Marie Javins's Blog, page 24

Fumetti

 Here is a little story. 

Old Photos

 Here are couple ancient photos my mom scanned in recently. One is me on the patio of my old apartment in Yellow Springs, Ohio, and the other is me walking in Fort Ward, Alexandria (according to my mom--is it Fort Ward or Fort Hunt? I'm not sure). 

Called It?

There's an old, thin, semi-toothless guy who sits on the steps of the pizza parlor every morning.

He talks to his handheld radio sometimes, and other times he talks to himself, and sometimes he talks to me or whoever is walking by.

Today he was silent as I approached on my morning walk to the coffee shop. Then, he suddenly looked right at me and spoke. "Your Pandora's Box, baby."

Or maybe it was "You're Pandora's box, baby." 

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Best-laid Plans

I got a cat toy for Jay the feral cat!

And it scared him. He ran away.

House Nostalgia

Tracy's FB memories sent her this six-year-old post from when she first checked out my new house...the day before I flew to Burbank to work for the next several years. 

It took a couple of us 8-10 months to get the house ready for its new family. My house is generally a pretty cheerful house, and conveniently the area it's in suddenly turned into the hippest part of town.

Who knew? Not I. All I knew was I wanted a house this time, not a condo, and this one was cheap on Craigslist.

Battery Level

I found the limit to my backyard game cam batteries. My camera took photos from January 9th to April 5th and then it was like "we're done here."

I bet all kinds of exciting things happened from April 6th to May 29th.

Ex BUR

I flew out of Burbank today for the first time in more than a year. The last time I'd flown into Burbank, I'd been horrified by how crowded the planes were at a time when there just wasn't much science established about COVID transmission. Now I'm vaccinated, and know plane air is filtered anyway, so I didn't mind my flight being sold out. I loved how easy it was to get a Lyft from my place to the post office to the airport—all in less than 20 minutes. 

Alas, there are no direct flights from Burbank to Newark, so I had to choose between changing planes in San Francisco or Denver. Which—always choose Denver if you can since it doesn't get fogged in all the time. 

My connecting flight out of Denver was running late so I used a lounge pass and hung out charging my electronics while remembering that time I came to Denver for a con and weirdly, my editor pal Joey Cavalieri happened to be there at that same time on a vacation, plus I ran into Larry Hama in the airport—he'd been at a GI Joe convention while I'd been at a comic convention.

No surprises this time. Just me, a power outlet to charge my phone, and all the individually packaged icky snacks I could possibly imagine.

I was looking forward to getting home after midnight--there was a book waiting for me to check through and sign off on for the printer!

Over the Hill - the Pandemic Edition

I'm vaccinated, all Pfizered up. I spent a week in Baja and earlier in the year, five weeks in Hawaii, and I haven't been shy about flying across the country...so today it was time to get back on the horse. 

Er, Los Angeles metro.

I hadn't been on the metro here since March of 2020. I haven't walked along Hollywood Boulevard or caught the 222 bus at Hollywood and Vine in that time as well. You all know I'm dedicated to public transportation. Why else would I not own a car in Los Angeles County? Time to walk the walk. Ride the ride.

I took the #155 bus to Universal for the metro Red Line, also called the B line now. I'll probably still call it the Red Line forever, the way old-timers in New York call the subway lines IRT or BMT. (You didn't think that was just a sandwich, did you?) 
The train was filthy. Almost all the passengers were men, with a couple of raggedy sleeping men on each car. I wondered briefly if this might not be my best idea ever, but the doors closed and we were off to Hollywood.

I disembarked at Hollywood and Western, walking alone through the station. A colorful sign at the top of the escalator advertised a bi-weekly farmers market. I crossed Hollywood Boulevard, expertly dodging a ranting man at a bus stop.

I trekked up the block to Thai Town, had some pad thai at a tiny outdoors table. I was relieved the little carry-out I like had made it through the pandemic. Unfortunately, my favorite Thai massage place was closed. There's no way to know for now if it's closed forever. I only found one open, and there were no appointments for the next two hours. No Thai massage for Marie today!

I walked all the way to Vermont and Sunset, sidestepping tents and another furious ranter, this time a woman. I thought I'd head up to the Observatory, which is closed but it was a nice day for a view. The Observatory bus isn't running though—not like there are tourists to cart up and down the hill—so instead, I jumped on a bus to Echo Park to go to Matrushka, the women's clothing store where I buy silly animal shirts.

I picked up a few shirts, then caught a bus to DTLA. One of the passengers, clearly imbalanced, kept yelling at the driver—"When are we getting to Broadway?" At one point the driver pulled over, told the man to put on his mask, and refused to drive until the man stopped yelling. He did stop. For a few minutes, anyway. Then he kicked up a fuss again. "When are we getting to Broadway?"

