Saturday, July 28, 2018

Into The Great Wide Open, Finale': The Bridge To Nirvana

It's time we put a bow on this stupid little travelogue. Again, all apologies to the tens of you who still read my incredibly infrequent stuff. Thanks for sticking with it though. Now, who knew I could get four posts worth of material out of an eleven day road trip? Certainly not me. Maybe I'm a little long-winded, I guess. Check out part one here, part two here, and part three here. Now that I've seen my old college roommate and seen how he's found satisfaction in life, caught up with some long-time friends, and experienced the beauty and the excesses of what California had to offer, all while getting laid emotionally low, it's time to wrap it up. In this installment, I hit up a stupid landmark from a twisted movie I saw as a kid, make my way into the Valley of the Sun to spend a couple days with my little "brother" and meet a new little buddy, end the season with some bad golf, and maybe figure out the key to life on the drive home. Let''s rock!

I didn't set an alarm the next day, and I finally found something that overpowered my Golf Professional Circadian Rhythm: three gin mules the night before. After a week and a half of managing to not sleep past 7:00 AM, regardless of whether I set an alarm or not, sleeping in was a welcome change. I rolled out of bed at 9:30 and packed up my shit. It was time to hit the road again. Thankfully, I'd slept past rush hour. Also, I think subconsciously, something in me didn't want to leave California. Outside of a protein shake, I skipped breakfast, checked out of my swanky hotel and made my way to a thinning I-10 freeway. I had one more stop on this spastic odyssey, a couple days with my "Little Brother" Pete and his little family in Phoenix, AZ.

Pete isn't really my brother, he's my first cousin, but growing up, we were as close as two guys that lived a hundred miles apart could be. Once a summer, I'd blow out of Price and spend some time with his family up in Salt Lick. Oddly enough, those trips always seemed to take place whenever Pete's dad needed a major project done in their yard. Funny how that works out. Those Summer days digging trenches in the yard, playing baseball and committing general mischief forged a hell of a bond. There still isn't a day that goes by that we don't at the very least fire off a "Wazzup" text to each other or argue about the Bears or Yankees. He's still the closest thing I've ever had to a brother, and now he lives five hundred miles away, so any chance I get to spend any time with him at all, I gotta take it.

There's things you wouldn't understand,
things you couldn't understand,
things you shouldn't understand.
But getting there is half the fun. After a stop for gas and lunch in Palm Springs, I saw a giant billboard. "The World''s Largest Dinosaurs in Cabazon!" OH SHIT! It's the statues from Pee-Wee's Big Adventure! Whoa! There they were, off in the distance, aaaaaannnnd, not nearly as large as they were in the movie. But still, you gotta check out the roadside attraction when you can, right? I wrestled Giselle off the freeway and pulled into the parking lot. There was a giant "Closed for Renovation" sign hanging from the gate. They needed to remodel the dinosaurs? They also wanted $13.00 just to walk in the door. Just as well, at least I wouldn't have to dodge Big Andy. Besides, you wouldn't want to get mixed up with a guy like me. I'm a loner. A rebel. Wait, what? Oh yeah, road trip. Anyway, I snapped a photo from a low angle to capture their slightly underwhelming majesty and hammered the gas pedal.

I contemplated taking a detour a little south to the Salton Sea, because clearly I hadn't seen enough dead things on this trip. Or north to see Huell Howser's crazy house on top of a Volcano in Twenty-Nine Palms, or even have a vision quest in Joshua Tree, but really at this point in the trip, I no longer really had no concept of time or distance. It's weird how two weeks with little-to-no responsibility can warp any sense of schedule, but I'd told Pete I'd be getting to his hood around 4-ish. He's a family man, and on a pretty strict, regimented schedule. It wasn't on me to disturb that. And really, a part of this trip was to see how the other half lived, so to speak. So those other stops on the road, well, I'm going to have to hit them up next time. But that's the nice thing about having a little bit of that freedom. I'll always have another chance.

The Grand Canyon State
welcomes you!
The vastness of the Mojave Desert spread out before me as I tried to make up time wasted. Nothing but straight highway all the way to the horizon. If you lose it out here, you're in a world of hurt. Thank god the car was fairly new and it was November. Driving across that stretch of desert whether it be on the 15 as you would heading from Vegas to LA, or where I was on the 10 from LA to Phoenix, you just end up happy you made it with no problems. I'm pretty sure a lot of people have just vanished on this stretch of highway.

