Sunday today. I spent the first three hours of the day in bed, editing, blogging, publishing a Twilight Groan episode that, to my horror, had never been uploaded, despite being finished in April. I finished another one, the only 2020 episode pre-pandemic, which, if I ever put it out there (at this rate, Patreon will get it in July, and you guys in August) will catch us up on all the old, unaired episodes.
My niece and I got together twice last week--once to podcast and once to go to the cinema, so it's probable that I can start putting these out more regularly soon. Of course, who knows what will happen with COVID-19, and how many steps backward we'll have to take after our steps forward.
Yesterday afternoon, I went over to the storage unit to drop off four boxes. Honestly, I should take a photo of what my storage unit looks like,* so you could see the horror of it all. Imagine the end scene of RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, but instead of crates going as far as the eye can see, it's piles upon piles of toys, some in bags, and some just haphazardly stacked, like the ravine next to Big Anklevich's flooded-out Toys R Us.
Even that is romanticizing how awful it looks. Not that anyone is lining up to go out with me, but if any female ever saw that storage unit, they would clear out faster than they would if they discovered it was filled with various cutting instruments and photos of naked women with their faces scratched out.
As I was pulling down the door, a man drove up--and older guy, probably in his late seventies--and proceeded to put something in his own spot, a unit two down from mine. He was friendly, overly so, and asked me who I was and where I came from. I told him, and he asked where that was, and then . . . jeez, I don't know what happened.
He started in on a guy he went to high school with who had lived near me, and then proceeded to tell me about where he had grown up, what he did for a living before he retired last year, and started in on story after story about the music industry (his wife had been a singer/songwriter, who'd been part of Barry White's touring company and wrote songs for him when they were first dating [she and the guy that owned the storage unit, not Barry White], and he'd gone all over the country and met all sorts of famous singers and some not-so-famous and isn't it strange that young people don't know who Olivia Newton John or Andy Williams or The Lettermen or Paul Revere and the Raiders or Art Garfunkel or Herman's Hermits or Barry White himself were?).
This guy was insanely personable, but every time I jangled my keys and began to walk to my car, he started in on another story, about being a sessions drummer or organizing concert venues or being on a plane with Pat Boone and his family or getting stuck in an elevator with Rick Springfield right before he hit it big. I started getting uncomfortable, because I had been standing there a half hour, just being talked to by a stranger, and there was no end in sight. His wife-to-be had not wanted to go on tour with Barry because she wanted to get married (this was back in '66 or '68), and so Barry White had hired Roger (the stranger) to play drums on the tour so the girl would come. Roger had installed a stage and sound system at a water park so they could have free concerts every night in summer, and had done so for twenty years, until last year, which ironically, was the last time anybody was having concerts because of the virus. He just went on and on, talking about the dissolution of Barry White's marriage, and how his ex-wife and son got nothing when he died. This guy reminded me of my father, in age and hair color, but he was so extraverted that I think I spoke to him longer than I EVER did my dad.
Finally, I told him I had to go, and he started to simply wind down his conversation, rather than just say, "Oh, okay. Well, it was nice to meet you." I wonder if I would be a happy person if I were like this guy, treating somebody I'd just met like we had been friends for twenty years. I wonder if people are annoyed by his personality, or if the majority just interrupt him and say, "I have to take off now." Or maybe he's just lonely; I can relate to that.
Sit-ups Today: 100
Sit-ups In June: 3577
I usually go hiking on these days (Sundays), and I might have, except I discovered my sister and her family were going on a road trip, and they didn't invite me. As they were loading into the car, I invited myself, and jumped in, not sure how long they'd be gone, but wanting to be away from myself.
Turns out they were driving to the Great Salt Lake in Utah, where the City gets its name from. I've been to Salt Lake several times, but have never been to the huge body of salt water that's just past the airport, heading west toward Nevada.
My dad used to tell me about the GSL, that it was so salty that you could go out in it and not sink--you'd just float, though I had heard that that hadn't been the case in decades, since they've been desalinating it all these years. I asked my mom if she had ever been there, and she said she went in 1968, with a bunch of friends, and described the same phenomenon.
As far as sight-seeing goes, we were pretty much on our own. We got off the I-80 freeway, and drove around a side road, looking for whatever struck our fancy.
