The Tragic Line of Cars

If you were to ask me how I can describe Los Angeles, I think that tonight I'd give you an unexpected answer. Today, I thought of the perception of my city from my friends in different countries, and they're pretty much right in line with what people here think; This city has no soul. You look around at the forced and borrowed culture, at all of the traffic and especially the dark corners everywhere, and there's proof positive.

As I was walking through the supermarket today, seeing all of the other people like me with their iPods on, filling their lonely carts with food for one, and the very next track in my ears connected it all in the innocence of a song. This city's soul is concerned with housing people who have nowhere else to go.

The next time you're in traffic, look at the person next to you. Chances are, they're emotionally not in their cars and mentally miles away. They're in a rush, or they're resigned to the wait. They're thinking about what they have waiting at home, whether it's a house full of responsibilities that leave them no room to breathe, or maybe it's just a quiet home with a dormant answering machine, and ramen noodles in the cupboard.

Look at stolen moments when you think a whole group of people is having fun, there's always someone who looks away, puts themselves miles away, looking off in the distance to see if their heart is intact. Look at how nobody in line at Starbucks talks to each other, and how people in a movie theater will almost always put a seat between themselves and somebody they don't know.

You have to ask; Does it hurt to make a connection to another person in this city? I think it just might. There are enough people, if you just pay attention, who ache for someone to bridge the gap, but then once the connection is made, there's no knowledge or experience...no intuition...that tells them how to keep it alive. I think it hurts somehow, but beyond that, I believe that it's just more obvious in Los Angeles. If it only happened here, people would stop coming. The wound runs deeper and farther than the city goes.

People look for something familiar, something that validates who they are. If it's not immediate, there's an abandonment and a continuing search to match the wound in the heart to the shape of the next person. It's sad, but I think it's true, and there lies the soul of a city whose name has been shortened to two letters for convenience. The angels...the city of angels...has a wounded soul that breathes in the lonely shopping carts, the little bubbles of existence on the 101 freeway in the morning, and in quiet little blogs for the reader and writer to make a connection and feel, if only for a moment, that they're not alone.