ericboy's Diaryland Diary

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

\"Oh, I really hate you / Love Dumpling / You're shit's like chocolate cake and / your ass smells like a rose.\" - Static X

So, Monday, I'm awfully tired to begin with. I had spent most of Sunday night watching Bryen play PokeMon Colosseum, which is not only addictive to play but to watch, as well. When I finally snapped out of that, Becki called me and we talked for like an hour and twenty minutes or so. Finally, I go to bed at three a.m. or so.

I wake up four hours later and go to work. Work is fun and, for the most part, harmless. I get off work and catch the six bus to 30th and University, which I wake up for at the last minute. I hop on the 908 and take it to 5th and University, which, again, I wake up for in the nick of time. I go to rehearsal and the rest of the players and I rock the small stage for two and a half hours. We kicked so much ass. The show is going to be flawless when it hits on Friday. So, as we exit and everyone starts going their separate ways, Scott hangs back and waits for me since we walk to the same bus stop to head home. I tell him "Not tonight, man. I'm heading downtown to pick up a CD. I'll catch you tomorrow." I turn and start walking towards downtown. I'm humming tunes to myself of a non-descript nature and carrying the new onelinedrawing CD and a promo of Year of the Rabbit with me. I didn't bring my bag as my portable CD player is still on the fritz. I get to the downtown Border's and buy Static X's Wisconson Death Trip and all is well. I walk over to the mega-bus-stop at 3rd and Broadway and check the schedules. The 11 is due by in about twenty minutes, so I head over to Wendy's and get some food to go. I take it back to the stop, where an attractive young girl in a hoodie asks me if I have any change for the bus. I reach into my left pocket and scoop out all of the change. I pull out a quarter for my own fare and deposit the rest in her hand. I sit down and eat my fries first, then start on my burger. With three bites to go, the bus arrives. I wrap it up, put it in the bag, fold the bag down, and get on the bus. I put the drink between my feet, the bag between my right foot and the wall, the CDs in my lap, and I rest my head on the molding between two windows. And we're off.

Despite the fact that my head bounces off the wall each time we traverse the neglected streets of inner-city San Diego and is throbbing with the intensity of my libido on a Saturday night, and the fact that I'm self-conscious about the drink between my feet, I manage to fall asleep. I wake up when the driver says "Last stop. Everyone off."

With growing horror and trepidation, I step off of the bus. I'm deposited in front of a closed liquor store with a Windmill Water kiosk in the parking lot. I look around. I have no idea where I am.

Refusing to panic, I eat the last of my burger and throw the trash in a proper receptacle. I theorize that if I merely retrace the route of the bus, by going from designated stop to stop, I can make my way back. So, I start walking in the direction opposite from the bus' when it let me out. The first sign I come across says "You are now Leaving San Diego, America's Finest City". This can't be good I say to myself, but I press on, as my logic is infallible. The next sign that I pass says "Welcome to SkySomething Something, an unincorporated community of San Diego". I realize that I am willingly walking into a neighborhood so shitty that even San Diego won't claim it. It is at this point that I realize that I have stepped into The Twilight Zone. I turn around.

I go to a 7-11, throwing my now-empty Wendy's cup in a proper receptacle, and ask if they have any maps. The counter person eyes me suspiciously as I pull soemthing out of my belt-line, but eases as I set my Borders bag with three CDs on the counter. He asks me what I said.

Me: "Do you have any maps?"

He: "To buy or to look at?"

Me: "Oh, to look at, I guess. I'm just lost and need to find out how to get home."

He pulls out a Thomas Guide map of San Diego County. I look outside at the intersection: Paradise Valley Ave and Worthington St. Page 1291, grid A4. I turn to that page, and there is a black ink circle where we are. Good, I think. They know where we are. This is a good start.

I look at the map, but it's like looking at a map of a starlight mint. I have no idea what the Hell is going on or where I am. To the left of our location is an intricate system of streets that I'd never heard of before. To the right, a blinding expanse of yellow, meaning that the makers of the map don't know or care what's out there. In my current situation, that yellow represents the edge of the Universe. And my Sanity. I ask the guy for help.

