Hot Springs Eternal: Road Trip Journal Part VII

Hungover. So hungover.

Maybe it's just the abuse I've done to my body, but I am in no real mood to chow down right now. So maybe that's what makes these items from La Comida so unappetizing--

Breakfast Quesadilla-- Yeah, sure, okay. I'm willing to let breakfast tacos happen, so I'll willing to let this happen. Okay. Go on.

Fruit Quesadilla-- Wait. . . What? What the fuck is that even?

Breakfast Churros-- Alright, I'm going home.

Breakfast Margarita-- Not an actual item, but it was what a man and his wife were drinking on the patio.

I'm sitting here in the shade of this hotel's awning, listening to Miles Davis and watching their waterfall flow. I'm sure I embarassed myself last night. That's almost assured. But this is the west. If I can't just get ino a vehicle and start fresh here then where could I? 

 I survived this hangover, I'll survive the next. Also, I think I drunk texted myself into a hunting trip this fall. So that's a new mistake to live through.

High Point of the Day: We found a hotel that doesn't look like a place snuff porn victims were dumped. That was great.

Seriously, though, it was Cody's Dug Up Gun Museum. It's got the coolest collection of rusty shit that you're ever going to see. I mean, if that's your sort of thing.

It isn't like the Cody Center of the West that's up the block, which is simply overwhelming with its content, this place tells a story.Why was this weapon dropped? Who was it that lost this weapon? Why weren't they ever picked up? There's some very obvious reasons for some of them, but then you wonder with

Like I was saying in an earlier entry, these things tell a story.

Low Point of the Day: At the Firearms Exhibits at the Cody Center of the West, I was looking at a Gatling Gun in a display case when I noticed an Indian fellow sitting there staring at it. He then asked me and my dad "It looks happy, doesn't it?"

I don't know if I had a good response to that.

Waldoism of the Day: “This bar is full of the three B's: Bikers, billionaires, and bums.”

Et Cetera: Besides the abundance of camping and gun stores, proof that I am no longer in California can be seen in the little things. There's the laxer smoking laws, there' the fact that I haven't seen a red curb in six days (the same goes for parking meters), and, more than anything, it's the proud lack of a state sales tax over here that really hammers home that I am not in the bureaucratic stronghold that is California. But then you just get the weird things.

“Fireworks Outlet.” Now, I don't know about you, but I were to buy fireworks, I don't think an outlet store would be the first place that I'd head to. If push came to shove, I mean.

As I am writing this in the car, a man walked by without his dog on a leash. Maybe we've got a few things figured out in California that they just don't want to admit to. The opposite is probably true of us, though, right?

MY STARK TREK REVIEW

YOU HAVE SEEN THEM STAR

YOU HAVE SEEN THEM TREK

NOW YOU WILL SEE THEM STAR TREK. . .

INTO DARKNESS

Star Trek No Colon Into Darkness is what summer blockbusters are supposed to feel like.

 

It's a roller coaster ride in the best sense of the phrase (besides it being a terrible cliche) and, in its more unguarded moments it manages to be genuinely emotional in a way that you can't fake with hundreds of millions of dollars.

I won't lower the conversation by naming lesser big budget movies like The Hobbit: A Unexpected Journey, which warbles and shambles along its nearly three hours like a drunken prison fifi brought to life by the cruelest of frat-magic, instead, I'll say that beyond all of the action and effects which work phenomenally, Star Trek No Colon Into Darkness succeeds because it manages to get a group of characters that you instantly know and like, give them stakes and motivations and relationships and you set that in the midst of intergalactic terrorism and Klingons and phasers and Tribbles and moons and space and accents and 9/11 and double-crosses and back and side references and Sherlock and FUCK THIS MOVIE WAS AWESOME.

Eating a fish taco waiting for the movie I was sitting next to a guy and his girlfriend who were on vacation from Las Vegas. They seemed amicable so, of course, I had to ask where someone from Las Vegas possibly go to for vacation. While they did not proposition me (it was before the movie and they weren't married yet so maybe the scene wasn't right), they did make me realize something about the movies that are out right now.

Of the four major movies playing that late at night there was Iron Man 3, Oblivion, Star Trek Into Darkness, and The Great Gatsby.

One of these things is not like the other. Of the massive, popcorn smashing affairs that you typically have invading the summer-- comic books, toy properties, reboots, TV shows you forgot about, Tom Cruise vehicles, Will Smith vehicles, Xenu repulsion vehicles, more comic books-- one of them is an adaptaiton of what might be the great novel written in the English language.


Taken altogether, you have a blockbuster that the exclamation point was created to service playing against a slick version of a story about a man failing to resurrect the past and that is awesome. We're living in a pretty decent age, even if I don't want to believe it sometimes, and it's perfectly fitting that a Star Trek feature is leading the way.