I crossed the state line early in the afternoon and stopped at a rest area in Ehrenberg, AZ to stretch my legs. The desert panorama that lay before me was quite impressive. Arizona really is quite beautiful with a a lot of vistas that reminded me of the San Rafael Swell not far from where I grew up. The colors and the cacti and buttes had me in rapt attention until out of the corner of my eye, I saw a sign posted just a few feet away "Rattlesnake dens nearby, exercise caution." Well, that's as good a sign as any to get me back on the road. Giselle may have laid a patch of rubber in the parking lot as I punched it back down the highway. Eff snakes!

Milk Drunk vs. Drunk Drunk (WHO YA GOT!?)
I pulled up to Pete's house in Phoenix around 4:30 and nobody was home yet so I swung by the grocery and liquor store to pick up some supplies. I got back to find Pete opening a box with a cooler in it. "You're just in time dude," he said, "Blue Apron just showed up. Lets go change the munchkin and get dinner on." Literally my first "how do you do" to my brand spankin' new nephew, Niko The Greeko was wiping his little ass. And really, I wouldn't have it any other way. Pete and I did a faithful re-creation of that episode of "Saved By The Bell" where Zack and Slater had to change Kelly's little brother, with the "awww god" and everything. He might've been the happiest baby I'd ever seen though. We put him on the floor and watched him play with his dog, Lia the Labradoodle. She'd come a long way from her days as a puppy, and her patience with the little drool machine was both awesome and pretty beautiful in its own right.

 With everybody freshened up, I retreated to the kitchen to prep some dinner. I'd never cooked anything from one of those meal-delivery things, but after constructing a passable version of pozole, I can certainly understand their appeal. It almost made it too easy. The ingredients were quality and they actually had some peppers with some heat to them. Pete's bride Rachel made it home from work and we all sat around the table. They even let me feed the kid. And holy Moses, that little dude will hoover up anything you put in front of him! Gotta love a kid who isn't a fussy eater. Of course, I wasn't either, and look what happened to me. Anyway, we put the kid down to bed, had a couple glasses of whiskey and I called it an early night.

The next day was a nice little whirlwind of some yard work in the morning (some things never change), and a killer lunch at a nearby Mexican joint where I got my palate blown sky-high by an Adovada burrito and my liver utterly destroyed on a giant margarita. We trucked our drunk asses back to the house. Rachel left for a haircut, and Pete and I calmed down little Niko and got him ready for his afternoon nap by introducing him to some of the watershed moments of our childhood, old pro wrasslin' promo videos from an unbelievably high on coke Macho Man Randy Savage and an equally beaked-up Ultimate Warrior. What can I say, little kids will surprise you with what catches their attention!

Later that evening, Pete and I barbecued some burgers and dogs, and a couple of their friends came over for dinner and drinks. It was nice to meet some new folks. They'd worked college jobs for a long time and as y'all well know, I've kind of been around that world for a long time. So at least there was plenty to talk about. After awhile, the baby monitor flickered to life, the kid was having a tough time settling in the crib for the night. So I drunkenly volunteered to try and calm him down. "Be my guest, and good luck," Rachel waved me into the room. Crying babies tend to freak me out a little bit. Poor little kids can't communicate what is wrong, you have to guess and it usually ends up being a case of throwing a bunch of shit against a wall to see what sticks. But I was bound and determined to get him to sleep. I picked him up and rocked him a little bit, his diaper wasn't mushy, but that didn't stop him from howling in my ear. I tried to calm him down to no avail. Finally I put him back in the crib and just kinda rubbed his belly while singing "Ball and Chain" by Social Distortion, a Capella, lullaby-style. He just kinda giggled a little bit, turned his head and passed out. I'm still convinced he was just fucking with me.

One of the few I managed to pipe that day
For my last full day on this trip, Pete and I played golf at a spectacular course called Papago Park. Now, I consider it a great professional and personal failure that virtually every one of my non-golf-world friends are pretty terrible at the game. I really need to do a better job as a teacher and a friend in that regard. Pete, like me, was primarily a baseball player for the bulk of his life, and it shows. The kid handles a club like it's an axe, but he's got potential. He also has an advantage in that every time I upgrade my gear, he gets my hand-me-downs. At least I know they're going to a good home that way. Now, I hadn't picked up a club in a little over a week and it showed as I struggled to a 78. That track was long and narrow and my hungover ass had no pop left in the bat. But it was great to get out with the kid, and he hit the new driver I gave him better than any I'd seen him hit before. All in all, a great capper to this visit with my brother, despite the shitty scores we posted.

I got up pretty early the next day, I was going to try to make it all the way back to Salt Lick by nightfall. Got one more chance to hang out and feed my little nephew. I found that the "airplane" method was, tried and true as it is, the single most effective way of getting mushed-up apples and carrots ferried from the bowl to his mouth. I was genuinely envious of him as at least that looked like it had some flavor. My daily breakfast of Greek yogurt, or as we call it, "yogurt," and a protein shake was kind of starting to get a little stale. The kid just stared at me with a "what's with you old man?" look on his face, and believe me, I get it. This old, crazy ogre blew into town in his red death-mobile, and shook up his highly structured 7-month-old world for three days, leaving goofy punk rock songs and about a million razzberries to the belly in his wake. And I couldn't wait to do it again, but sadly, real life back home beckoned and once again, I had to take to the highway.