The guy is a really nice and personable Asian fellow, whose nose is the most disfigured human extremity I'd ever seen. Either 750 years of binge drinking had caused the capillaries to burst and release an acid onto his face or he'd spent four years getting his face bashed in three times a day for giving bad directions. In hindsight, I think it was the latter.

"Okay, so that's Paradise Valley Avenue. You just want to keep going that way on there and then take a left onto Woodman and follow it until it dead-ends into MLK Drive and then go right, then it should take you here." He points to the map and I see a few streets that I recognize.

"Sounds like a plan," I say. "Thanks a lot. Have a good one." And with my faith restored in humankind, I take off walking.

Now, at this point, I should have either called Bryen and asked him to come get me or called a cab and payed for a ride home. I did neither because Bryen's car was acting up a lot lately and, more importantly, I had NO IDEA where the fuck I was! So, back to me walking.

Now that I have a game plan, I'm no longer tentatively meandering. I'm taking deliberate strides and going at it, full-tilt-boogie. Immediately, I start to develop a stitch in my left side. Great. I take in my surroundings: To the right I see mountains in the distance and sparse lighting. To the far left I see a sprawling metroplex of life. In my immediate point of view I see.. nothing. Paradise Valley is most likely the least-fitting name to be applied to this place. It was a valley, all right. But by no stretch of definition was it fucking paradise. In fact, the more I stumbled down the beaten side of the road, where there was no sidewalk, the more I was convinced that this was Hell. And it was much colder than I'd expected. And far less populated.

I find Woodman Street sooner than I expected, with which I had no problem. I'm walking in that direction when I see signs advertising the neighborhood of South Bay Hills. South Bay? I thought I was really far east. Oh well. Doesn't matter. I'm on my way to ML...

Highway 54?

MLK Drive is the affectionate petname for Highway 54, a very useful conduit for East San Diegans to get into Central San Diego... in a car! As a pedestrian, it presents to me: absolutely nothing. Shit.

So, I turn around and start heading west into South Bay Hills, hoping to hop, skip, and jump my way west in the back roads alongside the 54.

I spent at least an hour and a half trying to get out of that goddamned, but wonderfully planned and landscaped, neighborhood. Occasionally streets would apex at the top of a hill, allowing for beautiful views of the community and a faint glimmer of downtown waaaaaaaay off in the distance. At one point, after urinating on a bush, I spent a good deal of time just looking down on the neighborhood. It was straight from Tim Burton's Edward Scissorhands. The houses were pleasantly spaced from each other with beautifully manicured lawns and numerous parks and pools and community gathering spots. It was really lovely. So lovely, in fact, that I was certain that at some point I would be harrassed by cops for being there, walking, in the middle of the night. And I welcomed that.

One squad car drove by and flashed his spot on me, but then cruised by without care. I tried to run after him, but the cool night air had taken the fight out of me. I don't know why he didn't stop. I was wearing kakhis and a blue button-up shirt, respectable enough. But, Christ, I have a four-inch long goatee and I'm wearing a Harry Potter hat! Not to mention that I have a discreet red plastic bag that contains what could be three CDs or a really fat and stale sandwich or a bomb! This is about the time that I contemplated either kicking mailboxes, screaming out biblical names, or killing a small woodland creature and covering myself in its blood. Anything to get the cops to come back so I could say "Hey, I want to get out of this neighborhood as much as you want me out of here, so how about you give me a ride to the western outskirts of here, yeah?" Alas, my niceties won in the end.

Eventually I found a road leading out of there and ended up in another place called Paradise Valley. This manifestation was far closer to the way I imagine paradise than the previous. There were tall, beautiful buildings of breathtaking scope and architecture, a park with stone altars and archways, and flowers of each color in the rainbow. Perhaps it only appealled to me because I'd been walking for two hours, but it was nice. I passed by the Paradise Valley Sanitarium, and briefly considered checking myself in. I found a map for the 602 bus route. Not much on the map looked familiar except for Euclid Avenue and, of course, a highly informative arrow that said "North". I deduced from the map that Euclid Avenue would take me northwest, which was the perfect (and only, really) combination of the directions in which I wanted to head. So I started walking, half-assed relieved that I might actually be on my way to something near a passageway home.

