January is a bitch of a month, even in California. January is the kind of month that sends a quick shot of sleety rainwater down the back of your neck as you dash out of the grocery store, and then snickers when you try to turn up your collar and instead bash yourself in the head with the keys you forgot were balled in your fist. In January, if you’re not listing in a grey fog of ennui, you’re hopping through parking lots poking at the fresh cut on your ear and swearing at nobody in particular. Which is why I insist on posting yet another fragment that actually dates to last August.
Want to know one of the Los Angeles clichés that’s absolutely true? Nobody walks anywhere. Ever. It’s simply not practical; everything is far away from everything else and, as you may have heard, our public transit system is a joke for a city the size of this one. (Although remind me, at some point, to tell you about my unexpectedly pleasant experience with the Metro Bus system, which started here.) With a fifteen-minute daily commute, I am a local anomaly, but the amount of time I spend behind a steering wheel is still obscene by any normal standards.
This weekend, unusually, I went for a walk. A real old-fashioned walk — not a run for exercise, not a toddle between my car and the office elevator. It was a Sunday and I was on my way home from an ill-advised foray into the Valley, a place that Entourage once correctly referred to as Hell’s waiting room. I was, almost literally, boiled. Halfway down the 405, I also remembered that I’d been meaning to pick up a new journal, possibly at a little shop on Main Street that a friend had recently recommended.
Main Street is about three blocks from the beach. It is one of maybe four places in the city with real pedestrian traffic, and it’s never more than 75 degrees there. Caught between the devil of Santa Monica parking on a Sunday, and the deep sea of motionless, molten air that was lying all over the city that afternoon, I took my chances with the devil.
It turned out the shop was closed, but I’d fed the meter some extra quarters, having been burned before by the local parking gestapo. I had nowhere in particular to be. So I dropped my keys into my purse and started to stroll.
Here’s the thing. I had been to this street a million times, but never alone and never once during the day. I could have sworn to you that the place consisted almost entirely of bars, with some gift shops and the odd Starbucks. Apparently I have the observational powers of a brioche, because there were about six establishments on every block that I had never noticed before. Cool places, too. Arts & Letters, the paper-goods store where I’d intended to search for a journal, had windows crammed with delicious-looking stacks of cardstock and vellum and onionskin. Just beyond, I found several small, elegant furniture boutiques, the kind that are worth scouring now for items that IKEA might have knocked off, and will be eligible for further investigation after I become somebody’s trophy wife. A nearby store was called Bike Attack; I was sold on the name alone because it reminded me of Calvin & Hobbes. One particularly intriguing spot had no nameplate at all, just a sign that said “OPEN. TACOS.” in neon letters. (As any Angeleno knows, these are the best place to find good Mexican.) A Max Azria outlet (!!!) was having a sale, which I ignored only by crossing the street and staring determinedly at a parking meter for a while. Then there was a paint studio, with a deep, palm-shaded patio full of easels and a sign inviting beginners, making the ends of my non-artistic fingers itch.
For those of you who’ve read Harry Potter — which at this point really ought to be everyone, unless you’ve been trapped under a heavy object since 1998 – you know how the Leaky Cauldron and Number 12, Grimmauld Place seem to balloon suddenly between previously existing establishments, squishing other buildings out of their way? I had the strong sensation that the same thing was happening on Main Street. All of these places had appeared to me, in a very abrupt inflatable fashion, between the usual nighttime suspects: World Café, Finn McCool’s, Lula’s, Circle Bar, Mor Bar, Patrick O’Brien’s. I had never before noticed how out-of-place Circle Bar in particular looks. It’s on a sunny stretch of pavement, surrounded by chic, carefully curated little stores, but the bar itself is one big slab of building, sloppily painted in red and black with a leering yellow sign. It’s like a plot of land from Hollywood Boulevard was picked up and plunked in the middle of Santa Monica. Even at 4 o’clock on a Sunday afternoon, the sidewalk out front reeks of cheap booze.
If you hurry past that one disconcerting spot, the peoplewatching is good, too. Venice hippies and Westside yuppies carefully circumnavigate each other on the sidewalks; even their dogs maintain distance. I watched the police dealing with a drunk homeless man who was shouting nonsensically at passersby, a reminder of the intrinsic problems that plague this warm, hospitable part of town. The smells of cigarette smoke, coffee, patchouli, stale whiskey and expensive retail twined around all of us, wrapped in a rich waft of ocean salt.
