Los Angeles is big.

Los Angeles is big. It seems to go on forever. I wonder, if I walked every street and every alleyway in this city, how long would it take me? How many pairs of shows would I wear out? What would my map look like as I traced one end to the next? Would I discover the borders to this place? Does it even end? If I crawled along the freeway through the weeds and vacant lots how long would it take then? Baudrillard said that Los Angeles is less real than Disneyland. That makes me chuckle, but is it true? The other night, or some night, or one night, I rode my bike up to Griffith Park Observatory. You could see the whole city from there or part of it. Even from the top of the mountain you only get a small piece and even that small piece is as big as a small ocean, or a country in some part of the world. The other day, or some day, or one day, I rode my bike from Echo Park to the ocean. I rode along a bike path to the ocean for miles and miles. It took all day to do a complete loop. We rode for forty miles, in bike lanes, gutters, along concrete washes, through traffic being buzzed by busses and SUVs, along famous streets and famous intersections full of tourists and tourists busses, and everywhere I looked there were houses and shops and office buildings and people waiting outside. Los Angeles is big. It is a place that seems like it doesn't actually exist in the way that other cities exist. The car mediates all experiences here. The tedium, the waiting, the traffic, the assholes, the freeways, all of them plugged into the car. As a nondriver, it's a weird place to be.

What's that smell?

Do you ever walk through the city (which city?) and wonder what that smell is? Is that garbage? Rotten food? Human excrement? Do you ever wander through the city (which one?) and think that it can't be long until something big happens?