After I had finished writing my previous post I went to bed. I only managed to get about three hours of sleep. Somehow though I managed to wake up feeling refreshed. After a few aborted attempts at getting back to sleep I walked to the cafe/observation car and ordered a much needed tea.
As I watched the sun rise across the northern California farmlands a somewhat disheveled man sat in the chair next to mine. We chatted idly for a few minutes until he asked me if I 'liked science'. I said that while it was more my girlfriend's field than mine, I definitely had an interest. He took a deep breath, then embarked on a 45 minute diatribe about astro-physics, involving black Holes, quazars and the entire nature of our universe.
He spoke as one would to a child, taking me through the birth of stars, their mass before and after implosion and a whole litany of terms that I had only a cursory understanding of. How surprised I was, to find that the disheveled gas station attendant from Vermont sitting next to me was an amateur cosmologist. Astro-physics at 7:30 in the morning after three hours of sleep is a bitter pill however, and I became increasingly frustrated as I realized that this man could literally talk for hours without end. His stop came eventually and he left, leaving me with a shred of the refreshed feeling I had woken up with.
My stop came soon after. Lewis, much to my surprise, was totally on time and waiting for me despite it being 8:30 in the morning. It was great to see him, he's all grown up. After a cup of tea and a quick catching up in a nearby coffee shop we got into his car and headed to his apartment. We got about a block away from the station when I realized that our car was surrounded by dark smoke. Lewis, noticing the same thing said,
"that's not our car is it?"
Oh, what fateful words. Our car was indeed spewing dark, noxious smoke out of the exhaust. I boldly ventured into the obvious and told him,
"That's not good".
We figured it was better to just get back to his house as soon as possible so Lewis handed me his iPhone for directions, which of course, I failed at, sending him through a tunnel into Alameda which was the opposite direction we wanted to go. Through the mirror I could see our exhaust literally filling up the tunnel with thick smoke, obscuring basically everyone's vision who had the poor luck to be in the same tunnel as us. Once through the tunnel we found the nearest garage whose attendants turned also turned out to be lovers of the obvious, telling as that indeed, smoke spewing out your exhaust is not a good thing.
Opening up the car we found that there was absolutely no oil in the engine, so we bought some and at the advice of the attendants put four quarts in. Once we did that we tried to turn the car on again and while it seemed to run fine, it spewed even more smoke than before. 'Too much oil in the engine now', said another attendant. We started to realize that these guys were fools, but they realized their mistake in telling us how much to put in and offered to lift the car up and drain the oil (that we had just bought from them) for free. Once this was finished they told us to go drive on the freeway to flush the engine. This whole process took at least an hour, which obviously sucked but I suppose it was a good opportunity for Lewis and I to shoot the shit and for me to get some good footage of him saying 'damn, damn, damn' over and over again.
Figuring that driving with a go-go gadget flamethrower coming out the back was a bad idea we parked in the parking lot and ran the engine until a security guard came over and told us that we couldn't do that there as they had complaints about the smoke. Again we left, again we stopped. This time at a gas station in Alameda where Lewis decided to get the thing towed and his roommate, Ian to pick us up. It was now about 2:30, my train had arrived in 8:30. Lewis felt kind of bad but I reassured him that it was fine, after all, it was his car had just exploded not mine. He had plans to drive me into San Francisco and take me over the bridge which were now, obviously, scrapped.
After getting the car towed to Lewis' dealer in Walnut Creek (googlemaps it) we went back to his apartment and did the only logical thing in the circumstances: got wasted. Ian and Lewis took to me to a few local bars and showed me around Piedmont which is quite a nice area actually. It all gets a bit hazy at that point. I do remember being taken to someone's house where I played guitar and reassured someone that fret-buzz in low tunings can actually sound cool. There was a Tiki bar where I tried to get a photo of Mr. Quacky with a group of people, although a woman refused to be in the picture owing to the fact that she was a model and assured her friends that 'they would all end up on TMZ!'. I remember telling anyone who would listen that I was Canadian and them humoring me. I remember showing a 7/11 attendant a Canadian two dollar coin and him being very interested. I remember Lewis dropping a 6 pack in the street which smashed everywhere, covering my face in Mexican beer and him deciding that his day couldn't get any worse.
It'll all gone from that point in.
No comments:
Post a Comment