Lost in OC

Here I am, stagnating in the states. I remember a very senior and experienced SEAL once told me when I was about to take a vacation “Leave! What the fuck do you need leave for!? You just get soft and weak on leave!” That fucker was right in a lot of ways. You give yourself too much time to dwell on the banality of fungus growing on rocks flying through outer space and your reflexes slow down, thoughts get slurred, your determination is eroded. It was a Wednesday but I can only tell you that in retrospect, days and dates had become irrelevant. I woke up with a slight hangover or maybe still a little drunk, sometimes its hard to tell. I walk outside with just my shorts on to get some shit out of my truck and along the way manage to wave at a mailman and smile at a girl walking her dog and all at once I realize that I am completely gone. This place has eaten my brain, the zombies bit me and a short time later I too joined their ranks. The ranks of the undead.

This is what happens to you when you lose all your hiding places. This is what happens when you let the sunlight hit your skin. There was a time when we had a thousand hiding places, a thousand disguises, a thousand defenses against assimilation into the marching columns of mindless drones. I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with this place. South Orange County California, the “golden ghetto”, behind the orange curtain. A place so clean, so beautiful, so perfect that you want to fucking kill yourself. I imagine it like when the Architect is describing version 1.0 of the Matrix to Neo in that fucking movie.

The Architect – “The first matrix I designed was quite naturally perfect, it was a work of art, flawless, sublime. A triumph equaled only by its monumental failure.”

Like Adam and Eve in the garden there is only one true human response to the tyranny of safety, the tyranny of peace, and the tyranny of perfection. If we do truly have a choice then the only choice to make is to say “FUCK YOU!” with one finger extended.

So the idea grew in me for the day, it consumed dead flesh and replicated, a colony evolved, generation after generation were born until the idea itself became self aware. I needed to rediscover what once was, what once used to be. See old sights and experience old sensations. Try and wake myself up from a hibernating soul. Becoming a being, existential ontology. My medulla wanted to look at itself through the lens of the past. Remember what I once was and maybe give context to what I have become. Existentially, we are what we can become. Ours is a process, and our becoming is our ontic possibility of becoming. Human existence is a project in which the past and the present are subordinate to the future which is the main residence of our existence because it is just ahead of our projection of ourselves.

Heidegger said “Human existence cannot have a relationship with being unless it remains in the midst of nothingness.” So from nothingness my journey began, ex nihilo, and my future projection was my own past. Nothingness appears in existentialism as the placeholder of possibility. The awareness of anything in the world that is not my own existence (which by the way can’t be held in my consciousness without being nihilized [is this even a word? I don't fucking know but you get the idea]) is an awareness of nothingness, that is, what I, what this existence is/am not and in some cases what I could become.

I would rediscover the old hiding places, revisit the old sanctuaries, and hopefully this journey would free me from the clutches of the slave nation.

It was a Thursday when I started out. The rainclouds had parted just long enough for me to venture outside. Jumping into my pickup I popped out one of the 3 or 4 different ‘best of’ Doors CDs that I own and slammed in the Misfits. I was driving through the heart of South Orange County, through the tapioca dream world, sipping the strange mix of melted ice and leftover fast-food diet Coke with self-inflicted purpose in my mind for the first time in a while. Driving past pool cleaners in rusting vans and work-at-home types in shiny Mercedes and BMWs, past cookie-cutter track homes where the fleshy robots smile at me with cellophane faces and grope after me with mannequin hands, past the surreal consequence-free prison that people created for themselves. The zombies are everywhere and their hungry moans rise up into a cacophony of ruin “we will love you to death”.

“They hunger for your intensity” said my buddy Henry in a conversation we had a couple of weeks ago. People are starving to create gods and then watch them be destroyed. People want to judge and condemn. He was right, they hunger for your life-force and they feed on your rebellion. They feast on your individuality, and your lack of ‘give-a-shit’, and your insurgence until they have assimilated it. This is our Brave New World and I am the fucking savage. I chastise myself and they make a sex game out of it. My salvation lies in my self-destruction. I guess my only hope is to grasp some form of contentment some form of enlightenment somewhere along the way before I turn back into dust. This place is bewitching and insidious, life and death issues are meaningless here while the hyper-analysis of emotions and even the slightest deviation from prescribed modes of fashion or language are punished by excommunication. Feelings are more important than actions in a world where there are no consequences. Here in this Technicolor straightjacket of civilized behavior.

We arrive from nothingness to the absurd at the moment that we ask for a meaning after we have become aware of the other. Absurdity is a causal motivation in existentialism (especially in the works of Sartre and Camus). It is sometimes possible to overcome absurdity with absurdity itself but one must have the freedom to express absurdity and irrationalism without throwing the universe out of balance. We expressed our absurdity in the names and experiences of the places we chose to habituate. Here’s a quick listing of the places I can remember:

TERRORDOME – Named because it was kind of like a ‘terror’ place. Terrordome was up in the hills above the Ziggurat building in Laguna Hills back before they developed the shit out of it. It wasn’t much, just a giant empty water tank that you could go into and yell and hear the echo. The key elements to this place were primarily that it was totally off the beaten path and also it was kind of like an adventure just to go out there to it.

