Endless Summer Creations

There was a time we lived off in the woods.  As I lie here in the comfort and security of my bed, listening to the rain fall outside my window with the blinds drawn, I can almost imagine that we are in the middle of that forest again. It was a good place to rest.  A good place to escape the life that had been imposed upon us, and to redefine life according to  our terms. No need to dress up or look a certain way.  I mean, who really cared?  There was no pressure.  The residents were mostly down-to-earth, unassuming people living in a rural Pacific Northwestern town.  Some of them were retirees.  Some lived on Social Security like us.  For others, the RV park was just an in-between place.  One guy had been in the process of building a house on his own land for about a year. I even worked for the RV park for a while doing bathroom maintenance.  But it wasn't really a job....

Each day we drove on to these stepping stones on our trip home back across the nation saw places too big to fathom desert which stretched on forever, unchanged for centuries occasional border patrol checkpoints along the highway vast skies over dry mountains then eventually the sand gave way to green the waters drew close again we heard 2013 arrive from our San Antonio room by the next night we walked the streets of the French Quarter observing the spoils of the night before lingered over a meal of Big Easy favorites the promised land was within our reach now we would tarry there until the next chapter began but the highways have never stretched away so vast, free and wild since

Los Angeles a mystical land I'd heard of mostly in song film poetry then that one day we were there gazing through the rain at the vast expanse of city far below stretching away for miles what is LA but a surreal place fashioned of dreams? As the streetwalker in Pretty Woman proclaims "Everyone who comes to Hollywood has a dream What's your dream?" Indeed Dream to walk the red carpet or the red light district So much about LA I could not see as I looked down from atop the hill surrounded by a theater of mountains yet as I took in the sand, desert, neighborhoods and mountains so unfamiliar to me stories of LA floated through my head similar to the Florida I know yet beyond comparison in so many ways Laurel Canyon a community of 1960s hippie love the juxtaposition between crudity, violence and death the drive-by shootings of Compton and South Central to the renaissances of art blooming in Venice Beach and the bastions of style throughout the city the opulence of Rodeo...