The CFY,K Travelogue Phase Two: Venice Beach

• Mere micromips after Higginbotham dropped me off at the airport I was throwing my bags in the back of Jenkin, Nebraska's own Heroic Warrior Honda. There is something, to me at least, completely fascinating about being on an entirely different coast of the United States than the one you woke up on, all before lunchtime. (Nobody else seems to think that this is all that remarkable, however. "Can you believe it," I'd ask. "Yes," they'd say, "you were on an airplane." They don't understand, though, that airplanes are powered by magic.)

• The first night I was in town, there was a Swillpro Records Revue at the Good Hurt, but it really could have been held either inside of Nebraska's own MySpace page, or during a particularly strange evening at Fluids Bar and Lounge. Face was there! Think of this! Maybe you don't think air travel is all that wondrous, but surely you could grasp the significance of randomly running into Face, right? What are you? A robot? Anyway, the kid Smithers' Jagger elbows could seriously maybe give Shamanzo's time-tested Kiedis joints a run for their money (Ns;js).

• After that night, though, Nebraska and I got down to the business of not doing a whole lot of anything. To paraphrase our own Anvil Rabbitt, 'you laugh a special kind of weird little laugh when you hang out with Shaved.' It's true. You do. We spent a good deal of time wandering around the Venice Beach Boardwalk, which, exactly as I remember it, is better than television. In the span of seriously, you might come across a fistfight between two mimes - they had dropped all pretense and were screaming at each other - and, equally random but thematically linked precisely, Jimmy Hart, the Mouth of the South. I did. I also bought Brown's Requiem at Small World Books and caught up on some reading while Shaved Wieners shrapled the gnar like it was '88. Then it was off to get our Animal Style on.

• Me: In your professional opinion, how long would I have to stand around on the boardwalk before I ran into Nyft?
Nebraska: I'd say about two, three months.
{Not true. I ran into that dude in like an hour. It was awesome.}

• Roughly half of my time in the Los Angeles area was marked by this hilarious tension. Shaved was visited, in addition to myself, by this beautiful young schoolteacher that he had met on - get this - an airplane. (I know. This type of shit doesn't happen to anybody, but Nebraska's a damn superhero now. At some point before I showed up, he saved a house from burning down.) For a while there, as a result, he could not decide whether or not he was going to be Johnny Cool Guy, 'cause this lady was around, or, like Ridiculous Onomatopoeic Party Favor Noisemaker Nebraska, 'cause, you know, that's how the Security Council rolls. So I would send over these little lob shots over his Cool Guy net just to watch him deal with it. More sample dialogue:

Me: Hey, you want to play a Man Cup?
Lovely Lady: What's a 'Man Cup?'
Nebraska: It's nothing. It's the first level of MarioK -
Me: It's when we put on those jock straps, you know, with the cup? And then we run towards each other at full speed, from across the room, and bang cups together. Whoever thinks it sucks first loses.

• All of this eventually boiled over (aided in no small part by this depressing little movie we were all huddled around watching) in a furious fit of recording in The Genius's amazing new apartment in downtown L.A. There is evidence of this madness, and it can be found here and here, if you have the patience. (E Lamar, click these shits!)

• Suddenly - at least as suddenly as I had arrived in California, I was back on an airplane, headed this time for the mountains.

• When you're leaving LAX by airplane, they make you fly out to the ocean and turn around if you're headed eastward. I remember looking down out of the window of the plane at the expanse of water below. Moments later, after we made the turn back east, I was above undeveloped green land, and it looked exactly the same to me as the ocean had. "It's like," I thought, "they're the same thing, it's just that the ocean is moving faster than the land." I surmise from this that it is quite possible that either Los Angeles itself makes you high, or that they're putting strange chemicals in the air inside of airplane cabins.