Day 6 of a Four-Week Pleasure Cruise

We four are standing on a section of sidewalk overlooking part of Ventura Harbor, in front of a large fishing boat that's firmly anchored, yet slowly drifts to the dock and away from it repeatedly. I've got a butter pecan ice cream malt, and Meridith's got a cotton candy/bubble gum ice cream malt (which turns purple, her favorite color, when both flavors are combined), both from Coastal Cone nearby. We're right near the Fisherman's Memorial, which faces the parking lot that's adjacent to Andria's Seafood Restaurant, which was prohibitively expensive for us this time. It's the afternoon of New Year's Eve, also Mom's birthday. Being at Ventura Harbor Village used to feel vivid, exciting in parts, with much to look at in all the shops. It doesn't anymore.

Before this point, we went to Pacific View Mall, which Mom wanted to go to as a farewell before we finally left the Santa Clarita Valley for good (It'll happen soon enough, I hope), and she wanted to see what calendars the Calendar Club store had. I like that mall because most importantly, it's not Valencia Town Center, where you can walk around but feel throughout that you can't touch much, unlike Galleria at Sunset in Henderson where you can go anywhere in that mall and feel like it's yours to explore. Pacific View Mall actually feels like a mall, not just a collection of stores separated by escalators. There's Sears, Macy's, JCPenney and Target as anchors. The second floor is wall-to-wall carpeting. It's not a mall for me to embrace because outside of the Santa Clarita Valley, I always feel like a tourist wherever we go. California has that gift, good or bad.

At Target, I found a Matchbox flatbed dump truck, which I snapped up for my working vehicles collection. That's as far as I go with construction vehicles. Bulldozers, mixers, backhoes and others do a lot of work, but generally in one place. A dump truck has to get from one place to another. You can't drive a backhoe down the 405.

After that was Super Panda Buffet at the corner of the mall property. We've been to it before, and Mom decided to go there because Andria's was far too expensive and at least here, the price for all four for us was a lot more than what we could have gotten at Andria's for the same price. Plus, we could all find something we liked there, and we did, save for the hard-boiled egg I had at the end which was in the fridge in its shell for too long, with a gray color around it.

Back at that section of the harbor, after air hockey with Meridith, two games of Galaga, and two games of Cruis'n USA (I wish it had been Cruis'n Exotica, like at the roller skating rink in Ventura the year before last, because I liked rolling under that landing 747 at that Hong Kong airport), I thought about the entire day, had liked what we did, but it didn't feel like it used to. And I realized what was missing.

The many times before that we were at Ventura Harbor Village, there wasn't as much hope as there is now in moving out of Southern California. So being there, being somewhere completely different from where we exist ("Live" is a word that should be used when you're happy with where you are), we threw ourselves into the experience, which wasn't hard. This time, the pleasure was muted, because we know better things are coming in our lives.

Even so, it's places like Ventura Harbor Village that saved me from feeling insane from where I exist. It's true that in order to do anything interesting in the Santa Clarita Valley, you have to leave. Thank goodness for those options.

Real Reinvention

(I was going to write about my mom's birthday last Friday, which became day 6 of a four-week pleasure cruise, but this comes first.)

On the cover of Fool Me Once: Hustlers, Hookers, Headliners, and How Not to Get Screwed in Vegas by Las Vegas Weekly staff writer Rick Lax, a man looks at a smiling woman standing on a corner of Fremont Street against a brightly-lit casino background, white lights almost blinding. Is the woman smiling at him because she's genuinely interested, or is she thinking of more sinister plans? Is he dazzled by her only or do the lights behind her and the atmosphere around them make him interested and he'll find out that he was only interested in her in that setting?

Las Vegas is full of fantasy of all kinds available to everyone. You can find your pleasure here. But as you either go to Vegas more and more, or you become a resident, the fantasy begins to peel back. You come to a point where you have to separate fantasy from reality. There is reality in Las Vegas, but it's more a matter of adjusting what's to your taste. For example, I love Carnival World Buffet at Rio. I always look around in happy shock, wondering if I died and it's my first day in Heaven. But I can't go there all the time. I'd be right back to what I weighed in 2010 and then about 215% more than that (Outrageous estimates are made up by a professional, so please remember to always estimate with caution).

