Today was pretty stressful. We had to pack everything up in our motel room. Kim and Skylar waited at Pannikin while I went back to load up the car. Then I came to meet them only to find us once more thrust back into the crisis parenting mode that dominated our lives a few years ago. It turns out that the Bean was just having a hard time adjusting to the climate change. But the combination of her meltdown and Kim's having to assemble our campsite alone -- I was doing Skylar duty back at Pannikin -- had left all of us threadbare of patience. We needed to restore order to a once-promising day that had taken an abrupt turn onto the road to despair.
Curiously, it was a short visit to Legoland that revived us. For those of you who haven't been there, Legoland is located right in the middle of one of those Death Star-esque corporate office parks for which exurban California is famous. I'm talking about the sort of place where you show up for a meeting and end up circling the rotary spokes of the complex looking for a street address, even though there's no "street" to speak of and where the search for food and drink tends to be either fruitless or a harvest so bitter that you wish there were less of it. Although Legoland is an oasis amidst this wasteland, its setting is sufficiently Edge City to remind you that its namesake products are the templates for a high percentage of the postmodern economy: modular, slick, and a whole lot of holes to fill. Disneyland's environs are downright gritty in comparison.
Dinner at Pei-Wei was excessively clean and exactly what all of us wanted and needed. Now we're sitting at the Starbucks next door. Skylar is playing with her new "transformation" Lego set that lets you turn Annikin into Darth Vader. Kim is reading her latest issue of the wonderful magazine Film Comment. And I'm listening to the soothing strains of Cuban music played at just the right corporate-friendly volume. I can almost feel my hands turning into bionic appendages as I type. Call me Darth.