I've been walking around the neighborhood I grew up in lately, now that I have the time, and it's always interesting the things you find when you slow down your pace (i.e., from driving to hoofing it.) For example, I finally figured why the hell Round Top Drive is divided into two, each part flanking the Glendale Freeway just before it intersects the Ventura Fwy. The western segment has houses with addresses beginning with 4500, while the eastern segment has houses with addresses beginning with 4600 and beyond. When glancing at the relationship of the two segments from a distance (from an adjacent hill that is divided between Glendale and L.A.) I realized that before the Glendale Freeway was built (requiring a huge trench dug through the hill), the two segments were actually a continuous street, and once the freeway was built, they had to build a road to allow people to get off the hill. I'm trying to find an old map of L.A. to confirm this.

So I kind of wonder if the gated-off road that runs through the old park, flanking the freeway, is part of old Round Top Drive. Mapquest makes the relationship between the two segments even more obvious (search for the intersection of Round Top Drive and Lawndale Drive in Los Angeles)

Anyway, while searching for an old map online (which is becoming a more and more futile quest), I found this random site, which had this quote which I thought was kind of funny. (Not funny, ha-ha. OK, it's not funny at all. I don't know what's wrong with me.)

I think I was born a skeptic, but also that the conditions of my early life made it especially hard to believe in a loving, caring, active deity or other comforting religious notions. My parents had few values in common, fought constantly without ever resolving anything, and divorced when I was 5. As I grew up, the beautiful hill in front of our house, originally covered with pungently fragrant scrub and inhabited by many creatures, was first lopped across the top for an evangelical station's radio tower, then sliced down the side to make room for the Glendale freeway, and then almost completely covered with homes which fill with mud every time there is a landslide, and threaten to burn down whenever there is a brushfire on what little open land remains. At some point the resident coyotes, who once sang me to sleep every night, began to eat neighborhood cats, and then either starved to death or perhaps moved on.

Anyway, this reminded me of that damned evangelist preaching when I was a little kid. Since we live so close to that radio tower (who knows what sort of cancers I'll be developing when I'm 65), the radio station would interfere with our poorly insulated copper wiring, so you could hear him on the telephone. He would also creep into the radio (and because I couldn't sleep in silence when I was a little kid, I would sleep with the radio on.) Who knows what sort of perverse ideas that evangelist put into my head. It might explain a lot about why I hate fundamentalists so much, and why I am currently in the throes of a crisis of faith these days.

Ah well. I'll figure everything out once I'm dead, I guess. Or not.