Life Without A Car

So I don't drive, which is one of those things that's under review, and, really, if I weren't so lazy I might decide to get a car, but I am lazy, and people have been really nice about giving me rides, and I like sitting on the bus in the morning so much and getting that extra five seconds of brain-deadness and listening to Neil Diamond tell me that the time have never been so good, and so I don't drive.

Now, obviously, there are a lot of trade-offs that you make in deciding not to drive. And some of them strike me as totally fair. It takes me longer to get places. I'm more dependent on other people. I have to put up with the other people on the bus. Sometimes I have to pay for a taxi. My life involves a certain amount of waiting around. I walk places that are a little farther to walk than is really comfortable. Sometimes I carry groceries back home. Etc.

Those are the imperfections of life and I am willing to put up with them graciously. But the other day I found myself faced with a different kind of situation. I had to go into a setting where I was not allowed to carry my cellphone with me. Also, they refused to hold my cellphone behind the desk. Sorry, they said, you have to keep it in your car.

But, I said, I don't have a car. What can I do? They said, well, then you can't take your cellphone with you.

And if there is one thing that the functioning non-driving life requires, it is the cellphone. The cellphone allows you to summon a taxi, to call for help, to extricate yourself from unpleasant situations. I got kind of pissed off, actually, thinking about it. It is not really an issue, or it is one, at least, that I can work around. But there's something about the fact that non-drivers don't just have to deal with the issue of carlessness on the transportation front, but that they have to deal with it on the lack of portable storage front, that drove me nuts, made me feel like a person without status.

I Do Not Live At The Center Of The World

A fact which I guess is even more true now that I live in Bakersfield rather than L.A.

Let us contemplate, for a moment, the fact that when one looks up basketball schedules on the L.A. Times website (that would be the Los Angeles paper, if you're curious), they give you the game times in Eastern Time.

This is probably actually because the L.A. Times just puts in some schedule-generated somewhere else, and Eastern Time is the national default for tv schedules, and so that's the way it is. Still, there's something eerie about watching a Los Angeles based paper print the times of its own home team according to the time of some other locale entirely.

It reminds me of the sense I had, growing up, that Los Angeles was not really a part of the national consciousness. Which may seem ridiculous, given the entertainment industry and all, but that wasn't the L.A. I lived. A lot of the people I went to high school with, I guess, had parents who made their livings off such mysterious things as residuals but up until that point I didn't really know anybody in L.A. who was involved in all that.

The more I think about it, the more ridiculous it seems that I would try to make that claim, that L.A. wasn't part of the national consciousness. We had the Lakers and City of Quartz and the riots and Joan Didion brooding about fires and flooding and water rights. We had L.A. Gear and, for a while, both the Raiders and the Rams, and the big one was coming one of these days.

So maybe my sense of the dominance of the East Coast was more a matter of the knee-jerk sense that a place you love is, however much consideration it actually gets, under-appreciated, the impulse that drives people to write passionate letters in defense of Kobe Bryant.

But I will tell you this. When I lived in Los Angeles, not so very long ago, half the people I knew had grown up there, gone away, returned. And yet, talking to strangers who weren't from there, when I said I was they would say, "Oh, that's so unusual," suffering from the widespread rumor that Los Angeles is a city of dreamers, of kids from Nebraska looking to make it big.

Whereas, I guess what I'm saying is that in some ways Los Angeles is just a city, a big city, a city that deserves to have its hometown paper print the tv schedules in accordance with the time zone in which it actually exists.

Power, Glory

It's goddamn weird, getting old. Maybe you, maybe your friends, start becoming respectable citizens, vested with authority and power. You become, to whatever limited extent, bosses, charged with the judging of others.

This made me think of this just now.

Most of the people I like talk a lot of trash. Are prepared to exercise judgment on the question of lime green leggings, too-short skirts, general capacity to irritate.

Now a bunch of them are trash-talkers with power. If they see somebody doing a crummy job they have the option of doing something about it. Depending on your attitude towards organizational loyalty, you could argue that they have the obligation to do something about it. Bad apples rotting the barrel, loose nails losing battles, whatever.

It's not a bad thing. They're not exercising that power on the basis of lime green leggings. Somebody has to be the decider.

It gives me vertigo. It makes me queasy. Some of that's my own childishness and irresponsibility. Some of that's my utopian dream of a world in which we're all naturally good and nobody is given any power at all over anybody else and all decisions are made by consensus. But there's something about the act of exercising power that freaks me out too.

When I have power, I don't just use it. I don't say, "Look, I have this power over you. I want you to do this for me and I will exercise my power to the degree I can to make it happen."

No. I think, "Want what I want. I should not have to exercise my power to make this happen. It is a sign of lack of grace in you that you don't understand that."

Which strikes me as grotesque.

I don't know.