Not Quite Just Like Heaven: The Fast Food Years
JUNE, 1990. I was fresh out of high school when my hopes of becoming a Crew Leader went down in flames. It was a hot summer night, almost midnight, when the telltale beeping sound alerted our skeleton crew that someone had rolled up to the drive-thru menu. I was multitasking — stocking cups, wiping counters, trying to wrap things up so I could clock out and rendezvous with friends and cheap beer — and instinctively took the order over my headset: one side of onion rings. I instructed the customer to pull up to the window.
I bagged the order…
FIRST GRADE…The Greatest Adventure/Riddles in the Dark
JRR Tolkien’s literary classic, The Hobbit, reads like a novel but it’s actually a fictional memoir written by Mr. Bilbo Baggins himself: There and Back Again, a Hobbit’s Tale. I can picture Bilbo now as he sits by the crackling fire in Bag End, puffing pipe weed, dipping his quill in the inkwell and laying out the epic chronicle of a single year of his life and his modest role in some Middle Earth changing events — finding the One Ring, saving the Dwarves from giant spiders and asshole wood elves, even chatting with a dragon. …
Not New Age Crap/Bookstore Adventures
Album: Ry Cooder/Vishwa Bhatt: A Meeting by the River
1993: The building lined the sidewalk where Pier Avenue sloped rather steeply down to the Pacific Coast Highway, the crashing surf, and the Hermosa Beach pier. Any paint left clinging to the wooden exterior was well faded by a half century of ocean breezes and neglect, but the tall windows offered glimpses of the stories inside. A yellowed handwritten note tacked to the door read “DON’T LET THE CAT OUT” while another, newer note stated “HIRING QUALIFIED CANDIDATES.” I opened the creaky door — triggering the tinkle of a bell — walked up to the counter and asked a long…
The Lonesome Whistle
There’s something otherworldly about a train. A mysterious power beyond ordinary horsepower. As a kid I would lay in my bed listening for the deep rumble of the midnight freights, a sound that I felt long before I could hear it. Then the whistle would echo across the frozen valley, a mournful cry in the night. It was a soothing sound. Often unnoticed but always there, 40,000 tons of steel hissing and clanking through town at ongoing intervals — like a clock tower striking the hour.
Some of my earliest memories involve trains. Or songs about trains anyway, first heard…
Almost Joined a Cult
Album: Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young: Deja Vu
My stepfather Mark was from blue collar Wisconsin and he knew how to fix things. He could rebuild a transmission, rewire a home, weld a broken swing set, reupholster a vintage chair and generally build a car or a house from the ground up. He’d dropped out of high school around 1960 and, like many men of his generation, bounced around the country doing odd jobs, started and walked out on a family, and pursued the ever expanding personal freedoms of the era. He was a good guy at heart, but that…
MY NIRVANA CONCERT
Album: Nirvana Bleach
Not long ago, Taylor Swift put out an album entitled 1989. Why 1989? Because that’s the year she was born and this seemed symbolic to her as she used the album to transition herself from Nashville country star into a New York pop star. Don’t ask me how I know all that. Another reason was that she’d been listening to lots of music from that era, and was under the illusion that, probably because it was now 27 years old and therefore super vintage, the music from her birth year was actually good. To quote Ms. …
ESCAPE
Journey Totally Changed My Life, Man!
May, 1982: Fourth grade was winding down, and a glorious Rocky Mountain spring was in full effect. Robins hopped among the buttercups and greening grass. Baseball gloves and BMX bikes had been dug out of storage. The snow and mud and cabin fever of another long winter were giving way to the hopeful duo of rushing creeks and croaking frogs. …
Family Spring Breaking Part One
Spring break was coming, and we were all set to go camping in southern Utah. Redrock! Canyonlands! Ancient ruins! But the weather wasn’t as warm as we hoped it would be. Lows in the 30’s and highs in the 50’s, and cloudy. Not the sunburny spring break weather we were craving, especially since we’d be in a tent.
So we changed plans and decided to head south to Guadalupe Mountains and Carlsbad Caverns National Parks. Subterranean beauty! Limestone ramparts! Chihuahuan Desert! But the forecast for the region was updated to include “damaging winds”, something our towering family style dome tent…
The long view and the ties that bind
It’s the middle of January, the very depths of winter, yet while most of the country is recovering from blizzards and the now infamous “Polar Vortex”, New Mexico remains mired in serious drought. Cold, but sunny and dry, good for nothing beyond an absurdly extended hiking season. Thankfully, there’s still plenty of time left for snow, and the desert southwest will eventually get some much needed moisture. The creeks will tumble over boulders. The acequias will water the crops. The forests won’t burn to a crisp. That’s what everyone keeps telling themselves. …
Hiking in the new year…
It’s been a cold and dry winter thus far, just like the Farmer’s Almanac predicted, so rather than dust the black widow webs off the skis and drag out all the Gore-Tex and mittens and fleece, I took a hike in the badlands. Or, as Marty Robbins once sang, the Badlands of New Mexico…southbound, down a canyon and out into the wide open Espanola Valley.
Nervously, I parked the car on a Bureau of Land Management road just off the highway. Nervously, because this area is a true rural ghetto with gangs and a flourishing drug trade, and near the…
