Slow-churned

The Next Village
My grandfather used to say: "Life is astonishingly short. Now, in my memory, it is so compressed that I can hardly understand, for example, how a young person can decide to ride to the next village without being afraid that--apart from accidents--even the time allotted to a normal, happy life is far too short for such a journey."
--Franz Kafka

"It's too far."
My niece drones the blues with a voice sweetly trained by Christian pop sing-alongs.
"It's too far."
Naturally, as we begin a half-mile trip to the North Hollywood Diner, it was she who had suggested we walk somewhere to eat. "I'm tired of sitting in the car," she had said.

Dewy and lake cooled summers in northern Michigan stayed light past ten, and the wood of Grandpa's Victorian cottage mumbled softly through the night. The ritual morning walk brought sociability and contemplation. Between introducing a fidgety grandson to neighbors, Grandpa would mimic bird songs, recite poetry and quiz me on the names of trees. The sound of White Ash samaras crackled under rubber soles.

A retired Presbyterian minister, Grandpa never stopped teaching the sacredness of presence. In contrast to the stuff-fest practiced after fry-thru purchases--made perfect in world competitive eating--he admonished me to take time with my food. Later, he capped his fried chicken and string beans with a glass of buttermilk.

After half a bean and cheese burrito and an invitation to bake a brown sugar birthday cake, sobbing red face becomes cherub grin. "We're already there?!", she exclaims as we step through the courtyard gate to my apartment. "I can't believe we're already there!"

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.

Beggars Banquet

The Stigmatization of St. Francis, Albrecht Altdorfer

The process of moving forces a confrontation with the burden of accumulation. Like the mealy bugs that droop the leaves of my schefflera arboricola, leftovers--two jars of caraway seed, a cerulean paisley suitcase torn and frayed, maps collected from European and American travels--wilt me.

Packing and unpacking the years of residue momentarily clarifies the gasp of eye watered joy expressed at thrush rattled branches by Francis in Rossellini's Francesco, Giullare di Dio.

At a time when we try to smother our collective malaise with the commodified sparkle of a 40 inch plasma screen or BMW Z4, this bliss of dispossesion strikes the viewer as utterly bizarre.

To link spiritual beauty with being thrown to wallow in mud from the pouring rain after begging for alms so disturbs popular perversions of piety--from the Trinity Broadcasting Network's claim that gold plated limousines reveal God's blessing to the bunksters of "The Secret" who tell us thinking we own a Lexus RX 350 is owning it--signs of destitution require relentless extirpation.

Thus, last Sunday afternoon when four police officers grabbed a homeless woman, kicked her up and down like a Bozo Bop Bag, and roped her four limbs as if she were a rodeo calf, they merely acted to "serve and protect": serve as surrogate thugs and protect our hands from the slightest smudge of guilt for the daily butchery on the streets.

Pass that 24 year old bottle of Bordeaux to wash down 100 pounds of seasoned ground flesh: the 6000 dollar combo meal, exclusively in Gladys Park.