holy shit, we got it

i don't know how we did it, but somehow, rob and suz managed to come to new york city, with one apartment in mind and actually get that apartment.
we only looked at 2 places. the first place, we weren't even really interested in, we were just there because it was being rented by the same dude who was renting the one we wanted. we went to the one we weren't interested in first because he was showing it first. after a group of people clamored around him to express their interest in this apartment, we casually sauntered up to him and told him we were more interested in the other space he had for rent. we then began a casual discussion of philosophy, because our new landlord was actually a philosophy major in undergrad at berkeley over 20 years ago. over 20 years ago, when michel foucault was alive, he was teaching at berkeley, and he checked out our landlord...at least according to our landlord. but how cool is that. as he described it, he was "cruised" by michel. his impression of him was immaculate. just the right amount of head movement, a quick glance up and down followed immediately by a dramatic eye-roll at the end to perfectly punctuate the entire event.
magnificent.
starting in 2 weeks, suzanne and i will be official residents of a bustling neighborhood in bushwick.
this is going to be awesome.
did i mention the fact that the subway becomes an el-train (elevated train) through our neighborhood, and that the train actually passes by our apartment several times a day. now, when i say "passes by our apartment," i mean that quite literally. its like, right outside our window. if we were one floor up we would actually be able to see the passengers on the train. as it is now all we can see is the underside of the train, but we get a pretty good view. we love it. its so...funky.
that is all for now. i'll be back soon.

calling in all favors

alright everyone. suzanne and i are looking at an apartment tomorrow that is like...our dream loft.
we were looking at apartments on craigslist, and i was pushing for 2 bedrooms, cuz i wanted somewhere to do work and somewhere to sleep and somewhere to relax. suzanne randomly said, "hey, lets look at lofts." so, we looked up lofts and then we found one that made us say, "hey, lets only look at lofts." it was immaculate. it was a big long room, with giant windows, stretching from the floor all the way to the top of the ridiculously high ceilings. that apartment is no longer available, but literally like 2 days before we were coming to the city to look at apartments we found one almost exactly like what we first saw.
its in our price range, its in a good area and its awesome.
so, if you're the praying type, do that. if you're into voodoo, spill some dried snakes blood for your homies. ultimately though, focus some positive energy toward the brooklyn area for us.
think about it this way, if we get the place, you're all invited to visit. by all i mean those of you who i know in person.
thanks,
rob and suz

no sleep till brooklyn: i'm home

4,556 miles later and i'm finally home, and to be honest, i kinda get choked up as a type it out. i didn't really think i was going to be emotional about coming home. i guess that gives you a window into how emotinally closed off i can be. i love my parents, but seeing them so far hasn't even been really emotional. i think what really gets me is just the fact that i'm here. i started in san diego, and now i'm in webster. i know i started 10 days ago, but it really feels like no time has passed.
no time has passed since we left san diego, no time has past even since i left rochester nearly 2 full years ago. everything is always such a blur for me. i've gotta start paying more attention to things. i'm hoping that embaking on a career which is entirely based on paying attention to everything around you at all times is going to help me with that.
anyway, i'm not going to get into all of this right now, because i'm hanging out with my pops, watching tv and lounging on the couch, so i can't get too introspective just yet, but if i don't get back to this stuff, someone should get on my ass and yell at me.
so, before i go, lets just go through a quick summary of all the states we went through. here we go:
california, nevada, utah, colorado, kansas, missouri, illinois, kentucky, tennessee, virginia, north carolina (for some reason mapquest told us to take route 80 from nashville to north carolina, even though route 40 goes straight from nashville to winston salem), virginia, west virginia, pennsylvania (then back through west virginia cuz i took a wrong turn for about 20 miles), back to pennsylvania and then finally to new york.
this road trip is over, but i still have a long, difficult road ahead of me.
for now...i'm really home.