Unfortunately, the Waze app on my phone decided to send me on the "road-rage" route out of town. It sent me down surface streets, nowhere near a freeway, resulting in it taking roughly 90 minutes to finally hit city limits, but soon I was crossing the desert on a two-lane highway through Wickenburg, Wikiup and I probably passed through Wikipedia as well. I soon made my way up to Highway 93, streaking toward Boulder City. I needed to see for myself the greatest public works project in our country's history, Hoover Dam.

The 93 soon came into view of the Colorado River, so I knew I had to have been getting close. The scenery was spectacular, with an almost bottomless canyon to the left of the highway and some crazy cliffs on the right. I passed a sign, "Hoover Dam and Lake Mead Recreational Area 1 mile" I figured, I'd better stop soon. As I neared the turnoff, I noticed that there were hundreds of people lining the right side of the road, probably looking at the dam. Sadly I couldn't see it from the road and there was nowhere to pull over, so I just kept going until the turnoff to the dam itself. I drove down a little windy road and over the top of the dam to an overlook. Unfortunately, it was getting a little late in the day for a damn dam tour, but I had to stop and admire that incredible engineering marvel.

The metaphor I've been looking for
It was then that I looked up and saw where all of those people that I drove past were standing. They were along the top of the O'Callaghan-Tillman Bridge. As impressed as I was with the structure of the dam, the bridge was unlike anything I'd ever seen before, just completely massive and artificial, yet somehow looked like it'd been there forever. It was then that I realized the lesson I'd been searching for since I departed on this whole stupid odyssey. Everything we experience in life is your bridge. Just like when I was in Big Sur and I drove across that massive span and didn't even realize I was on the damn thing. I'd taken so much in life for granted. Always looking dead ahead, rarely stopping to appreciate the moments I was in, and the beauty that surrounded me. I always looked at the things that happened to me over the years with a certain detachment, reveling in the story without living in the experience itself. I think about where that had gotten me and how empty I often felt because of it. I'd look back on things and think, "wow, that really happened" and never really realized the gravity or the flat-out, batshit-crazy nature of those experiences while in the moment itself. That's no good way to go through life. We need to appreciate all of it, the good and the bad while it's happening.

It's like I said in the last entry, absolutely nothing is forever. Everything ends. It's the First Noble Truth of Buddhism, "that to live is to suffer." Suffering is inevitable for all of us as long as we labor under the delusion that things can be permanent. When in fact, nothing is permanent. We''re all composed of a series of systems. Our culture, our relationships, our physical bodies, they're all systems and all systems have a few things in common. They all begin, grow, flourish, decay and die. Everything. Without exception. you can be a good Christian, a good Jew, a good Muslim, a good Mormon or Scientologist. You can make all the right moves and do all the right things. But your dog is still gonna die. your parents are still gonna die You're gonna fuck up your marriage. Your boyfriend or girlfriend is still gonna cheat on you. Your kids are gonna grow up and not call you as much. And you can, y'know, sit in your nice house and not sleep for three days and cry to the cats and jack off until you're raw. Or you can buck up, put on your boots and work towards achieving Zen.

Zen is when abandon the concept of the past and the future and embrace only the moment. If you can free yourself from the events of the past, which is dead, and your expectations of the future, which is fantasy and embrace only the moment in which you are alive by freeing yourself from the tyranny of all of those wants that you have, then, dammit, can you finally have a taste of that state of Zen. But of course, by its very nature, it won't last.

Final Stats, but some things are immeasurable
Sadly that trip couldn't last forever. I pulled Giselle into my driveway around 9:30 that night and after getting all my bags out of her, I closed the trunk and just leaned against the bumper for a minute, looking up at the starry sky and how those stars looked the same whether I was in Monterey, SLO, Los Angeles (not really, wayyyyy too much light pollution but stay with me here), the Arizona desert or even in my driveway. In the big scheme of the universe, we're not even a blip. But in our own lives, and for the people around us, well, we're all we've got. We need to take care of each other and make each other's lives the best blip we can.

Thanks for sharing this dumb odyssey with me. Now I can finally write about something else! More material coming soon! I swear!

