L.A. nights

DISCLAIMER

This is an assignment on the issue of homelessness in the city of Los Angeles. I have a few questions; and felt the need to verify the accepted sentiment that the problem is related to mental illness and drug use. Three days into this assignment and a third road keeps inviting me to a new direction.  I have taken that road. 

I am not a journalist; I am a writer. There will be no unbiased reporting, only the truth of what I see and how it affects me as well as the questions that arise. I don't, for a second, think that I will arrive at a complete understanding of why a child that was once waited for and loved by someone now lies forgotten in the city of Los Angeles. The city of angels.

I could plan this, organize it, and then post it; but decided instead to post each day and invite you along to what I see and learn, and feel.

                                              

Mother

I was by the sea

When I realized

That sadness would always be.

The memory of my mother

Just too vast to forget

It sips into me, and me and me...

I practice many religions:

meditation, visualization, exercise,

Journaling, writing...

But mother is always there

She does not die; today

Or any other day.

And whatelse is there

Besides living with her within me?

A Breeze

 

Love Affair

I remember you,

even when you are,

nothing but a feeling.

I remember you,

even when all there is,

is hints of us.

Somewhere in time,

a feeling o despair, loneliness, nostalghia.

A feeling of a loss

of something,

that was never ours:

to possess, to claim

to forever long for.

In all my memories

of you

is the present that never was

a long for what we never became;

as if we exist somewhere 

and I alone remember 

each moment of it.

Your life moves forward 

and I can’t tell whether or not,

you miss me, think of me,

even once remember my existence.

I long for what you represent:

a family,

companionship,

complicity.

All that never was; 

and isn’t that,

the ripped fabric of a lost affair?

❤️ ❤️ ❤️ ❤️ ❤️ ❤️ ❤️ 

The Edge of Self

When one thinks of writing, one thinks of a person sitting alone and making things up, while the reality of it is that it’s in the real world that we manage to connect to the things we care about or the things we don’t necessarily care about and must one way or the other express those parameters to ourselves.

 The connection one has with a reader is the purest connection, since it is the reader acknowledging that he too feels the same way about: our place in the universe, our day to day, the conditions of the life around us and how we can’t seem to fit in anymore.

When you don’t fit in anymore is only because you outgrew your position, you outgrew the place you once felt comfortable in and you are growing, expanding, moving on to new things. There is no point in fighting this because not moving forward, even though you are afraid or worse, nostalgic, is a mistake and it will lead to mental health issues. 

As you walk forward in your life, it seems, every once in a while you come to the edge of yourself and you can no longer remain in stasis, you must cross the threshold of yourself and find something anew, something you didn’t even know you cold be.

RED LIGHT of the dead.

 I sat next to them on a red light; busy with their phones, all of them; frantically trying to send out their smoke signals, to whomever. I watched them, one by one, trying to determine what we had in common, and it came to me: a moment. We will never meet again and the very next moment we’ll share will be when we die. Yet, with so much on the line, none of them showed any interest in each other, their world safely downsized to their small devices.

We don’t share death anyway; we don’t face it, we don’t accept it; these are linguistic psychological tools the living use to soothe themselves. Ironic, since death will be the most soothing state our bodies will ever be in. Death will take us all and one hundred years from now, on the corner of LaBrea and whatever that other street is, new people will be there waiting for a green light, typing away on their phones.

It occurred to me that technology might be advanced enough that they won’t need to type at all; perhaps they will all have a chip on their heads which will allow them to communicate to whoever, at will. 

On the few minutes that it will take for that light to turn green what will remain the same is our aptitude to create ingenious ways to allow us to do the same things over and over again until the end.

🚘🏍🛴🚲✈️⛵️

L.A. nights