Echoes in a Hollow Space

Driving west on Manchester from Crenshaw, I noticed the neon sign for the Love Divine Chapel looked a little worse for wear: dirty, chipped, lacking in light. Neon signs always look a little depressed when they aren’t turned on, but I imagine that even when the giant L-O-V-E shone in the night it would still look dingy. The tiny meeting hall beside the sign needed paint and repair, the revival bus parked in the miniscule lot needed new tires. The homeless man holding up the hand-scrawled cardboard “Need Food” sign didn’t seem to notice the irony of standing beneath dingy love.

Further down Manchester, the planes coming into LAX paralleled the avenue, low and seeming-slow, though I knew they were speeding over the depressed neighborhoods below.

Customers lined up twenty deep at Randy’s Donuts. Even if you’re not from L.A. or have never been here, you’ve probably seen Randy’s Donuts in some montage or other: it’s the gigantic donut sitting on top of the tiny building right off the freeway. A sort of emblem of L.A. in it’s way. The space shuttle parked outside it for awhile, resting on its cross-town journey from LAX to the Museum of Science and Industry.

Randy’s is a kind of demarcation point between the poorer neighborhoods and the gradual swing to upscale as you head west. As the blocks whiz by the prices of rent and purchase gradually rise towards affluent Westchester. My parents bought in when Westchester was still a down at the heels lower middle class neighborhood, but it got “discovered” in the nineties and it’s fully gentrified now. Anything west of Sepulveda Boulevard is pretty pricy.

As I got closer to Sepulveda I saw a giant billboard advertising a place where they freeze fat for cosmetic reasons. I don’t even want to think about that too much. “Fear No Mirror” the billboard declared in far larger letters than the LOVE of the Divine Chapel. I realized we’d moved from the land of Fear No Evil to the land of Vanity of Vanities.

I fear no mirrors, comfortable in my aging skin, even as another birthday approaches. I do fear the fear of mirrors, however.  There is peace in accepting the passage of time, the transformation of the flesh, but we don’t live in an age—and I don’t live in a city—that accepts such peace. Rather the hard lessons of perpetually hard bodies, ever in denial, ever running too fast to stop and listen to the soft words of the soul.  What evils have been wrought in the name of vanity, and continue to be wrought. Yea, verily.

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

I’ve been thinking about blogging this for weeks, but I’ve been so busy at both work and home that many things fall through the cracks. Then yesterday, lizziebelle posted an eery story that prompted me to get on with it.

This all started months ago. I was driving home from work southbound on Pacific Avenue in Venice. It’s the last major north-south street before the beach. Past Venice Blvd. there’s a long stretch with no cross streets, just alley entrances on the western (beach) side, all bearing names like “28th Place.” Pedestrians on this western side have to walk on the actual street because the houses and apartments crowd right up to the street edge, and parking is tight. Usually the traffic moves swiftly, people rushing to the Marina Peninsula or Washington Blvd. Sometimes when there’s good beach weather, the traffic slows to a crawl, but even then it usually keeps moving. However, one night some months back it got seriously backed up, so much so that I actually had to come to a stop and sat there for several minutes.

Now, there is one piece of property along the western side which doesn’t have structures at street’s edge. One place is recessed back from the street with a dirt lot for parking cars along Pacific. The lot is also crowded on the southern side by old trees. As it happens, this odd-man-out piece of property is the one I stopped beside. I did what one does when sitting in traffic, looked around and registered things I usually speed by, and as I turned my head west I saw that I was aligned with a walkway running behind a series of linked cottages. It was as clear as day back there, though it was evening. A woman sat on the small stoop behind the first cottage, her legs stretched in front of her, elbows resting on knees, head down and staring at the ground between her feet. Such an aura of despondency hovered about her that I kept looking, fascinated. She had dark, wavy hair worn down past her shoulders and a dark, rather shapeless dress. It hit her mid-calf and I saw that her feet and legs were bare. The dress could have belonged to any era from 1920 onward, even further back in time if it actually went to the ground and she’d hitched it up to air our her calves.

