koreatown

The animal noises, and the restless heat and the sounds of distant fans reverberated through the sticky concrete streets like a symphony to struggle. She lay in her bed and tried to imagine a time when writers knew what to write, when the voices in their head were mightier than the societal tapeworm of reality TV and short-term attention spans, but such a time seemed almost mythical, like the Crusades or non-PC 70‘s shows, or Jesus.
She was living in a part of Los Angeles theoretically known as Koreatown, although the signs on Beverly and Temple read ‘Old Filipinotown.’ However, despite a lack of signage, most of her neighbors were El Salvadorian, even their dogs and children howling in what sounded like Hispanic accents. And yet, somehow, even in this mishmash of ethnicities, she’d managed to land in a ramshackle enclave where only white people lived. It was purely by accident, she liked to surmise, but her roommate, also white, said it was a subconscious decision, even without having seen the other white people. He said these decisions were based on things like smells.
Whatever the case, the private lives of everyone around, regardless of ethnicity, was up for neighborhood grabs. The big black guy on the other side of the fence had a bunch of mama hoodrats creepin through, a basketball hoop rendered useless by the car lean-to since built under its net, and an upstairs to his house that had been shut off by yellow police ‘caution’ tape since before she moved in. The ancient Filipino lady on the other side of the alley swept her barred driveway in the same flowered kimono everyday and had a son that kept his motorcycle there, covered by a pink blanket, also flowered. He also parked an insulting BMW there, behind the bars, between the potted cactuses, alongside a deaf outdoor cat that meowed pitilessly and without ceasing. The barely pubescent skater boys upstairs had pretty Malibu girlfriends, a penchant for all-nighters and didn’t mind blood, while the persnickety gay white guy in front sold weed and drove a rattly little Camry painted like a brown and gold Louis Vuitton bag from bumper to bumper.
She sat, with her ugly, clunky writer’s block, and listened to the sounds of all these people coming and going all day, and read and reread a quote by Albert Camus that gave her a queer - meant in the sense before it was co-opted to mean a subculture - but reassuring sense of purposefulness: ‘the only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.’
And it was in this proactively detached headspace that she and Armando’s similar lifestyles first became apparent. Armando may or may not have been mentally retarded. This was never established for certain, and even if he could or would have answered such a question his English wasn’t much better than her Spanish. Their acquaintance stayed at ‘hello,’ ‘hi’,’ and ‘hola.’ Eventually he upped the conversation to include ‘good morning,’ and then, later, her name. Most likely, he had a crush on her. There weren’t many other girls around to look at other than Hispanic mamas and those Malibu girls, who mostly stayed, shrieking and chain-smoking, behind drawn day blinds.
Armando threw up once a day, on the side of his house, in great, horrifying heaves. Afterwards, he’d wipe his eyes, shuffle off and turn the oldies back up on his porch partner’s - a cheerful-enough, lame old man prone to bouts of sudden sleep - handheld radio.
She didn’t realize until later that she, also, was throwing up everyday, because she was in denial about the fact that it wasn’t just because she had a sensitive stomach and that therefore, it wasn’t really happening since it would surely cease soon.

nothing and everything but a sparkling snowflake

You know how when you drive past the dog park and you notice a curly-haired guy with a daschund getting out of his car and then two hours later he walks into the coffeeshop where you’re working and you wonder if you’re the only person who notices these things? Or like when a guy comes out his house gate pushing a bike as you walk by and then bikes by your friend’s house five miles away later that afternoon? Do you notice these things too?
These kinds of things kind of torture me, because I don’t know what to do with them. They feel so meaningful in a meaningless way. Like, not meaningless because they have no meaning but so because we don’t yet have the mental or psychological or whatever capacity to grasp what it all means.
Some quantum physicists say the universe is a giant hologram, everything repeating and imitating itself onto infinity. That’s why nature metaphors work so well to describe our lives. Because basically we’re living inside a giant snowflake. And no two snowflakes are alike.
The entire universe, onto expanding infinity, is one giant snowstorm.
When you look at it like that, seeing the same curly-haired guy at the dog park and the coffeeshop feels even more meaningless than before. And yet, and yet, and yet … it’s like that’s all there is. Criss-crossing wavelengths, streaming the eternal question, does it matter? What does it all mean? And leaving a trail of sparkle that reminds us, at least we can look good doing this.
Whatever this is.