Smelling LA

When I lived in New York, I walked everywhere - on an average day 4-10 miles. This wasn't walking for exercise (I went to the gym for that), this was just normal, getting from place to place walking. Yes, I could have taken the subway, but there is just something special about experiencing NY on foot. I think part of it is the smells. Walking just two miles from work to my apartment led me from Shalimar(elderly theater goers) to urine (Port Authority) to BBQ (Little Korea). Every time I went somewhere I tried to take a different route, thereby getting to see and smell more of the city.

I walk around my area of Los Angeles (Santa Monica, Venice, West LA) quite frequently; partly because I have a dog, and partly because NY has conditioned me to prefer passing things slowly and taking them in, rather than flying by them in a car and having barely enough time to read a store name.

I went for a 5 mile walk with my dog this morning. We started in North Santa Monica, made our way to the Promenade, over to Main Street and Abbott Kinney and then finished with a long walk along what I consider to be the ugliest road in existence: Lincoln Ave. Though I could people watch, though I could find the hidden corners that truly define "place," I could not distinguish smells in the same way I did in NY. I'm not sure if this was because of car pollution, an ocean breeze that brought smells further east or lower buildings that let the smells escape too easily.

This was the first time I truly missed NY.

Ticketed

For me, there's little that compares the heart-quickening panic of being pulled over. Seeing the red-and-blues glimmer in my rear-view mirror floods me with the same shame -- and bloodrush to the face -- I felt in elementary school when my behavior card was turned from green to yellow. (This rarely happened, of course. I was always too terrified of the dreaded card-pull to do anything "bad.")

While the mildly passive-aggressive policeman who stopped me last Saturday at 1:30 in the morning scanned my registration and license, I sat in the unforgiving (and really unnecessary) light from his headlamp and tried to stay perfectly still. I thought about the fact that I was returning from a hotel lounge up the street where I'd had a big, foamy beer...or two. I thought about how close my house was--a quick sprinting distance, really. I thought about sleeping against cold cement in a jail cell. I fumed over the fact that he had been lurking, lights off, at the corner, waiting for someone to ignore the obscure signage that demanded "No turning between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m."

What bothers me most about the process of being pulled over is the waiting, which seems designed to inspire fear, discomfort, doubt. Like some kind of base torture technique. As I sat motionless, hands on the steering wheel, I pictured the policeman and his partner leaning back in their sedan seats, sipping coffee and shooting the shit to stretch out my squirm-inducing wait. Does it truly take in excess of eight minutes to determine whether or not my car is stolen or I am a convicted felon on the run?

But the worst part is the Stockholm syndrome-like response I always have when I'm finally told I'm free to go. When the cop finally returned and soberly handed me the inevitable ticket, I actually said "Thank you," as I signed my name.

Near Misses

Jenny Burman, of Chicken Corner, witnesses a collision in Echo Park; the tortured intellect behind "Why I Am Awesome and Not Awesome," narrowly avoids one with a "late-90s maroon luxury car bombing through its red light."

Stealth

We finished class tonight at 8:45, an hour earlier than usual, so the parking lot was still full of cars. This meant: no skaters. Most nights, when I get there, around 10:00, the lot—six levels of cement, on an incline—has already become a game of Brio Labyrinth for the tall, cool, silent kids on their extra-long skateboards.

The only sounds are the friction of hard plastic wheels on cement as they fly by, and the cautious beeping of my car as I, timid as a novice on a double-black diamond.

Tonight, as I was pulling out of the parking lot, I saw a figure, holding a skateboard, backed up against the green hedge that marks the edge of campus. Then more, stealthily making their way toward the lot: a white jock with a long board; a dark-skinned woman in a hoodie, looking furtively, reflexively over her right shoulder at the freshly abandoned guard station. It was intimate, seeing them this way, on this end of their journey. I felt an affinity, and wanted them to feel it, too.

I got on the freeway and drove, listening to Beginner's Spanish: Ella tiene un nino grande. I was halfway home before I realized I had forgotten to turn on my lights.