Im in the sidecar

This is matthew. I have joined London's roadtrip. It has been maybe four days for me on this road trip. I wish there was a way for me to explain to you how much you can experience - within a four day period - with this woman. Also, I wish I could figure out how to take pictures with my camera so that I could translate all this madness and beauty. I will however use words, lets see what I can accomplish.

I met am man who acts just like you and me...... but he loves seeing cakes and pies smeared all over a woman's body. His passion lies in seeing girls get covered in syrup, pudding, and marshmellow cream. He runs messygirl.com and he's really fun..... London and I wandered all around Houston the first night we flew in. Houston is just this huge, dead city filled with filled with crazy fountians. We spent a lot of time swimming at the condo.... doing headstands and flopping around like fish. 

 Next stop was a very kind man who has dedicated his life to a love of exotic plants, glass, pipes, photography, two dogs, and a crazy rooster. He wore overalls. I didn't want to interfere with the shoot, so I ended up getting lost in a bamboo forest behind his house. London got attacked by fire-ants when she was all dressed up like a cowgirl....and now she's all covered in big red welts... We both got eaten alive by mosquitos, big monsterous things. She's living on lots and lots of coverup makeup.

Then we headed to a woman's house who I feel I was meant to speak to.......London shot with a talented painter who needed content to paint from. At this nice lady's house we met an incredibly famous oil painter from china who was teaching a class to the community that she had set up in her painters studio. I got so caught up in talking to her that I forgot London's wardrobe.... we had to drive back in the morning to get it. Now we are in one of the most stunning cities I have ever laid eyes on. It is the Venice-America. Old houses and restaurants lining a walk which hugs the river. Ancient trees hang over head lit by romantic lamps. This city preserves beauty. London and I are staying with the man who has a million stories and a head full of some fantastic information.... He says that San Antonio has a huge war going on that no one knows about, a war of both good and evil, with christians and devil worshippers. That part is kind of scary but I hope you come here one day, San Antonio is beautiful.

The rain is pouring down and I love to feel at home when I am nowhere. London's life is her own without compromise, without question and I am happy to be her sidekick in this journey. --Matthew

And you thought I wouldn't return.... : )

Bonnaroo was a good time. Many mind altering substances, temperatures that made you pass out, and music music music...... loud music, pretty music, floating music. You washed yourself in big tin sinks. Your tent heated up like an oven at 8am, your snot was a funny black color, and people sold bloody mary's on the street.... it was quite the place to be. Leaving Long Island again. This time, with Matthew in tow. I didn't really know if he was going to make it at first. There was all this crazy drama going on and he didn't have a cell phone (he never has a cell phone).... but alas, I am on the plane now. He is looking through SkyMagazine for his daily message from the universe. Apparently, following his advice ..  the universe has been wanting to tell me that I am a "small iron skillet, great for outdoor cooking"

And this....

This is how I feel about babies......

NorthPort, Long Island

So the past few days, I have just been holed up in a basement in Long Island... booking booking, madly booking. As of right now, I have a great line-up of photographers from Houston to Santa Fe ... The best news is - that I booked a photographer in Albuquerque who is going to take me flying in his little four man plane. How cool is that? A plane ride across the New Mexico desert! Whoo hoo! Alas, amist all this positive - there must be some negative..... Because, let me tell you, Colorado isn't booking at all. I mean, nothing. Like, at all. Therefore I will be going an entire week, maybe two without pay. I haven't mentioned it yet, but my best friend, Matthew will be accompanying me on the rest of the trip crosscountry. He's going to be flying into Houston with me on the 24th - I planned out a lot of my schedule on half work/half sightseeing. We're hitting up Carlsbad Caverns, White Sands, Garden of the Gods, Arches National Park, Salt Lake (gotta float in the lake!), Bryce Canyon, Zion, Hoover Dam, Vegas, Grand Canyon, and a dozen other things...... lots of funny tourist attractions. Like the largest ball of twine. When I haven't been working on emails, I've been reading. In the past week, I've finished three books: Jitterbug Perfume, The Memory Keeper's Daughter, and Way Off the Road. Way Off the Road was written very poorly and full of seedy humor. But it had some great stories about traveling across the US..... examples:

• There is a place in Alabama where all lost luggage goes (Lost Mail, lost suitcases, lost packages). The lost luggage is bought, opened up, and stocked on shelves! You can go shopping in this giant warehouse of stuff.
• There is also a festival held just above Denver Colorado - that celebrates a frozen dead guy on ice. You can buy t-shirts, hats, and jump into a hole in the ice to celebrate the day!

Messy Gunge!

I spent the better part of this morning dumping vanilla icecream, brownie mix, and cake batter all over Liz Ashley. Messygirl.com is a fun site to work with. I've been to Houston at least three times this year to work with them. Not because I am all that into WAM (Wet and Messy fetish) but just because it's such a great break from Art photographers and Glamour photographers .... I mean, would you rather sit around posing for 3 hours or would you rather be dumping vanilla icecream, brownie mix, and cake batter on your face?... "Oooohhh baby, you know it. Hit me with that pie. Oh, that's just too hot. Do it again!" Tomorrow I do a 35 gallon pudding bath. Wish me luck, and hope that I don't drown.... what an obituary that would make, ha!

