Current mood:	excited
Current music:	Franz Ferdinand - Take Me Out

It's morning, mom, isn't it? I don't give a flying fuck, girl!

The week before spring break lasted much longer than five days. I was lucky to get six hours of sleep those days, preparing for all the stupid crap teachers like to cram in the last days before they have to complete our report cards. At the end of the week I was exhausted and woke up early for my weekly Saturday morning SAT class. I spend eight useless hours a week with Jimmy, our post-graduate teacher in a polo shirt (he wants to be a subdivision planner), learning The Kaplan Method for doing my best without learning anything. You, too, can learn how to get an upper leg over the kids who can't afford the $800 course, for the low low price of eight hours of maddening boredom each week. At least the other students are entertaining-- Abby Wilkes sits next to me and we laugh at stupid things. There's this insane guy in the class who sits in the back and occasionally emits gargling sounds or recites portions of the alphabet in a Yoda voice. Stanley Pun stares at us from the wall, promising that with The Kaplan Method we can score a 1560. His signature emblazens the poster, which is protected in a glass case.

When Saturday's class had ended, it felt as if Spring Break had finally begun. At home, though, I fell subject to the irritating and endless requests of my mother's impulsive gardening. After a few hours of relentless digging and redigging, Herrie rescued me in a phone call and showed up at my door a few hours later. I got in Sabrina Marchand's SUV, sitting in the back next to Herrie and a pasty 25-year old. In the front, Sabrina was operating the vehicle with three of her fingers and Alleson was resting a frozen package of corn against the ghosts of her wisdom teeth. Sabrina was being brash on country roads at 75 miles per hour without a driver's lisence. We drove past an intriguing abandoned church and cemetery-- a place which I inted to further explore as soon as possible-- evoking superstitious shock from Sabrina and the pasty slacker, who insisted in condescending tones that I would never be the same after visiting that place, and that unfriendly THINGS-- ghosts-- entitites would follow me home and haunt me for the rest of my life. Now, despite my extreme skepticism, I hold true to the belief that anything's possible, including the cracked out evaluations of supernatural outposts in the northern California suburbs-- I just don't find it probable. Anyway, after visiting one of the weirdest of Davis' six dozen parks, tryng to find a party that didn't exist on our level of reality, and after I had dissuaded Sabrina from adding a wine-cooler-induced DUI to her potential list of felonies, we decided it would be a good idea to drive her sister's SUV into the campus of our former Junior High. It was satisfying to make donuts on the cursed ground I had to spend an hour a day for two years exercising on. If there's a place in the suburbs that really is haunted, I think it would have to be the Junior High schools where three generations of youth wasted away. Sabrina dropped Herrie and me off and we ended up wandering around for a few hours, trying to find the party that continually escaped our grasp. Then, I went to bed.





I hadn't planned on going out on Sunday night, but I was sitting around at 8:00 when Paddy invited me over the information superhighway to join Alexa, Ben, Dani, Julie, Nick and him at a lego-constructing party that would be located in his West Davis abode. Two hours before, my mother had sent me on a simple mission to fill up the new car with gasoline and KFC. It was my first time driving a car by myself since the accident (after going through a series of rental cars that could only be driven by people over the age of 21, we had finally purchased a new used '99 LeSabre from Carmax-- a bigger car than our old '95 Regal) and I was exceedingly nervous. There's a diminsihed field of vision in the new car and I was still unused to the car's sheer mass (it's bigger than a fucking Cadillac). I drove with extreme caution, and upon approaching the first stop sign, settled into a panic attack that would last the next thirty minutes. I had to turn left, which had become a mortifying prospect for me after turning left into a fucking truck, on an exceedingly busy street decorated with gratuitous blind spots. I must have been waiting at the stop sign for at least three minutes before I slammed my foot on the accelerator in a mad dash and pulled into the gas station down the street, turning off the engine and screaming into my steering wheel. I was given a moment of relaxation while I pumped gas before I had to enter the insane Woodland traffic once again. Pulling out of the gas station, I realized my new plight-- I would have to turn left accross three lanes of extremely busy traffic to get down Main Street and reach the primary target (KFC). Alright, it was cool. I could to this. I would simply drive down the street and turn around at the next red light. As I pulled into traffic (maybe a little too soon...) a white-haired man glared at me and honked the horn of his green Subaru, freaking me out further. When I got to the next light, it was impossible to turn around. I turned right, then right again, then right some more, hoping that I would eventually get to Main Street without turning left at all. However, I had unwittingly entered a horrible trap-- a subdivision ridden with endless cul-de-sacs. I eventually returned to the entrance and had no choice but to make a left turn accross three lanes of really busy traffic. I waited a very long time before I swerved in front of a car and pumped the pedal to get me to the westbound lane. Needless to say, I suffered from thirtysix simultaneous heart attacks until I got home with the KFC in hand.

