Going back to Cali, to Cali, to Cali

Somewhere along Highway 1 on the California Coast
Campgrounds campgrounds everywhere, but nary a place to sleep. School is starting and Summer is coming to a close, so finding a place to camp along the coast on a Saturday night was probably a losing proposition from the start. I drove and drove as the sun set and set, and as darkness and tiredness started to envelope me I pulled into the parking lot of the Ragged Point inn where a small sign proclaimed “No Overnight Parking.” As I type this, I expect to get kicked out at any moment, but hopefully my overnight camping karma will prevail and I’ll be allowed to sleep through the night unmolested. So far on the trip I’ve yet to be kicked out of any parking lot or roadside turnout or ditch where I happened to rest my wheels for the night. Early on in the trip I figured that by not popping the top of the camper I could pass as any other low-pro parked car (albeit a car with curtains), but by this point I say fuck it and pop the top anywhere I please – in drive through lines, inside car washes, I’ve even popped the top while stopped at a stop light. I’m a rebel, Dottie, a rebel.

I’m south of Big Sur and North of Hearst Castle, which means I’m within spitting distance of L.A. I’m inching along, ever so slowly, in the hopes of dragging this thing out as long as possible, but the end is uncomfortably near. I’ll be unemployed and living my parents. Fuck. I’m halfway to being an actor.

I was in Seattle last weekend where I spent the day with Suzi and our friend Jeremy who was visiting from Merced. The salmon were running up the locks, and the city has built an area where you can walk down into a concrete structure with windows below the water line and watch them fight their way against the current. It’s odd to watch these large, ugly fish swim with such might in order to make a tiny bit of progress, and it’s heartbreaking to think that after they finish this horribly stressful journey they basically just spew our their eggs and then die. And those are the lucky ones. The others die along the way or get eaten by birds or humans or bears (do they have bears in Seattle?). What a shitty existence. If there’s an afterlife, I hope everyone who’s ever been an asshole to me comes back as a salmon.

Saturday night I stayed at my friend Dave’s place. We’d met in Santa Cruz when we were just baby radio worker bees, and Dave has since gone on to get a degree in journalism and write for a couple of papers. He writes for a daily in Everett, which is just north of Seattle, and his place was the first of all my friend’s places that I’ve seen around the country to make me jealous. He has a three bedroom house with hardwood floors and a front porch and a carport and a back room/deck that has a sweeping view of Puget Sound. For $1300 a month. I paid $1400 for my studio in San Francisco and $1150 for my one bedroom apartment in L.A. I guess I’m moving to Washington. I can kind of understand the high prices in San Francisco because it truly is a great place to live, but the price of places in L.A. just makes me sick. Unless you live in Santa Monica or the Hollywood Hills, it’s just a flat, smoggy, viewless, uninspiring, hot, traffic choked shithole. And everyone wants to live there.

Congratulations are in order for Dave and his bride to be, Camilla, on getting engaged last week!

Sunday morning I got word that Jen had gone into labor, so I started heading south to deliver the baby. I was far enough away, though, that there was no way I was getting to San Francisco before Ayden was born, especially if I took the laborious coastal road the whole way. It turned out that I had a better chance than I thought, however, because Jen ended up being in labor for 20 grueling hours. Chicks get the rough end of the deal on that one, man. I know that every guy who watches his wife go through the birthing process tries to be really supportive and say things like “I felt so bad for her, she’s such a trooper,” but I know most of you smile to yourself just a little bit because you know it’s never going to be you lying there with your legs wide open pushing a baby out of your penis. And women, I know you think you get the short end of the stick, but think about it this way – at least you’re not a salmon.

Driving down the Oregon and northern California coast is spectacular, but the process of achieving it is like the process of achieving most things in life that are beautiful – tedious and slow. It took me the better part of two days, and I was in the San Francisco area by Wednesday afternoon.