For people who move to the Las Vegas area, such as yours truly soon enough, you can reinvent yourself. You can keep only what's important to you from past experiences, what will truly benefit you in your new life, and then dump the rest. No one knows who you have been. You're free of what you once were, of insecurities you might have had, of what has bothered you, which, for me, is the Santa Clarita Valley.

For the past few months, as Dad has applied for many jobs in Las Vegas, I've enthusiastically told Meridith over and over that you can reinvent yourself in Vegas. We have so many chances to do what we want. But I didn't listen to myself. I thought being a middle school campus supervisor while reading and writing on the side would be enough.

Dad had a very successful phone interview on Friday for a job that has three positions available, and he was only one of three people interviewed. There's a very good chance that this job, which he'd really like to do, could be our supersonic ticket out of here.

This job combines Dad's decades of experience in teaching and working for Southern Bell/BellSouth. He'll be doing exactly what he wants, and he'll be a lot happier. What about me? A campus supervisor? Is reading and writing after work and on weekends and teacher workdays and holidays enough? No.

If Dad can find the job that completely suits him, so can I. I don't want my reading and writing to be shunted to the side. I want it to be the center of my life every day. I'm not going to get that by being a campus supervisor. It's still an option, as I'm keeping all my options open, but it's not my main hope anymore.

I've decided that I want to be a copywriter or a content developer, and I started by applying to be a content developer for Vegas.com. The company matches my love for Las Vegas and their offices are close to our new apartment in Henderson. I read the requirements, and I fit all of them. I have the experience, the computer knowledge, and I know I can do everything they want. They can ask for copy in any style they want and I will work promptly and diligently to match it. Most of all, I want to explore every inch of Las Vegas once I'm a resident and this is one of the best ways to do it.

This is the year to challenge myself and go for what I really want to do, not what I think I should do so I have a chance to do what I want to do. This will keep my writing the center of my life, and make it stronger because of it.

I wrote movie reviews for 11 years, I worked in two newsrooms, and I know Internet media. I'm a little nervous, but I'm ready. Let's do this.

Three More Working Vehicles

I thought I'd wait until we were residents of Henderson to expand my toy working vehicles collection. I was wrong.

Target was the first errand for Dad, Meridith and I, with Sprouts and Pavilions afterward, and we were there because Dad needed Imodium A-D or something like it. "Something like it" won out because it was cheaper than the brand.

We were at the register, Dad paid, and as he was leaving, I realized that I forgot to look at the Matchbox cars in the toy aisles. Meridith called Dad to let him know where we were and that we'd be at the car in a few minutes, and off I went, fairly rushing, fueled by my enthusiasm for my collection.

The tow truck still wasn't being sold separately from the car repair service set, but I first became giddy from finding a "Dallas Fort Worth Airport" hazmat truck. Then a green garbage truck with a sun and a green leaf in a white rectangle in the middle on each side, the stem of the green leaf saying "Live better in a clean world!", with "Go Green" under the leaf and word stem.

The back of the garbage truck is slightly open, and you press it down, and it comes back up to its original place. It's meant to be the crusher that comes down to make room for more garbage.

The final working vehicle I found was a water truck, labeled "Aqua King" on the underside. The inside of the truck is full of what's supposed to look like greenish bottles, their tops sticking out like you see on the road. This is one of my favorites.

I love how relatively cheap my hobby is, with these vehicles being $1.07 each. For now, at least, I don't go searching often for mine, and my hobby started by happening to find that five-pack of city vehicles, including the ice cream truck and moving truck, at the same Target. I was just browsing aimlessly.

I still want that tow truck, but now that I've searched on eBay, probably not the one I've been eyeing in that five-pack. There's so many other Matchbox types, including a "GMC Wrecker" released this year, another from 1990, and still another from 2000. I think I've found something to do while working on my writing projects.

