Under the bridge

I'm in LA now. My brother and I have been wandering around town for the past couple of days.

6/21




On Thursday night when I arrived we got sushi in Little Tokyo and walked around the civic center district. The area is apparently undergoing a rebirth, and the best evidence of that I saw was the heavy LAPD presence and some shiny new buildings like the Disney theater. A lot of the old hotels have been gutted and are being remodeled as apartments, and money seems to be pouring in. I had my new camera shipped to Mike's place, so I was playing with it as we walked. Most of the pictures didn't turn out very well (I hadn't figured out to change the ISO settings to shoot at night), but it was fun. When we went back to his place, we passed over the LA river and saw a rubble sorting facility. The air inside was filled with dust lit by flood lights, and pieces of heavy machinery were plucking tattered bits of plastic and broken stone from a big pile and moving them to smaller ones. There were people standing along a conveyor belt sorting things by hand. They also had guys spraying misters over the heaps to try to control the dust, and these huge sheets were dangling from the ceiling, supposedly to keep some of the floating particles contained. It was really surreal at first glance, so we walked back over after parking at Mikes (it was only 2 blocks away) and watched for a while.

6/22




On Friday I went for a run. Mike's apartment is in a warehouse in an industrial part of town (in case the heavy machinery didn't give it away), and for some reason I decided that running around the area was a good idea. Of course I went around noon, so the sun directly overhead meant everything was bleached and white and there was no shade to hide in. I knew that the temperature might be an issue, but when I left it was under 80 and I didn't really take relentless, brutal sunshine into account. Running around near a highway was new for me, and not very pleasant, but I'm glad I did it. I saw a lot of wholesalers and factories at work, loading trucks and operating machines and such. An awful lot of these buildings seem to be open to the street, so I peeked in as I went. I had mapped out my route online, but at some point 8th St. enters a giant factory complex with barbed wire and 'No Trespassing' signs. I want to know how big a company you have to be (or as my brother said, how long you have to have been there) before you get a portion of 8th street inside your facility. As far as I know the road resumes as normal when you leave the other side of their fence, but I didn't check it out.

After my run Mike and I went to lunch at a Vietnamese place that he knew of. The food was good and the noodles were cold, which was perfect in the heat. We ate outside (actually cooler than the inside), and the neighbor's cat spent the meal trying to climb my leg and swat bits of food off of the table. It should have been annoying, but the cat seemed smart and was very pretty, so it got away with being a sort of charming nuisance. There were also these guys in purple shirts who I'd started to notice during my run. They're some sort of public safety types, maybe city-funded rent-a-cops or something. They're unarmed, but they have radios and badges and ride around on bikes. I assume their job is to tell the Skid Row types to move along. Anyway, I had mentioned them to my brother, who didn't know what their job was, and then over lunch we saw a lanky white guy in full pimp regalia getting right up in one's face and yelling, "Fuck you!" repeatedly and with varying inflection. He ran off after shouting a few times. Then, later in the meal, a guy walking down the sidewalk carrying some sort of protest sign with only the words "Skid Row" visible yelled something about the "God damned purple-shirted pixies". Thankless job, I guess. There were two guys sitting at the table next to us. At one point I overheard one say, "So, have you read the script yet?" Only in LA, people.

When we finished lunch and got back to where we'd parked the car it was gone. A street sign, which of course we hadn't seen, prohibited parking from 3-7. My brother wanted to walk home and deal with it from there, but I convinced him to wander around to try to find the tow company's number on a sign. We didn't find it, and he went into a store to ask if they knew. The lady didn't, but she wondered why we hadn't asked the parking enforcement car that was visible through the window around the corner, where we'd just come from. It hadn't been there a moment ago, of course, but Mike sprinted out to catch it. He got a card from them with a phone number, then his call led to an address, and we started hiking. It was maybe a 20 minute walk away, which wasn't too bad, but combined with the rest of my day outside I ended up with a sunburn. Retrieving the car meant Mike had to pay a $100 towing fee and a $50 'administration fee', or rather LA's cut of the spoils. To add to the injury there was a $70 ticket on the windshield. The funny thing is that we had almost parked in a lot across the street from the meter for a $4 flat rate, and by the time we had put an hour's worth of quarters in the meter at a quarter per 10 minutes we barely would have saved anything. I'm usually pretty obsessive about checking signs, and my brother says he's the same, but our being lax this time cost him a ton of money.

