They’d warned me.
But I was truly expecting it to sound 100% different than it did. 100 miles north of where I was last night a “satellite ” broke the sound barrier 7 minutes after it took off.
The laidback wild ladies tea(if it’s eva branded, & it should be) earlier in the day had both filled me up and wiped me out.
It’d been an arresting combo:
Great food -salads as big as yer head & some Maestros originating lobster mac & cheese tossed into the festivities thanks to the badassed host’s cool assed hubby ;
Actual TEA- with the current King on it, my lil draught of Ojai honey & the Brit amongst us just stopping short of breaking out her proper heirloom tea set for us to cart over to make us seem to stick to some semblance of protocols;
& the literally maddening highs of the first Downton Abbey movie. There’s nothing like watching a period costume movie for the first time with bona fide, dyed in the wool costume designers who’ve already seen it. I’d hear premonitionary chuckling right before I’d be sliding out of the swaddling couches onto the floor, gagging in “beaded bias.”
My joy was more than full.
Love tanks I hadn’t looked at for eons overflowed like the storied once-in-a-lifetime Topanga waterfalls that I’d heard whispered were flowing for the first time in 20 years.
I felt so coddled that I had even sleepily passed on dinner at the best Italian spot around, knowing the odds of falling asleep on a pillow of tiramisu blushgrinning happily at everyone was very high.
I sent them bashfully off to a romantic early dinner holding down the fort, the Rockstar & I camped out by the fire.
They got back just as the neighborhood turned out to peer up into the sky with cocktails in hand. I, utterly exhausted by the last night in Ojai birth of an AWOL agenda variant, sleepily hugged a silk covered pillow on the couch in front of the window. I was in full post-pubhead, with the fire, yawning along to whirling 888s before crawling into & out of the hottest shower of my life.
…and then the sound barrier broke.
I’ve never fallen in love with a sonic experience so instantly in my Life. The closest hit to it was hearing the opening to John Frusciante’s Song to the Siren Tim Buckley cover, on my back in the dark.
I was transported. A deer in the woods, leg up, about to leap, looking around like “the Fuq was that?!”, both beatific & borderline fed up with the antics on these frickin hairless bears always up to nonsense encroaching my territory.
It was a flash of foreign, alien-ness that expanded and made you penetrate through it standing still because of how IT moved… which then bathed you in this deep-seated…affinity, a familiarity that just stayed with you, separated you momentarily from everything around you in a way that felt like …forever.
Whatever the big bang actually was that started all this creative mess we either are dissolving in going down or coming back together in rising up…I bet it rocked the beginning of all things like that.
“…Like birth?”
I mused to myself as I came back to the here and now.
& maybe that was the true retread. Sonic boom as the encapsulation of the shit that makes us scream to life.
I fell asleep in awe & oddly, inexplicably confirmed.
When ye gods of all things Malibu and below align our paths… I get blessed to hop a ride into LA under the cover of darkness with a friend who weathers the commute back to the beach cities along the frickin empty Pacific Coast hwy as a stealth relocation perk. One that he likes I wholly appreciate, road-hugger-lover that I am.
We pushed out into the equivalent of ink at 530am on the dot, Steven Tyler warbling in our groggy ears about dreams. Due to the mudslides we were redirected on the 101 towards Calabasas, an area I hadn’t seen yet & was excited about, cover of darkness or not.
We slid through pitch-black mountains yakking away as the sky slowly danced towards brighter, lighter blues of twilight behind solo silhouetted oak trees at the top of them. We veered right onto something called Mulholland hwy before being coaxed down the boozy pincurves Old Topanga canyon road takes you through, the only truck in sight not still sleepily hugging the curb less road.
& It was…gob-smacking gorgeous at dawn, fucking wild like the road up out of Santa Cruz to San Jose (that’s not the crazy enough 17) gets.
Heck, even much of my joy riding into Tahoe when called is frickin riding into Tahoe because of the curvaceousness of 50.
THIS?
Maybe it was the pre and post show of hwy 33 bookending soaking up Ojai in Jurassic Park mode while birthing book babies or the sonic boom that had gotten me all cosmically reoriented last night-
Whatever it was…it may have been my favorite Cali road ride Ever!
Now I fully get why everyone who knows how I roll yowled they knew I’d love Topanga. I’d dug my daytrip in from below in December, but this was riding in from above, and…dear God! & at Dawn?! Dawn, I tell yA!
That was a motherfucking chef’s kiss all the way intro to the spirit of that city.
I feel like it remembered me nosing around, walked up, blushgrinned and pinned me to the wall before licking mah face in brazen Nice ta OFFICIALLY meetchas.
We slid down towards the gypsy caravan I’d hung out in with owner/designhead purist Ashley(of the husband/ wife duo behind the edgy, earthy Alkemie Road) during my first foray up into the Topanga canyon with me blissed out my mind.
“I wonder if they’re still flowing?” my friend murmured as day broke all the way and sent shards of red and yellow light through the sun of its stained glass window onto our truck as we rode through town.
“Yep! Look left!” he laughed, knowing I was gonna be dumbfounded at the sight. The spirit of Topanga had honored my once in a lifetime is now wish after all-
[They weren’t this big but~to give you an approximation of the feels ]
Waterfall after waterfall coursed down the craggy canyons. We called them out like kids as we reveled in our detour back down to the PCH, Naan a mudslide aftermath in sight.
What an epic week.
What a stupendous, splendid ride in.
&…What a glorious road.
This is what I mean when I get all “ENJOY THE RIDE” in both AOLAB and Globalboho trek mode.
I am so fucking grateful for the girth and geist of this fn journey!
Never expected the best road ride to be so close to technical touchdown…I’m glad it gave it to me to Experience lol.
How could you live here & not make it your life’s purpose to consistently bask in things like this?