The Stormy Present: The One Episode of The West Wing That's Bothered Me for Seven Years

After creator Aaron Sorkin and chief director Thomas Schlamme left The West Wing at the end of the fourth season, the show entered a severe creative slump that only lessened with the spectacular episode "The Supremes" (guest-starring Glenn Close and William Fichtner as potential Supreme Court nominees), and then lasted until the seventh season, when the show got halfway and almost three-quarters to being Sorkin-like. I hung on. I had watched The West Wing from the beginning in 1999, graduated high school between seasons 3 and 4, and moved to Southern California between seasons 4 and 5, which should have been a sign of what living in Southern California was going to be like for eight years.

No matter how much John Goodman's Glenallen Walken was wasted as an Acting President (There was so much more they could have pursued with that storyline than just partisan sniping), no matter how bad the writing got, I was there. I kept hoping for better. I knew that without Sorkin, the show could never again reach the greatness it had consistently achieved, but I wanted enough of my show back to justify still watching it. I'm fascinated with the presidency, historical and fictional, and I just wanted my show to work again.

When "The Stormy Present" originally aired on January 7, 2004, I was hopeful. John Goodman was returning as Glenallen Walken, and James Cromwell was guest-starring as former president D. Wire Newman, the last Democratic president in office before Bartlet. All three were flying on Air Force One to the funeral of former president Owen Lassiter, a Republican, and likely Bartlet's predecessor, as Lassiter had served eight years in office throughout the '90s (The West Wing universe is markedly different from ours, especially with the differences in election years, which fans online have theorized about at length).

This was a few months before Reagan had died, so the funeral was modeled on Nixon's in 1994. It was being held at the "Lassiter Library in Costa Mesa," "The one with the fake Oval," as Josh states in Leo McGarry's office. Nixon's library does not look like what they filmed. It seems more vast, and quietly haunting, not just because of the funeral at hand, but I guess all presidential libraries are haunting in a way, with a recap of power, photos all over, various historical videos (The starting point of the Nixon Library has a video of Pat Nixon accepting a gift of two pandas from China for the National Zoo), accomplishments heralded, and scandals kept on the down low, save for the Nixon Library which apparently has a new Watergate exhibit that hews closely to the truth and not created by loyalists, as the previous exhibit was.

Bartlet with Newman and Walken could mean that the men would talk about their time in office, how they feel personally about the huge burden placed on them as leaders, however temporarily it was for Walken. It would be interesting to learn what it was like for Walken when he was summoned to the Oval Office to become Acting President. All we saw at the end of the fourth season was him coming down the steps of what might have been his home, or the Capitol building, and being ushered into a waiting car with a security detail there, and then climbing out of it and walking up the steps to the back end of the White House.

None of that happened. The episode was also about a protest in Saudi Arabia shouting for democracy, and the thought by Newman that Walken's actions of bombing Qumar (fictional Middle Eastern country in our world) in retaliation for Zoey Bartlet's kidnapping may have helped foster the protest. It's just policy discussions between Newman and Bartlet, and then all three after Walken joins them when the plane lands in Missouri to pick him up.

I still somewhat like the episode because of the presidential library setting, but Newman gets more play when discussing with Bartlet how he felt when Bartlet revealed to the world that he had multiple sclerosis. Walken is reduced to sitting with Bartlet on a bench, recounting a trip to China with Lassiter. The show is generally only 42 minutes, I get that, but here was a grand opportunity for reflection of a kind. Instead, the episode is also jammed with "B" and "C" storylines of Josh mediating a dispute between Connecticut and North Carolina on who actually owns a copy of the Bill of Rights that was stolen by a Union soldier during the Civil War, and C.J. finding out if the Department of Defense is heading up mind-control research. Useless storylines. What was so wrong with spending more time on Air Force One, and at the Lassiter Library, a little more time than just the last 11 minutes? There's former members of Lassiter's cabinet on the plane, including one named Bobby Bodine, "who I think tried to sell back Alaska as Secretary of the Interior," as Toby tells Josh on his cell phone while walking to the plane. Shouldn't Toby talk to these men that incense him so? He may not come to an understanding with them, if they'd want to talk to him at all, but just to put more meat in the episode. Here is a long-ago administration in the same plane as one that's most likely in the second year of its second term (I can't quite determine here what year the Bartlet administration is in, but that feels right).

