2001-07-09 :: 5:21 a.m.

home sweet suburbs

Soundtrack: Edie Brickell & New Bohemians, Shooting Rubberbands At The Stars

So I can sit on my own toilet again. I think I might've sat on Katie's, but other than that, no sitting since late February. I got back at a little after midnight, just into the 9^th. Mike was waiting for me, thank goodness, because my excess baggage was getting out of hand. I sweettalked my way to just $AU100 of overage fees in the whole trip. Not bad for something like seven or eight bags and many, many kilos more than I should have had.

Speaking of overage, I should mention the lady who took the aisle seat in my row. And I say 'took' because her stub said 12B, which means she was supposed to be in the middle. I had the window, which meant that Bob (from the FCC, where he makes presentations for foreigners wondering about our broadcast regulations) got screwed into the middle. I know I called her a lady, but she was really a sitcom character -- for one thing, she was balding, fully balding, not just thinning: her hairline's tide had long since risen. Her hair was gray and curly and a few stray bits of it were caught up in a tuft of a ponytail that stuck out an inch or so from the back of her large head. She wore many cheap-looking rings and a Fijian seashell necklace, the kind I refused to purchase when I went to the beach there. Well, I suppose it was Fijian, as she wore a tourist t-shirt saying "Fiji" -- maybe visiting her ancestral homeland? I couldn't tell, she was so distorted. Her body looked like the childhood toy with the multicolored plastic rings of various sizes that you stacked on the yellow pole. Instead of a bulb at the top of the pole sat her menacing cranium, insisting that she had the aisle seat. (I'm having this nervous worry that I've seen that analogy before and I'm stealing it, but I can't recall any reference at the moment.) Bob and I couldn't really argue with all of that mass. Needless to say, I was anxious to discuss terms on which we would be freed to relieve ourselves (I couldn't go in the terminal since I had so much damn luggage), but it ended up being not so bad. Though I was originally rather snappish (defending my claim to the window seat, which Bob was ready to take), I quickly made one-time friends(TM Chuck Palahniuk) with Bob, somewhat enjoyed the movie (The Dish, an Aussie film, which added some Nostalgia Factor since it's made by the team who did The Castle, which most of the Australians I met love and insist non-Australians cannot fully appreciate the humor of), dozed/reminisced to a few CD's (Utopia Parkway, OK Computer), and read a bit of Ripley Under Ground. One bathroom break proved enough, and the aisle thief cleared out after dinner to provide it without our asking (or maybe Bob asked, I don't know). She had this horrible cough and couldn't even walk; she had to get a wheelchair from the jetway. Then I began wondering if she was fat because she couldn't walk, or the other way around. Chicken and egg.

What is with all of this bathroom talk, enough of that.

Mike drove me home and I gave him a copy of Since I Left You direct from Melbourne, home of The Avalanches. I unpacked a little and drove to The Amphora, one of the few 24-hour joints around here. An order of cheese blintzes and then the addition of some chicken tenders filled my jetlagged stomach and now here I am, tiring out.

California provided an excellent decompression chamber. Lots of vegging out, lots of movies (Shrek, Cats & Dogs, Spike and Mike's Classic Animation Festival, Nowhere [the 1997 Araki one, on video]), lots of eating. It wasn't so weird to be in the States when I was staying with my best friend from my time overseas. And now it really is over. As Mike parked on my driveway, I felt it was strange to see my house again, but it was stranger still that it didn't really look odd, just familiar. I hadn't forgotten the code to the ADT or the garage, I had my housekey back on the keychain already, it was almost like I was coming back from a few weeks away instead of months on another continent. Jets lie. When Robyn's mom was driving me to "The Condo in Redondo" we went by the ocean, and I realized that the seemingly infinite view I had there was a mere second of the 14 hour trip I'd just made. How could I multiply that patch by 14 hours? Impossible.

I'm not even that tired, just drained. I don't want to deal with being back home, but at least I won't be here in the suburbs too long. And the house is mine in the meantime.

Sun's up...