remembering a past life through google maps

i'm on google maps.  look close.  i'm famous

Tonight I find myself using google maps street view to look at our last apartment in Los Angeles.  I travel down Los Feliz boulevard as if I was in a car and take a left had turn down Hillhurst avenue, I stop back track and decide to take the back way to Hillhurst via Rowena. I stop to ponder how truly amazing this technology is.  When I was a child I had this fantasy that I would wake up one morning to find that the world was frozen in place, everyone except me, and I would spend the day exploring everything go where ever I wanted and never having to worry about what people were thinking about me.  This is about as close to that fantasy as I could imagine.

This is a whole world frozen in various moments in time, I can go anywhere completely unseen and everyone around me is frozen.  People stand forever walking their dog, cars wait at stop signs infinitely, lovers sit at restaurant tables eternally existing only in that moment.  Unlike photographs which capture only a fraction of a moment in a world, google street view is like actually revisiting a place where I can virtually walk down a street and stop look around me and continue on.

 I am awestruck by how incredible this technology is until I begin to wonder what exactly is wrong with me.  Why am I spending my Wednesday night sitting on the computer virtually revisiting the place I formally lived?  I walked and drove these streets every single day and yet I never stopped to admire them.  Through google I just sit and stare at buildings I never gave two thoughts about before but now I ponder about the people that live there.  How is it that not being there causes me to think more about something than being there and experiencing it?

I travel down the road to Vermont Avenue and the Los Feliz 3 cinema where I question if it was really necessary to blur out the faces on the bill boards as well?  I go one door further down to Skylight Books and at any moment I feel that I could just walk right through my screen onto the street and into the store.  It then occurs to me that in this world it is daylight all the time, there is no night, there is no sleep.  Just as this illusion begins to fall apart I turn down Franklin Avenue and travel west, I move at a rate that almost feels like I’m driving down the street in my car.  I pass the House of Pies, Gelson’s, the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater, Birds, and then I turn left onto Tamarind Avenue.  I pull up next to the yellow stucco building look up to the unit at the top right and there I am standing in the window.

I know it’s me because the table on the balcony and the pathetic looking lemon tree in the corner are mine, the figure in the window is not Jaime, it has to be me.  The illusion is broken because that was me in that moment but now here I am sitting on my computer looking at me through the window like some perverted voyeur spying on myself.

Did I make a mistake leaving?  When I was in LA I spent the entire time reminiscing about Seattle, I surrounded myself with objects that reminded me of home.  Now that I’ve moved home I find myself reminiscing about LA, surrounding myself with things that remind me of that place and that moment frozen in time.  Will I ever be able to live somewhere and simply be there without thinking of somewhere else?

new city

self explanatory

       Having never moved to a new city before I wasn’t exactly prepared for this moment, the moment that occurs right after you’ve unpacked all your boxes and put things in their proper place.  The moment after your new home begins to feel like your only home.  The moment that you realize you have nothing left to do but to introduce yourself to this new city.  

There is a picture that sums up how I best remember those first days in our new home, I was on the phone with my mom telling her about our new apartment and walking from room to room taking detailed pictures like I was a crime scene photographer.  While taking a picture of the living room I caught Jaime asleep on the couch a blanket covering her.  The reason I remember this image most from those days was because that was exactly how I felt, tired and overwhelmed.  We hardly knew Los Angeles and on more than a few occasions I would lay down and drift off to sleep and dream of being somewhere more recognizable and comfortable.  When you don’t know what your next move is sleeping is as good a way as any to put off making it.

We were officially settled in by Friday the week we arrived and though we would soon be burning through what little money we had we decided to give ourselves the weekend to just relax without looking for jobs.  This gave us time to try and get ourselves acquainted with the city, learn the layout a bit.  If you’ve been to LA then you know that knowing the layout of the city is practically impossible as it essentially is one massive urban sprawl.  Not like New York with tall skye scrapers and twelve story apartment buildings contained in a small space or like Seattle where there are simple land marks to help orient yourself.

