March 21, 2000
Hello!
Time to put your number two pencils down and gather around the warm glowing monitor for some bedtime stories. As you have probably guessed, a lot has happened since I last had the time to spin my life's yarn. I think I left off with a killer snowboarding run at Tahoe and a trip to the Sundance film festival. The last words had to do with Ori's quest for a lady of the mystic, mythic California. So let's see now...
Ori was itching to hit the road and, hardly one to avoid adventure, it wasn't long before I was ready to jump into the truck and head west. We loaded up the usual stock of CDs and Mexican blankets and our four new rubber tires began to heat up the west Texas highways. The sun was shining, the weather was beautiful, and we had my (yet unnamed) sock monkey as our guide. For those of you into ancient Chinese literature, there is a classic novel called "Journey to the West". Beautifully enough, this story parallels our own in that it features a mischievous little monkey just like mine. It is also the tale of the retrieval of Buddhism from the west (in this case India). How many times have I had to tell you that it is the journey and not the destination? The Tao of travel with Kai? But I'm getting ahead of myself.
As it turns out, our initial burst of driving was more than brief. After talking nonstop for the complete duration of the journey, we were both tired and ready to sleep by the time we got to San Angelo... a good four hours away. This was to set the pace for our not-so-rapid cruise to come. We were welcomed by the very West Texas Pat and Pete, the domino playing keepers of the campground. Their little trailer even had a white picket fence! Then, too lazy to pitch a tent, we piled our blankets and sleeping bags into the truck bed and watched the billions of beautiful stars drift slowly by, the silence broken only by the frequent, "oh yeah! Dude! But what about..."
Not one to pay attention to time, it took me a while to get used to sleeping in the truck bed and having a big clock in the sky. Instead of one continuous ever-present time, there were now two: dark time and light time. I actually checked once and, believe it or not, I was getting up at 8:00 AM every morning! Conveniently, the sun did a good job of keeping up with the changing time zones so we didn't even have to make adjustments. Nature is pretty handy that way.
Next we visited Katherine in the microscopic town of Denver City, Texas. We got to see the CO2 recovery plant she has been constructing and even caught her sitting on a truck with heavy boots and a huge smelly flannel. It was fun to imagine my happy, bubbly, cookie-baking friend ordering around a bunch of rough oil working men. Ori got his first cruising experience. It was sort of a "training strip" with about three blocks of dark buildings and a Sonic at one end. We did a few slow laps, checked out the cars and sixteen year olds, and rolled in for some ice cream. He couldn't imagine doing it every night, but I convinced him that graduation to the big city made it more appealing.
On our way through Texas we stopped at every little historic marker we could find. Many of them were actually quite funny, and clearly funded by some local people intent on being remembered. They commemorated towns like "Buggscuffle" and places where, luckily, the good whities escaped those darned Indians. (Those pesky red people acted like they owned the place!) One was dedicated to the people who build a monument to some other people who once fought in a war. It described the heroics of the monument construction with the help of a little mule named, "Come On". Another described the formation of a little town. A few years later, a disgruntled dude left and formed his OWN town a few miles away. It wasn't long before there was a battle to become the county seat. After much debate, chanting, and sign waving there was a vote. It was discovered that several of the ballot boxes were tainted and the remaining count was within one vote. There was another long battle and another vote and, in the end, one little town did come out on top. The losing townspeople spent the next few years moving back to the new county seat until their hometown was completely abandoned. Silly humans.
The Carlsbad Caverns were filled with beautiful dripping silk and smooth icicles. I was inspired to create some like work with my metal sculpture. (I'll be starting a class in a few weeks.) It was also great fun to stand next to the Breast of Venus and listen to all of the foreign travelers giggle nervously or break into loud guffaws.
After hitting the alien museum in Roswell we got a little lost looking for the library. (We were hoping to check some email.) Of course you know what they say... "Roswell dead-ends well". So we found a giant silver spaceship made of hubcaps and washing machines instead.
