From L.V. to L.A.

To answer one of your questions: No, I did not gamble in Las Vegas. And now on with the story... 

After a really nice drive to Las Vegas, the drive to L.A. was bloody awful. First of all, "Moby Dick" was running out of steam. The curiosity factor that had been spurring me on was not able to overcome the rant, errant travelogue, and God-schmaud factors. I should probably explain. All the later passages in Moby Dick fit into the above three categories, which I shall define:

Rant - Ahab, Starbuck, Stubb, or some other knucklehead goes on and on about the doomed nature of their voyage, almost resolves to turn around and head for Nantucket ... But then (surprise!) has a change of heart and continues on the quest to slay the white whale. These can go on for pages with lots of talk about duty and revenge and spite. And, as you may expect, after the first few times these passages get rather boring because you know darn well that they're all pretty much doomed (Melville strongly hints at this throughout the whole book) and THEY'RE NOT GONNA TURN AROUND SO SHUT UP ALLREADY! 

Errant Travelogue -- Many chapters are devoted to the explanation of minutia of whaling or some wrong bit of science or (my favorite) both. Examples: A chapter on why "white" is menacing, a chapter how we will never know what the whale's spout is made of (do you think it might be water?), a chapter listing all the various whalers in literature, a chapter detailing why the whale could never be hunted to extinction, and a chapter setting up classes of whales and discussing why each whale is in each particular class. Dry, Dry, Dry.

God Schmaud - Various hints and implications of a mystical and religious nature. Lots of implications that this is some sort of religious analogy that I just don't care about. "God Schmaud, I want my monkey man." -- Bart Simpson.

So, in short (too late), the book was starting to suck and then the drive turned bad. Picture this: You're driving along an interstate in the desert and you notice the car in front of you put on it's brakes. And then it stops. But it's one of those big S.U.V. bastards and you can't see around it. So you creep along for 20 minutes thinking "What's going on here? Can there be traffic in the desert? Is it an accident? Construction?" Then you see a turn-off, but the map shows that it takes you out of your way so you don't take it and curse your self for 20 minutes because any type of motion would be better than staring at the back of an S.U.V. for 40 minutes. Finally you see a bus being pulled out of the ditch. On the other side of the Interstate! There's 50 feet of sand and cactus between you and the other lanes, but people saw an accident so they slowed to a crawl. Arggh! 

Now you might be thinking that I should be concerned about the people in the tour bus. That bus was messed up and I should feel bad. But I did not. The weird thing is that the people I felt the most sorry for were the people who were going the opposite direction and had an even worse back-up. For miles I drove by them - in many places they were completely stopped. In others the people had gotten out of their cars and were milling around, climbing on things to see if they could see. But they could not. And I felt terrible for their confusion and frustration. The parking lot continued for 10-15 miles. Wow.

But I got through it and resumed high velocity driving. But the traffic slowed again (still in the middle of nowhere). Same crawling along, this time with a truck in front of me so I couldn't see, and finally another accident revealed. California has agriculture check stations, somebody stopped too quickly, and... Voila! A 4 car pile-up with mostly crushed bumpers, didn't look too serious. 

And then I hit another bit of traffic. More waiting and cursing. This was weird. Some parts were real slow and then we'd start moving, back to slow, faster (maybe it's over?), slow to a crawl... And on and on. In the end it was nothing. Nothing! I saw absolutely no reason for any of this nonsense. So I started thinking about density waves.

A long tine ago nothing blew up, and by blowing up that nothing became something. This something continued to expand real fast, but subtle imperfections in the explosion caused some of the stuff to bunch up in places. And as it bunched up, the stuff behind it, which was trying to expand, hit it. Other stuff hit that stuff and the pile up continued backward. 10-20 billion years later somebody would define a wave as a periodic disturbance in space and time, but for now it was just a bunch of stuff pilling up. Kinda like traffic. Also like traffic in that sometimes the stuff got so close together that it stuck. Gravity pulled the stuff together and, like an ice skater pulling their arms in, it began to spin faster. Some of the stuff got so close together that it fused and produced a lot of light. Some of the stuff cooled and formed rocky things that went around the bright things. And then a lot of other stuff happened.

Including me arriving in L.A. around 5:30. We went out for pizza and Jon's DVD player broke (not my fault).