I got lost and what I found.

Life is about finding jewels.

Little things you come across, surprising discoveries that make you smile and make the day better.

I was reading an article about the band OK Go – a band I saw live about a week after they first formed when they played in New York at Town Hall as the musical act…

I started this way back in 2010 which in all honesty doesn’t seem like it was all that long ago even though 15 years have passed.

There was a time in my life when I would do more things than the way I live my life today. Currently, I can honestly say there are literally periods of weeks where I just don’t even leave the house. I mean an entire week can go by without me even going out the front door!

The way things have been with work lately it’s been like that.

Yet there was a period of time when it seemed like I did more. I was out more than I am not. Part of that is as simple as not really having money or not wanting to spend. The other part of that is not having a playmate - no, I’m not talking about a Playboy playmate as much as I am a significant other to share and do things with.

Back when I was with the ex, I would make plans for us to do things. We would go places, take trips and things. I’m not even entirely sure if she enjoyed those times but then looking back I’m not sure of a lot of things about her anymore but we did do things together and one of them stemmed out of my love of radio.

I took a trip out to California way back in ’92 and it was an eventful trip to say the least.

I should write about that trip sometime… I mean it was some trip. At one point though I had time to myself on an overcast Saturday and looking at the map I decided to drive up and see what was past Point Dume. In all my trips to LA when you look north from Venice or Santa Monica that’s the last part of the coastline you see.

Los Angeles really fucked me up in that I didn’t have any sense of the geography truthfully when I was out there. I’d look at the Thomas Brothers map I bought to get around driving.

So, I spent the day driving up the cost in the overcast I got past Point Dume and went further, up past Point Magu State Park and arrived at a big flat expanse of land. Now, at the time I did this which would have been around 1992, there are whole portions of Malibu that were totally undeveloped. I mean we’re talking about it being an overcast day 33 years ago and a lot of what’s there now simply isn’t there so it’s a drive up along a cost with the sea on one side and undeveloped ‘hills’ on the other.

After I got past Magu and into that flat area I stopped on the side of the PCH and looked at the map trying to figure out how far I was from when I started. As I was there, suddenly a C-130 flew in about 5 stories above me. Now, I don’t know about anyone else but to suddenly have one of these things fly over you without expecting it is one of those big wake up calls.

I had pulled over right in the flightpath of the runway at NAS Point Magu and when I saw the plane land I looked back up in the other direction and there was another plane behind it coming in as well.

In the above, note the noise these things make.

So, after that I decided to turn around and make my way back down to LA. I started down and got the bright idea that maybe I’d like to go over to Burbank and see if there was something over there I could check out with the time I had until my friend got off from work.

Here’s where I made the mistake… looking on the map I saw a road that cut in and I thought to myself I would save some time instead of driving all the way back to Santa Monica. So I turned into this road, it had a double yellow line so I thought it was a busy road and everything.

The road was marked 23 which I now know is also Decker Road. If you look on Google Maps street view today you see the one thing that was missing when I drove along the road and that’s GUARDRAILS! All that was between you and the drop alongside the road was a little clump of earth I called the death bump because if you went over the edge you’d hit the bump before the end. Even if you look now there are portions of the road without guardrails, simple CRAZY!

What’s great is that if you do go and check out the GMaps thing, when you are on the PCH it’s all sunny but once you start going up the road it’s foggy which is the way it was that day but the thing of it was it was getting progressively darker.

It become one of those weird situations because there really wasn’t anywhere you could make a u-turn easily so there was no choice but to keep moving forward as it kept getting darker but then after 45 minutes of this I started to get worried as I could see that the gas tank was getting lower and I wasn’t sure how much longer it would take to get to someplace, anyplace outside of the mountains I was stuck in.

I spent a long, long time using that shortcut and at the end I wound up in Thousand Oaks found a gas station and filled up the rental. I had spoken to a dick who was at the pump about the whole shortcut thing but that’s another story.

As I got onto the 110 to head back to LA proper I wound up tuning the radio to a broadcast of a Prairie Home Companion and that’s how I discovered the glory that is radio in a way that I hadn’t really thought about since the days of driving a cab but that may be a story for another time because I really want to clear out the drafts queue rather than droning on.