EUCALYPTI FOREST – This was a large grove of Eucalyptus trees on the east side of the 5 freeway between San Juan and San Clemente. This place was totally out of the way and required a long hike just to get to the clearing where we would hang out. The favored activities here would be drinking and drug use, I suppose the fun was that you could be as loud as you wanted without concern of anyone hearing you. The place was near a halfway house that Sean was living in at the time, so we could always swing by and grab Sean before heading into the place. While probing the depths of the Eucalypti Forest one time we found our very first “bum nest” complete with 3 or 4 shopping carts filled with braziers, women’s underpants, women’s shoes, and pantyhose. There was also a stack of rotting porno mags that all the pages had melted together after being left out in the rain for like 1000 years. We were so amazed and disgusted by all this shit that it eventually led to our not returning to the forest either that or we just didn’t give a fuck about the place any more.

ORANGE GROVES – Just west of the 5 freeway between San Juan and Mission Viejo was a large derelict orange grove. This was the last bastion of “old orange county” as it was pretty much the only orange grove left anywhere. Back in the early 80′s basically everywhere between Dana Point and LA was orange groves. You could drive down the 5 and the sweet smell of oranges was almost overpowering. Many of us would go down to these groves and get totally wasted on 40′s, eat a bunch of oranges, and fall asleep under the trees. One time we woke up just in time to see a mountain lion stalking up on our drunken sleeping bodies. Slowly over time the orange groves were mostly plowed under to make room for more houses and some horse trails.

SATAN’S HEARTBEAT – At the intersection of Aguacate and Del Obispo Rd in San Juan Capistrano there is the entrance to a sewer tunnel that runs about 2 miles until it dumps into the San Juan Creek. Just at the entrance, about 100 meters into the pitch black, we would sit and drink and bullshit all the while waiting for the inevitable BLAM BLAM – BLAM BLAM of “satan’s heatbeat”. The noise was cause by vehicle tires on the road overhead running over a perfectly placed loose manhole cover. The extreme sound coupled with the echo and the darkness made for an extremely cool hang out spot. One of the most memorable times held in Satan’s Heartbeat was when we all got totally drunk and sang twisted fucked up blues songs. One of which was about Brad’s girlfriend who at the time was known as “the goatess” (a female goat). The place was originally discovered by Brian when he went down there as a kid to spray some graffiti with the neighborhood retard. Brian drew like a marijuana leaf and the retard wrote “cop killer”. On their way back home the police saw them with the spray bottles and they got totally busted, of course when the police saw “cop killer” they were doubly angry and thought that Brian had done it all because the neighborhood tard would never do that shit anyway. You know, people always feel sorry for mentally retarded people like they had this really crappy thing happen to them and we need to be extra cool to them to make life better. THe fucked up thing is that some retards are like evil retards. Mean, abusive and spiteful. Those fuckers are like evil super villians from comic books with their retard secret identity and their evil retard strength. They only cause problems.

THE END – This was one of the more minor hangouts. Mostly used just to take a quick look down over San Juan or maybe off to the Saddleback Mountains while having a cigarette. It was just a dead end at the end of a street and was named “the end” because of the large yellow sign that stated this fact. Also we always kind of associated this place with the doors song of the same name.

THE MEAT – It could confidently be said that this was our most sacred of all hideaways. This place is more like mythology than history at this point in time simply because of the large volume of time and activities we engaged in there. “The Meat” got it’s name due to several influences. First of all there was the time when Fitzgerald told somebody, maybe Sean or someone who was afraid to go down to it, “dude, get down in the meat, it’s safe”. Another possibility is from one of the first levels on the video game DOOM 2 (I think) where you drop down into this totally dark room and there are a fucking bunch of bad guys and it’s totally an all out brawl. I can remember Henry saying, “get down in it” in regards to this place. Finally I think there was a slight influence from the Nine Inch Nails song ‘down in it’. What the real source of the name, maybe we will never know, but what is for sure is that almost daily someone would say “Let’s get down into the meat” and everyone knew exactly what they meant.