6/23




On Saturday we went to the Getty Museum and drove around Mulholland Drive. I don't have much to say about either, but not because they weren't really cool. The Getty is on a hill and feels very distant from the city around it and the highway below. The art was great and the museum grounds were lush and green. There was a nice breeze and the sound of the fountains made you feel like you were out by a stream somewhere. Mulholland was twisty and peppered with unfathomably big houses and expensive cars, but it was sort of hard to see in the dark. We ended up getting off of it accidently before we'd seen the best of the lights, so hopefully we'll go back.

It's not broken, it's got added character

6/16

Driving from Maryland to Tennessee I saw a lot of deer: 4 dead (including one baby) and 2 alive (soon to be dead? I mean deer that hang out around a highway probably aren't long for this world.) After seeing all of the bodies I thought about what I'd do if I saw one.

"Ok. You see a deer. First establish which way it's going, then gently swerve in the opposite direction while tapping the brakes. You don't have ABS, remember to tap. Should I honk the horn or not? Fuck. The deer has started to turn around and run where you're now inevitably going. Car is about to hit the deer. Will your direction of motion keep you on the road? Good. Close your eyes until any sound of breaking glass is over. Open eyes and look around cracks and blood. Continue to apply brakes. Don't oversteer."

When my dad and I drove to Maine last week we'd just read an article about someone hitting a moose and dying, so of course that's what we worried about the whole time. I wasn't worried about other cars (which maybe I should have been, since Maine has a huge drunk-driving rate and it was late at night) but I was nervous about a moose.

After I stopped in Bristol for a break my car wouldn't start. It didn't turn over or anything, the lights just sort of dimmed, so it was obviously a starter motor problem. I tried to push start it, but failed miserably. I had to try to roll it backwards because of the hill available to me. Actually it was just a shallow incline, but when you're trying to push a car it seems important. I was sort of amazed how easy it actually was to move my car around. Anyway, it's hard to push start a car in reverse because of the gearing; you'd need a lot of speed. In the end I had to get someone to turn the key while I crawled under the car and whacked the starter motor with a socket wrench. It came to life immediately, so I guess that's good.

My car has acquired a great list of quirks.

-It has 3 doors: driver, passenger, and trunk. The left trunk hinge is broken, so when you open the trunk you have to actually hold it open or it'll close at a 45 degree angle and probably break the other hinge. I sometimes use an ice scraper to prop it open. When you close the trunk you sort of have to guide it down. The driver side door lock has recently decided not to unlock from the outside when you turn the key, so the only way into my car is by opening the passenger side door and reaching across to unlock the driver's side from the inside.

-I backed into a firepit in Acadia and killed my muffler, so now the car sounds like a Harley when you're accelerating. I figure people pay good money for that, so I should start a business. $100 and I'll customize your exhaust. I'll call it Firepit Mods and no one will be the wiser. Well, unless they look under the car and realize that their exhaust is now wired to the muffler.

-My tape deck, used to hook up my iPod and so of fundamental import, is broken. You have to give it a good, hard whack on the side in order to get the gears to click into place. That always amuses the passengers, especially when they don't get the whack right and I have to show them how to do it.

-Now my starter motor is officially on the fritz after this second time it hasn't started (the first was in Maine in March). I get to look forward to push starting it or banging on the starter motor a lot, I think.

-My windshield wiper arm springs are rusted out and so the arms don't push against the windshield very hard, so unless there's a lot of rain the wipers don't work well.

-The paint, once red, has faded to a matte pinkish color. When it's wet the color's pretty nice, but on a hot, sunny day it looks pretty ridiculous.

-It crunches when you downshift into 3rd gear. The synchros are sort of shot, and to keep it from being truly awful you have to ever so gently ease it down into gear, and even then it's uncomfortable.

I love my car, and I think all of the quirks actually make me more attached to it. Despite the flaws, the thing was doing 90 coming in on I-81 without an issue. It hugs the road, it sips gas, the brakes are... I don't know. Something positive that brakes can be described as doing. The brakes give you pause. They put a stop to doubts. The brakes work... maybe that's enough.

Roadtripping, eventually

6/14

So right now I'm sitting at my grandmother's house killing time. I was supposed to have been on the road right now, but my car's in the shop. I took it in yesterday to get the oil changed, and as we were picking it the mechanic told my dad and me that a CV joint was shot, that the boot had cracked and all of the grease was gone. He recommended getting it replaced, of course. The grease in part keeps it cool, and if it kept running hot it could cause the whole wheel to pop off. Or something. My own knowledge, my dad's experience, and just now my uncle all say that it's much more likely to run (poorly) forever without catastrophic failure. But my dad's paranoid, and mechanic said it'd be an hour and a half, so we had him do it. I said I'd come by in the morning to pick it up. Expected cost, $60-70 for the CV joint, 1.5 hours labor?