It was only at the very end of the walk that I remembered: I had been there once before in the daytime. On a date – a Sunday morning brunch date, to be exact - almost precisely a year ago. I suppose it’s not surprising that I missed Max Azria or Bike Attack that morning; I was so nervous I thought I was going to turn inside out. I remember noting the Hare Krishna festival that was going on (they were rolling a festooned triple-decker float down the street, ululating and pelting onlookers with flowers, so they were difficult to miss), but otherwise the place in my memory is just a colorful blur.
It’s amazing how much of this you can only register or appreciate when you’re alone and on foot. Creamy pages stacked in a store window, or the scent of palm leaves mixed with acrylic paint. If you’re with someone you’re distracted, talking, and if you’re driving you’re glassed in, moving through the space too fast in your own temperature-controlled capsule. On Sunday I just stood there, my arms washed ochre in the late-summer light, and for a minute I could ignore the fact that it was going to take me another 45 minutes to drive the five miles home. For a minute I could just look around a little, feeling the salt in my hair and the pavement beneath my feet.
Well, here I am, flung precipitately into the next decade, without my consent and certainly without sufficient notice. I cannot understand how these chronological errors keep happening. About five minutes ago, it was August and I was planning to write about this really great little adventure I’d just had. Now all of a sudden it’s January — not only January, but bloody 2010 — and I’m sitting here blinking and wondering what happened.
At any rate, while I am appealing to the cosmos for somebody to fix the timekeeping machinery, I should tell you about this adventure. It falls into the LA’s-best-kept-secrets category, and the place is worth a visit.
Angelenos, ever heard of the Sunken City? Not Atlantis, but the local version. No, I hadn’t either.
Back in the 1920’s, this used to be a very tony six-acre neighborhood called Point Fermin. It’s situated high on the headland in San Pedro, looking south over the ocean toward Catalina Island; just the kind of place where you’d want to build your Jazz Age palace. Then, in 1929, the Associated Press reported that “A peculiar and unusual crack in the earth at Point Fermin has started rumors of exaggerated damage and thrown quite a scare into property owners within the limited district affected.” Except that the “peculiar and unusual crack” turned out to be an enthusiastic little bugger, and before too long the 600 block of Paseo del Mar — the main street running through the neighborhood — was moving inexorably oceanward, at an estimated rate of 11 inches per day. Loose soil in the the cliff below, eroded by the steady push and pull of the waves, was causing the entire neighborhood to slide into the sea. So much for the “limited district affected.”
With the exception of a few owners who had their big houses moved to safety, the whole area pretty much had to be given up as lost. Its remains are still there, right next to Point Fermin Park. They are deemed unsafe and are technically closed to the public, but I suggest to you that the city’s half-hearted fence is pretty easily overcome. (Beaten paths through the brush around the fence’s steep edge, and person-sized tunnels every few feet underneath it, will further suggest that you are not the first to have done this.)
You can still see where the roads and foundations used to be, but now they look as if a giant has dropped them from a few hundred feet, shattering and spilling them over the cliff’s edge into the boiling tide below. Huge slabs of concrete tilt at crazy angles; palm trees grow in and around the wreckage. The acreage also seems to have a nighttime job as a graffiti park, layering it with an interesting feel of urban decay.
That’s me, sitting on what was once a curb and part of a street.
Photo credit to Pat McFawn, who told me about the Sunken City to begin with.
Let me tell you, my inner eight-year-old was positively giddy over this place. I was jumping from rock to rock, planning secret forts, looking for caves and humming the Treasure Island theme song. If you stand on the very highest point and look off into the distance hard enough, you can almost see Spanish galleons hull down on the horizon. This is also where you go if you want to have a super-edgy photo shoot (like the two teenaged girls we saw, armed with a point-and-shoot, all smeared eyeliner and torn fishnets); scatter someone’s ashes (Remember that scene from The Big Lebowski? They filmed it here.); sit around with a buddy, backs on a sunwarmed slab, talking cabbages and kings. Or, if you are exceedingly nerdy, stand on a jagged boulder and recite Keats to yourself. (It’s possible I did this).
