mahiwaga

It is interesting how travel to a distance place defines a boundary in time. Less opaquely, my trip to NYC sort of divides things into pre-vacation and post-vacation.

I admit. I am making a mountain out of a molehill.

I feel changed, as usual, by this trip. Which is interesting since I really didn't do much that was different from what I usually do when I'm out there. Walk around what is essentially a gigantic outdoor mall called Soho. Check out Central Park, the museums. Visit friends who I haven't seen for a million years and who try to eke out a few minutes out of their busy schedules just to meet up. Take the subway everywhere.

On one hand, I left with a tinge of sadness. I suppose the end of vacation is always tinged by a little sadness. But my friends and family out there in the city—expatriate Californians, the lot of them—are dear to me, and I miss them. The Internet and cel phones with monstrous amounts of minutes make the barrier of distance more permeable, but nothing beats being face to face and hanging out and just shooting the shit with an old friend.

But, now that I am on the other side, just waiting to go back to work, I realize for truth that I would not have survived easily there.

The illusion of being able to stay in touch is easy to fall for when you're on vacation, but the sad reality is that without extraordinary effort, even if you live across the street from one another, it is hard to not feel isolated. Even here, surrounded by family, the loneliness will sometimes wake me up in the middle of the night, this hole inside me aching, and me not knowing at all how to stop it from doing so.

I am slowly growing used to the notion that, no matter what, at the end of your life, you are alone. Now, I am, statistically speaking, nowhere near the end of my life, but, the point is, I am trying to grow accustomed to the idea that loneliness is an unavoidable aspect of the human condition.

But the reason this particular song struck me as I was letting iTunes meander through my rather incoherent music library is that it makes me think of my second trip to NYC ever, back in 1997.

I was still in college, and it was a family vacation with my parents and my brother and my sister, the first stop in an East Coast cavalcade that would eventually run down to Virginia Beach. We stayed in Midtown, and did all the tourist things. The Empire State Building. The Statue of Liberty. Times Square. Watching a musical on Broadway. The World Trade Center. (Me and my brother have this now eerie picture with the WTC in the background.) Shopping on 5th Ave. St. Patrick's Cathedral.

I think back, and I still remember just who exactly it was I had a crush on at that time. It is interesting to reflect on how I actually had hope back then, however misguided.

I was struck, however, by the fact that despite being surrounded by 15 million people in an area that is probably just on the scale of the Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando, FL, it is still possible to feel completely alone.

I do not understand why I have allowed the aftermath of that time in my life to continue to haunt me to this day.

It's like Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, really. You can figure out the causal chain of events, but you can never really pinpoint what exactly made you become the way you are. It will forever remain a mystery, the complex way that certain events in my life have conspired to lock me in to a particular behavior.

You know you're in trouble when you start entertaining the possibility that you are still right, and all the 6 billion other people in the world are wrong.

But this is all very cryptic, and I don't expect anyone to read this and understand what the hell I'm getting at. I have a feeling that a week from now, I'll read this entry and even I won't understand what the hell I'm talking about.

I was glancing briefly at Chuck Palahniuk's non-fiction work entitled Stranger than Fiction. His prologue brought up the interesting dialectic of the human condition. When we are in a crowd, we long to be in solitude. When we are alone, we start feeling lonely, and long to be in a crowd. I think it is more complex than just the "grass is always greener" syndrome. I think that it borders on pathology, just one hair shy of dissociative disorder. We want these two things simultaneously. We want to be alone, but we want to be around other people.

Or, to personalize it a little, every time I long for a relationship, someone always manages to point out the fact that a lot of times, there is a lot of pain and suffering involved.

Honestly, at this point in my life, though, I don't know what's worse. The aching, hollowing, sinking, sharp, stabbing feeling of heartache, or this dull, drear numbness that I currently wallow in. To feel pain or not to feel at all. That is the question.

I also finished Idlewild on the plane, which is by Nick Sagan (who, incidentally, happens to be Carl Sagan's son.) One of the little tangents he touches on is the question as to whether pain will be implemented in virtual reality. And the fact of the matter is that pain is a product of evolution. Pain serves an adaptive useful function. Without pain, we'd constantly be doing things to ourselves that would be fatal. A nice little cut here, followed by an infection, followed by gangrene, then septicemia, then death. This is one of the side effects of leprosy, by the way. It eats away at your nerves, and you cease being able to feel pain in your hands and feet.

But I suppose there is a difference between physical pain, and psychic pain, the pain that arises purely from the mind, and yet eventually manages to ravage the entire body. This kind of pain is real, but it's an open question as to whether it's really useful. Especially in my life, currently.

