I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you.

If you’ve made the drive even once, you’ve seen it. If you’re local to Santa Barbara or Ventura, you know exactly what I’m talking about. If you have even one curious fiber in your body, you’ve thought about it. What is this island, and what goes on there?

The drive I speak of is the drive up the Ventura Freeway to Santa Barbara. Somewhere on the way up, right before Capinteria, in the tiny town of La Conchita, lies this small island directly off the coast, plainly visible from the freeway. I feel the need to explain that I took this picture while sitting in heavy traffic, with my car completely stopped on the freeway. Somehow, this justifies this picture to me. Anyways, here’s a better picture of the island.

As I’ve made this drive many times (as I’ve repeated ad nauseam on this blog), I have passed this island many times. Because of this, I’ve often thought about who lives on this island, and what goes on there. Because I’m much too lazy to run a simple Google search about this island, I actually tried to drive to the island once just to see for myself. Don’t question my logic, it just works.

Unfortunately for me and my illogical curiosity, I drove to the gates of the island, only to encounter… gates. Thwarted and dejected, I remain here to this day, pondering the goings-on of the mysterious isle. What could possibly be happening on this, by far the smallest of the Channel Islands, to justify such unimpeachable security?

Sure, there’s a Wikipedia page for the island, but since it’s Wikipedia, I don’t trust it. At all. I’m not even going to link to it here. As far as I’m concerned, this is a midterm paper, and Wikipedia doesn’t count as a reference.

• Perhaps they clone newborn babies there, as they did in UCLA’s Sproul Hall from 2005-2011?*
• Maybe the island contains the last surviving members of the long-since-forgotten-and-presumably-extinct subspecies of desert gecko, Gekko gordonus, and the island is its last known natural habitat.†
• They could be housing Monday Night Rehabilitation, every night.§
• They could be holding $25,000 cage fight invitational tournaments inside a makeshift outdoor octagon every night.‡

The Creation of Awesome.

Quick – think of the most stereotypical “California” scene you can, and hold that mental image for a second. Chances are, especially if you’re not a native Californian, you probably thought of this, this, or this. Besides all of those scenes being physically located in California, there is one more common thread linking them.

Highway 1 is one of the most famous roads in the world, and for good reason. It pretty much represents California: Pacific Coast Highway? That’s Highway 1. Bixby Canyon Bridge in Big Sur? Highway 1. The Golden Gate Bridge? Yep.

There’s not only the mountain of empirical evidence of Highway 1′s greatness, but there’s definitely something of an emotional connection that I have with this road. After all, it’s the major road that I grew up within a mile of. It’s the only road that links my hometown with where I currently live. It’s the home stretch of my marathon drives from L.A. to the Monterey Bay area. It’s also the only highway in Southern California that breaks the standard rules of SoCal highway nomenclature – it’s just “PCH”, never “The 1″. Sharp-eyed readers will notice that I use a Highway 1 sign as my avatar on this site.

So, last Thanksgiving, while on the last leg of one of those marathon drives back home, I noticed something a little different about the road just outside of Watsonville: They were building another highway, next to the existing highway. They were building a second Highway 1.

Do you know what this means? This means that there will soon be two Highway 1′s. Two Highway 1′s. This is, quite simply, the best news ever. Imagine Ano Nuevo, times two. Imagine Morro Bay, times two. Imagine the Moss Landing power plant… times two.

For a little over two months now, I’ve actually been working on a list of things that are more awesome than two Highway 1′s. Here’s what I’ve come up with.

Aftermath.

Coachella 2011 Official Stats:

• People in Party: 2
• Days Spent In The Desert: 4+
• Miles driven: 282 (round trip)
• Hours of Sleep (Total Over Four Nights): 16
• Number of 5 Hour Energy Shots Drank: 12
• Total Hours of Energy Given By Shots: 60
• Liters of Water Drank: 20 (estimated)
• Number of Power Bars eaten: 10
• Number of Bands Seen (Over Three Days): 23
• Number of Bands That We Should Have Seen: 50+
• Number of New Favorite Bands: 3
• Time Spent in The Do-Lab (in Hours): 4
• Bottles of Sunscreen Used: 2
• Sunburns: 1 (shoulders, suffered on Day 1)
• Neckties Destroyed in the Name of Hipster Fashion: 1
• Bottles of Red Hair Dye Used: 1
• Regrets: 0

SO worth it.

One other thing that I bought at the Ralph’s in town: Hair Dye. Why hair dye? Because it made so little sense that I had to do it. If you saw me from April-just about now, you may have noticed that I had a different hair color (or colors, depending on when you saw me). This is why.

Please excuse me while I go all hippie-love-child on you here, but it’s all about getting into the spirit of the festival, man.