“The Meat” represents a time in the history of the ghettoeez (what we called ourselves) when everything was going great. It can be said that it was symbolic for the height of our empire. What was the meat?? Well, it was a piece of what looked like abandoned construction on a highway or something that jutted out from the side of a hill back in the badlands of San Juan Capistrano. You could only get to in by horse trails and then a short hike through some bushes. It was basically a big flat piece of concrete extending from the side of a hill with a large metal pipe sticking out the end of it. We drank more 40′s down there than anyone would even believe. It was halfway customary to smash your empty 40 bottle of the metal pipe after you drank it. We talked about all kinds of fucked up shit down at the meat, we planned all sorts of misguided endeavors, and the whole time had more fun than we had a right to. It may seem weird that a bunch of jackass kids would have fun getting drunk on a chunk of concrete sticking out of a hillside but we fucking did and then some. There are probably a million stories I could tell you about hanging out down there but only one really comes to mind right now. For a time down at the meat there was a rattlesnake. It actually lived between the cracks of the concrete and sometimes on a sunny day when you would burst from the bushed and jump onto the meat it would be out sleeping in the sun. It would, of course, be totally startled and coil up and start rattling right away. Usually this meant a complete abandonment of the meat to the poisonous beast for the day but on one occasion I happen to be carrying a big stick as like a walking stick. Well we jumped through the bushes, the snake coiled up and rattled away, and instead of running like hell I smashed the fucker like 45 times on the back with the stick. I was shaking like hell and the snake was not really hurt too bad, he just kinda slithered back into his crack. He didn’t die from the encounter but he never really bothered us again after that. Eventually the meat was bulldozed into the ground to make room for a new housing track. Today it lies buried under more suburban hell.

THE TITS – In Mission Viejo just west of the 5 freeway on the top of a hill are 2 gazebos. These gazebos are like lookout points for the area but from a distance they resemble a couple of tits (hence the name). We would go up there and get fucked up late at night when we had nowhere else to really go.

POOP CHUTE – This was a sewer tunnel that had an entrance on Peppertree Bend, a street high in the San Juan hills. Secluded between multi-million dollar castles was a sewer entrance to pipe. The sewer pipe was only about 3 feet in diameter and ran for approximately 4 miles all the way down the hill, under the city, and eventually into San Juan Creek. We would go to the entrance, squat in the pipe and get fucked up, then lay on our backs on skateboards and luge the pipe at ultra-speeds all the way to the creek. This was totally fun and totally crazy. I was talking to Brian the other day and we both agreed that while it was cool at the time neither one of us had any interest in doing this again. Since those times a house has been constructed where the entrance used to be and they totally rewired the whole pipe system there.

BRIAN’S STREETLIGHT – Most often on a lazy evening when nobody knew what the fuck we were going to do that night and had nowhere else to go we would congregate out front of Brian’s house under the streetlight. 40 consumption there was at an all time high and it was once said that you are not truly an “ese” (a spanglish word we adopted to call ourselves – kinda like “droog” in clockwork orange) unless you had pissed on the wall there over one thousand times.

PORCUPINE HILL – This is a large hill in the heart of San Juan. Originally it was set aside by this wealthy developer to await what would have been an extremely kick-ass futire. The city of San Juan and this land developer came to an agreement a long long time ago. This guy would do all the development in San Juan, helping the tiny city out tremendously, making the place nice and pleasing to the eye and more modern. Making the place the kind of town the developer himself would like to live in. The only thing he asked was that on this hill, that he already owned the land for, he would be allowed to build his mansion home. Of course since the guy was super rich the house would have been the 9 th wonder of the world or something like that. Well, after doing all this work, setting the town up big, the people decided that they didn’t want him to build his home there. They said it would be too much like being commoners living under a kings castle, it would ruin the “skyline” of the city. I think it might have been a little jealousy too, but they disallowed him from building his home there. In retribution the developer planted like 50 palm trees on the totally barren hilltop just to make it ugly out of spite for the broken promise. After planting the trees he moved to Hawaii and basically abandoned the place. This is just the kind of spot a bunch of outsiders could hang out and have some fun.

UNDER THE BRIDGE – Like the Red Hot Chili Peppers song we would hang out “under the bridge”. On the road to the Orange Groves was a large underpass that goes under the 5 freeway. We would sit under there in the shadows and get fucked up while listening to the cars race by overhead.

76 STATION – Our buddy Jeff (for a time tagged with the nickname “Sea Bird” for god knows what reason) used to work here, and since it was a social spot with all the people coming in and out all day and night as well as having all kinds of junk food and drinks and shit we kind of hung out here all the time. Sometimes when Jeff would be doing something one of us would ring up a customer or help mop out the store or whatever. Jeff himself got drunk one time and completely smashed the toilet in the restroom to pieces. I think Jeff got arrested there once when the cops followed us there after I went on a drunk driving rampage after breaking up with a girlfriend.

SAN JUAN CAPISTRANO GRAVEYARD – What kind of people would we be if we didn’t get wasted at the graveyard like 100 times? Really, do I need to go into this any more? I didn’t think so. One dark and dismal night Brian and I got wasted and went up there and tried to dig up a fresh grave. We failed of course. Brian was sick as shit with some kind of TB or pneumonia or something. Another time we tried to hotwire this bulldozer that was doing construction in the area. The plan being to drive the thing full power into the mausoleum wherein the remains of the R.H. Dana (of “DANA” Point) family were buried. I don’t know what we would have done with the bones and stuff, but it would have been pretty cool to see that thing smash apart.