So. I wasn't too keen on driving anywhere that night, and my mom of course didn't want to drive anywhere, so my hopes of doing anything fun were slowly diminishing until Paddy IMed me and offered to give me a ride.

Dani picked me up with Alexa and Ben at 9:30 and we struggled to find Paddy's house in the thick jungle of identical roundabouts that make up West Davis. When we arrived Julie was sitting in a chair with Nick and there were Legos strewn accross the floor. Alexa promptly delivered a dramatic reading of whatever children's books Paddy's siblings had left lying around, only ceasing when Dani had forcibly removed all of the reading material within Alexa's grasp. Paddy put on The Faint and Alexa and I, in the course of pillaging the Wheeler family coat closet, mistakingly put on two home-knit dog sweaters that we had taken for ski masks. It was pretty grody once we realized our faces were in the place intended for a dog's ass. After discovering a hilarious "screaming" halloween decoration that provided endless amusement, Ben, Alexa, and I decided to stop by Wyndham's house for a few minutes to ask if it was really true that she was blind in one eye. She was in her pajamas and the statement turned out to be true, so we let her go to bed since it was 11:30 and her parents showed visible concern. Ben left us, going to Dani's house so she could drive him home [edit: so that he could retrieve his bicycle], and that's when it all went wrong. Ben was more familiar with the area than Alexa or me, so without him we were completely lost, wandering the desolate suburban streets that lacked any identifying characteristics for more than an hour. When we finally arrived at Paddy's house, no one came to the door, leaving us to wander for another hour until we arrived back at Dani's. It was like that time the Jews were forced to wander the deserts for forty years, only worse because at least the desert has aesthetic appeal. I rang the doorbell and Allan (my sister's boyfriend) answered, half-asleep. Luckily he didn't mind driving us home, but I didn't get home until almost 2:00 and I had to wake up the next morning at 6:45 for a dermatologist appointment in Sacramento.

Needless to say, I was completely exhausted when my dermatologist determined I would have to go on Acutane. Despite its negative public connotations, the drug really doesn't cause pimply teenagers to commit suicide, but my father's Newsweek-reading mentality (before the war started, Saddam was aiding terrorists and we knew this and that's what the whole thing was about, and now he was leading us on a wild goose chase because he wanted us to think he had weapons of mass destruction and blah blah blah) is incompatible with any information that isn't available on the World News Tonight. I got home at 10:00 am and went to sleep until 1:30, dreaming about cruise ships and post-apocolyptic fun.

Monday night I hung ot with Alexa, Ben, Dani, Julie and Paddy again, this time at the MU arcade. Alexa was flabbergasted by my "bowling sucks" T-shirt once more, specifically because we had intended to go bowling that night and she thought it a blasphemy. However, she isn't very good at Galaga. Ben and I watched the Police 911 2 intro a dozen times and Alexa only nearly beat me three out of four times in air hockey. Dani beat me by one point, so I'm afraid we'll have to have a re-match to determine who's the better air-hockier. Michael Amahdi even showed up, sporting a tie, for some reason.