As I stared and wondered why she was so sad, I guess she sensed me looking. Her head came up suddenly. Our eyes met. I was embarrassed to be caught, but such a look came over her face… The sorrow remained, but a spark had been added of something like defiance or anger or… I don’t know. Something old and negative and about me…but I thought not strictly about me, either. I just happened to be there to receive it.

Well, then I was really embarrassed. She had every right to be angry with me for staring and intruding upon her despondency, so I hunkered my head between my shoulder blades and quickly shifted my eyes back to the road. Thankfully, the traffic moved not long after. I stole another look before passing the property. She still stared my way with…whatever that negative surge was. I thought about her for the rest of the drive home, but—as these things go—promptly forgot about it when I got home and had chores and what all to do. Occasionally as I whizzed by that property each night, I’d think about her fleetingly, getting embarrassed all over again, or puzzled and wondering what had been up with her. I might even have stolen a glance that way, but usually couldn’t make anything out. It was quick, you know? I usually passed that place in seconds, in a hurry to get home.

Then one night several weeks back, I was maybe not driving as fast, or the traffic slowed (but didn’t stop), or—I’m not sure. This time as I drove by I took a good look towards that walkway. And I realized I couldn’t see it. Not just that it was too dark or that a car stood in the way (there were no cars in the dirt lot), I mean I couldn’t see it. Something blocked it. I had passed the property by the time that registered, and that part of Pacific isn’t friendly to people stopping and backing up. Too much traffic, not enough parking to pull over, and besides, I wanted to get home. I decided that I’d try to remember to give it a better look the next night.

I’m easily distracted these days and it was actually several days before I looked again. There was definitely a gate blocking the view of the walkway, but it didn’t look like a new gate. I thought, “Well, it must have been open when I stopped here that time.” I hadn’t remembered seeing a gate, but you know, it had to have been there. So the next time I remembered, I slowed down, risking irate honks from the cars behind me, when I got to the place where I’d been stopped before in direct alignment with the walkway. I recognized quite well the angle I’d been looking from.

The thing is, there were no linked cottages there, just a single house. And remember those trees on the south side of the dirt lot I mentioned? That night I realized that I not only could not have seen a walkway from that position, I couldn’t even see the gate. To see the gate I had to be ten, fifteen, twenty feet north of there and looking at an angle. There was no visibility of the gate or a possible walkway when looking dead on.

Dead on. Dead on. I looked dead on that night, but I still have no idea how I saw. Or who. Or what.

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

Six random scenes from the commute make a post.

(One of these things is not like the others.)


Tuesday evening: The big honking shiny SUV in front of me had a bumper sticker in the back window: What difference have YOU made? I wanted to scrawl across it's back window, I'm not a pompous SUV driver.

The next morning: At the corner of Pacific and Washington, a black limousine was pulled over to the curb. A sharp-dressed woman in one of those sixties-era cape coats bent forward, head leaning through the window up to her shoulders. Her little dog (a Pomeranian?) had pulled to the extreme length of its leash in the opposite direction. Butt in the air, it's head leaned up to the shoulders into the storm drain.

This morning: The doppleganger of Mrs. Kravetz from Bewitched walked briskly across the street in front of my car, wearing a steel blue sweat outfit and a dark grey hat with a brim, giving it the feel of a soft bowler. On the leash walking briskly beside her was a tiny grey poodle.

After my turn onto Admiralty Way, a man in a pink and white sweat outfit walked a red and white Spaniel down the sidewalk. The Spaniel walked slower and slower, pulling back until the man turned around, spread his arms wide, and mouthed "What?" The Spaniel looked up smiling and wagged its tail.

Across the street in the park a blonde woman wearing a dun-colored sweater jacket and a look of terminal boredom stood by one of the workout stations while the golden retriever on her leash sniffed and sniffed, taking a long time to decide when and if it wanted to do his business.

At the corner of Pacific and Washington again, one block up from the beach, two businesslike women in their businesslike workout clothes with their two businesslike roan-colored, short-haired, medium sized dogs all jogged in place, looking across the street, eager for the light to change.

Quote of the day:

"It's what you learn after you know it all that's important."