THE RUSTIC CABIN – Matt’s uber-rich parents had this giganto mansion up in the hills of San Juan. This place was complete with an avacado grove, giant swimming pool with huge boulders that we would try to make girls dance on like a rap music video, a thousand hiding places and home to more bombmaking and drunken times than any place should ever see. The house had an internal communications system of intercoms and crap that Matt’s parents would screach downstairs when we were being too loud or he was in trouble or dinner was ready (“Maaaaaaatt, come upstairs and eat some tacos!”) or whatever. The bottom parking lot was the most descreet entry for beer carrying members of the ghetto clan but you would have to fight your way up a 500 meter long dirt trail with the biggest nastiest spiders ever fucking seen. The worst would be when you got all drunk and forgot about them shits and would try to run down to your car or something and end up with a fucking huge web smashed on your face with a big hairy spider crawling all over your head and hair. Even the toughest among us would totally freak out and spazz for 5 minutes making completely certain that the beast was no longer on their head.

MALI – Short for “Malibu” this refers to the mega-house that Henry’s dad “Chip” had up in the Malibu hills. When all the shit in the ghetto of OC would stack up so high that you couldn’t take another minute this place was a welcome refuge. Henry and I went up there for a few weeks under the guise of “doing landscaping” for the never-to-be-finished mega-house. Dudes, I’ll be completely straight with you, this house was fucking intense. It has a helo pad and helo, a rotting lamborgini at the front of the driveway, about 7 bedrooms, a huge pool, a giant backyard that led into a canyon where you could watch the sun set and “Daya” a 3/4 wolf husky that Chip let loose on the property. It was fucking intense. The only problem was that Chip was a total cheap bastard and a real asshole most of the time. He was the kind of guy who would buy this mega-house but too tight-ass to finish fixing it up right. The driveway was rotting away, the pool was filled with mud, the construction wasn’t complete, the helicoptor was non-operational, basically the place was left for the bums. Chip had hired only one full-time dude to take care of the place “Hugo”. Hugo was the toughest mexican I’ve ever seen. Chip would have this one single dude do everything on the place. Fix fences, cut down all these overgrown bushes and crap, fucking everything. I know you are thinking that it doesn’t sound that bad, but just imagine if people got taken out by some kind of virus and all the bushes and vines and shit grew unhindered for 100 years. Not only that but Chip would be a complete prick to this guy and get him so pissed off that he would be mumbling shit under his breath for hours and threaten to kill Chip while he worked. That is what the landscaping was like at the Mali estate. Anyway, Henry and I would work for 40 dollars a day each doing this “landscaping” which consisted of us getting up with hangovers around noon, eating breakfast then spending hours and hours digging these huge boulders out of the ground and rolling them off the cliff in the backyard while we laughed in satisfaction as they smashed trees and shit below. Then Chip would come home, see us dirty and assume we had been actually working, pay us the cash and we would go into the town and get wasted again then come home and howl the night away with Daya. A pretty good way to clear your head out for a few weeks.

And there were probably a hell of a lot more. These were the places where we could escape from the judgement of modern society and freely talk and do whatever the fuck we wanted to. Each of these places contains a mix of memories and experiences for every person in our group of friends but some were more group locations than others. These fringe locations, these interstitial places may be the reason I always try to take pictures of the shit that is between the cracks. I am attracted to places off the beaten path, out of the way places, overlooked things, places and things inaccessible to the rest of the world.

So Thursday was carrying on just fine, a nice stroll down memory lane. I would have liked to take the journey with at least one other person but nobody was around so I traveled alone. The rain started up before I could hit all the places I wanted to but one thing really hit home. Even though I can go back to these old hangouts and hideaways I can never go back to the times we had back then. Things are totally different now. All the ghettoeez are fragmented and disparate. Even the guys who are still around have taken their paths each to their logical conclusions and become irreversibly changed because of it. I miss the old days because of the fun times, the carefree attitude, the sense of importance to our actions and thoughts but really I just kinda feel sad that things have changed into what they are now. Not that things are all that bad, but maybe it’s more zen like to just sigh and put no more words on it.

Detoured from my quest I ended up swinging by Sprague’s house and talk to him for a while. He was consumed with the ghetto drama of this girl Jill or Liz or something like that who lives across the street. Apparently this girl is totally crazy and even stole Sprague’s money right in front of his face, has emotional explosions that seem totally irrational and a bunch of other stuff that I don’t have the energy to get into but he is still talking to this girl. Anyway, Sprague tries to talk me into going with him to the circle-K to meet Jill/Liz because he thinks she has some dudes there to ambush him. I go along for the price of a green tea and after we get there it seemed like his street instincts served him well. PJ Martin shows up (a dude known back in the day for beating dudes up for money being all pumped up on roids) but as far as we can tell doesn’t want to fight because he recognized his mark as an old buddy he went to preschool with (Sprague). So I get totally smothered in ghetto drama and just try to chug down my green tea when we get back. Brian comes over just as Sprague is leaving for school so the two of us head out to try and find a good time.

