SubOakland 3

Other drawings/paintings around the area:

SubOakland 2

There were some drawings/scribblings next to the shanty. One of them said "Be Free". This is the most interesting one:This one was on the pillar next to the shanty. Behind the shanty, there was some trash and what looked like feces smeared onto the pillar.

SubOakland

Found a shanty today.

Hopefully, you can see the "Babies-R-Us" and the "Home Depot" in the background as the industrial wasteland of West Oakland blurs into the outdoor shopping mall of Emeryville.

Surf Rock

I found footage of the surf rock show I went to on youtube:

The Deadbeats





and The Tomorrowmen




my favorite is that you can hear someone in the audience shouting "HEY-OH" in the second Deadbeats clip.

Voyage 15

This is the cottage where Ingrid and I stay. When she saw me for the first time after 2 1/2 months, she didn't recognize me, with my beard, ripped shirt and pants, and feather necklace.

I told her I came down from the mountains.

Voyage 14

I don't know if you can see the small photo on the far left, but this was taken in the Adirondacks, in Old Forge. In the photo there's a deer walking next to a gas station pump. Nobody thought it was strange.

The photo in the middle was taken at a show Ingrid and I went to on Mischief Night at the Stork Club. The music scene out here is very different than it is in the rest of the country. The first band we saw at the Stork Club played music that is kind of like emo music made by people who listened to early emo music in the nineties. The other band played Bay Area punk, which I guess sounds like Green Day or the Offspring. I hate those bands, but this band that played captured me, as they covered CCR's "Bad Moon Rising", the Motown Marevelettes song "Please Mr. Postman", Black Flag's "Nervous Breakdown," and part of "Crazy Train". The band, Vitamin Party, played half of "Crazy Train", then stopped, saying they didn't remember the rest. They also covered a Devo song and Outkast's "Hey Ya!".

After they played these covers, they came back and played their band's material. The audience was older, Gen X'ers, those who spent their 20s in the nineties and they were mostly in costume. Hearing the people who considered themselves punk in the late 80s and 90s made sense to me, but was something I'd rarely experienced. What was great was there was someone dressed up as campy, 60s Batman, who had American Spirits and a lighter in his utility belt, and would get up on stage, rest his elbow on an amp and drink a 24 oz Pabst can with another, while he bopped his head to the music. Then he put a cigarette up his nose and when the music died down said, "What?" At the end of the show he got a hold of one of the guitarist's guitars, wherein the drummer said, "Can someone please take the guitar away from Drunk Batman?"

One thing I've noticed about being out here is that the people are a lot nicer across the board. Whether I'm in the black working-class neighborhood of West Oakland, where Ingrid and I live, or the Mission, the historically hip district, people are more willing to talk to strangers, say hi, and be pleasant.

Sunday, I went to a Surf rock show, which was awesome and could never happen on the East coast. Bands seem to love to dress up in costume in the Bay. And guys dance a lot more than they do in the East. And play air guitar/drums.

The sign that says, "Caspers", on it was taken of a hot dog fast food restaurant in Oakland. Oakland still has a lot of these 50s/60s restaurants and buildings, like burger joints with "Giant 1/4 lb. Burgers". Oakland sort of feels like a West Coast Detroit. There hasn't been a lot of development or redevelopment in the 70s, 80s, or 90s. There's been some condos, but the downtown is mostly abandoned and the city is rundown as a whole.

The other major different thing about California is that not only are the people less angsty and vain than they are on the East Coast, I've smelled weed everyday I've been here. Also, in Mid Market San Francisco, the only people out on the streets at night are crazy people or drug addicts or crazy drug addicts who are all middle aged.

Voyage 13

This bridge is one of the bridges to the Bay, affectionately called the Yay.

After waking up next to Battle Mountain, I drove through Nevada, through Reno. Reno is a horrible city, full of ugly middle aged people desperately trying to gamble into their ugly view of the good life.

I expected to find a cheap buffet at a casino, but everything was too pricey for lunch, so I ate at Mel's Diner and left.

These mountains are the Sierra Nevadas. I felt very happy when I saw the sign that told me I had entered California.

I-80 at this point changed from being very flat and straight to being windy and circuitous as I raced up and down the Sierra Nevadas.

Voyage 12

I pitched my tent in a dusty field near Battle Mountain, Nevada. This mountain is Battle Mountain. This is the first thing I saw when I unzipped my tent at sunrise.

Rouge slept with me in the tent. At first, he slept against my legs. When I woke up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, I saw Rouge shivering, so I put him in my sleeping bag when I went back to sleep. It was in the high 20s that night.

I slept next to a trailer park.

Before I got to Battle Mountain to crash, I visited Salt Lake around 7 PM.

I've been to Salt Lake when I was around 8 and the city seemed bigger than what I remember. I ate at a Carl's Jr because I'd never been to one before. There were a lot of middle aged homeless people in Salt Lake, as there was in Boulder. One of the homeless in Carl's Jr. looked at me like I was also crazy, with my beard, torn shirt, smell, and feather necklace.

I stopped at Love's across the country to fuel my voyage.

