drowned decadence

New Orleans is under water. For a city whose identity is so closely tied to its architecture, I imagine this is a tragedy.

I have images, now immortalized figments of what the city was and may never be again. Glimpses of a time when the only moisture was the choking humidity. Perhaps the last time the only people floating were those too drunk to walk normally down the French Quarter's devilish artery, Bourbon Street.

Annie Liebovitz photographed a landmark there called the Preservation Hall. I stood within the crackling, roach-travelled walls there and listened to the best jazz I've ever heard in my life. Now I suppose all that's left is the crumbling shell of a place once thriving in the glow of a million musical notes, a million beads of sweat, a million souls crashing together for the appreciation of preserving jazz the way it used to be.

And now jazz isn't the only thing needing to be preserved. So I'll do my paltry best, and offer up a few preserved moments of my own.

..........

This is where the day begins.

This week has been a dream.

I’ve been present in it, but not engaged. I’ve passed through interactions with the transient flutter of a ghost, allowing my eyes to become empty pools of apathy whenever pressed with an interaction I’d rather not have.

Today I get my car fixed. I am sitting (floating) in a stiff leather chair at the Volvo dealership in Orange County (a marked step up, admittedly, from the Volvo dealership in Covina). There is paperwork. There are details. There is insignificant chatter. There is ambient light and noise and A/C. At the next desk over, I hear Troy (Employee of the Year and recipient of an award for Excellent Service in the form of a plaque on his desk) chattering with a customer.

“My desk is the only one between the front desk and the garage.” He makes a sweeping motion with his hands I can only imagine represents the rushing whir of bodies making their way from point A to point B. “…So my desk becomes a catch-all. People just set their stuff here, but…”

Troy is rummaging. He is looking for a pen. He is getting frustrated, though not visibly.

“…in the process, they take all my pens. A good salesman always has a pen, I always say. It’s a tool of the trade.” He insists, finding a pen (although not as good as the one with the brushed steel casing he misplaced). The customer is nodding. Troy is scribbling things onto a pad of paper. Ambient light and ambient noise distract me and I drift to another place. I now wonder if someone collected all the insignificant chatter, all the small talk, all the space-filler verbage and assigned to it some sort of value (monetary or otherwise), what would we have?

If all the mindless prattle could be collected and assigned a chronological space within a day, how much time would it take? Would time still tick with the same regularity? Or would other events—some significant, others silent and unassuming—span great lengths of time, so that a day would look like something rather different in the end?

My days are spent living in this syncopated rhythm more often than not. Douglas Coupland writes about a day being an entire lifetime. “The whole world and an entire life in a day,” he muses. I think if that were the case, time would look very different. I could spend an entire lifetime in one passing instant—a moment which, in real-world time was only five minutes, or five seconds.

..........

I am in Northern California, in a town where cementeculture has yet to arrive. In this town, directions are not given based on the right-left-right grid of cross-streets and boulevards. Instead, directions are a sense of sight unto themselves: Take Hwy 90 until you pass Happy Apple Orchard, then the road will curve and wind for about three miles. At the bottom of the hill, go to the second stop sign, past the post office, and turn right over the railroad tracks…and so on.

Currently we are on a path from point A to point B, but at this moment, time spreads out before us, its brevity only measured by the way the sun collides with the car. We are threading noiselessly through the vertical flurry of pine trees whose branches are punctuated by the beams of late afternoon sunlight. If color were something you could taste, the color of our skin, the color of the sky and the car and the road would be honey. Thick, sticky, amber. We were caught in a black hole, where time ceased to exist.

This is where the day begins. Civilization ends, memory of a former life is cemented in our heads, becoming irrelevant. If life and an entire lifetime could be measured in one single day, this day would be it. In place of insignificant chatter, there was silence. In place of time, there was only the sun, only motion, inertia, light and shadow pulsing through our brains. Leaves and pine needles blurry and whirring, the road an endless ribbon unraveling under the tread of old tires. An entire day and an entire lifetime measured in one single passing moment.



