California

The waves lazily rolled onto the beach as fluffy white clouds drifted through a light blue sky during my afternoon in Ventura. My pasty skin blended into the white sand but was burning quickly enough to have me stand out as a painful pink mess before too long. Some of my friends played volleyball by the water while my other friends and I sat in the shade and watched the water. Palm trees swayed in the breeze, people jogged down the walkways to the pier, and fanny pack wearing tourists shouted at one another in languages I didn't understand. All in all, it was a typical great day at the beach.

The next day I drove back to my hometown to visit my parents. While I drove along the east side of the Sierras up Highway 395 I watched blue-gray clouds rolling over the peaks to either side of the Owens Valley. Lightning flashed as cloudbursts opened up in the rolling mountainsides of the Inyos, and the granite walls of the Sierra Nevada to the west stood purple and menacing against the thunderheads above them. I sat with my father and watched rain spit on the valley below and the sky turn a menagerie of colors above my old hometown, and when I mentioned the change of scenery I'd had over my weekend he simply said, "Welcome to California."

I take my home state for granted a lot. I've been in just about every corner of it, from the freeway mazes of Los Angeles to the winding narrow roads through the redwoods up north, from the flat agricultural expanses of the Central Valley to the mountainous regions of Eastern California that I've lived in for years. It has its economic and political faults, sure, but it's so diverse and interesting that it never ceases to keep me interested in exploring it. Deserts, forests, plains, coastlines, alpine territories, the list goes on and on; even if I forget sometimes, I realize now that I get to live in a pretty cool place.

I still need to make my way up to Lake Tahoe soon, and I'd really like to see Eureka again. I've explored Southern California two weekends in a row, and I plan to be in Mammoth Lakes again Saturday I think, so hopefully this California adventuring trend continues north some more. My backyard has a lot to explore, but if the whole Eastern Sierras are my backyard then the state of California is the whole neighborhood, and I wouldn't mind exploring all of it.

Basically I want to keep driving and hiking and exploring, but that's nothing new. I'm just realizing again how stoked I am with how much California has to offer.

Cruisin'

Inyo County, California, has a handful of highways; 6, 168, 136, 190, and the main road of 395. Highway 395 through Inyo County is a scenic route, skirting along the east side of the Sierra Nevadas, through high desert, rolling hills, grassy fields, and sleepy small towns, and it's easy to stare out into the scenery and take it all in. Traffic isn't heavy on any of the roads in the county most of the time, and there are occasions where even the busiest of the roads have no cars driving on it for hours at a time. Growing up in the town of Independence meant watching cars lazily drive through the lazy small towns, and learning to drive meant braving the tamest roads in the thinnest traffic imaginable.

Fast forward to last weekend. It'd been awhile since I'd been in Los Angeles traffic, but I remembered what kind of a challenge trudging through that maze can be. The entirety of Southern California is a jumbled web of major freeways and perpetual road construction, and anyone that has to navigate it can tell you it's a pain in the ass the majority of the time. I drove 640 miles collectively last weekend, a fair chunk of it through Los Angeles and San Diego, and while zipping by concrete dividing walls, road debris, and people who suddenly decided they didn't know how to drive, all while trying to find the right exits to take and lanes to be in on a part of the map I'd never been on before, I was tense. Anxious. Feeling alive.

I really enjoy driving.

Freeways, dark desert highways, and back roads appeal to me because they can take me places. Even if where I end up isn't the most ideal (like the time I ended up lost and in a rough neighborhood in Oakland on accident) I occasionally find myself surprised and pleased with what I see (like the time I ended up lost and found myself in Santa Cruz on Highway 1 the day after I ended up in Oakland). Watching the scenery change, the miles roll on, and finding myself somewhere else is like hiking-- but quicker, over greater distances, and with a better stereo system. It's not a means of reconnecting with nature and the world like hiking is, sure, but there is a connection with something within the self that comes from driving solo for hundreds of miles.

Combine long solo road trips with long solo hikes and I flip out with happiness.

However, the weekend trip I took was just driving, but it did take me to a lot of places. I started out in my quiet town, then through the desert, then through mountains into the Los Angeles basin, then through rolling hills and to the coast. I woke up in my modest apartment in a small town, and spent the evening out on the town in downtown San Diego. By the next evening I was back in my modest apartment after going a different route than I'd originally taken. I spent a bit over 11 hours behind the wheel, keeping myself company, watching the lines on the highway roll on by and the traffic thicken and thin.

It had been awhile since I'd last driven somewhere I'd never been before. I'm glad I did.

