Oh my god, I just realized I have a problem. When is the last time I called someone? The last time I called Sadie, it had been so long that I had to look up her number. I guess Delphine and I are OK and comfortable, but more often than not, I'll call, let it ring 3 or 4 times and hang up quickly and let her call me back once she sees that I tried calling.

I got a call from Lisa yesterday. Lisa of the band, Lisa. Lisa who I haven't seen in two years, Lisa. Lisa who last time left a message, left her cell number, home number, and two email addresses, and I still didn't respond although I meant to Lisa.

Needless to say, her calling now was probably a big thing for her, although she mentioned she was back together with Denise, with whom I've had sporadic email contact in the past year, so maybe that had something to do with it.

I need to call back this time. But I reach for the phone, and it's, "Maybe it'll be better if I call tonight", "I'll call tomorrow", "Maybe I should call for New Years", "Maybe I'll wait a week, lull her into thinking I'm not gonna call back, which is what she was half expecting anyway, and then surprise her, but in delaying, also suggesting that there was something behind the delay". OK, I have a problem.

I finally got my 2004 Audrey Hepburn calendar. I don't know why I waited so long, usually they sell out by this late in the season, although I'm sure I could find one online. Got it half price, though.

Delphine, noting the Audrey Hepburn calendar in my kitchen, said, "I guess you really like Audrey Hepburn". I shouldn't have pointed out that that one was a 2000 calendar.

The "Stuff"
- Car is gone
- Yamaha drums, one of my Takamines, and my Riverhead "Squid" bass are in New Jersey
- S*die has my electric drums
- Meghan gots my Washburn AB-20 acoustic-electric bass
- I just "lent" my mint-condition Ibanez Artstar 120 semi-hollowbody to D*lphine.

All I have left in the guitar department is my cheap Peavey Strat-copy, my other Takamine, my Spector bass, and my mini Taylor, which I've named "Motel Kamzoil" (sorry, inside joke for theater geeks (think Fiddler on the Roof, trust me, it's funny)).

And now? I've got a spankin' brand new this.

We haven't got the man (mazel tov, mazel tov)
We had when we began (mazel tov, mazel tov)
But since your grandma came, she'll marry what's-his-name -
The tailor Motel Kamzoil

A couple months ago, I was thinking how The Beatles' "The End" may be my fave lyric of all time:

And in the end
The love you take
Is equal to the love
You make

Just the simplicity of this final lyric of their career, I just wish they had credited it to all of them.

But, geez, without even standing a test of time, I think this comes pretty close:

In my dreams, I see myself hitting a baseball
In a green field somewhere near a freeway
I'm all tan and smiling and running from third base
- "My Slumbering Heart" - Lewis/Sennett (Rilo Kiley)

It just evokes such a beautiful childhood scene of the unadulterated freedom and joy. I fill the image in with the surrounding urban LA area landscape, the Summer sun in the hazy western sky, and the crowd of kids cheering for her as she runs home. Not one to be overly sentimental, she contrasts it with other lines in the song, like "It's become just like a chemical stress, tracing the lines in my face for something more beautiful than is there."

So I have to retract what I wrote before about SF Zen Center, in particular about the chanting in Japanese when very few people attending now, if any, are native Japanese speakers. It occured to me at the last Dharma Talk that the opening and closing chanting, or liturgy some call it, parts of which are in Japanese, is not just ritual tradition or granola exotification, but for the entire spiritual lineage of the school. It's a practical point of belief that they're all there. I'm glad I caught myself. My bad. I'll memorize it for next time, although I have been enjoying just listening, because when you have all these voices in unison, chanting at their lowest fundamental root tone, you can totally hear overtones an octave or more lower.

Typical me:

Q: So why didn't you shop for a bike and trainer before you gave up your car?
Me: (light bulb turns on) . . . oh yea.

I think I'll bleach my hair blonde again.

The clouds are gone.

The rain is gone.

