My brother, my car, and my son (but not necessarily in that order). 


Yesterday, I took my car in to the mechanic to get the headliner fixed. It's a minor detail - some work they didn't do right the first time - but it's under warranty, and I need to get it done before I put the car on the market. 

How strange to be driving my car to the mechanic's to get a problem fixed just so I can sell it. It was a beautiful day for a drive, though, so I went down Pacific Coast Highway and really drove the car the way it should be driven. God, what a fantastic car! Still, there was this strange mix of melancholy about it, and it took me awhile to realise that the car is the perfect symbol for my career - somehow letting it go is letting go of a lot of things. I bought the car right as my career started to take off. I had been working for about five years before that, but I suddenly had this weird meteoric rise (a cliché I've never understood - don't meteors fall?). In 2000, I made double what I'd made in the previous year. That car was the result of this new success and prosperity. Wind on five years, and here I am selling it off because my career will no longer support it. (Aside from the fact that I need the money, it costs between $3,000 and $6,000 a year to maintain.) I'm not looking forward to the actual selling part either, although I think I've got my sales pitch figured out. "If you're looking for a car with 'bling', this ain't the car for you. This car is for the connoisseur!"

I talked on the phone with my brother last night for two and a half hours. It was good. I think we both agreed that there's some kind of weird, screwed up dynamic between us, that we keep falling into the same patterns, and that my moving to Canada will probably be a good thing in the long run. I'm happy and relieved - nothing worse than unfinished business or "bad blood"... especially when you don't even remember where it came from.

Something I was thinking about yesterday, analysing this bizarre nostalgia I've been feeling: I think that after focusing on something for too long, the thing itself becomes the goal and you end up totally confused. I've been trying to figure out how I could get away from L.A. for so many years that now, closer than ever before, I'm having a hard time remembering all of the things that I hate about the place. Of course, as I mentioned in my last blog, I have a lot of history here. I'm sure that has something to do with it... and living in Oxnard for the past couple of years has been amazing. I'm sure that if we could afford to stay here, we certainly would. It's beautiful... and a half a block from the beach in Southern California? How can you beat that?! God, those Canadian winters are going to be a shock...

... and speaking of shocks...

I watched a film this afternoon called "The Edge" starring Anthony Hopkins and Alec Baldwin. It was engaging enough - four men, then three men, then just the two men out in the wilds of Alaska trying to survive and get themselves rescued. Graham was on the bed next to me playing and, at a particularly dramatic moment, decided to crawl off the bed and land head-first on the floor. He wasn't really hurt - more the shock of it, I think - but he cried for awhile, and I missed a pivotal point in the movie when Anthony Hopkins finds out that Alec Baldwin has slept with his wife. (I extrapolated that.) I remember glancing up, and there was a note... the text for the engraving on the two men's watches in the wife's handwriting. Anyway, I missed where the note came from! If anyone reading this knows what I'm talking about, e-mail me at: arp@bakuco.com 

Posted: Thu - October 13, 2005 at 04:03 PM          

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