So who cares if I made a complete impulse decision to buy a bottle of the brightest hair dye in Indio and dump all of it into my hair inside one of the shower trailers at the campground?

On a related note, who cares if I missed a few spots with the dye and showed up to work on Tuesday with spotty, two-colored hair?

Who cares if you purchase a necktie in the general store and immediately take a paintbrush and a pair of scissors to it and wear it as a headband?

Who cares if you take a hockey stick and tape glowsticks to it just so you can be seen? (I didn’t do this, but I was incredibly jealous of the person who did)

At Coachella, It Just Doesn’t Matter.

The beautiful thing about Coachella is that you can do all of this, so you just do. Do you want to go rollerskating or do yoga? Do you want to play dodgeball or play pinball? Do you want to see the Black Keys or Skrillex? YOU CAN DO ALL OF THESE THINGS AND IT IS AWESOME. I cannot stress this enough.

I mean, it’s not all peace-love-happiness-Woodstock out there, but for three days, you are granted an enormous amount of choice. It’s something that you should take advantage of. I realize that after attending four Coachella’s that I am incredibly biased, but I am also incredibly addicted.

Over 90,000 people from all over the world will come to a polo field in the middle of the Mojave Desert to have a good time with you. Last year, I was almost torn limb from limb 40 feet from the stage while singing along to The Strokes’ “Last Nite” with a group of people from Spain, and I cannot tell you how immensely happy I was doing it. If it’s not your thing to drop $300+ to go see maybe 3 or 4 bands that you care about, then that’s completely fine and I fully respect that. However, I can attest to this: There is no better feeling than laying in the middle of the polo field at night, just before the night’s headliner comes on, and taking a look around you simply to take it all in. The eight stages, the thousands of people, the excellent music, the kinetic sculptures, the ferris wheel, the palm trees - all of it.

I can’t wait.

Continue…

Food? Who needs food???

Maybe this time I’ll plan a little better. See, Bryan and I just kind of winged it last year, and while we definitely made do, we quickly realized that we were short of several basic necessities. Like food.

That’s my open trunk in the picture above, and even though it’s a horribly-lit photo and you really can’t see what is inside my trunk, I’ll just tell you: One case of water, one trash bag, and one empty tent bag. That’s it. We brought entirely too little food – A case of Power Bars and a box of crackers was about it – and just assumed that there would be food there to purchase. There definitely was food to purchase, but we also came to the realization that we were incredibly cheap and didn’t want to shell out $9 per meal for over three days.

Thank god for the shuttle into town, where there is a Ralph’s. And an Italian restaurant. With air conditioning. Thank god.

Oh yeah, I forgot – Indio in April is kind of like a sauna – it’s over 90 degrees every day of the festival, and you had better be prepared for it. Like bathing-in-sunscreen-prepared. Like bringing-gallons-of-water-prepared. Like go-into-a-mist-tent-or-air-conditioned-space-whenever-possible-prepared.

That’s also the beauty of camping on the grounds: There are a ton of amenities on site, like showers, general stores, shuttles into town, stuff that you can definitely take advantage of. You can also go in and out of the festival as many times as you like to retreat to your campsite. Because nothing beats the 12:00-4:00 crappy opening band routine like taking the shuttle into Indio and having a calzone for lunch at the Italian place, right?

Continue…

3 days of peace, love, and WAKEY WAKEY!!!

WAKEY WAKEY EGGS AND BAKEY!!!

7:00 AM. 7. AM. Seven-effing-AM, after getting exactly 3 1/2 hours of sleep the night before because of Dude Who Wanted To Blast His Crappy House Music 3 Feet From My Head, we were awakened by some idiot who seemed hell bent on turning the entire campground against her.

WAKEY WAKEY EGGS AND BAKEY!!!

As it turns out, House Dude didn’t want to wake up, so this horrible woman chose to repeat her five word refrain repeatedly until he did so. And guess what? He still didn’t wake up, but everybody else sure as hell did.

WAKEY WAKEY EGGS AND BAKEY!!!

I’ll never forget those five words for as long as I live. And why, WHY did she want to wake up so early? Because she wanted to take a shower before the lines got too long. The showers were 200 feet from our campsites. Hardly logical, but as I learned that weekend, little is logical at Coachella. You just roll with it.

WAKEY WAKEY EGGS AND BAKEY!!!

Outside of Idiot Girl and House Dude, everybody around us seemed to be pretty cool people. See the California Bear Flag in the background of the picture? Yeah, those guys were all A’s fans from the Bay Area. The car next to them were a group from Santa Cruz. The group in the foreground took up four campsites and set up a little shanty town for themselves. I like to think they came up with their own constitution and legal system just for the weekend, and sent people to neighboring campsites in search of trade partners. They probably printed their own money too. One thing’s for sure though – EVERYTHING was legal in that shanty town.

