One of the wonderful things about sorting through old papers is the opportunity to stumble upon fragments of essays, journals, and poems. I found something from 2003 -- over a decade old, almost a different person, partly embarrassing -- and yet there's something that still rings true. As I found it:
Walked out of the house this morning, the thin knotted clouds you get some January mornings. A breeze and i thought that's one of the great things about Los Angeles -- the sky is so dynamic, so mutable. The Pacific sweeps against us, and it's this sense of perpetual movement that makes life so exciting. Something new will be blown to shore and the remnants of memory and maybe other things blow east, fall into back canyons the way one loses a pair of earrings behind the dresser. On that note, you can see why the Santa Anas are so bizzare when they blow out of the canyons and the city looks at itself again. But for now, at sunset it seems the sun is closer, more basic in some way. Light is simple, unadorned, ironic in this beautiful way because most other beauties in this city are anything but unadorned. But walking to the car in the park (green space!) the mood is rising large and pale over the low box of the grocery store and the ice cream shop. Struck by disconnects -- such simple pale moon lofted over Los Angeles -- so i guess one finds beauty here in simple things: the thatching of an empty parking lot maybe a woman stepping out of the store late at night walking to her small car; or the patient fronds of the palms along our block; lemons are growing on the tree in the front of the house and the sky is -- that's it -- the west is here so expansive, so unbounded. You talk about infinity, think standing on the beach watching sunset. Here sitting in front of the house, the first star just beside the crown of the palm tree, a plan taking off in the sky which bleeds; the golden circlet of the sunset, the sky is pale, the vault seems shallow almost, thin. There are planes going places high above, a seagull's body gold in the sun, flies west towards the beach.
(scattered in the front patio; LA - sunset; 1/4/03)
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