biology and frailty

Just read phrase: biology and frailty and thought that it sums up perfectly the concerns that plague me of late. I know that everyone has these maps within their minds, maps of good places to eat or shop, for me it is maps of yards that have beautiful fragrant flowers begging me to steal them under cover of night or art supply stores that sell the ink and paper I love, but also there are other maps, sadder maps, like the map of homeless people in Los Angeles. Not all the homeless people, just the ones I know, the ones I see every day, the ones whose clothes I recognise, who I expect to see and about whom I worry when they are missing from their spots.

I remember when I was little, I was endlessly fascinated by one thing at my Granny’s place: the 1969 set of world book Encyclopedia. They were a window to another world, pure pleasure, all black and white except for the transparent sections in H and F, one was layered coloured diagrams of the various internal systems of the human body and one was the same kind of thing but for the body of a frog. They were the most grand and amazing thing. Rich glossy pink guts and organs, liver and intestines, so bright and thrilling. I loved those pages like nothing else. The maps within my mind are like those pages, they lay on top of one another and you can see them all at once or you can pull them apart and see only one system. My maps are complex because I have lived in so many place and I have various maps for every city. Take me back to Shibata today and I can tell you exactly where to picky lily of the valley or where you can hear someone practicing piano in the evening, return me to New Orleans and I will show you a yard with such divine plentiful rose bushes, that you cant resist picking, where the best confederate jasmine blooms. The mind is mysterious, the way it categorizes baffles me.
The point of all that was that there is one particular homeless man I see every day. He sits at the place where Century Park E. meets Santa Monica. He has a little cart and a chair, his khaki pants are filthy, his jacket had a hood which is always up, I have never seen his face, but I do often see a cigarette poking out of the drawn-closed hood. He has also an umbrella which makes it hard to see the face, it is oddly a Titleist golf umbrella, such an bizarre juxtaposition of something that connotes wealth and privilege and someone living a life that is the polar opposite. The other day I saw him standing with his back to oncoming traffic, he was apparently wiping his hands with a cloth while his pants were pulled down to the knees. His pink thighs exposed, while his pants were also pulled up over the calves, exposing the lower parts of his legs that were chalk white and cracked like a dry riverbed. Something about the scene, seeing his lack of care/awareness that his ass was exposed to oncoming traffic, seeing that pink flesh of another person so seldom seen. Something about it just struck me as tremendously incomprehensible. I see homeless people every day. I wonder about their lives, I wonder how they got there, what will become of them, I wonder about their families, and all that makes me feel pity, but this was so disturbing because it illustrated madness in a way I have never experienced. I have never seen someone just oblivious to the rest of the world, to the norms of society in quite that way. The insertion of that realization with empathy was something I was not expecting from my AM commute. A dot on my map. Biology and frailty. What is the connection? You tell me.

pre-nostalgia

As usual, knowing I will only be here a relatively short time longer is making me take even more note of things that I may not see for a long time after leaving. The ocean of course, I will miss the saline tingle in my nostrils and the dark umber of the enormous pelicans resting on rocks, the ice-plants hanging off the cliffs, the plastic-looking pink kelp, the brilliant-ink-swirl of the toxic smog sunsets, so intense. The lean vacant girls with silly sunglasses and the wild tanned southern California kids with their unkempt hair and year-round freckles. Deli sandwiches with thick avocado chunks, sparkling water, local wine in plastic cups, the smell of hot sunscreen being baked into the skin by this unrelenting West Coast sun. The orchid trees in September with the wicked-thorny, touch-me-not trunks and branches. I will miss the simultaneous repulsion and thrill of Hollywood at night, the feelings of possibility and defeat that well up with the first shot of tequila (and the first toast to St. Christopher Cornell). The smell of the foul fake perfumey air freshener in Hollywood bar bathrooms where I have met many a bff while waiting for the single stall, why do the bathrooms here only have one stall? Charming bartenders... oh the charming bartenders. The flower market early on chilly Saturday mornings with the big white buckets full of overconfident roses, shy wax flowers, glamourous ranunculus, joyous freesia, languorous orchids, demure calla lilies, bloated hydrangeas, elegant dahlias, immature sunflowers, bright daffodils, perverted anthurium, aristocratic iris, silly Gerber daisies, maternal mums, regal gladiolas, accommodating stock, delicate bluebells........HOW I WILL MISS THE CHILLY WAREHOUSES full of the smell of green and all the colour....the dirty freight elevator, the handsome young flower sellers... I will miss seeing lovely small lemons on a new tree, the way the red on the skin of blood oranges tends toward the bottom of the fruit as if it weighs more and gravity draws it low. A hopeful new-planted avocado tree. The song of the little bird with the twig-coloured faux-hawk, so light and trilly-sweet. The darting hummingbirds which remind me of do-re-me-fa-so-la-to….as they rise and fall “sew- a needle pulling thread…” through the air. The copper throats of the little brownies, the deep crimson throats of the greenies… So many things to miss, but, I know too that they will all be replaced with beloved items of god’s handiwork wherever else I roam. The suspicious crows looming…. the succulents and the perfect round leaves of the strange eucalyptus, Japanese magnolia against the dark sky, the vanilla-lily-heavy-custard scent of waxy-leaved magnolia….all of the fruit trees blooming in February, so early… Yesterday, walking, I saw a pick laying beside a shovel in freshly turned damp earth, whoever had been employing the tools had clearly gone off for lunch and left them looking spent in the soil, it was so sensual, seemed so erotic and gorgeous to me. Okay… this is all for now…