It took me quite some time to clean all the smoke and ash that had drifted from Altadena into my bathroom and other slightly moist areas of the apartment. It is a little odd to think that someone's house was now sprinkled on my windowsills, or that a tiny bit of Madlib's personal record collection could now be coating the inside crevices of my lungs, waiting dormant for a few decades before deciding to smite me with a nice tumor.
I stopped my tutoring gigs for a couple of months due to all of the evacuations and other disturbances. We've since resumed, but I am no longer allowed to engage in my post-tutoring hobby of driving down to PCH, turning up towards Malibu, and taking Sunset all the way home. For some reason the National Guard is not comfortable with people driving 2008 Nissan Altima Coupes at 10PM through the evacuation zones. It's too bad, because nothing beats playing Roadhouse Blues as you approach the fun long part of PCH that curves off towards the west, with the mansion lights twinkling on the right and the black blot of the ocean on the left.
The main reason I would play The Doors so often in the car was due to a convenient market that opened up in 2023. Ruben was studying abroad in Spain, needed some cash, and had no use for his old car. I was starting my MS, figured that I should finally learn to drive, and had some internship money burning a hole in my pocket. The one obstacle to closing this transaction was the fact that Ruben was already in Spain by the time I returned to L.A. Thankfully, Ruben's very business-savvy mom was willing to complete the physical exchange, and I got to feel very cool handing her a fat envelope of cash in her dining room.
Their house is in the back of a dusty courtyard in one of the dozens of inner-ring Latino suburbs of LA, with several other family members and unrelated renters living in the various adjacent units. I think Ruben's mom owns the entire complex, which was fun because it made me feel like I was getting some special deal from a powerful business person or mafia member. She spent a considerable amount of energy prepping the car for sale, but didn't remove the collection of CDs that Ruben left in the 6-disk audio system. Morrison Hotel was housed in Disk 1. Thus, my longer commutes tend to start with Roadhouse Blues.
I will not disagree with the common sentiment that driving in Los Angeles in the daytime is a grueling and generally unpleasant experience. I'm lucky enough that I don't have much reason to be driving around the area during the middle of the weekdays. I lived in walking distance to campus during the first year of the MS program and mostly only drove to friends and family outside of LA at night. This year I mostly commute on the bus.
However, driving at night, gives me a sense of the vision the last generation had for what an automobile experience should be in Los Angeles. The roads are empty enough that you can drive at (or above...) the speed limit, and the vast expanses of the LA basin become immediately more accessible and interesting. It makes it a bit easier to be spontaneous: getting Carnitas Michoacan at midnight or some coffee from Canter's at one, perhaps swinging by a warehouse rave at two and heading back to Hollywood by five A.M. Not in the same night, of course.
The ability to explore local sites on a whim with less worry about managing the mental overhead of not crashing this physical piece of metal into a much more expensive piece of metal was one of the reasons I generally enjoyed New York a bit more than Los Angeles in years past, but driving late at night re-captures some of that levity. Listening to Queen of the Highway with the windows down, feeling the moist marine layer roll over the hills, you can feel the presence of time and places and people that no longer exist here. Rolling around the moldy Westwood apartments, Ruben and I would imagine the creative chaos that Jim Morrison or Ray Manzarek instigated along the same streets. The comparisons really end there, since I don't think either of them spent as much time matching Lisp parentheses as we did at the same age.
Driving down to Irvine to see Katie after 10 P.M. was just as exciting. Going past LAX, you get feel for what should have been the ideal American post-war suburban design. Miles upon miles of identical homes with pretty lawns, wide roads, cozy drive-thrus. The oil refinery is more exciting to me than the big castle at Disneyland. When you finally cross the San Diego Creek and the estuary wetlands of Newport Bay, two things hit: The most modern, car-adapted-pedestrian-hostile experience in California, and the smell of sagebrush and riparian shrubs and trees that trigger some ancient memory of what this land looked like when it was mostly peopled by Tongva and Acjachemen folks. As you pass over the old arroyos (now chanellized), you get hit with bursts of cold air, like ghosts that only come out at night.
"Words... Words are very... good." -- Omar Velasco paraphrasing Maya Angelou on the Omar y Argelia radio show, circa 2016.
I've decided to pull the trigger and actually begin publishing some of my writing on my personal site. I'm mostly inspired by my good friend Tim's inactive blog, which I suspect was at least partly inspired by the venerable NYCB blog and its musings of dot-com era undergraduate life in the UCLA Computer Science department.
The greatest source of impedance to the creation of this site was my recurring decision paralysis. I contemplated using one of various blog platforms, but decided to start off with a static HTML version. I might write a simple script to set up RSS syndication, but that's not too important to me right now.
Regarding my current state: I finished up a very fun internship in the Bay Area (thanks Tim for letting me live on your floor for three months), visited family in Central America for the first time, had my longest non-work non-school break of the past five years, partied with my cousins almost every weekend between Thanksgiving and the new year, and moved back to LA to finish up my MS. About two days after I moved in began the terrible winds and fires in Pacific Palisades and Altadena.
The particulate matter during a wildfire, combined with extremely low humidity, results in a lighting and air condition that is very unsettling. Sometime around 2018 I wrote a poem describing my emotional response to these conditions after the extensive fires of the previous two years. I cannot find it now, and I definitely would not post it until after the fires are contained.