the garrison show

LA was, as a always, a whirlwind.

ransford and i spent some quality time together and i finally got a chance to catch up with Harrell-Edge, the Laziest Man in America (that’s official). thanks to the aforementioned prize-winner, i spent an evening in the green room of the jimmy kimmel show, rubbing elbows with celebs. juicy.

i visited the LA consulate of the chinese embassy and let me tell you, it’s NOTHING like it looks like on 24. there’s no garden, there’s no troops, it’s one floor in a random office building. though it is well-stocked with gorgeous asian clerks. i suppose they’re really chinese, not just ‘asian,’ but whatever they are, they’re all knockouts.

so just a few last minute details to attend to (including finding a bed to sleep in when i get to hong kong), and i’ll be off!

so i finally got to las vegas, after all these years. it wasn’t quite worth the wait.

don’t get me wrong, there are tons of cool things to see and do. i guess. i mean, that’s what everyone tells me and who am i to say anything different. we drove in at night and saw all the lights and found a cheap hotel room about half a mile from the strip. walked to the tropicana and the walk took long enough both to wonder, “who walks to the casinos?” and answer, “the losers do.” great.

tropicana, it was quickly determined, actually was for losers. we left and went to the bellagio, which was immediately more my style. no shortage of beautiful people there, that’s for sure. or beautiful money. neither of which i had any of.

i was lamenting the lack of money in particular when i came up with the good idea that once i’ve secured a job and a few paychecks, it would be fun to come out here with, say $1000, and really live it up the way you’re supposed to. i had gone about 10 steps down the sidewalk before i realized that if i’m going to have a $1000 weekend, i’d rather have it in italy or france. duh.

and that’s about all i needed to know about vegas.

damn. i mean…damn.

it’s really quite difficult to explain the impression that the canyon makes. even with pictures, which everyone’s seen before, it’s hard to get your head around the scale of “that hole in the ground.”

most of the canyon is surrounded by national forest so when you drive into the park, all you see is trees. there’s a driving tour along the north rim (the south rim is closed in winter) but you can’t quite see anything from the car. so you drive around through the park and it feels like a resort. you see lodges and cabins, campgrounds and all that. then you get on to this road that follows the rim of the canyon with a dozen or so spots you can park and get out. the entire way, though, the road is maybe 50 meters off the rim so you can’t quite see anything from it. so you get out of your car and walk up the path and…. damn.

at its widest it’s more than a mile and its deepest is almost two miles to the canyon floor. it’s just huge. and colorful. and breathtaking. if you’re at all interested, you should put it on your list of things to do. we pulled in around 4:00 pm, which was too late to start a hike to camp in the backcountry, so we drove the tour and took pictures then camped in the campground. with the hot chocolate and bar service, it wasn’t quite “roughing it,” but it was fun enough. and it sure felt like we were roughing something when we woke up and realized it had snowed 6 inches on us.

we took the same driving tour again to get the shots with the snow in them. then we had to go and that was that. i will definitely go back for a longer trip, probably during warmer weather, when i can hike down into the inner gorge and see the colorado river.

anyone else want to go?

here’s all you need to know about phoenix: it’s not finished yet.

i couldn’t find any infomration (though i didn’t even look) but it seems like they are building a rail or trolley system that goes all over downtown and through the middle of every street. all i can tell you is that there is construction EVERYWHERE and it totally sucks. you’re driving on the right side of the street then all of a sudden you’re on the left side then you’re on the sidewalk then you’re in a 4-foot pothole then you’re…you get the point.

koon and i found a place to eat where vibe magazine was sponsoring a live poetry/slam sort of reading. interesting. one guy had an entire album of poetry dedicated to his dick. he read one of the pieces and, though i can’t remember any details at this point, i’m sure it was great.

we stayed in a hostel. in phoenix. is that weird? the answer is yes. there were 3 40-somethings who ran it and they were a little off. but very hospitable and very cheap. no complaints here!!

that’s really about all i have to say about phoenix.

how often does texas get an ice storm?

so i’m heading west along I-10, an enomous interstate that runs across the entire country, when i see a notice that about 100 miles of it are shut down, starting in boerne. so i’m on the phone to adam and puzzling over my AAA maps trying to figure out a way around this. i end up having to backtrack east a ways, shoot up north 40 miles or so, and then go west on route 190.

190 is not a road that’s seeing a lot of traffic. i end up on it for 60 or 70 miles and probably see a dozen cars, total. never mind the fact that i’m driving through a blizzard, this is some rural land. there’s a house every 3 miles and not much more to be seen. i figured out that if you want to live somewhere, do whatever the fuck you want and have no one bother you, texas is the spot.

i can’t drive too long without having disturbing visions of what’s going on at some of these houses. bestiality is probably the nicest thing i’m imagining. i’ll spare you the gory details and simply let you know, and i swear i’m not making this up, that i drove by a scantily-clad man dancing to a bonfire in an oil barrel in the backyard of his house. ridiculous. i couldn’t actually see the sacrifical virgin covered in pigs blood, but i’m sure she was there.

only slightly less bizarre was the town of Iraan. after some internet research (a fancy term that means ‘google’), i found out the name is actually a “clever” combination of the names Ira and Ann, the founders of the town. with a population of around 1000, it’s not setting any records for anything other than creepiness. it felt like the whole “town” was just some fake front for a secret military installation. you might say my imagination was working overtime, but i say screw you. there were weird lights, tanks, everything just looked official somehow. maybe the aforementioned blizzard i was driving through had some impact, as well. or maybe i was starting to hallucinate.

