June 2, 2001

I drive Ashley and Aussie Bob to the airport.  Ethan wanted to come, but I told him this was a best friend thing.  "Aren't I your best friend?" he says, a little wounded.  "Sure you are,"  liar!, "But I've know Ashley longer."   Liar liar liar liar.

I stare at the road ahead.  Ashley's chortling about how easy it was to slough off so much of her stuff.  She sold a lot of her crappy college furniture to crappy college students "Continuing the cycle," she says.  She's decided that everyone should be able to compress their life so it can fit into three, okay four suitcases.  So you can pick up and go whenever you want.  She thinks it would make a lot of life's decisions easier, knowing that wherever you went, whatever you wanted to buy, it would have to fit in four suitcases.  We're shooting down south La Cienega, and she's not even looking out the back window, no good-byes to the place she's spent the past three years at.

We get to the airport and have about an hour and a half before the plane takes off.  We hunker down by CPK and order every gross thing on the menu.  I can always count on Ashley to do things like eat really bad-for-you food like cheesesticks and make no bones about calories or cholesterol or oh-my-gosh-I'm-not-eating-for-the-rest-of-the-week, or excuse-me-while-I-run-to-the-bathroom-real-quick.

She and Aussie Bob are already pounding the beer, hell it's an international flight, I would too, and I'm chomping away on the pizza, and she looks at me for a second and say,s "I think it would be when we got the chalk and drew the choo choo train on the sidewalk.  Remember?"  And I look at her, of course I remember.  We got unbelievably trashed one night, and Ashley wakes up all bright as a button the next morning and says we have to get some chalk.  So we go to the 99 cent store and get some strange looking color chalk and plop down outside my apartment and draw on the sidewalk all day long.