I got a call late last night saying that the CV joint was somehow fused to the wheel bearing, and he wanted me to call him back in the morning to tell him whether he should blowtorch them apart. I called at 8:30 (I had to get up at 8:30... Ugh.) and told him to do it. Added cost, ~$30 for the wheel bearing.

He called at 11:30 and said that the CV joint he'd ordered didn't fit and he'd asked for another. I called at 2:40 and he said it'd be half an hour, so I went by at 3:20. My car's still up on the lift without a wheel. Ugh. Turns out the replacement didn't work either, so the original CV joint, which had been rebuilt, was on its way back. That was maybe an hour ago, and I'm waiting to see how much longer it takes and how much it costs. Then I have to put air in my damn tires and power steering fluid in the reservoir, after that hopefully I'll be able to get on the road.

6/15

I'm at a Panera in Maryland now, waiting for Marshall to get off work and commute over here to meet up. I hate Panera, but they have couches, AC, and free wifi, so I guess I'll let them live when the revolution comes.

I finally got the car back at around 6 yesterday. After wiping down the steering wheel and the shifter (the mechanic had driven the thing around while wearing oily gloves) I took it for a test run around town and out onto the highway, taking sharp turns and driving fast and such. This was during rush hour, so the reality is that it took 30 minutes, 20 of which were spent waiting to exit the highway. I'm not quite sure what the idea of my test run was. I guess that if anything failed I'd be close to home and family with cars, but in the event of my wheel bearing or CV joint blowing out I'd probably lose control (and the wheel) and kill people. Not that the idea didn't appeal to me after sitting in stop and go traffic in Burlington, but at heart I truly am a peaceful man. Honest. I just curse a lot. And like guns. No, fuck it, I'm lying.

So I packed the car as quickly as possible, raced my grandmother through her obligatory last-minute photos (seriously, you've spent all week with me and taken photos in Maine and at graduation, how important are a few photos outside of the house?), and sped off. I had to stop to put air in my tires and get gas, which because I was late was a serious drag, but it turned into a minor blessing by the fact that I'd left my suit carrier at the house and my mother brought it downtown to me. Had I been on the highway I'd have had to turn around, and that would have sucked.

Leaving later than planned wasn't fun, but most of the traffic was gone, so I made great time. I was cruising at about 80mph at some point maybe 20 miles after leaving, and I noticed that my hood was starting to pop up and was shaking in the wind. I pulled over (which I've never actually had to do on a highway before) and closed it. Turns out the mechanic hadn't shut it properly, the bastard. I had these wonderful images of my hood popping up and blinding me, or maybe it'd rip off entirely at high speed and I'd be driving with an exposed engine compartment.
This wasn't actually that dramatic, but getting up to speed in the shoulder and back into traffic was interesting. I mean, my grandmother's car has a turbocharger, I think it's only fair that I should have one, too. Speaking of driving my grandmother's car, that's what I've been doing lately. So slowing down at the tollbooth with the music on loud I completely forget that I'm driving a manual and ignore the clutch. I stalled the thing right in front of the toll collector, who must have been laughing at the confused look on my face.

I hit about 30 minutes worth of traffic on 95 just outside of New York. Last time I went into NYC I took Merrit Parkway on the advice of someone stuck in traffic on 95 up ahead. It's a really beautiful 2 lane highway with lots of hills and curves, and the bridges that pass overhead are all unique and made of stone. I think what makes it fun to drive, though, is the fact that there are trees on either side, overhanging the road. If I ever make the Boston-NYC commute again I'm definitely going to take it, 95's just a huge drag.

New York was brief. I didn't find parking until like 11:30, and that was only after I'd given up on finding the correct side parking for Friday morning and had resigned myself to waking up at 8 to leave. The New Yorkers went to bed early, so I didn't actually get to do much more than say hi. Ah well.

The drive to Maryland was uneventful, but I was shocked that between the NJ turnpike toll, the George Washington Memorial Bridge toll, the Delaware toll, and a toll in Maryland I hit $13.85 in about 50 miles. Apparently in NJ it's illegal to have self-serve gas stations, too. Gas was still 20 cents cheaper than in Boston, even with the attendant, but full service stations make me uncomfortable.