Thursday, June 28, 2018

Into The Great Wide Open Part Three: The Saint of Los Angeles

Apologize for the delay, had to work out a few things in my mind on how to approach things here, then got busy! Moving on! Check out part one of this stupid one-man odyssey right here and part two right here! In this installment, I leave the scenic stretches and California kitsch of the central coast and trade it for the ultimate concrete jungle. Along the way, I get to reconnect with some old friends that I hadn't seen in over a decade, get irrationally bummed out from a message from back home, get tailored, visit every Real Rock n' Rolla's spiritual home and start to put it all together while meditating on a beach. Let's get back on the road...

The alignment on that car had to have been pretty great
After a quick stop back in San Luis Obispo at the Firestone Grill for one of their famous Tri-Tip sandwiches, I was back on Highway 1 heading south. The road weaves in and out of its ocean view and I made one more stop in Pismo Beach, just to see what Bugs Bunny was making such a fuss about. It was kinda nice, well worth taking that right turn in Albuquerque. I blasted through Santa Maria and found myself nearing Lompoc, where Mia, O'Conner and the fellas once sprung Toretto by wrecking his prison bus and somehow didn't kill everybody aboard. There were no prison buses on the road, but traffic was starting to build, and by the time I hit Santa Barbara, it was stop-and-go time. For the next two hours I probably averaged about five miles an hour as we crawled along the 101 through Ventura. It kinda blows my mind that the beautiful vistas of the chaparral that I was "forced" to look at (along with about ten thousand tail lights) pretty much went up in smoke last Winter. Eventually, I got through whatever it was that was throttling down traffic to two lanes, split from the 1 and managed to hit the Valley just as it was getting dusky and the famous LA rush hour traffic was starting to build up. The Waze app is a godsend in places like this, and even though game 6 of the World Series was going on just adjacent to my route, I was able to find my hotel downtown without a crazy amount of trouble.

My tongue is LAVA!
After stowing my gear and a quick freshening up, I took a walk to find some dinner, stopping off for some tacos at a little place down the street. It was Halloween night and pretty busy, but there was an open seat at the bar in the rear of the place and I struck up a conversation with the bartender while he was pouring. He'd come to LA from the midwest to try and get into the film business and figured out he had it a lot easier slinging drinks and living in an apartment the size of a closet downtown. NOT STEREOTYPICAL WHATSOEVER. Still, there's something to be said about actually taking the leap when you've got nothing to lose. Now, I can't eat quite what I used to these days, so I settled on just three small tacos, (carnitas, chicken and shrimp) as well as one of the better margaritas I've had in quite some time. The carnitas and chicken were both outstanding, the shrimp had to have been one of the top-ten hottest things I've ever eaten. Just blew my already-fried palate all to hell. I'm glad I saved it for last. Just as the Dodgers were putting the finishing touches on forcing a game 7 in the World Series, I paid for my meal and walked back to the hotel. The streets were a lot more crowded both with people in costumes heading to the bars for a wild night and ecstatic local Dodger fans, with visions of a possible championship dancing in their eyes.

We're practically the same guy.
The margaritas had my brain in a fog and as my head hit the pillow just after midnight, a messenger alert snapped me back to reality. Hey! It's the mysterious girl from back home! She got my "just thinkin' about you" message! I opened the app aaaaand her blunt response made it abundantly clear that whatever feelings I had for her, weren't exactly reciprocated. Not exactly what I wanted to read on my first night in The City of Angels, or ever really. But thinking about it, shit, it's totally okay. We were in completely different places in our lives. And relationships are definitely a two-way street. I was an idiot for thinking I could rekindle something that probably wasn't really there from twenty years ago. Not the first time I've made that kind of mistake and it probably won't be the last. God knows, I'm terrible at catching a hint. But hell yeah, it hurt. But just like everybody's favorite animated doormat Butters once said on the legendary "Raisins" episode of South Park, "but at the same time I'm really happy that something could make me feel that sad. It's like, it makes me feel alive, you know? It makes me feel human. And the only way I could feel this sad now is if I felt somethin' really good before. So I have to take the bad with the good, so I guess what I'm feelin' is like a, beautiful sadness. I guess that sounds stupid." Still, at the time, it felt like the many highs of the past few days had just been mashed with a pair of size fifteen waffle-stompers. I hammered down a hot shot of NyQuil and I'm not sure how long it took to fall asleep, but it was a while.
Wish we had something like this here in Salt Lick.


It was a fairly restless night, but I rolled out of bed bright and early to meet an old college friend for breakfast, Jess. You might remember her from a couple cameos in some of my old Dorm Days stories, specifically when she fell asleep hiding in my closet from campus security during our huge dorm party, and when she totally brightened up my day during one of the shittiest weeks I had during that era. Good friends like her are hard to come by in this world. She suggested we meet up at the Grand Central Market, one of those big food markets that only seem to exist on Travel Network TV shows. Thankfully, the market was only about a twenty-minute walk from my hotel. In LA, driving doesn't cost a lot, PARKING costs a lot. Actually, with the cost of gas these days, driving costs a lot too.



