So You Think You Need A Camper Van, Day 3
Mar. 14th, 2004 04:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
garoteThis morning my dreams are a clash of gamer culture, hanging out with old friends, and reconciling past love interests.
I am simultaneously designing and living within a role-playing game about magic. Sometimes I'm looking at wireframe schematics of temples, tracing secret passages to see how they affect gameplay. Sometimes I'm relaxing on the stone slabs of the temple, surrounded by people I grew up with, having long philosophical discussions.
An ex-girlfriend with long blond hair walks by, part of a crowd I do not know. I recognize her, though she looks older, perhaps how she would look in the present. Her eyes flick towards me. She knows I am here, but she pretends I'm a stranger. She is hoping I'll play along and ignore her the same way. This feeds my suspicion that in the intervening years she has become embarrassed at how she acted when we were together. She's too proud to apologize, especially in front of her "peers", so instead I am a possible threat, because I have good reason to resent her.
Though my intimacy with her has been replaced by a far greater intimacy with my beloved, some paradoxical core of me wishes to reclaim hers anyway. However, I also know that the feelings of trust and kindness that supposedly motivate me have curdled on the inside, like an egg forgotten by its mother hen. Now her presence sets me on edge, because of what I might say to her. I like that we parted amicably. In the dream, I make small talk, scrutinizing her face, eventually just staring at her. I feel like yelling. I realize that yes, perhaps I have become a threat.
I wake up, sweep every scrap of my presence out of the hotel room, and roll onto the highway. I've got a whole lot of ground to cover and very little weekend time remaining. Once again I pine for the cruise-control widgets that I enjoyed so much in the Aerostar.
The cloud cover has broken up, and the dry air is pleasantly cool. Perhaps the desert ground has not had enough time to absorb heat. Riding so high on the road, I feel a greater kinship with the truckers than I do with the minivans that scurry around me. I scroll around on the iPod and realize that Muslimgauze is the perfect soundtrack for endless red rock. The playlist is over six hours long.
A few hours outside of town, our lanes are compressed to one lane, and then shunted over to a divided section on the opposite half of the highway. The lanes that used to be ours are covered with a grid of rebar, the skeleton of a new surface. After a few miles the grid devolves to uncut rebar lying across the old road in stacks. A few miles more, and that peters out, leaving the old highway empty to the horizon. Twenty minutes later we are finally given our own lanes back. The entire time, I don't see a single worker. Not even a construction vehicle.
These highways must be vital to large parts of Texas. It must also be very costly to bring all the materials out here, and then bus the workers to and from the site. I try to imagine what would happen if a section of this interstate were destroyed. How many thousands of cars would get logjammed here before a detour was in place? How many tons of needed supplies would arrive behind schedule because they're stuck inside trucks, idling in the sun?
I picture a Texan cruising along in his big truck, and suddenly driving into a big hole blasted in the road. He crawls out, gets on his cellphone, and pretty soon another truck comes by to pick him up. Along comes another Texan, who also drives his truck into the hole. The scenario repeats itself. Pretty soon the hole is filled with smashed up trucks, over which other Texans are casually driving. Problem solved.
El Paso is a colorful town, in the literal sense. All the buildings are painted in cheerful pastels, each one different. I suspect that if the paint goes on darker, the sun turns it pastel eventually. The cumulative effect from a distance is a pointillist assault on your eyes, like a dozen clones of Monet decided to make a painting together and started splashing paint onto canvas before anyone could agree what the subject was. I roll up and down the hills on the highway, craning my neck at all the roadsigns, architectural accidents, and industrial piping. Thank goodness the desert winds eliminate the smog out here.
Civilization has arrived. If I wasn't sure before, the sight of a "Hummer" cruising laconically in the fast lane, festooned with chrome dingbats, confirms my suspicion. I ride a good foot higher than the cab of the hummer, and can look down into it. I consider making a bumper sticker saying, "Hummers are for pansies" and planting it on my bumper. Later when I suggest it to Sherrila, she grins and replies, "That's an insult. To pansies. Of the flower and the human variety."
