A nice car ride to nowhere. You have to be a little lucky with the music, and we were. James always surprises me with the songs he knows. A nice time of morning too, just before dawn. Every hour has its special illusions. The 4-6AM period is a transition time, from the false romance of possibilities to the false sense of renewal and relief of forgetting. Isn't it strange how the most mundane things can make you feel like you've shed a useless skin? A well-timed shower, a walk around the block, a drive in the middle of the night.

There are lots of little pointless towns around here, as soon as you leave Portland. It isn't like the Bay Area, where there are hundreds of square miles of suburbs, a buffer between the city people and the slack-jawed yokels. It's like, here's Portland and then immediately here's Crap Town #34. Strangely, no matter how small the town is, it has at least three car dealerships and a very new-looking strip mall. In small California towns, you often sense a subterranean menace, those are the little towns which turn out to have the serial killers and so on. I don't get that feeling from the small towns up here. No sense of mystery, no eerie stillness, no evil enveloping haze ala John Carpenter. Growing up in California, I just assumed all places were like that, but they aren't. Charles Ng. The Zodiac. Leave it to California to fertilize the growth of new art forms. Now I'm in the PNW, which is supposedly ground zero for serial killers, but I don't know. In David Lynch movies the presence of evil is always indicated by electricity. Strange electrical buzzing, high tension wires, the crackling of overloaded circuits. I don't believe in evil but I do think events somehow leave a kind of residue, in some way I can't describe, that's not supernatural at all but is no less unnerving, and of course not all events are pleasant ones.