I sent Jennifer Bilec a google map of our Coachella house in La Quinta, California. This is the response I received in my inbox a handful of hours later:

Background: this is what I woke up and wrote when I got your google maps link...

I'm imaging a scene from Death Proof with Charlie Feather's Mound of Clay playing in the background as you pull up to a single level desert spread.  And every morning the runner van picks up your hodgepodge of freelancers from all points north, south, east, west converged on a Los Angeles desert, Los Angeles, where just the other day a character actor from "CHiPs" identified the body of his son on the side of the 10 and a drunk Arcadia based Japanese born man is now sitting behind bars and two hundred grand and loads of regret.  A character actor from CHiPs and a champion motorcycle racer, his son was wearing Caltran orange and a concrete saw and 21 one years and Carhartt.  Los Angeles.  A city where 70s character actors' kids work for the city.  A city who has a drunk uncle named Desert, you know what you can put in your netflix queue? A haircut.  Thanks Uncle Desert, where you can run and hide for undisclosed chunks of time with undisclosed chunks of clothing.  Ryan Adam's Jesus Don't Touch My Baby is playing to the dusty and flat landscape running aground next to you.  And the minute you hit site Stephen Stills Johnny's Garden soothes the split in your head and the moan in your gut.  And your taupe trailer days with walls full of road paraphernalia and 4 and 6 footers with more candy than printer ink and every minute of your day oozes Steely Dan I'm A Fool To Do Your Dirty Work.  And every evening you are half pillaged half inebriated half empty and half full, with Lee Michael's Do You Know What I Mean running through your blood alongside three fashions of beers fashioned by the festival in the most elaborate intoxicating convincing fashion, for you to turn to your simple right or left and choose between 15 passengers of equal weights in some shape or form for you to red lipstick and high heels Honky Tonk Down In Mexico to next to that green blue eco-lit lazy flamingo shaped pool, of which when you return to resembles more of a psych ward flickering source, a home of which you are now positive was justifiably and uniformly poured in a Clock Opera's Belongings kind of way to allow its visitors to seep all vulnerability and burden and lust and fantasy into without any worry or contemplation that those actions and thoughts and things consumed will not escape the subway tiled walls and seep into his or her abodes in Prospect Heights or Wall Street or Queens or Silverlake or Charlottesville or Detroit or Austin or Carlsbad or Albany or Laguna Niguel or Boise or suburbia or loft or condo or 3 bedroom one bath where nobody ever cleans and nobody ever buys the milk and bread and nobody ever comes home quiet and nobody ever turns off the heat and nobody ever puts anything but written letters and rent checks on the fridge but the liquor cabinet looks like a retirement community in the middle of Florida.  When those late nights melt into mornings with a house full of vagabonds slow dancing from their sleeping positions to Doors' Indian Summer.  Some radio holsters have been in those misty manicured grounds for weeks some just about to descend.  And hey remember it's for weekends of debauchery and it's for the kids with normal tax returns and it's for 3 bedroom one baths and it's for 3 wives and 4 kids in West Virginia and it's for bottle vices and sunrises in diners in Manhattan and it's for stories you attempt to tell the general public and it's for consequently telling the general public you work for Cash For Gold because holding Usher's kids front of house doesn't have a salary and hey remember, it's gonna rain Friday.  I don't know much but I do know that if I could have dinner with one person dead or alive it would be Cory Traversari and I do know, my friend, that by the good grace of God, it will always eventually rain.  

PS, you know when I told you I went to Santa Barbara, last week, well we drove through the mountains between Ojai and Carpinteria at sunset.  Dude I'm telling you, take 33 north off of the 101 some time, Ventura exit-ish and then take 150 West, Casitas Pass Road.  That little 11 or so miles up and through for 20 or so minutes 7 or so in the evening where Lake Casitas sits protected in a mother's lovely sage Central Coast mountain sling, we probably only passed about 9 cars.  9 people + me and mine saw that sunset in that mountain pass road.  What a fucking fantasy that little grapefruit by the sea.  And we stayed in some little place called the Lavender Inn with little lavender filled pillows sitting on each bed a free bottle of fucking champagne in the mini fridge and access to a jacuzzi that clearly hadn't been used in years but we woke up and missed breakfast so had champagne and jacuzzi for breakfast.  And some nice young man named Joe gave us a deal on the room and Joe wants to be a park ranger but he told us hotels pay the bills for now.  So Marissa had a full day dose of what a retreat style doctorate in depth psychology was but the most interesting snippet of the trip wasn't the paradise campus in the hills or the private beach coves or the most legit Indian food or the homophobic State Street but the night before we saved some grossly intoxicated baby faced 24 year old spoiled rich kid named Roland outside of a bar called the Neighborhood Bar.  He was laying face down, one flip flop, curled in a ball so tight like the first time you got your period, still holding a convenience store bag with Dr. Pepper and Fritos and a few Snickers and Twix and maybe a few Abba Zabbas.  We literally scraped him off the ground with paint stripper.  Roland seriously would have fucking died on that street.  Well, actually he probably would've just woken up in some downtown Santa Barbara drunk tank, a very pretty Lavender Inn kind of drunk tank I mean fuck it's Santa Barbara. But we didn't want him to die.  And he made an honest, blitzed attempt to treat himself to a variety of delightful 2am convenience store items.  I tried 4 different cabbies and all refused just as the little fucker would stumble into oblivion, oblivion that sincerely looked as exaggerated and outrageous as some off off off off Broadway short story but he sincerely was really fucked up.  So being the physicist of societal intuition that I am, it was a matter of precise timing, Roland standing on his own for 3 seconds and hailing a cab just as those 3 seconds were about to start.  And bam it finally harmonized so we threw him in a van, with his bag of snacks and an address for the driver and his eyes suddenly momentarily soberly jumped open and just as we closed the door he says, 'thank. you. so. much."  

Oh and I got mistaken for a man the other day getting a pedicure by a Korean woman in Long Beach.  Marissa finally believed me about the whole sir thing.  You hava callous and you come back every week I scrub callous.  Yeah they're pretty bad huh I respond and she's all, notta like most men that come see me. You have brudder?  I hava 20 year old daughter, you so cute, you so cute but you hava no brudder?  Marissa explained that Asian men have very feminine features and I realized I'm a old Korean mother's dream.  

Thursday my friend.  Thursday.  Safe travels.  

Bilec

God Bless the locals. 4.9.12

(P.S. - I'm not retyping, so I'm just going to leave the text and background colors as is - probably easier to read anyway.)