L.A. Weekly, May 10, 2002
I HAVE LIVED WHERE I LIVE FOR A VERY LONG TIME.
Embarrassingly long, I sometimes think. I am in a way surprised that you
find me still here. (By my watch, I should have been living in Paris five
years already.) Children have grown up and gone away to college and
dropped out 
of college, Seinfeld was launched and
decommissioned, country-rock has been revived seven times, and there have
been three presidents -- four, if you count George W. Bush -- since I have
lived where I live now. I have lived here now longer than I lived with my
parents, in which first very long time I learned countless clever things
-- how to roll over, sit up, speak, ride a bike, do arithmetic, eat with a
spoon and in many other ways to convincingly imitate a human being. (You
should see me in my little red cap and green vest.) I grew from an
unformed little blob who knew nothing at all into a big strapping blob
with a high school diploma. In the long time I have lived where I live now
my development has not been so apparently spectacular, though I like to
think that I have improved in certain subtle ways. I like to think I am
still making progress.
I like to think
that.
Yet here I am again, walking to
Larchmont. Strictly speaking, I am making progress: I start out at
home, and I end up at Larchmont. But how many times have I taken this
walk? Hundreds, certainly. Thousands? It's not impossible. If I add trips
by car and by bike -- I begin to be frightened. Winter, spring, summer,
fall, by light of day and dark of night and light of day, point A to point
B to point A to point B to point A. I am moving, but I am in another,
occasionally disturbing sense standing still.
"HABIT IS A GREAT DEADENER," SAID VLADIMIR not exactly to
Estragon (who was asleep) as they waited for Godot; and when, at 16, I
read those words, I vowed to live a life of improvisation and change. No
hanging around by a dead tree for me! That dude is not going to
show. Of course if you last at all in the world, habit creeps in, and
not merely from entropy or moral failing or lack of vigilance, but because
wherever you find yourself, there are not just things you have to do, but
things you prefer to do. I like going to Larchmont, where there is
coffee and lunch and a bookstore and a post office and good-looking foot
traffic, and the way between here and there runs pleasantly through
curving streets flush with green and lined with pretty houses I could
never afford to live in but am not too bitter to appreciate. There are
birds and squirrels and flowers -- all that
shit.
It's the longest-lived of my
several route-routines, but it isn't the first: There were seven years of
following Hatteras Avenue past the wall of honeysuckle vines and the
witch's house to Rhoda Street Elementary, another six years hiking
cornfield-flanked Balboa Boulevard to junior high and high school.
(Combined they are still not a patch on the Larchmont Years.) Driving the
freeway back over Cahuenga Pass from the Valley I oft marvel at how often
the wheel of life has brought me to exactly the same . . . pass -- from
infant excursions to Grandma's house, through teenage bus rides to hang
around Hollywood Boulevard, and on to a couple of adult decades of trips
back from where I grew up to where I live now -- and I don't know whether
to be appalled or impressed.
Impressed,
when I consider that various parade of previous selves, and how long a
short life actually may be. Appalled, when I consider how many fucking
times I have done these same fucking things. Habit, you great
deadener, you. I would think that by now there would not be a square inch
unknown to me between here and Larchmont, no shrub or flagstone I could
not count an old friend, no sidewalk love-inscription I could not recite
by heart; but no. Most of the time I shuttle along in a fog. Whole houses,
huge houses, houses that long predate even my ancient presence in this
neighborhood, will suddenly rear up as absolute strangers. Now, where
did that come from? It's alarming how much of my time here has been
spent wrapped up inside my head, distracted, unconscious. It's true that
inattention, when carefully practiced, has its upside: When I get a new
record, for instance, I tend to only half listen to it, if that, so as --
this is my theory, at any rate -- not to use it up too fast. In this way I
am still surprised by records I have owned for 30 years. (I just recently
discovered that there's a piano solo in "Heartbreak Hotel." Hands up,
people who knew that.) It's a kind of delayed gratification. (The trick
being not to delay it until you're, you know, past all gratification.) But
this is stupid ultimately, like not getting healthy now so you won't miss
feeling good when you're old -- which is another thing I suspect I'm
guilty of.
GLASS HALF EMPTY? GLASS HALF FULL? I am some third sort
of person who stares hard at the glass and can't quite work it out. Is it
some sort of Zen trick? There are places in my neighborhood where I
qualify as a regular, where I get that regular's nod when I walk in, and I
don't know whether to be flattered or ashamed, to feel like an insider --
a person with a place to be -- or a loser: a person with no other place to
be.
But here I am, and in any case, it's
good to take a walk, even for the thousandth time, even when it's the
streets of Paris I should rightfully have been walking these last five
years, if there were any justice in the world. Sometimes the glass is half
empty and sometimes it's half full and sometimes it's both at once.
Because if I can manage to see the world in a grain of sand, or a
well-kept lawn, or a happy little squirrel crossing the street on that
telephone line there, the way Blake says I'm supposed to -- and,
unpredictably, I occasionally can -- one place is as good as another.
There's always something new to see. I move through the world and the
world moves through me.
The Earth
revolves around the revolving sun, the galaxies pirouette in the inky
empyrean: Stillness is an illusion. But so is progress. You are moving
even when you're not, and wherever you seem to go, you're going in
circles. I have been here a long time, but here is different now. Is it
time to go, or have I already gone?
Illustration by Hadley Hooper