There was a fair bit of drinking last
night. The rooftop bar lead to the
downtown restaurant and then half the attendees were crowded around the hotel
bar, closing out a tab until the late hours of the night. Steeling myself to a relatively recent period
of abstinence I kept ordering soda water and lime at every venue. Averring a drink in the beginning of the evening
can be a bit of a challenge. Later in
the evening, as the barbiturate sedatives begin to pull those around you down
and they repeat things and order things and pay for things, it’s all rather
easy to stay detached.
I made it back to
my hotel room with nothing but a bladder full of Perrier to concern myself with
and, having finished my presentation earlier in the day, went off to bed
without too much to immediately concern me.
Up early I left Petrograd behind and relocated my mind’s reading to
Burgundy, where Collette was puttering about her family’s rustic house,
observing squirrels and snails. Her
“autobiography” pulled from various writings, compiled by Robert Phelps, was
something a friend gave me the last time I visited his home. I’m glad to leave the uncompromising word of
revolutionary commitment behind. She
shared the earth for much the same time as Lenin and then a bit longer. Her perception of World War I, writing from
Verdun among the wounded, is rather different from Vladimir who could cheer the
war, as an expedient.
By mid-morning I
was on the road with a colleague heading up towards Pasadena through the heart of
L.A. It’s not a ride I’ve done
before. We stopped at a pharmacy for a
bottle of Vitamin B, I’d wanted and later at a mall for an espresso. Newport Beach, Huntington Beach, I’ve known
of these places and have friends who hail from these places but have never
properly driven through them. I hadn’t
assumed, for example, that there would be a large, unfortunate oil refinery
standing astride the beach at “America’s Surf City,” as Huntington Beach is otherwise, and officially known. It strikes me that my understanding of Los Angles tremendous urban sprawl is all rather limited.
Driving along,
heading towards downtown, I can see the mountains and I know that Pasadena is
near the foot of those hills. And I can
see the newly minted downtown of Los Angeles.
I know we're heading to somewhere in the imaginary triangle of space that
forms from here, staring northward. But
we are lost. We are relying on mapping
applications, my buddy on Google and myself on Apple and we realize that,
despite the fact that we have as many bars of LTE connectivity as anyone would
ever presumably want, that our little blue dots are not updating themselves. Neither is the suggestion for where to
turn. This is a six-lane highway and
we’ll never make it over to the exit for the highway north. We’re heading to the coast all of a sudden,
cursing our phones, hypothesizing on why it is we don’t have proper connectivity
in the middle of the nation’s second largest city.
Pasadena is awfully
sunny. So is my host. It’s a pleasure to be here. People, let’s be honest, women, walk by and
one remembers the strange pull of Hollywood that seems to draw those cursed with
good looks above all else to this, (obviously not Pasadena itself, but L.A. in
general and Hollywood in particular) great market place of the fetching. Eating a quinoa salad, I wouldn’t be able to
find in Beijing, with a view out to the street, I’m not complaining.
Friday 02/02/18
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