no sleep till brooklyn: nearing the end

we're at 4150 or something now. we were gonna just do a powerhouse move from winston salem all the way up to webster where my rents live, but we got really sick of driving, and one more 11 hour day really was going to kill us.
so, we're springing for one more hotel room in waynesburg, pa. last night i called to make a reservation, so i started by calling some other motel and asked if they had a pool. they said no, but suggested the comfort inn. i called the comfort inn, and for whatever reason, i didn't ask them if they had a pool, figuring that i was speaking to the correct comfort inn and that they would in fact have a pool and spa. unfortunately, i was wrong, and despite the fact that for most of the day i sat in the car worrying that i had spoken with a different comfort inn than the one that was suggested to me, we pushed on only to discover when we arrived that this comfort inn does not have a pool. there is one 20 minutes to the north and 20 minutes to the south, but the one in the middle, the one that i called and made a reservation at of course does not have a pool.
goddammit. do you know how much we were both looking forward to a pool and spa...very much...very, very much.
anyway, winston salem was very cool, thanks largely to dave super. he was a wonderful host, even sacrificing his bed for our comfort. what a guy.
as mentioned in a previous post, we spent some time floating on inner-tubes down a river. its actually quite relaxing spending a bunch of time floating, especially when a cooler full of beer is floating next to you. yeah, we had a damn good time.
unfortunately though it all had to come to an end today and we had to push on. our eastward momentum has taken a sudden turn to the left and we are now heading north. we made it as far as the southern boarder of pennsylvania before we realized how great of an idea it was to stop for the night. clearly we could've kept driving and probably made it through to webster uneventfully, but i'm really getting sick of driving. my fingers are developing a certan curve to them that matches the curve of my steering wheel. as cool as it sounds, its actually quite painful.
anyway, we're here now, and we're gonna enjoy it. we just finished ordering a pizza and a side salad and are awaiting it with eager anticipation. we're going to veg all night tonight. massages and hbo are on the itinerary. tomorrow morning we milk the continental breakfast and then we're on the road again until we hit rochester. my parents are dying to see us, and we're dying to see their spa.
we'll let you know how everything goes.

no sleep till brooklyn: day whatever

so, right now, i'm pretty drunk, and that is the result of 3 hours on the dan-something river that involved a whole lot of alcohol and floating. it was awesome. we dove a whole bunch yesterday, i think we're at like 3805 or something like that. we went through virginia, which is actually where i was born. the good ol' chippenham hospital in richmmond virginia. words are incredibly difficult to form with my fingers right now, so you should be thoroughly impressed by how few grammatical and spelling errors there are right now.
suffice it to say, tennessee was a beautiful state, and north carolina, as far as i can tell so far, is full of a bunch of alcohol and tobacco loving maniacs who happen to have at least one river at their disposal on which they will float away the afternoon consuming mass amounts of alcohol.
perhaps there will be further elucidation later, but don't count on it.

addendum

it took a while for me to realize this, but rain is falling from the sky.
you don't understand how long its been since i've really seen something falling from the sky. in many ways, i would be as surprised if all of a sudden a great ape that spoke with an english accent fell from the sky, onto my car and casually struck up a conversation with me about the education system of zimbabwe.
i haven't decided yet whether or not i like this. the idea of precipitation isn't necessarily new to me, but some part of my brain has clearly forgotten about it.

no sleep till brooklyn: day 6

3354 miles and counting. it was another day of endless driving. fortunately, today, the monotony was broken by a thunder storm between the hours of 8:30 and 11:30 pm. while the lightning was fantastic, driving in the dark, in the rain, with a bunch of 18-wheelers is actuallly somewhat of a terrifying experience...especially after you've already been driving for 8 hours.
i can't remember a single thing about the 5 states we drove through today except that they occurred in this order...kansas, missouri, illinois, kentucky and tennessee. the united states gets significantly less interesting as you go east, until you get to new york. this also happens to be the case when you start driving longer and longer distances each day as you get further and further east. tomorrow its off to winston salem north carolina. we'll be crashing there for a couple days with our dear friend, dave super. its a relatively short drive (but not really because its still 7 hours) but we're looking forward to a nice relaxing couple of days after tomorrow.
goodnight.

no sleep till brooklyn: the days blur

we finished out yesterday at something like 2561 miles. we drove a lot. we didn't get into wichita until like 2 in the morning. i can't remember if that was wichita time or what. basically we are drained. we didn't do anything all day yesterday except drive, so there isn't much to report.
we drove past the tyson chicken processing plant...and that was pretty much the most exciting part of the drive. by exciting i mean really, really smelly. in fact, a lot of kansas was like that. barren, desolate, and smelly. it was interesting.
before kansas, there was colorado. filled with mountainous majestic beauty, but unfortunately, the beauty is the result of those big ol' mountains that are there, and those big ol' mountains also mean roads that aren't major highways, especially if you are rob and suz...we don't really like the major routes. so, what happened was we spent a lot of time stopped on the road, waiting for traffic from the other direction again. it took us 2 hours to get less than 50 miles. that was awesome.
back to kansas. it was dark out when we were going through kansas, so when we were driving, we could see lights out in the distance. we came up with a game called, processing plant, penitentiary or city. you'd be surprised how difficult this game can actually be. give it a try sometime, you can amuse yourself for hours, which is fortunate because if you're driving through kansas, you have hours to kill.
so we decided that we were going to spend an extra night here, just so we could relax a bit. we did essentially nothing, primarily becuase it was fucking 112 degrees out. it was really fun giving suz a brush-up course in driving stick in 112 degree heat. she picked it up pretty quick, so maybe she'll be doing some driving tomorrow. tomorrow we're driving to nashville. we'll be driving for about 11 1/2 hours...grand.
goodnight folks.

no sleep till brooklyn: what day is it?

