Motel 6, Jackson, Michigan

I'm reading the brochure it says: "At Motel 6 you don't have to sacrifice comfort to save money" and I'm grateful. I'm now about 2500 miles from California. If I think of California as the site and myself, my wife and children as the work, would we be a site-specific work? No, definitely more like plop art, placed there with no consideration whatsoever to the area’s specific history. What traces of us are left in California? There’s a photo of my children pinned to the wall in the graduate coordinator’s office, the furniture we lived with then sold or gave away to friends or strangers, the people we met and shook hands with and parted, the conversations mostly forgotten, the medical records from my children’s birth in a filing cabinet at the UCSD medical centre, the placental remains that were shipped to different labs for analysis, current location unknown.

The UCSD campus is located in posh La Jolla. I'd never seen so many luxury cars and SUVs in such a high concentration. Every couple of hours the peaceful hum of expensive cars was broken by the noise of F/A-18 fighter planes flying very low overhead. It seemed like they were patrolling the neighbourhood, but in fact, the Miramar Air Force Base was just down the road sitting on some very expensive real estate.