There is no reason why I shouldn't have a new bike by the end of the day. Price range $300-$400. $500 is still reasonable, but I hate that $500 price range because I don't think of it as it as being better quality than the $300-$400 range. I think of the $500 price range as the high end of $300-$400 price range quality, and you're just paying extra for stupid shit, and you're too cheap-ass to bump up to the $600-$700 price range.

Those are my words of wisdom teeth for today.

Bleah, today can't decide if it wants to rain or dry out. I'm on a quest to buy a replacement workhorse mountain bike, and I've been eyeballing a sweet Cannondale for $699, and it finally occured to me why I've been balking. I can't afford $699 for a new bike!! Also, "workhorse" to me means sturdy and low maintenance. I ride somewhere, lock it up, put down my thang, and when I'm done I ride home. With this Cannondale, I'd have to worry about locking it up, where I lock it up, how long I lock it up, and still worry that it or its components won't be there when I return. So now I'm perusing Craig's List for used bikes, and also want to return to the bike shops with a $300-$400 range.

But every time the roads dry up, it starts raining again. Another day to think about what I want and what I want to use the bike for. At least I might get a trainer for my Peugeot off of Craig's List tonight.

The idea is supposed to be that I'm supposed to feel a lot lighter now, now that I don't have a car that I didn't even pay for, that I didn't even work for, that I didn't really earn or deserve in any appreciable way. Hmm, if I put it that way, I guess I do feel lighter. I was gonna say I haven't noticed feeling any different since I don't use it regularly, but I anticipate that I will feel lighter as time goes by, weighing in the convenience it brought against the material possessions thing and the pollution thing.

I guess my apartment feels lighter now that my drumset is gone. My bedroom is a little emptier, at least. And I'm two basses and one guitar down, too. That helps. I'm a few items of clothes heavier, as I couldn't resist the fact that New Jersey has no sales tax on clothes. I got a pair of 501 Levis jeans! I'm so early-90's!! You know you're old when you get a pair of button-fly 501s and they fit well, and you think that's a good thing.

"Lord, strike that poor boy down!"
Went to a Korean restaurant last night and I had a bottle of soju. Shit is stealth wine, I swear. When you drink it, it doesn't taste, smell, or feel like anything. But after I got home, not even side A of Van Halen's Fair Warning could keep me upright. That's some good shit.

It's strange how I don't even like David Lee Roth, but after he was fired, Van Halen just wasn't worth listening to anymore. They were pretty bad ass in the early days. Eddie, deservedly, gets all the attention, but listening to this old LP, Michael Anthony and Alex Van Halen were an incredibly tight rhythm section. I'm sure Eddie is not an easy guitarist to play under, but man did they hold it together. And with that now-classic LA studio sound.

My father is obsessed with atomic clocks. Clocks in general, actually, but atomic clocks in particular. He even got me and my brothers atomic clocks and atomic watches! The way they work is that there is a main atomic clock out in Colorado somewhere that sends out a radio signal transmitting the precise time, and all of these clocks (and watches) receive that signal and perfectly synch themselves with that signal.

It was a little creepy when my father called out that we were going to lunch at 12:30. I looked at my (atomic) watch, looked at the (atomic) clock on the wall, and across the room at the (atomic) clock in the kitchen, and they were all precisely synchronized to the exact time, seconds clicking off in perfect unison. It was creepy, like automatons, no life. My other watches, set four minutes fast, have no place in this world of meticulous, overbearing calibration.

I had set my watch (non-atomic) when I left San Francisco. But traveling across the country, time zone by time zone I had to knock off an hour, and each time, the zero second was a guess, imprecise at best. So it was a bit of a surprise when I got to my parents' house and compared my watch to the atomic time and found it a mere five seconds off. Of course, that was just lucky. A little bit off one way from one time zone, compensated the other way crossing another time zone; still, five seconds is pretty darned close. Five seconds?!! That won't do! Time to melt down that watch, strip it for it's springs and sprockets!

I don't know what it is about my father and clocks. Right now where I'm sitting at the kitchen table, three different clocks are within earshot, three others are in visual range, not counting VCRs, and I know there is one other one out of sight just around the corner.