I pass acres and acres of RVs for sale, most of them brand-new. Every city of respectable size in Texas has an RV dealership, to go along with the truck dealerships and the Wal-Mart. All the dealerships are ready with cheap financing. It must seem like a small step, to go from a house that was brought in by trailer, or actually is a trailer, to a house with the wheels built-in. I reflect on my own situation. Most people here buy an RV to travel beyond Texas. I traveled into Texas to buy a vehicle that will become a miniature RV, and now I'm leaving as quickly as possible. Some kind of pattern here?
It must be the geography. Most of Texas is the same. Most of Texas is flat. All of Texas' neighboring states seem to have more interesting landmarks and attractions. The New Orleans culture. The Native American presence in New Mexico. Well that's not entirely true -- the exception I suppose, is Oklahoma, which may be even more boring than Texas. Texas has a Latin American influence that Oklahoma doesn't register. Look at me, painting with the broad brush of my dimly informed west coast stereotypes! I'm part of the club now.
That leads me to a thought about California's version of Latin American influence. Most people in California bandy around terms like "illegal alien" and "immigrant". We think we can spot them on the street. In Texas, the cowboy hat, the boots, the surname, the courtesy, even the accent and the religion, aren't meaningful identifiers. Could still be a Texan, could still be a Mexican, could be both. Walk around town for ten minutes, trying to guess who's who, and this becomes obvious.
"No," I think to myself, "I don't want a bumper sticker about Hummers. I want one in big block letters that just gets right to the point and says, 'USE YOUR BRAIN'."
If I sat around in coffee shops every day for a year, all over Texas, I wonder if I'd ever overhear what I heard in Venice Beach during my short stay in Los Angeles: A bunch of white high schoolers bragging about their last drive into "TJ", how drunk they got, who they screwed, what they stole, and where they slept. Teenagers are teenagers, yes. Mormon kids in Utah probably have conversations like that about Reno. But the attitudes are an amusing contrast. I mull this over, as I head out of El Paso, and over the Texas border to New Mexico.
The first thing I encounter in New Mexico is a prison compound. The big signs reading "DO NOT PICK UP HITCHHIKERS" emphasize the situation. Beyond the prison, I experience an odd looping effect in reality. I pass fifteen billboards, evenly spaced, each imploring me to halt and shop at the impending Native American Trading Post. After the fifteen billboards, I pass an off-ramp, terminating at a wide, flat building and a gas station. The highway continues quietly for a while, and then the same thing happens again. Fifteen billboards. Off ramp. Wide flat building. This happens three times.
The first time I see the store, I want to stop and find Sherrila something. Just before exiting, I decide against it. I don't want to bring her trinkets when she's still trying so hard to unburden herself of the ones we shipped from Florida. The second time I pass the shop, I make that decision all over again. The third time, I'm too disoriented to think about it. Instead I consider switching the iPod from "Muslimgauze" to "The Outer Limits Soundtrack", but then the terrain becomes crowded with hills and rocks, breaking the cycle.
This rocky terrain continues for hours. And hours. I switch to an audiobook called "A Fatal Glass of Beer". While the hapless detective in the book pursues a bizarre identity theft case with his trusty sidekick and legendary actor W.C. Fields, the monotony of New Mexico becomes the monotony of lower Arizona. When my cellphone is not stuck in 'ROAM', I chat with the few people whose numbers I've embedded in it. I want to call my sister and wish her a happy birthday, but the only number I have is incorrect. I ask Sherrila to do some research about adding cruise control to a Ford van -- how it's done, what it costs.
I stop for gas in Phoenix, where the air smells horrible. Easily worse than Los Angeles. I ask the attendant if it's always this bad, and he says yes, but it gets better at the north end of the city because of the gentle upward slope in the terrain.
