Twilight Occidental

By Eliot Gabriel Graham

[H]istorical knowledge is that special case of memory where the object of present thought is past thought, the gap between present and past being bridged not only by the power of present thought to think of the past, but also by the power of past thought to awaken itself in the present.
~ R.G. Collingwood

Every person spawned from a grainy childhood has nostalgia for the future. That is, at some point there’s a realization that the only nostalgia ever felt isn’t for the preceding, but rather for the proceeding. The lead time for this recognition is as unique as the issuing Tolstoian family, particular to the strength of its web. Until such full dimensional present is reached, an exigency-of-place sensation creates a seemingly interminable succession of new hometowns; the psychological dungeon of moving back somewhere is always beyond assent. For years this happens as a matter of instinct, a metaphysical stoke towards the next corner store utopia, the next hikeable summit. But when the gimbal of history is finally unlocked, traditional nostalgia fades away, along with the anxiety that was keeping it alive, and the future becomes much more relatable and therefore pursued. Past feelings evolve into thoughts, replete with meta-thoughts of their validation. Confirmation of the eternal presence of mind, the apperception of the spirit of a living life, Ithaca doesn’t keep.

Reading One

     Animal Style Potatoes

     Crack yourself up, Los Angeles, behind the windscreen, hemmed in by wide sidewalks and even wider medians. Let’s build tunnels under this sprawling basin, the idea went, so that our individual pods can sneak around even more independently. But that would never catch on because our daily one acts would be clipped of audience. Austin is probably a better place for that sort of thing anyway. We have trains, though, above and below, actually, to satisfy that particular need. Alas, these don’t seem to make their mark, either. Satisfying angels is surprisingly hard goddam work, isn’t it? Rodolpho couldn’t cook the view, but these people eat the juicy sunshine, that’s for sure. That’s why their teeth are so bright!

The word May doesn’t rhyme with gloom; neither does June, in fact. Why are they used together then, June and gloom? In the month of May, even? Gloomy, yes, but not Jumey, of Jlumey, Jluney or goon, or Jume. So, how about this: let’s use June Moon instead. That seems to work. As well, the copyright’s expired, in case you’re worried, so it’s fine. Good, now we’ve got snap-clicked rhyming rhythmicity and some backstory to heuristic into. The last and the first of spring and summer, respectively. It feels a lot less arbitrary than the lazy victim commiserate that magnetizes our dull glands together on festival orchestra scale. Especially in overcast weather.

A city is only as good as its transportation system. Cars get humans nowhere, it must be certain. This region has become so sprung on the auto mode of life such that here we are in 2023 having to wait another six months for the primary airport of the country’s second largest metro region to establish a rail connection to it. To boot, the baseball stadium isn’t even on rail service, mind you. Right, so, after you land, crack-ped on your way to Sepulveda, my friend. Out from the terminal, at least there’s some positive, constructive evidence of a slow motion forward, albeit hung with some indifference, and always a swinging piñata of disinclination. The Theme Building’s arms and legs seem to googie-woogie more purposely. A grafted mess it smacks of, certainly designed by a 20-something who will never use it. Some möbius backtracking, swivel circling through hodgepodge, a touch of civically-coerced jaywalking and voilà eureka: the entrance to the city is right on your gob!

So what, it’s northbound from Century to get to the bus. A hundred or so yards up, two young ladies tightly bell-bottomed give the scene a P.T. Anderson Valley vibe. They must be foreigners, for Americans would never walk this way; the strained plica semilunaris of conjunctiva chime back our nictitating capabilities and pinky feathers. Tea cups and traffic moving, nonetheless, until Plane Spotting is on the left, kitty-catty to burger treats. It wasn’t on the itinerary, any of this, but such are the serendipities of the flâneur. So much beach there’s enough of it to park and taxi jumbo jets without cramping anyone’s muscles, surfboards or boardwalks, or piers and other artefactual piles of the Roman Dude.

