Fear and loathing in Burbank

It’s a two mile walk down Magnolia past the Rite Aid to the Metro line, which takes me to a shuttle to the Rose Bowl.

When the world wakes up I’ll get some breakfast and head over there.

This hotel is so threadbare it doesn’t have ESPN. There ought to be a constitutional amendment, especially this close to the stadium.

I got to my room around eight. It was cold in Burbank, around 34 degrees with a biting wind. I envision palm trees and roller bladers and sidewalk stands that sold fish tacos.

The town, at least this part of it, was deathly quiet. I found a Rite Aid a couple of blocks away, got a quart of chocolate milk and a can of deluxe mix nuts for supper. Does anyone really like Brazil nuts? The sandwiches in the dairy case looked suspiciously faded, the meat grey-looking, in need of a surgeon general’s warning. Retail stores sell liquor in California. There were big jugs of honey-colored whiskey for twenty bucks, and if they’d had a pint of Jameson’s I might have made a ceremonial purchase, tipped a couple of fingers of it into one of the wrapped plastic cups in my room.

I decided that’d make a dismal party, the start of the long road toward a disastrous habit, drinking alone with the heater running all night. I turned on Pitbull from Miami and turned the sound all the way down, scanned some game stories on my laptop and played 2048 for a while, exhausted from a day of flying on a sardine-can flight from Portland to Oakland to Burbank. Saw a lot of folks in Oregon hats or pullovers but they were quiet. Not like an Auburn crowd shouting War Eagle! from gate-to-gate.

I read nearly to the end of Bruce Feldman’s The QB and fell asleep before 11. When I woke up there was a photo text from Hallie–she and Morgan made it to 10:30, and then midnight, and I owed them $2 apiece.