to go hiking. griffith park is where things like the batcave and the hollywood sign are.

we hiked up to the hollywood sign, in the heat and smog, chatting all the while. which is something that is usually hard for me, banter. but it went rather smoothly, explaining about where i have been the last 15 years, and hearing about her history, then we are at the top and coming back down.

it all seemed to move rather fast, we spent maybe 3 hours together. that probably doubled the one on one time we have had in our lives, but again we are both old (er) now. more mature.

so this leg of the journey, if i can use the term again, my springboard weeks, have been fruitful. hopefully i have gained enough confidence from tiffany and annie and bradley that the people in my past actually liked me and i dont have to worry about trying to impress them now. people will just be happy to see and hear from me and i should take advantage of that.

hopefully i will.

and now i am wrapping it all up. tomorrow morning everyone will leave. so, san diego: watch out...i guess.

my forgotten history with tiffany promise.

well, something that i had thought of before i left was writing an apology to all of the cats that ive had in my life and have left. because i remember there being a lot of them. however i had forgotten that i lived with any cats in ny with tiffany. from the pictures it looks like there were 4 or 5... and that is just the beginning of the things that i dont recall.

it really is a shitty situation, not having a clear memory of my past. i do remember many things, i remember people pretty well, and the places but the things that actually happened i guess that is just fodder that gets dismissed from my memory banks. tiffany chatted with me for awhile last night about our past together and there are just so many things that she remembers and i have no memory of, but when she tells something starts to clear.

like our apartment in ny, it was a huge apartment. 3 bedrooms above a convenient store (which i conveniently worked at) a large living room and a small kitchen. when you walked into the apartment there was a long hallway and my bedroom was immediately on your right. i remember liking it because i could come into the apt without anyone having to know.

downt the hallway opened up into the living room and then again to the right was a little cove, if i recall, with the bathroom centered between tiffanys room and virginias room. virginia, we wont get into her since there was really no interaction between us and we dont know where she is now.

if you walked left through the living room you would come to the windows overlooking the street and then turn right to the entrance of a small hallway like kitchen. i absolutely believe that i couldnt have gotten past the hallway last night.

and the hallway is something i had forgotten about too. at some point i commissioned my artist friends to paint a mural on the hallway, a cityscape that featured tiffany and virginia in it. and on the other side of the hallway...well i dont have pictures of that. oh, and this was when i painted my room entirely black.

the things i dont remember could fill a lifetime.

i have forgotten much of the events between sept 2001 and sept 2002. the basics that i knew before last night were that i worked for my dad, had a little house in calumet township, partied alot. and then in the last few weeks of august 2002, i have some better memories. steve came to visit from santa barbara, my brother fired me, i moved to portland with steve. tiffany came to visit, she stayed at my house for a couple weeks, we partied alot. etc.

but apparently, in sept 2001, tiffany also came to visit. she lived at my house for the two weeks when i was at fire school, by herself with her cat. another cat. there are pictures and they force me to remember. she lived there for about a month before my brother kicked her out.

but for that year she came back multiple times and stayed. why dont i just remember these things? i always knew that tiffany was a big part of my life and we had been through many things together. i always just associated those things with ny, or when she came to visit me in olympia, the last two weeks of my life in indiana.

it was hard listening to the things. i felt bad for not remembering, but also overwhelmed. i kept a journal from the time but it wasnt about things that were going on around me with people, it was things that were going on inside my head, ideas and things.

i just wish i were present for more of my own life.

rincon island

starting just before gaviota state park in the californian central coast you can see just offshore, just within the naked eye, monstrous floating cities out in the water. their numbers are so great it would be very hard to count them from the coast. when i first saw them on my bike trip it took me awhile to figure out what they were, but i learned that they were oil rigs.

rincon island from the north

offshore oil drilling on the californian coast. i had no idea that took place in 2001, but i saw them, i think i wrote a poem about their ugliness and then i forgot about them. and when i started seeing them again on this trip, i recalled all the things i disliked about their existence.

shortly after leaving santa barbara there is an island off of highway one. it is a spectacular looking thing from the highway, a small one lane bridge stretches the distance across the ocean to the island and from a distance it just looks like a mini paradise connected to land by the powers of man.

nothing could be further from the truth.

i saw it from a distance and was immediately drawn toward it. i said "i want to go to there" and so i made it happen. i found an exit that allowed me to gain access close to the bridge, i parked and then i walked out to it because the entrance was all fenced closed.

rincon island from the beach

i wondered why they would build a bridge to the island and then close it off. i was determined to find out more information. i wrote down the information on the sign, Rincon Island, and left. back on the highway i pulled off at the next vista point to get some good shots from the distance, the place really interested me.

after doing some research i learned that the island was not the fruit of the world in any sense. the island was constructed, yes made by the hands of man, in 1957 for the sole purpose of offshore drilling. a lush looking oil rig island, a mere 3,000 feet offshore. who would guess?

and it hasnt been good for the local community. starting in 1999, the island received 300 safety violations and threatened or polluted state waters 20 times. this included a spill of 1600 gallons in december of 2008.

for now rincon island is shut down and not producing any oil. the pipeline that transports the oil runs under the bridge, and the bridge has been deemed unsafe for vehicular travel since october 2008. and now, closed off and fenced with barbed wire the island will most likely be demolished.

los angeles!

i am done contemplating my life on an oxnard beach. yesterday i rolled into ventura and walked around the downtown for a bit. i peed on city hall. and ate some strawberries from a community garden. it was pretty nice.

all of these little coastal communities seem similar, very tourist oriented, and transient. it would be hard to live in one of these places i think. so, no more romanticizing about it. especially after los angeles. i have a dread feeling that i am going to be overwhelmed and by this city.

after much deliberation and some courage boosts, i called tiffany yesterday. i dont know why i am so nervous but it just is that way, after the first few folks that i reconnect with maybe the nervousness will die down a bit. but we chatted for some minutes and she is going to call me today and we will hang out.

i am excited and nervous. what if she has changed so much but i just havent at all? that is soemthing that worries me, because i really do think that i have changed, but it is really other people that determine that, not me. so, right now i am about to head down the 1 towards malibu and then into LA.

wish me luck.