I’m feeling incredibly lazy today. I was gonna write about the Santa Barbara leg of the trip, which was a whirlwind of people and adoring fans, but that will have to come later. I’m in Avila Beach now, just a stone’s throw from San Luis Obispo. I’m a bit Gumby-headed from a couple glasses of Edna Valley Zin, and I’m chilling on the back porch of my parents’ place.

Just sayin’.

More soon.

It’s been a rough winter. It’s been a rough year. Events of the past 12 months have left me adrift and isolated and struggling to find a way back to life and love and all that hooey. It hasn’t been easy. But it didn’t take me long after returning to Los Angeles to find what I’d been missing.

Last night at Spaceland, above the crash and bang of the music and the din of shouted drink orders, I ran into a bunch of people I’d known from back in the Amoeba daze. And I don’t know why it struck me as surprising, but all of them remembered my name. I mean, this is a store whose work staff was easily over 200 people. You knew lots of names, but they tend to drift away. Especially after three years away.

And then again, today, when I actually dropped by the store, aside from the rows of new faces at the checkout counters, which see more turnover than a WWI trench, it was almost as if I’d never left. Of course, I had, and there’s really not much to do at Amoeba if you’re not on the clock, so I wandered off and drove down the street to my old apartment building on Martel, where I thought I’d check on my old neighbor, Bertila.

Testing the caption

I love my old place. It’s in a classic Hollywood apartment enclosure with the front gate and the courtyard and the big, central banana tree, and as I mounted the stairs to her flat, I found it impossible to believe that it had been a full three years since I’d move out of there. So Bertila and I sat and talked in her flat, me, the addled, aimless motormouth and her, the wise, hookah-smoking caterpillar with her back to the sunny window, wreathed in pearly smoke, dispensing advice and gently chiding me for being so reluctant to admit that I’m totally rad.

Like, totally.

Those are the kinds of friends I have. The awesome ones.

I hung out at Hotel Figueroa on Monday night with some of my fellow Metro-bloggers. I was in no condition to be having any alcohol since my post-Coachella body was like one of those sponges you find abandoned in the desert. But I had some anyway, and it probably cost me my iPod.

Wait, no, no, it was just boring ol’ inattention and forgetfulness that did that. I left it on our table. It’s a black iPod and there were a lot of shadows draped about. The place was near empty as closing time was drawing near, so it made perfect sense to me, after getting off the Metro and realizing it was gone, that the only person who might have seen it would have been whoever bused our table. And since the world is a good and honest place, they’d have saved it for me. I was confident of that. I had some good karma saved up; On Sunday I saw a girl drop her Coachella ticket, so I picked it up and gave it to her. I should have gotten a reprieve for this one.

But no.

I called the Hotel Figueroa twice and then yesterday, in exasperation, went in and talked to the manager. I explained that I left my iPod and I just wanted to make a decent effort to get it back. He nodded and said he understood. In a very tentative and tactful way, he put forth the notion that there’s a chance someone NOT on staff found it (which put us in a weird semiotics zone, since it was suddenly becoming too easy for the word “found” to mean “stole.”) Yes, of course, I agreed. I’d already thought of that one. It was my second most-likely scenario, right above my vague suspicion that Muqtada al-Sadr stole found it. Since the bar was closed at the moment, there was not much else we could do, so I left him my phone number and he promised to call if they found it.

You know, under a sofa cushion or something.

I don’t think I’ll see it again. I’m not devastated. It’s just a hunk of metal. I still have all the music here on Deep Blue. But seriously, what a pain. I especially believe that now because the other Will got me thinking about another potential culprit. I was so quick to blame a human, but what it had been cats? Seriously, cats with laser cannons? Or ghosts of cats? Or cats possessed by the ghosts of dead hotel residents? You know, cats’re pretty sneaky.

With all the threats out there, it’s hard to believe we hang on to our stuff as long as we do.