Everyone just kind of operated on their own schedules for the most part, and kept to themselves until the final night, when we all came together for one last massive party in the campground. Once inside the gates though, all bets were off.

WAKEY WAKEY EGGS AND BAKEY!!!

Oh right, Idiot Girl. Perhaps not surprisingly, after her 7:00 AM outburst on Day 1 of the festival, she was never heard from again.

Continue…

Prepare for the best.

As you may have heard over the last couple of weeks, Coachella is coming. As you may have heard over the last few days, Coachella is sold out. As you may be thinking to yourself, “What the hell is Coachella, and why do I care?”, please allow me to shed a little (more) light into the rituals and experiences of this yearly Mojave-based culture festival.

Over the next five days, I plan to write about each of the five days I spent at last year’s festival (the three days of the festival proper, and two days for travel), in order to properly reminisce about the event nine months ago, and to psych up for this year’s festival, coming in three months.

Truth be told, I’ve been sitting on this series for about nine months, until the time became right to write about last year’s festival. It’s like I’m the ultimate hipster: I’m writing about Coachella 2011 three months before Coachella 2012 because I can. I don’t need your approval.

Actually, truth be told, I wanted to write this series this last May but completely forgot to do so.

So what is Coachella? For starters, it’s a three day alternative/indie/dance/house music festival in the middle of the desert about a half hour outside of Palm Springs. Close to a 150 acts perform before 90,000 or so sweaty, sunburned, (probably) inebriated people, and generally it’s just awesome.

Technically, it’s the Coachella Valley Music And Arts Festival, but let’s face it – it’s just Coachella.

ANYWAYS, you can camp outside the festival grounds, and so I did. This was the sight upon entering the grounds late Thursday night at about 11:30 PM. At 12:30 AM, I was probably 30 feet or so further up than I was at 11:30. At 1:30 I had my car searched by security in order to remove any sort of fun drugs and alcohol from my car, and at 2:00 my campsite was set.

The thing is, you can “camp”, but you’re never going to sleep. In my case, it was a combination of just being straight-up JACKED for the festival and the dude in the campsite next to me who insisted on removing the massive subwoofer from his car’s trunk, placing it directly next to my tent, and turning his car’s radio up to 40.

Whatever. It didn’t matter – because I was at Coachella, and in 8 hours I was going inside those festival gates.

Continue…

It's like deja vu all over again...

I’ve never been big on actually sitting down and creating lasting New Year’s resolutions for myself. To me, it always sounded kind of funny, like why would I have to wait until January 1 to act on a resolution? If I’m planning to make a resolution, why can’t I just go ahead and act on it now? However, I figured I would give it a try this year, as I actually have some concrete goals for myself  - most of all, to not let stupid crap get to me so much.

As much as I find the humor in the stupid crap that gets to me – and as much as I write about said stupid crap on this blog – I think that it would be in my best interest if I tried to not let it bother me so much. And so, last week I decided to make my first ever Official New Year’s Resolution: To Stop Letting Stupid Crap Get To Me So Much.

My Official New Year’s Resolution To Stop Letting Stupid Crap Get To Me So Much lasted all of eight seconds after I walked into my apartment on the evening of January 1 and immediately got super pissed off at stupid crap, which I believe is a new record of futility for myself. Well, then.

Maybe I could have a little more luck with a more unofficial New Year’s resolution? Around the middle of last year, I made a conscious decision to begin to eat healthier, with mixed success thus far. After the holidays, I fully intended to get back on the horse and start consistently eating healthier, and I actually did so for a little while! Just look at my first two meals for today:

• Breakfast: Oatmeal with ground flaxseed mixed in (actually my normal breakfast)
• Lunch: Whole wheat gnocchi with chunky marinara sauce.

Unfortunately for me, the cheese enchiladas I had for dinner derailed that train just as it was picking up steam.

Another unofficial and recurring New Year’s resolution of mine is to constantly challenge myself and try new things in life. The beginnings of this blog in late 2009 actually resulted from that desire to try something new. Well, in keeping with the breaking of my other New Year’s resolutions, I will NOT challenge myself, and I will instead try something I’ve tried over a half dozen times before and write a post about a town in the Salinas Valley, this time being King City. Seriously, I’m running out of towns in the Salad Bowl to write about – I think the only one I haven’t written about yet is Salinas itself.

I’m even going to be consciously lazy about the picture above: The road in the background of this picture is Jolon Road, which I’ve already written about here.

Obviously, the above is written with tongue firmly in cheek: New Year’s is a logical time to reassess one’s goals and to strive to make improvements in one’s life, and I completely intend to stick to my guns in 2012. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in the last year, it’s that it is nearly impossible to stay completely static in your life for an extended period of time. Where I was as a person on January 4, 2011 is nowhere near where I’m at on January 4, 2012, and I would bet my entire next year’s salary that the same holds true for you as well. You go either up, down, laterally, or diagonally – there’s no staying put.