As for me
I could leave the world
with today
in my eyes.
—Truman Capote

22, young and (un)afraid

Welcome to the motherland. California opens her wearied welcoming arms, O Traveler. Allow yourself to be embraced and feel the warmth of that famed honey pacific sun. California's siren call beckons you to relieve your cares and throw your caution to the wind.

In Los Angeles, the sprinklers don’t water the grass. Whether this is a crucial miscalculation by sprinkler-head manufacturers or simply a fluke—a glitch in the systemized grid of Los Angeles proper—is not presently known. It is widely believed that many years ago, sprinklers did, in fact, water the grass for which they were so lovingly created. However, due to extenuating circumstances, the sprinklers also watered the concrete.

Because of this, the concrete grew and grew until it gobbled up almost everything. In the plant kingdom, there are certain weeds known to do the very same thing. And just like horticulture, there are many different species of concrete, different varietals for diverse landscapes, and so on.

Luckily, Californians didn’t seem to mind this.

They simply cultivated the crops of concrete by using special machines to plow over the rolling hills of concrete farmland. But the sprinklers just kept on watering, sputtering mouthfuls of water onto the calloused ground day after day until all grass and horticulture ceased to exist in its natural state. Never fearing the phenomenon before them, Los Angeles farmers and scientists (being the fearless opportunists that they are) snatched up the occasion to create a new kind of culture: Cementeculture.

Now instead of fretting about the loss of horticulture, farmers and scientists were able to frenetically dump their energy into cementeculture, and thus new crops of concrete sprang up almost every day. Sprinkling systems squirted and gargled as streams of water marched sinuously into the cracks and crevices on the ground below and the concrete just kept growing.

Subsequently, water had nowhere to go. Neither did smog, nor thoughts, nor ideas. The influx of farmers who moved to Los Angeles to cultivate their own concrete crops caused the fields to thunder with the steps of its overweight masses, bouncing thoughts and ideas back and forth like a spilled sack of marbles.

Seeing the churning sea of concrete around them made the farmers nervous. The long-extinct horticulture boasted one thing that cementeculture couldn’t: trees. So the nervous farmers and the opportunistic scientists put their heads together and delved into their past to uncover a solution: palm trees.

Palm trees were special because instead of growing outward and crowding the ideas and thoughts and smog and concrete, palm trees grew straight up, up, up into the sky. The farmers and the scientists were thrilled to learn that palm trees don’t use ideas or concrete for energy, either, thus preserving the surplus of both. Instead, palm trees munch on sunlight and the shimmering beams from helicopters, and keep on growing into the heavens.

Down below, these special trees didn’t grow roots the way the extinct trees used to; they grew pots. Nice, bulbous ceramic pots that encompassed their bases and allowed them to shiver decadently in the breeze while sipping their sun smoothie.

This tickled the farmers to death, and sent the scientists into a tizzy, and so cementeculture was cemented as a valid and tantalizing way of life. Now special machines called cars could devour the ground and sail from one piece of farmland to another. To make it easier for the cars to find their way from place to place, developers created healthy arteries of special concrete that pulsed through the outskirts and the centers of the busiest concrete farms, connecting them all.

Sometimes an artery would become clogged with all the machinery flowing through it constantly. These arteries would burst every day around 5:00pm from all the hustle and bustle. The developers thought it decent to at least number these arteries so motorists could identify their whereabouts while they were dashing from one farm to another. For example, a gaping wound called the 210 is sutured by cross streets named after extinct horticultural legends like citrus and fruit.

And so the people of Los Angeles came to be. Now they coexist peacefully by buzzing from artery to artery, without ever touching (unless they crash into one another by accident, which they sometimes do); feeding off the floating ideas and thoughts that have risen from the ground. All the while, sprinklers gurgle and spit and toss more ideas into the atmosphere and grow more concrete.