"...and the Devil is a Railroad Car."

I spent the majority of this past weekend on a train - approximately two out of the past three days. The brief time not spent en route was spent cramming in as much friend-and-family time as possible in LA. Total count? About 30 hours, 30 relatives, and 15 friends. Thank you to everyone who made time to see me. I appreciated every second.

Nicole and I tried to sleep most of the round-trip. It's hard not to when 12 of the 16 hours in transit fell between dusk and dawn. But Amtrak seats are only a bit more comfortable than airplane seats, and not very conducive to restful slumber. So I read a little, stared blankly into the darkness, and sometimes went to the lounge to sip coffee see who else wasn't sleeping. Besides, I don't think my reading Catcher in the Rye aloud to Nicole was much appreciated by the giggly church volunteer behind us or the elderly Mennonite couple across from her. Bits like, "...and his soul's in Heaven and all that crap," could not have been warmly received.

There seemed to be an inordinate number of Jesus fans on the rails in general. That Mennonite couple was only the first of three couples I saw during my round trip, and on the way back yesterday I suddenly found myself locked in conversation between a preacher and a hard place - the hard place being a former farmer from Burlington, Iowa.

He was good company, though, in between feeding his pop addiction and pointing out livestock and buildings as we trekked across the sparsely populated snowy mesas between Flagstaff and Albuquerque. He also consented to be a guinea pig for my new blogging idea (to be revealed soon). Nicole even found a hilarious pamphlet of Christian propaganda entitled "The Atheist Test". Apparently, the Big Bang theory doesn't hold up to scrutiny when applied to the origins of soda cans. This is an actual graphic from the booklet.

They insisted I'm a believer, whether or not I knew it. This isn't the first time I've heard such things, but it makes me wonder if they say that to all the 20-somethings, hoping it will win them over to the church with trust and goodwill. Are they just spiritual confidence men? Yesterday I almost believed them, today I have more doubts. Of course, yesterday I was sleep-deprived, and today I'm better rested. Maybe this is what Saint Anthony, Buddha, and all their ascetic company mean when they say physical comfort distracts from what is truly important. Whatever that is.

By the way, have you ever seen Los Angeles' Union Station lit up at night? It's an elegant and stunning sight, as well as a dangerous one, considering it will make people loathe to leave, as it did me.

January 2009 - east by northeast by north

After recovering from New Years on the 1st, I flew to New York City on the 2nd.  This was a 3 day stopover on my way to Israel for my birthright trip.  I met Dani there and we stayed with his family on Long Island and then with Danny Gurman in the East Village.

It was pleasantly cold and there was snow on the ground in places.  I spent some time walking in the park and wandering up and down 5th Ave.  Then Danny led us into a subterranean sake bar, where I had coaxed Becky into meeting us, and then we ventured upstairs on another block to a soviet themed drinking establishment.  The next day it was to Newark early in the morning to catch our plane to the Holy Land.

That trip felt like at least a month on its own, so there really is no way to go into details.  We bussed around, camped in the desert, drank drank drank, danced danced, hiked hiked hiked, and were constantly amused and in awe of our guide, Jared.  This was all during the most recent war in Gaza.  The closest we got to any missiles was a lone rogue coming out of Syria from the North, some 15 miles from where we were that day.  So no worries, really.  Alright, I'm still totally giddy that I was within 15 miles of an actual Middle-Eastern missile attack.

Then it was back to Newark, then to Los Angeles.  The flight home was incredible.  From New Jersey to the Sierra Nevadas, the entire country was coated in thick white frosting.  I remember staring out my window the entire flight, though I'm sure I passed in and out of consciousness considering that was still a continuation of the day before for me.

The following weekend it was time to go visit Nicole in Santa Cruz, and then to Berkeley for Burnlesque, a sexy little burner party in downtown Oakland with Mr. Mann and Ms. Bouncy.  Eventually I would stay home for longer than a week, I promise.  It started in February.

May 2008 - mr. evans goes to europe

I had limited time from the start, unfortunately, but I knew if I postponed this trip to sometime more convenient, it would conveniently never happen.  On April 29th I entered Los Angeles International Airport and did not breathe open air again until reaching Toronto's Pearson International.  Not Europe yet, but I reckoned I was passing over Canada one way or the other so I might as well stop by and visit some friends.

Myia met me at the airport and we took buses and trolleys to her Spadina Avenue apartment.  She and her partner Mike live in this incredible upstairs apartment on a major thoroughfare in a neighborhood I somehow remember being Chinatown and Kensington Market at the same time.  In fact, I just discovered you can see a photo taken from just a few doors down from theirs on Wikipedia.  We gathered up all sorts of old friends from the Vancouver days and cooked and dined and drank.  Mike played for us a rare album, a 70's rock opera based on the War of the Worlds.  I got drenched in the heaviest rain I'd ever even imagined, beneath a daytime sky blacker than I'd thought possible.  I stayed some at Myia and Mike's, some at Sarah and Marta's, and then Myia and I caught a train (moments after my soaking) to Montreal.