I’m letting go of one of my prized possessions. Yes, it’s time to sell my cute little invader kit. Though I still love the work of the artist, I’m realizing that I don’t need this little bit of pop culture. In fact, I have a more interesting collection of tiles I can use should I ever want to build my own critter, which is a lot more fun to own because this invader kit, while cool, is a limited, numbered edition. That means it’s best left in its wrapper. That way it remains highly collectible. But no fun. So I’m releasing it into the wild via eBay where someone else can hold onto it forever.

Link to the auction. Bid high.

Occasionally I’m scrolling through the music folder on my hard drive and I come across something that I just don’t recognize. It happens this morning as I’m loading up the ol’ Rio Carbon for the drive north to Santa Barbara. “Electric President?” WTF? Who the heck are they? I run a quick check on allmusic.com. Yep, they exist. But where did I get it? What made me grab it from work? I throw it onto the player in case I get a moment to check it out.

It’s not until on the way back home, after having a nice lunch with lovely, witty Nicole (whom I haven’t seen in a decade, and whom I didn’t realize how much I missed until today) and dinner at the Brewhouse with Christian and Briana and then a late coffee with my old boss Tom Hurd (who wants to start a website called itchyforearms.com — I’m all for it) that I finally track to the opening cut on the album and press PLAY. I expect to be mildly interested for a few tracks. I’m just pulling onto the 101 at the time. That means I don’t expect to be still listening past, say, La Conchita. But as I pull back off the 101 at Highland and glide down past the Bowl and into the bosom of Hollywoodland I’m still listening.

Electric President is an electro-acoustic wonderland. It’s what you might expect to hear if Mark Linkous (Sparklehorse) met up with Jimmy Tamborello (Dntel) and birthed a little electric baby. Who…uh…then went on to win the primary and then the nomination and then…well, you get it.

I get home well after ten o’clock that night and check out their site. Seems they were on tour recently. Too bad I missed it. From the site:

The U.S. tour is now over with. Special thanks to everyone that came out, and sorry if the show sucked. We don’t play live very often anymore. And another thanks to Alias and Tarsier for putting up with us. You guys are sweethearts.

Alias & Tarsier. Ah, I remember now. I’m talking to Burgess at Amoeba. he hands me the Electric President CD and tells me to give it a shot. Burgess records under the name Healamonster with his girlfriend, Rona, who goes by the name Tarsier. And… are you seeing the connection? Burgess and Rona have recently returned from the road, where they performed with Alias on a number of dates across the country. Apparently, Electric President was part of that.

Mystery solved. And this what I’ve gained. Check out “Ten Thousand Lines,” a nice little track that actually makes me smile during its final moments (somewhere around La Conchita, actually).

“Hey, I dont know if you like fire, but there’s a big one across the street.”

My neighbor has just knocked on my door. I just got home from a long day at work. I had awakened at four AM in Mew Mexico, hopped on a plane to LAX and driven straight to Amoeba where I ran around for nine hours in service of hundreds of last-minute shoppers. A hard day. A tough job.

But as I step outside to the chaos and craziness of Martel Avenue I realize that there are some people who have far tougher jobs than I do:

Firefighters arrived quickly to reports of a structure fire with a person trapped to discover flames extending from the front portion of a subdivided single family home threatening a three-story apartment building to the south.

According to witnesses, an 18 year-old male had been seated in the living room of the one-story duplex, when he noticed a nearby artificial Christmas Tree catch fire. At first attempting to unplug the tree, he was driven back by intense heat and flames, and subsequently proved unable to find or muster a fire extinguisher within the home.

His 61 year-old father departed his spouse in a rear bedroom in an attempt to assist his son, before both men were pushed from the house by searing heat and ink-dark smoke that rose from floor-to-ceiling, making their rescue of the man’s 56 year-old wife impossible.

Read the full account at the LAFD blog here.