First we went out in a nature preserve, looking for bullfrogs in the marshes. We saw and heard none, and my nephew kept asking his phone where we could find frogs, and the answers were very vague ("in the wetlands near the Great Salt Lake" was all it would say). We found a lot of bugs--the tiny, buzzing, pest kind--and I found a bunch of old Campbell's Soup Cans, abandoned in the mud, not even opened, but boy, why would you ever open them now?
There were no sign of frogs, so we loaded back into the car and went up the road until we got to the old, abandoned Salt Air (Saltair?) pavilion, where the movie CARNIVAL OF SOULS was shot more than half a century ago. It's all fenced-off now, and my sister says they still have outdoor concerts there (well, not in 2020, of course, but she had seen the Jared Leto band there once . . . 50 Seconds To Mars? 30 Seconds To Mars? 20 Seconds?).
There were some tourists there, some cars, but the area was frankly so huge and so underattended that we didn't interact with people a single time except for at the parking lot. So, it was me and my sister and her husband and kids, and we walked down toward the water, which was half a mile away (I got the feeling that the water level is sometimes way up and sometimes way down, and today happened to be a down day, because there was a sort of low-quality beach area pretty much from where the vegetation ended all the way to where the lake began, but it took ten minutes of walking to get to the lake).
My mind, as it always does, went to how nice it would be to take a girl to a place like this . . . but I was dissuaded of that notion by the unpleasant saline smell, and the even worse discovery of hundreds of dead birds (seagulls?) half-buried in sand, in various states of decomposition (that, with its frankly, horrible smell). Why were all the dead birds there? What killed them all? Why were they just left out there to rot? Where are the coyotes or carrion birds that would normally clean up something like that? And how long before my own dead body joined them?
Once we got past that rather disturbing barrier--which would be a deal-breaker for some, I reckon--we reached the actual water, which was a sort of grey color, and so very shallow that it was warm. I took off my shoes and socks and waded out ten feet, and the water didn't get any deeper. Another ten feet out, and it actually got shallower. My nephew and I (the nine year old) went out together for fifty more feet, then a hundred more feet, and it never got any deeper than my calves.
We were walking, barefoot, in sand, which was a neat grey, almost black color, but was not mud, but sand like you'd find at the ocean. There were no fish in the water (I'd read that the salt content is so high as to kill any kind of fish or wildlife, and all that can survive in it are tiny brine shrimp too small to catch or eat), but there were also no sharp rocks or broken glass, like you normally would find in a place by a city.
It was an overcast day, the sky hazy and threatening to rain, but my brother-in-law and the others enjoyed playing in the water, so we kept walking. In the distance, you could see what appeared to be an island, but in the other direction, there appeared to be nothing for as far as the eye could see, as though this were the ocean.
I took a couple of pictures, but it wasn't all that impressive to look at, and while my mind is always going there, it hardly seemed like a romantic scene if you were there with The One You Love.
But then . . . the clouds parted for about five minutes, and heaven's light shone down, and suddenly, the gross grey water looked a little bluer and the sand looked silver. I grabbed my sister's family and made them stand together, just before the sunlight went away, and took a couple of really wonderful pictures like this one:
My nephew and I discovered what we thought were flat grey rocks beneath our feet, half submerged in sand, but what it turned out to be was sand itself, some kind of shale, that you could break if you wanted to, but more fun, were perfect skipping stones that we could toss ahead or behind us, and then go retrieve, since the water was clear enough to find them again. We did this for a good long while, and I got one to skip seven times, while my nephew only managed four.
The twelve year old had wanted to catch frogs, and he started complaining early on about us wasting our time (or more specifically, his time), so after an hour or so, it was time to go back to the car. As we made our way through the water toward shore, it did start to rain, but it was just a light sprinkle, not the downpour that would come soon, and I meandered quite a bit, both physically and mentally.
Oh, what I would have given to walk around there with The One You Love, even though she/he belongs to you, and I'm sorry for sharing an intimate moment with your beloved like that. It would've been worth the bad smell and the fact that the salt stained my shorts and shoes and left a gross residue on my skin and hair.
When I got to the shore, my nephew told me that my shoes and socks were covered with tiny black flies--so much so that the white socks now appeared to be black socks. He chased thousands of them away, but there were still enough of them for me to take a picture before I banged them together and put them back on.
