Took the week off last week and headed down to LA. This was a make-up trip off for a botched trip to Bosnia in August, just a bit of a placeholder visit. Sarah had a work trip and I decided to tag along. Her company flew her, but I decided to drive down, since I haven’t taken the new Prius on a trip much longer than the 25 or so miles from my house to the dealership. It ended up being the worst possible weekend in history gas price-wise, but I get about 55 MPG on the highway, so it wasn’t a huge hit.

It’s always weird for me to take a trip in my own car, since I seldom do. I never pack until the last possible second, and this time I did with absolutely no thought on weights or limitations, simply throwing stuff in bags the night before I left. I packed far too much film, plus two film cameras, my Canon R10, and too many lenses. Almost brought a tripod too, but I knew I’d never drag that thing around all day.

The drive down was typical, uneventful. I’d done this same trip in 2021 albeit with the 2014 Prius C. The 2024 Prius LTD is a much nicer highway machine, because I can put it on cruise and the adaptive lane guidance stuff takes over and I can pretty much just zone out and take in the scenery. Not much scenery on I-5, though: lots of farms, the crops pretty much gone for the season, and the occasional windmill.

We stayed at the westdrift, which is a Marriott Autograph Collection thing, on a 9-hole golf course, right off Rosecrans in Manhattan Beach. The Marriott Residence Inn from 2021 is exactly one mile north of this hotel in El Segundo, and it’s about five miles south of my 2008 apartment in Playa del Rey. So, I’m familiar with the area, or I thought I was. What’s amazing is how much it’s changed, even since 2021. There are wide swaths of upscale strip malls and big-box stores and outdoor shopping centers that magically appeared out of nowhere, plus hotels and apartments everywhere. Every car wash or Citgo station from 2008 is now a Shake Shack or Goop Kitchen. This is astounding to me, because in every other part of the country retail is dying, but it feels like it’s growing exponentially there.

I had zero plans for the trip, except I wanted to go to March AFB in Riverside and see the SR-71 there. The drive out took about 90 minutes, and I feel like the temp rose maybe twenty degrees when I headed inland. There were over 100 planes there, mostly outside. Inside, they had the 61-7975 SR-71, and it’s in great condition, all sleek matte black paint and lots of extras on display, like the starting cart and camera pods and such. Other oddities include the YA-9, Northrop’s failed bid for what was one by the A-10; a half-dozen MiG jets; and a Top Gun TA-4J “MiG”. They also had multiples of several aircraft, like three different F-4s and three variants of the F-86. They also had many large aircraft, like a B-52, a B-47, a KC-135, and the first KC-10 I’ve seen up close. (The KC-10 is weird to me because I think of it as “new,” having been introduced in 1981. It was retired and stopped flying about two years ago.) Anyway, good collection, but the heat was unbearable, and I was dragging around two cameras, so I only hung in for an hour or so.

Me and Sarah took a day off to explore a bit, mostly driving through the old neighborhood to remember what was and what is now gone. We also went to Santa Monica for lunch. The promenade was largely abandoned, which was a bummer. The ocean view and that little turn you take to get down to the PCH was stupendous as always. We went downtown to check out The Last Bookstore and I bought a few rolls of film from a small stall on the second floor, a cool place with vintage cameras and typewriters and stuff.

There were a few dinners with coworkers of Sarah’s, but I mostly just lolled around and did little, walking and driving and looking at things. Made the mistake of looking at Zillow and seeing how much the houses by the golf course cost. Also made the mistake of checking in on work and getting pulled into a few phone calls. But otherwise, I mostly did nothing, which was fine.

Drive back was pretty easy on Thursday, made it back in just under six hours with just one stop outside Bakersfield. I probably took my favorite picture there, which my iPhone, negating the effort of hauling all that equipment in my car. I guess that happens sometimes.

OK, so I’m back on Substack.

TL;DR: jkonrath.substack.com. Like and subscribe.

I briefly tried this before and got a bit locked up for a few reasons, the biggest being a lack of time. I still have no time, but I’m between projects, so I’ll give it an honest go and see what I can get started.

The main motive is to get a different set of eyeballs on stuff. I have no idea how the algorithm works there, and I’m not really trying to chase virality or expect magic. But there’s absolutely no chance of cross-pollination in publishing out in the open web anymore, and Google searches are largely useless. I personally want to find things to read and all social media is largely the same garbage amplified for the election season. It would be nice to find other writers and writing.

One of the challenges here is I don’t know what I will blog here at Rumored versus what goes to the Substack. I have over a million words of stuff here, and some of it could be worthy of republishing to a new audience. I’ll look into that. A feel slightly bad about recycling content, that long-time readers will see new posts and realize they already read it in like 2014. But some of it might be worth revisiting anyway.

I do want to focus on new material, though. The real question there is what new material and what type of material. I think any time a new bucket appears for me to throw stuff into, I worry far too much about persona and what kind of writer I need to be to fit things into that bucket. This is particularly worrisome to me with Substack because there are very specific types of writing there. It’s very newsletter-oriented, and the most popular stacks are journalists writing articles, or facsimiles thereof. That makes me want to write some Chuck Klosterman-like things, critical analysis essays or nostalgia pieces, and that’s not the kind of writing I necessarily want to focus on.

This reminds me of when blogs became a big thing in about 2002 or so. I’d already been blogging for years, although I didn’t call it that, and I didn’t have an overall theme. It was more of a personal journal that was live to the internet. Sometimes I would write articles, but not on a specific, specialized theme. And the people who were blowing up and getting book deals and millions of views were writing highly specialized things. Of course I was jealous of that and it irked me. But it also reminded me of when zines were a big deal in the 90s, and then everyone saw them as a gateway not to true DIY craftwork, but as a stepping stone to commercial publishing. I loved stapling my own zines and mailing them to people, creating things, having a connection with people. But the people in the alt.zines Usenet group were arguing about bar codes and distribution in chain book stores, and it all got stupid.

I see the same thing with Substack, the people Producing Content to Build their Brand. I have no interest in that, and don’t even know how it works. I haven’t turned on the paid subscriptions, and I’m not sure I will. I do want to find new people out there, but I’m not terribly interested in writing SEO-tuned Content.

And as always, there’s a very high chance in a month, I’ll say all of this was stupid and stop doing it. But we’ll see. Anyway, jkonrath.substack.com.