Voyage 11

These are last images of time in WY. I took a nap on the ground next to these rocks on the bottom picture. I used a rock to shield myself from the cold wind.

Voyage 10

These photos are from the Wyoming/Colorado area.

The pickup truck carrying the dog was going 85 mph.

The big green thing is a tank.

Voyage 9

Luckily, John and I hiked up a nice mountain to get a view of the town. I needed the exercise, because, although my legs were recovering from the excessive hiking in the Adirondacks, their continual disuse made my body and mind feel foggy and unconnected.

John and I got ribs from a shack near his dorm where an old black man who cut Martin Luther King Jr.'s hair served us moldy white bread. The ribs were good. Mine were a little dry. Not crazy about the mold. I'm glad John pointed it out to me. The rib place was also strange because there were all these pictures of black calvarymen and cowboys. I guess that's how things go in the West.

At night, John and I went to this function called "Drunk Poet's Society," affectionately called by one of his roommates, "DPS".

The meeting was cute: it was a bunch of literary nerdy types who were really nice and drunk and read poems that were earnest and confused. I might have like it better if I was a freshman in college, but maybe not. I was also afraid the older poets in Philadelphia grew up in environments like this, where their art work was uncritical though super-earnest. I wish more environments like "Drunk Poet's Society" exist, because although the poetry could be better, better poetry could grow from environments like these.

The next morning I woke up super early, ate at the IHOP, and left town for California. I knew I had eleven hours of straight driving left. This photo of a car had a parrot in it in the IHOP parking lot.

Voyage 8

When I got to Boulder, I felt really weird from staying in my car for the past three days. Something about driving 75 mph for 12+ hours for the past three days gave me a weird look in my eyes, like the whole world was moving too slow.

John showed me his school and Boulder. I noticed how built up Boulder had become, but the most striking thing about the town was the mountains. Boulder lies at the foot of the Rocky Mountains and John and I could really feel their presence.

The first photo is Naropa University's Harry Smith's Print Shop. They have a letterpress and some other printing materials.

Naropa was a nice environment, but I didn't understand how the students could be so self-involved. A student was having a crisis about whether or not to cut his hair.

Voyage 7

My next stop was to meet my friend John in Boulder, CO. John's going to school at Naropa University.

I got there pretty quickly after I got out of the snow.

Voyage 6

I got to Omaha around 9 PM. I stepped out of the car with my ripped shirt, beard, and feather necklace to ask a gas station attendant where a diner was. Before I could say anything, he said to me, "Did you just get murdered?"

He was talking to this middle aged junkie looking woman. She asked me for a meal and a ride.

I drove away to eat at Mexican restaurant. Omaha was bigger than I thought and the people were more Western than Mid Western.

I drove on past Omaha to somewhere in Western Nebraska. It started raining so I pulled over and slept in my car. The next day the rain turned to snow and I wound up having to drive in a snow storm till Colorado.

Voyage 5

So after three days of Pat and I going to the highest and lowest place in the state of New York, my birthstate, I left.


The first stop on my voyage was Syracuse, NY. I went there to find a mechanic to work on my car: the trip wound up being moot, but I found the town of Syracuse interesting. Syracuse was strange in that it had a lot of abandoned industrial areas.

After a couple hours in Syracuse, I drove on I-90 to I-80 West past Buffalo an "All America City" and Cleveland. I wound up staying in Sturgis, IN. I camped behind a hotel. Indiana was strange. Two women I saw had beards. I went to a Waffle House and that made me happy because they had Patsy Cline, Tom Petty, Hank Williams, and the Kinks on the jukebox. A 60 year old man said I took his spot and threatened to waiter to arm wrestle me for it. He then said he had manic depression.

Rouge stayed in the passenger seat of the car. He slept most of the time. These are the first photos I took with a disposable camera I bought from a Walmart in Indiana. I took a nap behind the Walmart next to a farm. From Indiana to Nebraska I saw nothing but corn fields and blue skies.

Voyage 4

After hiking back from our camp in the High Peaks Wilderness Area, Pat and I crashed at 9 PM.

I wanted to come back to the mountain, because I'd tried to climb it before with Pat, Ingrid, and my brother, but we started too late and we were all too unprepared, e.g. we brought more beer than food, and bad beer at that.

After climbing the mountain the only other thing I had to do in the Adirondacks to fulfill my other failed attempt was to spelunk Eagle Cave. Eagle Cave is one of the largest caves on the US eastern seaboard. Pat had told my brother, Ingrid, and I when we were there in July that the cave was somewhere near Chimney mountain. It took a long time to find the cave and when we did some other spelunkers told us we would need a rope to pull us out of the cave as there is a 12 foot drop. We also needed headlamps.

So, after returning to the cave with headlamps (which I got from Ghosthunters Academy) and rope, Pat and I explored the cave. We almost got lost in one of the caverns. There were lots of bats trying to sleep and not so happy we were waking them. Some of the bats would fly in front of our faces, then fly away. Pat lost his sweater in the cave and we were both very sad. We were in the cave for six hours.

Voyage 3

Pat had some fun taking beautiful pictures of natural ice sculptures arrayed with the lights from our head lamps.