My stuff has already begun the journey to America. Now it's my turn. Barring something unusual, my flight will be taking off as this auto-posts.
"Made up my mind to make a new start,
Going to California with an aching in my heart.
Someone told me theres a girl out there
With love in her eyes and flowers in her hair.Took my chances on a big jet plane,
Never let them tell you that theyre all the same.
The sea was red and the sky was grey,
Wondered how tomorrow could ever follow today......Standing on a hill in my mountain of dreams,
Telling myself its not as hard, hard, hard as it seems."
Now they'll have to change the name to "Los Angeles, Featuring Joe Katzman."
Important tips:
1. If you don't wear sunglasses to bed, they'll know you're from out of town.
2. Look out for bicycles when you're walking, because Charles Johnson speeds like hell.
3. First thing to do when you get there is figure out a way to make your own electricity.
4. Kiss your cultural life goodbye. It's against the law out there.
5. If you have to kill a whole bunch of people in California for some reason, don't worry because the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals will believe almost any excuse.
Joe has arrived in a town where, when I was having Sunday brunch with my wife and two of our children in college there, a Gay Pride rolled down the street. We noticed that the spectators were a lot weirder than the parade participants.
Joe,
Send me an email when you get here and I'll buy you...well, the only thing I can buy you in my immediate neighborhood is a rotisserie chicken from Ralph's supermarket. So you can have a drumstick or something. Marc knows where the real restaurants are, and they sure as hell aren't in sprawl city.
best of luck, joe. zeppelin rules!!
g
Welcome.
Welcome aboard!
Hope you know spanish.
Made it in safely, with some help from Air Canada who sent a golf cart to fetch me after delays at immigration. And so the journey begins....
FYI for readers, we're in central California and the nearest city to us of any note is San Jose. Before someone asks, no I do not know the way yet (I've been away so long, I may go wrong and lose my way). San Francisco/Oakland is farther up about an hour and a half north, and Santa Cruz is closest of all but at best it's a town not a city.
LA is considerably south in an 8 hour drive past Big Sur down the famous coastal highway. Which is good, because after paying for the movers to ship my stuff across the continent, I doubt I'd have enough left to rent a rowboat and camera crew for use in the next natural disaster (mandatory in LA, apparently...). Also, instead of wild parties at our place with Tara Reid and Paris Hilton, we get redwoods and deer. Whose only similarity is that they also look a lot less cute after they've showed up and trashed your front yard.
Its beautiful country there, Joe. I'm almost jealous.
Joe,
The deer will chase dogs. My aunt in Pacific Grove has a problem with that - the deer chase her dog into the house. She keeps a metal garden rake by her kitchen door to shove into the antlers of deer which try to follow her dog in. It gets entangled in their antlers and they hate that.
Or get a really big dog.
I love California. There is always some sort of flower blooming.
When I lived in Oregon, in late September or early October you'd start to see yellow leaves on the trees. And bursts of red and orange, a final color conflagration before the winter tsunami's came with their all-enveloping gray and brown and drabness.
So the color yellow among green leaves always signaled a time for depression because summer was drawing to a close and winter was coming.
The first year I lived in southern California I was out for a walk one afternoon. Down the street I saw a large green tree, and as I grew closer I saw something the same vibrant color of yellow as I was familiar with in Oregon. I checked my internal calendar and sure enough it was October, and I started to get depressed. But, as I kept walking and got close enough to see, the yellow "thing" turned out to be a lemon. Something alive and growing and fruitful, not something dead and shrivelling and wasting away.
Whoooo-hoooo! A lemon growing in October! Life is good in southern California, and you know that the days it's brown and drab and dreary will only be a matter of hours, not months.
In Austin we also had (still have, though I'm not there anymore) a problem with deer wandering onto everyone's lawn at duck and eating all their flowers. Not to mention causing car wrecks at night. In fact, my best friend's teen daughter totaled her car hitting a deer. (No one was hurt, including the deer. We think.)
Totally changed my feelings about deer. They are just huge squirrels.
Welcome to the USA! Let us know if you have a housewarming party.
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