     Abbot Kinney is not the Doge of Venice

     Prairie lots in a city, dead spaces not filling any anatomical civic need have always stitched itchy in the craw. Tracts of land frisbeed helplessly through the cracked windows of sweaty metal bugs insolently smug on transfused lifeblood of such superior creatures. It was of chop-licking comeuppance delight to watch the volcanic magma crumple all those quivering cans on Wilshire in that film. Jurassic arrogance these little fleas. Take it or leave it, Lincoln Boulevard, wherever you’d like to, apparently, says the land brats; too much disposable space. Why not camp there? Why not? Because the homunculus needs its cake, too. Rearguard buffer patches for the lagoon-bound refugees destined for their Coney Island build, there’s only so much camp to go around.

Birthday man will probably make it another 30 years anyway, so the package being picked up from the Amazon locker, The Blue Zones Kitchen: 100 Recipes to live to be…, is just a present reminder to stay the course. Stow it and cut through Oakwood salivating at the big bowl of sleep coming after check in. Pandemic neo-medieval redoubts abound. Some appear pretty well interesting, but any serious architectural value would be squelched out by the smooth-sterility defensive gesture they all seem to assume. The license to crenellate fast tracked from palatine to palatinate under the tacit assumption that the counties will again supply permit people for these sorts of matters, nodding dispensation for wartime discretions in the meantime.

An abandoned sound stage for the likes of Tim Burton, the encircling stockade stands tall, as a stack of gelatin does, held together by the code-sensitive lock the entry instructions misleadingly emphasize. Once through, the air thickens with dank laziness. A small parking slip with eight or so Tasmanian house cars, the surroundings of which strewn with the waif their travels have whipped up and carried in with them. The sour filthiness only humans can create with concrete and their greasy residue, so artificial only kelvin-scale heat and chemistry can sheer clean. There’s a patch of grass, but it sticks out, uncomfortably. The stay here will require a Spartan stomach and laconic tact. Check-in personnel always probe for this.

Wind and weather are much better house cleaners than the ear-tattered bunnies lounging around here. The outside follows you right in and ghost-swirls until it webs up in the exposed rafters, sneezing out dust spores periodically like produce misters at a grocery store. Each randomized pod responds indignantly with its own burst of salty carbon dioxide. The result is a hyper-modulated work song of brackish atomized allium-smelling burlap, thickening into a promising crustate nebula. Check out will be prior to the imminent collapse, anxiously, and all of this can carry on deep into the back of beyond. With sleep comes patience.

If Florida is the poor man’s California, Miami Beach vis-à-vis Abbot Kinney Boulevard is that conceit’s basis, from 1991 on, of course. The childhood allure of Los Angeles was never about the beach; sand and waves were a prominent feature of adolescence 60 miles up the coast. Glamorized, rather, was the big city life most western kids with a nose for books long for, and there’s not a whole lot of that until you’re east of The Swamp Boulevard. A beach is a beach, presumably, because generally there doesn’t tend to be anything notionally urban about them. So, first-time comer experience this, that of the Los Angeles ‘Westside Guy’, despite being a regional native. In fact, a Westside runners’ group is getting its kicks chasing the sun seaward, as one of them overhears, “they’re more like joggers; they’re not fast enough to be called ‘runners’”. The retortive snort is audibly elephantine and delicious. The boardwalk has always distracted attention from what is, it must be said, eat one’s own head, a grand sandy beach. Overdressed like Lawrence of Arabia, the shoes stay on for the walk to the ocean. The sunset halts the pioneer spirit.

There’s a Ballerina Clown and a Binocular Building squinting each other out through nautical dusk. The birthday book needs a card, and the card has to be good. Theodore Roosevelt-riding-a-dinosaur, Bob-Ross-with-a-buttery-grin-good. A really good bad-card, circus quality, come to think of it. Follow the clown inside, then, man. And after considerable perusal, the wiener was found, with some opening polka music, for good measure.

A spread of raw food picnicked out on a Whole Foods dining table. Plasma-mushy yellow mango on sale for a buck, avocado, dinner roll, bottle of fizzy, banana and yoghurt. Clean zoo food for a song. Thrifty pride of the enlightened apes. Have you ever seen someone manage an avocado with a plastic knife and spork? Yoga lady sitting the table opposite stretched her sockets and periwinkle tights in muted exhibitional awe. With a background negatively lit by astronomical dusk and ubiquitously afterthunk parking field, she softly splits her angle of attention between the man she’s mouthing words to and the quiffed momentary muse in her medium foreground. Synced up nicely, this parlor sport helps the town’s industry gears stay fragrantly lubricated, classy as that sounds. The static field cast as widely as possible so that the battery juice is always topped off. Vista snakes will lock onto your frequency string and gack up all your hump’s renal energy, if you fall for it. So don’t: It’s only real when the camera’s rolling for these people. Hucksters have been pulling each other into this quicksand for as long as an American can remember, beginning with the pilot of this dreamy mess. Van’s bike was stolen in Santa Monica, and ended up here.