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
We left before it got dark, not wanting particularly to run into the graffiti artists. But I went to bed that night with centuries shuffling through my head. This one, where we have fishnets and aerosol cans, and where I am currently hopping about. The last, where the Jazz Age landlords were sliding over a cliff. The 19th, where Keats was writing dreamy verses far away in a London apartment. And the 16th, where Cortez and Balboa were climbing stoutly up unknown mountain ranges. All of us connected, you see — all of us obsessed with the mysterious pull of that ocean I stared into today. The Pacific, that monster that charms cities into existence and then tears them to pieces again.
Makes you wonder what’s in store for Los Angeles as a whole, doesn’t it?
This was my favorite photo from last New Year’s Eve:
If I knew who took this picture, I would give them credit.
That’s me in the blue. It was a good night, just like it looks. And, for the most part, the rest of the year followed suit.
And now I intend to drift out of 2009 in much the same way that I drifted in: In a happy haze of champagne and glitter. I wish you all an evening full of the same, and I will see you in 2010!
I’m in the midst of my annual hibernation, that period between Christmas and New Year’s when I hole up in Simi and turn off my phone for whole hours at a time. It’s restorative, but blog inspiration is pretty scarce, given that my most-frequented locales in the past few days have been 1) that spot just inside the radius of the open fridge door; 2) the rug in front of the fireplace, and 3) bed. In the meantime, these are some scribblings from a couple of weeks ago, right after I came back from my Philadelphia trip.
Tonight I hopped off of a transcontinental flight, walked down to the beach, and tried to wrap my brain around the disorienting experience of modern travel. This morning I got up and hailed a cab in an Eastern rainstorm. Six hours later I’m home, sitting on the sand in the cold clarity of a California December, looking into the great black wash that is the Pacific. In the scope of the continent I am now finally, utterly west. There is nowhere left to go.
And there is a certain rawness, a certain loneliness, to this end of the country, where the ghosts of history don’t trouble us. You don’t realize it until you’ve been someplace else.
Earlier today I was standing in Independence Hall. We went at my insistence, never mind that we took the exact same tour last year. It never gets old for me. I walk into that room, the grey-blue walls and the green baize tables, and I have to stop myself from squeaking incoherently at whatever unfortunate tourist is nearby, because one of my favorite stories happened right where I am standing. John Hancock stood up there and scratched out a signature that fat George in London could read without his glasses. Ben Franklin sat in that chair and insouciantly fell asleep, mid-debate, day after day. Ned Rutledge rustled around in his fancy waistcoats in that corner; Caesar Rodney strode through those doors at the eleventh hour to swing Delaware’s vote towards independence. And wham-bam-boom, a mere couple of centuries later, here I am, in my boots and my L.L. Bean raincoat, awestruck and dripping all over these hallowed floors.
Assembly Room, Independence Hall, originally uploaded by Dailyville.
You don’t do that in Los Angeles, not ever. You can’t stand where the history of nations was written. Maybe it’s easier to forget things out here.
Going on that theory, I blame Independence Hall for what happened on my plane ride home. I was finally finishing my John Adams biography; figured it was appropriate reading for the day. But quite to my own surprise, somewhere between the sodas and the fasten-seatbelt sign, I discovered was sobbing. Twice. First when Abigail died, and then when John did. They’re two of my favorite historical figures, but still — I sat there and cried like an idiot over people who’ve been dead for more than 200 years.
Now that I’ve outed myself as the kind of history nutjob who turns into a teary mess 39,000 feet over Nevada, this probably isn’t worth much. But I like the ghosts. I wish we had a few more of them in this town.
Ye gods, the malls this time of year! I thought I would just stop by on my way home from work tonight, and so help me Baby Jesus, it is an error I will not repeat.
Finding a parking space took half an hour of driving slowly and stealthily behind any people who looked like they had full shopping bags, accidentally petrifying several single female shoppers in the process. (Truly, when in my vehicle and on a mission for Christmas gifts, I am a fearsome sight.) And, of course, the people who finally did turn out to be walking to their car were driving….a Civic. It took another ten minutes of careful maneuvering to wrestle the Jeep into the spot – a rather tight pinch, but if Santa could do it, then so could the Grinch. The owner of the coupe parked next to me will never know how close his midlife crisis came to total annihilation.
I made it inside at last, but I’d gotten only as far as the center court of the mall when all the lights went out. After a few tense moments, where shoppers paused and looked at each other nervously, someone who sounded like P.T. Barnum began speaking unintelligibly from the high reaches of the ceiling. And then everything went mad.