in any case, overall, it was a harrowing and hair-raising drive, and i only made it as far as fort stockton. i’d wanted to get all the way to phoenix, but with I-10 closed, that was never going to happen. for $40 i got a bed at the executive inn and hoped for faster travels the next day.

it’s a city we all know and love - big sky country, as the locals call it, houston stays at the top of my list of beautiful american resort destinations. or not.

houston’s draw for me centers around one thing - adam kuhlmann. i holed up at his place for 2 or 3 nights and am eternally grateful. i have to report that he beat me at darts (probably because he cheated, but i’m not sure how yet), and is still as intelligent as ever. i was treated to a number of fine meals and even an art museum.

but the highlight of this trip has to be joel osteen. adam’s girlfriend is a good, christian girl and in the course of making fun of this (in a good-hearted manner, to be sure), we stumbled upon joel as a topic of discussion. it wasn’t long before we dared each other to go to his houston-based church, lakewood. sweet.

honestly, it was ridiculous. we’re walking from the parking garage to the church and the crowd gets bigger at every turn. i use the term ‘church’ faily loosely because the actual building is much closer to a stadium than a church. we get inside and we’re making our way to the cheap seats when an usher spots my camera and asks if we’re “first-timers.” we admit that we’ve never been here before and the usher tells us she can get us good seats down by the stage. floor seats. score.

she leads us into the labyrinth, down elevators, through secret hallways, past the ritual sacrifice rooms and finally opens the door onto the floor of the church. i’m not exaggerating when i tell you it was like walking into a rock concert. laser light show, pounding music, screaming fans - it was all there. our guide pushes through, taking us closer and closer to the stage. we end up 3 rows back, stage right maybe 15 feet from joel himself. i’m so giddy i’m shaking.

the singing (i believe the technical term is ‘praise) continues for some time before joel’s wife, victoria, gives a quick story. she tells us she dialed a wrong number and happened to have a conversation with the person who answered. amazingly enough, the person was in dire need of prayer and victoria was only too willing to oblige. it seems that perhaps that wasn’t a wrong number after all!! doesn’t god work in such mysterious ways?

anyway, the service was quite entertaining; joel’s a fine public speaker and everything is catered to those with short attention spans. beautiful people were all around us although it was a refreshing change of pace to see a fairly mixed group, racially and socio-economically. although i think it would a little difficult to find anything controversial or even disagreeable in joel’s “message” that 2007 is going to be a year of victory and preaching the power of positive thinking.

after the service, we wandered by the bookstore. we had time because it takes a while for 8,000 (typical attendance) people to leave a parking garage. if what we saw that sunday was representative at all, joel is making more money than he knows what to do with. he runs his church like a business, and it surely is a profitable one. the church considers you a member after 3 services, but you only have to buy 2 books to make it all the way into heaven.

frankly, i don’t think it’d be worth it.

i’ve wanted to see new orleans ever since katrina wrecked her unimaginable damage across the gulf coast and i got my chance coming out of biloxi. i didn’t want to spend the night there because of the chronic crime problems, but i thought it at least merited a drive through and it wasn’t too far out of the way. i’m glad i went.

new orleans looks like shit. being that that was my first time there, i have no way of knowing how much of it is attributable to the hurricane and how much to general conditions, but i know that it’s shit now. houses falling apart, lots filled with trash, and poor people absolutely everywhere. i can’t imagine it has much trouble cracking the top 10 dirtiest cities in the US.

i drove around downtown a bit, then parked and walked the french quarter. tourism dollars have spruced that area up disproportionately to anything surrounding it, but even in pristine condition, it reeks of alcohol and bad food. do you want to know what you have to do to get weed? you have to get out of your car. actually, i’m pretty sure they’re willing to overlook even that requirement. i was first propositioned about 30 seconds after i park and didn’t leave before i’d collected 8 more offers.

after revelling on bourbon street with saints fan (who were out for the eagles game) and driving through some of the beat-up parts of the city, i was sufficiently depressed and decided to move on.

if george bush does like black people, new orleans is not the proof.

the first thing you see in biloxi is a casino - the imperial palace. i figured i’d earn my hotel fare and ATM’d $100 and saddled up to the roulette wheel. if you weren’t sure until now, i can give you definitive proof that i am an idiot.

my idea was to bet on two different 3rd’s of the numbers. so i bet on 1-12 and 13-24; both of these pay 3-to-1, so I have a 2/3rd’s chance to win 50%. are you following me? now - on the betting turf (obviously it’s not called a turf, but i have no idea what it’s called), you’ve got all the numbers and then the groups on the outside. i lost half my money on my first bet bceause i tried to play the line between 1st 12 and 2nd 12. well, that line means 0 and 00. who knew? not me. long story short (well, it’s not too long a story), my $100 didn’t last long and i found a $60/night hotel.

when i got to the hotel, i asked if there was someplace to go out. they recommended the casino. there aren’t too many options in biloxi. at first i was a bit annoyed and then i remembered that hurricane that devastated the entire tri-state area a year ago. driving around, i stayed close to the gulf coast and saw lots of reminders of the destruction. many lots have still not had the trash and debris cleared. you can see where the boardwalk used to be and nothing has swept in to take its place yet. it’s a shame because it’s a beautiful area, just all beat to hell and back.

given the situation, there wasn’t too much reason to stick around too long in biloxi. i got in to the town late, slept, drove and took some pictures, and then headed out on I-10, ready for another adventure…