Tales of the American Jet-set

Drove down to San Diego today. It took about twelve hours after getting stuck in the Saturday night LA to Santa Monica mess. It still was better than dealing with the whole airline hassle. It was nice getting out of town with some music and my thoughts. I like to remind myself how beautiful it is between SF and Big Sur along Highway 1. Also, I forget how it is between Santa Barbara and San Diego, just one strip of asphalt and shopping mall. I drove down the main drag of La Jolla. There are lines of college kids outside the bars and clubs. I guess when you live in Southern California, you don't need to leave for spring break. If only I didn't have to get up at 5am for work.

I just finished the excellent book, "12 Days on the Road" which chronicles the Sex Pistols ill-fated tour through the United States in 1978. It provided some good, albeit tragic, insight into the people who made up a band often seen more as a freakshow and regarded as a joke, than as a immoveable force furthering the rebelliousness of the rock and roll lineage. Noel Monk, the author, includes road tales that by the end of the book, make the tour seem as though it had lasted 12 MONTHS, not days. I highly recommend it for fans of rock music history.

So last Friday I met up with my old friend Doug at my hotel bar. Karoke night began shortly thereafter, prompting us to make a hasty exit. Throughout the night we made a small circle of downtown Cedar Rapids which had much more going for it than many other larger towns. The last bar we were at was pretty crowded. At first it appeared to be filled by a younger college crowd, but upon further inspection they were people 5-10 years out of school. Looking around at the clothing and hairstyles I felt like I was in a timewarp. The jukebox blared the Red Hot Chili Peppers and other early 90s drivel. Upon hearing my observation, Doug remarked, "you know how in Minnesota things are 5-7 behind? Well, here it's 7-10 years." A couple more bourbon nitecaps later we agreed to go to Iowa City the next morning. The following morning I called to discover we were both in the same physical dire straits from the late evening/early morning. We had a late lunch then I drove off to the job in Cedar Falls.

Late the next night when I got back into town, Doug brought me to a place where he works, a building in the middle of nowhere that houses the transmitters that work in conjunction with the tall radio towers you see on hilltops or in the middle of a fields across the country. The place was filled with all sorts of retro-nerd junk from radio yesteryear: wooden control boards with enormous dials and switches, reel-to-reel tape players, transmitters, walkie talkies, record players and miles of wires in various states of mice ingested mess. Checking out all the past high-tech gems, I felt like I was a kid playing in an old abandoned car or something. I snatched a burnt-out vacuum tube the size of a liter soda bottle, which turned out to be an amusing learning experience for airport security. At first the TSA agent thought it belonged to a pilot, but I fessed up and had to explain what it was as it easily looked like some sort of bomb detonating device.

Getting back to SFO I was greeted with two voicemail messages. One from the Cedar Rapids health department and another from Northwest alerting me that there was a confirmed case of the measles on my Friday flight from Detroit to Cedar Rapids. I called Kaiser and was assured that my past innoculation was sufficient. I guess we will wait and see.