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.

Walking In L.A.

There's something a little bit perverse about saying that I really like walking around L.A. L.A. is a famously bad city for walking in; there are songs about it and everything.

But I do. Tonight I was en route to the convenience store (when in doubt, go to the convenience store) and I stepped out into the courtyard and the rain was bouncing off the surface of the lit-up swimming pool and I decided to walk around first.

I don't walk around my neighborhood that much. I've only lived here for a year and some change, and it still can feel a little bit foreign and therefore menacing to me, and so when I walk for comfort, which I often do, I go back to my old neighborhood. And when I walk for natural beauty and a sense of accomplishment, I also don't usually stay in this neighborhood, because the natural beauty portions of it are heavily trafficked and frighten me with their cultural currency.

But really, when you just want to walk, it's always best to do it in your neighborhood. Then you know you can turn around and go home when you get tired or bored, and it gives you a satisfying sense that you know what the space you live in looks like, and there's just generally something intimate about it.

Some people like to walk by shops, and some people like to walk by landmarks, but really, when it comes down to it, for this kind of casual walk I like best to walk by houses that I don't know that are all lit up inside and try to imagine what kind of lives those people lead and feel a vague sense of envy and estrangement but also coziness. That's the killer combination: simultaneous attachment and detachment.

It was raining a little bit, and there were some puddles on the sidewalk and wet leaves and not too many cars out and people were lighting their fires and the wood was smoky and some Christmas lights were out and it was, really, all pretty satisfactory.

Behind Closed Doors

A couple years ago the Los Angeles Times had an article in its magazine section about how more and more self-centered Angeleno types were planting un-see-through-able shrubs around their houses, presumably to facilitate nude sunbathing or front-yard drug use. And the Times writer, as best I can recall, took the position that this was a bad thing, that this would tear down the fabric of street life and make us all strangers to each other.

(I think this is the article. This is along the same lines.)

I think about that article a lot, late at night when I'm walking through the streets of Los Angeles. Mostly, it kind of bothers me.

I hate that "it's the end of the world" attitude among Los Angeles architectural critics. They have in their heads, I think, some kind of monster created by the spawn of the Utne Reader and Sunset magazine, and when the city strays from that dual image and its pitchers of mojitos on the front porch of a green communal compound in the hills, they think it's all going to hell.

It's the kind of thing that it's easy to think here. Los Angeles is a weirdo city, giving the illusion of space and sun enough for all your most benign dreams. Buy property at the right moment and before you know it you're a guerilla filmmaker with a vintage car.

But at the end of the day it's just a city, and some of us wind up in the hills in our compounds and some of us wind up in the flatlands, and we're all happy and unhappy in our various ways and while I am a firm believer in the idea that architecture and space can affect your mood I don't want to take that too far.

I also kind of feel that these people are barking up the wrong tree. If the hedges make you feel so closed off in your own neighborhood, there are always shopping centers and carparks. There's the bus if you want to look your co-residents square in the face. Who doesn't dream off a life of porches and neighborhood gossip -- but it's not always available, like so many things that we dream of.

And then, finally, last but not least, I like walking through the city streets lined with hedges. You try to peer through; it feels menacing and glamorous; you don't know what's happening back there; you never will.

I Am A Klutz

Last night I was walking idly around my apartment chatting on the phone and I looked down and noticed that my toe was bleeding. Kind of a lot.

I have no idea how that happened.

It did not startle me, particularly, because I am not a graceful person and am used to banging into things. When I was a child I would come back from every excursion dirtier than the children around me. Today there are relatively few occasions for getting covered in dirt, but I pick up stray bruises. I bump my head on things. I bang my elbow against walls. I trip, a little bit, walking down the street.

I am self-conscious about it. The ability to move smoothly through space seems like a desirable human attribute.
On the other hand, if it really mattered to me I could probably fix it. Be one of those people who takes up fencing or ballet late in life. Only some of my clumsiness is innate. Enough to keep me out of contention in competitive sporting events, but probably not enough to make me fall on my face.

The rest is lack of attention. I don't think about those things. I think about things that I'm good at, like smoking or sleeping. And lost in that haze, I knock over my coffee cup, and curse.


In some ways I wish it weren't fixable, that I could say, "well, I'm left-handed," or "I lacked proper training as a child." There seems something strange about deciding that I admire gracefulness in other people, think it a good thing in the abstract, but refuse, in the particular, to take the steps needed for me to obtain it.

Another Burst Of Nostalgia From Captain Colossal

To this day, when, in a fit of panic or bonhomie or sheer sentimentality, I am trying to convince someone that I am cooler than I seem, I mention my semester abroad in Berlin.

I was pretty broke in Berlin. I'm not exactly sure why; I was well-funded by my family and I paid maybe 220 DM (a now defunct currency) a month for my one bedroom apartment. That comes out to somewhere a little above $100, is my recollection. The apartment had unfinished wood floorboards, a plug-in shower, coal ovens for heating. The guy I was subletting from left me some coal, also a space heater because I worried I would asphyxiate myself with the coal. A friend christened it the Commie Hut.

I don't know how to describe Berlin, or the Berlin I lived in. In many ways, it's more like Los Angeles than any other city I know, or it was then. I lived in Friedrichshain (10 Samariter Str.). Around me were those tiled buildings put up during the communist years; they were always dropping their tiles. Everything was either very new or a little seedy in an inoffensive way. The streets around my house were full of dog shit; there was more dogshit per square foot than anywhere else I've ever seen. In my recollection there weren't that many people on the street; I don't think that's correct.