Apparently this was supposed to be a festive holiday light show. I swear to you: It resembled nothing so strongly as a scene from Band of Brothers. The tree, a menacing affair three stories tall, was decked with giant, shiny ornaments that looked exactly like exploding grenades when the lights started flashing. There were pulsing stars that reminded me uncomfortably of swastikas. A lot of cascading tinsel. (Shrapnel?) And the whole business was set to an industrial metal remix of the march from the first act of the Nutcracker (you know, you’ve heard it, dun da da da dun dun DUN DUN DUN), played at the same volume as your average piece of heavy artillery. It was the most terrifying display of holiday merriment I have ever seen. Even though rationally I knew she was performing all the way across town at the Nokia, I half expected Lady Gaga to come tumbling down the escalator, dressed as a Pfeffernüss cookie and toting an M1.
I have way too much work to do given that it’s the week of Christmas (so much for tying ribbons and weather-watching), but I am so damn grateful to be in my own bed revising budgets, because it means I am not at the scary mall.
With thanks to Mark Twain, reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated. Please take my word for it that I have been terribly busy and important for the past two months — certainly not laying about in yoga pants, mindlessly reading GFY and eating holiday-related food items — and that I now have many brilliant observations stored up for your enjoyment.
It is, incredibly, December. The entire country is three feet deep in snow (it’s even snowing on the WordPress homepage), except it’s a balmy 65 here in Los Angeles. Yesterday, I drove down to Newport with some friends to watch the annual holiday boat parade. We came in a convertible, and the only reason we didn’t put the top down was because the girls protested about hairdos. We sat in the sand on the Peninsula, stripped off our jackets, and watched the yachts go by.
Newport Beach, 2009 Christmas Boat Parade, originally uploaded by Dontknowy.
I will say this: Life on this coast is just easier than it is in other places. There’s so much less to do. I was in Philadelphia last weekend, and by Eastern standards it wasn’t bad weather — high 20s in the daytime, windy but dry, no snow. But man, you have to put on about six complete Los Angeles outfits before you are ready to walk around all day in that kind of climate. The first morning, I spent half an hour donning the requisite number of layers, and then wheezed, “Okay. I got dressed. I think I need to lie down now. We’re not doing anything else today, are we?”
I’m trying to remember this as I get jealous about everyone else’s white Christmas. It’s odd to do holiday shopping in flipflops, and mildly frustrating when it’s too hot be enthused about hot chocolate, but I have shoveled not a flake of snow and de-iced not a square centimeter of windshield, and if I’m wearing more than one layer it’s for fashion reasons.
And even without the snow, I had a lovely day today. I didn’t set an alarm for the first time in weeks, passing the morning in that delicious type of sleep where you wake up just enough to realize you are warm and comfortable before drifting off again. When I did finally make it out of bed, I cleaned up my room, ate lunch, made a batch of snickerdoodles. I watched Christmasy kinds of movies — Little Women, Holiday Inn, The Grinch Who Stole Christmas — while I paid bills and packed Goodwill bags. My roommate had both house and dinner guests, all really enjoyable people, who laughed around our kitchen table while the risotto bubbled and I wrapped presents on the floor. Now I’m at my laptop with a cup of coffee, listening to Dave Matthews’ Christmas Song on repeat, and there is pretty little cache of gifts winking at me from the corner. I can’t wait to give them out.
I love, love, these last two weeks of December. The year always seems to be folding in on itself, like a dog who paces in circles a few times before settling down to sleep. Everything is slowing, quieting. 2010 is on its way, and it will probably be crazy, just like the last year was. But for now it’s still 2009, and all we have to do is tie a couple of ribbons and watch the weather go by.
There are few frustrations in modern life that compare to not being able to find a song you want on iTunes. Look, I gave up on illegal downloading in college, after they sent me an email a week about how students caught using Kazaa would be arrested and fined and expelled and THEN the RIAA was going to systematically disembowel you with a blunt shovel. The scare tactics worked. I stick to iTunes these days. But I am a child of the age of instant gratification, and if you want me to continue sticking to iTunes then you had better have what I’m looking for, thankyouverymuch.