At the risk of sounding like Tony Robbins, even if you don’t actually sit down and make New Year’s resolutions, it’s possible to improve your outlook on life and to improve your overall well-being. Even if you make baby steps like, I don’t know, drinking a bottle of water instead of a Coke at lunchtime, that’s one little step towards improving yourself. Now all of that being said, here’s to a great 2012!

The Most Familiar Place In The World.

Please excuse me if I’m feeling a bit out of sorts as of late. Between being sick with the flu (sick with “a few things” says the doctor) for 19 days and counting, work getting out of control with balancing the sick days and our springtime push (records have a long lead time) and my freelance work (It’s basketball season now? Wait, what?), and former co-workers of mine being SHOT in Hollywood (he’s okay) – yeah, it’s been a crazy few weeks. How are you?

Please excuse me if I’m rambling a bit, as the flu meds are going to kick in at any second and probably knock me out faster than a Junior Dos Santos right hand. As I said, I’m feeling a bit out of sorts. You see, it’s the end of the year, and I’m not quite ready for this one to end yet. It’s not that I’m afraid of change, it’s that the new year always brings about a bit of uncertainty, which, for the record, I’m not really worried about – it’s just making me feel a bit uneasy, and I don’t really know why it is.

It’s not “2012 end of the world” stuff, although if the bucket of crazy is true and the world really does end next year, the predictions point to me missing my 26th birthday by one day. Of course that means I’ll have the most unbelievable party ever one year from now.

It kind of feels like all of the existential quarter-life crisis stuff that I’ve written about before and rehashed before, but at the same time, it’s not quite like that.

I just don’t think I’m ready for 2011 to end yet.

It’s definitely been quite a year with both its highs and lows, and if I’ve learned nothing else this year, here’s the thing that I’ve come to realize in the last twelve months: You just get through it. There’s still no roadmap on how to navigate through life. They don’t teach you these sorts of things in college.

• They don’t teach you what to do when one of your roommates just moves out of your apartment with no notice and stiffs you on the rent, and suddenly you’re a few hundred bucks short.
• There’s no seminar course entitled “Real Life 165: So Contractors Just Destroyed Half Of Your Apartment While Replacing The Building’s Plumbing”.
• They also don’t tell you how to answer when your boss’ boss asks you just what the hell you did to your hair?! You dyed it red?!? Why??!?

It’s just been nuts this year. Can we just make January the 13th month of 2011? Because I kind of want to see what happens next.

But please excuse me if right now, I just want something a bit more familiar before we move on.

And so, here it is: The Most Familiar Place In The World.

Its mystery is incomprehensible.

Okay, this has kind of bugged me for years. As you may know by now, I make somewhat frequent trips up and down the 101 freeway between Los Angeles and Northern California. I may go up and down the road about a half a dozen times per year, in fact. Along the way, I drive through some of the most beautiful and diverse land there is in the state. However, every time I pass Exit 161, I just have to ask myself: What The Hell Is This???

I mean, looking at the picture, it seems normal enough: it’s a freeway offramp, there are some hills around, maybe a few shrubs, nothing too spectacular. The issue that I have with Exit 161? It has no name. It’s just Exit 161.

Exit 12A off the 101 in Universal City is Lankershim Boulevard, an exit I used to take daily on my way to work. Exit 283 in King City is Jolon Road, which I’ve written about before. Exit 456 is Lucas Valley Road, which leads you to George Lucas’ Skywalker Ranch. Exit 161 has no name, and it leads you nowhere.

Exit 161 is located on the very northern edge of the Santa Ynez valley in Santa Barbara County, which is one of the more impressive looking places you can imagine. It’s in the middle of Santa Barbara wine country (or as the Chumash Casino billboards will have you believe, Santa Barbara Win Country), somewhere south of the tri-tip and north of the split pea soup.

If you go under the freeway to the other side, you find… the other side of the freeway, and a dirt road that leads up into the hills. Google Maps won’t help you out here, the dirt road literally leads you… nowhere. Seriously, if you blink at the right moment while driving up the freeway, you’ll miss the exit and not even know it.

I let my curiosity get the better of me last weekend while driving back to L.A., and took the mysterious Exit 161. I feel like a more complete person for having done so, yet only slightly less off-put by the nameless exit. I still don’t know what it is, where it should lead, or why it is even there. Somebody could have had the decency to at least make up a name for the exit. They didn’t even have to be creative about it – the Cat Canyon Road turnoff is only a few miles to the south.

Regardless, Exit 161 remains. Defiant. Independent. Nameless.