The next day I began editing the movie I've been working on for ever, getting through approximately one minute of final product. Anyway, Herrie came over and we spent the afternoon reading books in my bedroom. At 6:00 pm we went downtown and slummed around for a while, looking at magazines and CDs and getting ice cream and all the usual boring Davis shit. There were an annoying number of couples being affectionate downtown and while we ate our ice cream, a bunch of thirtysomething parents let their kids run around screaming. "Go to Baby Jail," one mother taunted jokingly, just before the toddler collapsed on the cement. We parked Herrie's SUV in the Rent-A-Center at 7:30 and went accross the street to the park, where we watched some 20-year old skaters show off for us in the skate park. We spent some time in the playground, where one of the skaters played with his five-year old daughter. Claire (media_naranja) called me around 8:00 to let us know she had missed the bus. When we picked her up she was wearing her hair in a ponytail and she had on a black long-sleeved shirt and Diesel pants, looking like some sort of hipster cat burglar. It was time for us to explore:



Claire and I had been meaning to explore the place ever since last fall, when she had heard about it from me. Daniel Gruska took Paddy and I to break in last summer, but we had been foiled by a menacing hobo who had been sleeping in the path. Anyway, this place is practically the only (pseudo-)abandoned place in Davis (other than the abandoned shack that I posted pictures of a couple months ago, and the abandoned church that I just found out about from Sabrina). It used to be owned by Hunt-Wesson and it manufactured a great deal of the tomatoes you ate, until it was shut down in 2000 in favor of cheaper, more rural locations to house tomato factories. Since then it's been in purgatory, at one time proposed to be demolished and converted into a mall complete with Nordstrom's (!) but the fucking local activists would have none of that, demanding that Davis retain its false identity as the ideal small town (!). Anyway, it's now simply used to store things for random companies while they determine its fate, but they have it gated off and a security guard protects the decaying structures from a solitary booth near the main entrance.

I led the way accross the railroad tracks and into the secret path at the bottom of a busy overpass, where the property's gate rests. Luckily we didn't run into any sleeping hobos, but I was at a loss for how we were supposed to deal with the fence, which was crowned in three lines of barbed wire. We couldn't exactly go over it, and after ten minutes of feeling out the entire area, it was evident that there weren't any holes we could just slip through. The only way I could think of to gain access was to find a loose peice of fence and lift it up so we could slide under it. The loosest section was an incredibly tight fit, but Herrie, Claire and I managed to get under it smoothly, coming out on the other side. We were in a hidden area, luckily, behind a patch of trees, which gave us time to survey the area for guards before going any further. We had to slide under a tree branch to get out and we ran to the side of the enormous looming building before us, hiding in a semi-shaded patch of wall. Our adrenaline rushing, we stayed on that side of the building for about ten minutes. It was big enough that we would have much to explore before moving on. Strange yellow and green lights were on, illuminating the area in an eerie glow (but not enough to be able to take very good pictures in the dimmer areas).







On that same long wall we discovered a loading dock that was brightly illuminated, so we stopped there to take some pictures before moving on to another building.






(to give you some sense of perspective, this loading area was about 1/4 the length and 1/2 the height of the wall we had started from)



We peered around the edge of the building, surprised to see an entire complex of buildings and structures expanding for a quarter of a mile, each of them at least as big as the one we were currently travelling beside. There was a distant space between the building we were standing next to and the nearest building, and the security guard's booth was directly down the road from us. We realized we would have to make a mad dash for the next building if we didn't want to risk being seen. Running first to a tree that allowed us to hide for a moment before continuing on, we looked around in awe at an enormous grassy area stretching to the edge of the property before we made it to the second building.







Walking past the building, we discovered a quarry of giant funnels bathed in green light, including one that was elevated above a pile of nuts and bolts that appeared to have been excreted from it like some sort of mechanical icing funnel.









Continuing on, Claire and I ascended an enormous structure adjacent to the building. The structure was covered in weird mechanical devices and stairs going every direction. Unfortunately there wasn't enough light to get any good pictures of it, but I did get an interesting shot of the space in front of it from when I was standing on one of the top levels of the structure.





We came down and the three of us continued walking, moving into the open space pictured above.







The building (the same one we had been walking next to ever since we had dashed accross the road-- we'd been walking (and exploring) next to it for a good 20 minutes at this point) was lit up on the inside, so we didn't try to go in, but we came to a wall that had windows and peered in to see a bunch of mainly empty rooms. Outside, there were even more weird ladders and staircases and broken pipes lying around everywhere, which made for a group of excellent photographic subjects.