Don't blame me. The rat peed there.
Now, there's a lot to be said for living in a clean, almost sterile city like Salt Lick, but this was an enjoyable stroll to me for a few reasons. First, people actually seemed interested in where they were going and were MOVING. And even if you bumped into somebody accidentally, they didn't give you the side-eye, they just kept on. I actually kind of liked that anonymity. Also, as gross as it sounds, there's something oddly comforting about that familiar scent of urine and pigeon shit in the air. That felt like a city that's lived in. It doesn't pressure you to conform to a certain way of living. You can do what you want, live your life the way you want to as long as it doesn't hurt anybody else, and nobody gives a rat's ass, not even the rats. That being said, it'd be nice if it was a little cheaper though, but I still dig it. Those high prices, and the fact that your house may either burn down in a brush fire or shake itself apart in the event of an earthquake are all a small price to pay for the luxury of 70 degrees and perfect every single day with a beach nearby.


After hanging around the ever-growing line at the counter of the tastefully named breakfast sandwich booth called Eggslut for about twenty minutes, from behind me I just heard a loud, "NICKAS!" and a big hug. It'd been about ten years since I'd seen her but Jess was a vision as always! I'll tell y'all what, if we have any chance whatsoever at cleaning up the literal mess this country has made of itself in terms of litter and pollution, Jess is going to be at the forefront of the solutions. She works for a waste management NPO in Southern California and was one of the main proponents of their recent plastic grocery bag bans, as well as several other major sustainable trash management initiatives. She knows more about garbage than anyone I know, and that's a good thing. She's going to have a positive impact on this earth. It was great to catch up with her, even if for just a little while as we reminisced about the Dorm Days and everything that's happened since then. After a dynamite sausage sandwich for breakfast and about eight cups of coffee, I walked her to her car and said goodbye. As she pulled away into traffic, I remembered one of the dumb goals of this trip that I had in mind when I left Salt Lick, I was going to buy a suit.



I mentioned in the last chapter of this travelogue that one of my favorite podcasts, The After Disaster, was based in Southern California. A couple months before this, they'd mentioned on one of their shows that two of them had recently purchased tailored suits from a small tailor called Al Weiss. They'd mentioned that they were so good, they practically sized you up as you walked in the door, asked you what you were interested in, and had you outfitted literally ten minutes later with something that fit perfectly, and for not a whole lot of dough. I punched in the coordinates on my phone and found that it was located only about fifteen blocks away, so I continued my march through the streets toward the fashion district. I almost walked right past it, it was so small. I walked in and it looked like it was chock-full of stuff that "fell off the back of the truck." A dude named Roman walked over and just like they said on the show, basically sized me up on everything besides neck-size, grabbed a couple things off the shelf and told me to try them on. Holy shit! This stuff looked great! I just needed the pant legs shortened by an inch. "No problem," the guy said, "take it over to Freddy's next door and they'll tailor it for you. I was in and out of Freddy's in about ten minutes and only out about five bucks for the alterations. I stopped back into Al Weiss and bought three more shirts. All told, I was out all of $250 for an Italian suit and four shirts. Insane. I then had another pleasurable walk for about fifteen blocks packing my garment bag back to my hotel. Nobody gave me a second look. Anonymity is awesome and I was already starting to feel a little bit better. Like it was time to turn a corner.
38 Minutes! It's like I run in slow motion or something, still,
it's a pretty nice view! 

After a killer workout in the surprisingly swanky hotel gym in which I set (at the time) a treadmill 5K personal best (gotta love interval training at sea level!), I met up with my television writer buddy MJ and his wife Alexia for dinner and drinks at a brewpub in Burbank. I coached MJ for a season of high school golf at Carbon High during my freshman year of college and I'd worked with his mother for quite a few years when I was first breaking into the golf business. We spent a couple hours catching up and commiserating on the depressing state of our hometown, politics and the joys of legal weed. All the while on the giant TV screen in the bar, the Dodgers were getting thoroughly destroyed in Game 7 of the series by the Astros. We seemed to be the only ones yukking it up in there, as the rest of the crowd in the bar made the place resemble a funeral parlor. Even though I can't stand the Dodgers, I was almost secretly hoping they'd pull it off (don't tell my Giant fan Dad), so I'd have the once in a lifetime opportunity to take part in a good, old fashioned sports riot! Instead, the ride back to the hotel was pretty uneventful. Out of the window of the high-rise, I heard a few sirens and some shouting, but I chalked that up to just a typical Wednesday night in downtown Los Angeles. After the shit night I had before, I slept like a baby.