its tuesday. we are in durango, which i keep confusing in my head with pueblo.
the mileage, we're at 1815 now. we didn't really drive that much today, but it took forever. we got a late start so we got in late. also, we got in late because utah is a stupid state. the road we took is only two lanes...total. one in each direction and a very tiny shoulder. this means that when they do construction there's only one lane. periodically today, we would have to stop, on the highway, and wait for traffic to come from the opposing direction. they would allow 20 ro 30 cars pile up and then let them go, meanwhile another 30 are piling up in the other direction. this takes a while, and they block of long sections of road.
this, i consider very, very stupid. then they decided that it would be a fantastic idea to just change the speed limit to 40 miles per hour...forever. not really forever, but it felt like forever. i really didn't like utah...until we got to arches national park. i guess at some point all of that park was under water and when it dried up there was a lot of salt, rock and dirt that settled...it that order. salt, under that much pressure, goes nuts, and shifts, causing all those crazy rifts. then after a few hundred million years, you get arches, and a lot of giant rock formations that look like giant penises. all of this is orange and red with shrubs that range in shades of green from sage/mint, pine and like...watermelon. basically its like you're on mars. its also like 400,000 degrees out, so that helps add to the mars charm. we hiked for like maybe 300 yards, up an incline so we could see "delicate arch" from really far away. we didn't realize how it was goign to be totally not worth it until we felt like we were going to die when we reached the "viewing area." we kept the walking to a minimum after that, but who goes to a national park to walk anyway?
so, that part of utah was cool. but then we had to drive through colorado to get to durango. also took forever. and the best part is, we get to drive for like 13 hours tomorrow. its gonna be pretty lame. we decided today that the next time we do this, we aren't going to drive more than 600 miles in one day. its getting pretty dumb.

no sleep till brooklyn: day three

SUZANNE'S BIRTHDAY!!!
ok, so last night, after i posted the day's review, suzanne and i decided to mapquest our trip just to make sure we had everything clear. much to our surprise, mapquest informed us that we had approximately 850 miles and 14 hours of driving ahead of us. after much deliberation, we decided that we had no choice, and that we'd have to just wake our asses up early and hit the road. unfortunately though, we had to chop yosemite from the itinerary.
so anyway, this morning we woke up at 4 pacific time, i gave suzanne a beautifully poetic birthday card filled with all my pontifications on our love, our journeys and our future. it was great. i hopped in the shower, let suzanne sleep a bit more and then started packing shit up. we got on the road at 5:20 a.m...awesome right?
we drove for a little while before realizing how hungry we were, so we stopped at the first denny's we could find. i got the moons over my hammy, minus the hammy and suzanne ordered a veggie omelette. while she was in the bathroom i asked the waitress to put a candle in her omelette. when it arrived, i sang, the waitress sang, and the woman sitting behind suzanne (who i had befriended primarily because she heard me asking the waitress for a candle), she sang too. it was cute.
from there, we just kept on driving, and driving, and driving, and driving. we left california, and then we were in nevada. did you know that the last above-ground atomic bomb test was actually done on july 17th? we found that out last night. anyway, while we were driving through nevada we saw a sign that said "low flying aircraft," and then after we saw that, we saw the hillside exploding. well...not really exploding, it was kinda like they were firing blanks at the hill. whatever they were dropping, didn't have explosives in it, but something was causing dust to shoot up from the hill.
we saw this on route 50 going through nevada. route 50 is also known as "the lonliest road in america." this is probably because this was the most desolate, abandoned, nothing-around-for-miles road i've ever been on. it was amazing. tons of mountains, tons of desert shrubbery, tons of nature's majesty.
next came utah...that's right, we drove through california, nevada and utah...we were busy today. did you know that utah is on fire? neither did we, until we were driving through more desert and we realized that everything around us seemed really orange and really smokey. when we finally made it to a town, we asked a gas station attendant if there were wildfires going on. after he laughed at us, he confirmed what we though. apparently there are fires to the west, to the south and to the east of delta, utah. after delta, we only had like another 175 more miles to drive...only. we finally made our way to fabulous provo, utah and into the econo lodge...thank goodness for small miracles.
so, at the end of yesterday the odometer read 512 miles. today it reads 1404 miles. quick math reveals that we drove (and by we, i mean i drove) 892 miles. as stated previously, we started at 5:20 a.m. pacific time and we arrived here at 8:30 p.m. pacific time (9:30 p.m. mountain time) which means we were driving for 15 hours and 10 minutes.
fucking awesome. thank god tomorrow we only have like 6 1/2 hours to drive to durango. we're crossing our fingers and hoping that none of the roads we're taking are closed because they're on fire.
right now we're eating pizza, and after that we're eating leftover cake that we've been lugging around with us for 3 days. i had the foresight to bring birthday candles, and the insight to bring ones that looked like crayons. it wouldn't be my girl's birthday if they were just normal candles. god i love her.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY MY DEAREST!