There's a covered outdoor area of the Lassiter Library that Bartlet and Newman somberly walk through, and there's a banner with Lassiter's likeness on it. Here is this man's presidential library. Here are these men who have served and are serving in the same office. Reflective moments were sorely needed in this episode, from those former Lassiter cabinet members, from Walken, from Newman, from Bartlet (though he does get one when he talks with Toby, who's having trouble writing Bartlet's eulogy for Lassiter). What does it mean to these men to have been in power, to have power? How does it change them?

All of that would have been most welcome. But still I'll watch that episode occasionally (I am right now on Amazon), reminded of Reagan's death and the events that followed, and watching the Reagan funeral motorcade on that freeway from our apartment in Valencia in that summer of 2004. And it continues to inspire me for one presidential history book I want to write. I watch with regret, though. Always regret.

More Hope

Not that I need any reassurance that moving to Henderson and always having Las Vegas available is the right path for me, but it's always nice to have those moments along the way to it that give more than you thought was there. Much more. And I've already thought there to be so much to look forward to already.

I'm reading a novel called Greyhound, published by AmazonEncore, about a 11-year-old, nearly 12, who's put on a Greyhound bus in Stockton, California by his feckless, uncaring mother, pushing him off to Altoona, Pennsylvania to live with his father's grandmother (a father who left long ago), because she doesn't want him to interfere with her new life with her new man, Dick, another man in a long line of men. This is a three-and-a-half day journey for the boy, with many well-defined characters along the way, the best so far being the kindly Mr. Hastings, working behind the ticket counter at the Los Angeles Greyhound terminal, and Marcus Franklin, his seatmate out of Los Angeles, a Langston Hughes and Miles Davis conoisseur.

I'm only on page 58, out of 240 pages, and I love this novel. I was on page 20 a few minutes ago and I knew that it was going into my permanent collection. Most important to me is where AmazonEncore seems to be based. On the copyright page, there's a P.O. Box address that ends with "Las Vegas, NV 89140."

Great literature does exist in, and come out of, Las Vegas. It is a place for readers and writers just as much as it is for dreamers. I will be proud to be part of it, because there's so much to see, so much to feel, so much to write about. From there, anything is possible for me, and AmazonEncore's existence gives me more hope. Maybe it was just a matter of convenience for the company, to not have that division ensconced in a thickly-populated metropolis. Even so, they have the right idea. The writers that fuel AmazonEncore may not come from Las Vegas (Steffan Piper, the author of Greyhound, lives in Los Angeles), but the books themselves do. The city is part of yet another valuable service.

Got to Be the Only Uptick in That Aisle

Yesterday, the end of a long list of errands (post office, Sprouts, Walmart, made long by the time spent at the latter) led us to Albertsons to pick up what apparently is the only decent bread in this valley. It's the only one Mom has found that is tolerable, and we hope to find many good kinds in Henderson and not just one.

Albertsons is also the only store I know of in this valley that sells individual Matchbox cars. Target sells only five-packs, one of which I picked up and considerably expanded my collection of working vehicles. I haven't checked Toys"R"Us because the location here has always felt like the Wal-Mart of toy stores, just where you go to pick up obligatory birthday gifts for someone's kid.

At this Albertsons, in recent weeks, I've bought a forklift, a "concrete specialists" truck, and an "MH Authentic Austin Performance Parts" vehicle, which looks like a close cousin of a hearse. I figure that in supermarkets, at Walmart, at Target, heck, at anywhere that caters to customers, they keep tabs on what sells. Now, whether my purchases of individual working vehicles at Albertsons made such a difference, I don't know, but last night, I went to that empty toy aisle as always (It doesn't seem like anyone buys anything from there), flipped through the individual cars, noted what I already had, and then found in the back a water tanker truck, "Construction Water Supply Delivery." Exactly what I hoped to find just as a working vehicle, and it gives me hope that maybe somewhere in Vegas or in Henderson, the tow truck I want is sold individually, because I surely won't find it here.

