I was so tired of the standard Movable Type template I was ready to kill myself.

Now I am so tired of wrestling with CSS I'm even more ready to kill myself. If you got here from an archive page or an individual entry, it looks like ca-ca right now and for that my sincerest apologies. You didn't wanna read that old junk anyway, didja?

So, I'm throwing in some table tags (I know! copout!) and some photos I took yesterday (reload! reload! look ma! javascript!) up at Mount Wilson and later while hanging out of the side of Jack's 914 while he drove me from Pasadena to San Gabriel to downtown LA and back at 1am. I almost lost my camera once or twice on the 110 going around those turns. Probably almost lost my arm too.

Most cities are more beautiful at night, but with Los Angeles I think it's particularly striking.

When I was a kid, I almost drowned. More than once, actually - it's not hard to almost drown when you are nine or ten or so and trying to paddle around in overhead-high surf every day.

You never expect you're going to drown, it just happens to you. You're paddling along, trying to make a wave, or paddling out, trying to get past a wave, and you slip or misjudge when it's going to break, or you catch the wave and bail too late or your leash tangles around your leg when you fall off and suddenly you are in the ocean spin-cycle and you forgot to take a deep breath first. Then it's like a car accident, or a big fall, or any other event that takes long enough for you to realize o h s h i i i i i i t g o n n a d i i i i e. Everything slows down and gets choppy at the same time and you have a moment, probably a second or two, where your brain hits 'record' and 'play' at the same time and your reflexes kick in and you become both acutely aware that you're fucked and wow! time slowed down! just like in the movies!

You're spinning over and over and over and the only sensation or sound is that of the wave crashing, full of grit and seaweed, battering, churning, pushing you under. The sea takes you, and you know it, and you stop fighting it. You stop swimming because there is no more up direction to swim toward, or because you are being dragged backwards by a very buoyant hunk of foam attached to your ankle.

This is where I usually got lucky and ended up spit out, shaken and unsteady, in the whitewash ten yards from shore. Once or twice, though, that spin-cycle lasted an infinity and a half, tumbling over and over and over and over, head over feet, side to side, lungs full of salt and god-knows-what-else.

It's a strange sensation, being trapped underwater. You don't want to, but the first thing you do is open your mouth when all the air rushes out of your sinus cavity and the seawater and sand and salt rush in - snort - to replace it. When you're sleeping and you can't breathe, you wake up with a start and begin breathing again. When you're under water and can't breathe, almost the same thing happens. You reflexively breathe in through your open mouth. You can't help it. The wave pushes into you, into your chest, seeps into your lungs, fills your mouth and your nose. Everything within you strains for air, grasps for it, wants it. And there is none.

There is such pain in being underwater, unable to breathe, lungs full of liquid and grit, and such relief when you finally breach the surface and feel air on your skin and cough even though there is nothing in your lungs to cough with and take that one hard, cold, rattling breath.

I was sitting in my car this morning, practicing how I was gonna ask for money to help pay for a tiny studio apartment we can't afford, car full of rental applications and maps and bank statements and my one billable invoice for just over two hundred dollars and my stellar credit report which allowed me to see in detail just how far I've gotten myself in the hole so far, and I thought of those moments underwater, spinning, directionless, uncertain.

I am wondering when I will catch my first breath.