     Esquisse d’un Tableau Chimérique des Progrès de l’esprit humain

     Days of big perspective feel like forward motion without aging. Yesterday’s scale and scope silenced all the metaphysical growls that expose the body to extra gravitational tug. Willed through a wincing night of sleep, the bed sheet formed a protective screen from the cycling collapsed lung of entropic particles. Evil doesn’t get up early, so if you beat it to the blocks, you’ll be chasing it around all day, rather than the opposite. Dawn patrol. June Moon is still on, so heat won’t be the enemy for an elbow swing up the boardwalk with trek momentum still burning. Push the remains of the Sutyagin House out of view, and tack starboard up the coast. How many muscle beaches are there, for Christ’s sake? Take Venice Boulevard to its provenance and cut right at the Merriam-Webster-level of analysis mural. Another Roman attention span is hypostatized ostentatiously. Leave it to the Church of the Ladder Day Romans to breeze over the Latin mistake of creating a philological irony by teasing pantheon and pantheism out of πάνθεονς and then advertising that gaff in the form of a pantheon of pantheism as public iconography. Craft without history is commerce. Maybe gods are just inevitable.

If there is a doge of Venice, then you know who it is. His mural stands tallest on the boardwalk a couple blocks down. The only Muscle Beach is right here, he’ll have you know. Could there be a more appropriate expression of the bread-and-circus ethos than a body-builder-cum-entertainment-actor rising to the gubernatorial level? All of that started right here. And I doubt Abbot would be surprised, if not a touch jealous. Das ist komisch.

The toll to get into Santa Monica is bit much, so the border becomes the turnaround. A nice satin sheen of sweat worked up, grease and glide through the boardwalk, landing back at the compound where a host of guests are gathered around the smoke pit their collective morning puffs are producing. They didn’t even look up. The hustle shuffle leaves no time for small talk and barely enough for perfunctory eye contact; the zippy understand, the zonky find it offensive. The city of Los Angeles is shaped like an amoebic oil spill. Travelling between shoestring annexations, clumps, drips, and tails, or, even worse, from within to without, requires some frustratingly circuitous navigation through transit blind spots. From coastal to coastal, up 60 miles, for example, means reversing eastward into the kernel of the city, and then setting out through the Valley blob to go north by northwest. (Straphangers of the L-train sympathize.) Patching together a route with city busses is possible, but you’ll spend more time traffic gazing from a whizzy sidewalk bench than traveling.

The pandemic allowed Los Angeles to become a more extreme version of itself. Fiercely cellular, this polity, it’s still lamenting the return to status quo ex ante; wonky public transportation was taken as a colorful municipal eccentricity. “L.A. doesn’t have a subway, like where?” the blonde American skepticized in a Parisian public policy course ten years ago, swiveling her head around for peer support. Bus drivers react quizzically when you offer fair. Hobos nod and hooch, cling-clanking their gear wherever they find themselves. One sat in the seat behind drops his glass pipe and a red light ahead causes it to skid under your seat. Get out of that moral pickle jar. All the same, riding the bus keeps the ethical chisels sharp and clean, for motion is the serum of the spirit.

Without great imaginative effort one can picture Culver Station withering into Brooklyn’s Broadway Junction in modern-speed-soon time. Only seven years old, this place more resembles a dusty aviary, pigeons tumbling in and out; the steps up to the platform slippery with human soot. And with the flat sprawl of the region allowing more direct broadcast sun lighting, the juxtaposition is felt more keenly still. Smoking and yelling, bland apathy and no law enforcement: the historical experience of a metro system only used by the poor and the intrepid. Randy Newman never took the Metro.

