I'm in L.A.

"If you stare too long into the abyss, eventually the abyss will begin to stare back"
--- (something like that, I'm paraphrasing) Fred Nietzsche


I'm half way to Seattle. Stopped off in L.A. for few days. Toby and I stopped in Joshua Tree:








Joshua Tree is a weird alien landscape like you're literally on Mars. It's bad-butt.













Now I'm in L.A. There's all these damn plants here. So much luxuriating plant life that it's hard to know how to handle it. There is this duality though where everything in L.A. seems overgrown with the sheer abundance of plant-life spilling over everywhere, but at the same time, it seems to all be dying away and unhealthy. I guess it's partly because nothing here grows naturally. It's supposed to be a big dead desert, but they artificially threw a crazy city here anyway. Like the city is overgrown with vibrant plants that are also all dying. I brought this up to my friend, and he told me that it is rumored that all palm trees in L.A. are supposed to be dying in the next few years. The story goes that all the palms were planted roughly 70 years ago, and that is also about the expected life-span of those trees. So they are all starting to die off. Could be a total lie.

So tomorrow I'm leaving for Seattle with possible stops in Big Sur and places like that. I wanted to go The La Brea Tar Pits and throw in a microwave or something. If you translated "The La Brea Tar Pits" into straight English, it would be: "the the tar tar pits." I've told this joke 100 times today.

Also there are more ads for more movies here than anywhere else I have ever seen in my life combined. Toby said it's like preaching to the choir. I certainly don't get it. I'm sure it's some sick incestuous Hollywood marketing thing where they have to prove to themselves that they are really trying. They have to justify their own exorbitant advertising budgets to the other suits, and that. I imagine some dudes driving around in convertibles deciding whether some other guys in convertibles are doing a good enough job with all the ad money for Transformers 2. If they subliminally see enough bill boards and bus ads then they feel pretty good about things, and they can comfortably go back to thinking about speed boats.