The Vegas Adventure

We hitched from San Francisco to Ventura in two days. We got a few rides from women, one a mother and one a psychic, and the rest were men of different, casual occupations. Our night on the road was spent in a field about 50 yards off from a truck stop parking lot. We were surrounded by trees and the ground was soft. The late night employee offered us free showers and hot dogs but we opted for coffees to save for the morning.

Once in Ventura, we got all cleaned up. We sat around my sisters house and watched movies and "I Love New York" on VH1 (for which we're having a "new episode" party tonight, nachos and champagne, the whole house). That's about it.

SO WE WENT TO VEGAS!!!!!!!!

Vegas is the toxic shit on the bottom of my shoe.

Let's see. My aunt Laura's wedding to Mr. Ken Aydelott was fun and great. I love ceremonies and rituals that reinforce love. We saw David Spade after the wedding, he was in a golf cart at the country club. Leanne's first celebrity sighting! Ha.......

But really, Vegas is a city that only humans could survive in. There is no sustainable anything on that little island of neon, and you can't get a bight to eat for under $10. Luckily we picked up some beers before we got to the strip to keep us rightfully buzzed (when I was sober in Vegas I wanted to cry constantly). But even so, CASINOS ARE THE WORST POSSIBLE PLACE TO HAVE A HANGOVER, AND EVERY HOTEL IS A GODDAMN CASINO. I almost puked all over my $12 omelett. What is more, Vegas is so densely populated with tourists that I couldn't make it 10 feet without high-fiving some college bro. So I wore my sunglasses and kept my head down so all that I had to deal with was "WHATS THE MATTER? YOURE IN VEGAS!!! WOOOOOOOOOOOOOO" which was just ridiculous enough to be tolerable in it's irony. Thanks to Grandma for providing my entire family with everything, by the way.

We're back in Ventura now, about to head back north.

Le Foto

My sister, Mz Alison Virginia Knox, came to the bay to document a lil of our day-to-day. She's a photographer, so it goes. Here's a few of my favorite pictures she took, drastically resized, and a few very slightly altered by myself (probably a major offense, but for the sake of resizing I felt it helpful... errrr... uh... ok).

Goodbye burn-outs, surfers, hydrogen punks...

Well, well, well. I made it into November with my heart still stuck in October. I loved San Francisco.


Anyway, so about a week and a half ago, Leanne and I decided to take a vacation from the industrial waste dump and ride on down to Santa Cruz. Oh, Santa Cruz, you treat us well, so long as we never have to consider paying rent in your general area. We spent our first night in the redwood forest surrounding the UCSC campus, checking out all the little squats built throughout the location and clumsily hopping the ten-foot fence into the dining hall come night time. I actually broke the fence while climbing over it, causing a loud "CRACK," which generated lots of head turns and stares from the college folk. I waved and rolled over and dropped the ten feet, and ran into the dining hall, promptly taking off my sweater and disappearing into a sea of buffet-goers. It was a delicious meal filled with spinach and the now dreaded tofu. My belly is apparently completely over digesting the bean curd.

So we wake and make breakfast in the student lounge. Our friend Konstantin tells us of a train we can hop that will take us to a beach eight miles north. It comes through three days a week around noon, usually rolling at a walking pace. Well it was a running pace on this beautiful Friday afternoon, and I felt it to be a little too fast for my on-the-fly abilities. Four kids caught it and we decided to meet them up the coast via hitching the 1. So we got there in a half-hour, thanks to a woman testing her new power-steering fluid and needing a reason to drive around (like picking up hitch-hikers, you see). The beach was fabulous, some kid played fiddle, I played with my video camera, and the rest tried to swim naked. I thought that was absolutely ridiculous because I dislike swimming in cold water and the Pacific, these days, ain't warm.

Waiting for the train


We hitched back to town only to hitch four miles north again come nightfall for a post-apocalyptic themed guerrilla theater showing down on the beach. They projected Twilight Zones and animations on the cliff while we all shivered in our sleeping bags around the burn-barrells. about 15 of us camped out on the sand, Leanne and I were the last to wake in the morning. It was only 9 am but we were alone. Then, as if we had made it to heaven, two separate people came down to give us coffee and pastries. All fed and caffeinated, we decided to stay on the beach til our skin was about to fry right off our bones. We went back to Santa Cruz proper for one more night in the redwoods and then hitched back to San Francisco in the morning.






So I'm writing now from Ventura, where I am sun-burnt, bleach blond, and wearing my sisters clothes. Clean and well fed, I'm ready to get dirty again... but that'll have to wait till after my aunt gets married in Vegas this weekend.