We got to the car and the plan was to drive up the road a ways, toward where the world-famous Bonneville Salt Flats are. I had never been to the Salt Flats before, though I knew they shot scenes from INDEPENDENCE DAY there, the third PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN, and that Anthony Hopkins-doing-a-Kiwi-accent movie, THE WORLD'S FASTEST INDIAN. The Salt Flats are this ultra-romantic, almost sacred place to me . . . and still out of my reach, because once it started raining in earnest, nobody wanted to go walking anymore.
Not much more to tell beyond that. Just lots of driving, though we did stop and get Chinese food right before it got dark. There was a slightly gross smell from the water on all of us, but I do remember there being a smell when we played in the Pacific Ocean last summer, so it must just be a saltwater thing.
I fell asleep, and missed a moment where a truck hit one of those orange traffic barrels ahead of us and knocked it into our path. But I was awakened when we slammed on the brakes to avoid it--still striking it--and I hit my head on the seat in front of me, crushing the 7-11 cup I'd had sitting in my lap. That was kind of amusing to those around me, and there was no damage to the car from hitting the barrel.
And that's about it. I was happy to have gone along and had a mini-trip, though I sure would have liked to see the Salt Flats, which Big Anklevich said he had visited often on his way to Sacramento over the years.
Words Today: 1030
Words In June: 28,561
*Whoops, I originally typed, "I should take a photo of what my unit looks like," but felt that it needed some kind of clarification. Don't you agree?
Finally, I told him I had to go, and he started to simply wind down his conversation, rather than just say, "Oh, okay. Well, it was nice to meet you." I wonder if I would be a happy person if I were like this guy, treating somebody I'd just met like we had been friends for twenty years. I wonder if people are annoyed by his personality, or if the majority just interrupt him and say, "I have to take off now." Or maybe he's just lonely; I can relate to that.
Sit-ups Today: 100
Sit-ups In June: 3577
I usually go hiking on these days (Sundays), and I might have, except I discovered my sister and her family were going on a road trip, and they didn't invite me. As they were loading into the car, I invited myself, and jumped in, not sure how long they'd be gone, but wanting to be away from myself.
Turns out they were driving to the Great Salt Lake in Utah, where the City gets its name from. I've been to Salt Lake several times, but have never been to the huge body of salt water that's just past the airport, heading west toward Nevada.
My dad used to tell me about the GSL, that it was so salty that you could go out in it and not sink--you'd just float, though I had heard that that hadn't been the case in decades, since they've been desalinating it all these years. I asked my mom if she had ever been there, and she said she went in 1968, with a bunch of friends, and described the same phenomenon.
As far as sight-seeing goes, we were pretty much on our own. We got off the I-80 freeway, and drove around a side road, looking for whatever struck our fancy.
First we went out in a nature preserve, looking for bullfrogs in the marshes. We saw and heard none, and my nephew kept asking his phone where we could find frogs, and the answers were very vague ("in the wetlands near the Great Salt Lake" was all it would say). We found a lot of bugs--the tiny, buzzing, pest kind--and I found a bunch of old Campbell's Soup Cans, abandoned in the mud, not even opened, but boy, why would you ever open them now?
There were no sign of frogs, so we loaded back into the car and went up the road until we got to the old, abandoned Salt Air (Saltair?) pavilion, where the movie CARNIVAL OF SOULS was shot more than half a century ago. It's all fenced-off now, and my sister says they still have outdoor concerts there (well, not in 2020, of course, but she had seen the Jared Leto band there once . . . 50 Seconds To Mars? 30 Seconds To Mars? 20 Seconds?).
There were some tourists there, some cars, but the area was frankly so huge and so underattended that we didn't interact with people a single time except for at the parking lot. So, it was me and my sister and her husband and kids, and we walked down toward the water, which was half a mile away (I got the feeling that the water level is sometimes way up and sometimes way down, and today happened to be a down day, because there was a sort of low-quality beach area pretty much from where the vegetation ended all the way to where the lake began, but it took ten minutes of walking to get to the lake).
