I am sure that those of you who read my first post - yes, all zero of you - have been waiting with baited breath to hear how some Ohio guy, who had lived in cautious, suburban environs his whole life, ended up in that bastion of progressive thinking and fake ta tas, southern California.
I had been slaving as a lawyer at one of those obnoxiously huge law firms for about 5 years. Once that ended, around the beginning of March 2009, I decided that I was going to just take some time and visit friends around the country. Figure out what I wanted to do with my life, so to speak. My first visit was to California, where I had never in my life been, to visit some friends. While in San Diego visiting my buddies Dave and Kyle, it was bandied about, during fairly heavy drinking sessions, why I don't just move to SD. I had not thought about that, but did then, and decided that I would move. So I flew back to Ohio, and started searching online for places to live in SD. It really was that simple. Impulsive? Yes. Reckless? Arguably. But eff it, why not, I thought.
For the living quarters issue, I decided to rely heavily upon my buddy Dave. In hindsight, this was taking a real chance. Dave is a friend from college. During college he used to wear this hideous Park City coat that was gray and bright, super bright, fluorescent yellow. The mere sight of it would make me laugh my face off, so much so that when I graduated he gave it to me as a gift. It was the most awful coat ever. Dave and I lived together with one of my other buddies, Brian (a/k/a "Face" - don't ask), in this crappy little house one summer in between semesters.
Dave was weird. There is no other way to say it. He would disappear for hours, sometimes days, at a time, and whenever Brian or I would ask where he had been, we were greeted with the same response: "Don't worry about it." He would often cook up some pasta and disappear into the bathroom. I have no idea what the guy did all summer. I really don't.
Dave's room in our house was nothing short of amazing. Despite having lived (at the time) 22 years on this Earth, he had nearly no possessions. His bed was some cushion apparatus that he fished out of a garbage bin. He had a few t-shirts stacked in the corner, about 6 or 7 hawaiian shirts in the closet, and a guitar. And that's it. Maybe he was on the lam or something.
So, obviously, I decided to follow one impulsive decision with a questionable one - I trusted Dave to go check out a place on the boardwalk for me. He reported back that the place was "solid" and that, apparently, was good enough for me. I cut a check the next day and sent it off, and started preparing to make the move across country at the end of March.
I went home to visit my parents and my brother and sister in northeast Ohio just before I left. I think they thought I was utterly insane. I had no job to which I was going, in a sweet economy no less, and no real plan at all except to go there and just "figure it out." California offered no "reciprocity" to lawyers from other states (i.e., you don't have to take the bar exam). So, naturally, off I went.
My original plan for the trip was to buy a handheld camcorder, stop in a small town every so often, and try to convince local citizens to do this (specifically, at the 1:59 mark) across the road. I decided, though, NOT to do this because I had a huge hunk of money from my closed bank account and did not want to risk some Deliverance-type experience that would end with me married to a wolf or something and decked out day-to-day in excessive denim.
I did, however, try to take pictures of every notable or funny sign I encountered, and I did in fact buy t-shirts at crappy rest stops in every state. The trip went well for the most part. The first day I drove from Ohio to Oklahoma, and the second day I drove from Oklahoma to Flagstaff, Arizona. Let's keep in mind that it was near the end of March. Sunny skies and good weather all the way as I made my way into New Mexico.
Then, out of nowhere, snow and a ton of it. I was on a narrow-ish road in the New Mexico mountains, with two lanes of traffic going both ways. I was no stranger to driving in the snow. Ohio has a good amount of it, and for two years I lived in upstate New York, which has a sh*t-ton of it. So I turn my wipers on as semi-trucks whiz by in the other lane, each time launching mounds of slush and snow and ice onto my car. This or something else resulted in my wipers sticking. Now I'm in trouble. So I slow down and start to make my way to the side of the road. I was not sure if there were rumble strips or a guardrail, but I had to find out. Turns out there were rumble strips, and I stopped on the side of the road.
Problem was, I was in a t shirt and jeans and all of my heavier clothes were either in my parents' basement (I was moving to California) or buried somewhere in my car. I did not like the idea of sitting on the side of a mountain road in a snowstorm, so I got out and was literally slamming my wiper down on the windshield trying to break the ice. It worked. I got off at the next rest stop and asked the cashier at the convenience store if this happens a lot (the snowstorm). She said, "sometimes." What the...
After that, I eventually made it to California. Mapquest (yes, for my cross country trip, I used effing mapquest - sweet decision number 200 in less than a month) decided to forego major highways once I got into California in favor of desert-like one lane roads with no commerce in sight. See Deliverance fears above. But eventually I made it and crashed at Dave and Kyle's the first night.
My next post will be about the first significant event that happened to me in California, exactly one day after I got there.
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