Happy Late Night, Sweet Baby,
I hope you had a nice day, and I'll bet you were doing something involved with your work in one way or another. I saw a post about an upcoming record release show with Versus Me. Will the 360 Video be timed to release with the record, or is it coming out sooner? I guess I will find out soon enough! :)
I finally went on a hike today, at O'Melveny Park. The temp was close to 100 degrees, and I just couldn't pass it up. Plus, my sha-na-na-na knees! knees! (can't resist that one) were feeling pretty well healed up, so I even went about halfway up the slope on the main trail. Nothing major, but enough to get back into it again, after a couple weeks of taking it easy. On my way out of the park, as I passed the large main lawn, which is where I saw the deer family last month, this time I saw a lone figure trot steadily across the lawn toward the water trough. It was far enough away to make identification difficult, but I could tell it was a wild creature. I had thought it was a bobcat.
When I got to the parking lot five minutes later, a guy coming in said, "Watch out, a coyote just ran through here a minute ago". Okay, so that's what it was.
My third coyote sighting of the Summer. The guy said it looked in bad shape, mangy, fur mostly gone. I feel sorry for these poor critters as our drought goes on for years. Sure, at the park there is a trough of water, but the animals have to come out of their environment to get to it. All the old creeks, like Aliso or Bee Canyon have long since dried up. The guy also told me he'd had a bobcat follow him out of the main trail once. That is one thing I have been grateful for, in all my hikes : that I've never seen a bobcat, or worse, a Mountain Lion. Mostly I think they only come out at night, and they stay far from the main trail areas in all the places I go to. But with the water shortage, the poor guys are coming out of the woodwork. The guy in the parking lot told me he saw a bear once, way back in the canyon, much further back than I would ever go.
It made me think of how much wildlife must be out there, in the mountains that surround Los Angeles. They have a world of their own that we mostly don't know about. I have been fortunate to see only the friendly creatures, bunnies and deer (who are less afraid of Humans than are the predators), and today my third coyote. I feel sorry for those guys most of all, because no one seems to like them, and they seem so lonesome.
Tonight I watched another episode of "One Step Beyond". A newlywed couple is about to go on their honeymoon, and the bride (another bride, just like last night), starts having dreams about being immersed in dark, cold water. It turns out that her husband has booked them a room on the Titanic. These shows, which feature spooky introductions by creator John Newland, are really well done. They get under your skin and stay there.
So of course I love 'em. :)
Well, tonight's tidbit about 1989 concerns again the ride in the car, this time heading south on Reseda Boulevard, toward the intersection of Roscoe. One cool thing in this day and age is that you can Google Map that intersection and get "street view", and actually see the section of street that I'm talking about. Also, I realise that all this stuff I'm writing about is just in snippets, out of context and missing all the main information, but that's the way it's got to be this time. I wrote the full story ten years ago, don't wanna do it again, and I am doing these snippets and tidbits now mainly to help me to arrange certain minutia in my mind. Remember that I am a CSI Investigator. Because I am a lone investigator, it has taken me years to realise certain things, or to think about practical concerns, such as : who fed my dog for the 12 days this thing was happening?
There are dozens of other questions, and that's what happens when your memory is taken away from you.
When it comes back, it is the traumatic parts which return first, because they contain the most emotion, and therefore the strongest memorial connection. All of our best remembered memories are emotion-based.
That's why we don't remember an ordinary every day visit to the supermarket in, say, February 1998.
So, when one recovers from amnesia, it is the most shocking and startling things that come back first. I will have more to say on this later.
For tonight, I want to talk about one of the strongest memories that initially came back to me, in 1997. When a memory has a fixed location placement, it can really help you in recovering from amnesia, because when you pass a certain location, if you have already begun to recover your memory, and thus have some of the puzzle pieces in place, then in passing that location, you can basically relive the experience emotionally and replay it in your mind, to a fairly exact reproduction.
I have been talking the last couple nights about the Feds, and how quickly they were on the scene of what should have required - at worst - a police response.
Now I'd like to mention what we saw, while driving in the car in which the attempt had been made to take me to Northridge Hospital. The sequence of the drive is something I made a strenuous effort to recreate in my memory, because it is crucial to how the larger scheme of things unfolded. I think that the drive to Northridge Hospital occurred right after I was released by the paramedic. At the hospital was when we were attacked by Howard Schaller, as previously described. The episode at the hospital took quite a bit of time, but eventually we left, and I believe the person who was looking after me - who had "taken custody" of me from the paramedic - decided to try and take me home. But when we got there, the person discovered there was no one at home - no parents or siblings - to watch out for me. I was not very coherant. So this person, being consciensious, decided it was not safe to leave me at home all by myself. And so we drove once again.
Back down Reseda Boulevard, going south.
From Nordhoff to Roscoe is one mile, not far, and - I will never forget this as long as I live, it is one of my strongest memories for almost 20 years now - as we approached the intersection of Reseda & Roscoe Boulevards (the location again of Northridge Hospital), the people in the car with me got very scared, even hysterical. The adrenaline would have been flowing in everyone except me, although I was fully aware of everything that was happening. I was just experiencing it inside myself.
As we got to within a couple hundred yards of the intersection, we could see there was a blockade there. A few police cars, squaring off the large intersection, with a wide opening in the middle. We were still in motion, and things happened very fast. Nerves were on high tension. The actress was driving the car, my helper was in the front passenger seat. I was in the back with a third person. The three people were talking, then yelling as we drove : "what is it?!
"Go around it"!
"Oh my God, just go around it"!
"Go!........Go"!
It was Freakin' Scary.
I wrote about this in depth in my book, because I never forgot about that part of our drive.
The actress made a manouver that not only stuck in my brain, strong enough to defeat amnesia, but it also stuck as a placement location.
So that when I drove past there, years later, I could literally re-experience the way she drove on the wrong side of the street to avoid that police blockade.
Normally, if police were blockading an intersection, a carload of people, if they were not criminals with something to hide, might be surprised by such a sight, coming upon it suddenly.
So what caused the panic in our car, followed by the instant evasive reaction of our driver, the famous actress?
We saw a helicopter landing in that intersection, in the large square in the middle that the police had blocked off.
We came upon it exactly as it was landing, and the noise of it's engine and it's lights and the "whump-whump-whump" of it's rotor was terrifying, so suddenly, and after all that had transpired beforehand.
Our driver had quick reflexes, and drove on the wrong side of the road, never stopping, and then entered the parking lot of a 7/11 on the northeast corner of Roscoe and Reseda (which you can Google Map and Street View). From that 7/11, our driver continued on, back to the original apartment building.
I have concluded that she made that her destination because A) she didn't know what else to do at that point, and B) because it was where the other two passengers, besides me, still had their cars parked.
So, that's a recreation of the Famous Car Ride, and again, the point is the Arrival Of The Federal Agents.
Here they were, landing in a helicopter at a blocked-off intersection, not two or maybe three hours after what had initially happened, which was an ordinary event.
So again we must ask why they were there. It looked like an emergency, but it couldn't have been so just as the result of Howard Schaller attacking us in the parking lot.
Could it have been a drill, as we read about the kind that happened on the day of 9/11?
I don't know. I think that some kind of surveillance must have been in place, for such an immediate response. I don't think it was a drill. It looked like an emergency of the most extreme kind.
But why? ////////
That's all for tonight, SB. I know this stuff must be confusing, but writing it out helps me to work it out in my memory. I'll try to just do a little bit at a time.
See you in the morning. I Love You. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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