!Scramble!
L.A. RUMINATIONS NOTES NOTES:
“Past the travel agency lit with neon signs for cheap tickets to Guadalajara. Past the 76 Gas station with a faux Western facade and silent glass panel sliding doors. Past the insurance offices with 14 different shades of off white bouncing and ringing against the fluorescent overheads. Past a million cars before I pass a million more. Pushing through aesthetic boundaries. Towards the rectilinear shelter. Towards a lgiht on inside the kitchen. Towards a establishment of egalitarian eateries. Towards a chimney-less stove. Towards Jack’s Box. Towards a sunny window seat with, indented and plastic formed, invitingly shallow and stable.”
Jack in the Box, my Cabala, squared away against the 403 highway, dug in, to the hillside with red cinder block retaining walls lining the drive through. If retrofitted with a glass roof, you could catch a few seconds of culinary mastery from the highway, chickens mashed and pressed into uniform shapes, robotic syrup tubes measuring teaspoons of minute maid concentrate, fruitless strawberry banana smoothies.
Hungry! Wedge my foot diagonally between the metal, push palms along the top of the fence, swing a leg over the dull iron Fleur De Lis spikes, down into the lemon tree surrounded by unwrapped presents of trash. Home Depot receipts, sticky mexican coke bottles and a sharp porcupine of lemon spurs, hustling holes into my descent.
Everyone has a dogyard. Whole dirt flats full of paw prints, chain link fences bulging in the middle as dog after dog slams face against the perimeter, cramming and pushing teeth and skin through the rounded square holes. Moving across the side walk from concrete tile to concrete tile is one long series of attacks. Dead grass runways. Juniper fox holes. Hedge bunkers. A suburban shark tube, full of action and cracked glass, fin bark and fur leaking from the suburban sea and littering the automated walk way with salt water and nervous energy. I want these dogs out of my ears and preemptively I wrap pointer fingers with T-Shirt cloth finding the holes in my head, wishing I could hover over the dog, clicking away with a Kid Pix eraser tool. I bark back and sometimes it works! Silenced by my widened eyes and stooped shuffle as I move broadside along the fence. Everything about a dog to me is private. It’s private relationship/kinship with it’s owner. It’s ruthless defense of private property. Dogs are a tool with the simple purpose of privatizing space.