Posts Tagged ‘Travel’
Conscience Asks The Question
I haven’t stepped foot in a high school in years. And for good reason; they’re large, generic, often sterile and sometimes impenetrable institutions — to say nothing of their inordinately soul-crushing social pressures. Fitting, then, that I should return to high school today — Martin Luther King Jr. Day — for a general civics lesson…
Read MoreRun (Into The Arms Of America)
I love this country, though I wouldn’t call myself patriotic. I remember first appreciating the massive scope of the American landscape as I drove from Philadelphia to San Diego in college. The four-week, 8553-mile road trip saw me traverse the Mississippi, Ohio, Colorado, and Rio Grande rivers. I camped in the Buffalo Wilderness, the Badlands,…
Read MoreCome On Up For The Rising
It took less than an hour for my inaugural cynicism to fade. It wasn’t the bunting, the banners, or the red, white and blue. It wasn’t The Mall, the monuments, or the museums. It wasn’t even hope, change, or unity. It was Bruce. My colleague, Gil, and I were walking off lunch with a long…
Read MoreBray’s Island, South Carolina (Winter 2008)
Twenty-four Hours Of “Twilight”
The red eye may be as close as we get to time travel. Without it, there’s far less of a chance that I would have volunteered to fly to Los Angeles for twenty-four hours (well, 12 in the air, and 12 in L.A., anyway). What would motivate such a trip at the end of a…
Read MoreBee Season
For a few hours before my whole emergency appendectomy ordeal, an entirely different health issue was at hand. Pun intended. See, I like fire. Always have. Just ask our former neighbor, Ron Wells, who nabbed my brother, Christofer, and I behind the hedges with a can of gasoline, a box of matches and a few…
Read MoreEST
“When are you going to get back to our time zone?” Abbi asked. The days following a long, cross-country business trip are always a bit hazy. Factor in the single-biggest, mission-critical, make-or-break event of the year, and a week of twelve-hour days culminating in an all-nighter and transcontinental flight and, well, you get the idea.…
Read MoreBack In Your Hollywood Arms
I’m gonna argue that Hollywood itself is the biggest brand in the world. In stark contrast to the lush, Technicolor fantasies in which the place trades, though, the town itself is a dirty mess of bleached concrete, dusty stucco, and drought-ridden patches of weeds. Which is a far cry from the Hollywood director D.W. Griffith…
Read More37
Hollywood feeds on its young. To celebrate the thirty-seventh anniversary of my birth here, then, is not without irony. To be away from home and enduring what is typically the most challenging week of the year only added insult to injury. I woke, fittingly, to AT&T’s oft-heard ringtone, a sound that prompts dozens of my…
Read MoreHollywood Roosevelt Hotel #1023
My hotel room is bigger than my apartment. Downtown Los Angeles sparkles outside my east-facing windows. The Hollywood sign is out the north. Last night after work, I pulled my Hyundai into valet as Kate Walsh and the cast of “Private Practice” walked a red carpet across the parking lot. Upstairs, I watched “Wanted” on-demand…
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