L.A. Story
Thursday, July 21
On Thursday morning, I awoke to find the Professor preparing to leave for his lab. The important thing here is, the Professor has a lab! (And I got to see it on Saturday!) Around noon, Steeze, the Belle, and I drove to Santa Monica. We dropped her off at the aquarium where she has an internship and got the nickel tour. it's a tiny littel aqaurium right on the beach that pimarily caters to school groups. Man, kids have to love that place. Science! Because she only had to work for a few hours, Steeze and I decided to tool around instead of returning to BTWest.

We stopped of lunch at El Cholo and our waitress freaked out over my T-shirt (it reads: "The Aquabats! The Last Great American Band"). Apparently, she was herself a fan of The Aquabats!, though oddly enough she didn't know that they are still together. Truly a shame, since they do more touring in SoCal than anywhere else and had she applied herself she probably could have seen a quite a few times over the past few years. We continued driving around Santa Monica and Steeze pointed out all the post-production and editing service companies located there. Yeah, based on the exteriors they all could have housed accounts and loan adjusters. We drove around Hollywood, and as we passed Paramount, the only movie studio still in Hollywood proper, I mourned the recent death of Star Trek.

Fun fact about Hollywood: if you want to use the w.c. in any of the fast food restaurants, you first have to buy something. The doors all sport elaborate locks and only paying customers receive the magic token to gain entrance. Despite these precaustions, the walls are still covered in grafitti. The only difference from Michigan? The grafitti is in Spanish!

We picked up the Belle and drove to the house where she is officially staying this summer, though in practice she lives at BTWest. She picked up a few items and told her sponsors she'd be back after the weekend and then we returned to BTWest. The only thing I truly hated about LA was the traffic on the freeways. And not even really the traffic, but the resignation with which everyone faces it. I am well aware of the blood pressure-raising futility of getting angry at traffic congestion, but fucking come on, people! Going 35 miles per hour on an expressway is unacceptable, yet my compaions all seemed grateful that we weren't at a complete standstill. Yes, traveling at 35 mph is much better than not moving at all, but what the fuck ever happened to standards?

Steeze and I did some brainstorming about Serma 6, a comic book idea he's been working on for a year or so, and the Belle did an admirable job concealing her boredom and bemusement at two grown men trying to figure out the motivations of fictional teenagers on an alien planet. After the Professor returing home (from the lab!), he and I discovered Kofi Annan's blog. The secretary-general's quite a weird guy.

We ordered pizza for dinner (I keep mentioning where we ate not because I'm obsessed with food, but because we really didn't do many touristy things; so, restaurants are the prinicple places I went outside of BTWest) and spent most of the night playing Risk. I rolled very poorly; so, I don't want to talk about it.

Friday, July 22
The day of The Island! I journeyed to California so that I could see the Professor and K. Steeze, but the timing of the trip was determined by the premiere of the movie The Island, on which Steeze worked as a post-production assistant. Still, we had plenty of day to utilitze before the evening's festivities.

Again, I woke up when the Professor was going off to work, but this morning that did not mean I was up before Steeze and the Belle of Texas. The left to drop Steeze's car, the Pirate Boat 2000, off at the shop to have it's air conditioning system repaired. As I was still groggy, I decided to stay home. It was kind of weird beign on a completely foreign apratment all by myself, but I took the opportunity to take a shower, shoot some pictures, and write in my journal.

Shortly after they returned (all the driving we had done to this point had been in the Belle's as yet unnamed car), we headed off to Home Despot to commence a new art project, Three Doors Down: Circle, Stripe, Sock. Originally, it was titled Three Doors Down. When Steeze showed me the design, three separate illustrations to be hung side by side by side, I instictively labeled them "Circle", "Stripe", and "Sock" just so I would know about which one we were speaking at a given time. Steeze found this hilarious, so Circle, Stripe, Sock was added to the title.

BTWest is a sadly stereotypical adult apartment; I won't lie, I'm disappointed in Kevin and Jon. Neither one has a single decoration in his bedroom, and precious little light. It's a loft and so there are only four rooms: foyer/kitchen/main room; two bedrooms, one of which they built themselves (quite impressive, that); and a water closet. They've painted the main room quite a fetching shade of maroonish red and it has adequate light (though more would be better), but their bedrooms? I go back and forth between creepy and just plain sad. The one decoration in the main room is a series of twelve small canvases arranged four across and three high, painted in the pattern of a gray rectangle surrounded by a white border. In typically glorious BTW fashion, it is titled The Deconstruction of Western Civilization as We Don't Know It and I am rather fond of it.

But now I am off to eat dinner, and after that it's Sci Fi Friday; so, Friday shall be concluded another time. Next time on "L.A. Story": the Triumph of the Narwhal!