2024/07/02 : walked 2 old town Albuquerque but couldn't find anywhere D-cent 2 eat, eXcept the Sawmill, D-pressing food court kind of place, wanted 2 eat in Duran Central pharmacy but it was closed so just 8 @ Buen Provecho, nice outdoor patio > rewatched The Doors, figured it was appropriate since Morrison had that 4mative Xperience in New Mexico + ended up in LA, where wheel B mañana

where we 5leep

07/03 > did another Bosque walk/run, this time south + when j turned back i kept running, about 5 walking/5 running, ~12 miles on the day

in the bosque

smooth soft-shell turtle

> rite after i took the above photo, this big turtle started 2 scamper in2 busy traffic on route 66 so i stopped traffic + picked her up + threw her in a creek leading 2 Rio Grande, so that makes 2 turtle lives we've saved

> hung out by the pool then went 2 return the car + walked a mile or so in 100° heat, past the unhinged riff-raff that hangs out near bus + train stns > thus B-gins our experiment in going 2 + hanging out in LA-LA L& sin coche

> Amtrak was rea||y L8, spent a few hrs w8ing in the stn + then on the train sitting in the stn ... didnt leave ABQ until 6:00 even tho we were scheduled 2 leave @ 4:30

> read Unearthingly by Julian Mithra ... if u had 2 characterize the book G-illogically, it'd B conglomerate, mayB a bit metamorphic, a hodge-podge of 5tories/poems/found txts dealing mostly w/ geology + southwest/ChicanX i55ues, so appropri8 2 B reading in ABQ + on the train thru New Mexico > 4 the most part tho, i staired out the window reflecting on my G-illogical surveying dayzzz in the SW, in the 90s, how much terrain i traversed taking soil samples or pulling wires 4 geophysical surveys ... seems like another lifetime ago

> 8 dinner w/ 2 desert rat millenials w/ colored hair, the majenta-haired 1 a forensic toxicologist (thus provided insight in2 R thinking in the last post, wondering what type of drugs these unhinged/unhoused ppl have in their systems (meth))

07/04 > on the train, now somewhere in the Mojave, July 4th > an Italian friend once told us «Italy is a beautiful country ... if u could take the ppl out of it»——we're wondering if the same is true of the U.S.A.? R breakfast companions were an old hippy programmer from Oakland + a weathered river-raft guide from Orange country > talking 2 these west coast ppl made us realize how diffrent we are 5ince moving 2 NYC, the time we 5pent on the west coast 25 yrs B-hind us ... when the river-rafter asked how we adjusted 2 NYC (we were talking about outdoor stuff) i said i'm basically a diffrent version of myself than i used 2 B

approaching LA

> now readng Die Closer to Me by David Kuhnlein ... good train reading, pulpy fiction in large font + relevant 2 the urban blight we were talking about in the last post (what Kuhnlein calls «the poverty of experience»), but in this new era of janky streets popuL8ed by drugged up zom-B types, + more horror/sci-fi, B-tween earth (Venice beach in particular) + another frigid planet, Süskind (witch i'm wondering if it's ^ nod 2 Patrick Süskind, author of Perfume (since 1 of the main charactors Jo has extra-sensory smelling abilities) > the book is uber visceral, especially of the olfactory 5ense

> in the book, intergalactic advertisements read:

SPACE IS BETTER
WITH YOU OUT IN IT

... b4 vandals swap «YOU» + «OUT» witch is funny b/c that's how we read it in the 1st place > the book is blurbed by Blake Butler + Kenji Siratori, witch makes sense az it falls somewhere in between, w/ a bit of JG Ballard + William Gibson

(probly more appropriate 2 take a photo in Venice, but we won't B there 4 another week or 2)

> arrived LA union station, got on Metro, really weird, more police/security than passengers, which is not saying much b/c hardly any 1 rides the metro in LA it seems > took B to Western/Hollywood, staying at the Cara Hotel, thus begins R experiment of LA senza macchina

LA Metro, in 5tark contrast to NYC