I have never shopped on Black Friday. Mall or otherwise. There are a few reasons for this and none of them are admirable. The main one is that I am incapable of functioning in a group of people trying to occupy the exact same spot at the exact same time, much less when any of them are the slightest bit competitive or viewing me as a potential roadblock to something they want. I can’t even handle two or more people going after the same Lean Cuisine as me in the grocery store on a random Tuesday. I’m a special kind of skittish claustrophobic when it comes to mingling with the public.

I love Black Friday. For a couple of years now I have found that My Black Friday is the perfect time to drag Mr. Zoom to some bizarre places I’ve found out about so that I can feel safe and brave while I check out some truly odd things. There’s no traffic to fight and there are even less people at the destination than normal, which almost always means we are alone while we are there. Mr. Zoom deserves news coverage because while he finds the bizarre fascinating, he would not be jumping into a car to check it out if I weren’t asking him to take me there. He never rushes me and when we can’t locate something right away he will get out of the car and start asking people for directions. Twice he’s managed to come out of that situation with a map someone produced for him to help us figure things out.

I do have to monitor him on Monday though when the courts open again. I’m not sure he’s not going to try and get away from me legally because of what I made him take me to yesterday. Behold, the downright frightening weirdness that is the Old Trapper’s Lodge statues. These things live on the campus of Pierce College in Woodland Hills. Photos can NOT ever, ever ever ever, convey the oddness of this little collection. There are no signs to help you find them and even the officials on the campus refuse to acknowledge they exist there. They don’t say “they don’t exist,” they say “I’ve never heard of what you are asking me about.” There are live animals not 10 feet away that are part of the college program, and the site itself has a historic landmark marker. So I’m not sure how nobody could know they exist unless they simply don’t want to know. And these statues are odd enough, I actually don’t blame them for implementing the If I Ignore It - It Will Not Exist defensive mechanism. I may find this stuff endlessly fascinating, but I have to admit that this odd grouping falls right on my personal line. As it is, one sculpture represents a kidnapping (that is the title of the piece) of a woman and I have read that it represents even more disturbing actions. If I was honest with myself, I’d admit it actually crossed my personal line of not amusing anymore, but I was able to find enough historic value and hopefully unintentional (meaning the artist was doing what he had to because he was touched in the head) offense in it that I’m ok with it. I think.

Next we drove into the hills just below the Hollywood sign. I had read about this fascinating place called The Garden of Oz. Unfortunately, the soul of the place is behind a locked gate but the article said it was worth a drive by. And oh my glitter glass toy god, it was. There is a yellow brick road and every square inch of a yard that is huge is covered with a mosaic of old toys, glass, marbles, shiny metal, tile, just anything you can think of. I haven’t been to the Watts Towers (yet), but I get the impression it is even more densely packed with bric a brac than those towers are. There is a gate that you can see through, you can see a lot of what is in there. There is also a sign pleading for no photographs. So even though one could stick a camera through the gate and get some shots, I did not do that. I just stood there and vibrated as I looked inside. There was plenty of “along the street” stuff that could be photographed, so I went for that, as does everyone else who visits this site.

The only thing that got to me was that the locals living on this street seem to have had their fill of people coming to view the Garden. When we so much as turned our heads to the right as we drove by, the person behind us laid on their car horn as if we had stopped dead in the middle of the road. Which pretty much made us stop dead in the middle of the road to check our britches. We later parked the car and walked down to the site and as cars drove past they too laid on their horns. Not because we were in their way, it was no doubt them wanting to shoo the gawking public away. I might have had more sympathy if this was a main street that many people had to use. This street is one of those teeny two way (barely) windy roads in the Hollywood Hills. When one chooses to live there, one deals with wide eyed interlopers such as me - and really, I do hope they got what they needed out of that.