This weekend Rudy and I went up to Santa Barbara to visit Jeppe, Rudy’s co-DJ at Break-A-Way, a.k.a. “Senior” of Junior Senior. Jeppe had been wanting to take a break from of the fast paced party-all-the-time world of Los Angeles for some months, so he finally decided to rent a cottage by the sea, surrounded by exotic flora and tropical birds. We arrived in the early afternoon on Saturday, right before Jeppe left for a behind-the-wheel American driving lesson. To kill time while he was gone, Rudy and I sauntered about on the main drag of town, crowded with bored Laguna Beach hos and their rich mothers, pansy gangsters and shirtless hobos. In the Sak’s Fifth Avenue of Santa Barbara, a grandmother of tired glamour informed the shopgirl, “Everyone gives me compliments on these earrings. But they just look good because I’m wearing them.” Outside, a lackluster anti-war group marched down the street, rousing little interest.

At a record store sale, there was nothing but copies of Labouche and Salt-N-Pepa and Jewel and every other 90s pop act you can vaguely remember. I did manage to find a Carpenters four-disc box set for $16. When Rudy asked one of the employees to get it from behind the counter, she sassed, “Are you sure you don’t want the Barbara Streisand box set?” Bitch. We also purchased a Slumber Party Massacre double feature.

After Jeppe’s driving lesson, we all went thrift store shopping, where I picked up a badass set of badminton racquets and an extraordinarily standard Van Heusen dress shirt. Jeppe showed us an adult “book store” jammed with edible undies and aisles of porn. In the back, there was a “viewing booth” area that couldn’t have been more Eraserhead. It was a long, dark hallway of numbered doors through which unearthly screams and moans emanated softly, where an old man in a coat stood silently, his harrowed face illuminated by the flickering light of an unseen source, staring me down. I ran away. Jeppe picked up a package of Danish food that had been sent to him at a mobile home park that was straight out of Freeway before we headed down to the beach to watch the sunset.

Jeppe treated us to dinner at a delicious Thai restaurant near the beach, in honor of our one-year anniversary. We stopped by Trader Joe’s on the way home, and I picked up an enormous circular mass of corn bread. “Is that an American thing?” said Jeppe, “…eating a whole corn bread as a snack?” Rudy and Jeppe chose their own snacks and we returned to the cottage to watch Krush Groove and The Descent.