Into Seventh and Figueroa Station and quickly remark on the plastic surgery the block has undergone since the last visit. Thirty minutes to drop off luggage and get into the middle of Union Station. A downtown with King Kong blocks always feels so Americanly southwestern. Platform for the Red Line has a platoon of Deputies patrolling. Word is the Expo Line needs some eye, too. They always smirk at suggestions that they absorb later and ultimately implement, experience gets one past the momentary ego sting of this. Never early, but always just before just in time takes delicate execution, and a bit of courage.

     Walls of Open Space

     Railroads and rivers, when they can, follow the same course; when they can’t, it’s a portage relationship. Here the flows are equally engineered and constructed with the hearts and minds and hubris of the homesteader. Union Station, like most buildings around, feels like a hasty, uninspired collage of others’ theoretical hard work. Mission Revival in the front, some kind of Streamline-Italianate for Patsaouras in the back, and Deco mishmash here and there inside; style panels blunting against each other, the void of transition leaves an echo of hot screech for all to walk through, stew in. Physically easy to squeeze in and out of, though, plenty of room to set up the dolly for the running-to-make-your-train shots, as is often the case, presently like. Track away from the platform and creep behind Chinatown, the Surfliner falls in with Zanja Madre, the Queen Angel of Porciuncula, the paved canal shoehorned in line like everything else in this city. Along the industrial banks of Northeast Los Angeles, followed by Կլէնտէյլ and it’s-still Bob Hope’s Airport. Then the Valley Blob starts with Burbank, Van Nuys, Northridge, and Chatsworth treadmilling by.

Stultifying consistency is interrupted by the Santa Susanna outcropping, bending before Spahn Ranch and feeling the subtle grade upwards. There’s a tunnel all of the sudden, which raises a little bubble of curiosity. Like the Gadsden Purchase, it would appear the extra dimension was required to circumvent something or another. Lilac Lane must have housed the managers of the duty-free market town for the intersecting Chumash, Tongva and Tataviam. Or an archaeoastronomy path for the a Burro Flats’ one percent; a lost highway to a Rancho San Francisco cache the King of California never found out about; a checkpoint onto North American Cutoff access road to the Santa Susana Field laboratory, still stung and bruised from a half decade of Cold War mania; a members-only backdoor to the House of the Book; or, more banally, crew access to a patch of derelict oil derricks. Indeed, it’s vortextual, but not without looking up. The old train depot greets you as you blitz out, and the frequency on this side is palpably different, you could guess, as it’s surely been since prehistory.

A gas station attendant across the street from the Ronald Reagan Library once was asked if there was anything else in this town worth seeing. That’s about it, is how they answered. Moorpark was a guinea pig for the Sodium Reactor Experiment while it lasted, and has a nice community college. The State Hospital of Camarillo that Reagan shut down as governor is now a University the locals affectionately refer to as C-Suck-y. ‘Bumming beer’ was a common term teenagers in this area used to refer to the practice of getting mental hospital discharges to buy them alcohol. Tumbleweed was one that comes to mind. Borax another. Mr. Reagan took all the world as his stage, mopping up the Soviet threat, some like to say, providing a magna precedent path to executive offices of the state, all the way to the nation. We toasted him as kids in the neighborhood parks after hours with our 40 bottles, dodging police spotlights. The horizon is aggressive here, the way Orange County wanted it to remain but couldn’t because there wasn’t enough borderland geography to hold off the neighboring juggernaut. Ventura County has erected and successfully maintained walls of open space, El Dorado of the encomienda, rancho, and later of freshwater conservativism.

     Growing Block Universe, Part I

     This is the panhandle. Like Powers of Ten, zoom out from the starting point, and rack back in when the time comes. Six years or so since the last showing, and it’s all cerebral now, approached like an archeology dig, in town only to reexamine some evidence with better lighting. Conservative Missions; oil piers, orchard gardens; SOARS; rum runners; shared trashy white culture of the hill people and their flatlander labor pool; Chumash lands. Literate invaders always go underappreciated, hostility is the shopkeeper’s bell. But, hey, someone’s got to man the ledger, right? Less and less of a lot goes into these trips, with more and more of a little going acknowledged. The only finite resource in life is time, a fining perspective agent capable of clarifying any moment with anyone.

