Home on the Grave

(Image from Santa Clarita realtor Anna Riggs)

A green plexiglas half wall stands three feet behind the B of A ATM at Magnolia and Laurel Canyon, forming a little alcove of privacy and shade. After my first time using it, looking down at my receipt while turning around, I walk directly into the wall. Shaking my head, I curve around to the sidewalk. Two guys in a moving van are laughing and pointing at me. "Hey buddy, watch out!" I give them an embarrassed smile and walk on.

The poison of stigmatization seeps into the skin with prickly irritation pushing us to normality. In L.A. the normal don't ride the bus.

David Zahniser of the L.A. weekly reveals the absurdity of MTA self promotion by expressing the Angelenos revulsion toward a bus rider's daily indignities--turtle speed service, blaring infomercials, the odor of passengers who haven't bathed for months--which haunt the journey through angel city grime.

A nondescript corner in North Hills now sours your vision with the image of an anxious one hour wait on the way to a nursery for orchid food, trying to sustain a strange house warming gift for the horticulturally insecure.

Visceral annoyance at dysfunction brought by the swarming infestation of urbanity propels flight to spacious Castaic homes on cul-de-sacs filled with miniature basketball hoops and battery powered Barbie Jeeps, where domestic joy conceals a landscape of blight. A recent Audubon Society survey found California bird populations decimated by loss of habitat, some species declining 80 percent over the past forty years.

Forty-four years ago Hitchock told a story of nature's apocalyptic revenge. Bird beaks peck out eyes blinded by the quiet.