We interrupt this posting to let you know that I have been kicked out of the parking lot. Well, not exactly kicked out, but warned that if I stay the cops would be called. However, I was informed that about a quarter mile down the road there was a turnout where no one would bother me, and that’s where I currently reside. There were two other small motor homes when I got here and they’re a little nice than mine, so hopefully if someone wants to carjack and kill one of us, I’m not the most likely target.

I had planned to see the baby on Thursday, so I wanted to bring a couple of gifts. I popped into the big mall in San Jose and headed straight for the first baby store I saw. The second I walked in I realized “You know what, I have never in my life been inside a store that sells only baby stuff, let alone actually shopped for baby stuff.” The look upon my face must have broadcast this thought loud and clear, because I was immediately approached by a sales woman who asked “Can I help you” in a tone that really meant “Don’t worry, I know you’re as clueless as the newborn for which you are shopping – we’ll get through this with a minimal amount of pain.” She showed me to the new baby stuff and we rifled through singlets and booties and cheesy shirts that proclaimed the father of the baby that would be wearing it rocked. I found a fuzzy green hat and matching booties that were cute and made my first baby purchase. Now a baby shopping authority, I dismissed the next store as cheap, “Baby Gap” as too commercial, and another store as too generic. I bought a hoodie jacket embroidered with a monkey from an overpriced boutique, and at that point I was exhausted.

One thing I really liked about the baby clothes world, that I’d like to see brought over to the adult world, is the shopping by age rather than size factor. How much easier would it be to walk into Macy’s and go to the section marked “336-360 Months?” Although, inevitably some snooty saleswoman would say “Are you sure you’re 346 months? You look a little more like you’re around 400 months. Why don’t we try something a little older.”

Wednesday night I was in San Jose, where I did my Schnauzer Logic segment in studio. Having done it on the phone for the past few months, I have a new found respect for radio guests who are good on the phone because it’s so much easier to be an in studio guest. You can make eye contact with everyone and see by their reaction what stories are hitting and when to move on, plus it’s so much easier to feed off of their energy. And I’ve got to say, there’s nothing better to me than sitting in front of a mic and just shooting the shit with friends. I don’t care if I’m in the nicest radio studio or in someone’s second bedroom – you put a mic in front of me and something just switches on in my brain. We had a lot of fun, did what felt like a pretty kickin two hour show (I say felt like because I haven’t actually listened back to it), and you can check it out for yourself over at www.schnauzerlogic.tblog.com. Sean, it was great to see you again, nice to meet you Parviz, and thanks for letting me do laundry Robin!

Wednesday night I drove to Santa Cruz to sleep in the parking lot of KSCO. I figured this was the wisest move, as my segment on there is at 6:45am, and there was no way I would actually be making it to the studio at that time unless I slept ten feet away. It turned out to be an interesting morning – this is what I wrote when I was woken up early and couldn’t fall back asleep:

Allow me to bitch for a second about how radio ruined my morning. So I’m doing the KSCO thing, and not only is it enough that I’m awake at 6:45am, I’m expected to be entertaining as well. And being on in the morning is the most coveted gig in this industry, so if you’re getting up at 3am to be at work by 5, you’re doing something right. And only when you work in radio do your friends feel it’s not only okay, but perfectly acceptable to call you at 5am just to chat, which is what Sam happened to do this morning. Now, a lot of people wake up and wonder where they are, but for the past 3 and a half months I’ve seriously had to take some time with that question every morning, because often the answer has been something that takes a little getting used to like “Oh, you’re in a Wal-Mart parking lot in Missoula, Montana.” So this particular morning I remember that “Oh, I’m in the parking lot of KSCO in Santa Cruz,” and by now I’m off the phone with Sam and it’s 5:15. It would be great to fall back asleep, but of course it’s now the time when people begin arriving at work to start their lovely day, so the parking lot is a sea of commotion all around me, and I just know the morning news woman, Susan Simon, is going to investigate what this strange car is doing in the parking lot. Sure enough at 5:30 there’s a knock on the car followed by “What are you doing in this parking lot?” Well, this question is answered by Rosemary, the host of the morning show, who just happened to pull up at that exact second, and she says to Susan “He’s parked here because he’s coming on the radio with us at 6:45.” You might think that the news anchor could put two and two together and figure out that if a late 80’s model VW van is parked in the lot on a Thursday that maybe it’s the guy who has been doing a segment on the show every Thursday for past 3 and half months about traveling around the country in a late 80’s model VW van. You would think. Not to mention the fact that when I told Rosemary on the phone just yesterday to expect me in the parking lot this evening, she jokingly said “I’ll alert the media.” Her own staff IS the media, and she failed to alert even them. When I pulled up at midnight last night, I knocked on the door to alert the overnight board op to my presence so as not to be woken up by the cops and this guy straight out of Santa Cruz cliché central casting opened the door to tell me “No worries, bra…peace.”

