Road trip, day 2.

Through the strangeness that is Vegas,

its weird monuments,

and whatever the hell this is, bright towering light in the full daylight, over what looks like water against the mountains,

and hours later, we arrive and fall into sleep, and wake to this:

the low cooing of doves,

a strange but also familiar door,

and lamplight pooling against the dark.

Posted with Blogsy

To the desert:

Here, it is hot during the day, as one might expect. At night, it cools down. Here, in this house high on a hill, just north of Joshua Tree National Park, late in the day, we open the doors and windows to let the cool in. Because it's a house I'm not used to, I wake a few times in the night. The windows are uncurtained because the house is remote, and I can see the changing face of the sky. A three-quarter moon. An airy tree. At six, a sky all blue and bright with sun.

In this desert house, there is no television, and more, I need less diversion. Diversion from what? There are art magazines and books. In the past, when I've subscribed to art magazines, they often just felt like pretentious noise. This was especially true when what I needed more than anything was diversion. I am thinking about diversion a lot, because I realize, what I've been seeking to be diverted from is my life, my actual life. I thought the stress emanated only from the job, but that's because the job felt like it was my only life.

But that's done. Today, I wrote a million ideas. Not ideas for diversions, and not ideas for my job. Ideas for my work, my work and my life.

In the desert, like everywhere else, there is a history that lives in the layers of things. Today, we found out about the sea that covered the California deserts. There are artifacts left from the people who lived by it, near the Pinto Mountains. And all over the desert there are oases, where California fan palm trees grow. Yesterday, we hiked up Palm Canyon, outside of Palm Springs. Palm Canyon, part of a complex of canyons known as "Indian Canyons," are not too far from a golf course and resort. All of it is owned by the Agua Caliente band of the Cahuilla tribe. You can't believe how beautiful and how peaceful.

According to the tribe,

With our language dying, our ceremonies fading and the younger generation leaving the old ways, the death of our Tribal leader brought the past and future together in a momentous way. The elders determined that there was no one left among us to serve as the people's teacher, to preside over meetings, rituals, rites of passage, and wield the power of the Um na'a as had been done since the creation of the world. They came to the painful decision that no one would be named as our new net and that the traditional ceremonial house would be burned. As fire engulfed the structure, so went many of our ancient ways. It was time, they said, to look to the future.

I have been looking to the past, to try to understand my own and how it intersects with this particular landscape. Here, in a place where there are so many ruined houses, so many abandoned sites of enterprise and human artificing from every possible era, I'm laying hands upon a will, a desire to start again, an urge from which I will not be diverted.

And now I will inundate you with further desert pictures.

I don't know whether to apologize or say, you're welcome! but if you want to see some pictures of how beautiful Joshua Tree National Park is, hello, you're here:

Somebody oughta market this place like crazy. Or . . . not.

[note to Facebook viewers: you have to click on the original link--no pics otherwise. On the other hand, maybe that's what you're after in which case, here you go.]

tags: Joshua Tree, national park, kind of remote

Some more desert.

When we're out and about in foreign environs, such as the desert almost directly south of Barstow, we like to pick up all the free ephemera floating around in the racks at the Seven-Eleven, or in this case, at the Stater Bros. grocery store in Twenty-Nine Palms (this might be the all-time greatest name for a town in the history of the universe, and I am including Constantinople and Timbuktu).

In this little rag, we found an article about a brand new book that was having its brand new book party that very weekend. The book is called Jackrabbit Homestead, which is all about the little homesteads that sprang up in the Morongo Basin near Twenty-Nine Palms as a result of the federal government's (hows you spell that, son? I said: g-u-v-m-i-n-t. God Bless America.) Small Tract Act of 1938.

Turns out that our little piece of heaven in the desert is right there in the middle (or on the verge, anyway), of the remains of these homesteads, which are basically mostly abandoned shacks. Some of them are being reclaimed by all sorts--artists included.

Shack architecture, is what we started calling it:

tags: shack

L.A. Report.

This chapter of the Los Angeles Project started in the Moronga Valley, which is west of the San Bernardino Mountains. The reason for this fact is a slightly not well written book that I read in my book group, which was all about the marriage of Raymond Chandler to an older woman, and their peripatetic house-moving, through parts of Los Angeles, Pasadena, La Jolla, and--here's the relevant part--Cathedral City, which is just next door to Palm Springs, which is not too far from the Twenty-Nine Palms Highway, which is where Joshua Tree (the town) and Joshua Tree (the National Park) is, which are all in the Moronga Valley. (Which, also a few years ago, I read a true crime book about a murder that occurred in Twenty-Nine Palms.) All of which led me to figure out if there was a place to stay in Cathedral City or Palm Springs or . . . what's this? a little house right next to Joshua Tree National Park? A little house called Quail Mountain House?



And, the people, this beautiful little place had no television, no internet, no phone. Let me reiterate, and this time with bullet points:

• no television
• no internet
• no phone.

Which, honestly, usually would not be recommending points. But here's a novel fact: both nights we stayed there, I fell asleep at 9:30 p.m.

NINE THIRTY in the evening.

Which I frankly did not think was possible. Literally, as in, I could not go to bed that early unless I was at death's door, and also if I took a Nyquil. At death's door. Woozy and on the verge of death: that was the only way I believed I could fall asleep at nine thirty. I don't think I've fallen asleep like that, at nine thirty, since I was like five years old.

Sorry, it still stuns me.

The better thing was that I woke up with the sun--the desert sun, which is somehow sunnier than all other sun. At six in the morning. And it was glorious.

Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind.

Translation: go on a trip, come back to your actual life. With a job and all.

Question: was it a "trip," aka a vacation? or was it a "project"? And all that that entails.

Question: will I ever organize my photos?

For now:

Earth Day Challenge: Day 3.

The dishes. As a child, the dishes were the bane of my existence because of stuff that detached itself from the dishes and floated in the water. And then touched my hand. It was the stuff of nightmares, especially when there were scrambled eggs involved. Gak. This meant I had demands, such as rubber gloves for when I had to immerse my hands into the floatie-filled water. Of course, the first tine of a fork grabbed the wrong way and the gloves would leak--that was its own fresh hell.

With the advent of the dishwasher (cue heavenly choirs), one could avoid almost all direct contact with the food on the plate, with the help of running water, gallons of it. Gallons of running water and a scrubbie thing. Then you could load your practically-clean dishes into the dishwasher for their prophylactic hour in hot water.

Okay, I know the gallons of running water are wrong. I know this. So today, when doing the dishes, I filled two pans with water, squeezed a little soap in, soaked the flatware in that, and then scrubbed them out. I used a little running water, but hardly any. Comparatively speaking, I was collecting rainwater in buckets. That's, of course, compared to the way I used to do the dishes.

[Oh, and here's today's little versification.]