The door opens up to Seaside Park, whose front lot is cluttered with roadshow gear, ATA cases pointing in all directions. Circus tents list suspensefully in Doppler ambiguousness. Momentary tableau focus activates a few roadies, the same way red ants pop up into view on a sandy beach with a good stare. Is this Ozzfest (?), a disembarker behind snarks out as a small file of us gumbies onto the platform. A Styrofoam impression this, overcast sky and dirty pelicans hanging around like the last two people at a party. Driftwood strained from waves by shore. Every tic-tac-toe square foot water logged with the whitewash of a bashful past. You never return to the same place twice, or see the same place the same way twice, if you return properly. Home is where your mom is, unless she moved without telling anyone.

You guys loading in, or out?
In, lilted the carnie, straightening out her tech neck.
Far from her home was the immediate deduction.
Opening tomorrow night? (It was Thursday.)
That’s right, she smiled.
Well, K-B-O, then.
How’s that, then? Her brow furrowed a touch.

The farewell smile kept the stride unbroken. Circus would have been a good birthday plan, if only tonight’s party had been arranged with the slightest bit of effort. Not worth the twilight, mission control, though. The approaching promenade doesn’t feel de facto open. And most of the pier is fenced off. The host at Eric Ericson’s completed the inquiry with a small sense of concern. Out of service since February is the word. Longest wooden pier in all of California was the running proclamation. Many a ‘not presently’ qualified that boast after the perennial storm chewed up or down the coast, nipping off the forward section like a trigger fish does a crab’s leg. Cogent questions usually illicit tension in small and medium-sized towns. But a neutral thank you was given, followed by civil salutations. Six and a half hours here is about how long the fuse runs at these speeds.

Up California Street past Bombay’s, the downtown parking garage--showbox of too many clunky brawls to recall in a single moment of walking--and City Hall of Two Jake’s fame. Memories are as flat as a karaoke penguin’s falsetto. The landscape was saturated monadic deep into adolescence. So much blank ocean to the left, astrological hills to the right, forfeiting an enfilade strip of land to stuff the entire universe into. Between Scylla and the deep blue Charybdis. People behaving poorly throughout, snapshots of which decomposing miasmically with the passage of time. Wild West ethics revving around in cars instead of on horses. Over the hills the wildcats loomed, the ocean whistled abyss.

Downtown Main Street was converted to pedestrian-only, marshal barricades announcing this at the Fir Street intersection. Surely Judas and Brutus held the door open for others, from time to time. The baseball diamond at Lincoln School was built over, classroom bungalows in the field. Administrators there had had enough of mud football, apparently. Vacuous the human frequency this, having conceded the middle ground to their motors’ superior emissions. Cresting the hill at Cemetery Park, pausing for a 360 panorama, pondering to the 3,000 interred: did your descendants get it right? If they’re still here, that is. For some, land isn’t enough and they move on. Dry Spanish stucco elicits a near olfactory parch. Packed with blood and clots, wine and drugs, tears and snot. Long finger nails raking across dry skin, kicking up a desert fire of chalky wake sylph. Mission scars stretched out through adulthood with the accumulation of emotional muscle.

Bootleggers trailed out this town from pier to upriver; the chronological architecture procession on Main Street is frieze documentation. Spaniard tiles and adobe give way to chopped up bungalows, and then to Dingbats with soft stories cropping up east of Cabrillo Middle School. Roads and lots, stables and corrals, reconstituted stone and bitumen, pitch and jet, lime and aggregate, desiccant grid holes, sand-trapping the precious packet of squish we all wake up with. Horror clowns hide out in storm drains, subsisting off of progress report cards from shameful 7th graders. Come to think of it, it should be around here somewhere, most certainly somewhere up Lincoln hill.

The sidewalk narrows, foreshortening the acclivity. Counting steps is too arduous, so one bails into the middle of the drive, just like the 12-year old versions of ourselves did for school, to and fro, against the grade both ways, thank you very much. The residents of this stretch wouldn’t have it any other way. The febrile German shepherd absorbed a two-seamed dirt clod once, attempting to enforce their master’s enclosure policy. The Hill People of this town guard their vistas with simian jealousy, hierophantically. The second most expensive place to live in the country, the oft-relayed apocrypha, like the pier statistic, to which the Mark Twain aphorism can now be applied, with cozy pleasure.

