Where have I been? What have I seen?

The past few days have been a blur, shrouded in the glamour of pain not responsive to NSAIDs or Tylenol.

I’m falling apart.

Saturday I decided I had had enough of the squalor I have been living in, and managed to gather together (6) 13 gallon bags of trash. I also managed to pick everything off of the floor. Now it’s just a disasterous stack sitting on top of my drawers and tables instead of underneath them.

There is clearly something wrong with me.

Afterwards, I decided to go up to L.A. I hadn’t yet seen my sister even though she had been back in the U.S. for a week already, and my brother had just turned 27, so I figured those were as good enough reasons as any.

I managed to reach San Clemente as the sun sunk slowly behind the Pacific, illuminating Santa Catalina Island off to the west. I don’t remember the sky ever being that clear before. I’ve only caught sight of Catalina once on a drive up from S.D. to L.A. in the three years that I’ve lived down here. One of these days, I’ll actually download my pics off of my phone.

Because of the prognostications of the Internet, I decided to take a rather circuitous route to my parents’ house: I-5 to CA-73 to I-405 to I-110 to I-5 to CA-2. I took me only slightly more than two hours, and the only traffic I really ran into was in Downtown L.A. (naturally) Of course, I kind of wonder if I couldn’t’ve avoided traffic entirely if I had just stayed on the 5 in the first place.

By luck, I managed to catch the Manuel Pacquiao vs Marco Barrera fight, which my dad decided to order for $50(!) I swear, in some ways, featherweight matches are more brutal than heavyweight matches. While I’m sure it hurts like hell when someone like George Foreman or Mike Tyson hits you, it’s not unreasonable for a match like that to end in three rounds, or even in just one round. The crowd may not be happy, but that’s what happens when one man gets severely concussed by another man. In contrast, featherweight matches are guaranteed to be long, drawn-out fights, depending a lot on a fighter’s endurance and ability to throw good punches, rather than on knock-outs. I wasn’t surprised that this went all the way to the 12th round and had to be decided by decision.

I spent most of the next day sleeping.