Trapped Like Beans

I've spent the last few days in a La Quinta built inside a converted lima bean silo. Every room is perfectly hexagonal, with un-painted concrete walls. The rooms surround hexagonal spaces strung along the hallway like so many ben-wa beads. On the outside, delivery chutes stick out at least seven feet, so ostentatiously formerly-functional it becomes the height of a kind of luxury. I feel like I'm becoming two people, the bee that goes out to forage, and the larva that wraps himself in the honey and does nothing but think "Change! Change!"

Irvine, in general, puts me in mind of the malls, warehouses and empty spaces of the area around the Miami airport, but mapped to an expanded coordinate system, distances stretching out, like the expanding universe. Every second spent here seems to make everything else one second further away.

So, tomorrow I drive to Morro Bay. The day after that, the City By The Bay. From moving out of Falls Church to arriving in San Francisco, that will be just about 53 days. Maybe not an olympic record, but certainly a personal best, of a sort.

Oh, and Arizona. Arizona was a mixed bag. I'll let my mostly un-edited pictures explain.

arizona