I locked myself out of my apartment once. In the end, after being plied by my bathrobe clad next-door neighbor with liquor and cigarettes (Gitanes) and coffee I made my way in by climbing over the wall separating our shared balcony and kicking in the french door that led to my bedroom. Before that, the guy working at the restaurant downstairs told me he didn't know how to get in touch with the landlord, but (after some discussion in a language I didn't know) told me I could move in with the guy at the end of the bar.

I slept on a filthy futon on the floor. I had one bowl, one plate, one fork, etc. Cigarettes were cheap in those days. I didn't have a drug habit. And yet I was always broke.

Because the thing was, I longed and longed for bourgeois comfort. Not instead of, just in addition to. I was going to school at the Humboldt. It was also in former East Berlin, but in Mitte. Mitte, I think, was refurbished in an antique private train-car kind of way. One of my classes was near this place called Hackescher Hof. Hackescher Hof served fresh-squeezed orange juice with its continental breakfast.

One of the things I could never adjust to in Germany, even in Berlin, was the generalized discomfort. I had never realized until then the extent to which my country prized comfort. If a capitalist good can be made more comfortable, more pleasant, the United States will spare no effort to make it so. I didn't know how admirable this was until I got to Germany. There was very little fresh-squeezed orange juice in Germany.

I spent my money on orange juice and opera tickets and the complete works of Heinrich Heine. I bought a fake gilt mirror for the Commie Hut. I didn't take any pictures. I took the longest tram ride imaginable out to the planetarium to see Jackie Brown undubbed. I went down to a gentrified district I can no longer remember the name of and got tuna rolls to go and walked along the banks of the Spree Canal and imagined what it would be like to have an enormous apartment with a balcony. I was obsessed with milch-kaffee and marzipan rolls coated with chocolate.

I don't know. It all seems like a pretty standard response to ego-depletion, in retrospect.

I was wandering around Hollywood this morning, thinking about ego depletion, eating a breakfast burrito, letting my neighbor, of whom I am fond, take my picture for a t-shirt he's making for his Landmark Forum course, and somehow it made all that come back to me.

The Street Where I Lived

I found myself back in my old neighborhood today.

Since I live in the same city I grew up in, this is not a particularly unusual state of affairs. Also my old neighborhood has become one of the places where people like me tend to live in Los Angeles. East Coast types have been known to describe it as reminiscent of New York. They are out of their fucking minds, because it is nothing like New York.

That's not really the point, except to say that as often as I go there, and as many people as I know that live around there in their normal adult lives, I still, usually, get some kind of charge out of being in the place where I grew up.

I don't know how to describe the charge. Some of it is just me being annoying -- I'm hanging around with you and we're going to some bar there and I have to tell you the first time I went there and the first time I saw that building and I tend to say it in a way that suggests that I think I have some kind of superior claim on this bar and this building even though you're the one that goes there every week. Like that.

We're not just dealing with my need for self-branding, though. Tonight I was walking down Talmadge. It was dusk and there were clouds and I remembered roller-skating down that street circa age 11 and I remembered stopping at the mildly sinister convenience store to be bought Martinelli's apple juice in the apple shaped container by my folks (for whom such food counted as decadence). The convenience store isn't there anymore, but there was something about remembering a time before you knew the probabilities of life, a time where you could make up stories about the various buildings and for all you know they're true. Also just the layer upon layer of time spent on that street, fugitive memories of a party in one of those houses, or maybe a nightmare about one of those houses. The past, a little out of reach.

I listen to a certain amount of sappy country music. Kenny Chesney has this song called Back Where I Come From that's all about growing up in the country and how he's proud of it. It's a little stranger to have grown up some place that lots of people come, that's a big city designed to be legible to outsiders, and yet to want to stake that mine, all mine, kind of claim to the place.

Choose Your Own Adventure: You Find A Skeleton In The Woods

Today, in the spirit of not smoking, I went for a walk. Although I refuse, as a matter of principle, to call my walks anything other than walks, this was a walk that could maybe have merited a more grandiose terminology. Maybe it rose to the level of a hike. The scratches on my arm and my stomach, and the poison oak that will emerge in a week, certainly suggest as much.

Anyway, somewhere in the middle of this walk, before I found myself dangling from a tree branch and screaming like a small child (I was maybe a foot and a half away from the bottom at that point, lest you imagine me in actual physical danger) I found a skeleton. A vertebrae. I actually found myself trying to pick it up, at which point the bottom half fell off. It was only a little bit later (after the dangling from the branch) that I found myself contemplating the hygiene implications of picking up the skeleton (it had to have died of something, right?).

I have no idea what kind of skeleton it was. Probably not human. (I didn't find the whole thing, only the vertebrae.) Anyway, I don't know what the protocol is for skeletons found in the woods. Are you supposed to report them? What if it was human? Etc.

This happens to me a lot -- I never know how interventionist to be. By nature, I'm pretty anti-interventionist. If I'm crying on the bus, I want to be left alone, etc. So when I hear shrieking coming from a neighboring apartment building I assume it's kids playing or something similarly innocuous. But then you read the stories about the woman killed in full view of her neighbors and editorialists writing about how come nobody did anything and then you worry that maybe you should become one of those people who asks people if they're all right and calls the police and steps into conversations. I don't know.