It's not a mortality thing. Sure they're getting on in age, and sure they are shameless capitalist/materialists, buying shit like they have no concept of "you can't take it with you", but they talk rationally and sensibly about their own deaths. They aren't in denial about their age and their place in the life cycle.

I wonder if the fellow who discovered or conceived of the light-year realized the irony in measuring that length of distance using a term relating to time. If the theory is true that time stops at the speed of light, a particle of light travels a year, covering the distance of a light-year, but is the same "age" at the end as it was at the beginning.

New Jersey is cold and I'm enjoying it, not having to live in it. I complain about how cold San Francisco is, but that's because there's a possibility of being cold at any time during the year. As I recall, I often under-dressed when I lived here and in Ohio. Frigid cold weather was a test for me to see how much I could stand, wearing as little as possible, and although I never liked cold (ie, I preferred turning up the heat over putting on more clothes), I never complained about it. And reliably hot and humid summers was the trade-off for this. My winter dress was a hoodie sweatshirt and a denim jacket. When it got really cold, I wore a long coat over the hoodie sweatshirt, which wasn't much warmer than the denim jacket, but provided more coverage. When I was in grade school, I used to go to school without a jacket and I didn't understand it back then, but apparently there was concern among the teachers whether I was being abused, with my parents not providing sufficient winter clothing. They totally did, it was just my choice. Otherwise I was a pretty normal kid. Did I just write that?

Last night my brother and I braved the cold and went to New York to catch the musical "Thoroughly Modern Millie" on Broadway. I already have the CD and now I understand what's going on song to song, and I thorougly enjoyed it. Just from the CD, I wasn't sure what the take would be with the Asian characters and I was a little scared, but it was totally on the level dealing with any race/immigrant portrayal (*whew*). The only curious part is that the Chinese dialogue is in Cantonese, but the Chinese singing parts are in Mandarin. But having any Chinese dialogue suggests that the discrepancy wasn't a matter of ignorance, so I'm thinking it was a decision that Mandarin sounded better or fit better for those melodies. Or maybe the songs were initially written in Mandarin and then they realized that those characters in that context would only have been speaking Cantonese, but it was too late to change the songs.

I don't mean to be PC-policing, but with decades of negative portrayals of Asians in the entertainment industry, I think it's only fair to applaud a single instance of a positive (ie, human) image of not only Asians, but Asian immigrants. And not only Asian immigrants, but Asian immigrant men! One of them steals the white girl away from the white male CEO! I was stunned, unrealistic as that may have been. Really. Even more unrealistic was that the white guy just civily stormed off with a hurumph, not engaging in violence or a string of racial epithets to salve his wounded pride.

Having said all that, the female lead, Sutton Foster, who originated the role, was adorable! I adored her. She carried the show and was incredibly dynamic and charismatic and funny. The show wasn't astoundingly fresh or original, at least three of the songs sounded vaguely the same and there were ideas that were reminiscent from other musicals, "Annie" is one that comes to mind, but for purely entertainment purposes, I loved it.

So driving across the country was simply brilliant, I must say. Highly recommended, given the right circumstances. What I enjoyed about cruising along, alone, behind a steering wheel for six or seven hours a day for seven days, I couldn't tell you. Maybe I shoulda been a truck driver. Maybe not.

I hated Texas. Texas just goes on and on and feels like it will never end. And I missed Austin. No, I didn't go there, loved it, leaved it, wherefore I missed it, but I was driving on a road towards Austin, and the next thing I know I check the map and I'm on a road awaaaay from Austin. I have never missed an entire city before, much less a state capital city. I blame Texas. I reluctantly backtracked through some pretty horrendous traffic just so I could get a gist of Austin, and once I was walking around, I remembered that this was where Stevie Ray Vaughn made his name, and all was forgiven.

Speaking of traffic, if you reach L.A. any time after around 3 p.m., welcome to traffic hell. How and why Los Angelinos put up with that, I may live a thousand years and never understand.