The water tanker truck brings me to 11 working vehicles so far, and it'll only keep growing. I was always fascinated by garbage trucks when I was a kid, and I think I like these vehicles because they've got a purpose besides transport. They're not just showing off. They're a part of something. Once I have more room in our new place (even though it's actually smaller square footage than this place, but my DVDs are all in two binders and I'll be moving with less books), I'm thinking of adding big rigs.

Covered in Books, But Not Overwhelmed

Mid-afternoon yesterday, I began reading an anthology called Steampunk!, which involves worlds with machines made of many gears, clockwork, airships hovering about, and I know I'm not explaining it very well, but I'm still immersing myself in it and it is awe-inspiring. I want a way to have now that expansive feeling when I spent all day in Tomorrowland in the Magic Kingdom at Walt Disney World, going between Space Mountain, the Tomorrowland Transit Authority, and Walt Disney's Carousel of Progress, that unspoken encouragement to imagine big, dream big. I get that with this anthology, and as I resume an interest in Superman, and seek out more sci-fi books, I feel I can have it all the time.

Sara, an old, very dear friend of mine who is making great strides toward becoming a human rights lawyer at Florida State University College of Law, recommended to me To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis in a list of her favorite books when we reconnected at the start of this year. I thought nothing of it, then, but later in the year, I thought I had purchased it out of curiosity, yet let it languish just like countless other books in my room.

With this new craving for sci-fi books, and so invigorated by the stories in Steampunk!, I remembered To Say Nothing of the Dog and thought I still had it in my room. This, of course, meant pulling out stacks of books that inevitably fell. Lola of WOMEN: WE SHALL OVERCOME offered to organize my books for me, and I refused, because I have certain stacks in place, one with all Las Vegas and Florida books (the former for the future, the latter for nostalgia-at-a-glance), another of books I want to read over the next few weeks or months, and others just haphazardly organized. When you don't look at those stacks closely every day, and put back the books that have fallen out of place without thinking anything of it, there's no reason to consider organization.

I'm not overwhelmed by the sheer number of books in my room, but it is clear that once we move to Henderson, settle into our new apartment, and I get the bookshelves I was promised years ago, I am going to come up with an organizational plan. I can't do it like this anymore. For now, being that all my DVDs are now in two big, heavy-duty binders, those box shelves are empty (yes, box shelves, fashioned from the boxes we moved with, which are still whole), and once I determined what I didn't need to read right now, I shoved a lot of books into those shelves and into the bottom box shelves too. It's not a case of out of sight, out of mind, but rather getting some floor space back and maybe vacuuming it one of these days.

I couldn't find To Say Nothing of the Dog. I may actually have been remembering checking it out of the Valencia library a few months before it switched from County of Los Angeles to City of Santa Clarita control. But that craving for sci-fi books is strong, and so I found the other steampunk anthology I bought last month, as well as the Superman novels I bought, Soulless by Gail Carriger, the 600+-page The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy book I have that contains all the novels, the Jules Verne book I have with all his novels, as well as many Charles Dickens novels I bought that I want to read, including Hard Times, Great Expectations, and Bleak House. The 2005 miniseries of the latter book is what turned me on to reading it. Unrelated to science fiction, but the same desire.

Cleared floor space means room for a very important stack, that of the books I'm using for my research, as well as books I'm reading for insight and inspiration, such as The Season by William Goldman, his chronicle of the 1967-68 Broadway season. It's not what I'm writing, but it's that kind of framework that Goldman employs. Plus I've ordered a few other books which are directly related to what I'm writing, and I want to see how those authors did it. I'm never intimidated by reading those who have done what I want to do; I just want to study their approach, and see what works for me.

My room looks a lot better, now that I've also cleaned up the junk that was littering my floor, such as loose papers and past issues of The New Yorker that I probably won't read now. The October 13th issue that I picked up from my floor is still folded back to the page that begins a profile of IKEA, and I intend to read that, now that it's sitting right in front of me.

Hopefully this reorganization of my book stacks is a sign that we'll be moving soon. I'd like that to be the final time of doing that here. I know I can't take all these books with me, and I don't mind that. But I would like some hint that this is getting me closer to the future I want. Can't predict what others are going to do, but I hope those others are giving thought to bringing my dad into their company so we can finally get started on really enjoying our lives, and I can seek the job I want.