July 27 Dont be fooled by the lead in: A recounting of history with very little to do with London

My quest for the perfect chocolate croissant continues outside of Santa Monica. Sitting in a Starbucks in Piccadilly Circus in London is far from disappointing. I came to a Starbucks, instead of a local café for two reasons: No small local café can survive in this shopping district. Come to think of it, Im not sure if some low budget labor-of-love café could survive anywhere in London, which might be why I havent seen any. Everything is a chain here and the most popular and plentiful cafes are Café Neros, Costa’s and Starbucks. So I went with Starbucks, which brings me to Starbucks’ second draw: free internet. Which actually doesn’t exist. I like a lot of things about London so far but what I don’t like is that free wifi is very hard to come by. But lets focus on what I do like.

I like that its been constantly drizzling rain for the last four days and I like that all the other tourists, which make up 75% of the city, are twice as bumbling, confused, ill-prepared, and just straight up unable to function on a very basic level, as I am. So it makes me feel great and also makes me attract other tourists like a magnet, thinking I am a fountain of information in terms of “Where is Hyde Park Corner?”, “Excuse me, how do I get to Oxford street?” and the more desperate, teary-eyed call of the Japanese tourist, who think that all Caucasians must be locals, “Where I am right now? Please!”. But so far, my chez doevre in terms of giving directions was explaining to two local teenagers what underground line to take to get from the Southbank Centre to the museum of Natural Science.

But back to the chocolate croissant. Not bad. Not great but not bad either. Just a little dense. From what I’ve observed, pastry- wise, in Starbucks, is that everything is on the dense side. Maybe they assume that if you find yourself in a Starbucks, its because you don’t have the time to find a smaller, more personal coffee shop, and you’re an on-the-go kind of person, meaning you probably don’t have time to eat decent food and therefore are looking for the kind of food that your told is good for bringing with when backpacking: small, compact, non-perishable, and packed with calories. When at a café that doesn’t bake its own pastries, I’ve found chocolate croissants are much better than regular croissants, which are usually just a rolled up ball of uncooked dough inside of a slightly browned layer of the same dough. Why don’t more cafés make croissants like Baxter does- smaller but the perfect consistency and flaky? Oh ya, maybe because it takes him an entire day and several packages of butter to make 6 croissants, each of which can sell for no more than two dollars. Still though, I think Baxter’s croissant phase was one of his better. What boy, by the age of 20, has devoted several weeks to the pursuit of baking the perfect croissant? No wonder he and I are brother and sister. Sometimes I forget how similar we are. Even in our ability to obsess. I don’t know what phases I’ve gone through: you’d have to ask someone else, but I remember all of Baxter’s.

The first time I became aware of Baxter’s ability to obsess over and dive into one thing, one passion, was during his goth phase. This was while he was in 7th and 8th grade and began with his obsession over the card game, Magic, which somehow lead to the growing out of his dirty blond, jew-curly hair. I think he thought it made him look like a badass but actually he just looked like a charob having a bad day. This phase most notable involved black fingernails, monotonous rave music, hours, sometimes days, spent isolated in his room (I think I remember him not even leaving his room to walk the 10 paces to the bathroom and therefore, peeing out of his window and onto the especially green patch of the rose plants that lined our front yard), a pair of well-worn tight-fitting red plaid pants, and a knee length khaki trench coat, for which, he proudly bore the name “Trench Coat Boy” amongst his classmates, dubbed to him by a girl who was probably going through a similar phase.

Baxter’s next phase began with the realization that school was not “his thing”, rather, he was beyond school. This phase is what I call his “James Bond phase”. In terms of being socially acceptable, this phase was a vast improvement from “Trench Coat Boy”. However, to my parents’ dismay, it was much more cost demanding. His fashion demands went from anything that was black, to pricey Express dress shirts and aged Italian leather boots. Although his style was based on being Smooooth, JB style, he was still a spazzy 15 year old boy whose limbs extended beyond his spatial awareness. Luckily, he always carried with him a deck of cards which he could whip out and start shuffling whenever awkwardness or humiliation resulted.

Then there was the cycling phase. This was the family favorite, seeing as how constructive it was- and how good he was too. Bax got a beautiful Orbea road bike and trained on the roads all through LA and the velodrome in Carson. He raced in criteriums mainly and always did fairly well. It also changed a lot about him. He cut his hair short, replaced his Italian leather boots (the blisters from which were endured as a sacrifice to fashion- something I’ve never understood) with addidas sandals and his tailor made dress shirts with “velonews” polyester blend tee shirts, and he had a new, surprisingly positive outlook on life, accentuated Im sure by a constant endorphin high.

Unfortunately, his addiction to the buzz of endorphins lead to addictions to the buzz of other chemicals, which costed a bit more and made him unpleasant to be around for the following year, or was it two? He’s admitted to having blank spots in his memory of that year or two as well. The cycling came to a jolting halt and time spent with the girlfriend skyrocketed. Meanwhile, “the family’s” already shaky approval of the girlfriend plummeted. (We wouldn’t let ourselves believe that it was Baxter and it was convenient to have a Girlfriend to blame everything on). He no longer complained about her constant stream of insecurity-calls and text messages and instead ran out of the room every 15 minutes to answer them all in privacy. That phase quickly ended when the girlfriend proved her already apparent incompetence by failing her second driving test by making a left turn without blinkers from the right hand turn lane. I remember my dad sitting Bax down with the basic theme of: “listen, Im on your side and its time to move on”. Eventually he did. It was just another phase. Sadly, for Michelle, the girlfriend, it wasn’t a phase, it was a lifestyle.

And then Bax moved to Colorado. To the cold cold mountains of Colorado to start the working interview for a catering school. And now he has an impressive resume, a salary job as a cook in one of the better restaurants in Boulder, and is moving into his new apartment as we speak. I can’t wait to see pictures. Apparently, it has hard wood floors. What? A bachelor with hard wood floors?! Ya, that’s my bro.

So what’s next? And for me, I have this month of travel still in front of me and lots of thoughts and possibilities for afterwards, so what’s next? For now though, Im happy just thinking about dinner. Its my last night in London, 9:30, and Im mighty hungry.