My mind, as it always does, went to how nice it would be to take a girl to a place like this . . . but I was dissuaded of that notion by the unpleasant saline smell, and the even worse discovery of hundreds of dead birds (seagulls?) half-buried in sand, in various states of decomposition (that, with its frankly, horrible smell). Why were all the dead birds there? What killed them all? Why were they just left out there to rot? Where are the coyotes or carrion birds that would normally clean up something like that? And how long before my own dead body joined them?
Once we got past that rather disturbing barrier--which would be a deal-breaker for some, I reckon--we reached the actual water, which was a sort of grey color, and so very shallow that it was warm. I took off my shoes and socks and waded out ten feet, and the water didn't get any deeper. Another ten feet out, and it actually got shallower. My nephew and I (the nine year old) went out together for fifty more feet, then a hundred more feet, and it never got any deeper than my calves.
We were walking, barefoot, in sand, which was a neat grey, almost black color, but was not mud, but sand like you'd find at the ocean. There were no fish in the water (I'd read that the salt content is so high as to kill any kind of fish or wildlife, and all that can survive in it are tiny brine shrimp too small to catch or eat), but there were also no sharp rocks or broken glass, like you normally would find in a place by a city.
It was an overcast day, the sky hazy and threatening to rain, but my brother-in-law and the others enjoyed playing in the water, so we kept walking. In the distance, you could see what appeared to be an island, but in the other direction, there appeared to be nothing for as far as the eye could see, as though this were the ocean.
I took a couple of pictures, but it wasn't all that impressive to look at, and while my mind is always going there, it hardly seemed like a romantic scene if you were there with The One You Love.
But then . . . the clouds parted for about five minutes, and heaven's light shone down, and suddenly, the gross grey water looked a little bluer and the sand looked silver. I grabbed my sister's family and made them stand together, just before the sunlight went away, and took a couple of really wonderful pictures like this one:
My nephew and I discovered what we thought were flat grey rocks beneath our feet, half submerged in sand, but what it turned out to be was sand itself, some kind of shale, that you could break if you wanted to, but more fun, were perfect skipping stones that we could toss ahead or behind us, and then go retrieve, since the water was clear enough to find them again. We did this for a good long while, and I got one to skip seven times, while my nephew only managed four.
The twelve year old had wanted to catch frogs, and he started complaining early on about us wasting our time (or more specifically, his time), so after an hour or so, it was time to go back to the car. As we made our way through the water toward shore, it did start to rain, but it was just a light sprinkle, not the downpour that would come soon, and I meandered quite a bit, both physically and mentally.
Oh, what I would have given to walk around there with The One You Love, even though she/he belongs to you, and I'm sorry for sharing an intimate moment with your beloved like that. It would've been worth the bad smell and the fact that the salt stained my shorts and shoes and left a gross residue on my skin and hair.
When I got to the shore, my nephew told me that my shoes and socks were covered with tiny black flies--so much so that the white socks now appeared to be black socks. He chased thousands of them away, but there were still enough of them for me to take a picture before I banged them together and put them back on.
We got to the car and the plan was to drive up the road a ways, toward where the world-famous Bonneville Salt Flats are. I had never been to the Salt Flats before, though I knew they shot scenes from INDEPENDENCE DAY there, the third PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN, and that Anthony Hopkins-doing-a-Kiwi-accent movie, THE WORLD'S FASTEST INDIAN. The Salt Flats are this ultra-romantic, almost sacred place to me . . . and still out of my reach, because once it started raining in earnest, nobody wanted to go walking anymore.
Not much more to tell beyond that. Just lots of driving, though we did stop and get Chinese food right before it got dark. There was a slightly gross smell from the water on all of us, but I do remember there being a smell when we played in the Pacific Ocean last summer, so it must just be a saltwater thing.
I fell asleep, and missed a moment where a truck hit one of those orange traffic barrels ahead of us and knocked it into our path. But I was awakened when we slammed on the brakes to avoid it--still striking it--and I hit my head on the seat in front of me, crushing the 7-11 cup I'd had sitting in my lap. That was kind of amusing to those around me, and there was no damage to the car from hitting the barrel.
And that's about it. I was happy to have gone along and had a mini-trip, though I sure would have liked to see the Salt Flats, which Big Anklevich said he had visited often on his way to Sacramento over the years.
Words Today: 1030
Words In June: 28,561
*Whoops, I originally typed, "I should take a photo of what my unit looks like," but felt that it needed some kind of clarification. Don't you agree?
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