Regardless of all the commotion, my segment was, of course, brilliant this morning, and thanks to Robin Goldstein of Schnauzer Logic for hosting it over at www.schnauzerlogic.tblog.com. While you’re there, check out his most recent podcast featuring me. And fans of the weekly KSCO conversation, don’t despair (all both of you). The trip may end, but the hijinks will continue. Yes, I will continue doing a segment at 6:45am every Thursday morning until I get kicked off the station, which if past history is any indication, is inevitable. You can catch the stream over at www.ksco.com, and I will hopefully figure out how to capture and post it myself so as to stop sapping Robin’s bandwith with my millions of fans listening and downloading from his site.

I spent Thursday morning driving around Santa Cruz, checking out how things had changed since I’d left six years ago. There are a few more buildings, downtown is a little more gentrified, but the wacky homeless still reign supreme. A guy walked past me in a long trench coat with a small gray kitten on his shoulder. The kitten was on a hemp leash. I picked up a few things for Jon and Jen – sandwiches from Zoccollis, cookies from Pacific Cookie Company, skordalia from Vasili’s. I went up to campus and a ton of new construction had been completed in the past few years, including the new bookstore that actually gives the college a central place to gather and hang out, something it had lacked when I was in school. I bought little Ayden a baby UC Santa Cruz Banana Slug t-shirt and then made my way up to San Rafael.

Baby Ayden is cute and squirmy with a full head of dark hair. I looked at pictures of Jon as a newborn, and they could have easily passed for Ayden. Jon is the oldest of four boys who all look alike, so you knew his genes were going to be dominant, but it’s still shocking to see it in person. I’m an only child and I don’t have a large family, so I haven’t spent much time around babies. The whole thing is very foreign to me, and I quickly learned that they are very loud. When they’re not happy, they let you know at high volume, and they seem to not be very happy often. He slept for most of the time I was there, and I even held him once without doing any visible damage. Jon and Jen are the first of my friends to have a kid, so it’s an interesting process to watch. Hopefully I’ll learn a few things so that when it’s time for a mini-Jason, I’ll be ahead of the curve.

I left the Marin area Friday afternoon and traveled to the east east-bay to hang with my cousins Jana and Elisa who guilted me earlier in the trip for coming to the area and not stopping by. We had a nice dinner, and I tried to regale them with stories of my journey, but unfortunately they keep up on the blog so I had nothing interesting to talk about. Elisa works for a Honda dealer, and she told me that she’s looked at my blog so much that her company has blocked access to it. If you’re getting banned you must be doing something right, so that made me very proud. My blog and midget porn – both blocked by Honda of Hayward.

So that’s about it – a few more stops, and I’ll likely be home on Monday. It’s supposed to be over a hundred degrees – I can’t fucking wait. I have half a mind to pass through L.A. and drive straight through to Tijuana – half a mind and an empty wallet…I don’t think I’d get too far.