I want to do it again soon.

Running (pt. 2)

The pennant was pinned crookedly on my shirt, so I redid it while waiting for the starting call. The sun wasn't too high yet, and the early morning sunlight threw long shadows from the houses and trees of my old hometown. People in running shorts and shoes mingled and stretched on the pavement. I made small talk with a few people-- mostly making plans for later in the day-- but the thought of being at the starting line of my first race in fifteen years lingered in the back of my head.

It wasn't going to be a long race, really; 4K. Why not a 5K like most races? Having it short didn't bug me too much since I had the rest of the day to do whatever afterward, and I'd only slept a couple hours the night before because I'd gotten off work really late so I wasn't a huge ball of energy to begin with. I wasn't worried about placing anything significant either, since my goal was "better than second to last place" and easily attained if I even just walked at a brisk pace. Success was just giving it a go as far as I was concerned, so hanging out in Independence, California, a couple doors over from Dehy Park was enough of a win for me.

The announcement was made that the race was going to start, and the list of places of where the proceeds would go, the explanation of the track, and thank-yous was stated. The countdown started from three, two, one--

Go.

And I began to run. I overtook some people but figured I'd see them again soon enough. I made my way through the streets of town, listening to some tunes from my high school years to bring back some nostalgia of when I used to explore the side streets and alleyways as I retraced one of the many paths of my younger days. At the first mile the shin splints I'd decided to ignore before the race decided to make themselves known and make every slap to the ground pretty painful, so I slowed down a little bit. The people I'd passed passed me, and I watched them sweat and go while I sweated and went.

After a little while the race went through the woodlot. Making my was around a corner, enjoying the shade of the trees in the quickly warming day, I saw a man walking in the opposite direction. Behind him was a collie dog walking along and a six-year-old boy walking and taking a breather from the race. The dog thought the kid looked interesting and decided to run up to smell him. The kid freaked, considering a dog he didn't know that was twice his size was getting a bit too close for comfort, so I stepped in and shooed the dog away before the owner finally called it over to him. The kid stood for a second, looked at me, and asked, "Why didn't he try to attack you?"

"I dunno," I shrugged, "I'm a bit taller than you are I guess."

The boy and I walked for awhile, him wondering why a dog would just run up to him like that one had, me wondering why an unattended six year old was running a footrace. He asked questions about the weather, how long it'd take to run "a million billion miles" (his answer was "about ten days" which, y'know, good for him, he's got gumption), and how much longer the race was because he was tired. I told him we were just about done, so when the threat of any unleashed dog was gone, I tuned to him and said, "I'll see you at the finish line, bud," before running off.

After getting back onto pavement and on the last quarter mile, I thought about why I bothered doing the run in the first place. I could have saved my money and ran my usual track back home, but I remembered; I had redemption to think about. It's not like it honestly mattered, and it's not like I really cared that much about it, but it was something to do-- something easy to succeed in, and if I was going to be active I'd might as well have lazy goals to go with it. I crossed the finish line, a number of people who were actually in shape cheering me on, and I got a gift bag with a bandana and an Independence Day pin.

16th place with a time just over twenty minutes or so. Not stellar, but not that bad considering I smoke, had shin splints, and spent a chunk of the race walking with a six year old.

It was fun, I wouldn't mind doing another short race sometime.

Hydrated

The morning provides little comfort from the heat of the day this time of year. Even before the sun crests over the eastern horizon it begins to get hot, and before long the burning ball of light in the sky and the unforgiving wind sap the life out of a anyone stuck outside. Dust kicks up in the breeze, the suns rays stab down to the earth, and a person ends up feeling dirt-peppered beef jerky if exposed to it too long, salty with sweat but not very tasty. The simple act of being outside is bad enough; in this kind of heat I don't mind shutting myself up inside, under the cooler, with a cold drink and Netflix, or maybe retreating into the high country to have it a little more pleasant.

But, of course, I've been running in the oppressive heat because I have a thing I want to do in a couple of days (a 4k, one whole k less than expected) and I'm an huge idiot.

Sweating bullets like a perspiration pistol has been reminding me to keep hydrated, especially while I'm kicking up dust trotting through the desert in 80 to 90 degree heat like a moron. I know I don't drink enough water under normal circumstances, and I know I'm usually kind of dehydrated anyway, so exerting myself in natures big convection oven has me very conscious of my water intake. Between a Camelbak, a couple Nalgene bottles, and countless glasses of water, I'm taking in a LOT, and if I wasn't sweating it all out I'd probably be in a constant state of peeing. Luckily for me, I feel pretty good despite the heat and the sweating, because there's been at least one instance where I've been hospitalized for not drinking enough water.