The excitement wore off quickly when the next sign that I passed announced that I was in National City. National City was another place that I'd never been to before that night, but at least I knew of it. And what I knew of it was that it was really far southeast of everything that I knew and loved. I quickly realized that nothing was going to get me out of the situation any faster, so I just kept walking.

At one point, about a mile or two from the Euclid Trolley Station, I passed a market that was open twenty-four hours. A hooded black man in the parking lot greeted me when my glance caught him.

"What up, player?"

How you doing?

"Hey, dog, let me speak at you a second."

Dude, I don't have time. I've been walking for about four hours now and I'm tired.

"Slow up, dog. Just hold on a second." He was making his way over to me. I didn't want to run away from the guy; that's just plain mean. I wasn't scared of him, at all; I just didn't want to talk to anybody. I wanted to go home and lay the fuck down and go the fuck to sleep before I had to get up and go the fuck to work the next fucking day. My agitation shone through in my speech patterns.

What, man? What the fuck do you want?

"Chill, dog. My name's Ice." Ice offered me a fist to pound. I pounded. "Hey, man, I just need someone to help me out, man. I'm just trying to scatch together some money for a hotel room, man. My socks are all wet from wearing 'em and walking around for the past two days, dog. Ya understand?"

Yeah. No lie, there. I did. Look, man. I've got a dollar in cash on me. I fished it out, This, also, was true. I had spent two dollars and the quarter that I held back to fund this roller-coaster ride to Hell and I had only a dollar in cash left and my ATM card. I handed him the dollar. And it's yours. Hang in there.

"Thanks a lot, man. I appreciate it, dog. Hey, if I ever see you again, maybe I can help you out next time."

In a very funny and very, very sad way, I realized that his offer was a true and plausible reality. At the rate things had been going this past week, I could find myself in the situation where Ice could help me.

Cool. Stay up, Ice.

"Peace out, dog."

I walked on. After a while, Euclid stopped being the bustling avenue of business district glory and became a dark, street-lamp-less stretch of cold country road. The kind of barren outer-city streets that axe-murderers like to chill on the side of, lying in wait for unsuspecting prey. I was reminded of Stephen King's and Peter Straub's Black House wherein a young boy is snatched by an escaped mental patient in the bushes that run along the road just outside the asylum's fence. When reading it and picturing it in my head, it looked exactly like the house that was to my right then, and the bushes were full and dense and capable of hiding anything. For a good half hour of my journey, I was scared shitless.

Before long, I came upon University Boulevard. That was not only a name that I recognized, but a street that I had intimate relations with. A great sense of relief washed over me as I turned left, and within two street crossings I was able to ascertain that I was only thirty-four blocks away from being at my front door. And after all I had been through, that was child's play.

Now that I knew that an end was in sight, my adrenaline dissipated into my bloodstream and my survival instincts went back into whatever latent corner they hang out in, and my body finally started catching up on the damage accrued from this journey. My right foot ached, my thighs bounced with spasms, and my arms became useless noodles attatched to my body at the shoulder. Delerium kicked in, and I found myself several times frightened by my own shadow.

I made it home. In my room, my clock read 4:52am. Two hours of sleep before getting up to go to work. I laid down and every muscle, and I mean every muscle, in my body began to throb. Even my gums were throbbing. How in the Hell are your gums gonna throb after walking for five hours? That just don't make no damn sense!!!

The really sad part: There's no sense of discovery in this Static X album. I've owned it before. I sold it last year when I had no job. It's good; don't get me wrong. But it's not worth all that I went through.

Let's face it, kids: Nothing is!!

I haven't even listened to it, yet. But, I'm pretty familiar with it. The title of this entry is some of Wayne Static's brilliant songwriting.

10:25 p.m. - 2004-04-20

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

previous - next