Why Can't I Touch It?
it never rains in L.A. except when it does
Sensing usually implies something beyond sight. “Something’s off here!” you say if you smell a gas leak. “What was that?” when you hear a raccoon finding out to its delight how poorly you closed the trash can. “That doesn’t feel good,” touching your clearly broken wrist through your jacket. Humans just don’t really sound confident talking about the unseeing senses. “No no, I saw it happen,” you say when you saw it happen. Nobody follows up with, “Yeah, but could you taste it?” Not that we should give sight all the credibility our language seemingly wants to, but it’s not often you’re putting taste ahead of it outside the dinner plate. So it comes as quite a shock to really feel like you’re sensing something with the eyes, like you would a sour taste or corduroy under your finger nails.
It might make as much sense to your ears as it does your eyes seeing the Grand Canyon at dusk. I’m sure my nose had something to say about the Grand Canyon, but the eyes were having a moment. Eventually the eyes give up and hands off description duties to the camera.
Spent the last week in the Los Angeles and Deserted Surroundings for Sam’s birthday. Go give her a follow as a present.
The last few days in Los Angeles drew rain you usually only see there at Universal Studios. This time I was in Disneyland. It was the out-of-nowhere, heavy droplet stuff that turns the air 10 degrees hotter and L.A.’s vast expanses of parking lots into oily lakes. There’s a giddiness that takes over if you’re caught in it. The rules around not noticing each other are paused, and we look at each other as if we’re witnessing an unplanned solar eclipse. Then it stops like someone twisted a spigot. You have until stepping in the first puddle to say, “Yeah, we really needed that!” then move on with your antediluvian plan to go on Space Mountain.
Rain in Los Angeles also reminds me of Joan Didion.
The apparent ease of California life is an illusion, and those who believe the illusion real live here in only the most temporary way. I know as well as the next person that there is considerable transcendent value in a river running wild and undimmed, a river running free over granite, but I have also lived beneath such a river when it was running in flood, and gone without showers when it was running dry.