I’ve been thinking about home and how much time is spent in the workplace in comparison to our quality of life at home, or whatever space gives us time out for ourselves.
After leaving our weed farm in Northern California, we took a drive down south on the way to Joshua Tree and ended up having an overnight camp in Yosemite National Park. The next morning, we took off towards LA to meet up with our friend who worked at Dreamworks, for some barbecue buffet – who can pass up a free lunch?
We meandered through the sunny Californian gardens after meeting him at reception, walking past ponds of Koi and yoga barbies dripping in Lululemon, downward-dogging their way alongside the mile long water feature.
Like a scene from LA Story (“I’ll have a half double decaffeinated half-caf, with a twist of lemon”), people hobnobbed and noshed along the scenic balconies overlooking cascading waterfalls with a desert mountain backdrop.
The nameless faces passing me by seemed rather subdued, and the dark, broody lighting made some common areas look like a high-class hooker establishment. It reminded me of a past life in my corporate job in Melbourne – the false premise of building a second ‘home’ around people, which is supposed to remind you of sitting in your own lounge room – the stale, crisp pages of books that have never been read, laying idle in the bookshelves on display and the couches so stiff that they have never had to sniff the Lululemon odour of a yoga energizer bunny’s ass cheeks at any stage in their inanimate-born life – being an attempt to woo people to work longer hours and make their work life, their HOME life, in order to keep them a slave to the grind.
We had lunch in a large dining mall with a dazzling Noah’s Ark array of meat, then said our goodbye’s (not without shoving a few cakes in some napkins for snackies, later).
After setting off, my road dog made the comment about how lovely the leafy suburbs of LA were. And then the car promptly broke down in the middle of the road.
That was when our idyllic LA Story ended up with us at the mechanics.
I googled and researched forums in the searing LA heat, and came up with my own logical explanation for the breakdown (I can now call myself a mechanic, thanks to Google) while my driver sat in a camp chair on the pedestrian footpath, making teary phone calls to his girlfriend who lived on the other side of the country. We managed to jump start it and get it to a mechanics about a mile down the road though, wincing every time there was a stop sign and fist pumping every time the car made it through to the other side without getting sideswiped by another car.
We found a mechanic who explained everything to us (exactly as I had discovered = fist pump) and it was to be fixed within two to three hours or if he found anything serious, it could take up to a week to find parts. So we took to sitting in a drain and drinking a 40 oz Mickey’s in a brown paper bag to tide us through. Unsure as to whether we would be making it out of LA that night, I considered sleeping in the drain, but decided against it, for fear of getting jumped. However, we were in a pretty sweet part of town: Glendale. A huge Armenian community with many families and lots of palm trees and old men playing card games in the park – so I figured we would probably be OK. I was also kinda buzzed to see this through and maybe sleep in the car for the night if it got too late to drive for another two hours in the dark.
And just when I was starting to hum the song ‘Hotel California’ (…’you can never leave’), we got the phone call to tell us that we would be on the road that afternoon. I was relieved to say the least, until we hit peak hour LA traffic leaving the city. But once we lit a spliff and made it through the City of Fallen Angels, we were well on our way to one of my most favourite places on earth: Joshua Tree National Park. U2 named one of their albums after it, it’s that fucking good (depending on whether you think Bono is a dick or not.)
OK, back to the work thing. Statistically across the developed world, most people hate their jobs. And we spend a hell of a lot more time at our jobs or commuting to our jobs, than we do actually living our lives. Which is why it blew me away to find out that our two-hour or more drive to Joshua Tree, was a one-way commute to work for some people. That means four hours of travel per day, including 8 hours of work, to live in a place that is more affordable than LA (not hard) and is on the border of a national park (which I kind of get). But not one of those homes had solar energy or greenhouses to make them self-sufficient. And why the fuck can’t most people work from home anyway?
Yes, I get it. We all have to make some money in order to live, but at what point did it become acceptable to spend more time in your Active Wear at work, taking it doggy-style from some corporate big wig’s weiner(stein), than it is to be putting in a good day’s work and then heading home (that isn’t in the middle of the fucking desert) to spend quality time with our family and our community?
(Gotta keep that treadmill moving I guess). Rollin’, rollin’ rollin’…
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