Mr. Foxman met us in Montreal.  Adam and I stayed at a hostel the first few nights, while Myia stayed at a friend's.  We bought wine and cheese and bread and hiked the Mont Royale, from which the city derives its name, but not before killing a couple of hours in the playground at the base of the hill.  Myia's friends Etienne and Virpi were incredible part-time tour-guides.  They took us to an avant-garde art show as well as the greatest and most fancy vegan Thai restaurant on this earth.  Remember the world famous appetizer!

Time ran out for us there all too soon.  Foxman found a plane to his next stop - Colorado, I believe - and I found a bus to Burlington, Vermont from where I would hop to New York City's JFK Airport and then to Dublin, Eire.  Then began a trip much too dense to attend to in this much detail.  Just know I rambled:

• from Dublin, where I discovered a man can live at least a day on Guiness alone,
• to Killarney, where I played guitar with Poppa Goodtimes on the roof of a pub,
• to Belfast, where I took a day trip with a pretty German girl,
• to Edinburgh, where I nearly got stuck on an island in the middle of the Firth of Forth,
• to London, where Colin, a 36 year-old gutter punk lectured me about those who were tools of society and those who weren't,
• to Paris, where I drank at least two bottles of wine a day and sneaked on and off the Metro,
• to Amsterdam, where I stayed with Sarah and Marta in their acquaintance's canal-adjacent apartment,
• to Berlin, where I visited with two new friends a concentration camp just north of the city,
• to Nürnberg, where I cemented my addiction to wurst, lager, and sauerkraut, 
• to Düsseldorf, where I had one great night playing the Wii with the beautiful Catherine LeBlanc,
• to Los Angeles, where I seem to inevitably end up despite myself, at times.
  

I would like to have stayed longer in Europe had it not been for the big event - Lara Carina Spade was to marry Samantha Lemke on the 06-07-08.

April 2008 - spring renewal

Back in California, I was restless still.  A few days after returning from BC I set about on a drive to visit friends north of me.  Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo, Santa Cruz, San Francisco, Sacramento - I guess just about every California town that begins with 'S'.  I drove through Big Sur with my windows down, and took my time doing so.  The fresh pacific air is shielded here from the filth produced on the mainland, and I relished my privilege place along PCH between the shore and the cliff.

I had lunch with Nicole in Santa Cruz, unaware that in less than a year we would fall in love with each other.  In San Francisco, as I was leaving Alex's apartment after a late night of bar hopping with him, Jess, and Evan, a rabbi invited me to his home for sabbath lunch.  I had to decline, of course, for I had places to be.  I was due in Sacramento for a night of drinking with Adam.  Then, on Sunday, it was back home for me.  Back home again.  I was expecting company soon.

Mel was coming into town later that week, and I had been making an effort to become more involved with the CouchSurfing scene, ramping up for my trip to Europe.  I met a girl who worked as a photographer at Disneyland at a CS ArtWalk gathering on Thursday that offered to get Mel and me into the park for free on Friday.  So that's exactly what we did on Friday, straight from the airport.  Then we went to another CS event, a pancake breakfast, on Sunday morning.  She stayed with me for a few more days and then went camping with Kyle.

Passover came and went with relative insignificance.  All I really remember between Mel leaving and April 29 is researching, packing, stressing, budgeting, going to the DMV, and waking up late in the day.  I just remember being excited for my first trip to another continent.  I left for Toronto, the first stop on my trip, on April 29, but that whole venture is basically May material.

March 2008 - moneymoneymoney

This was the month that my contract at the hospital job came to an end.  As is common with the end of fancy corporate jobs, this meant a lot of money would soon be coming my way.  I explained a bit about this in another entry, so I'll swerve away from being too Jewish and just leave it by saying I received six checks this month, each of them larger than a typical paycheck - some factors larger.

With my new found fortune and ever expanding leisure time, what was I do?  By the end of my last week working at the mental health clinic just above downtown, I was more than ready for a change of scenery.  My home away from home beckoned me.  G and I ran away to the north, to old Vancouver and Victoria.  We stayed with Kristina at her historic downtown apartment in Vancouver, and then with Sarah at her middle-aged duplex in residential Victoria.  It was deliciously cold up there, and sumptuously moist.  The rain, interspersed with moments of snow and moments of drought, refreshed me inside and out as it always does.

Sarah and her friends took us out to a Jamaican restaurant that actually had vegetarian items being jerked alongside the pork and chicken.  G bought a fabulous coat at a thrift shop on a bargain, albeit at a price still far beyond her means.  The ride back to the airport was decorated with daffodils, just popping into season in fields beside the highway.  We flew into Seattle, then into LA, a truncated week that felt even shorter upon our return.  Back to the lions, back to the relentless sun.