Downtown was pretty bleak. Grand Central Market was partially open, as was the Spring Street Arcade, but many stores were boarded up or out of business. Plenty of people were walking along Hill, Broadway, and Spring, but not the gentrifiers. Where had all the wealthy hipsters gone, I wondered. Maybe they'd gotten out of town the way many New Yorkers had decamped to the Hudson Valley. Or maybe they were just going from their homes to their cars, or ordering in due to the pandemic.

I made a big loop and walked up to 7th and Metro Center, caught the train back to Hollywood and Vine, and boarded the #222 bus back over the hill to Burbank.

I was a bit disconcerted by the day. LA was looking peaked...people still walked the streets. There is still traffic. But there are so many boarded-up stores, and transient encampments sprawl across places they never were before. I assume people have put up tents in what were once high-traffic areas--in the absence of busy foot traffic, people have taken up residence.

Which...I'm sure papers will be written on the last year. Books, articles. Did COVID ravage Skid Row and people moved to other parts of town? Are people still in Skid Row but the shelters became too infectious? There are movements to build tiny house shelters, but these things take time.

Los Angeles today felt like the setting for a movie about climate change. The setting for the first act of a movie where you just know it's not a romantic comedy or a feel-good movie where people come together to solve a problem. A horror movie, perhaps, or an adventure about a former cop who meets a dingo and drives a hotrod out into the desert. But it could just as easily be a movie set in 1970s New York City, and I'm more comfortable with that story, the story where diehard city-dwellers refuse to leave, adapting to new realities as they crop up.

What are these new realities? I don't know anymore than anyone else. Will we ease back into our lives? Just over the hill, monied Burbank feels relatively normal. Last week, San Jose del Cabo was adorable and bustling. Was LA always so bleak? I don't think it was...though it's possible I had just adjusted and stopped noticing.

I'm curious to see what happens next, but I think I'm going to miss any immediate changes, since I'm heading back to Jersey City next week. I want to enjoy my time left before I have to go back to working in an office in Burbank, and by the time I come back to the west coast, Los Angeles will probably have moved on to evolve into whatever it's going to be.

Vamanos

My trip home yesterday started out kind of typical, but ended on an unexpected high note. I dragged my luggage down to the rental car I'd picked up the night before, secured it in the trunk, took out the trash from the San Jose del Cabo AirBnB, took one last look around, then departed. I put the key back in the key locker and scrambled the code, messaged the owner that I was out, and then I…drove my car two blocks to a different parking space. Because I was worried someone might have seen me put my luggage in the trunk. 

Ha. Absurd, I know.

I was driving a VW Jetta from Alamo, but I had desperately wanted a Nissan March. They don’t exist in the US, so I had my eye on them since I’d spotted on my first day in Mexico. Alas, Alamo had no Nissan March for me. The March looks kind of like a Nissan Juke. 
I stopped for brunch at my second-favorite bakery, then headed out to the hotel zone, an area I hadn’t explored. It’s what it sounds like—a bunch of hotels along the coast. I stopped in some stores, but my favorite part was when I parked in a parking structure, then tried to pay for my parking on the way out. The parking machine got really angry with me and beeped loudly. A nice Mexican lady came to help me, and she couldn’t make it work either. Finally she looked at my parking receipt and noticed I hadn’t been there more than an hour. “Gratis,” she said, shoving the receipt back at me.

Oh.

I drove to a park at the end of the road, stopped at the ATM for some pesos (I like to have some spares in my Burbank stash so I don’t have to worry about getting money right when I cross into Mexico), and finally, headed north to the airport to drop off my Jetta and check in.

The airport did all kinds of annoying airport things, fairly typical of an airport. I emptied my water bottle, went through security, looked for a snack but the options were Sbarro, Subway, and Carl’s Jr, so that was icky.

The flight back was two hours, and I used my Global Entry for the first time, and now I’m never going back to the queue. I waltzed right through.

I picked up my luggage and walked outside to an overcast day. I’ve been catching Lyfts to and from the airport during the pandemic instead of my usual Flyaway bus, and while it was a stretch to imagine the Flyaway is dangerous given I’d just assumed my vaccination status would protect me on two planes, four buses, and on the streets of Mexico for a week, I reasoned that my bag was kinda heavy and I didn’t really want to navigate public transit. So I wheeled my bag over to the ride-share lot next to Terminal 1.

I signed up for a Lyft via my mobile, and then I noticed I had a text alert.

“I think I just saw you walk past Terminal 1,” texted Fletcher, a friend of mine who used to work at DC. “I’m waiting on Eddy to pick me up.” Eddy is another friend of ours who used to work at DC.

I checked my Lyft status. No driver had accepted yet. I canceled the ride, walked back to Terminal 1, and that is how I ended up eating noodles on Sawtelle last night with Fletch and Eddy.

A good time was had by all.

My plates made it home 

Be Warned

The secretaria of salud does not mess around here.