On I go, turning left to stay with highway 10. I take a break from "A Fatal Glass of Beer" to hear the end of "The Bourne Supremacy", a book I started two years ago but never finished. I've found that intimate relationships cut into one's reading time considerably. I have no regrets of course, but the observation interests me. We swap things in and out of our lives, like parts in a motor, depending on where we want to go. Some parts just don't fit together, and you have to choose.
As I begin the long ride down into the LA basin, I notice a sharp increase in rude drivers. A half-dozen trucks, some towing trailers, bob and weave their way through the traffic, flashing their headlights and tailgating anyone in their way. Each one is painted with neon flame decals and the legend "A&R RACING".
This van only cost me 4500 bucks, and it's more than large enough to drive one of these wankers right off the road, hopefully into a dune, or maybe a rock wall. Perhaps I'd get a big gash down the side, even wreck my vehicle ... but the impact would probably kill the other guy ... and wouldn't that be worth it, just to see his wanker face bashed right the hell into his steering wheel, his shiny flame-colored truck cab splattered with blood, from his twitchy right foot which will never press a gas pedal again? The image in my mind is gory and satisfying in equal measure.
After the idiot parade has moved along, I do my best to push them out of my thoughts. Wherever there's technology you'll find irresponsible young men waving their dicks around in it, but the real trouble starts when they endanger the lives of people who don't want to be involved. It's always bothered me. That, and the stupid flame decals. If you've got fire coming out of your engine, you're not a badass, you're a bad mechanic! Hah!
Whatever. I return to my audiobook. I'm trying not to think about where I'll be driving for the next few hours. Label me as you will, but this conviction is solid: I hate the LA basin. I've given it multiple chances to show me something redeeming, and each time it's disappointed me. Perhaps tonight I'll find something different? I decide to watch carefully this time through.
I stop for gas at a Chevron, right around the city of Coachella. As I exit the van, I look across the block at a Shell station, and see a truck with "A&R RACING" painted on. I can't seem to get away from these jerks. I slide my card, and begin filling the van. Between Phoenix and here, gas has become 25 cents more expensive per gallon.
Outside the mini mart, the attendant is taking a cigarette break. He's leaning against the brick wall, with one foot flat against it. His wrist is resting on the bent knee, and he flicks the ash off his cigarette by snapping it with the end of his thumbnail. On his head is a beat up cap, with the Playboy logo sewn into it.
I walk up to the side of the mini mart, to investigate a cloud of moths beneath the sodium light. Each one is large, a body about as thick as an acorn, and intricately marked. I scoop my hand under a specimen clinging to the rough wall, and it climbs stiffly onto my finger. It's a pretty thing. I rotate my finger under the station lights, and then flick my wrist. The moth flutters away, then turns in a meandering arc, back to its companions at the wall.
Thinking about moths and moth markings, I walk about five feet, to the door of the mini mart. A different man is standing there now. He's in his mid-to-late 30's, about my height. His head was probably shaved a month ago, and is now in that fuzzy stage. He has two gold earrings crimped into one earlobe. Dangling from his hand are a pair of leather straps, each one ending at a collar, around a tiny, jittering, almost hamster-sized chihuahua.
He grins at me. Friendly enough. He glances back at the wall of moths, and asks, "Giant grasshoppers?"
I look at him like he is a space alien, so great is my surprise. All I can think in the moment is, "This 35 year old man with the earrings and the doggies doesn't know the difference between a moth and a grasshopper." Perhaps I was setting myself up for disappointment.
I shake my head, and say, "No", without elaborating. It's all I can manage. Some grasshoppers do have a flying stage, so maybe I was being too judgmental.
Inside the store, the man with the Playboy hat is selling two drippy ice-cream cones to a heavy woman with over-styled hair. I go to the bathroom to wash my face, muttering about stupid city people who can't be bothered to go and look at bugs on a wall, and other impolite and unfair things. Back at the counter I get a cup of soda, dosing up on caffeine for the rest of the drive. Above the counter is a sign advertising greasy food from an in-house restaurant called "Boondoggles". Burgers, shakes, ice cream.
