Vox Nihilim

We say goodbye to the homeless encampment, the lawnmower graveyard and the infinity of wayward cats and head to Denny's for breakfast. Someone once said "Denny's is never where you go, it's where you end up." but no one told my traveling partner, because he always planned to eat there. The waitress station was right behind us. They're speaking rapid Spanish and laughing and it warms my heart. Good people working. While we begin to wade into our eggs and pancakes and toast and bacon a dishwasher comes from the back...coming off his first shift. The woman are peppering him in bursts of high and bubbly Spanish and he blushes. The manager is coming into work as the dishwasher leaves. He welcoms the boy to his first shift, making sure he knows where to park. He dismisses him with a thick handshake out into the morning brilliance. Outside, the air is still and cool and the clouds congeal against the mountaintops in the near distance.

Across the table, he's grunting and eating and not talking again. That's okay. The coffee tastes good and warms the corners of my still-sleeping self as it spills into me.  The mug  reads "Rome wasn't built in a day, but maybe if the had coffee..." It makes me laugh how terrible that is.

Today we are driving through the mountains and up the coast. We share a love for vistas and driving apparently. We strip off our coats and sweaters, so that we're in t-shirts and roll out of The Garlic Capital of the World and head off into the mountains.

We don't talk much as we rise into the clouds. The temperature drops and there's an oasis of conversation around where the defog is located on the rental car. We share small stories occasionally when the silence begins to thicken, but mostly we're doing what drivers and riders do. He's traveled extensively both for the company and on his own. He's nice. I may not have known that, were we not sitting in the same car for prolonged periods. I thought he just WAS before this. Now his life takes a shape and a form as he describes it to me. I talk about mine.

The mountains fall behind us and we roll into Santa Cruz. The boardwalk is closed so we walk to the pier. It would be thick with tourists if it weren't a weekday and early, but right now it's got that deserted beauty that comes with salt smells and waves churning against the pylons. It feels like the end of the world and that suits me. The ocean lays all around out into infinity.



We move on. Up the coast with trees and rocks and mountains and sea. For hours on end we only talk about how beautiful it is. The tang of the ocean saturates this land. The tall yellow grasses wave in the breeze as the turmoil of the surf talks over itself. Surfers peel off their wet suits as they stand dripping by the sides of their cars, the dust soaking up the salt water. We stop at Pigeon Point to explore the lighthouse, hostel and for a bathroom break. The half-broken cars with blankets over the backseats snuggle against the weathered hostel houses. The next generation of coastal explorers and drifters bunk together inside, reeking of cannabis and patoili and optimism. Each bunkhouse has a name; "Whale" and "Pelican" and "Dolphin". The lighthouse looms over it all, lording over its domain. We watch the fisherman and the sea lions play in the froth, exploring every inch of the outcropping before we return to the car.









On to Half-Moon Bay, where we drink beer and eat fish tacos and talk football with the barman who laments the state of the San Fransisco and Oakland teams. My companion enjoys a few fingers of old scotch that looks and smells like smoke as he swirls it under his nose. Time has stopped now. The desire to go anywhere fades with the beer-fueled warmth spreading through my body. We laugh with other patrons about jokes I don't remember as tourists amble past the open door looking out onto the thoroughfare.

Later we stop at a beach and watch the surfers and the children play in the waves as seagulls wheel overhead. The day is nearly over and our long flight home lies ahead. I can't stop watching the surf though. It takes me far away to the south. To another surfside motel where I was once truly happy.  That place is lost to me now and I hate thinking of it. But only sort of. I love the memory too. It's warm and loving and I was blessed to have lived it. It's a bittersweet and good ending to my day.

We finished our work early today. I think I like it here. Not right here, but you know...in this region. Right here is infested with feral cats, which I learned this morning come to the motel because a number of the permanent residents of this poorly soundproofed donkey-hole have taken to feeding all the strays that come by. Well word must have gotten out amongst the feline hordes, because brother, cat business here is boomin'.  Their presence and numbers amuse me. There's something about too many cats being anywhere that is inherently funny. And sure, maybe you want to make a racist Chinese restaurant joke... but I'm gonna have to shut you down. I've grown beyond that.

Some of my writing from a decade ago is problematic. If I were ever in danger of becoming famous, I would most certainly need to publicly apologize for it. It doesn't exactly "hold up" in the era of Me Too and sexual identity rights and millennial super-empathy, (I am not anti- any of those things. I'm pro- all of them...I beginning to believe they (millennials) have it right and we (Gen-X) had it wrong.)  I don't remember writing anything specifically unpalatable, but I am more than capable of charting the arc of my own ignorance and growth and I freely acknowledge that my thoughts back then were geared towards getting a laugh at the peril of my human decency. But the dick jokes? They were top-notch to be fair.