The problem, you see, was that I watched Adele perform at the Hollywood Bowl earlier this summer (I can’t believe I never wrote about that. Look for a post later this week.) and she sang this wrenching cover of Many Shades of Black, originally by The Raconteurs. I flipped over it. I came home and tore the internet apart trying to find a copy that I could have to play over and over again. But it’s not on iTunes, it’s not on her CD, it’s not on some shady recording on eBay, it’s not anywhere unless you buy it on vinyl from the UK and pay a million dollars in shipping and I don’t have a record player anyway. I gave up, finally, but not before subjecting quite a few hapless friends to the iTunes rant above.
S0metimes, though, if you bitch loud and long enough, the universe listens. Tonight I was in my room, going about my business and enjoying the sound of the season’s first rain in the back yard, when I heard some familiar chords floating down the hall. My roommates, watching 90210 in the living room, were baffled to hear me shriek “THAT’S THE SONG!!! THAT’S IT!!!!” and shoot to the television as though rocket-propelled. According to the end credits, it was available on the new 90210 soundtrack CD, and when I fired up iTunes, it told me that the album was only just released today. Track 1, Many Shades of Black, by Adele & The Raconteurs: all mine, for $0.99.
Victory!
Hello, October! So far, you are about 30 degrees too hot, but I love you anyway because you have given me an excuse to rip off a page on my desk calendar (I’ll never know why that noise is so satisfying) and to decorate the mantle over my fireplace with Halloween frippery.
Today’s photographic gem is from a storefront in Culver City. Otherwise known as Why I Love West LA:
paris hilton doesn’t shop here, originally uploaded by msgluck.
It seems like half of my recent posts end this way, but I am headed elsewhere for the weekend. (A New Year’s resolution, well-kept!) Speakeasies, Scootcars, deep-dish pizza, football, and old friends await me in San Francisco. I hear Paris doesn’t shop there, either.
Not that you’d know it by the weather. Southern California does this to me, every single year. At the end of April, when I am feeling frolicsome and ready for swimsuits, the whole world looks like it’s been rolled up in grey flannel and the temperature doesn’t rise above 60 for weeks. And then, come September or October, when I am ready to wear a scarf and watch the garden fill up with rain, the sun goes supernova and it’s suddenly hot enough to fry eggs on every sidewalk. The photo above was really taken in January, which sounds about right.
Weather vagaries notwithstanding, we’re perched on the soft coppery edge of my very favorite season. There’s so much to do. I’m cleaning the house one room at a time, sweeping out the leftover sand and taking down the blankets. I’m planning menus: roasted squash, cider, zucchini and pumpkin breads. Last night I moved all the summer fluff to the bottom of my bookshelf, getting ready to tackle some of the heavyweights I’ve been saving. And I’m doing some studying, some planning, thinking about next fall and the fall beyond that. Just today, everything is in balance. I feel like good things are in store.
Happy equinox.
As someone who is still adjusting to the lawlessness of adulthood, travel on a whim – especially to odd, “why the hell would you want to go there?” places – is one of my favorite forms of entertainment. This past weekend, the target oddity was Columbus, OH, originally for a big noisy college reunion at the USC-Ohio State game. None of us had ever been to Columbus before, and all of us will go practically anywhere to watch good football, so why not?
Last-minute crises in everyone’s places of employ (adulthood perhaps not as lawless as I would like to think) reduced the trip to a two-woman expedition. Fortunately, neither I nor friend AT – original mastermind of the venture – were daunted by the prospect. And so I return to the west coast to report that a football weekend in Columbus goes something like this:
- We exit the plane on Thursday night, garbed head-to-toe in USC gear, ready for anything. After being deposited at our hotel, it occurs to us that our $9 LAX sandwiches were a long time ago, and that we have been subsisting for many hours on Southwest’s Nabisco® Selections . We attempt to walk across the (very dark, very sidewalkless, possibly actually a freeway?) street in search of sustenance, and promptly have a near-death experience, as we are almost mown down by a stream of Mack trucks materializing out of the darkness.
- Chastened, we give up and eat at the Waffle House, located in the same parking lot as our hotel. I unwisely order my waffle with strawberries, thinking of the pancakes I had at brunch last Sunday, which were strewn with sweet, whole berries. Instead, the food article in question shows up mottled with a baked-in pink syrup — looking, in fact, rather as though it has the measles. The waitress refers to me as “hon” but could clearly squash me with her pinky finger, so I eat it anyway.
