June gloom bustola
I got up at the buttcrack of dawn as my Russian friend likes to call it and got on a jet plane to Los Angeles. In my head, X was playing Los Angeles over and over. Or was it Woody Guthrie’s Coming into Los Angeles? Maybe we are living too long if I have punk and folk tangled and confused in my pea brain. But here I was out West again and wondering once again, who the hell I am? I arrived in the midst of June gloom as the pilot called it – 67 degrees outside and grey skies tinged with brown. Sigh. Where am I?
The car drove and I tackled emails and phone calls and barely looked up except when I saw the driver put on some cheaters and heard him texting. I said, “Ahem, would you mind not texting while you are driving?” Sheesh. He gave me a dirty look between his two pairs of glasses.
Minutes later, we pulled up to the place where I will be meeting over the next couple of days. I had left home grouchy – all of my contact numbers have disappeared into thin air and when I try to add new contacts, it says they already exist because now my phone and Blackberry are one. But the contacts for email don’t have phone numbers so I spent the better part of the other night trying to load in all the phone numbers into my Entourage contacts only to find out they won’t sync with my Blackberry contacts. I wanted to bang my head with bricks.
I checked in and crawled to my room and somewhere between the lobby and the three minute walk to my room the sun came out and when I drew the curtains the light was bright and shining and the blue Pacific ocean was the perfect compliment to the California shore. Palm trees swayed and I plopped my iPod into the player and Todd Rundgren’s Hello It’s Me came on as I unpacked, which combined with being West made me grow misty eyed but then soon after Bob Dylan’s I Don’t Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Met) came on, and I chirped up and walked outside to inspect the arid foliage, the crisp white color of the air, and the blue that was echoing everywhere.
I came back in to get online and as I sit to write this Joanne Newsom’s Clam Crab Cockrel Cowrie – Just look at me, oh whoa whoa oh whoa whoa… is playing and right outside on the grass, behind me, a little kid just popped his beach ball and it exploded like a cannonball being fired and I realize that you get to a certain age and the range of memories, emotions, experiences, and desires have amplified larger than any sea, which means you could go from way down low to way up high without skipping a beat or stopping to take a breath.
And maybe punk and folk are really the same after all, just sung at a different tempo, because weren’t Guthrie and X basically singing about the same thing. Arriving in Los Angeles – knowing it now, knowing it then, and still not knowing it?