As a ridiculously naive adolescent I thought of getting a tattoo of my favorite line by French surrealist writer and poet Arthur Rimbaud: “my wisdom is as scorned as chaos”… well in most ways we grow old, but in some ways we never mature… so here I am decades later, still tattoo free, (I will be the last musician on the planet not tattooed or pierced… it is my destiny!) and I find it now the time for the obligatory  “plagiarize or simply steal if necessary” blogging moment. My 14 year old brain was right and will always be right. Steal from Rimbaud because you can’t go wrong … besides, the signs are everywhere.

O! The vast highways of this god forsaken country, dotted endlessly with primary colored gas stations. Our shrines to shiny new SUV’s sucking fuel; build another on-ramp to another Arco, another Union 76, another Texaco with a KFC attached. For Christ’s sake, there can never be too many! Just remember, one day, I want my turn at greed and ingenuity! But first, where is the cheapest gas station? I must save three cents to every gallon! That’s 36 cents a tank full. If you add it up, that’s $1.44 from Seattle to Los Angeles. Or a 20 ounce cup of coffee at a 7-11! But then again, these are just numbers, simple math.

From that time to here, I can still see the old me in my rear view mirror! I remember the those beautifully crafted black and white Ford Crown Victoria highway patrol cars trying to lure me into a felony, they can’t stop me, I’m invisible, I have the entire 5 Freeway on my shoulder, at my hip, caressing me, pushing me, telling me to fly home like a homing pigeon over the battle of Verdun in 1916. Everyone is too busy killing each other to notice me overhead. 362,000 French and 337,000 Germans, nearly 700,000 men will die at Verdun with perhaps a million wounded, and I’ll fly over them like it’s a sunny Sunday afternoon in Central Park … but hey, please ignore the blathering of my brain, these are just numbers, and since there are no dollar signs in front of them … not enough people cared back then, so why care now.

A couple of weeks ago Randy van Horne passed away at the age of 83. You might not recognize his name but you would certainly recognize the sound and work of the Randy Van Horne Singers, one of the most in-demand studio session vocal groups of the 1950s and ‘60s. They can be heard on countless television and radio commercials, jingles and station identification spots many of them written by Van Horne. But they’ll always be remembered for singing the themes to many of Hanna-Barbera’s iconic pop-cultural cartoons like The Jetsons, The Huckleberry Hound Show, Yogi Bear, and The Flintstones. Hey, it’s Yabba-dabba-doo time, kids!

The Randy Van Horne Singers also worked with some of the biggest names of the era including Mel Tormé, Dean Martin, Martin Denny, Jimmy Witherspoon and Juan Garcia Esquivel, who twisted jazz and lounge into a quirky genre we now call Space Age Pop. Serious fans of Esquivel will know his trademark "Zu-zu-zus," crooned by the Randy Van Horne Singers.

The group included some of the most famous session singers (yet almost completely unknown to the public!) of all time including Marni Nixon. She was singing voice for Natalie Wood in West Side Story, and sang for Deborah Kerr in The King and I. Thurl Ravenscroft - the voice of Tony the Tiger for Kellogg's Frosted Flakes commercials, and he sang You're A Mean One, Mr. Grinch from the classic animated television special, How the Grinch Stole Christmas and B.J. Baker who worked with Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra, Bobby Darin and Sam Cooke, among others. She was also Miss Alabama in 1944.

Al Chang, an Army cameraman who was twice nominated for a Pulitzer Prize has died. He chronicled the conflict in both Korea and Vietnam, witnessed the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor (where he worked as a dockworker), and was even awarded the Purple Heart for being wounded in the line of duty in Vietnam, past away in Honolulu, he was 85. He is best known as the photographer who captured one of the most iconic images of the 20th century. That image shows a U.S. infantryman weeping in the arms of another soldier. Taken on Aug. 28, 1950, the photo shows Army Sgt. Bill Redifer comforting fellow soldier Vincent Nozzolillo, who has learned that his replacement has been killed, while in the background another corpsman sifts through casualty reports, looking strangely detached. The photograph was featured in Edward Steichen's "Family of Man" exhibit in 1955 at New York's Museum of Modern Art. This portrait of anguish, grief and comfort has become one of the most enduring images of the Korean War, often called the forgotten war.

Last year after drifting about the Northwest for a while, a new door opened, time came to ramble down the road and drive south to Los Angeles for some gigs … of course I should have flown but somehow I thought I'll just do 'the drive' one more time, a little adventure is good for the soul, besides, I’ll save a little cash on the expense of flying and car rental etc, etc, … in retrospect, it wasn’t my best idea.

Side note: I often feel suspicious in airports; airports regularly bring out my deepest, most paranoid feelings. But it’s not exactly the sensation that  “everybody is out to get me.”  As a matter of fact, my feelings are exactly the opposite.

Anyway, never again am I going to do that drive in one day by myself: 1100 miles from Seattle to Los Angeles, oh so dim-witted, pitifully dim-witted. Never again, I know I've said that before, but … Never. Ever. Again. (Funny how that reads so differently when you put a period after each word … huh?)

I felt like my hands were duct taped to the steering wheel for about thirty brain-snapping hours. Between waiting for the ferry (the only way on and off the island where I was living), taking my wife and son to SeaTac Airport (they were flying to Paris, France and I was driving to LA!?!), the realization I forgot something important at home, again ferry back over and off the island, (of course you might say if you forget something, so what, that's what a credit card is good for, exactly right … I forgot the credit card) stopping at a rest stop, my foiled attempts at sleeping in the car, include my kinder gentler approach to driving (not hammering the last bit of life out of my old Corolla), and I was a witness to, if not infinity, at least a very lengthy torturous wait in eternity.

Depending on your point of view this could either be good news or bad. So if I view this sign optimistically, does that actually make me a pessimist?