Is This Home?

Well, it’s happened at last. I am blogging tired. What is blogging tired? Well, it’s kind of like blogging drunk only a yard more irritable. Let’s see if I can pull it off.

What did I do today to make me so tired, you ask? Well, first of all, I woke up in Virginia at five in the morning, which, as my internal clock has now adjusted to Pacific Time, felt more like two in the morning. I was not exactly eager to face the day, let me tell you.

But face the day I did. My parents drove me to Dulles, bid me farewell, and after submitting to the TSA grunts (I inwardly commiserated with a particularly bewildered oldster who’d been pulled aside for a pat-down), I was in the terminal. I had about an hour, so I decided to get breakfast at the only place open, a bar & grill called (I think) Max’s. The eggs and potatoes were fine but the bacon was burnt to an unpalatable crisp. I was also given—and therefore charged for—an orange juice which I did not order, but after I drank it and enjoyed it, I decided not to make a fuss. Do you see how hard my life is?

We boarded the plane and it took off more or less on time. I watched as the cars, trees, and houses of northern Virginia receded into model scale. Soon we were above the clouds.

There was an annoying family seated across the aisle. They had brought a portable DVD player (who buys these crappy, useless devices?) and were watching Home Alone on full-blast without headphones. I complained about this to the stewardess but I don’t think she was entirely on my side, and instead of asking them to turn it off, she simply requested that they lower the volume. I bitterly read Maugham’s Of Human Bondage with my fingers stuffed in my ears.

We reached Colorado and the snowy Rockies which jutted out of the earth like white volcanoes. An hour later, the pilot pointed out the Grand Canyon which, thankfully, was below my side of the plane, so I had a clear view of it. “It’s so vast,” I thought. “It goes everywhere.”

A little before 11 am, we were descending over Greater LA, which looked bright and warm under all that sun. This is the only view of the freeways that makes them look grand, I told myself; from above. When we touched down, I closed my eyes, as I often do before a landing. Moments later, I was in the terminal, heading for Baggage Claim.

Happily, my bag was first out of the chute; the only time that’s ever happened to me. I headed out to the bus line to determine where I could catch a bus to Encino.

You cannot catch a bus to Encino. You can catch a bus to Westwood, from whence you can catch a bus to Sherman Oaks, from whence you can catch a bus to Encino. Once I’d figured this out, I determined that an hour and a half would be a long time to go without food, considering the last time I’d eaten was over seven hours ago. There was no food in the terminal I’d left, however, so I had to drag my bag several terminals down, where I managed to snag a vanilla milkshake.

About an hour later I was in Westwood, where I had a good deal of trouble tracking down the next bus I was to take. Eventually I found it and soon I was on my way. As we made our way over the Santa Monica Mountains, I began to muse on the irony that it was taking me almost a third as much time to get from LAX to the Valley as it had taken me to get to LAX from Virginia. I decided not to dwell on this. Soon I would be home, where I could have something to eat and take a nice afternoon nap.

Sadly, it was not to be. When I arrived, around 2:30 in the afternoon, my house had a guest who I had not been anticipating, and he was sitting on the living room couch, thoroughly engrossed in a full-volume screening of Bruce Almighty on the flat-screen television that dominates the wall adjacent to my bedroom.

“Do you want me to turn it down?” he asked me.

Rather than responding truthfully and thereby risk getting into an extended conversation about it, I said, “No, I’ll just be leaving.”

Which is what I did. And so I’m here. At the Coffee Fix, my home-away-from-home on Moorpark in Studio City. And now I truly am exhausted. I think I’ll finish this mustardy sandwich I have before me and by the time I’m done, perhaps sleep will be prepared to do its worst: overcome even the most vociferous of screwball comedies screaming from the next room. If I can sleep through that, I know I’m set.