It all looks the same, save for a pretentious palm tree planter in the driveway, and a couple smaller ones by the entrance. Skateboarding kids would have a hard time avoiding these as they practiced on their launch ramp and railslider before the OVS bus collected them across the street at Presbyterian Church. The raw materials of which their dad repurposed from old furniture. The Beach Boys sang “Kokomo” as a consolation. Bags of avocadoes they picked from the grandmother’s backyard sold at the traffic triangle just opposite. So surprised they were at how quickly they sold out at three for a dollar. It quietly sits there, smugly, a cargo vessel of another family’s story. Can’t help but wonder how it looks on the inside, after all these years.

     Lincoln Hill Revisited

     With hand spectated like a Ouija board exercise, the door is rapped. The kismetic opportunity to exercise life’s obverse vector. To the wonder, that life, or this. Reaching maturity in a house like this, surrounded by the same people, shared ideas of spaces and times. The old man racing yachts, working in finance, and tinkering with projects in the garage where the radio announced that Stevie Ray Vaughn had died in a helicopter accident. A business savvy mom who held her breath when she spoke and used her eyes as much as her ears to listen to her children. Her hobbies keeping her busy when the kids were in school or at tennis lessons. Family dinners of lintel soup and carob shakes.

Here he is, a thickly bespectacled man, of boomer age, dressed California-garage formal, opening the door, unyoking his attention from that moment’s immediate project, only snapping eye contact to the present imposition after a few elastic small-town beats.
Yes?
He twitched his head down so as to see over his frames to better feel out the interloper with his eyes. After hearing the request, he then giraffed his neck incredulously through the door, over both shoulders, to make sure it wasn’t a ruse. He got close enough to impel immediate recoil from a stranger’s breath, the way older people often do. His face deflated studiously.
What’s your name?
Surprisingly, he immediately recognized the name given, his eyes narrowing softly.
Let me see if my wife’s okay with it. He nodded as he closed the door.
Her teeth, hair and skin appeared well-financed, accompanied by an overall body structure and gait that implies generational wealth. Her bright and engaging nature seem to emit confidence on her surroundings; the kind of woman one could never find the courage to disrespect in person.
Well, hello there. When did you say you lived here?
He’s ****’s kid, the husband said.
Oh, is that right? Wow, okay. Please come in. Do you mind taking your shoes off?

Still smooth as glass, the hardwoods of the floor. Lightly furnished as it was. Creamy walls and lowered ceilings. Back and down, the corridor tightened by the pucker of time, gallery of Hollywood golden-era movie posters rubbered out. Carpeted much more thickly now, upgraded from the rugburn patches romper-rooming kids always seem to create; even dry it feels slightly moist, like a dish sponge fresh out of its packaging. Pop’s old office would be snuck into and hours spent pouring over Thomas guides of Ventura and Los Angeles counties. Being nerdy had to be done illicitly. Now the woman of the house uses it to patch together Elizabethan costumes. Tetris in the bathroom, as always, a poster of Zappa on a throne of his own looking down on you, impressed with your record (162). At the end fresh is the bay view loss lament, apparently; bitterness passed with ownership. The master bath was expanded to full, requiring some structural upgrading, the couple intoned with deep satisfaction. No more water bed, then, descrambled Mike Tyson fights, Three-Amigos rehearsals, the goofiest of friends tumbling staircase slide side into the pool when an adult crashed the party. Magic Johnson’s HIV announcement holding everyone’s afterschool attention. Where’s the core roller that used to live in this room? Never mind, it’s fine.