Thursday, I made my way back north a bit to Ventura County. One of my comedic heroes and radio legend, Phil Hendrie, often waxed poetic about his beloved El Pacifico and the calming shores of Silver Strand beach. It wasn't too difficult to find, the weather was a beautiful 60 degrees and to my surprise, there was all of about four people on the mile wide stretch of beach. I shouldn't have been surprised, it was a Thursday at noon, in November. What kind of crazy asshole would be at the beach right now? Well, that guy and a tourist dipshit like myelf. I plopped my duffel down, laid out a couple towels and waded out into the water. Yep, it was November, JUMPIN' JEEZUS THAT'S COLD! That was okay though, I practically had the beach to myself. 

Working on the bronze, thinking about
the universe and shit.


I pulled into the big dude equivalent of a lotus position on my towel and zoned out for a minute. Now, normally I have a difficult time shutting my brain off, but something about the gentle waves rolling in and crashing ashore, the occasional seagull squeak, the sand shifting under my tucchus made all of the whirlwind of the road, the heartache from back home, the stresses about work fall away like the sand getting pulled back into the water. I learned a lot from the ocean that day. See, those waves roll in, and roll out. They crash on the beach and move back out again. And there's a rhythm to it. Over and over again. Sometimes they roll in long, and sometimes short. Sometimes the time of day rolls them further up the beach, and at certain times of day, the beach gets bigger. But they crash, over and over and over again. Those waves hit that beach eons before I got there and they'll hit that beach long after I'm gone. No outside forces can change that. Over and over again, the waves crash. I'll leave an imprint of my ass in the sand, and by tomorrow it'll be gone. The universe doesn't care, it just does what it does. The only things we can control are what we do. The way we treat others, the way we treat the planet, the way we feel about ourselves, no other person should have the power to change that about you. They can only be a catalyst, a spark, the rest is entirely up to you. We all have that choice to make.


The Strand Jetty
It's like the second noble truth of Buddhism. "Nothing is forever. Everything ends. Except the waves of the ocean. "To live, is to suffer." Suffering is inevitable for all human beings as long as they labor under the delusion that things can be permanent. When in fact, nothing is permanent. Your life is composed of a series of systems. Your culture, your relationships, your physical body, they're all systems and all systems have a few things in common. They all begin, grow, flourish, decay, and die. Everything without exception. You can be a good Christian, a good Jew, a good Muslim, a good Scientologist, make all the right moves, and do all the right things. But your dog is still gonna die, your parents are still gonna die. You're gonna fuck up your marriage. Your girlfriend is still gonna cheat on you. Your kids are gonna grow up and not call you as much. And you can, sit in your nice house and not sleep for three days and cry to the cats and jack off until your dick hurts. Or you can man up, put on your boots and work towards achieving zen. Zen is when you abandon the concept of the past and the future and embrace only the moment. If you can free yourself from the events of the past, which is dead, and your expectations of the future, which is fantasy, and embrace only the moment in which you are alive by freeing yourself from the tyranny of all of those wants that you have, then you can achieve a state of zen consciousness which leads to a state of bliss. 
The golden arcs!


I snapped out of it and looked at my watch. I'd been literally staring at those waves for two and a half hours. I packed up my stuff, snagged a t-shirt at a local surf shop, and hammered down a gyro at a Greek joint adjacent to the beach. After topping off Giselle's fuel tank, I cruised back down the 101 towards the city and my hotel. Fortunately, Waze was acting kind of weird again and had me running through neighborhoods again, but it was fortuitous, and I almost crashed the car when suddenly I drove by a very famous, but very out of place movie landmark, McDowell's from Coming To America! Unfortunately, I'd missed the pop-up restaurant by a couple days, and an apparent appearance by JACKSON HEIGHTS' VERY OWN MR. RANDY WATSON, but still, just the fact that somebody did that to their restaurant was fucking funny and well worth the picture! Somebody get my formerly fat ass a Big Mick!



That night, I ventured into West Hollywood for a stop at the SINGLE GREATEST RECORD STORE IN THE HISTORY OF GODDAMN MANKIND and picked up some vinyl and shopped around a bit. Seriously, if it exists, they probably have a copy of it. After losing myself in there for a couple hours, I drove west down the world famous Sunset Strip to the world famous Rainbow Bar and Grill. I make a pilgrimage to that place every single time I'm in Southern California. There isn't rocker throughout history that hasn't thrown on a massive drunk in that place, and you can almost feel the ghosts echo through the walls. Their food is excellent too, and I went there on this trip for a couple reasons. My friend Susie walked in and sat down in the booth across from me. I hadn't seen her in almost sixteen years and like so many people I know, had somehow managed not to age as time wore on. It was great to see her doing well, she was dating one of my best friends throughout high school, so we'd hang at her house quite often back in the day. Nowadays, she was a doctor for the local department of corrections and had some wild stories to tell. Nothing I care to repeat here, but she's SEEN SOME SHIT! Stuff the makes the "Tossed Salad Man" seem like a walk in the park. But she's weathered through it with a sense of humor, and had also recently started a family. "Having kids changes everything" she said, "it's something I never thought I'd do, but it's been the most rewarding thing ever." I'm sure it really puts things in perspective, especially after dealing with the absolute dregs of society on a daily basis. "Keep that kid outta County!" I quipped. 


