Week 23: The LA Flyby
(or, a writer has a real good week)
THE GOLDEN QUEEN SHOWS UP TO THE PARTY
So, forgive me if I mentioned this before, but my very favorite metaphor- that I’ve ever come up with, and am likely ever to come up with in the future- is about a swordsman named Chair, and his deck of cards. Wait, wait! Where you going? This won’t take long, I promise. (And if you believe that, welcome to this Substack! You must have just joined!)
So back in the depths of Covid, while I was both waiting to find out if the world was going to end AND biting my nails waiting to find out if my book was going to come out, I wrote a book called COLOR that was part therapy, part exhaustive examination of mental illness in all of its forms, and part fun colorful portal fantasy, like The Phantom Tollbooth crossed with One Flew Over A Cuckoos Nest. It’s great! You’ll get to read it someday, Book Gods willing. HOWEVER! I bring this up not to soft-sell my Alice In Wonderland rip-off (or not JUST to do that) but to tell you about a specific character; the aforementioned Chair, and his deck of magic cards.
Did I mention it’s my favorite metaphor? Ok, so here’s how it works, and I promise this is the closest I can possibly get to describing the experience of being me (other than writing endlessly about my FEEEEEELINGS on Substack). So Chair is a mercurial fellow, right, and every so often- between two to three weeks, he has to sit down, pull out his deck of magic cards, and see who he’s going to be for the next few weeks.
The cards are more like Tarot cards than playing cards; each one has a different figure on it, and a different meaning. For instance, one of them is the Angry Bowman- a severe figure, intensely focused, no sense of humor. Another might be the Flautist; a merry, capering fool of a musician. There’s the Drover, someone good at putting their head down, gritting their teeth, and forcing their way through the muck; there’s the Teenager, all anxiety and indecision, the Dreamlike Wanderer, who floats through all of the worlds of imagination but can’t be bothered to write any of it down. And there’s the Grinning Fool, an absolute motherfucker of a fellow who exists to burn it all down, baby, and dance in the flames.
Now, Chair’s life would be INTERESTING if all he had to do was turn over a card, and then he’d be that person for the next few weeks. But that would be a little too easy, don’t you think? He could, eventually, get used to his various Aspects, learn to work with them, and settle into a rythem. But that’s not how Chair’s magic works- OH NO. You see, he has to draw three cards. Let’s say he draws the Angry Bowman first; that means he’s going to be humorless, focused, and driven. But then, maybe, he draws the Teenager, and sets it partway across the Bowman- Oh no! Now he’s focused… on his anxiety. And the third card? Let’s say the Grinning Fool. And now, for the next three weeks, Chair is going to be someone who is anxiously, humorlessly driven to do all of the self-destructive shit he can, and feel utterly awful about it the whole time.
Is anybody still here? No? Just me? That’s okay, I talk to myself all the time. The point being, there are GOOD combinations of cards too, but there are never any good cards like the GOLDEN QUEEN.
She’s rare; she doesn’t show up often, but when she does- Whew. Golden sunlight on your face; a cool wind on a hot day; creativity and joy and wonder, flowing easily. Any group of three cards that has the Golden Queen in them is going to be a pretty good few weeks.
BUT. Sometimes. Maybe only once a year; maybe twice. The FIRST card drawn is the Golden Queen, and then baby, it don’t hardly matter what the other two are, you are in for a ride. You are in for a couple weeks of sunshine, baby. Just pure happy good.
ANYWAYS, that’s my dude Chair, who hangs around with a witch who sees things that are sometimes true and a man who shares his heart with a little boy that lives in an endless dark forest full of wolves, and they’re trying to cheer up a lady who got so depressed that she can’t see colors anymore. Oh, shit, selling the dumb book again.
Obviously Chair is my metaphor for being bipolar, but it’s my favorite metaphor because it breaks the condition away from being a binary thing; up/down, on/off. Sometimes when I’m struggling hard with who I seem to be at the moment, I can ruefully chuckle and say ‘Man, turned over some bad cards this time’. When my friends ask if I’m doing okay, instead of sending them a ten page text I can just say ‘sorry, turned over some weird cards’ and they understand. And when I’m feeling absolutely spectacular, it oddly can help to blame that on the cards, too- ‘Got myself a golden queen in this hand’, and remind myself that no matter the cards I’m holding, no matter what I’m feeling, Chair still gotta slay dragons and I still gotta brush my teeth, get some writing done, and be a human being to those I love. Because that can actually be even harder when I’m feeling good, sometimes.
Anyway. Which is all to say (did I really say I was going to keep this short with a straight face?) that the week I drove back to LA was a week where I turned over like, THREE Golden Queens, baby.
THE ROAD THROUGH JOSHUA TREE
So will it surprise anybody if I tell you that, instead of the extremely popular, relatively crowded, and well-trod National Park called Joshua Tree, I vastly prefer the road that drives AROUND Joshua Tree? No? Huh. Well anyway, I liked the National Park a ton, it’s one of the most spectacular things I’ve ever seen and I already talked about it at length. But oddly enough the quickest and most gas-saviest route back to LA from where I was in Arizona took me right across the top of Joshua Tree- and in fact, within a mile of the dry lake bed were I stayed for three weeks and kicked off the Desert Exile! But man, that drive was something else. I’ll probably toss a couple photos in a gallery down there but, like most things out west, photos can’t do it any kind of justice. Or at least, MY photos can’t.
But after the Spiritual Wrasslin’ and Long Walks and going Cold Turkey On Video Games of the last few weeks, getting on the road and going somewhere felt… Indescribably amazing. I felt like I was back on the Tour, you know? And that stretch of California is profoundly majestic. I found myself feeling some real big feels, and it wasn’t all just the Golden Queen. It was being on the road again, just me and the van, driving through Vistas on our way somewhere. I’m loving the Desert Exile, don’t get me wrong, but this little jaunt back to LA reconfirmed that, IF I can make it through the drought and work picks up, I still have a WHOLE LOT of this country to see. And I’m fuckin’ excited.
