on the way home...

I'm back in LA. I couldn't make the road journal thing work. This blogging program will not let me write posts from my phone, so it all became too complicated. Oh well. ...After the misadventure with Terry's car on Friday afternoon, the rest of the trip turned out to be quite enjoyable. I broke my eating regimen all weekend long. On Friday night, we stopped at an In and Out Burger off the 5 freeway, somewhere in Kern County. I inhaled a double-double with fries like they were oxygen. I must look like a rabid dog when I'm eating. We arrived at the hotel just in time to see the Rangers finish off the Yankees. It made me very happy, but I called it wrong. I guess I'm no handicapper. A little more on this later. Terry and I were both pretty tired, so we had a quick drink at a local dive in Sunnyvale and then went to sleep around 1am. The Best Western we were staying at seemed to be some kind of weird magnet for Indians because the night person there was Indian and the whole place smelled vaguely of curry. And then at about 7 on Saturday morning that vague smell became much more powerful, nauseatingly so, as if the people in the room below us were preparing the most pungent curry ever. It felt like I had woken up in a ten-ton vat of the nasty fucking curry. We found a breakfast place and then drove to Santa Cruz for a visit with Tom's family. It's weird seeing his kids now as teenagers after having not really spent much time with them since they were little kids. It was at Tom's house where I had the insights to which I've previously alluded, about the two Americas and my quitting academia. Santa Cruz, as I said, is archetypal coastal, liberal America, the kind David Brooks describes so pompously in his book about bourgeois bohemians, what he calls Bobos. In any case, Santa Cruz is a nice place to visit for a day or two, but I think its provinciality and its smallness, in both the literal and figurative senses, would drive me crazy after awhile. ...At around 4:00 on Saturday, I drove with Tom and Terry to the Shoreline in Mountain View. First we ate killer burritos at a place near the venue called La Bamba. I'm not a big burrito eater at all - I prefer tacos if given a choice - but La Bamba's fare was out of this world. I was trying to be good, so I had chicken instead of steak in mine, but I don't think it matters because the burritos were so filled with greasy, peppery goodness that the meat was beside the point. Again, I made my food disappear in mere minutes. I was very hungry all weekend, actually, and I was very aware of how fast I was eating at meal times. ...A bone chillingly cold rain began to fall when we got to Shoreline. I could have very easily bummed out at the prospect of having to stand in the wet weather for four hours, but I chose instead to roll with it. Tom brought some Maker's Mark in a flask. It helped warm me up and made me appreciate the hot sweetness of burboun... One thing that made the night interesting was that the Giants were playing Game 6 of the NLCS at the same time, and the crowd roared when they recorded the final out against the Phillies and clinched the Pennant. ...So I was exactly backwards in my prediction for the World Series. It'll be Texas and Frisco starting Tuesday night, which seems a bit like a clash of civilizations. I don't really have a rooting interest, but I think the Rangers will win in five or six games. I've been underestimating the Giants all year, and they still don't seem like they're that good to me, but they made it this far and anything can happen in baseball. ...Most of the acts prior to Buffalo Springfield on Saturday were boring. I'm really not interested in hearing Elvis Costello sing country music, for example, and Lucinda Williams always sounds drunk and tired to me. Perhaps this is part of her appeal but it's just not my thing. One exception to an otherwise uninteresting lineup was Billy Idol. He played a half-hour set, dividing things evenly between his 80s hits and a few Generation X songs. ...The Springfield finally came on at 11pm. They were well worth the wait. I thought they might just play a few of their hits and well-known songs, but they went pretty deep into all three albums. For guys who are near 70 at this point, they sang and harmonized really well together. They did quite a few of my favorites, including On the Way Home, Do I Have to Come Right Out and Say It, Nowadays Clancy Can't Sing, Bluebird, Rock 'n Roll Woman... Richie Furay is the best preserved out of the three of them. Terry pointed out that this is no doubt the result of his 40-some-odd years of clean living. ...In spite of the bad weather and the stuff we had to deal with on Friday afternoon, the weekend was quite enjoyable. I definitely feel exhausted now, so I think this is as good a time as any for me to put my virtual pen down...