Neither one of us even remotely wanting to get drunk we end up going to every bar in town and drinking cokes and water. Hennesey’s first, too early.. nobody here yet, then to Laguna Beach for a quick walk around but all the bars sound too faggy so after a cheeseburger we swing over the The Swallows (yes, the perennial tavern of San Juan Capistrano). Named after the bird the ‘Swallow’ known world wide for it’s crazy return to the mission of San Juan Capistrano. I actually remember when the birds still returned to San Juan, they say they came here because 100 years ago the mission was the highest building in the area. In the. 70′s they build the giant Mission Viejo Mall which is where the swallows would ‘return to’ through most of the 80′s until so much construction had gone on that in the late 90′s there was never a swallow to be found

anywhere in the area. The place is only a stones throw from the San Juan Mission (founded by the Spanish missionary Junipero Serra and hailed as “the jewel of the missions”) and it always has the most eclectic group of assholes around. Cowboys and cowgirls with boots and hats, 50′s types with poodle skirts and leather jackets and greased up hair, business types with nice suit and tie, and just the regular folks who just happen to wander in there. We hang out for a while and listen to some shit kick while standing on the sawdust floors until we decide to bounce out. Next we drop by Coconuts down in Capo Beach. This place is larger, better lit, has multiple TVs and pool tables (all of which The Swallows does not) but the place never pulls any people. The people that do go there look like survivors of a trailer part holocaust. They had a live band that was jamming AC/DC cover songs that sounded like a bunch of drunk throat cancer patients trying Karioke for the first time. After Brian found a booger in his coke we abandoned the place to try Hennesey’s Tavern one last time. Despite the downpour all the bars we had been to so far were packed and Hennesey’s was no exception. Not really a bad place, the best looking girls in town go there, but it has a cliquey post-highschool crowd that are not always the best for conversation. One girl did a drunken rain dance and nearly pulled her shirt off, two guys almost fought and then hugged over a spilled drink, and Brian and I sat there amidst the downpour just laughing and drinking water.

The main characteristic of existence itself when we face our contingence and the absurdity of our acts and choices is angst. For Heidegger angst is that through which fear becomes possible. For Kierkegaard angst is a desire that one fears. For Sartre it is the immediate consequence of facing the possibility of nothingness. No matter what your definition is, angst, we decided, was the major motivating factor of our escapism. Misguided, misunderstood, marginalized, outcast kids in a plastic eventless suburban hell-hole raging against the system that was causing them so much strife. But this shit was what people like to call “progress”. Fucking progress. The qualitative argument that “progress” is “good” is itself a metanarrative and open for deconstruction to an existentialist. Unfortunately most people just blindly swallow on a very basic level, never thinking, never questioning, never really existing, but still arguing and complaining and trying to push their view on the world. This doesn’t leave a lot of room for oudsider views. It’s like when people want to live in nice suburban homes on hillsides with natural views, they want to protect the ‘skyline’ and maintain wilderness areas but then get pissed off when coyotes come down from the hills and eat their Chihuahua. We are like the coyotes, out there on the fringe, a hunter-gatherer life in a world where manifest destiny has paved over the last of our natural habitats. We come down from the hills and natural instincts don’t seem so cute any more when they interfere with the consentual hallucination.

Angst. That’s why we created those places. We didn’t fit into the natural order, we refused to be compartmentalized, we didn’t fit in. We weren’t the chicks who show their tits or the guys who fight then hug. I would like to think that we were different because we were better, but the truth is that our desires were just not compatible with ‘the norm’ and what we perceived as our salvation was only the catalyst to our downfall. Too much intensity, too many disregarded rules, too much rebellion and nihilism and desperation. There’s no retirement plan for outcasts and losers. So now we just sit here and talk about the dream that was the past drinking water in a bar, the two of us just sad shells of their previous selves. Both of us too afraid to ask “what now? What do we do now?” but already knowing the answer.

The shitty thing is that we still have it. It’s still in us, just muted and toned down by a thousand blown opportunities and fucked up relationships. All this shit from life slowly buries your instincts inside of you and you can’t dig ‘em up without confronting a million sickening memories of wasted time and bad intentions. I told Noah today, “dude, maybe it’s not everybody else, maybe it’s really just us. Maybe we’re the ones who are all fucked up and stupid and shortsighted and slaves. Maybe all the fucking shit that happens to us isn’t because the Navy is fucked up or our bosses have been assholes or the people we sometimes work with are stupid or crazy or misguided… Maybe all our relationships suffer and we can’t fit in and we fuck up all the time is because we are the god damned assholes. Maybe it’s been us this whole fucking time.”

Noah -”Dude, you can’t think like that. You know you are not a robot and that’s why shit is always so hard for us. Because we work and live around all these people that just don’t get it and we are fucking different.”

I told Henry about this conversation and he was like “FUCK YOU! You can never think like that. Dude, you know you aren’t a slave, you are fucking INTENSE, and yeah it’s fucking shitty living in a world full of slaves but dude, the hardest thing for us is just dealing with that. “

Both Noah and Henry are right on this one, sometimes an observing ego can be a handy tool, but self-doubt is fucking BULLSHIT!