At White Sands we ran up and down the dunes and painted huge finger paintings and mandalas. We leaped off the steep side of the dunes for the stomach-clenching thrill of still not... still not... still not hitting the ground. We watched the sun set while sitting in the warm sand. We camped up above the dunes, on the side of the mountains, and stayed up all night talking and listening to the coyotes howling, first one, and then a chorus of echoing replies building into a unified, powerful cry that filled the valley.
In Alamogordo we checked out the Space Museum and learned about all of the blundering taking place in the International Space Station construction. It would really be great to see that project get off the ground. We found what we thought were the coolest rubber balls in the universe in the gift shop. You bounce them off the ground and a little spring makes contact internally and starts a pair of LEDs blinking for several minutes. Great for night hand ball. (Which we played.) We got several to give as gifts, thrilled about our new discovery until our return to Austin where we found that everyone and their dog had these things with company logos plastered on the side. Is nothing sacred?!
In Albuquerque we had a list of tasks to perform for my friend Corregan who once suffered there. We dug for a restaurant that no longer existed, tried to find pepper popcorn without any luck, and finally succeeded in spitting on a building that, we were informed, was a haven of vileness and mental stagnation. We have it on video.
On my birthday I woke up inside the truck, in front of the painted desert, to the sound of hail pounding the roof. Warm and snug in the truck, we broke out a German Chocolate Cake and milk and watched the snow. Dessert by the desert. Sweet. The only sadness was that I was missing a really great floppy leather hat that I hadn't bought the day before. I vowed to return one day and snag it.
I really wanted to check out Edwards Airforce Base, home of the first crack of the sound barrier, but uniformed dudes with guns convinced us not to. I later heard that you could sometimes see the stealth fighter zipping through the sky like a little bat. Luckily it was well after we passed by or I would have been waiting there for weeks with a kink in my neck.
We saw some really amazing arrays of wind powered generators on the way through the mountains to highway 1. California certainly is a wonderland of implementation for great new ideas. Of course there were cows wandering through the same hills. It reminded me of the miles of photographs Weishi and I took of cows by the ocean in Maui, the beauty of novelty being too much to pass up.
The highway itself was quite beautiful and, while a bit cold, was littered with every conceivable mode of mobile living space. We saw converted bread trucks, microbuses, RVs, wooden houses atop old pickups... I was inspired. We spent the night next to the ocean and went to sleep listening to the waves carving away more of that precious high-dollar California landmass. The next day we found muscles attached to the rocks a little way out from the shore. We boiled them up in some ocean water for the salt and dropped a little lemon juice on them. It was one of the most wonderful breakfasts I've ever had. Oh yeah... and we didn't die. We then cruised up the coastline and pulled over to take a photograph only to discover a whole beach full of mating elephant seals. Both voyeuristic and fascinating, we saw hardheaded males macking on each other's women and getting into loud brawls. It was sort of like watching bad soap opera. I felt bad for the kids though. They had to hang around while this was going on and somehow develop into tough little seals, only twenty percent or so that would survive the swim back out to sea. Here above the waves the human children that don't survive the trauma of childhood stay alive to suffer and serve as shrink food. I'm not sure who's better off.
At long last we made it to Santa Cruz, Ori's destination point with Susan. I dug the sweet little surf museum and watched some beautiful waves roll in. I finally understand why this is the place to surf, and not in the tiny, choppy waves where I learned. There were VW Microbuses and Vanagons in every other driveway, and surfboards strapped to the top of each. I quickly fell in love with them!