Boondoggle. Verb. "To do useless, wasteful, or trivial work." How appropriate, for a menu where every item is a dairy product. Yes, I know, get off your vegan soapbox! Okay.
I get back in the van, and try to find the freeway. The onramp eludes me, and I accidentally drive down the frontage road. Back in California now, and I still can't get the hang of this onramp business. I pass by the gaudy doors of a casino on the left. Immediately to my right is an RV park. A few men driving golf carts zip across my path, carrying senior citizens to and from the Casino doors. While I wait at a crowded stop sign, an old man in long underwear leads a poodle onto the grass embankment, three feet from the cars. The poodle craps on the grass, then turns over and writhes on it, while the old man stands impassively.
A fifteen minute stop in the LA basin, and this is what I see. I couldn't make this up if I tried.
Finally I find the freeway, and ride it all the way to the Grapevine, and over. I put the van in neutral for the cruise out of the hills, and find that the transmission responds exactly like the Aerostar did. If you want to leave overdrive, punch the gas until the van downshifts for you, then turn off overdrive. If you want to go back, just turn overdrive back on, and don't move your foot at all. If you want to enter neutral, shift in first, then take your foot off the gas afterwards. If you want to leave neutral, rest your foot very lightly on the gas, shift back into drive, then resume your normal pressure. I put the Aerostar through a lot of punishment until my friend Andy taught me all that.
Anyway, on I go. Hours and more hours pass. I get about halfway through "A Fatal Glass Of Beer". The rest of the drive is uneventful, and I manage to arrive in Santa Cruz just before dawn. When I stop the iPod, W. C. Fields has unmasked the villain who stole his money, and is now being shot at by a second villain from the bushes.
Now that the van is back home, I've got to register it, have my friend inspect it, and begin the conversion process. But that can wait until after a nice long sleep. And hey, after a minute or two inside, my body finally decides it's time to poop! Huzzah!
I collapse into bed.
(Postscript: Man, I get some funny looks driving a van around Santa Cruz with Texas plates on it. People scrutinize me, like they're looking for tattoo or the sign around my neck reading "hick". There's got to be some way to have fun with this.)
I am simultaneously designing and living within a role-playing game about magic. Sometimes I'm looking at wireframe schematics of temples, tracing secret passages to see how they affect gameplay. Sometimes I'm relaxing on the stone slabs of the temple, surrounded by people I grew up with, having long philosophical discussions.
An ex-girlfriend with long blond hair walks by, part of a crowd I do not know. I recognize her, though she looks older, perhaps how she would look in the present. Her eyes flick towards me. She knows I am here, but she pretends I'm a stranger. She is hoping I'll play along and ignore her the same way. This feeds my suspicion that in the intervening years she has become embarrassed at how she acted when we were together. She's too proud to apologize, especially in front of her "peers", so instead I am a possible threat, because I have good reason to resent her.
Though my intimacy with her has been replaced by a far greater intimacy with my beloved, some paradoxical core of me wishes to reclaim hers anyway. However, I also know that the feelings of trust and kindness that supposedly motivate me have curdled on the inside, like an egg forgotten by its mother hen. Now her presence sets me on edge, because of what I might say to her. I like that we parted amicably. In the dream, I make small talk, scrutinizing her face, eventually just staring at her. I feel like yelling. I realize that yes, perhaps I have become a threat.
I wake up, sweep every scrap of my presence out of the hotel room, and roll onto the highway. I've got a whole lot of ground to cover and very little weekend time remaining. Once again I pine for the cruise-control widgets that I enjoyed so much in the Aerostar.
The cloud cover has broken up, and the dry air is pleasantly cool. Perhaps the desert ground has not had enough time to absorb heat. Riding so high on the road, I feel a greater kinship with the truckers than I do with the minivans that scurry around me. I scroll around on the iPod and realize that Muslimgauze is the perfect soundtrack for endless red rock. The playlist is over six hours long.