no sleep till brooklyn: day two

alright, quick correction from day one...we actually drove 441 miles yesterday. today the odometer reades 512, and that is largely because we just did a whole lot of exploring today. our hotel is in carmel, which is like 4 1/2 seconds away from monterey which is quite an interesting little town.
so anyway, let me start from the beginning of today. we woke up surprisingly early, and i say surprisingly because when i woke up, i was surprised that i had even fallen asleep. it was one of those nights when we fell asleep in eachother's arms at like 10:30 and stayed that way until we woke up. so, we woke up, chilled a little, went for a swim, had some coffee. i decorated the room for suz's birthday, even though her birthday isn't until tomorrow, we wanted to celebrate in a hotel room that was actually in california. so i decorated the room and gave her a birthday tiara.
after we snacked on some road-trip goodies we hit the road again for a little exploratory adventure. we tried going through some of carmel and ended up getting stuck in the tourist district, which really sucked. it put both of us in a mood that made us want to retreat from civilization. so, we went with that vibe and decided to check out the local mission.
the carmel mission is part of the original el camino real, which means the way of the king. what it is basically is a trail of missions that go up the california coast. each mission is a one day horse ride from the previous one and this one was actually the second one built, which is kinda weird cuz its so far north. anyway though, the dude who came up with the idea of building all these missions is named junipero sera, who is actually buried under the altar at this mission. the place is filled with all sorts of crazy vibes. we knelt and prayed in front of a shrine to mary of bethlehem that pope john paul II knelt when he visited the US. so, the mission was cool.
after the mission we drove around trying to find a place where we could find some quick food so we could hit the road. we wanted to take the 1 back south so we could revisit some of the majestic beauty of california one last time before we left the state. but, finding food was actually pretty difficult for some reason. probably mostly because we wanted to avoid the tourist areas and because we had no idea where we were going. anyway, eventually we found an international deli which was actually basically just an awesome greek restaurant. the lady there chatted us up a while after we finished our food and we found out her son is going to SDSU. we told her we were road-trippin all the way across the states and she snuck us a free baklava. after that we wanted some coffee so we found a little hole-in-the-wall cafe called miriam's cafe. miriam just happened to be working at the store that day, and we got to talking to her a little bit too. she is originally from humbolt county. in my two short years in california, i have come to understand that if you are originally from humbolt county you are, as a matter of course, a major pothead. miriam appeared not to be the exception to the rule, but i didn't get an official confirmation because we had to hit the road.
once we were satiated and caffeinated we were on the road again. we drove south and saw some pretty great stuff, some of which might actually make it to my blog one day. i doubt that the digital camera really captured the intensity of what we were looking at, but it did its best, so i commend it for that. now, we have made it back to the hotel and are relaxing and getting ready for the long drive ahead of us. tomorrow we are off to provo, utah...woo hoo. we will officially be saying goodbye to california and heading east.
updates will be soon to come. i know you're on the edge of your seat.

no sleep till brooklyn: day one

have you ever driven along the pacific coast highway amidst a blinding haze of fog and wash from the surf crashing hundreds of feet below you as the sun is setting to your left and just said to yourself, "if i were to go crashing off this cliff right here, where would i go? clearly i'm already in heaven." well...i have, as of today at least.
today was the first leg of our second trans-continental journey, appropriately dubbed, compliments of my dear suzanne, the "no sleep till brooklyn tour." i mean, we'll sleep and all, but we're gonna be driving a whole lot.
today we drove from our dear apartment in vista, all the way up to carmel, which is just south of monterey. look it up on google maps, i think you'll get a kick out of it. we drove approximately 450 miles and a large portion of it was along the california coast. incidentally, coast driving is awesome. you know all those movies where the hot guy and the hot girl are driving along a winding road with the ocean crashing against the cliffs below them...that was suzanne and i today.
the area that we're in right now is called big sur, which is absolutely picturesque. its where william randolph hearst built his castle. that guy had a lot of money, and pretty good taste from what i hear, so i think that means that we're in one of the coolest place in the world.
there was one point when we were driving along the cliffs, and this area is very foggy, and we were watching the fog being drawn up the mountain and over us. we were driving through a tunnel of fog...it was fucking awesome. there was this other part when we were driving through some thick fog, and then all of a sudden, out of nowhere it cleared up, which is when we realized that there was this big ol' mountain right in front of us. it was insane.
we are at the edge of the continent. we drove where the mountains dropped into the ocean. we stood at the edge of a cliff 250 feet above the ocean and looked west until we saw no more. we looked down on clouds that were barely hovering above the oceans surface.
so, how do i feel about moving back to the east coast, going back to school and in general, starting what i expect will be a fantastic new chapter in my life? so far things are going pretty well.