—John Wooden


Other quote of the day:

"There are people who take the heart out of you, and there are people who put it back."

—Elizabeth David


Interesting sight of the day:

I'm driving down Speedway Avenue in Venice to get around the bottleneck on Pacific that always occurs in the two blocks leading up to the left hand turn onto Venice North—one of my standard traffic evasions these days. As it happened, there was a bit of traffic on Speedway and I had to stop rather than driving right on through as I usually do. This gave me the opportunity to look around and soak in the scene. For some reason I looked up to the top of a three-story apartment house just ahead of me. I caught just a glimpse of a figure up on the roof near the ledge. I could only see "him" from the waist up—but unmoving and canted at a thirty-degree angle. Then the chump behind me was blowing his horn to get me to move and I didn't get a chance to study it in detail.

Well, of course the imagination engine started to churn. I was fairly certain it had to be a manikin of some sort, but I had a great deal of fun thinking what else he might be. Later, it made me think of the great old bluesy song, "Papa's On the House Top" (sometimes called "Papa's On the Rooftop"), which you can listen to here:

http://thehound.net/19900929/mp3s/start33.mp3

I told myself I needed to drive down Speedway the next day to see if Stiffy was still there, and he was. He was there every night last week that I drove down Speedway. I'll have to check it out again next time I'm down that way.

I love my neighborhood, it's funky down-at-the-heels-but-struggling-to-hipness; it's a great mixture of classes and races and ethnicities. It's a real neighborhood, not a housing development grouped around shopping centers. And I will miss it.

So, less than three weeks until I move. Three weeks from yesterday. I've started grieving for my lost home, my lost neighborhood. I suppose I've been grieving all along, but I'm acknowledging it now, letting it in. I'm moving someplace I don't want to move, but there's no help for it. Since I haven't got any choice, I've tried to embrace the move and make it my own—and that's worked well for the most part. But I'm exhausted now, and that always brings my negative emotions closer to the surface.

Interesting sight of the day: On the drive home, I was brooding about all this—brooding is a talent of mine and I was exercising it with great vigor last night. I decided to do something really suicidal, so I turned off Venice Blvd. into a quiet residential section of Venice so I could cut through the back way to Lincoln Blvd. to visit an execrable fast food drive-through joint. Nothing like fast food to really crash my emotions and body.

But deep in the lushest part of this residential neighborhood, where ancient trees grow tall and shady, where the streets are broad and from the early Twentieth Century, as are the houses, I saw a group of kids playing. They ran across the street down the block from me, laughing, and followed by a three-legged golden retriever. He was smiling and laughing right along with them—you know that look dogs get on their faces when they're with people they love and all's right with the world? And he was vigorous and running on his three legs and his coat gleamed with good health and good care and he was completely in the moment and happy.

And I thought, Puppy's got it right.

I have a safe and dry place to sleep; I am in reasonably good health, well-fed and well-groomed; I have a place to go and things to do; I have people who love me and want to play with me. What's to be unhappy? So I only have three legs. It hasn't stopped me from running.

I did a slight variation on the drive home last night because I needed to go by the Mecca of bargains fabrics here on the Westside: Lincoln Fabrics. It's a seedy store in a seedy section of Venice, but the prices can't be beat. The place is a complete fire hazard, with material stacked nearly to the ceiling in a profusion of piles. But it's quality stuff, if you dig for it.

( Read More )

A series of random, synchronous events have colored the last few days...

1

It seems like I've been encountering "cityscape palimpsests" a lot this week, first reading of them and discussing them in the blog of sartorias, and discussing them in my own blog. Then last night I was standing in line at Sav-on and the cashier started discussing with the woman in front of me how different Lincoln Blvd. used to be in the old days.

"Like how?"
"Well, there used to be open fields all around here."
"And," I found myself saying with an overwhelming sense of dejà vu, "there used to be stables here."

So of course I had to talk about the stables from my extreme youth which occupied the exact spot on which we stood in line.