A few hours outside of town, our lanes are compressed to one lane, and then shunted over to a divided section on the opposite half of the highway. The lanes that used to be ours are covered with a grid of rebar, the skeleton of a new surface. After a few miles the grid devolves to uncut rebar lying across the old road in stacks. A few miles more, and that peters out, leaving the old highway empty to the horizon. Twenty minutes later we are finally given our own lanes back. The entire time, I don't see a single worker. Not even a construction vehicle.
These highways must be vital to large parts of Texas. It must also be very costly to bring all the materials out here, and then bus the workers to and from the site. I try to imagine what would happen if a section of this interstate were destroyed. How many thousands of cars would get logjammed here before a detour was in place? How many tons of needed supplies would arrive behind schedule because they're stuck inside trucks, idling in the sun?
I picture a Texan cruising along in his big truck, and suddenly driving into a big hole blasted in the road. He crawls out, gets on his cellphone, and pretty soon another truck comes by to pick him up. Along comes another Texan, who also drives his truck into the hole. The scenario repeats itself. Pretty soon the hole is filled with smashed up trucks, over which other Texans are casually driving. Problem solved.
El Paso is a colorful town, in the literal sense. All the buildings are painted in cheerful pastels, each one different. I suspect that if the paint goes on darker, the sun turns it pastel eventually. The cumulative effect from a distance is a pointillist assault on your eyes, like a dozen clones of Monet decided to make a painting together and started splashing paint onto canvas before anyone could agree what the subject was. I roll up and down the hills on the highway, craning my neck at all the roadsigns, architectural accidents, and industrial piping. Thank goodness the desert winds eliminate the smog out here.
Civilization has arrived. If I wasn't sure before, the sight of a "Hummer" cruising laconically in the fast lane, festooned with chrome dingbats, confirms my suspicion. I ride a good foot higher than the cab of the hummer, and can look down into it. I consider making a bumper sticker saying, "Hummers are for pansies" and planting it on my bumper. Later when I suggest it to Sherrila, she grins and replies, "That's an insult. To pansies. Of the flower and the human variety."
I pass acres and acres of RVs for sale, most of them brand-new. Every city of respectable size in Texas has an RV dealership, to go along with the truck dealerships and the Wal-Mart. All the dealerships are ready with cheap financing. It must seem like a small step, to go from a house that was brought in by trailer, or actually is a trailer, to a house with the wheels built-in. I reflect on my own situation. Most people here buy an RV to travel beyond Texas. I traveled into Texas to buy a vehicle that will become a miniature RV, and now I'm leaving as quickly as possible. Some kind of pattern here?
It must be the geography. Most of Texas is the same. Most of Texas is flat. All of Texas' neighboring states seem to have more interesting landmarks and attractions. The New Orleans culture. The Native American presence in New Mexico. Well that's not entirely true -- the exception I suppose, is Oklahoma, which may be even more boring than Texas. Texas has a Latin American influence that Oklahoma doesn't register. Look at me, painting with the broad brush of my dimly informed west coast stereotypes! I'm part of the club now.
That leads me to a thought about California's version of Latin American influence. Most people in California bandy around terms like "illegal alien" and "immigrant". We think we can spot them on the street. In Texas, the cowboy hat, the boots, the surname, the courtesy, even the accent and the religion, aren't meaningful identifiers. Could still be a Texan, could still be a Mexican, could be both. Walk around town for ten minutes, trying to guess who's who, and this becomes obvious.
"No," I think to myself, "I don't want a bumper sticker about Hummers. I want one in big block letters that just gets right to the point and says, 'USE YOUR BRAIN'."
If I sat around in coffee shops every day for a year, all over Texas, I wonder if I'd ever overhear what I heard in Venice Beach during my short stay in Los Angeles: A bunch of white high schoolers bragging about their last drive into "TJ", how drunk they got, who they screwed, what they stole, and where they slept. Teenagers are teenagers, yes. Mormon kids in Utah probably have conversations like that about Reno. But the attitudes are an amusing contrast. I mull this over, as I head out of El Paso, and over the Texas border to New Mexico.