As our luck would have it the only two people we knew in the city were out of town the week we arrived, coincidentally in the Northwest.  It was up to us to get our bearings on our own.  We started small, with a trip to the Gelson’s kitty corner from our building.  At first we were excited to live so close to a grocery store but once we went inside we realized that we were living next to a grocery store priced like it was inside of an airport.  People often would ask us, what is Gelson’s like, and I would say “well it’s like any other grocery store accept add $2 to everything, so the celebrities can shop there.”

Our next big adventure out was to a Hollywood Bed Bath and Beyond and though it was less than two miles away we had to google map it and spent fifteen minutes looking for it.  By the time we got there I felt like an Alzheimer’s patient who didn’t really know where they were, how they got there or how to get home.  In fact we were so close to our apartment we could almost see it from the store.  By the time we arrived home there was a surprise, our first piece of mail.  It was a note from my mom noting that she was sending us our first piece of mail.

Aside from the grocery store we also lived across the street from what is called “Franklin Village” which is home to a series of restaurants, a very expensive cafe, a pet store, clothing store, used bookstore, wine store, a video Hut (more on that later) and finally the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater.  That first month we spent nearly every night there, the shows were cheap (about $5 a person) and there was guaranteed to be someone that we admired performing that evening.  It was like our chance for a cheap night on the town, we would even get a little dressed up to go stand outside the theater to get our hands stamped and watch an hour to two hours of raunchy comedy.  We didn’t miss one show in particular which was performed every Wednesday evening, until one night when the girl in the box office recognized us.  This may not seem like a big deal however there was another guy who saw every show the theater performed, we’re talking 3-4 different shows a night 7 nights a week, you could not walk by that place without seeing him first in line for the next show.  Clearly this guy had no life and when the box office girl recognized us I had this vision of becoming best friends with that guy waiting in line with him before every show and as we walked outside past that guy he stopped us.

“Hey do I know you?” He asked Jaime.  “Are you on a TV show?”

This wasn’t unreasonable to ask because as I was well becoming aware, if you think someone is famous they probably are.  In this case however he was wrong he recognized us not because we were famous but because we’d been going to the same shows for the last fucking week.  That was the moment that made me realize that perhaps we needed to diversify our entertainment options.

This is when we discovered Video Hut.  If you haven’t been to one they’re mostly extinct now but imagine your local video store before Blockbuster and Hollywood video took over the brick and mortar video rental business.  Small spaces with small selections and movies released two years ago that were still on the “just in” shelf with sun faded covers.  You had to love it’s old world charm but the thing you really had to love is that they would rent out movies the week before they were released.  In order to keep ourselves from becoming that creepy fanatic waiting in line we supplemented our theater going with “officially”  unreleased movies from video hut.

Our first Sunday we spent the morning by venturing all the way out to IKEA in Burbank, a city which I had heard of many times but didn’t know what exactly could be found there.  As it turns out... nothing.  After we returned home we sat around trying to think of something not too far away or expensive that we could do.  Somehow we decided on driving over to the Kodak theater at the heart of Hollywood.  This was the only time in three years we ever spent time there just to visit.  The reason being that you only need to go once to realize that that place is a total nightmare.  A couple of boring landmarks, stores you could literally shop at in any mall in America, a bunch of assholes dressed up like super heros, shops full of stripper clothes, and a million disappointed tourists.  They came here expecting exciting photo opportunities but instead found something far more depressing.  A street of broken dreams.

Back at home we silently acknowledged to one another that we would not be returning there anytime soon.  In a few hours our grace period would be over, we would no longer be allowed to nap on the couch in the middle of the day without feeling guilty.  We could no longer ignore the balance of our shrinking checking account and live a carefree lifestyle.  We had to get jobs and become productive members of society.  I wasn’t stupid, I didn’t think that would come easy. 

It didn’t.