A number of years back I'd gone hiking in the Inyo Mountains with my father. The mountain range is notoriously arid, and I was younger and dumber than I am now, so I didn't drink nearly enough water. The day itself was a lot of fun; seeing the Sierra Nevadas off to the west, quality time with my dad, and poking around the desert was a hoot, but after doing that all day, spending most of the evening drinking soda and eating salty foods at the movie theater, I ended up having to go to the ER. They ran a full battery of tests, from blood work to a CT scan to a freaking spinal tap at three in the morning, just to be certain the headache and nausea I came in with wasn't anything serious, but I think it was simply dehydration from being stupid in the desert and loving junk food.

We'll never know.

It's going to be hot for a few more months. It makes me wish for winter every year because I'd rather curl up with a cup of coffee by the fire than desperately guzzling a gallon of water and a couple liters of Gatorade under a cooler vent. I have to relent to obsessively maintaining proper hydration, being soaked in sweat like I've been sitting in the worlds grossest splash zone, and wishing for sweater weather to come around again for the time being, but the challenge of not feeling mummified will at least keep me occupied.

Monsters

Some horrors are closer than one would like to think. They lay in wait, unnoticed, in the darkened corners of your home while you sleep. When you're fixing the morning coffee... they're waiting. When you're grabbing a beer out of the fridge after a long day at work... they're watching. When it's one in the morning and you're after a snack in the fridge... that's when those horrifying nightmare beings are most dangerous, because in your tired state of mind and desperation you might just draw out one of the terrors that hides in the shadows.

I remembered that, of course, while I cleaned out my fridge this afternoon.

The amount of questions that arise while cleaning out the fridge outnumber the amount of freezer bags and plastic containers that become Petri dishes and Lovecraftian horrors. Certain colors shouldn't occur in nature, let alone sprout on top of a mysterious pasta dish that sat in wait for the last month or more, but I stare through the hazily transparent plastic box at the rainbow from the fridge because opening the container might release the kind of spore that starts a zombie apocalypse. Why I find it necessary to save one slice of provolone cheese for three months, a few slices of salami until they become close to fossilized, or milk that is no longer liquid, is something I can't figure out.

It's kind of fun to see what sorts of foods don't actually go bad, though. A package of hot dogs I had open for a few weeks still looked like new, but the can of sauerkraut-- already fermented cabbage-- that I opened at the same time as the hot dogs was DEFINITELY spoiled. It makes me wonder what sort of toxic crap I willingly put in my body; if bacteria won't even survive on it, how do I? Why do I knowingly ingest food-like substances that don't follow laws of nature? I know I won't be able to eat the technicolor fuzzfest in that Tupperware, but should I attempt to eat the processed lunch meat from a bygone era?

Of course, I tend to forget about the horrors of food that refuses to spoil and the food that grows furry mold, get hungry, go grocery shopping, eat most of a meal, and save the scant few leftovers for another few months until terror strikes again.

It's finding Frankenstein's monster frankfurter that makes cleaning the fridge exciting and mortifying.

Stargazing

Outside of the town of Big Pine is the Owens Valley Radio Observatory. I'd visited it a few times as a kid, and aside from the badass liquid nitrogen demonstration they have at the end of the tour (dude, they straight up froze a rose and made it shatter like glass! 7-year-old me was like, "THAT'S RAD!") it got me interested in the night sky. The giant radio telescopes they have detect bodies in deep space using radio waves, and the results are images of colorful blobs representing different collections of interstellar gasses and matter in the void of space. It's a heavy concept for a little kid; there's stuff way, way, way out there in space, and the world is really small compared to the grand scheme of the Universe. It's one thing to go to a planetarium and another to stand in the place where scientists look into space daily, and it's one thing to see models and another to see actual images of deep space bodies that we will never be physically able to go to ever. 

For an small town boy in elementary school, realizing you're an insignificant speck on an insignificant speck floating around in an insignificant speck in a cluster of insignificant specks is kind of heavy.

As I got older I got into the habit of wandering into the desert and staring at the night sky. The beautiful thing about growing up in the middle of nowhere is the lack of light pollution and how easy it is to escape it, so when I wanted to do some introspection as a teenager I could walk or drive a short ways and be in complete darkness with nothing but the inky blackness of space with its Milky Way and countless constellations above me. I started thinking about being a particle in the universe made up of smaller parts, which were made up of smaller parts, and so on, and thinking about being made up of particles that were made up of other smaller stuff was enough infinity to keep my geeky high school self stoked on everything. Finding me stargazing and thinking about stuff was a pretty big hobby of mine once upon a time.

