the west is the best

so here i sit in palm springs. on an unsecured, un-password-protected, unknown wireless connection. heehee. guess i won't be doing any banking from this connection, will i?

after yesterday's panic for leaving for the airport on time, it was nice to be able to just sit on a couple of planes and think of nothing for several hours. nothing but the amazing and fascinating stephen davis biography of jim morrison that i've been reading. holy, unholy fascination. since beginning the book a few days ago, i have begun to become a doors fan. yes, me. a fan of the doors. after spending most of my life trying to avoid their music, i'm now downloading tracks from itunes at a frightening clip.

what a fucked up individual (jim, not me). he is reminding me a lot of kurt cobain. growing up when i did, i was much more aware of cobain's music and his demon genius. i also have a copy of his published journals (sorry, kurt, i know how much you would of hated that) and i have to say that the absolute messed-up havoc that pushed cobain seems to have also pushed morrison. it's hard to know which one was pushed harder or further.

i will say that it does seem that if people like kurt and jim didn't actually end up creating enduring music and art that they'd some of the biggest losers ever. then again - maybe their torment and addictions and bad behaviour were necessary to birth their creations.

anyway - after the journey across north america, i was happy to end up in joshua tree national park today. it's pretty big, pretty hot and literally full of joshua trees. the best part of the day was the search for "skull rock". i found a trail with a big-ass arrow on it pointing in a direction. we began to walk down the trail, assuming that after 10 minutes or so, we'd come to the rock shaped like a skull. well, we walked and walked and then walked some more. it was some very beautiful desert terrain to be walking through, but there was still no damned skull rock. we actually got to a bit of a dead end and decided to turn around and go back the way we came. thinking we'd come across this goddamn rock on the way back. nope. we just missed it... or so we thought. instead, right beside the highway there was skull rock. literally 10 steps in from the road. plainly visible. actually, it was just to the left of the big-assed arrow i mentioned above. heehee. i think my dad was a little regretful of the long walk under the very hot sun. oh well... i loved it!

taken as the plane was coming in to palm springs. come to think of it - this could very well be joshua tree national park!

part of the formation imaginatively called "jumbo rocks"

the joshua tree forest - you literally could look to your left and see these strange and twisted trees for miles and miles and miles.

a classic image of a classic joshua tree. it's a lot larger than you think it might be.

doesn't this look like the hand of a giant who is trying to climb to the top of this hill? it wasn't, just in case you were wondering...

the infamous (and obvious) skull rock.

[music | the doors, "the end"]