I’m eating steel cut oats this morning on the brick patio, fully nude, presenting my uncurated self to the sun, and the new neighbor behind me, the one who doesn’t do autobody work or landscaping or hump boxes at TJ’s, the one who works in the music industry, the one who peeked over the bamboo in April to say how much he admired my deck and with whom I made tentative plans to invite over for wine on said deck once, you know, the lockdown craziness had passed...is also on his patio this morning, talking on the phone:
Do you know what the Magna Carta was? You think you do, but you don’t.
There were two. Most people don’t know that.
The secret Magna Carta was a way for the Royal family to collect money from countries the world over.
They’re richer than anyone knows. You are paying them money without knowing.
The Windsor family owns most of Los Angeles. No, they do! Accept it.
It has been that kind of summer. I wander naked, oatmeal bowl in hand, eavesdropping on conspiracy theories and call it Wednesday.
We can’t agree on the facts anymore, so we create entertainment to explain our world. We burrow inward like the polyphagous shot-hole borer, lay our larvae, and let our fungus devour the tree from the inside. Two years after the pestilence, the sweetgums are falling all over my neighborhood this summer.
The Beautiful Young Man who Meditates could not be more at peace as he informs Mrs. UpintheValley, from a lotus position atop a car hood, the virus was invented for the purposes of installing tracking devices on everyone.
Los Angeles is getting a little autistic now, four months in. By robbing ourselves of facial cues behind our masks we can longer discern irony or return smiles. We fall into suspicion without exchanging words. We make sport of denunciation. We look inside our phones for the smoking gun proving the Other Side crazy.
The underlying facts remain unchanged, even if we don’t accept them. The virus will be lethal to 80-year-olds and obese diabetics. The rest of us not so much, and on a declining scale of risk. Children not at all. So, by all means, close the schools. Let us have governmentally-inflicted entertainment; let’s put a tub of popcorn on the stove for Fear Porn II: The Return of Newsom.
We deserve to be painted by Brueghel or Bosch.
What to do with this weird unrequested time-out? Your early resentment at the induced economic coma is now a bit more philosophical. You decide to make a gift of it. You make an abundance of your mornings. There is nothing stopping you from creative projects. You are fertile in the afternoon, foraging for cuttings to propagate the yard, at least one per day. You find rocks in the riverbed for the garden. You finish the driveway and the retaining wall and it is glorious. You read Joan Didion, seeking a historical mirror, an interpreter of the weirdness, but can’t get past the fact she rented a 12 room mansion in Runyon Canyon on a magazine writer’s pay. You try binge-watching House of Cards, and it already feels like an artifact of another era. You shift to The Great, Hulus irreverent take on Imperial Russia, and huzzah, it hits the mark. Portentously.
You ride your bike from Culver to Redondo -crowded beaches and wait time for patio tables- and note the general mask defiance. The following weekend you try the familiar haunts of downtown and find full mask compliance and a city on life support and mostly closed. Skid Row remains in full bloom, giving the street parade a harder edge than normal. You wonder where the loft people are. Upstairs living off DoorDash, or out of town? Has an exodus begun? What of all the unfinished condo conversion? You sense billions swirling the drain.
On the return home, you stop at MacLeod for a four-pack of Doubled Over Happy. You adjourn to the upstairs deck, erected in a frenzy of inspiration only to be underutilized. The wisteria has grown over the trellis, providing full shade. There are always breezes. You have spent a good deal of time up there this summer, fertile and creative, closing a circle on a project started years before.
Tis a great bounty, this deck, prized by your own labor. Unlike so many Sunday returns through the Cahuenga pass you are grateful for what you have. You feel advantaged to be living in the Valley. Gratitude snuck up on you while looking elsewhere.