I still do the stargazing-and-thinking-about-stuff thing today. Whenever I'm camping, or walking around town at night, or hanging out at an outdoor party in the desert, I usually find myself looking up at the infinite expanse, and the completely unknown volumes space holds. I think about the atoms that make up my physical being like the amazing technicolor dream gasses of radio telescope images. I remind myself that the universe is a pretty big deal, and me being like my own universe makes me kind of a big deal too, and that everyone ever is like the universe and a big deal, and that sort of connection to everyone and everything that comes from stargazing tends to make me feel a lot better about life.

There are two things I can say for sure since I'd visited the OVRO; even though the universe is massive it doesn't mean we're all too insignificant, and that liquid nitrogen is hella cool.

The X Files, Then And Now: An Observation

(DISCLAIMER: This post has some spoilers for a 21-year-old television show. If this sort of thing bothers you... well, you should probably reconsider your priorities of things to be mad about, but to each their own, so don't say I didn't warn you.)

The other night I watched a few episodes of The X Files. My family used to watch it all the time when it was on the air, so for the sake of nostalgia and good television I decided to revisit it. Mulder and Scully were household names when I was a kid, and the theme music queued a night of bad dreams for me and my overactive imagination, so from the time it aired in 1993 until it ended in 2001, it made itself a fixture in my life. It's still an entertaining show, and I can see why my parents watched it back in the day, but it's very obviously from the '90s.

If Agents Mulder and Scully were conducting their investigations into the X files during the 2010s instead of the 1990s, they probably wouldn't have run into the same roadblocks they'd faced in the first few episodes of the series. For example, toward the end of the very first episode, a bunch of evidence was destroyed when Scully's motel room was burned down. If they were conducting this investigation nowadays all of her field reports, her photos, the x-ray images from the autopsy, and research materials would have probably been saved to a cloud account somewhere. Her report on the case would have been in Dropbox before she ran off to see Mulder. Little snippets of information she'd have jotted in a pad of paper could have been saved in Evernote. Hell, the pictures and x-ray images could have been saved to the camera roll of her iPhone if she'd had one.

That's another thing; if Mulder and Scully had smart phones, there would never be any question to the credibility of their reports. Some creepy contortionist cannibal crawling through the vent in your bathroom? Scully could film that with her phone! UFO sightings over a secret airbase? It'd be on Instagram for the world to see before anyone was the wiser. Delicate information needs to be conveyed? Snapchat destroys the evidence within ten seconds. Need to silently get a hold of someone while hiding from some supernatural entity? Texting. Having a smartphone alone would make solving Mulder and Scully's problems exponentially easier.

You know what else would have helped them? The internet. Since they work for the FBI, they have access to a lot of government databases, one a federal level to a local level, so the amount of time spent looking through physical archives in dramatic dark libraries would be cut way shorter. Google would make a lot of questions they have a lot easier to answer, like searching "UFO sightings near Iowa" or whatever they happen to be working on. The combination of smart phones, the internet, and cloud storage, probably could cut a conveniently timed 45 minute episode of investigation and spooky stuff in half.

Then again, one thing about modern times is government surveillance. The NSA could swoop in and swipe up anyone tweeting "omg just saw sum dude eat & puke out a healthy FBI person. #gross #wat" or someone searching Google for Cthulhu-like nonsense that doesn't seem normal. Any bizarre findings being saved to Scully's Drive account could be theoretically be seized and destroyed by the NSA if they really wanted to. Hiding identities or going undercover would be impossible if anyone found Fox "Spooky" Mulder of Facebook. A lot of cases would probably be pretty obvious if some blogger somewhere decided to talk about how his cousin wrote a bunch of binary code and the government got involved... unless the government saw that blog post and got involved.

Really, the only way to keep that sort of secret stuff secret and out of the hands of the wrong people would be to have it all in physical forms; notebooks, film photos, physically documented information, in-person discussions and first-hand-eyewitness accounts... like they did in the show, I guess. Hmm.

Either way, while there would be some pitfalls for Mulder and Scully working in the 21st century, cases would probably still be way easier than doing so by communicating via land line and car phone, losing evidence to fire and exposing undeveloped film, and not having the worlds knowledge accessible from a device that can fit in a pocket. The 1990s were a simpler time, despite confusing shows like The X Files and Twin Peaks, and it's fun to think about them from a modern perspective.