The next morning I got into an argument with my mom and sister and they told me that until my escrow closes I had to find somewhere else to live. I wrote down what I could remember from the conversation, like a transcript or whatever, but I’ve decided that even though it might help to just dump that shit out of me it’s probably not the best thing to do under the circumstances.

What to do when your whole life is packed in the back of a pickup truck and you have no home? Get drunk immediately! I woke up at Sprague’s place the next morning. Nate, another old tyme bro, also crashed there that night and Nate, Spray, and me all went out to Denny’s that morning with absolutely no motivation but somehow ended up driving all the way to Joshua Tree on a whim. We actually didn’t intend on going to Denny’s at first, Spray wanted to go to some place he called “the waffle factory” up in Aliso Viejo. Nate and I were already skeptical about going all the way to Aliso for some fucking waffles, but the problems really came out when Spray couldn’t remember where this place was. He was actually looking for the world famous ‘Pancake House’ on Moulton right past the toll road but his idiot brain couldn’t remember that. Spray does a lot of stuff that makes people think his brain is turned off. For example the other day Brian and I were talking about Blue Grass music and Spray pipes up “yeah, I like that BLUES GRASS”. I know this is a minor thing but dude, wake up, blues grass!?! We ended up eating at the Denny’ in San Juan right off the freeway there. So anyway after a meat lovers scramble (which is a lot of food for 5 bucks!) and 2 cups of coffee I jumped back in the car with my now food comatose friends headed really nowhere and somehow we start driving down the Ortega Highway. In a sleepy daze we drive past green rolling hills and survivalist camps until we pass by a place called “Nichols Institute” out in the middle of fucking nowhere.

me -”Dude, look at that place, I bet they fucking invent giant tesla coils there that can shoot down satellites there.”

Spray – “You mean the Nichols Institute? My dad did all the parking lots there, he’s like their parking lot guy.”
Nate – “My ex-girlfriends mom works there. They do like plant melding between species and shit, she used to bring home all these weird houseplants that don’t exist in nature.”

Me – “Whoa, cool.”

Spray – “Sometimes they call my dad up to have him fix up the parking lots when they get worn down and stuff. He has to go out there about every 2 years.”

Sometimes I think my life is like some fucked up existential work of literature. It just occurred to me that this whole blog is remarkably similar to Beckett’s play Waiting For Godot. Godot is a two-act play that begins with two bums on the side of the road who are waiting for the arrival of someone called ‘Godot’ and ends with the same idea. Many critics think that Act Two is simply a repeat of Act One. (second verse same as the first type thing) In other words, Vladimir and Estragon may forever be “waiting for Godot.” We are never given an answer to their situation. As an audience, we can only watch them do the same things, listen to them say the same things, and accept the fact that Godot may or may not come. Much like them, we are stuck in a world where our actions dictate our survival. We may search for an answer or a meaning to our existence, but we most likely will never find it. It’s like there can be no answers, Godot may or may not exist and may or may not arrive, we know no more about him than Vladimir and Estragon do. In this way, the play is structurally arranged in such a way as to make you believe that Godot will probably never come, and that you must accept the uncertainty of life.

The two main characters, Vladimir and Estragon, spend their days reliving their past trying to make sense of their existence, and even contemplate suicide as a form of escape. As characters, however, they are the prototypical absurdist figures who remain detached from the audience. They essentially lack identities and their vaudeville mannerisms, particularly when it comes to contemplating their suicides, seems more comic than tragic. This is perhaps best observed in the beginning scene of the play when they contemplate hanging themselves:

“

VLADIMIR: What do we do now?

ESTRAGON: Wait.

VLADIMIR: Yes, but while waiting.

ESTRAGON: What about hanging ourselves?

VLADIMIR: Hmm. It’d give us an erection.

ESTRAGON: (highly excited). An erection!

“

What follows is a discussion of who should hang themselves first. Vladimir suggests Estragon go first since he is lighter and therefore won’t break the bough and leave the other one alone and alive. The conversation continues:

“

ESTRAGON: (with effort). Gogo light- bough not break- Gogo dead. Didi heavy- bough break- Didi alone. Whereas-

VLADIMIR: I hadn’t thought of that.

ESTRAGON: If it hangs you it’ll hang anything.

VLADIMIR: But am I heavier than you?

ESTRAGON: So you tell me. I don’t know. There’s an even chance. Or nearly.

VLADIMIR: Well? What do we do?

ESTRAGON: Don’t let’s do anything. It’s safer.

VLADIMIR: Let’s wait and see what he says.

ESTRAGON: Who?

VLADIMIR: Godot.

ESTRAGON: Good idea.

“

So me and my absurdist companions press on with no particular goal in mind.

