June 9, 2001

The morning sun comes in, and I get up because I'm blinded.  Not because I want to get up.  No, see, I'm depressed, we've established that, and I've tumbled headlong into the pit of despair and I have every right to stay in bed all day long and do nothing except eat crap.  Except I'm the kind of person that doesn't eat when I'm depressed.  Takes too much energy to chew.  Liquids only.  So begins my drunken binge, ha ha ha.

But depression on a vacation does not fly very well so I muster enough energy to follow Ethan wherever he wants to go.  We hike around the little town for awhile, take in the kitschy little stores selling dreamcatchers made out of polished rocks and stuff.  In all honesty, I'm a little culture shocked.  I mean, there are TREES here.  There's GRASS here.  It's not just miles and miles and miles of asphalt, strip malls, and attitude.  It's times like this that you remember, oh yeah, there's a whole other world outside of L.A.  The rest of the world doesn't look like L.A.

L.A. just seals you off.  It's like Logan's Run.  You don't know there's another world out there until you stumble upon an exit, and then you're just standing looking at everything with gaping mouths.  I start wondering aloud to Ethan what it would be like to live out here, to make your living out here.  How easy it would be to buy some cute little place and cater to the tourist crowd.  Forget the trucker bar in Texas fantasy, buy some seafood shack out here and shuck oysters all day.  I could deal with that.  I could deal very well with that.  I wouldn't need a crowd of regulars, everybody would just be there for a few days on vacation and gone again.  I'd close up at 2 in the morning, maybe take moonlight walks down the beach, fall asleep with the window open, letting the ocean be the soundtrack to my dreams.  I could sit and watch the world pass by my oyster shack.  People on vacation are probably easier to deal with.  Especially the people around here.  Almost everybody here is a couple.  Almost everybody here is happy to be with the person they're with.  You could impress a different person every day with your dreamcatchers.