2

I went to late lunch-early dinner at Panini, my favorite coffee shop in Marina del Rey (just across the way from Sav-on). It's situated just about where I rode English saddle for the first (and last) time in the opening ceremonies of a gymkhana. I was a good rider (for a five year old) on a Western saddle (with specially shortened stirrups), but I did not like that English saddle. The rider in front of me was leading the horse I was on (I was stuck on the saddle just for the adorable factor), but I got bored halfway through the ceremonies and decided to slide off the horse and get out of there. Much hilarity ensued in the crowd, followed by much horror as I wove in and out of the legs of the horses. The horses were very patient and I emerged unscathed.

3

At the coffee shop I was reading The Philosophers' Secret Fire: A History of the Imagination by Patrick Harpur. I've been reading it on and off for months and months and months. It's a fascinating book, but I don't seem to get to it much, what with all the other reading and writing I do. It's become my default Saturday afternoon at the coffee shop reading material. The section I picked up on today talked about the myths we humans carry around with us.

"Myths," says Harpur, "are imaginative templates which, when laid over the world, make sense of it. We cannot think without them, because they provide the structures which determine the way we think in the first instance."

These myths include not just the obvious—one's spirituals beliefs, et al.—but such things as the analytical method, societal norms, national identity, etc., etc. They are all a form of myth, all part of how we define ourselves and the filters through which we see the world around us. If you were from Papua New Guinea, for instance, your templates would probably be radically different.

And of course this made me think of the week's "cityscape palimpsest" mojo floating through the air and those ghosts of memory we also overlay on the world.

4

After eating supper, I felt restless so decided to go for a drive. I wound up on Culver Blvd. heading towards Playa del Rey, then I drove along the beach towards Manhattan Beach. I thought, "This stretch of beach hasn't changed much since the old days. Well, all except for the big honking airport just to the east." I realized I couldn't remember this stretch of beach all that clearly as my family and friends tended to go to Venice or Santa Monica beach, not the one on the butt end of LAX.

5

In Manhattan Beach, I turned around and drove back the way I'd come. By that time the sun was getting low in the sky. The sea was a slate grey, highlighted by blue-white facets of light. Small craft bobbed lazily out on the swells and in the distance, large tankers headed north. Garth Trinidad on Chocolate City began to play Sade. She sang, "I couldn't love you more/Never change a thing." It was prime—the perfect song for the perfect moment.

But when it was over, I couldn't help saying, "Sade, darling, everything changes. Nothing remains the same. Especially human beings."

Last night I drove east on Washington Boulevard near the Culver City-L.A. border and passed a mini-mall on the corner of Washington and Rosabell. Normally, the marquee outside this mini-mall holds a white plastic neon-lit rectangle prominently featuring the name of a cut-rate dental office. Last night, the front and back panels of this rectangle had been removed, leaving only a framework with vertical bars of neon lights spaced like the bars in a cell door. They were lit, pumping out bright white light, a neon prison. Perfectly framed behind this prison of light was the full moon. She looked a sad, weary sister behind that artificial brightness. Once she'd been the brightest light in the night sky, now she'd been overwhelmed by the human need for attention-getting.

I found myself thinking how much I related to that forlorn moon.

I must explain that I was extremely sleep-deprived yesterday. Boyfriend of Ms. 207 upstairs was on an real rip-snortin' tear Thursday night-early Friday morning. The two of them, but mostly him, woke me up every half hour between 11 p.m. and 1:30 a.m. I have to get up at 6 for work, so you can imagine I was a wee bit tired. It was one of those situations where just as I drifted back to sleep, another noise eruption broke out and I'd be awake again. It culminated with them having loud, raucous, bed-thumping, screaming vocalization sex at 1:30. Before that, just before one, Boyfriend had cranked up the stereo and was singing at the top of his lungs (off-key). I guess he was anticipating the loud, raucous sex to come. But one good thing about that loud, raucous sex (from my POV, anyway) is that once it occurred I knew I'd probably get some sleep because, well, the darling young things would most likely be going to sleep themselves soon after. Indeed, that's what happened.