The recording studio downstairs is gone, too. Replaced with bedrooms and dens and bathrooms out of a Sears catalog. Does every person remember sticking their finger into an electrical socket as a kid? Maybe just the ones on the hunt for a more universal energy? That was here. Ghostrider, a guitar instrumental favored among the kiddos, got requested most. Here, too. Not a place for real kid play, though, unless it involved an instrument, which it inevitably did, with the native sibling. Jam sessions in the living room for christ’s sake, if downstairs was occupied with higher skill level. A straw man bass player --tall, skinny, older than us, with the invariable scruff chin and crunchy Adam’s apple--identikit Shaggy Dan has to be his name. So many other details besides. All the foregone music. Traded for vinnibags, yachting, an Eritrean exchange student. Thirty years of upper-middle class family tunes in a house on a piece of land, on a hillock. These people cared more for it presence, from the looks of it, wrung raspy of its breath. Ownership sometimes is not worth the treacherous Cop Street contest for occupancy. Materialists will always have a monopoly on the present, but reach out to you for help with all other dimensions. Your time is appreciated.

     Growing Block Universe, Part II

     Exhaling electric exhaust, shoelaces hastily tied, greasing down Encinal, intellectual chloroform. Text message landed and notified. Wet-dog-shake disapproved head at its contents. A proper call will speed this up. Fall into the hmm trap and watch the hummingbird lose a wing, divine where it might crash land. Son et lumière that gobbles up all the surrounding oxygen, starves the horizon breathless. Nevermore. The runtime on this program has been discovered, right-click inspect source. The pulse has been there all along, in plain ole 1’s and 0’s, too pixelated, hitherto though, to decipher up close. It’s a circle, not a cycle, no contour to lean on. Ferris wheel round and around until dizziness wins, or you decide to look away.

The gas station used to be considered town, as in going to town--an expression picked up from a scholastic year at the Ojai Valley School. Candy snacks and a place to hide behind, always needed a place to hide behind as an adolescent. Vacant for years, apparently because the underground tanks leaked into the defenseless supporting soil. Inclination or coercion couldn’t be harnessed to renew the lot for another use. So it sat there like it sits today. Check the cadaster for more details. The road through schools carries on, from the elementary, to the middle, and now towards the high. Small, slow and weird the path chases hinterland. The tone of death in slow motion created by those barely alive.

From here it’s a long walk to the active cemetery, at least an hour. A paddle through bright, bitter simple syrup. Stretch along a numb landscape pock marked with rotting cavities jeering silently for combustion. Nowhere else is the void so fierce, hungry for every ounce of recognizable zips of time and dollops of space. Hungry for your siblings, too, like Audrey number five. Trekking through tall blades of fescue limping from the weight of clumsy locusts singing off-key and out of sync. In the parking lot of Spudnuts detectives on their lunch break spot a couple high school kids jumping on another and spring into action, guns drawn. Seaward. In the alley behind Yolanda’s a best friend of twenty years is stabbed in the right tricep with a gruesomely-serrated SpiderCo knife, all over a game of pool. Borchard. The underside of East Main, sketches of skunky motels. A man drags a woman with his car, nonchalantly, until the pitch of her scream satisfies him and she’s flicked loose; the kids skipping school behind Loops Diner observe one morning, stoned enough to think that it’s normal, amusing even. Lemon Grove. At Mills and Main another kid runs across the intersection to a car parked at the AMPM, reaches in and stabs the passenger in the hand with a ColdSteel; he was aiming for his chest. No discernible reason for any of it, just an account: minds concentrate or fight. A Mexican kid with a shaved head screams white power at a Mexican man with a full head of hair. Et Cetera. Hostility from either side of the cordon, angry constituents needing a power point to plug into. The lens grows longer with age, as does the silliness of all these vignettes. Hometown as a lifelong moral hangover.

A place where intelligence goes to be racked, drawn and quartered in Boeotian ocean street arenas. So one must slip in and out undetected, like a commando tip-toeing through a minefield of napping mad dogs. Memories here are long and shallow like whitewash. Skip like a smooth stone over a small pond with apostolic discipline and citric reflexes. Faces bobble around like string-less balloons, locking into synchronized attention if Rothko-like eye throb is offered. Euclid over Gaussian space; one gravity for all. Stick-figure logic triangulates free-body nose bow and the free body enjoys a break from that compound dimension, at least until Chick-Fil-a. The opposite of downtown Main, pedestrians are very much so here, sidewalks falling off into empty lots, another open field with no issue but through iceplants and tumbleweeds and angst. Down a feeder zoom road, next to a bigger, barriered zoom-zoom rink. Fabled and warbled by America. The aspect of which one could never abide. Walk in the west, young man, leave the keys in the river and the cars neutralized up to the Montalvo Cutoff.