See a few more photos (taken by my ailing digital camera) here.

I guess I was short by a few cents postage, or perhaps I typed the address wrong. There’s also been the theory that her mailbox was just too small and there was no place for the carrier to just leave it. Whatever the case, they were just gone. That was in November. Of 2005.

But today, a year later, I get ‘em back.

Anyone have any idea why it would take a year for these to get back to me? What happened? Where would they have been sitting all this time?

This is what I get for parking in something other than my usual, protected, blessed spot.

I sleep on the couch last night. The reason? After shutting down the ol’ laptop and blearily enjoying an episode of Red Dwarf, I stumble into the bedroom to discover that all my clean laundry is on the bed. It’s easier to just crash in the living room.

At 3:30 AM I wake up, heart pounding. I just had a vivid and disturbing earthquake dream. I have them occasionally. This one was intense. And I think my heart is pounding because the last time I had an earthquake dream there was a real-world correlation. In that dream, I’m in a brick house. It’s the home of Maryann’s parents, who live in Indiana. There’s some kind of barbecue in progress outside. I’m a guest, and I’ve taken the liberty of exploring the house. As I’m looking around, I think, “This would be a bad place to be in an earthquake.” And then of course, an earthquake strikes. I run to the doorjamb, but because I recently read that doorways are no longer the safest place to cool your heels in an earthquake, I run all the way outside. I turn around just in time to see the entire brick structure to slump into a shapeless pile of brick. Had I stayed in there I would have been ground to a fine paste.

The next day i tell Maryann about the dream. This is my friend and coworker Maryann, whom I’m convinced has an unusually acute third eye. She stares at me, amazed, and says that the night before she and Cynthia were looking through Indiana real estate listings. They see a nice house at a nice price but Cynthia says, “Oh, but we can’t live there.”

“Why not?” asks Maryann.

“Because it’s a brick house. What if there’s an earthquake?”

Maryann just laughs. “There ARE no earthquakes in Indiana.”

And that’s not all. Earlier that same day, Maryann had seen a book on the cover of which was a photo of a house that had slid off its foundation. She had taken a photo of the house, cropping it so that it didn’t look like a second generation photo and sent it to a friend with a message that read, “Look, my parents’ house collapsed.”

Now I’m not saying tht I’m Nostradamus, but it’s just too strange to be called a coicidence. And Maryann’s no stranger to premonitions. A couple weeks ago she was looking for a spot to park near her apartment. It was late at night. She found a spot close by but this thought flashed through her mind: “I can’t park there. My car will get hit.” And even though she understood perfectly well that the thought had no rational basis, she chose a parking spot much farther away, right next to a shadowy park.

The next morning, guess what? As Maryann leaves to go get her car she sees that the car that had parked there has been hit by another driver, and all the involved parties are gathered in a knot, hashing out the details.

Anyway, all of this is going through my head at 3:30 this morning as I shake the sleep from my mind. The dream was so vivid–the collapsing hillsides, the dust lifting from the roads and the crumbling dirt and brick houses (I was in some kind of jungle canyon.) Finally, I let it drift and fell back asleep.

So this morning, I get up and switch on KPCC. This is the story they’re telling.

Magnitude 6.4 quake hits off Peru coast

A 6.4-magnitude earthquake has hit near the coast of central Peru, shaking three cities and causing some light damage but no injuries were reported, Peru’s Geophysical Institute said.

The quake struck at 5:48am (local time) with an epicentre 90 kilometres north-west of the city of Pisco, at a depth of 43 kilometres. The US Geological Survey reported the quake was of a 6.5 magnitude at a depth of 33 kilometres.

“Some light damage to houses in Pisco has been reported but there are no deaths or injuries,” institute director Hernando Tavera said. The quake could also be felt in the capital Lima and the city of Camana.

Look at the time. 5:48 AM in Peru is 3:48 AM in Los Angeles. Maybe I AM Nostradamus.