the old-school guestbook archives
my amazon wish list... my favorite astrologer... my favorite artist... yerba mate revolution! erowid: a travel guide for interior journeys... no more war: MoveOn.org United for Peace and Justice True Majority seek the truth: Common Dreams Unamerican Activities The Nation people I adore, diaries I read: rev.raikes ariana cubiclegirl epiphany glitter333 laurakay wammo the music: the asylum street spankers backyard tire fire blue highway bill camplin wendy colonna freedom tribe joules graves guy forsyth band hamsa lila hanuman libby kirkpatrick leftover salmon pamela means medeski martin & wood the motet the nice outfit nickel creek open road rose polenzani railroad earth south austin jug band string cheese incident taarka tha musemeant the devil makes three tim o'brien band trolley wild sage keller williams yonder mountain string band |
computers, cars, and blessings received ~ 2000-11-13 - 20:32:48 I just lost an entry somehow... problems saving it. I could probably figure out how to retrieve it if I could get into the system, but diaryland doesn't give me that kind of access. I'm secretly a low-level geek, see... not high-tech enough to make fat money in silicon valley, but comfortable playing in UNIX and writing my own web pages in HTML. the whole dot com thing is quite an issue around here at the moment. boulder creek is on the outside edge of santa cruz county, right outside the bounds of silicon valley. the town is a trippy mix of computer professionals, hippies and environmentalists, and rednecks with pickup trucks. a lot of computer people want to live in the woods, since they spend their working lives behind a computer monitor. and they can afford to drop half a million on a house. property values are out of control. this is the third most expensive place to live in the country, right behind san francisco and manhattan. and getting more expensive all the time. steven and shanda are facing their third rent increase in a year-- up to $1,750 a month for a two bedroom house. they're looking for a place to buy, but that often seems like an impossible dream. a termit infested cabin on an acre of land up here will run you about $100,000. it seems like it's time to find the next cool place, where beautiful people can afford to live. a lot of people around here are heading up to humboldt, mendocino. I don't know, I think I'd like to live somewhere tropical for a while. costa rica, say. I hear you can still get cheap land down there. and I'm a sunshine-and-hot-weather kind of girl. in summertime I am in my glory. ironic, that. my skin wasn't designed to be any further south than dublin. I've sunburned myself so badly I could hardly walk... on my first visit to santa cruz, as a matter of fact, when I was 19 and traveling around the country on greyhound buses. an adventure, that. surprisingly, I'd recommend it, just for the experience. I'm so glad I have a car, now, though. guilty as I am for my participation in the petrochemical industry, there's really nothing like the freedom of a car. my current ride is a silver peugeot named Chi. I just bought it a few weeks ago, so I don't quite have the symbiotic relationship with this car as I did with my scirocco, Rocko. I survived a brush with death in Rocko. I was on 80, south of sacramento, with two of my favorite angels. when the tire blew, it was surreal, because I had envisioned exactly that happening earlier in the day. let me say that I drive like a fuckin' maniac. ask anyone who's ever ridden with me. and I try to take it easy on passengers. so no one but me knows just how psycho I am when I drive on my own. yet I don't get into accidents (at least, I haven't in years), and I don't get tickets. I have something of a magic circle of protection. so I had this vision of us spinning off the highway, and in the vision I was saying "it's alright, guys, we're not gonna die". I wish I'd had the presence of mind to say that at the time, because at least one other person in the car was sure that we were gonna die. when the tire blew, I was going somewhere around 85 mph. there was a gravel shoulder sloping down to a steel guardrail. as soon as the tires hit the gravel we started sliding, and rather than issuing serene reassurances, I was yelling "fuck! fuck!" as I fought for control of the car and locked up the brakes, sending us into a 360 spin and kicking up a huge cloud of dust so that we couldn't see anything. when the car stopped and the dust settled, we were entirely on the shoulder, facing the wrong way, a foot away from the guardrail. we never even hit a thing. everyone was fine. as soon as all that sank into my brain, I kind of brushed it off and went-- "okay, I've got a spare, but we've gotta clear all that stuff out of the trunk..."-- and I got out and went around to the back, opened the trunk, and then collapsed on the ground, my whole body shaking. I had to sit there and breathe for a minute while one of the others dug the spare out of the trunk, and the other tried to wrap her head around the belief that she was NOT going to die, not today. I sat and breathed out the adrenaline and offered up my gratitude to the universe for blessings received. I find myself needing to do that quite a lot.
(((rings))) |