A theatre turntable set scratching and mixing perpetually with any location of any piece flying around like staff notes. It’s never right there, even when it is. A new tree, a new memorial statue of some kind, a bench: certainly an addition since the last visit. Perhaps the vertigo is just emotional cover, a priming device. Like the slow-growing trees of the park’s shelterbelt just opposite. Still, the irreverent, attacking sounds of velocity and polymer static friction sheer through. Slightly awkward, disrespectful and uncivilized, a sustaining tone for the locals, Sisyphean for minds that see it. In the end, though, it’s always found, sometimes with a little direction. And a shaky peace renewed. Iphigenian peace. On the way out one of the groundskeepers mindlessly drives over headstones in his maintenance cart.

Stiffened by the experience, slunk back beachward, shadowed by a self-eclipsing light as it gathers enough speed for the slowdive circadia off The Point, witness the draining of the city’s moral reservoir in real time. Twilight occidental flatlands, juicy virtues defenseless before the expanding grayscale formaldehyde. To the manor born, all the wimps caught after sundown. Time is the blood these vampires pursue. Not the message the bright holds but the obtuse core of it. Block stomps then, backtrack smoothly cruise down the Potemkin high street. The package needs its bow, the decoy phone call its ring. ISO dialing up like barometric pressure, Here they come…duh-dun, duh-dun, duh-dun, de-dun, de-dun…duh-dun, duh-dun…

The crusty, purulent vein, Thompson Boulevard, Cain to Main’s Abel, the Land of Nod. Milestone path of millstones. A fitting place to celebrate one. The box is ribboned up; the ruse call a success. Quorum remiss, however. Just the sibling guys and jelly eyes. Long table of Arthurian heft with the chairs to match--so severely vertical and solid they suborn postures into dead-weight spinal compression. Throughout the next hour and a half everyone more than once visibly springs in and out of this preoccupation, a subtle duck feather adjustment snuck into clausal pauses. It’s a Californio Cantina, so the refried beans are rich with lard, the floor cold and mop slick with terra cotta tile. Such long wavelengths, it’s hard to slow down to keep up. All are authentically surprised at the newest arrival, expected to be the guest of honor, who’s running late. At the tire shop getting a nail pulled, there shortly.

In the meantime Mme. Cronemo appears with an erst-way-while coworker, whose silent anticipatory beat paired with fluorescent nerve marbles upon reintroduction conveys that craving for drama so common among Amerigo’s people. Of course one remembers, but the quality of the past has evolved, so to speak. There will be no OMGs. She would spend fifteen minutes sniffing out a lighter that somehow found its way under the table, escalating its retrieval to a group problem. No matter, Mr. Obbligato coasts in with autopilot insouciance, unguarded, scanner off, the table’s focus swinging elliptically in his direction. A steady appearance at this age, year-on-year, is the interest accrued on banking a healthy lifestyle from early on. Take note: this is what a vegetarian beefheart looks like at 70. Well done, sir. He was genuinely jigged; a reactive expression holds any situation’s maximum store of truth. The high cheek bones splay towards the ears; the brow nudges toward the crown of the nose; the whites of the eyeballs froth a bit. The occasion begins in accelerated earnest, staccato player piano on intervalometer tempo.

Is this Samarra or Baghdad? Reducing it to a vector problem helps. It’s the center of the earth for us all, where the moving image of eternity churns pre-binary, inevitably. A family reunion can be thought of as a preview of that appointment, similar to the aforementioned marketplace hazard. A warmup for the grandest of sensory experiences, just imagine remembering your own birth. But try communicating that to a table who thinks advocating for D.C. statehood is a high-brow position to hold, or so the momentary record-skip hush would suggest. The message will be forwarded, Mr. Obbligato, post haste, and your contribution recorded, but for now let’s have some cake and open a present or two. There’s a train to catch, and if history serves, parties always degenerate the moment there’s a collective what’s next. Twenty-two years ago this restaurant was the last meal before hitting the road to a history-terminating future; history is no match for the present now, and all that pent up nostalgia for what’s to come. Bye-bye genepolitism. Bye-bye atavistic metro-myopia. Bon courage.