welcome to my new life

We’re all here. We’re safe. The cars made it.

So much has happened over the past three days that I’m not really sure how to sort it all out into readable bits and pieces. It’s still hitting me in waves of emotion. Moments and emotions and memories all flooding in and washing out– and since I’m not sure how to talk about it yet, I know that these feelings can’t be over. I go from incredibly excited to incredibly sad in about ten minutes.

I suppose what will happen is I’ll still be telling small stories about the past few days over the next week or so. When I’m homesick, or when I have some time to sit and write. Even when I had moments in the car and I thought that I should write about the trip, something in me didn’t want to yet. I don’t know how all of it fits in.

I don’t like driving by myself across the country. Makes me sleepy. Radiohead doesn’t help.

The new Wyclef Jean CD kinda sucks.

If I ever make a real enemy, like a “hate you, hate your daddy” kind of enemy, and I get to choose some method of torture for this enemy, I will make he or she try and drive from Austin to New Mexico. My word. That drive sucks.

I didn’t think I’d feel anything driving though Palm Springs again. I hadn’t seen it since I left when I was nine. But once I saw the windmills again, I felt like I was coming back to something. Reclaiming a city that I left with bad memories. I was older, stronger, and not afraid. It was good.

New Mexico looks exactly like I thought it would. Small adobe houses and road runners.

There’s nothing Destiny’s Child can’t fix.

I don’t know. It’s all still swirling around my head. Driving into LA and just being here. I get these waves of panic, and sorta swirly head rushes that shout out, “I LIVE HERE NOW.”

My new apartment is the nicest place I’ve ever lived. Right now as I write this, I’m on the cell phone to the web hosting company to fix pamie.com’s disk space problem, I’m checking my email, Ray is making a series of phone calls on his cell phone and Eric is in the other room on his cell phone talking to his dad. I’m drinking my Coffee Bean Mocha. Chris is reading the LA Weekly. Welcome to LA, yo. Somehow I think I’ll probably be okay here.

I guess it was last night, when I was sitting at the bar with my high school friend when I had that Fate moment. The two of us, who met when we were fourteen and fifteen, spent three years together in high school, only to have him move to New York where I thought I’d never see him again. He assured me that we would. We saw each other maybe twice through my college and out-of-college years, but we kept in touch by phone every few months. Then this year it turned out we were both planning on moving to LA at the same time. He got here about three weeks ago. He lives just down the street. And last night we talked until the sun came up over my porch. There’s something about that. There’s something to that where I can’t help but feel like I’m supposed to be here. Now. Actually, it’s too bad I wasn’t here last week so I could have seen Foo Fighters, Beck and Radiohead. But in any event, something about this seems like a good idea.

There’s a party tonight to meet my friends, old and new, and get welcomed to this city. That will be nice. There’s something about this city that doesn’t let me sleep anyway, so a party will only help.

But man, I miss the people at home. I wish they could have all taken that road trip with me.

Yeah, this doesn’t really tell much about the road trip. I wish there were some really good stories. But to be honest, it was just driving for twenty-three hours. Traffic in Phoenix. Singing until I lost my voice. We saw “The Thing?” outside of Tucson. Other than that, it was just driving, driving, driving. Once I merged across four lanes of traffic while talking on my cell phone, Chris wasn’t worried about me in LA anymore.

Oh, and last night we watched a highway pursuit on television. It ended up about a block away from where my friend was standing waiting for his ride to come see me. In fact, if I had realized at the time where he was, I probably saw him on television, getting whipped around by eight police cars, nine helicopters and a Mercedes that took a wrong turn. Welcome to LA, indeed.