I also had to hit up the 'Bow to pay my respects to the late, great Lemmy Kilmister, the mastermind of heavy metal stalwarts Motorhead. I always thought that the only things that would survive our impending doom on the planet would be Keith Richards, cockroaches and Lemmy, but unfortunately seventy years of the hardest living imaginable finally did him in. I was at one of the last shows Motorhead played, here in Salt Lick, when after three songs, he walked off the stage in obviously rough shape. Probably one of the more traumatic concert experiences I've ever had. I literally thought I'd seen the man die onstage that night. His health finally gave out a few months later, and death finally came for the unkillable. 



After the epiphany I'd had earlier in the day on the beach, viewing his Memorial at the Rainbow seemed especially poignant. There weren't too many people over the years that lived "in the moment" as ferociously as Lemmy. That dude attacked life like it was something to be devoured. He toured the world blowing out eardrums, did all the drugs, drank all the booze, bed down with women worldwide and he did it every goddamn day of his life. If he wanted to do something, he made it happen. I think there's something we can all learn from that. Maybe not quite to the destructive ends he went to health-wise, but I think after we all handle our responsibilities, we owe it to ourselves to seek out and experience joy. Whatever that may be. I was never again going to let indecision and fear cloud the direction my life would take. I'm going to tackle life like a linebacker smashing a wide receiver going over the middle. It was time to make some changes, but I had one more lesson to learn on the road before I'd return to life back home...

Coming up soon -  Part Four: The Bridge to Nirvana

"I was born the King of Fools
At any other game I never lose.
But when it comes around to
Love that's when I realize
I was born the king of fools."




Wednesday, June 13, 2018

Why I Do What I Do (Riding a different kind of white horse)

Okay, I know what you're thinking. "What the hell man! You promised us an insanely personal story about the whole lot of good and that personally crushing thing that happened to you in Los Angeles during that stupid trip you took last fall! Why are you leaving us hanging? What an asshole!" To which I am going to reply, "Hey, it's been a busy year." I'm actually almost done with that story and hope to have it up in a few days. But something happened to me today, and it hit some weird spot in my brain and I just had to reflect on it a little bit. Because it cuts to the absolute core of who I am, what I do and why I do it. So for you guys, and the shockingly strange amount of readers I have from Eastern Europe and behind the Iron Curtain, here's your chance to get inside my head for a second. I'll finish that travelogue soon, and maybe dust off The Dorm Days later this year. 

Not enough tacklin' fuel.
Anyway, on to the meat of this blog entry. Growing up I was a total Mama’s Boy. Not Waterboy bad, but my momma and I were pretty close. Like it should be, I guess. When I was a little kid, my dad owned a trucking company and worked from 6 AM to 8 PM every day, so he wasn’t around too much. She drove me to various sports practices daily, served as president of my Little League and Babe Ruth leagues, helped me with my homework and did all this while holding down a full time job, and attended college! Total Superwoman growing up, a strong, take-no-bullshit kind of lady. Eventually my dad sold the company, and took another job giving him a little bit more time to be around, but I was always closer to my mother.  


What a bunch of reprobates.
My dad and I butted heads constantly. It seemed like I could never do anything good enough for the guy. My grades were never good enough. I didn’t work hard enough in the yard. Hell, I think I was the only “coach’s kid” in all of youth baseball that didn’t have an easy ride. I’d hit a home run to the opposite field and as I’d be rounding first, all I’d hear is “You were a little late getting around on that one.” One of the reasons I got into golf in the first place was that it was something he’d never done before so he couldn’t criticize me about it. To be honest with you there was a period there where I thought the dude was a total asshole. We just didn’t get along, even threw down a couple of times. Believe me, I'm not proud of this, and I'm glad we're good now. Get along with your parents kids, you'll thank me later.

