the phaltscape calls

As the leaves turn brown and the morning mists catch me shivering, I struggle to resist the siren-song of the far and distant phaltscape. Known also as the asphalt landscape, the phaltscape exists in cities around the world, in urban environments large and small, in concrete jungles the world over. To some degree, the phaltscape exists here, too, in this rural little Pennsylvania town; I ride on it every day, pulling myself on my smogsled across its winding expanse, laboring along its curling and rising and dipping pathways with as much speed as I can muster. There is one phaltscape in particular for which I long, however; it stretches from Santa Monica Bay to Cesar E. Chavez Boulevard, from the Griffith Observatory to the 10 Freeway – I pine for the blacktop of my fair lost city, El Pueblo De El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora La Reina de Los Angeles de Porciuncula.

I do not linger in agony, nor do I suffer too greatly from being absent for the past seven months from her cruel and tender embrace; my love for her lives in a special place within the folds of my heart, in that place normally reserved for one's biological, or birth, mother. It is likely because I died and was reborn more than once in L.A. that I regard her with such child-like devotion, that I think of her with such fondness, that I am blind to her faults and see only her virtues; if she were less harsh, I'd feel betrayed, yet if she were to age and gain some wrinkles, I would not care one bit. Ask me to explain this affection, and I will draw a blank. Ask me to define, even, what I mean exactly by L.A., and my brains will overload and go blue-screen while they trying to pin down her elusive and terrifying grandeur.

Part of her charm lies in the diversity of her people, in her Chicanos and Japanese and Russians and Germans and Thais; part of it lies in her pleasant weather, in her hot winter winds and cool spring breezes and weeks upon weeks of bright, sunny days. Ah, but I have slipped into the trap I just warned against and tried to pin down that which I just said I could not pin down, struggling for words as my mind grew sluggish, only through great effort pulling myself back from the brink of complete mental shutdown. Suffice it to say that beyond the direct calls from her people – from friends still living there who ask when I shall return – I feel as if Los Angeles herself were pining a bit for me, too, for my footfalls to sound once more in her forgotten and noisome places, for the pneumatic wheels of my wire-donkey to sing from the Ocean to the River, the sweat of my brow gently moistening byway and avenue alike. Of course, such thoughts are but mere foolishness, the heart-pangs of a star-crossed lover yearning for his mate; she is likely glad to be rid of my stink, happy that I have begun to sink in roots of tree and garden, out here. No matter how much, though, I tell myself otherwise, I cannot with ease shake my memories of her. Sigh… and mahalo.

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