Mactivism

So now I get the beauty of LA,
instead of musing while people watching,
we get an endless stream of cars swift through our supersized streets...

I get that some of our streets are wide because of the Red Cars, but why were the rest of the connecting streets built with a minimum of 5 lanes?

I get the whole car industry fiasco, and the 50's post-war boom and white-suburban-living sentimentality, but did white people really not expect all the brown people from the global south to overrun Southern California?

We really weren't supposed to live here. Beyond the man made inhospitable conditions, I think there's a curse in these lands, people were only supposed to come visit, but never to stay, hence all the angst and unhappiness that accompany our beautiful warm and sunny days.

It's almost as if we become enamored with, and dreadful of yet another sunny day. Is there ever Change if things only Change for a revised version of the same conditions?
[Think about that! Obama!]

Trust me! I'm not advocating, nor would I ever live in a place where there are things like rain, and snow, and where there are real trees, that change like colors depending on the season...

I had those things growing up in the third world, and now that nature is for the white people that enjoy traveling to Xela, and for the first-world brown people seeking to "reconnect with their roots."

Freeways are my new rivers, the rivers that I was always too afraid of even dipping my feet in...

In Los Abrazos Rotos there's a scene, which I would describe as a gorgeous shot, but then again Almodóvar only takes beautiful shots, with black sand beaches and a small child seeing the ocean for the first time.

A couple of years ago someone was telling me how after the blowouts in East LA, back when students where doing things that they really wanted to do, not what organizers told them they should be doing in order to meet grant requirements, some of those students were taken to retreats in Malibu, and how for most of them it was their first time seeing the ocean.

I will never be able to wrap my head around this concept, not that I should. But it is hard for me to imagine how someone living 20 miles away from the Pacific, even if those 20 miles are a vast sea of economic and societal challenges and borders, can not board a bus and head west to see the ocean.

So this scene is supposed to evoke childhood memories and/or deep emotional memories of its audience first encounter with the brash and stunning waves of the ocean.

I've never been fond of the ocean, or rivers, or wilderness.
I've always had a tremulous reaction to these forces.
I will always feel safer stranded in a city, than having to survive on my own, vulnerable to forces of nature that I cannot control.

Darwin be damned!

In Guatemala, or how the pompous adults like to say "En mi tierra..." or "En Guatemala," I always preferred swimming in pools than rivers or the ocean. There was something about controlled waters, even if said control came through a machine...

Don't blame me, blame America.

Oh! I'm sorry does that sound cliché?
Well after all, aren't platitudes what make the world go round?

The few most significant childhood memories I have managed to unbury are but remnants of life relegated to those who managed to stray away from major conflicts and genocide of the civil war,

memories of life clinched by those who worked under globalization.

a privatized education in an all boys academy,
militarized school functions masked as civilian preparation for boys who would grow up to be men,
the ever changing landscape of a small city with the complex of a small town,
having La Panamericana as my backyard,
the arrival of a McDonald's, a shitty tiny airport, cable television, telephone poles, and Coca Cola billboards to my third-world city,
shopping at a mercado for vegetables, and the supermarket for meats,

and leaving all that to end up in LA.

embracing the expansiveness of a made-up city,
traversing down Vermont from Koreatown to South Central to go to school,
sitting in the back seat of a car, speeding by USC, by all the pan-derias of Pico-Union, through all the crazy cars trying to maneuver into dense parking lots, or aimlessly waiting for the opening of a street parking space,
or walking to buy champurrado and tamales on the corner of Wilshire and Vermont, or fresh squeezed orange juice off a supermarket cart on 8th,

Immigrants are used to living on top of each other.

There's a reason why the densest parts of the city are hella brown, and people actually walk, and take the bus, and open small business, all without the need for some urban planner, nor the leadership of our Latino politicos, nor the advocacy of the joke of "community organizations" in this city.

But crossing a stretch of 6 car lanes always seemed like a big ordeal, not because I could get run over by a car, but because if you plan accordingly you can drive to a specific area and ensure that you park on the same side of the street, and simply walk from the insides of your car to your destination.

These rivers called freeways aren't as scary, when you don't have to walk on the bridges masked as streets hanging over the swooshing cars.

I don't have to worry about dipping my feet in these waters, because the river is less scary when you are part of its enthralling force.

and so it seems that I will be staying here for another year, a year to close a decade that I actually remember, living in this city.

and so I will continue to drive, and get lost in this vast city with its idyllic suburbanization...

next time you drive think of how whenever you are speeding down a freeway you are actually getting somewhere, you are traversing a distance that actually separates towns in other parts of the country, and crosses some national borders in parts of Europe.

and yet you are not getting anywhere, because the expanse is still there, and the deeper you go into it, the farther you are from penetrating it and finding an exit point.

and next time you feel lonely in LA, and wonder why this can't be a real city where you can sit outside your door, and just watch people pass by, or take a walk and bump into a stranger,

and wonder why this city seems so desolate

just remember that the people are there,
they are just locked away inside their cars,
and they still go for a stroll around the city,
they just don't want to bump into your car,

and they are there,
they just don't want to talk to you,
because they are lonelier than you...