We just kind of ramble on like this as the miles melt away and somehow on this journey decide to go all the way to Joshua Tree and climb on the rock piles. The idea kind of just came up and never got vetoed. Like someone was like, ‘hey lets just go all the way to Joshua Tree’ and everyone was too lazy to say ‘no’ so we went. We start our descent into Lake Elsinore with a new sense of purpose. Lake Elsinore, tweaker town. What looks like a quaint little village turns into row after row of trailer homes when you come down the mountain. Lake Elsinore is actually a man-made lake from all the runoff water in the area. It is not fed by any streams or rivers and has no outlet. Basically it’s just a big piss lake.

Nate – “Man, that lake is so nasty, you can put your hand in it and you can only see it for like a few inches because it’s so dirty.”

Spray – “Gross.”

Nate – “Yeah, and it’s hot too! Like 85 degrees!”

Me – “We need fucking sustenance for this journey.”

Nate (laughing) – “Man, that word is funny, it sounds like the bible or something.”

Me (laughing) – ” The Lord he did cometh down from the Ortegas and spoke unto the people, ‘dude, we need sustenance!”

We swing past the Black Dragon martial arts studio and a psychic reader into the Circle-K for some supplies.

Circle-K supplies list 5000:

The woman ahead of us in line is purchasing a six-pack of Budweiser and bloody mary mix. The hideous toothless hag working behind the counter keeps talking about “more vodka” as part of the recipe she was explaining to the customer. I find that ghetto Circle-K employees usually know the best cooking recipes and stuff. I bet she could tell us how to cook up meth with her eyes closed. We buy our shit and walk outside.

Nate – “Hey Dude, that chick wanted to give you a rim-job.”

Me – “Cool.”

We head back out as the rain starts to fall again. I don’t know what the fuck but there was a bone in my Slim Jim. I find this really fucked up because I didn’t even think it was made of meat in the first place.

Nate – “Last time I was out there in J-tree I was creepin around all these rocks and throwing rocks in peoples’ fires. Nobody caught me too.”

Nate borrows my notebook so he can roll up a J while Spray starts talking about the state of affairs in the US.

Spray – ” Dude, America is like ‘corporate america’, like, ‘hey, come here and buy stuff’”

Nate finishes rolling it up and I make us all crack the windows so I don’t get hot-boxed.

Nate – “Dude, what did you study in college?”

Me – “History.”

Nate – “What kind of history?”

Me – “Well you don’t really focus a lot in undergrad, you do that with your masters and shit but I studied a lot of wars and the industrial revolution and postmodern approaches and shit like that.”

Nate – “I’ve been doing a lot of reading about WW2 on my own like. Not in school or anything, but it’s pretty cool. You studied martial arts too, huh?”

Me – “Yeah, for like 5 years.”

Nate – “What kind?”

Me – “Ninjitsu, it was a lot of fun.”

Nate – “Why don’t you just like be a history teacher or a martial arts instructor or go back to school?”

Spray – “Because maybe you can’t do just one thing for life and be happy.”

Nate – “Well that’s just because you only do comic books and that sucks!”

Spray – “I like comic books.”

We get off on Norco Drive to buy a map because none of us can remember exactly how to get to Joshua Tree and we can’t afford too many fuck ups. Spray keeps asking if ‘norco’ is some kind of drug, he seems to remember something about it. We send him into the gas station to pick one the map as Nate and I sit and slowly trip out over the Mexican music that seems to be coming from everywhere and nowhere at the same time. I start looking around and all of a sudden I’m completely pissed off about how people put crosses on the top of every god-damned hill. We cruise through some more freeways past green places that look like ‘middle earth’ and trailor park towns, through fields of windmills and cloud capped mountains until we start to get close to 29 Palms. Spray starts reminiscing about when he was out here doing NTC (that’s the Army’s National Training Center). He keeps blabbing on about this thing called the “brain cluster” and the time when this dust storm with a face on it like in The Scorpion King almost killed him during training.

Spray (while searching like crazy and driving at the same time) – “I refuse to accept, god, that I lost my chocolate Kit-Kat.”

Nate – “You mean, I refuse to accept, god, that I am a homosexual.”

We enter Joshua Tree just as the sun breaks through the clouds. Native Americans lived here 9330 years ago (no bullshit) before even bows and arrows were invented. I throw on Spray’s Dominos pizza work shirt to fight off the cold. The shirt stinks like two weeks worth of B.O. and crusty pizza drippings. As luck would have it I left my phone, camera, notebook, and sweatshirt in my truck thinking we were only going out to breakfast. But this is how ghetto adventures always start so fuck it all anyway. We find a cool looking peak that we all want to climb so we park and go for it. It takes three distinct route attempts before we finally reach the top. Nate and Spray finish off a joint as I climb to the very top of the thing just as it starts to rain again. On the way back down we leave a note in a crevice for somebody to find.

“

3 ghetto white kids

from orange county

conquered this piece

on 2-20-2005

SO EAT MY ASS YOU WHORES!

Me, Spray, Nate

“

We decided to chill out for 5 minutes and live in the moment a little before we headed back down. We stop for sandwiches just after dark on our way back to OC. I got a beef dip and jalapeno chips. Spray got cream of broccoli soup and chocolate cake and I buy Nate a meatball sub because he is totally out of money.