We had freaked out a of couple times already-- spooked by the multitudinous croaking toads and screeching bats, but as the wall we had been following came to an end, we began noticing even more strange sounds around us. At first we thought we heard footsteps and froze in our places for a minute until we were sure the coast was clear. Continuing, we came upon a few strangely shaped wells filled with trickling water dripping down to some unseen place twenty feet below ground. Further on, we approached an empty shack at first with eagerness-- until we heard the horrible breathing!! We immediately thought it had to be a person standing on the other side of the shack, so we ran as fast as we could the other direction before realizing there was almost no way it could have been a person and we were only freaking ourselves out. We returned to find nothing but the haunting breathing that was too loud to be human, originating from some distant source. We determined it was most likely a farm animal (the property was surrounded by farms) or a vent releasing air, and continued to another shack, this one with the light on. When we arrived there, we realized that we had passed through the gaurd's field of vision. Uncertain, we stayed in the shack for a few minutes, surveying his booth from a quarter-mile away, trying to figure out what to do.





After watching him for a while, Claire and Herrie determined he had seen us and we decided to go back to the fence we had entered from-- but we couldn't figure out how to accomplish that goal without making ourselves visible again. We tried to stay in the shadows as much as possible and managed to get back to the wall where the funnel structures had been, our hearts pounding and out of breath. We thought we were clear, so we walked calmly back to the tree that we had hidden behind before dashing accross the makeshift road the first time. Looking down at the booth from behind the tree, we knew we had been spotted. There was a car with its lights on moving in our direction. I was ready to have a heart attack when the car turned right at the last minute, preventing him from reaching our location. We ran across the road again and back to the first long wall, even more scared than we had been before. Just as we thought we were going to make it back to the fence, Claire heard something and told us to be quiet. Before we knew it, the car was turning around the corner just forty feet in front of us:



We pressed our bodies up against the nearest wall, in a laughable attempt to hide ourselves from view. I thought for sure the guard would stop his car right there and he would handcuff us and I would be deported to Canada, but miraculously he kept driving and drove past the loading dock and out of sight. The three of us ran like hell and dove under the tree, pulling up the fence. Claire slid under first, folllowed by Herrie. Herrie was struggling and her clothes kept getting caught on the fence, and it was like too many bad horror movies. I went under last, getting onto the other side out of breath and unbelievably relieved. We took a moment to regain our composition and then prepared to make the long trek out of "Hoboland," when Claire shouted "Bike!!" I turned around and saw a bright light shining from the other side of the fence (apparently from a man on a bike, although that detail was later disputed), and I started scrambling up the hill-- the quickest way out, but not really the most practical, thickly covered in trees and shruberry of a menacing sort. The man was yelling "Get back here!!" and something about trespassing, but I was too busy moving with every muscle in my body to get away from that place. Branches were flinging from every tree, smacking me in the face with a stinging pain. I was a little more than halfway up the hill and to the safety of the well-lit overpass when my bag got snagged on a tree, and I had to spend a maddening ten seconds trying to free it from the tree's wretched botanical grasp. Finally I reached the top and jumped over the edge of the road, into the overpass's bike lane. Herrie was almost at the top and she was about to slip, so she grabbed my hand and I pulled her out of the thick greenery. We were all standing in the overpass, exasperated, and we ran to the median of the overpass's four lanes, cars passing a couple feet away from us at 40 miles an hour, horns blaring. We ran to the other side of the overpass and finally felt relatively safe, although the adreneline remained coursing through our veins.

We kept talking about the exciting final moments of our exploration until we reached the park again, where we all used the bathroom. The men's room didn't have a mirror, so I took a picture of my face to see what the damage was-- as we were walking to the park, Herrie had pointed out that my face was bleeding in several places, where the trees had ripped open my pimples. I guess you can't have that much fun without paying just a little bit. I hope I don't scar:



As we were leaving the park and crossing (using the crosswalk this time) the overpass to return to Herrie's car, the security gaurd totally pulled up his silver Ford Focus right in front of us at the stoplight. We walked directly past his windshield, trying our best to fake nonchalance. Miraculously, however, we made one last narrow escape without being recognized.