There's got to be another alternative besides pain or numbness.

Now the question is how the hell do I figure out what that alternative is?

I randomly decided to hop on the MTA Gold Line, which runs from Union Station in Downtown L.A. to the eastern edge of Pasadena. I got on at the Lincoln Heights/Cypress Park stop and headed north to Lake Avenue in Pasadena, where I hoofed it down to Colorado Ave to visit Vroman's Bookstore (for some reason I can't get the actual site to load up, so I linked Google's cache.) I splurged and bought too many books, but, oh well. I have no excuses. On the way back I hopped on at the Memorial Park Station, which is where you would get off if you were interested in visiting Old Town. The bohemian-like enclave that I sighted off of the Mission St Station in South Pasadena intrigued me, and I had a rather late lunch there. I kind of wonder if it has always been there, or if it literally grew around the station. Of course, it was mostly white people. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

It looks like there are going to be massive developments adjacent the Lincoln Heights/Cypress Park station. There were a bunch of bulldozers at a vacant lot right next to the station. Just a block or so down the street is the Los Angeles River Gardens, which was the former site of Lawry's. I didn't really get to tarry too long there, although I may consider stopping there tomorrow before I head home.

While many people think it is completely ludicrous to build rail (whether heavy or light) in the city that built one of the first freeways in the country, it is interesting the patterns of development that subway and light-rail stations create. For better and for worse, nodes of gentrification are developing. You can see this most conspicuously at the Hollywood and Western stop off the Red Line. When I was in high school, this place was teeming with porno shops, and ladies were working the streets bigtime. Now it has given way to miles of non-descript strip malls and new housing developments.

I did have to chuckle a bit as the Gold Line crossed over the parking-lot like Pasadena Freeway. The experts estimate that the average speed of rush hour traffic will drop off to about 17 mph in a few years. Freeway widening will have little relief. (As I read somewhere—unfortunately I can't give proper credit—freeway widening is a little too much like trying to solve your weight problem by merely loosening your pants.)

Ever since I first rode the trains in San Francisco, New York, and Chicago, I've dreamt of being able to traverse the City of Angels without ever having to hop in my car. It is unlikely this will ever happen in my lifetime, but at least the MTA is heading in the right direction. They plan to expand the Gold Line to go through East L.A. and some of the more proximal suburbs of the San Gabriel Valley. There is talk of using existing railroad right-of-way for the Expo Line, which would provide access to Mid-Wilshire and West L.A., and maybe even Santa Monica. As the traffic continues to worsen, as gas prices continue to rise, and as the world's oil supply slowly becomes depleted, someday the City of Angels will have to look to the future and build a reasonable transportation infrastructure.

One of the neat things about the Gold Line is the scenic route through the Arroyo Seco. As it heads out from Union Station, you get some of the urban vibe, but it quickly enters the viaduct maze where the L.A. River rounds the bend past the hills where Dodger Stadium and Elysian Park sit. From there on it gets pretty residential, and downright nature like, until it hits Pasadena. It quickly passes through a completely industrial area then ends up in Old Town, which is chock full of commercial fun. From there it finds itself in the median of the Foothill Freeway, where things are a little more nondescript, although Mt. Wilson looms grandly to the North. In the straight-up industrial and residential outskirts of New York and Chicago, I do not think you can get this kind of view. Sure, you get an excellent urban feel, which probably cannot be reduplicated in L.A. (although downtown L.A. does serve as the inspiration for all that noir fiction), but that's about it. In contrast, the Gold Line manages to highlight the natural beauty of the city which has resisted taming by even the most zealous developers. As one of my fellow passengers remarked, "Wow, this ride sure is pretty."

Which brings me to the fact that lots of people use the light-rail. In a city where it is often stated that there are more cars than people, in a city where the combined surface area of all the freeways could probably pave the entire state of Rhode Island over, in a city for which there is a song about how no one walks there, a lot of people overlook the reality that not everyone can afford a car, and the annual reg fees, the insurance premiums, the gasoline. In the trains I rode, most of the seats were occupied. Granted, no one had to stand up, and it wasn't packed the way a rush hour Brooklyn-bound B-train gets packed, but it was still impressive that lots of people were using it.

There was a computer game once upon a time (in the early 1990's) called "Rise of the Dragon" which depicted the city of L.A. with actually useful public transit. Like subways and shit. Since then, it's always been something I fantasize about. Imagine being able to take a train out to the beach on any of those numerous 70 degree days anytime during the year, and not having it take 2 hours to get back home. Imagine being able to hit all the hotspots without having to hop into a car.

Again, unlikely in my lifetime. Ah well.