Safely crossing over the Rocky Mountains despite the falling snow, I stopped for the night in the town of Idaho Falls, Colorado (which just seems intentionally confusing.)
The balcony off the back of my room looked out across a small river at a mountain.
I love the Alpine ski lodge aesthetic, but Vale seems to suffer the same problem that the Grand Californian hotel at Disneyland does: it’s a lodge aesthetic metastasized to a monstrous scale.
I woke up to find this strange substance frosting over the top of my car. Never seen anything like it. Not sure if this frosting has a name, so I’ve decided to call it “morning sparkles”!
Driving across country always makes me think of the American Odyssey aspect of Lolita.
Just realized that going up and over the Grapevine into the Central Valley is the California analog of going up and over the Rocky Mountains into the Great Plains.
I’m heading eastward to see some friends & family, visit some great American sites I’ve never visited before, and to do a little genealogical research along the way.
The more I think about it, the more I believe that there is always a choice. A choice between escape and reality.
Escape can take many, many different forms, but reality is the thing that won’t go away.
I found this Note on my phone from the morning after my father passed away. I think I grossly underestimated the amount of things we were going to have to do.
At my father’s memorial gathering, I was struck by the view of the moon over the apartment building next door from the Young family home.
From Hamlet Act I scene ii:
“‘Tis sweet and commendable in your nature, Hamlet,
To give these mourning duties to your father;
But you must know, your father lost a father;
That father lost, lost his, and the survivors bound
In filial obligation for some term
To do obsequious sorrow…”
At the end of the Young family memorial gathering for my father, my Aunt Barbara, Uncle Jonathan, Aunt Andrea and her husband got up to play & sing this song. They said that “My Little Buckaroo” was a lullabye that my grandmother had sung to my father when he was a child. A lullabye that, later, she didn’t sing to her other five children. A lullabye just for him.
Per my father’s wishes. A beautiful spot, in view of the Hollywood sign and, in the other direction, looking out across L.A. to the Pacific.
The family wore Aloha shirts in homage to him. Just for the day, I wore his Universal Studios monster shirt—covered with Dracula, Frankenstein, the Wolfman, and the Mummy—which my brother had given to him as a gift and which he loved.
In the background of the memorial gathering we had for him at the Youngs’ old family home on Valley Spring Lane, we played the two songs that he had specifically requested: Frank Sinatra’s “When the Wind Was Green” and Gato Barbieri’s “Europa”.
I’ve been studying the Daoists recently and it’s gotten me thinking a lot about enantiodromia: the tendency of things to become their opposites.
I’m astonished I’ve never run into this Japanese word before: