through hazy eyes

Some phone snaps taken over the past two months:

1. The Eastern Columbia Building downtown on Broadway - this looks so gorgeous lit up at night and is easily the best example of Art Deco architecture in downtown Los Angeles.
2. I passed by this booth of vintage industrial furniture without regarding it too closely, then did a double take upon noticing this marker-scrawled folding chair. Andy and H (and maybe an abstract fish?), wow :3.
3. A handful of translucent, waxy mystery seeds that I WOULD know the name of had I harvested them myself. But they were in the hands of an art professor that I had met a mere 15 minutes before. (edit: they're amaryllis seeds!)
4. Semi-crepuscular rays in Highland Park, mid-October. When the sky looks this way, it elevates even the most tedious drive...
5. A deliciously soft, sweet and chewy hachiya persimmon, courtesy of our family mechanic! I so wish I had more of these to munch on throughout the winter months, they are like candy.
6. Mushrooms fit for a hobbit! (except for the fact these are of the toxic lawn kind).

salvation mountain

Y and I have had Salvation Mountain on our list of places to visit for years now, and two weeks ago on a whim we decided to make the drive out to Slab City, where it sits on the fringes of. It was about three hours each way - I drove, and Y snoozed as she had been up at an ungodly hour the night before. When we arrived I felt an eerie sense of excitement, and the bright adobe/painted hill welcomed us with crazy, earnest declarations of love for God, along with other Christian sayings and verses from the Bible. I admired the intensity and passion that must have filled Leonard Knight to compel him to create this art installation, though my own days of piety and prayers for salvation are a thing of the past. When the colors and sayings became too much, I focused instead on the construction of the piece - eyeing bales of hay, rolls of chicken wire and branches and imagining how the project would have been pieced together. We walked back to the car, but not after pocketing a few rocks, and started the drive back.

But who drives all the way out to Niland, CA from Los Angeles and skips a visit to the Salton Sea? Not us! We stopped at Bombay Beach, which was eerily quiet. It didn't have that fresh salty smell of a saline body of water - more of a rank, tired odor, and there were dried up skeletons of fish strewn all over the shore, as well as decrepit remains of houses and shacks sadly leaning over on their last breaths. It was weird and beautiful.

On the last leg of the trip, we made a point to view the Cabazon dinosaurs, but didn't feel up to paying $8 each to see what we assumed would be kitschy life-size dioramas of said dinosaurs in semi-realistic settings. We were happy enough to see the T-Rex and Brontosaurus at the entrance. As we left the heat of the desert and the swooping wind turbines, heading back to (at the time) rainy L.A., I exhaled a silent sigh - happy with the small adventure we had, and grateful for the freedom and panache we possessed to make it happen.

the light returns

Thanksgiving was almost a week ago, and the days following it for the long weekend were days of utter bliss. For hours at a time I did literally nothing, which at the time made me feel a little guilty, but looking back, the idleness equaled precious decompression time. Not at all do I regret the lazy hours spent with my sister on our freshly cleaned red couch, munching on two different types of Trader Joe's cookies, exchanging idle chatter/profound ideas, watching multiple episodes of Breaking Bad, then switching to Jim Jarmusch's 'Dead Man' when I got too stressed out about the former. Interspersed with visits from A, who came back down for a quick Thanksgiving break, as well as a long adventurous bike ride with my sister, it was a satisfying, languid long weekend.

A sorted out this multi-tool (you can see me in the spoon!) that my sister had picked up for me at a flea market over the summer, and now that all the components are unfolded I can clean it up real nicely. I handed him all my recent rock finds and listened intently as he patiently studied and identified them. The two close-ups are a really roughed-up quartz that I found on a hike in Griffith Park, and another dark quartz-ish chunk I found at the construction site in Hollywood. You all probably know this, but the translucent quality of both are the most obvious indicators of the presence of quartz in the rock. I like how they glow when the light hits them.

One more month until the year is over! Let us finish it strong.

construction details

I am really thankful for my job for the close proximity it affords me to have to such a large and busy construction site! I walk the site maybe once a week, but I am going to have to up it to three times or so to accurately document the flurry of activity that is ongoing. Much of my job has lacked a creative slant to it, it has really just been documentation, observation, and interpretation of information/ideas (which is...slightly creative) but the good thing is that the past several months have been much BUSIER, and I have gotten a better sense of my duties and how I can be useful to the office.

I feel like I haven't had much to say the past few weeks, but those lulls in life are inevitable, so it isn't a big point of 'crisis' like I've made of such silences in the past. And I have been reading again! And generally I've found some more time for myself, which feels like a giant breath of cold, fresh air...so, no complaints here.

new home

My sister and I moved out of the San Gabriel suburbs, out of our mother's house, to a new place of our own. A few days ago I met another occupant of our quadplex, and she asked me, with a teasing smile 'How are you liking it here - how d'you like the noise.' And though yes, there's the obvious presence of rambunctious little neighbor kids and a lot more street traffic/noise, the price of freedom is well worth it. The commute to work is shorter, even if by a fraction, the neighborhood is super-walkable, fairly bike-able, and there's lots to explore. Yesterday evening, we walked to our local polling location and dropped off our ballots, then got pizza at a tasty Italian joint and headed back home - to new home.