LA WAS A GOOD DAY
The last time I was in LA was a cool day; I got to meet a Movie Dude who liked my book and have a coffee in Beverly Hills; you can now check THAT off my bucket list, thank you! But I was also kind of stressed out, partied out, and was ready to get the fuck out of Los Angeles- so I didn’t properly appreciate the moment, I don’t think. This time, I was only going to be in LA for an afternoon, and I was determined to enjoy it a bit more this time.
I got to meet another Movie Dude who liked my book- it was worth the tank of gas to zip back to LA and meet him- and after the meeting, instead of jumping back into the van and once again getting the fuck out of LA, I decided to stretch my legs, and take a walk. And that’s when I stumbled upon my new Happy Place in Los Angeles (other than my beloved Los Feliz, that is), which is Melrose Avenue.
YOU GUYS. It’s so grimy, and beat-up, but with so many cool shops and cocktail bars and smoke shops and you fuckin’ NAME IT; it’s a total Dive Bar of a street and I fell instantly in love. I treated myself to a too-expensive Tiki drink at this absolute masterclass of a cocktail bar called the Umbrella Company then found a dive bar called the Snake Pit and met dude who toured the world with a troupe of tuba players once and is currently touring the world as a roadie for a Very Famous Rock Band that he made me promise not to share online. The dude who served me the absolute cheapest beer I’ve seen in LA (five bucks; I paid 23 for a Coors Light the last time I was in town) moonlights as a bartender when he’s not touring the world as one of those nutball Red Bull skateboarders doing tricks off buildings and whatnot.
And then, as I was stumbling back to my van, I peered up blearily at a sign that, in part, said ‘hot dog’, and that sounded REEEEEEAL fine to me at that point in the night, so I ordered some extravagant monstrosity of a hot dog and only then looked around. Oh, cool. I’m in PINK’S, arguably the most famous hot dog stand in the world. Every surface is covered with pictures of celebrities eating their hot dogs- and they don’t fuck around with the B-list, boy. Pretty sure I saw Tom Cruise next to Oprah next to one of the Marvel dudes. And, sure, I was a bit tipsy, so take this with a grain of salt, but…
Best hot dog I ever had.
In a fit of defiance that shall ring down through the centuries, I decided that I shall risk flaunting the LA ordinance against sleeping in your vehicle overnight and crashed out. Got a cup of coffee at one of those ‘so cool it’s not really even that cool’ LA coffeeshops in the morning, and then got the fuck out of LA.
It was a good goddamn day.
BACK TO AZ BAYBEEEE
At this point I’ve criss-crossed South-West California so many times I was running out of new roads to drive, so I figured I’d go see what this Northern Arizona thing was all about. Well, it’s so different from Southern Arizona that it might as well be a different state, that’s what it’s about!
There’s a road that you drive up through Bullhead City on your way to Kingman (I was getting tired of driving the Interstate and wanted to see some sights) where you start in Arizona, and then within like, five miles dip back into California, lick the very bottom of Nevada, and then are back in Arizona. It’s wild! There’s a string of little towns there that would have benefitted from exploring, but it was time for me to stop all this gallivantin’ about, remember that I’m supposed to be in the Desert Exile(tm) and find myself a parking spot for a bit.
And I did; a spot up in some mountainous-type areas with scrub trees taller than the van and a pretty good view. I also discovered that night that, just because it said ‘Arizona’ on the sign, didn’t mean it was no desert. I pulled up to snow on the ground. And that night, I figured out why!
True to my own recalcitrant nature (that’s for Len, if he ever reads this, I hope you got a chuckle outta that) I woke up the next morning to a freezing cold floor and was like Nope! I’m getting the fuck back down to where it’s warm!
But then the sun came up and it hit 75 and was just as beautiful and comfortable as it could possibly be, and also apparently I was camping on some cow grazing lands, and so I had some Big Beef come visit me from time to time, and also I kinda liked my little hole in the scrub pines. And I’ve figured out the system for pretty much staying toasty at night no matter how cold it gets, so my days turned into waking up to a freezing van (invigorating!) and chucking on ALL OF THE LAYERS and huddling over my coffeepot while it was cooking, rubbing my hands and blowing on them like I was an extra in Lonesome Dove or something, and then gradually throughout the day stripping off layers as it became more and more Ideally Comfortable, sitting cross-legged in the back of the van tapping away happily in a thin shirt and shorts, waving at my Cow Friends when they passed. And then the sun would go down, and the process would reverse, until I would end up wrapped, mummy-like, in my toasty little bed watching House Of Guinness. (If you haven’t watched HoG yet, like… what are you doing? Go watch it. Netflix.)
The routine was weirdly addictive! I mean, the ol’ Golden Queen probably didn’t help, and I had a real good creative run in that spot- maybe not as good as the Canada Explosion Of Creativity, but pretty damn good.
And that’s where I’ll leave you, because the next day I left; headed south, down through Flagstaff and Sedona, back to the good ol’ habitable climes of Tucson. Going to find some new BLM lands, spend some weeks, and punctuate those weeks with some beautiful drives.
Man, it’s almost hard to be mopey! But don’t worry, I’m sure I’ll manage.
Thanks to one and all, every week I’m like, can I do this another week? And then I’m done with the week and I’m like, you couldn’t drag me home with one of those steers up there. I’m in it until they force me to stop. Thanks to Jenna for the always inspirational card; she’s a tremendous artist (in addition to being a world-famous rock n rolla) HERE.
I'm glad you had a good week! You were due for a change.