At night we crashed at Susan's place and spent many hours discussing the state of the American prison/punishment system. She even gave us a tour of the county jail with her psychology and law class. Never before have I been so convinced that we need to end this ridiculous war on drugs. More than fifty percent of those currently incarcerated are there for non-violent drug offenses. Certainly addictive drugs may lead some to commit crimes in order to obtain those drugs, but many of these cases have to do with things like possession of marijuana, a non-addictive drug that, if anything, produces a state of mellow euphoria in users. These persons we have decided to label as "criminal" are doing no harm to those around them and the war to prevent them from enjoying their chosen pastime is costing us unbelievable amounts of money and, much more importantly, ruining and COSTING lives. People on both sides of this situation, police and population alike, are dying for what is ultimately the forcing of the morality of a decreasing minority of one group of citizens on another. At best, we are putting nonviolent people into prison situations where they are forced to become violent criminals to survive. In building more prisons we are constructing training and indoctrination camps for the sole purpose of growing the criminal population. But I digress. ;-)
Next was a trip to Cupertino to swap stories and slides with Weishi. From there I popped up to San Francisco to spend some time with Steve and Donna. I needed a ride back to Austin so Ori and I spent a day in Berkley putting up little signs. I offered tickets to the Phish movie premier at South by SouthWest, cool CDs, road stories and bad jokes. Ori headed back down to Susan's and I spent the next few days waiting for replies to my ads and reading and arguing philosophy with Steve. Who can get enough of that?
Unfortunately time was getting tight. Angela and Wendy were primed to cover me with honey and feed me to the fire ants if I didn't get back to Austin soon. A theater manager had dropped out and I was needed to fill the slot for the film festival. With only days remaining, Ori suddenly reappeared. Fortunately for me, things hadn't worked out with Susan. Yay! Sweet catastrophe to save my butt! I convinced him that he could see San Francisco any old time and what was one more day anyhow and we loaded up the truck and set sail for Austin.
This time the road flew by. I popped in the upbeat music and shortened my sleep hours. I expected a nice speedy return across the flat, straight, and uneventful freeway.
Of course, those of you more familiar with the topography of our great nation will realize that Flagstaff is, well, in the mountains. We were welcomed by a massive blizzard. The hours that followed were some of the most surreal I have ever experienced. We were drifting along at about 30 MPH on a white sheet with vague boundaries behind two tiny bouncing semi taillights. In front of the semi was an emergency vehicle of some kind that was creating a corona of blurring, swimming red and yellow light. The snow was flowing directly at us creating the sensation of zooming through space at a liquid warp speed. To top it off we were playing spacey trance techno music and taking turns thwapping Rhubarb, our little blinking red rubber ball on the windshield. We felt we were on a voyage of the gods!
Eventually the number of more intelligent drivers stopped by the side of the road convinced us that we should pull over for the night. We tucked in behind some friendly snoring trucks and grabbed a few nibbles of sleep.
In the morning the trucks had left and we had a quick snowball fight before continuing our wandering through the winter wonderland, questioning how much of the previous night had been a dream. As we dipped down out of the mountains, we started hitting all of the little Indian shops we could find. Weirdly the storm had cut power for many miles and most places were closed. Eventually, however, we did found the very same home of the floppy hat and he was waiting there for me. I snatched him up, put sock monkey in the brim, and had another snowball fight.
The remainder of the drive was fairly uneventful. Ori and I realized yet again that we were really just sitting on a giant moving sofa when we caught ourselves quietly munching on a bag of pretzels, drinking coke, and looking slowly around the big screen in front of us. The driving was simply a slow video game that we took turns playing. Of course, once we started talking about this we couldn't stop talking until we were both hoarse but that's pretty much what happens on the sofa at home too.
Somehow, living for the moment for so long made the return to Austin especially odd. We both felt as though we had just zipped off for a bag of groceries and returned. So it didn't work out with Susan and Ori. In the end it was yet other case of the destination serving only as the incentive to get off our Duffs and hit the road. Then, suddenly, I had to strap on a watch for the first time in six years and go to work. Granted, the work consisted of watching movies, hanging out with interesting new people, introducing cool filmmakers and snagging free food and beer at parties with great live music, but that's a story for the next Life of Kai.
Bis dann,
Kai