The first thing I encounter in New Mexico is a prison compound. The big signs reading "DO NOT PICK UP HITCHHIKERS" emphasize the situation. Beyond the prison, I experience an odd looping effect in reality. I pass fifteen billboards, evenly spaced, each imploring me to halt and shop at the impending Native American Trading Post. After the fifteen billboards, I pass an off-ramp, terminating at a wide, flat building and a gas station. The highway continues quietly for a while, and then the same thing happens again. Fifteen billboards. Off ramp. Wide flat building. This happens three times.
The first time I see the store, I want to stop and find Sherrila something. Just before exiting, I decide against it. I don't want to bring her trinkets when she's still trying so hard to unburden herself of the ones we shipped from Florida. The second time I pass the shop, I make that decision all over again. The third time, I'm too disoriented to think about it. Instead I consider switching the iPod from "Muslimgauze" to "The Outer Limits Soundtrack", but then the terrain becomes crowded with hills and rocks, breaking the cycle.
This rocky terrain continues for hours. And hours. I switch to an audiobook called "A Fatal Glass of Beer". While the hapless detective in the book pursues a bizarre identity theft case with his trusty sidekick and legendary actor W.C. Fields, the monotony of New Mexico becomes the monotony of lower Arizona. When my cellphone is not stuck in 'ROAM', I chat with the few people whose numbers I've embedded in it. I want to call my sister and wish her a happy birthday, but the only number I have is incorrect. I ask Sherrila to do some research about adding cruise control to a Ford van -- how it's done, what it costs.
I stop for gas in Phoenix, where the air smells horrible. Easily worse than Los Angeles. I ask the attendant if it's always this bad, and he says yes, but it gets better at the north end of the city because of the gentle upward slope in the terrain.
On I go, turning left to stay with highway 10. I take a break from "A Fatal Glass of Beer" to hear the end of "The Bourne Supremacy", a book I started two years ago but never finished. I've found that intimate relationships cut into one's reading time considerably. I have no regrets of course, but the observation interests me. We swap things in and out of our lives, like parts in a motor, depending on where we want to go. Some parts just don't fit together, and you have to choose.
As I begin the long ride down into the LA basin, I notice a sharp increase in rude drivers. A half-dozen trucks, some towing trailers, bob and weave their way through the traffic, flashing their headlights and tailgating anyone in their way. Each one is painted with neon flame decals and the legend "A&R RACING".
This van only cost me 4500 bucks, and it's more than large enough to drive one of these wankers right off the road, hopefully into a dune, or maybe a rock wall. Perhaps I'd get a big gash down the side, even wreck my vehicle ... but the impact would probably kill the other guy ... and wouldn't that be worth it, just to see his wanker face bashed right the hell into his steering wheel, his shiny flame-colored truck cab splattered with blood, from his twitchy right foot which will never press a gas pedal again? The image in my mind is gory and satisfying in equal measure.
After the idiot parade has moved along, I do my best to push them out of my thoughts. Wherever there's technology you'll find irresponsible young men waving their dicks around in it, but the real trouble starts when they endanger the lives of people who don't want to be involved. It's always bothered me. That, and the stupid flame decals. If you've got fire coming out of your engine, you're not a badass, you're a bad mechanic! Hah!
Whatever. I return to my audiobook. I'm trying not to think about where I'll be driving for the next few hours. Label me as you will, but this conviction is solid: I hate the LA basin. I've given it multiple chances to show me something redeeming, and each time it's disappointed me. Perhaps tonight I'll find something different? I decide to watch carefully this time through.
I stop for gas at a Chevron, right around the city of Coachella. As I exit the van, I look across the block at a Shell station, and see a truck with "A&R RACING" painted on. I can't seem to get away from these jerks. I slide my card, and begin filling the van. Between Phoenix and here, gas has become 25 cents more expensive per gallon.
Outside the mini mart, the attendant is taking a cigarette break. He's leaning against the brick wall, with one foot flat against it. His wrist is resting on the bent knee, and he flicks the ash off his cigarette by snapping it with the end of his thumbnail. On his head is a beat up cap, with the Playboy logo sewn into it.