Declining Latitude, Attitude

My trip comes to a close. Now, I've never taken any truly long and adventurous journeys, but even after only a week in a city that was my home for three years, I'm waiting for my flight (delayed an hour) in a shallow valley of depression, a floodplain slowly soaking up a sense of something lost and questions about what comes next.

This trip was on the horizon for so long, and now I have nothing like it to look forward to for a long time. Hawaiian organic coffee farm in April 2008? I'm looking forward to that like I'm looking forward to retirement. Tonight I'll get home and tomorrow I'll wake up, assuming I sleep at all tonight, and go to work and start it all over again, my escape thwarted by the all too efficient prison guards of work-a-day reality.

Leaving Vancouver tosses me deep into the throes of postpartum depression. There are problems with the city, for sure, as with pregnancy, but when I leave, I realize that I'm not just leaving my friends there, I'm leaving a piece of myself that has permanently attached itself to the city - a ghost of myself that's been sucked into the enduring cloud cover forever haunting the skyline. Is this what Tony Bennett meant when he realized his heart was still in San Francisco?

Los Angeles, on the other hand, only alienates. Maybe it's just too much metropolis for me to handle. Maybe it's too complicated and too glorified. When the nation, and even the world looks in your direction to be entertained...isn't that a little too much pressure for anyone else? Every time I start to feel close to L.A., it finds a new way to push me away. I don't feel pressured to perform in Vancouver. It allows me to move at my own pace rather than only at the speed of schmooze or the crawl of freeway traffic.

Of course, the longer I remain here in the South, the more attached I become. I have great friends and family here and it seems no matter where I go, I will leave someone behind. This is why people follow jobs, geography, and climate - because people are everywhere and, though distant sometimes, have a tendency to stick with you regardless. Best then to find a city that sticks to you, with or without its inhabitants, so that when you leave to visit those you love, you can return to a home you love just as much.

Terrorist Wait List

Scene: 7:00 am, February 14th, 2007. Valentine's Day. But this story has nothing to do with love.

I'm attempting to check in at the Los Angeles International Airport, at an electronic self check-in kiosk with Alaska Airlines. After having to start over a couple of times because of the conspiracy launched upon me by Travelocity and my printer to cut off the last and most important third of my confirmation e-mail, I finally find my flight on the system and swipe my passport. But then, as I think it's all over, instead of printing out a boarding pass, the screen reveals a message in big, red letters:

"WE'RE SORRY, BUT WE ARE UNABLE TO CHECK YOU IN AT THIS TIME BECAUSE YOU ARE A TERRORIST."

Other people might not have seen that last phrase, but only because they weren't reading hard enough! These surface-dwellers might only have read an innocuous message about seeing a counter representative instead of using the machine for a non-specific reason. But my reading was quickly justified upon progressing to the counter.

"Would you hold on a moment, sir? I need to clear you with the authorities."

The clerk walks offstage, my passport in hand, to "check something," as others might have heard it, naively enough. But then, finally, upon returning, the truth spills out in plain English that even the most innocent could understand. She hands me a poorly photocopied sheet of paper that seems to explain something about TSA and Federal Watch Lists.

"Is this because I 'partially matched' some name on the terror watch list?" I casually suggest.

"Yep, that's it, sir!" she jovially replies.

We chuckle about it for half a second, or until I realize there's nothing funny about it, and then move on with our business. This has happened to me the last three times I've flown, as well as being pulled aside two of those three times for "random additional screening." Yes, I have an unkempt beard. Yes, I often travel with a guitar case that must inspire thoughts of mafia hit men. And yes, I probably usually look suspicious because I'm always tired and make weird faces to keep myself awake. Do these things make me terrorist?

Possibly. I suppose as much as anyone, and possibly just a little bit more so. That's the sad truth about profiling. It's not always about skin color or whether or not you happen to have the Qur'an sticking out of your butt pocket. Sometimes, you really can just look shifty and attract all the wrong attention.

However, even more disturbing than my seemingly constant annoyances at the gate, is how easily I was cleared at the check-in counter. I didn't do or say anything, but apparently my name matched something somewhere, and then, with a mere gesture, I was magically absolved. Of course, I speak mostly here out of an inborn sense of civic paranoia, though, and I so realize that I have no idea what goes on backstage and how thorough and solid a process it may or may not be. Maybe it's actually a series of occult motions.

"But...no! If all the new security measures aren't making us any safer, what oh what are we to do?!"

Fear not, fellow citizen. The good thing about mice and mousetraps is that better inevitably begets better. Take comfort that, in these chaotic times, we can still maintain balance with something.