After all, what I’m trying to convey in this project is something about the way this music reverberates across my brain, across my life, giving the landscape I navigate at least some portion of its contours. What had brought me to this Pomona parking lot was the vague idea that this was where something significant had happened – something that was important enough to my favourite songwriter that it had become, in turn, indelibly inscribed on my own brain – and that seeing the place might enhance my understanding of the art it inspired. I wasn’t waiting for my man, or for anything in particular I had no business here. I wasn’t here because I was interested in the drugs themselves, or even in Darnielle’s own experience of taking them, which couldn’t, in any meaningful sense, be accessed by me standing on Holt in person, drinking a teeth-rattlingly cold strawberry lemonade and worrying about the train times. But Holt Boulevard, between Garey and White, was an ordinary location where somebody who’d written a lot of songs I liked knew you could go to buy drugs in the mid-1980s. On Mills Avenue, I could see how as you headed north the road widened out and, with it, possibility, in a way that corresponded closely with the image in my mind when I listened to ‘ This Year ’ – admittedly after I’d already walked down it for half an hour in the wrong direction. These were places whose names I knew from Mountain Goats songs, which by this point I’d been listening to increasingly intently for over a decade of my life: Mills Avenue and Harvey Mudd felt a long way from the village in the English Midlands where I was born and raised, and they’d been rattling around in my head for long enough that it felt only logical to make a kind of pilgrimage, to see for myself what they actually looked like.Īnd yet on another level, there was nothing logical about this. I’d given myself a few days before the main event to explore the area – the city itself, but also a handful of locations further off the beaten track, some thirty miles east, which were accessible enough in a single visit to the Inland Empire. I’d come to Holt Boulevard (or rather, as the street signs on this strip actually read, East Holt Avenue) in 2018, on a day trip from L.A., where I’d flown from Birmingham, England to participate in a seminar at an international Shakespeare conference held in a hotel I could not afford. As I stood there, in a parking lot at the intersection with Garey Avenue, eating my sad bag of stuffed jalapeños and squinting at the few darkened blocks to the west before Holt met White, I thought about the real reason for my journey which I’d withheld from the driver, primarily out of fear that he might ask me the same question I now had no choice but to ask myself: what the fuck are you doing here? The fast-food chain would have had locations closer to where the trip had started, north of here in suburban Claremont, and as a vegetarian, I soon realised once I’d stepped inside (it would have felt even more suspicious not to) there was almost nothing on the menu I could actually eat.
I didn’t know what else to tell him, so I said yes and got out of the car, reflecting as I did that this must have seemed an odd destination for a fifteen-minute drive.
#Throttled meaning in hindi driver
‘Are you going to Jack In The Box?’, the Lyft driver asked me as we pulled into the otherwise unremarkable stretch of businesses lining a section of Holt Boulevard in Pomona, California.
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