Traffic slows down to a crawl as the rain hammers down so we pull off the freeway into Casino Morongo. The parking lot is filled with pickup trucks, RVs, and big-rigs. Nate and I grab coffee as Spray gambles for big bucks. The place is filled with the scum of the earth losers. After complaining about how weak the coffee is I accidentally “shart” my pants. Just like in that fucking Polly movie what I thought was a fart turned out to be a squirt of shit. Fucking perfect! After squishing my way through glaze-eyed-grandmothers and lusty biker whores to the restroom I find that my pants were not stained at all (sooooo lucky!!). We finally fight our way back to Dana Point and just crash out. Another ghetto adventure successfully completed.

I spent the next couple of nights sleeping on couches and in garages and camping out (which is ultra-shitty because the rain has been relentless). I even got a motel room for one night down in San Clemente and got one of my first nights sleep on a bed since I’d been back in America. The “El Rancho Motel” treated me with all the comforts of trailor park living for the low low price of only 44 dollars (tax included) a night. I walked across the street to the liquor store and bought some red bulls and a 40 of Old English. Sat there on my bed next to stained walls and ashtrays (in the non-smoking room.. go figure) watching television and drinking malt liquor while listening to a heated argument through the walls that was taking place in one of the other rooms.

The next day I did my laundry in the Laundromat on Del Obispo Rd in Dana Point with a bunch of Mexicans that kept staring at me I think because I was white and wearing Elvis sunglasses. I was happy to see “punk’s not dead” carved into the handle of my dryer but this joy was soon demolished when a friend told me how that is actually totally fucked up.

“Dude, that’s kinda fucked up. Like, the people who say “punk’s not dead” are chaos punks and they never wash their clothes. So like for that to be at a Laundromat is kinda fucked up. My sister was a chaos punk and she spilled a chilito all over her bondage pants and didn’t wash them for like 2 months.”

O.k. , point taken. Feeling like there is truly nothing left for me in Orange County (as well as having used up all the couches and garages my friends could offer up) I head down to San Diego for some time with old friends. My buddy Kiwi puts me up on his girlfriends couch for one night, the next day I crash at Marcella and Marta’s new apartment on Bankers Hill, until finally and inevitably ending up on Noah’s floor the next night. Only 2 more days to kill before I get my new place but it feels sometimes like I’m not gonna make it. I woke up on the couch at Kiwi’s girlfriends place and the pillow had all these hairs on it. Time is running out. Time is running out fast as fuck.

Death… Heidegger’s view of reality does not provide for existence of an individual before birth or after death. According to his scheme, the man who recognizes this fact, freely accepts its inevitability, and seeks nothing beyond, is then free to choose his own existence. He is no longer bound by fear of death or imaginary retributive punishment after death. He is able to choose his actions, in so doing he is choosing his existence and ultimately his essence. It always seemed to me like Heidegger was more trying to convince himself of this rather than expound on the truths of this mode of thought. For Heidegger, man is the being that knows he is going to die. He dies not only at the end of life, but every day of it. Death is certain yet indefinite. Because it is inevitable it marks the contingency of life. Life is puked out between nothing and nothing. Death is its boundary and is its supreme possibility. To freely accept death and to live in its presence and to acknowledge that for it there is no substitute and into it one must go alone, is to escape from all illusions and to achieve genuine dignity and authentic existence.

My buddy Kiwi called me up to see if I wanted to go downtown to a place called “W”. Apparently this is an exclusive hotel bar that is on the roof of a one of those tall buildings that they have covered with sand and made look just like the beach. Noah went down to Tiajuana to DJ a 3 hour set with Mike at some club. Henry has the weekend off from school and wants me to go up to L.A. again to get raw. I really just didn’t feel like doing anything. So I ended up just working on the site and feeling hollow and cold for most of the evening. I had to call up USAA and get property insurance on the new place this afternoon. Sometimes I think that I am totally ghetto and yet at the same time I feel like a total rule-following sellout. I’m like a rich bum, a homeless man with a house, a autonomous and self-determined individual with no direction. So this installment on the site does not really end up with all the issues resolved and all the problems worked out. I started out trying to work out who I am and what I’m doing based on things that I’ve done and places I’ve been but I just got nowhere. I went on a ghetto rollercoaster ride and ended up right back in the fucking theme park, no wiser and no better off. This time things are totally left wide open for a reason. Who really fucking knows what the hell is gonna happen next. I guess that’s the fun of life. The freedom of personal choice and individualism within a postmodern context of no absolute truth. The problem with existentialism is that it leaves you without absolute foundations, encourages a separate / individual sense of self and gives too much power to our imagination and how we may choose to live. While this may be liberating, it unfortunately offers little guidance. I’m not as optimistic about the future as I once was. Sometimes it feels like I’ve already done everything there is to do in one way or another and everything from this point forward is just an imitation of the original act. I guess all I can say is stay tuned to see where I end up next because the only predictable thing about my life these days is its total unpredictability.

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