(Waffle House menu. Mysterious white substance pictured next to the eggs finally identified as grits. Don’t laugh; Nobody eats grits where I’m from.)
coffee and menus, originally uploaded by pink_fish13.
- The next morning, we sally forth to see what there is to see. We spend much of the day wandering up and down High Street and through the OSU campus. I am never so happy as when I am on a campus, any campus, so I spend most of this time bouncing around and exclaiming over things like staircases and acorns. (Really, though, their campus is lovely. And huge. Their library, correspondingly huge, nearly reduced me to tears.)
- We are two of what feels like nine people in the whole town who are wearing USC colors. Being a pair of petite and decidedly non-threatening females, we try to make up for this by smiling a lot. It seems to work: Pretty much everyone is nice.
- Herman Melville wrote about the human propensity to gravitate towards the ocean, saying “Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest reveries — stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in all that region.” Replace the word “water” with “tequila,” and you have an accurate description of the American twentysomething (or at least, all the twentysomethings I hang around with). Using this unerring instinct, we locate a likely-looking bar on a street full of same, and order a round. We almost fall off our stools when presented with the tab for a margarita and a Newcastle: $4.75. Columbus is our new favorite city in which to drink.
- Some hours later, we are being ushered past an interminable line into a nightclub throbbing with bass, and seated at a table which I am fairly sure was occupied by another party just moments before. Grey Goose is being poured, and I am having a long conversation with a Very Important Businessman about how he met his wife. Between the fog machines, the endless chants of “O-H!” “I-O!”, and the excellent vodka, I am having a difficult time ascertaining what the hell is happening to me.
- Not enough hours later, I am blearily awake, and AT is standing over me in a towel, shouting, “GAMEDAY!”
- We are waiting in the hotel lobby for a cab. Three middle-aged guys bound through the doors, each wearing a Waffle House ball cap adorned with a gold “Waffle House VIP” pin. In speaking with them, it emerges that they have just eaten at that establishment for the first time ever, and their waitress bestowed caps on them as a reward. We are aggrieved. We were first-timers. (Well, one of us.) We were not given ball caps. Resilient creatures that we are, we press on, hatless.
- It is 7 PM Eastern Standard Time. Tailgating is over. Michigan has narrowly beaten Notre Dame. The band has come and gone. (Ohio State’s is impressive, by the way.) It is GAME TIME. AT — who is five foot nothing, blonde, and bubbly — has completed a Hulklike transformation, and is now standing wild-haired on her seat, using an inexplicable lung capacity to bellow at our football team, the opposing football team, the coaches, the stadium, and the universe in general. Several people seated in the row below us turn around, expecting to see a hirsute trucker type with a bandanna and a beer gut, and are instead confronted by the vision of our petite superfan going apoplectic in her “You can’t beat Pete” tee shirt. She is the hit of the section.
(The Horseshoe, by the way, looks like this. It’s awesome, in the older sense of the word, especially when it’s filled with 100,000 people who hate your guts.)
Ohio Stadium: Ohio State – USC., originally uploaded by bronder.
- Fourth quarter. USC is down, and keeps making stupid mistakes. It seems impossible that we will win.
- We win.
- We go out, clearly. We are double-fisting (well, the bar upstairs was crowded, and we didn’t want to have to fight our way back to it a second time, okay?) and basking in victory. We make friends with a large group of Ohio State fans. They teach us how to do the ubiquitous “O-H!” “I-O!” refrain, and we teach them a So-Cal Spellout, and then we spend some time merrily insulting each other’s cheers.
- There is a lot more drinking, a lot of walking, and a lot of hunting for a cab in another dark street having an identity crisis. (Alley? Freeway? Who knows?) Somewhere circa 4 AM, I pass out.
- For the third morning in a row, we are offended by our hotel’s shameless price-gouging: $9 for a continental breakfast. Dismissing as unbearably tacky the idea of sneaking into the nearby Quality Inn and passing ourselves off as their guests (because surely the Quality Inn knows that breakfast should be free), we once again end up at our new culinary haven. This time, we are both smart enough to avoid anything with the word “strawberry” in the title, and I casually request that my hash browns be “well-scattered.” We are the queens of the Waffle House.
- Secure in this title, we fly home.
I am going to do my very best to keep this from turning into a football blog this fall, because that is not really its purpose, but know that I am a little bit unhinged about college ball — and USC football in particular — so I am attempting a great deal of restraint here. Stay tuned.
