Luke Reynolds :: Blog

Los Angeles October 2008

It’s my first night in a new apartment in Los Angeles California and it’s night time.  I’ve just gotten in from the first day of rehearsing with a new band.  That’s new.  It’s dark outside.  My computer is set up on a cardboard box in the corner next to piles of books and an open door which leads to a balcony overlooking the street below.  I’m frying onions on the stove and catching a buzz off this first glass of wine.  The onions on the stove, a shiny white thing, sit off to my left and I can hear them bubbling and popping in the frying pan.  The house smells like fried onions.  I’ll eat them with eggs and tortillas and black beans for dinner.

I was used to my old stove in Portland Oregon that we cooked on all summer. My girl and me lived in that apartment. I knew how long it took to heat a pan up, how long it took to boil water. Knowing how to change things like an oil filter on a friends car, or how to quarter an elk with an axe and a saw, those are things I learned from experience.  It’s different down here in L.A.  Up the street from where I am now, there’s a Lamborghini dealer.  I doubt the kind of people who’d buy a Lamborghini, know how to do either of those things.

One winter, I spent Christmas in a log cabin about the size of a pickup truck in Montana.  We had a wood stove, and about five feet of snow on the ground.  I woke up one morning, with exactly an hour and a half until I had to be anywhere. Outside it was well below zero.  I put logs on the fire until it was so hot in that little cabin, I had to open all the windows up.  I fried onions for breakfast in a cast iron pan, on a cast iron stove.  It took so long.  This stove is different.