Oh, lazy, fat-cat Americans like me, spoiled yet again by paradise--er, and by paradise, I mean the free post-apocalyptic environment of blackish brown smooth hills dotted with the construction paper black skeletons of trees. From here to Lake Arrowhead (almost a hundred miles), this is the genuinely glorious sight on either side of the 15 freeway, not to mention the crusty black scalps of land hugging the winding road leading up to the mountain that Lake Arrowhead calls home.
Lake Arrowhead--cold. Quite cold. Especially in the hotel room where my mother laughed at our craziness with the heater and sagely turned the device down to a perfectly sane 60 degrees (my mother tends to be too warm).
It's easy to kill an hour or two in the cute little "village" (read "mall") within walking distance of the hotel. It was there that I ate at a restaurant that had--judging from autographed photos about the place--previously served David Prowse, William Shatner, and, most incredibally, Lani "Captain Crais" Tupu! Someone at the Casa Coyote had proudly presented Tupu with a Farscape production photo for him to put his John Hancock on! This thrilled me lots. And it's fun to say Lani Tupu.
The drives sucked because I largely had to put up with my mother's insistence on playing a live Eagles CD over and over (I do sort of like "Desperado" and "Hotel California," but if a band's live performance tends to be a collection of their greatest hits, to me that says something). During "The Girl From Yester-day", by mother and sister agreed that it was silly to cry over a lost love and that anyone who did it was a loser. After all, there was always someone else at the party.
With triumphant laughter, my mother informed us that breaking up was a time when one essentially announced, "Next!"
Echoing her laughter, I rejoined with my oft-undetected sarcasm, "Yeah, totally! The idea of someone being irreplacable is preposterous as it is of course predicated upon the idea that people are unique! Ha ha, what a tired fallacy!"
What reply any member of my family may've had to my comment shall never be known because at that time we rounded a corner and saw the aftermath of a rather severe car accident featuring an expensive black sports car with a hood crumpled like a soda can. We were forced to park in another shopping centre so let's shop more, hurrah!
The bulk of my time was spent in the hotel room reading, mostly Caitlin R. Kiernan stuff. I finished the brilliant Threshold which combined interesting, tormented characters who exchanged dialogue that got me in a way somehow similer to the way dialogue got me in Citizen Kane, with a great, slimy dark, dark something underneath it all that was mysterious and mythos-ish. Especially mythos-ish as I spent a lot of time in the hotel room also reading stories from Caitlin's Tales of Pain and Wonder relating to Threshold's characters and something.
Speaking of Caitlin, that lovely woman has put a bunch of my manga and stuff on her Nebari.net in my absence, and oy, was it ever a nice thing to come home to.
I think I'll go out and buy Low Read Moon now . . . Or at least, as soon as I catch up with correspondences and things.
Oh! And happy Thanksgiving (it's occured to me that poultry is the worst smelling thing in the world. Why do people wanna eat something that smells like raw sewage? Maybe my vegetarian olfactory is biased . . .).
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