lomo roadtrip

when it rains it fucking pours

Fuck.

That was the word of choice.

Fuck I’m leaving. Fuck you’re leaving. Fuck lets get drunk. Fuck yeah! Fuck I got kicked out. Fuck the club. Fuck the bouncers. Fuck lets eat. Fuck this rain. Fuck McDonalds. Fuck the rain. Oh fuck. Oh fuck. Fuck.

The word didn’t carry any weight until “oh fuck” came along. Then it got heavy.

Our evening was like a high school counselors scare tactic speech verbatim; the crest of summer, a culmination of three months rolled into a single night. Young hotclique upstarts painting the town, like a wake for adventures past and a celebration of new pursuits in the forthcoming academic year. We have the future at our toes. This is only headed in one direction: tragedy.

Tucked in the industrial terrain off main and terminal lay an oasis of grease. Clouds, with all their silver lined evilness, were unrelenting. My McChicken sauce was watered down but I didn’t care. Our clothes seemed watered down as well and we cared about that. Time to find shelter.

I am finding it difficult to explain what happened with any semblance of elegance. Basically it felt like I had just been speared by Goldberg. Then some guy is stuffing a cigarette in my mouth and nattering on. “You just got hit by a fucking car dude!”

According to him I flew back about seven to ten feet, hit the ground on my side and rolled. Then I jumped up and stumbled/crawled/ran to the sidewalk. Ambulances are here now. Neck brace on. IVs in. The lights are really bright.

I don’t even want to talk about this anymore. I went to the hospital and limped out unassisted. It was all very uncomfortable and very scary. I consider myself fucking lucky.

we dont give a font

i dont know what happened, but something is up. ill get computer smart soon.

another chance at life: the unofficial dave story.

Sun soaked young ladies, too hot on beaches and fawning over the latest sun soaked guy. Overheating in and sweating into dirty jeans; they are shin protection for a flipping skateboard. Walking through neighbourhoods almost aimlessly in a t-shirt, but never getting even slightly cold. These are some of the things that make late August in Vancouver wonderful. But this time around it’s raining. It reminds me that we live in a temperate rainforest. The reminder, this premature Vancouver monsoon season, gets me pining for heat and easy things.

We ran in the rain last night, from one party ending to another in full swing. It was all pretty easy. We had money for cover and could pay whatever the asking price for drinks. We got a ride downtown instead of taking transit or shelling out for a cab ride. We saw old friends who made us happy, and then we saw decrepit street people who made us feel not so low. It was all pretty easy to handle.

The McDonalds walk-thru window served us, and we were sheltered from the downpour. We readied ourselves to run eight blocks. I took off. I am fast, and I quickly made some fair distance on Dave. Once I had fifty yards on him, I could no longer hear his footsteps in the puddles, so I turned to goad him on with loud words. In a moment of ephemeral eternity, I saw him running and a car coming. It did happen in one moment, me turning and him, smashed, thrown to the ground. So very quickly. While I witnessed the car travel two feet before hitting him, I managed to make time slow down enough to think that this was it, curtains.

It does not take much time for a car traveling at 50kph to move forward two feet. While it may take less time to compute some visual stimulus and then come up with an appropriate brain wave, or reaction, I’m not here to use science to prove anything.

Dave then struggled or bounded to his feet (I cant recall for sure in what way he got up), and made his way to the sidewalk. As I raced down the street to him, seeing him walking raised my hopes. When I reached him, a properly concerned fellow was at his side, reassuring him that, yes, “dude, you got fucked up!” And yes Tim, he got fucked up. Tim, whose name I later found out, radiated incredible enthusiasm that may have been due to being blessed enough to witness the incident. Dave’s eyes were open and he was coherent; I asked if he was okay and he answered, “I just got fucking hit by a fucking car. Fuck”. Coherent enough for me.

I ran off, down 2^nd avenue, eastbound after the driver. He was stopped in the middle of the road, unsure of what to do. He rolled down the driver side window, shirtless, and asked if my buddy was okay. I answered, “You just drove into my friend. Of course he’s not okay.” Properly concerned, he immediately began defending himself, claiming that the pedestrian he hit jumped in front of him. In a city of jaywalking bums, we all know that if we hit a bum, we are still at fault, even though they have no souls, no credit ratings and often no sense. There is nothing secret about that.

Eventually the ambulance took the two of us to Vancouver General, where I found a fresh twenty-dollar bill on the ground outside of the emergency entrance. It turned out to be a good night after all. And Dave is okay and going back to work tomorrow.

way out, past the breakers brah.

I'm surfing in Tofino. Rather, I tried surfing yesterday and the day before at some long and sandy and cold beaches, the pulsing water littered, spotted with wetsuited surfers, bobbing on boards. I was the sole rider with out neoprene protection. I hung ten. I'm gnarly.

skate or die brah!... YEAH!

i still have welts

WARNING: mildly offensive use of slurs. All in jest. Sorry, it flies in the 'burbs.

gutter,

Sorry. This sucks. Hopefully I can make something better. Till then...

futuresex-roadtrip

When we left Alis mom told us to fix the front left headlight. When we returned she said the same thing.

My mom gave me a hug, seven thousand kilometers and we didn’t fuck up once. I almost got a speeding ticket. That was it. Friends ask the question. You say it was good but can’t really explain.

Images from this trip flicker back to me:
Mexico – stripper with chipped teeth touches Alis inner thigh.
Utah – zion canyons deep red walls; watching discovery channel thunder and lightning on a river bank.
Arizona – new friends, new drunk munchies. Dice games in Viva.
California – san diego to san francisco, low light, highway 101.

No facebook album can correctly enunciate how I felt at those times.

Alex has managed to digest some of this trip and produce some stuff below. I haven’t started. Images to post as well as a whole tape of video footage to sift through and hopefully turn into something coherent. Give it a week.

PS: I just noticed how much Radiohead there is in Clueless. And there is a scene in which a character named Summer uses the word random to describe attendees at a party. Amy Heckerling was way ahead of Josh Schwartz.

fake tickets to robotic rock

We saw Daft Punk.

Holy jeeze, what a spectacle. The light show was non-stop and bonkers and completely in sync with the music. The crowd bounced and swayed a little slower then the massive speaker cones pumped. Each persons movement was amplified by the constricting crowd.

I'm not going to lie, I was stoked to be there, and I couldn't say a bad thing about the show, 'cept I really had to urinate badly for the last thirty minutes of the performance. I couldn't care less if Daft Punk was doing anything up there in their pyramid of lights and screens; I couldn't even care less if it was actually the dudes from Daft Punk in the robot suits. I read somewhere that there was some suspicion that the genuine Frenchmen might have hired people to masquerade as them. Fuck it. It doesn't matter anyways, and I'm now convinced that Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel did become robots in some freak accident eight years ago.

During the latter part of the show, the pyramid screens began blasting short, somewhat subliminal shots of flora, fauna, nebulas and planets, moons, and then human anatomy. I saw the college crowd rage and raise up in rapture and sweat; I worried they were being hypnotized by Daft Punk. I would enjoy having that power over the next generation of American power makers and World Leaders.

Did I mention where the performance took place? Stumbling into some dumb and beautiful luck, David and I scored a dorm room in a Berkeley Co-op. Whew. I'd like to go to that school. Dave knew that Daft Punk was playing that night, somewhere in San Francisco, some place called The Greek Theater.

"Ali, The Greek Theater is like, 4 blocks from the pad, or something."

We had to go. Scalpers were selling single tickets for one hundred fifty a pop. A bit steep, but we agreed that we'd pay one hundred. We couldn't pass by this opportunity. After driving around on the prowl for extra tickets, for less then $150, then walking around and asking, all to no avail, we happened upon a big and stout Aboriginal Australian; tickets for $100. Stoked.

He gathers us close, along with some other males our age, as if to tell us the secret of seven league boots. Instead of instruction for magic boots, he tells us how to get in with pilfered tickets...

"Right, follow me, to the tee. Follow me and go to the same ticket checker as I do. Make sure it's the same guy, got it? Alright, lets go."

Following, past the turnstyle, past the ticket checker. He feigns a scan, avoids eye contact and I pass. Success.

Seven dollar drinks.

The next day we look at the tickets: "LCD Soundsystem with Guests, May 14 2007, Fillmore."

don't go south for safety

We've been home for over one week now. Where is the ambition to write; let fingers fly over the keyboard to help elaborate our tale to you. We kept it gutter; we'll write about it.

From Vancouver all the way back to Vancouver in seven thousand kilometers.

It seems a roundabout way to get back to life, but the voyage itself, measuring distance and days, gas tanks and tacos, was one of the pivotal reasons to take on the road trip. There are plenty of hidden away spots at which one can stay hidden for days, within a few hours of our city. Setting a distant goal (Mexico) and then choosing a fairly slow method of transport to reach that goal (ie: not an airplane) affords one the extasies of a joy well earned.

Crossing borders, leaving the interstate system for rural Mexican highways, the change is visible instantly. These were the fruits of our labour; a hazy, less refined infrastructure, corrupt police turning blind eyes, the visible displays of monetary power. These vices are easily generalized about, but do seem pervasive enough to lead to the classification of the Mexican way to be a double edged sword.

It's so much fucking fun to go there and rip up the gnarly highways, but the speed limits are slower then in America. Imperial to Metric; a better method of measurement assigned to a primitive and dangerous system of roads.

Anyways, what I'm saying is that it is very easy to drive too fast to reach a destination a little faster then is actually safe, or to lay your eyes on three dimensional pornography while getting there. If you happen to fall into this trap, thinking that the Mexican Highway Patrol will let a Caucasian fly by for free, just remember the bit i mentioned about vice. They will close their eyes. They will blink at the right time if they know to. To get them to miss something fictional, of their own creation, you have to give them cash.

The only road to Puerto Penasco, a tourist town on the north eastern end of the Sea of Cortez , one crosses from Arizona to Sonoyta. The first impression one gets is of lawlessness. Though there is a police presence in the streets, the feeling of greed and suspicion is pervasive. It is that very force of supposed law and order that makes it scary to be there. The majority of the people one is bound to meet down there are friendly; a fact many people forget. You've just seen the northern side of the border. There are large reflective yellow road signs showing a stickman mother and children running, hurrying across the freeway; keep alert for straggling illegal immigrants suffering from heat stroke, sun parched. Back on the other side of the frontier there are millions upon millions being spent on and by the Boarder Patrol. The investment in the form of territorial and even racial protectionism is so vast. I won't go into the official reasons for it. It's trafficking in any form. Just across that protected border you get to see what the white and green government trucks protect their citizens from.

welcome

fuck that