I walk up to the side of the mini mart, to investigate a cloud of moths beneath the sodium light. Each one is large, a body about as thick as an acorn, and intricately marked. I scoop my hand under a specimen clinging to the rough wall, and it climbs stiffly onto my finger. It's a pretty thing. I rotate my finger under the station lights, and then flick my wrist. The moth flutters away, then turns in a meandering arc, back to its companions at the wall.
Thinking about moths and moth markings, I walk about five feet, to the door of the mini mart. A different man is standing there now. He's in his mid-to-late 30's, about my height. His head was probably shaved a month ago, and is now in that fuzzy stage. He has two gold earrings crimped into one earlobe. Dangling from his hand are a pair of leather straps, each one ending at a collar, around a tiny, jittering, almost hamster-sized chihuahua.
He grins at me. Friendly enough. He glances back at the wall of moths, and asks, "Giant grasshoppers?"
I look at him like he is a space alien, so great is my surprise. All I can think in the moment is, "This 35 year old man with the earrings and the doggies doesn't know the difference between a moth and a grasshopper." Perhaps I was setting myself up for disappointment.
I shake my head, and say, "No", without elaborating. It's all I can manage. Some grasshoppers do have a flying stage, so maybe I was being too judgmental.
Inside the store, the man with the Playboy hat is selling two drippy ice-cream cones to a heavy woman with over-styled hair. I go to the bathroom to wash my face, muttering about stupid city people who can't be bothered to go and look at bugs on a wall, and other impolite and unfair things. Back at the counter I get a cup of soda, dosing up on caffeine for the rest of the drive. Above the counter is a sign advertising greasy food from an in-house restaurant called "Boondoggles". Burgers, shakes, ice cream.
Boondoggle. Verb. "To do useless, wasteful, or trivial work." How appropriate, for a menu where every item is a dairy product. Yes, I know, get off your vegan soapbox! Okay.
I get back in the van, and try to find the freeway. The onramp eludes me, and I accidentally drive down the frontage road. Back in California now, and I still can't get the hang of this onramp business. I pass by the gaudy doors of a casino on the left. Immediately to my right is an RV park. A few men driving golf carts zip across my path, carrying senior citizens to and from the Casino doors. While I wait at a crowded stop sign, an old man in long underwear leads a poodle onto the grass embankment, three feet from the cars. The poodle craps on the grass, then turns over and writhes on it, while the old man stands impassively.
A fifteen minute stop in the LA basin, and this is what I see. I couldn't make this up if I tried.
Finally I find the freeway, and ride it all the way to the Grapevine, and over. I put the van in neutral for the cruise out of the hills, and find that the transmission responds exactly like the Aerostar did. If you want to leave overdrive, punch the gas until the van downshifts for you, then turn off overdrive. If you want to go back, just turn overdrive back on, and don't move your foot at all. If you want to enter neutral, shift in first, then take your foot off the gas afterwards. If you want to leave neutral, rest your foot very lightly on the gas, shift back into drive, then resume your normal pressure. I put the Aerostar through a lot of punishment until my friend Andy taught me all that.
Anyway, on I go. Hours and more hours pass. I get about halfway through "A Fatal Glass Of Beer". The rest of the drive is uneventful, and I manage to arrive in Santa Cruz just before dawn. When I stop the iPod, W. C. Fields has unmasked the villain who stole his money, and is now being shot at by a second villain from the bushes.
Now that the van is back home, I've got to register it, have my friend inspect it, and begin the conversion process. But that can wait until after a nice long sleep. And hey, after a minute or two inside, my body finally decides it's time to poop! Huzzah!
I collapse into bed.
(Postscript: Man, I get some funny looks driving a van around Santa Cruz with Texas plates on it. People scrutinize me, like they're looking for tattoo or the sign around my neck reading "hick". There's got to be some way to have fun with this.)