So, there I was exhausted and blue Friday evening, feeling a kinship with the dimmed moon imprisoned by the human need for exhibitionism. It had been an ugly, busy week at work, too, and I'd been ill with some stomach virus early in the week. I'm in the culmination phase of my novel, writing the finale chapters, and although that's going pretty well and I see the dim light at the end of the tunnel, the latest chapter I posted on the writing workshop (27-28 out of 32+epilogue) did not do particularly well. I got only one critique in over a week. I'd been doing well on the workshop before this current posting, had good luck with my posts for the last two years, but natural attrition has caused some critters to drop away, and at a certain point nobody new is going to sign on for critiques of the advanced chapters of a novel. My friend Jon says not to take it personally, and he's absolutely right, but it's hard not to take it personally. Finally, two friends took pity on me and there were two more posted critiques waiting for me Friday morning, but I was already in a massive funk by then. Aided, I'm sure, by only 4-1/2 to 5 hours sleep. I was on the point of pulling everything off the workshop and slinking into a hole somewhere to hide.

But I've learned not to make significant decisions when I'm depressed and sleep-deprived. I'm still in a bit of a funk, but the questions I'm asking myself today are somewhat different. Like: why the hell do I even bother to write?

You know, there are head answers to that question, and there are soul answers to that question. You could probably generate some of the head answers yourself:

o I write because it's a great means of self-expression.
o I write to explore universal truths.
o I write because it's a fun exercise of my imagination.
o I write to see my dreams and fantasies come alive on the page.

Etc., etc., fill in the blanks. All of those head answers--and whatever other ones I or you could come up with—are true, as far as they go. But they are all, essentially, irrelevant—they don't, at least for me, get to the heart of things. Because there's only one true answer, the soul answer: I write because I have no choice.

I would write even if no one was reading (and most times I think no one truly is). I believe there are writers who can say, "Enough," and move on to something else, but I'm not one of them. I've tried, and was utterly miserable each time. It was like having a writhing itch I couldn't reach, and it didn't go away until I started writing again. Once I even stopped writing for four or five years: the longest, most miserable years of my life. I said "Uncle" that time and never went to that place again, because I realized there is something in this particular form of artistic expression that I must do. It's my essence, ingrained in the whorls of my soul.

Trust me, I know how melodramatic that sounds. But it's also true. There's no rule guaranteeing that the truth isn't also melodramatic. Or maybe I've just never learned to express it in better terms. At any rate, if I ask my soul why I write maybe I can try to be honest:

o I write because I want someone to pat me on the head and say, "Good girl."

That's fairly honest, but only partially true. I wrote in a vacuum for years and it still did the trick for me. It's only recently that the need for attention has become part of the equation. And I can easily foresee a time when I might go back into the vacuum because this need to be noticed may never be fulfilled. I'll write anyway. I have to.

o I write because my father was a consummate storyteller. I never pleased him otherwise, and although he's been dead for over twenty years, I'm still trying to please him.

Okay, a bit more honest. That was certainly a strong component in why I originally chose this art form. I do visual art, too, always have, but it's never filled me up like writing—and I'm sure the Freudian answer would be: Daddy. But at a certain point I realized I was no longer writing to please Daddy. I woke up one day and knew I had crossed that Rubicon; moved into a new world, a new way of doing things, left the old rules behind. I do this for me now, and that's a good evolution. I lost my dad when I was fairly young and before I'd had a chance to truly differentiate myself from my parents. I think I've achieved that now—and that's always a healthy thing.

o I write because it's the only thing that patches the holes in my soul.

Yeah, that's a true reason. I've had my dark times, my New Moon phases, I will again, but the work is always the remedy, even if the work is sometimes the cause of the darkness. I always turn back to it—for me, not for anyone else—and it always does the trick, like nothing else can.

So I guess I'm like the full moon after all. I may be trapped sometimes in a prison of artificial light, made weak by the need for attention-getting—but last night in my exhaustion and depression, I forgot the other lesson of the full moon. That once I moved further down the street, the moon was still there, no longer behind those bars. And if I travel out of the city and its wash of artificial light, away from the distractions and visual noise, the moon still shines, alone in a dark sky.