The rain is unexpected here and the drops throw flairs along the Christmas lights strung along San Benito street. People scurry along the sidewalks trying to outflank the unwelcome moisture falling on them. We watch from the warmth of the restaurant as the greeter smiles her brace-laden smile at us and expounds on how startled she was by the precipitation. She's beautiful and coltish and I know this is her first job because she's trying sooo hard. She's good in a way that older people are not. In ways I am not. I both love and hate her for this. She seats us and goes back behind her counter, watching the rain and waiting for her next guest. Hollister feels young, but maybe I'm just co-opting that from the eponymous retail chain. The fat haters. The one whose sizes stop around the 36" waist. We look at our phones and don't talk. He's older than me and we have little in common. We just work together. The silence is not uncomfortable. It's very professional. The pony girl scans the floor, catches my eye and smiles genuinely. Jesus Christ.

I wrote as a character called The Monster Apathy for a few years. I had a decent following. He was a bit of a twat to be honest. He was all the terrible things I saw in myself as a separated, unemployed man who had half-custody, a cat, and a small apartment that could have been cleaner. He was all my self-loathing turned up to 11 for comedic effect. I don't remember a lot of what I wrote...because I wrote a lot and am not super-remembry in general. I stumble upon some of it from time to time though and it still makes me laugh. Those blogs are locked down now, I think. Not meant for modern consumption. The tapestry they weave has some painful memories intertwined. There's a lot about that time in my life I'm still struggling to unpack. (Insert deflective dick joke here). Eventually, the Monster Apathy became this gonzo caricature of who he was when I started. I couldn't connect with him anymore because my life had improved. But I kept trying and failing to capture him. He died in 2012 sometime, I think. It was for the best, I'm sure.

The food comes and it's fine. We eat in silence. They have the big Christmas lights strung around the windows and they color the tableau of puddles in the gathering dark outside with their seasonal jest. We're eating early because we're both trying to stay on East Coast time. When he gets full, he starts making this sound like he's being strangled every time he swallows.  I must never marry this man for this certainly would be the quirksome trait that led to his early demise at my hand. I wonder what I do that would make him kill me? I think about that while he grunts his way through the last of his chicken. We trade not talking for taking turns spouting alternating facts about Hollister, California, taxes, motorcycles, and ...oh wait that's a conversation. I'm just being a capricous dick apparently.

Insert deflective dick joke again.

We drive back in the dark and I see lights up on the hills. People live up there. People waiting for Christmas. People wondering at the rain. People living lives I never contemplated before this moment. People who have never thought about my life as I rocket up the 101 back to Gilroy. That's okay. I'll think of them and wonder about them. I'll think of the greeter and her braces and her life and be glad for her. I'll start a new conversation with my painfully digesting partner. I'll try to be better.

I think that's what it's all about.

A lot of time has passed.

I'm talking specifically since the last time I chose to write anything online. But in a more nebulous sense, a lot of time has passed since I was a person who WOULD write anything online. I'm older now. The hot,flaky, insanity of writing private thoughts online is a phenomenon of the past.  I miss it.

I'm sitting here in my motel room, listening to the army of feral cats outside wail in asynchronous time with the hushed flumes of the cars hurtling down the nearby interstate. An outpost for the homeless has been built under the tree that rests on the precipice of a dried out gully. Their tarpaulins, and rags flap in the wind like banners on the walls of nothing. The cats swirl and spiral in eddies around the garbage cans. This is the Garlic capital of the world, and tonight I am its king.

When I first started blogging in 2007, I was very depressed. Untreated and clinical...not the fun kind. I came here alone and lonely, and wrote to draw the bile that had built up within from my nasty separation with my wife, and excise it into the dust like so much ill-advised rattlesnake venom in old Westerns. I eventually made friends online, and we built a little community, first on Myspace and then here.  It was very nice and it was precisely what I needed at the time. I was very silly. I wrote a lot of silly things. I behaved even sillier. I fell in love a few times. I hurt people. Others hurt me. It was a new life bloomed in the crater of the old one. It was like garlic. Strong and powerful and stinking and flavorful.

There is a small engine repair shop next door, The boards of the shop walls are dried and their paint is flaky and grey, like the peelings of sunburn to be rasped off. A hazard of lawnmowers congeal in clots throughout the alkali dust of the shoddily-fenced backyard. Rust and rust and rust peppering the ground in tumors beneath the untrimmed palms.  The cats roil through fence holes. In and out along their byways, always searching for food. The thin blue oil of a worklight spills across the dirt in a narrow cone, while the warm wind cradles the light twang of country music. On the breeze it is only a whisper, a secret, a melancholy wish for another place, or time, or girl, or chance... it's too subtle to tell which. It doesn't matter. The point is made.

I don't think I'm depressed anymore. My life has righted itself from the near disastrous toppling of a decade ago. There have been times when I felt lost since. When my father died. When I sat in the hotel in Chicago and wept for hours at the things I knew I had ruined. A few other times between the general positive uptick life has taken. I can't complain. I've figured myself out and come to terms with my mistakes and shortcomings. But I've never felt the urge to write until tonight. I don't even know why...I just CAN again.

Garlic capital of the world. Fucking weird, yo.