A walk in Los Angeles

I find LA a great place to walk, perhaps since no one else is walking, and so I walked last night along Washington Blvd. from Sawtelle west to Abbot Kinney and back.

It was a lovelyl, strange walk, loud with the sound of fast automobiles coming toward me and leaving me behind. There were whole stretches of time when I felt like I was walking beside a river made of plastic, metal and halogen light instead of water.

I counted eight other walkers during a journey, I'm guessing, of 4 or 5 miles, and three bicyclists, two of them riding without front or rear lights. 

Washington Blvd. is such a creative pastiche of auto parts stores, storage-unit facilities, restaurants, architect offices, a .99 Cent outlet and at least three donut shops. At The Kinney, a newish-looking hotel in Venice, which appears to be a fairly new fabricated update of a 1950's apartment building, gussied up and re-named (anytime you can call something THE you have a tremendous marketing advantage, at least cosmetically) I turned around and walked east on the other side of the street.

I found a small restaurant with comfort food--Wood--sat down, ordered spaghetti bolognese and a glass of red wine. I read the new New Yorker, the one with the story about Nicholas Maduro, the President of Venezuela, and looked at the cartoons. 

Sitting in the restaurant, it felt like I'd finally found what I'd been searching for, whether I'd known it or not--complete invisibility. I enjoyed my 2-hour dinner with myself, though I missed my wife who'd returned to San Francisco and who I'll be very happy to see the day after tomorrow.

This morning I woke up happy in Mar Vista, scene of my late night walk, still alone but no longer invisible, writing this note on my iPhone:

Is the job of government to help make its citizens feel bigger than than they really are, or smaller, or would its citizens be better served by feeling almost nothing about their government at all?