And when you think about houses, really think, aren't they so weird? They're boxes where we keep ourselves and our stuff, boxes shaped like Tudor manors and chic cement warlord bunkers like this one and glassy mod spaceships and geodesic domes and sleek vitrines. It's all one big map of the stars.Īnd I was like, you know what? It's mostly just houses. Don't go driving around gawking because you're already there, man. People talk about the sprawl, and, yeah, the city is a drunk, laughing bitch sprawled across the flats in a spangled dress, legs kicked up the canyons, skirt spread over the hills, and she's shimmering, vibrating, ticklish with light. It's the obviousness of pointing out that the freeway looks like a ruby bracelet stretched alongside a diamond one, looks like a river of lava flowing counter to a river of champagne bubbles.

It's the Big One that's coming to turn the city to rubble and set the rubble on fire but not today, hopefully not today. It's a lazy hammock moon rising over power lines, over the skeletal silhouettes of pylons, over shaggy cypress trees and the spiky black lionfish shapes of palm-tree crowns on too-skinny trunks. It's a crescent moon in a sky bruised green after the sunset has beaten the shit out of it. is dust and exhaust and the hot, dry wind that sets your nerves on edge and pushes fire up the hillsides in ragged lines like tears in the paper that separates us from hell, and it's towering clouds of smoke, and it's sunshine that won't let up and cool ocean fog that gets unrolled at night over the whole basin like a clean white hospital sheet and peeled back again in the morning. It's pit bulls barking through chain-link and Chihuahuas yapping behind screen doors and poodles snoozing on terra-cotta It's a Norteño song bouncing out of a passing El Camino and schoolkids singing o beautiful for spacious skies in a classroom with the windows open and the rasp of a beat from somebody's earbuds you pass on the sidewalk. It's gongs and oms and whale songs soothing in the dim inner sancta of spas. It's dance music pounding in a dark room full of people pedaling bicycles going nowhere. It's the thrum of hummingbird wings and the silent gliding gyres of vultures and the long-legged stepping of white egrets through shallow green water in the concrete channel that's the river. It's coyotes yipping like delinquents who've just left lit firecrackers in a mailbox, and it's mourning doves sitting on power lines practicing the same sad four-note riff. And it's muscle cars and leaf blowers and trash trucks picking up everyone's bins and tossing them back like tequila shots.

It's wind chimes and helicopters, I said.

Shipstead great circle