Speaking of LA, Louisiana this time, I was happy to drive into this Southern state which just elected a woman governor in a race that pitted her against a conservative Republican Indian American! It doesn't make it a progressive state per se, but it's a start. And boy howdy the severe weather I hit in Louisiana was exciting. Squalls that slowed traffic to 45 mph and tornado warnings, well, they crapped on what was supposed to be my "break day", but I'm easy. Wandering along Bourbon Street in the French Quarter was pretty much Fisherman's Wharf, New Orleans style. The rainy gloom probably made it bearable. The rain stopped just long enough for me to walk around and not get soaked.

Tucson made me giddy all over again. Driving in from the direction of Organ Pipe National Monument just had me romantically thinking of Tucson as the jewel of the Sonoran Desert. Of course having been there in April, and now in November, I completely missed the sweltering Summer heat. I went to Saguaro National Park East on my National Parks Pass, and I communed with the saguaro, singing 10,000 Maniacs' "The Painted Desert". How I'd like to be reborn as a saguaro in solemn meditation on the sun rising in the east and setting in the west, and the stars in the sky, "the stars were so many there, they seemed to overlap".

That morning before Tucson found me hiking in solitude in Organ Pipe National Monument. It abuts Mexico, so it's not on the way to anything. You have to go out of your way to go to Organ Pipe. I hiked an hour in a canyon and didn't see a soul and sang Peter Gabriel's "Washing the Water" to myself with abandon.

I met up with Kristin at Carlsbad Cavern. OK, I met Kristin at Carsbad Cavern. Either way. For someone whose name I wouldn't know for another 45 minutes, we hit it off pretty well. She was a wandering soul with a 45 day Greyhound Bus pass, trying to keep her channels open. She was 10 years younger than me, and 10 years ago, I was doing my best to keep my channels to the universe open, too. It's a good way to be. A good way to try to get back to, even if, in the end, you don't find the answer to the universe or true love or happiness.

The purpose of taking the far southern route was to stay warm as long as possible, but as a cold front pushed through even to Florida, I decided to head north through Alabama, finally succumbing to the allure of "Waffle House". I was disappointed by the meager selection for waffle options, but I made the best of it. I once had a gerbil named "Waffle".

Beelining up the East Coast was appropriate, as there is not much to stop for this side of the Mississippi. Very brief (and cold) stop in Montgomery for the Civil Rights Monument (they really didn't put much effort into that thing, the MLK monument at Yerba Buena Gardens in San Francisco is much better), and then it was Georgia on my mind, South Carolina which might not have been there at all, and then North Carolina, which I wanted to give more credit for spawning Archers of Loaf and Superchunk. Virginia found me stuck in traffic in the Fredricksburg regional shopping district (I think all urban landscapes should be re-designated into regional shopping districts, it's the American way!), and finally at Meghan's, the end of the motels and the beginning of the end of the roadtrip. The end of my run with my cute Isuzu Rodeo. When I got it, it was cute, SUV's weren't being vilified yet, they hadn't become a yuppie symbol. It's still cute. It still runs great. It will hate me for giving it to my brother.

No back-dating. That was geeky.

Here's what the cross-country drive looked like en breve:

- Friday, November 21, San Francisco to Escondido, CA (Deer Park Monastery), 492 miles.

- Sunday, November 23, Escondido to Ajo, AZ (Organ Pipe National Monument), 341 miles.

- Monday, November 24, Ajo to El Paso, TX (Tucson and Saguaro National Park East), 535 miles.

- Tuesday, November 25, El Paso to Kerrville, TX (Kristin at Carlsbad Caverns), 569 miles.

- Wednesday, November 26, Kerrville to Lake Charles, LA (Austin), 488 miles.

- Thursday, November 27, Lake Charles to Slidell, LA (New Orleans), 252 miles (break day).

- Friday, November 28, Slidell to Gastonia, NC (Biloxi and the Gulf Coast drive), 660 miles.

- Saturday, November 29, Gastonia to Alexandria, VA (Meghan), 420 miles.

- Sunday, November 30, Alexandria to Philadelphia (brother), 149 miles.

- Monday, December 1, Philadelphia to Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 100 miles.