When the going gets weird, the normal get conservative.

That title doesn't have much to do with this post, it's just something I heard Henry Rollins say one that I thought was cool. I've been trying to work on the book, with varying degrees of success. I might (after watching "The Devil and Daniel Johnston") write a week's worth of posts on my relationship with music. We'll see how much of that I write this weekend.

I spent the last part of the summer of 2003 driving across the country, helping my then-girlfriend Kate move to California. We trucked across the unpopulated vastness of much of the western United States, all the while suppressing the urge to say things that could come back to bite us on the ass like: "Wow! We're in the middle of NOWHERE!",(after passing a broken down car) "Man, hate to be that guy!" and "Did you hear(smell) something?"

Eventually we made our way to Berkeley, which answered a question I've never asked:"How Liberal is TOO liberal?" Kate's cousin had told us that California in general was just weird, "It's almost it's own country, it has rules and regulations that no other place had, and the weirdos..."

I'm used to weirdos, some of my best friends have been weirdos. Even the less anti-social ones I've come across still fit into the established archetypes of crazy: the unkempt, the paranoid, the talking-to-selves.

The first trip I took into San Francisco on the BART I realized that the "status quo challenged" here were, to me, true innovators. As we waited in the park outside the station for Kate's friend to met us for lunch, I saw in my lazy periphery what I thought was a bird cleaning under it's wing. As I put it to the foreground, I realized it was actually a rail-thin woman ducking her head into her pink zip-up sweatshirt. I trained my eyes a bit more, trying to figure it out what she was doing. Turns out she was tweezing her armpits with her fingers then flicking the plucked hairs out into the afternoon breeze.

Upon looking around a little more I saw a majestic magenta gentleman. He was a bit over six feet tall with long magenta-dyed hair dressed in a magenta bathrobe and magenta sandals, pulling a grocery cart. The cart and everything in it were colored the same shade of dusty magenta that everything else was.

I have rarely seen someone, before or since, look as utterly content as this fellow. He walked slowly, face towards the sun as if his bliss was solar-powered. He was the benevolent Magenta King, oblivious to the gawkers in his wake, gracing his subjects on this late summer afternoon.

When Kate's friend finally arrived, Kate and I tried to explain the glory of the Magenta King to him but we seemed to fall short. Luckily, the King himself passed by the burrito place where we were eating.

The friend was disappointed, "I thought he would be dressed nicer."