Now I'm on the train. Sadly, they made an announcement about not drinking your own liquor, so I may be too timid to do so.
Yesterday was a nostalgic return to one of the few places I remember from the summer my dad got some kind of fellowship in LA and we spent a few weeks or maybe the whole summer out there. The place I remember is the La Brea tar pits, a weird little park where you can watch tar bubbling up through a pond, through various patches of ground...you can also watch people excavating bones out of the tar, because things used to get stuck in it and die and be preserved. There's an exhibit inside the museum where you try to pull steel poles out of tar, and I swear I remember this from when I was four or five.
By afternoon I was obsessing about various things far beyond the end of my vacation and was no fun. Some down time was needed and taken after a lunch trip to the big semi outdoor mall thing called the farmer's market. There was this crazy, excellent store where they had all this vintage crap, just postcards and plastic things, all pretty cheap. I got some kitschy rodeo postcards. I guess they're actual photographs. I guess those people exist.
L and I walked to The Abbey, a cavernous gay bar with predictably perfect-looking go-go people, one of each gender. I needed a martini and got one. M, a friend of 20 years now living near Santa Monica and working at UCLA joined us, with her girlfriend.
On the way out of town, something infuriating happened: I was taking a bus to the subway to save twenty bucks (or, who knows, thirty?) and as I was waiting on La Cienega, a cab driver leaned out of his window and yelled that the bus wasn't running and did I want a cab. Now, I was pretty sure I had seen a bus going down La Cienega just before. I said so. He shrugged or something. I shrugged or something. And of course five minutes later, my bus came. Asshole!!
Union Station has a cheap bag check so I left my stuff and walked around downtown for an hour. Several people had told me it would be an interesting walk and it was. City Hall, the old LA Times building, finally I was plunged back into noir LA. I walked to Disney Hall (not so noir) and back.
The seat assignment lady was a dick about giving me a window. I was an hour early and clearly her chart of the car was empty but I walked up an odd number instead of an even and she kept saying "there might be families!" It is very hard to sleep in an aisle seat, nothing to lean against. As it turned out, I got a row to myself which is the grand prize. Even so, one wakes up with a horribly stiff back.
The sun set immediately upon our departure so there hasn't been much to see, but the moon is very bright and the glimpses of scenery have been very grand. It takes an hour and three quarters to escape metro LA but then there are more snowcaps.
Hoping to see some westerny looking West in a couple of hours. It'll be the last great scenery of the trip. After New Mexico there is a lot of Kansas. Now passing Flagstaff, as close as we get to the Grand Canyon. Jesus, what an enormous fucking country.
I think I saw everything I wanted to in LA except maybe the Watts Towers. Surely I won't be back for a while.
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