Moving on up

It was really hard leaving New Orleans.... not so much because of the city. But mostly because I found myself so comfortable in one place..... Normally when staying at a motel, I am dying to get on the move. ... In the condo though, it was like time stopped moving. I wanted nothing other than to sit and watch re-runs of Sex in the City on my laptop...... without having to move anywhere but the couch to the bed and back to the couch.... Somehow I pulled myself from the void, packed myself into my car - headed towards that Lone Star State. Where the sky just seems to go on forever. I've been down this way several times in the past year and half. I like how the land sprawls from mountians to fields to lakes and then desert...If you want to see the US but you are short on time, just drive through TX for a week.... Tonight a photographer took me out on his motorcylce and showed me St. Charles neighborhood. It was fun.

Katrina stories....

The secret to shooting
for more than three hours?
........Change the scenery.
Shooting more than one setting, breaks the shoots into mini shoots.

I can shoot longer and I can pose better when things around me change.

My photographer had a Katrina story today...

... Everyone down here has a Katrina story. Everyone down here remembers where they were, what they were doing, how their life changed....

He survived the storm, only to find out that the Levee had broken and that water was making its way into the city - Instead of evacuating, he went to the local hospital and helped vacate the patients. Over 20 cars, just regular people, help evacuating patients on respirators. He then returned to help a local Hospice which needed help. 1/3 of the patients there had already perished because generators had failed.... To get to the hospice, they had to take buses with an escort from a bunch national guardsmen. There was another guy who went around saving people who were stuck in their flooded houses.... He paddled in his tiny canoe from house to house. While passing by an estate, he noticed a boat with some keys in the ignition and decided to use the boat instead of his canoe. After a week, he returned the boat and wrote, "This boat saved 400 people"

I love stories.
People are truly just stories.
Your life is one big story...
And it ends when you blink....

Anyways........I liked the photographer's story so much.....I kept wondering, "What other stories are out there?" - So, of course, I ended up at the local bar.

My favorite story of tonight was this one girl. She vacated her house - packing her husband, two kids, two dogs, three chickens, and an iguana.... to a hotel in Arkansas. Where she lived for 5 months with the chicken eating crackers on the bed. Anyways, She said when she got home, she barely recognized her house. Her grass was 3 feet high. And her refrigerator - which she never emptied, had crab legs, hamburgers, and pork inside it for 5 months in 90 degree heat. She had her husband tape it up and put it out on the street..... FEMA sent her a $2000 check total for her 5 month and now they are sending her letters asking her to pay the money back. They believe she misused it because she bought a new refrigerator with it... "So I wrote them a letter back and I said, 'Well I'd like to pay you back. But lets see you squeeze blood from a turnip.'"

The French Quarter....

Traveling from New York to Gulfport, everyone cautioned me about Louisiana...... "You're going to New Orleans?," they'd say, "It's so dangerous there right now!" - Point is, all these requests of caution, eventually got to me.... It got to the point where I didn't want to venture out........... because I convinced that the city would kill me.

Haha... until, I sat in the condo for two days
Cleaned the entire apartment...
and decided life is for living....

Found my way to the French Quarter pretty easily. Everyone was wearing Disney hats, and multicolored fanny packs (not so scary afterall, huh?)

So I walked around, bought a few postcards and things to send home to Mom (half naked girls wearing nothing but beads! She is going to love the postcards that I chose) I've been trying not to spend too money. Modeling has been very slow from Tallahassee to Gulfport. I am very close to running out of money this week.

I did decide to treat myself though. Just this once. I chose a place called Mr B's.

There was a lady at the bar. And we got to talking and she tells me that she is a 'messenger'.... She says that the universe brought us together. "We have been pulled by the same force. Jessica, you are on a journey."... She starts telling me about all these things that I am going to see. Places that I need to go. She said that I will find my spiritual leader in Zion and that I am a Rainbow Warrior. She wrote everything down on a dozen little napkins, covered in the Whiskey she was drinking.....I walked out of Mr. B's with a purse jam packed with napkins predicting my future. She kept stressing that I am supposed to record all the positive things that I experience in my life, take all that information that I get from it and give it back to the world so that they can also bathe in positivity.... She told me to write a book, "Your book could change the world".... I, honestly, cannot see how my traveling will change the world. A LOT of people travel. But she said she was a messenger and she bought me dinner that night and it was very kind of her. So I am going to keep all her little napkins. Perhaps they will predict the future.

Bourbon street was madness. Being a lone traveler, I had to become my own babysitter. I had two drinks and watched a marching band play and headed home. When I got back to the condo, I jumped in the pool with all my clothes on (sober, of course, it's just really hot down here right now).

Smoking Cloves....

I just spent the last 20 minutes trying to explain my day -
but you know what?
If it is taking me 20 minutes,
I probably don't know how to tell you about it

Basically Bourbon Street smells like ex-boyfriends and
one night stands..... clove ciggerrettes remind me of college.
... I like being alive, I hope everyone else does too..