Tweaker…picking the remains, Van Nuys.
The timbers, I notice, are well-preserved, straight-grained and true. Old growth, probably. You can’t get it anymore, at any price.
Anything hockable has been stripped, hauled off in shopping carts and bartered at the scrapyard, then converted to crack cocaine and exhaled, unsatiated, in a fit of tachycardia in a tent by the Orange Line. The metals will journey onward via container to Long Beach, then China, which will melt it down and sell it back to us as a consumer good.
In a couple days, perhaps tomorrow, the carcass will be demolished along with the other homes and taken to the landfill, save the fireplace masonry, with will be salvaged by the specialist, and retailed for a buck a piece at Balboa Brick.
Bamboo flooring! Oh, the hopes someone once had for the place.
…and a swimming pool, even though the backyard abutted the 405. The concrete will be broken down into aggregate and live again, as some sort of structural underlayment, perhaps as a breakwater.
In six months the lots will be consolidated and a six story Bento Box apartment building will sprout in their place.
I think of the Moroccan tile we installed over the summer. How satisfying it felt as the back butter grabbed the floor and the corners met precisely, within 1/32 an inch of tolerance. How permanent.
