Currently Listening: “Don’t Look Back In Anger” from Oasis, “The Black Parade” from My Chemical Romance, “Imagine” from A Perfect Circle.
Twelve hours past the eigth night of Chanukah and three days before the traditional amass of wrapping paper on the living room before, the city is a cold 25 degrees, American. I stare down the ramp at the skyscrapers of Phoenix, their outline still a hazy Los Angeles gray with lights that briefly poke through the charcoal smog. They say that the light we see today from stars in the sky was actually light created billions of years ago that just now reached us. Using this logic, the lights from the steel towers I am looking at could be light from, say, at least 15 minutes ago.
Awaking this morning with heavy eyes and a cloudy head that continually flashed with images of the dreams from the night before, dreams that were drawn from the well of our late-night viewing of “A Scanner Darkly.” The film was so-so, but watching real-life Anaheim sketched into graphic novel visuals made everything too familiar. Even The Crystal Cathedral and the City Tower and the Irvine Spectrum made it into the film, as backdrops during Keanu Reeve’s high speed drive on the Interstate 5.
And I sit here at the light, above the city, waiting for the green arrow to turn left down onto 24th, and a cement truck pulls up besides me and idles, and the car behind me pulls up too close to my rear bumper. I shift to neutral and let the clutch out just a bit, and he quits idling forward.
This is a long light. Between Panic! At The Disco’s “I Write Sins Not Tradegies” and U2’s “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” The Edge rattles off Phoenix-area traffic incidents like lists of the ships lost in the Caspian, and most of them are on the 10, most of them behind me.
I remember when I listened to the Edge one day, a week ago or so, and they listed off a four car pile-up just before the 60 interchange on the eastbound, and I took credit for that incident. My Pontiac having thrown a rod through the engine block and disabled in the middle lane, a random Mexican mechanic and I stop three lanes of rush hour interstate traffic to push the disabled car with the Israeli flag to the shoulder, and as I jump in to hit the break, my car is glanced by a reckless Mustang, I lose my footing, and I am drug fifteen feet or so along this highway. Cars around and behind me only slowed due to the four-car pileup that I created just behind the Broadway curve, but maybe that made them slow enough so as not to run over me.
The light changes, and I remind myself of just eight more hours of work today. Then off to do what I love, the fun of writing and the whatnot. Five freelance assignments from a high-end developer, talks with an agent in San Francisco, the awaiting of this and that Project Forever … project, the teaming-up of a backpacker from Seattle for a Book of Travels, and stacks and stacks of submissions of shorts from New Yorkers, and the first Project Forever hate mail from Boston.
I park the Suzuki behind the warehouse, swipe my badge, and begin today.
Posted by sharoute 
