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Matt Rogers in San Diego
Wednesday, January 19 2000
Last night we'd had word that none other than the infamous Matt Rogers was in town. As he'd promised, he and his mother had traveled overland down the Pacific coast from Oregon and was spending the night camped in Mission Bay Park. Today we actually went and picked Matt Rogers up. Steph, who was hanging out with Kim when I came home from work, came along for the ride.
Matt Rogers was waiting for us in the parking lot of Long's Drugstore in Mission Beach. He was with his mother, but, generations being what they are with respect to one another, she wouldn't be joining us.
Matt Rogers had gained a few pounds and a couple of sideburns, so now he rather resembled a young David Crosby. Under his floppy leather hat, he looked considerably less urban than when I'd last scene him in Ann Arbor.
There was a corner store across the street from the Mission Bay roller coaster and the Middle Eastern guys running the place were selling Harp Ale for only $5/six pack, so I bought two of those. Matt even offered to pay.
We crossed the street to the place where Steph's boyfriend works, a "smoke shop" called Get It On. EJ was working the counter in the front room, where some bland posters and tee shirts were available for purchase. That was all well and good, but the merchandise didn't get interesting until you went in the 18 and over back room. Whoah, dude! I've been in smoke shops before, but never in one quite so comprehensive. The glass shelves were absolutely covered with practically every nuance of pipe variety, all grouped according to size and shape. On one shelf, the pipes resembled geckos, complete with creepy little transparent glass toes. On another they looked like warty cedar stumps. And there were more things to buy than just marijuana smoking equipment; there were pornographic videotapes, lava lamps, incense, marijuana growing instructional manuals, you name it. Despite all the bongs, the place didn't smell even remotely like bong water.
Kim drove down Newport Avenue to give Matt Rogers a sense of the lay of the land in the neighborhood in which we live. There they were, the bikers, bums & hippies doing all the things they always do on Newport. Matt Rogers even bought me a vegetarian ghetto burrito.
Back at the house we sat around shooting the shit, with me using my video camera to record parts. Here's a sample of what Matt said regarding weathering Y2k in backwoods Oregon:
"I was so relieved after the millennium, we were on full-on paranoid mode up there, like we were going to completely loose the infra-structure. And when it didn't happen, it was actually a shock to my system because I had bought into that reality that the infrastructure was going to collapse because of imbedded controller chips and because of cascading errors in the Y2K code. That sounded like a plausible scenario, especially with the Eastern European nuclear, which is based on old main frame systems. That seemed like it'd be really sketchy and go down so I was all like 'I've got my fifty pounds of rice now and I've got my like green peas and I've got my dry beans and we've got the water that's like based on a spring and we're ready to go if the whole civilization collapses.' And the lights didn't even flicker. It's like 'Oh wow, interesting!' And now I have to like create a new scenario for how I'm going to deal with my life."
Others arrived, including the neighbor Lisa and even Jenna the German Girl. Later we were joined by Adam, one of EJ's co-workers from Get It On who just happens to live about a block from us. EJ had ordered some clean new parts for Kim's bong and Adam was the one who brought them. Soon the bong was working just like new.
For a drunken week night, I was incredibly energized, doing crazy dancing with my devil sticks and laughing maniacally.
Matt Rogers
Kim (with her bong in the foreground)
Matt Rogers
Steph & EJ
Matt Rogers
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