Los Angeles Is The Twilight Zone

Cars in LA make lefts on reds.

Like a sprinkler system, the rain lasts for a few hours then disappears.

Time is just something on a calendar.

I live by the Grove mall and it reminds me of Disneyland (Full disclosure: I haven’t been to a Disney owned Amusement Park).  There is no roof.  No long many paneled skylight. I’m always confused to whether or not I can smoke (I lean towards no).  Malls in L.A.  feel like they were designed by Michael Bay: great display, but generally disappointing merchandise selection. 

Coming from the land of weather, Massachusetts, I am deeply disturbed by never being inconvenienced by nature. My clothes are always dry, and my pant legs don’t gather layers of ground rock salt. My nonexistent oil bill makes the end of the month empty. The pools never close.  No traumatic experience, which is the annual pool opening when children fall into the sludge of decaying leaves, frogs, and mice while being yelled at. This is no land for childhood: no rainy days trapped with a bookshelf. No awakenings to the cold red of the rising sun off the snow covered roofs on the day after New Year’s Day.

It is a city where one was born leagues away or one has never left the county line. In many ways even the flora is just as transient as the population.  The imported palms dot the landscape: alien biology.  New measures, in an attempt to save the natural Californian ecosystem, prevent the planning of new palms.  The invasion will be repelled.

The streets are clean, but the city succumbs daily to decay.  Not the bad kind of rotting, but a stylized urban crumble. I believe the desert location to be to blame. No one feels the passage of time and the desert air preserves the mid-nineties through mummification.  The old motels with aged neon filled with “One Days”, people who will be possibly.  The strip malls without Starbucks.  The street meat cooked in tin foil covered shopping carts.  It is a beautiful place with dollar tacos, not from Taco Bell.

The only problem is no one lives here. Mostly people are driving on the freeway to somewhere or coming back.  I keep to my side streets and stop signs.  There is no where I need to be that requires traffic. It’s hard not to pull over and lay on the grass for the day.  I think that is why my car doors lock automatically.

I would write more, but someone has to be on the roof for sunset.