Something in my thoughts right now returns to magical sparkling fairy filled nights on Franklin Ave., Los Angeles, 2001. Gloriously long happy summer before the world became a place everyone thinks is filled with danger. In those waning days of the old regime, I was attached at the hip to Mark: Apostle or easy target the clown fucker is still to find out. Our city through the lens of Franklin Ave. was mysterious and dazzling: fitness freaks jogging at midnight past midgets walking Great Danes around the Scientology Celebrity Center as we walked from street parking on a highway overpass, lights streaking in the night. Somehow through the thinning smog, all was radiant. Franklin Ave., Francesca Lia Block’s LA. Foothills turned outward, caves of strange fulfillments and tendencies. Constant pints and parades of beautiful women, all out of the reach of my thickening (reference the pints) self, things come and gone faceless like the transience of our emotions then, single and strange and almost Invisible, dark amongst the flickering neon. Mark was always watching, the novelist he is, and I was always trying to either insert or extricate myself from the strangest circumstances I could find – from the petite and obvious therapist to autistic children before, to the neurotic Bryn Mawr girl whose intentions and methods were absolutely incomprehensible after. In the middle were two boys playing with the newly found toy: legal drinking age, in the most obscure scenes to be found in this where even the commute to work was a matter of significance: 101 to Gower if I could, 10 to La Brea if I couldn’t, Venice to Crenshaw to Wilshire to Highland if even that was impassible. It had meaning. Significance is what I was seeking here in the middle of all this. And somehow, just peeking through, there it was, undeniable yet unidentifiable. La Poubelle had the best Guinness we had found, and we tried to drink them dry while others orbited, not yet did we know whether they would reach escape velocity or crash back in a blaze of humanity to less forgiving terrains. Even if we had kept track, those orbits are still too slow to discern their fate, and I feel something akin now, more than three years later to that same indeterminacy watching everything play out like quantum ballet: the smallest events, the most dramatic significances. There was something there no to be named but understood that these words only do the merest justice to.
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