Bird

Yesterday I picked up another Charlie Parker CD at the library. I find Monk's style to be more technically unique, but Parker definitely has the soul and is always front and center. This album, a live recording from September 26, 1952, has a unique story to it (see link).

So tonight is New Years Eve, and I was going to just stay in, but a friend called and persuaded me to not be a total loser on this night and to go out. So I guess I will. First, a few people may come over to watch a movie before we head out.

As I sit here, I think about the four pictures I took twenty years ago on this day presently hanging above my head in my living room. My friend Montana Bob and I drove across the US in record time (roughly 52 hours from Scranton, Pennsylvania to L.A. - non-stop). And we didn't even speed that much, we just never stopped driving (excpet to stop for gas and an occasional six-pack or two back in the day. Now we have cell phone users which are the equivalents of alcohol-impaired drivers, except they're not only out at 2am on Saturday nights but at all hours of the day and night, but I digress...) .

Well the pictures I took are from the end of the journey driving up Highway One on a day that started in Tijuana and ended that ended forty hours later in the parking lot of a New Years Eve Grateful Dead concert at the Oakland Coliseum with no sleep. I call the series of four pictures "Fear and Loathing on the PCH." But the pictures did come out wonderfully and have been with me for the past two decades.

Wow, how Time Fades Away.