About a month and a half before high school graduation, my folks split up. I never did see it coming, but at the same time, I wasn't around home very often back then. I pretty much lived over at my buddy Wischer's place back then and the local golf course. In a baseball parlance, I was just "playing out the string" until graduation when I would maybe force myself to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. A wiser person than I (not exactly distinguished company, that's probably 95% of the world) once said "whatever you take for granted, you lose" and you could definitely say that at the time, I took my family for granted. And when it blew up, mentally it threw me into a tailspin. I pretended to hold it together for my Dad and little sister, but even they had to have known I was pretty jacked-up. Sure, the circumstances kind of forced my Dad and I to get along for the first time pretty much ever, but I was still lost, spending what time I wasn't in class or at work crawling into a bottle of Jack Daniels that an older buddy would pick up for me once a week. 

There used to be a lot more weeds to the right.
One day though, the following summer I was out by myself playing golf at good ol' Carbon Country Club. As was typical at the time I was thinking about what a mess I was and probably feeling sorry for myself. It was late in the day, right around dusk, and the course down home seemed completely deserted. I striped my tee shot down  the 18th fairway and walked to my ball. When I reached it, I had a good look around and something weird happened. I noticed the grass was the most beautiful tint of jade that I'd ever seen. The sand in the trap seemed pearl white, even though it was the same shitty sand we'd always had. The clouds in the sky looked to be on fire as the little remaining light cast what seemed to be the air around me in the most surreal shade of blue with streaks of warm orange light almost illuminating a path towards nirvana. The scene gave me pause, and then for the first time a sense of total calmness came over me as all the chaos and strife in my life seemingly lifted away. It was almost like something else was there standing next to me letting me know that everything was going to be all right. Then I stepped up to my ball, and hosel-rocketed it straight into the weeds. But you know what, I didn't care, because I was in a good state of mind. Things were going to be all right.

A monster is chained in all our hearts, waiting to be set free by obsession
Now, I'm not particularly religious. I grew up that way, hell, I was even an altar-boy at my church. I grew out of it and let's just say it's probably not in the cards for me to head down that path again. Nowadays I dabble a little bit in the Tao, and meditation, but that's more for personal enlightenment. I fucking hate rules. But I felt something that day, and I've been chasing it ever since. I competed at a fairly high level in the game for years, and I thought the charge of being in contention in a tournament might've been that feeling. But it's a whole other ballgame entirely. What I've been chasing is that sense of calmness that I can only describe as being one with the vibrations of the universe. I don't mean to come off sounding like a two-bit Rust Cohle but golf happens to be my particular tool for finding that greater sense of being. For the rest of you, it might be (and probably is) something else entirely and I can't tell you what that might be, but I encourage all of you that might be reading this to try and find it. You'll know it when you do. It's better than drugs. It's better than booze. And you'll be chasing it like a junkie taking the spike until you find it again. Hopefully what it is for you, isn't actually heroin. That shit kills people.

Anyway, today, I threw some new irons in the bag, gave them a good shakedown on the range, and blasted through eighteen holes in about two and a half hours, firing the best round I've shot all season. Afterward, I taught my golf for women class (beginning golf session 1 starts in just a month, sign up!). Tonight they learned a very difficult shot, and at the end they all had hit a bunch of shots they could be proud of. Professionally, nothing satisfies me more. Once class wrapped up, I sprinted back out for nine more holes. I work mostly evenings these days, so rarely do I get some dusk golf in, and this is my favorite time of the year to do it. I didn't hit the ball as well as I did earlier today, but that's okay. The great thing about the game is you can still have a great time, even if things are struggling. 

These days I struggle finding a balance between work and life. For the first time ever, I feel like I have my health, and mentally I'm in a pretty good place, but we didn't get much of a break this Winter and it seems like we've been grinding pretty hard since January. I'm down to one day a week off, and I'm filling what free time I've got with lessons. I enjoy being busy, but it's left a bit of a lack of time for other things in life, from relationships, to creative pursuits, to hell, even just keeping up with my yard! My work-life balance is way outta whack, but I guess it's what I signed up for all those years ago when I got into this crazy business in the first place. 

I didn't have a camera all those years ago.
Today, I did, and this still isn't as brilliant as it looked in real life.
I got to the last hole, as the sun was hanging low and found myself with an approach shot out of some heavy rough after shoving my second shot about thirty yards right of the fairway. I pulled the club out of my bag, took a couple practice swings and just before I took a stance, I took a good look around. And for just a second, that sense of balance and calm and brilliant color washed over me like a gentle flood. The only sound I could hear was a couple sprinklers in the distance as I drew my wedge back and fired a smooth dart to about five feet from the pin. The smile and daze I was in didn't leave my face as I walked up to the ball, hearing an imaginary gallery going crazy as I approached the green. I lined up my putt and slid in my eighth birdie in twenty seven holes. Pure bliss, until I remembered that I had taken a cart and left it at the spot from where I hit my approach 120 yards back up the hole. Sometimes getting caught up in the moment can make you feel like an idiot.