GOING BACK GO CALI

Unrested as usual, I fly out of JFK airport for the Coachella music festival in California. Forced to finish a liter of water I’d brought with me before I go through security I notice members of the band Gogol Bordello in line with me. The lead singer carries one piece of carry-on luggage, his guitar, which he sporadically plays in line to the amusement of an older woman who seems to be quite taken by the novelty of it all. Later, on the flight one of the band members sits next to me (I in the fantastic middle seat) and we spend the next hour talking almost entirely about music, including his recommendations for bands to check out in Coachella and those in NYC when I return. Rest of the flight is boring and cramped, man sitting next to me spends most of flight entering information from business cards in to blackberry,

Landing in LA and left my digital camera on the plane, which I find out, is impossible to retrieve and basically lost. I tell myself this is a good thing since I’ve been wanting to upgrade to a 7.1 megapixel anyway and will promptly stop at the nearest Best Buy and get myself a new Canon ELPH1000 before I panic from the sheer nudity of being without camera more than an hour. Take the shuttle to pick up my car at Thrifty and find out all they have for me to drive in the way an economy car is a PT Cruiser, a vehicle primarily designed and marketed for men entering mid-life crisis stage and tasteless nostalgic types who yearn for glory days but settle of ersatz imitations of quality cars from the 50s. Only getting on freeway do I realize I left my new UNIQLO track jacket in rental office.

I take a detour to Chino to swim at an outdoor YMCA pool, the only one I was able to find after hours of research earlier in the week even remotely on the way to where I’m heading that has evening swim hours. Traffic is so bad it takes two hours to make a one-hour trip. LA radio is a wasteland unless you happen to be part of an audience for five rap stations, endless banal religious and Hispanic programming. Find on so-so classical station and one good independent station with a pathetically weak signal. The pool is warm and saline and I have a sweet hour workout while the sun sets. Terribly hungry I soon find that at the dreadfully late hour of 8:30 only Subway Sandwiches offers any sort of remotely healthy selecting. Drive in painful travel-induced constipation for an hour and a half to Palm Desert and the IntraWest resort that my friend Dahli has reserved for us. I’m bloody exhausted.