LA On Foot, On Mushrooms

The mushrooms have begun to take effect, pleasant but still disappointing. I am perhaps past the point in my life where mushrooms do much for me. The interesting modes of thought brought out by the drug are no longer novel, in my walking my thoughts are psychedelic enough. The city at night lends itself to the psychedelic, already the walker inhabits another strange world existing atop or perhaps underneath- maybe even alongside, whatever- the one they inhabit when the sun is up.

My stomach is uncomfortable, the downside of mushrooms, why I don’t take them recreationally all that often. I keep walking and try to breath through it. Walking the city at night I find moments of pure breath in the way yoga promises but seldom delivers; walking the street is freer, I am genuinely alone, answerable only to myself and my own exploration. No guide is there to tell me what to do.

I find myself, as I walk a street of stately houses above Wilshire, trying to have thoughts about them; interesting thoughts like one might put in a book. They all strike me as banal, forced, other people’s thoughts I’m thinking to impress people. I’m trying to convince the other in my mind that I’m cleaver. ‘ This house is a historic landmark because it’s a simulated Italian Villa, isn’t that just like LA. A landmark of the fake.’ True perhaps, but not really my thought, a common ‘clever-person’s-irony’. With my breath I try to stop thinking in conversation with the other. The purpose… well perhaps not purpose but the joy maybe, of the night walk is to experience first, put into words second if ever.

I begin to see- an italicized form of the verb- the street open in front of me. It’s rare I see the street. Mostly when I’m on it it I’m on it for a destination, I’m going somewhere. Perhaps I see what’s on the street but I don’t see the street itself as an object, as a place. The first thing that brings itself to my attention is distance, I see the space between things. It’s always this way when I’m high, and sometimes even when I’m sober but in that same sort of ‘zone’. The negative space between the limbs of trees on this manicured street becomes tangible. The light poles and hedges begin to press in on my awareness, making the street a tunnel in the darkness. The more I breath the more I live in this tunnel, the here of the street, unmediated by the conversational talk of thinking.

As I walk the tunnel I become aware of the smells of flowers, somewhere someone is burning something, behind a wealthy person’s hedge there must be a pine tree. I can smell its sap. It’s one of my favorite smells. It’s here that I begin to think myself, not think as in conversation. It’s this space I walk the streets for in whatever city I find myself; New York, London, Chicago, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Toronto, Indianapolis, Omaha. Every city, even in all its remarkable difference, still leads to the same place, or it can anyway. It’s a destination that can’t always be reached. Drugs aren’t necessary, but they do make it easier to walk into this present. Thoughts here are not so much words conversed with your own mind as they are noticings, impressions that could become word eventually.

I stop in front of a massive home near Larchmont Village. It has stained glass windows. I want to stare at it, but I’m afraid. On the street, I realize, I am always afraid. The panoptic gaze of some other feels like it is always on me. The street is isolating, out of every window and every car is a suspicious eye. This, now, is a true thought, a realization of a thing always haunting me, suspicion bread by culture. Walking the street at night I am a man out of place. Though no rule says I should not be here — I don’t live in a time of curfew — it is still understood. The signs alerting me to every home’s security system, the ever present camera, none of these serve the purpose they say they do, their purpose is as reminder that the streets are for purposeful movement only, to be on when a thing must be done. ‘Don’t be here. Your presence is dangerous’. The only other people out with me are those running or walking their dogs and babies. A task. An excuse.

With my opening up to suspicion I also realize that the watcher is only in my head. Being in my head doesn’t make it any less real or scary. It shows it to be an infection, an product of symbolic violence. It also brings me to realize that though society is always watching me through my own eyes no one is actually looking at me. No one is looking out from their windows. The cars that drive by might as well be a different species. I’m entirely alone.

I move on and walk down Wilshire Boulevard. I see a woman walking the other way. Though cars pass she and I are alone in a desolate world, as isolated as if we were in the woods. The night walk shows how hollowed out the human city and the human soul have become. Devoted entirely to function, entirely to getting from place to place. I see this woman as though a wonderer in a future Wild West, and at the same time I see that our cultural imagination places in some unreal location what is actually here. Does this move help us see it, this truth of our isolation and alienation, or does it hide it by placing it out of time and in spaces that do not exist? This woman wondering at night is as much the cyber-punk hero as Gibson’s Case and Molly, walking through a neon world in the bowls of a mechanical city, as disconnected from anything collective as the rest of us. That’s the moral of cyber-punk fiction, right? The technical alienates people from what it is that makes us human, the experience of being collective?

I keep walking. The cars on the street, as much a danger as wild beasts are at the same time something flowing and natural, bees as they go about their work, the respiration of the tree, blood flowing through the body. The city is an emergent thing, a great organism. In this wave pattern it is transcendent, but where does the person fit into this emergent whole. I mean the embodied person, not the mind only, not the human-become-car, not the giant brain that is the internet, not finance which is itself both thought and organism. How does the free floating human body fit in the city? It seems as if the whole of city making is effort to keep the body out of the city. The body is supposed to be indoors doing tasks; shopping, working, relaxing so to shop and work more. This is the offense to decency of the homeless camp, the revolutionary power of street protest, the fear of the loitering black body; the street is not a place for flesh. Flesh on the street is at once suspect and vulnerable.

I come upon the Ebell theater and am attracted to its Edwardian wrought iron door. The intricacies bring to mind my fiancé’s engagement ring which is also Edwardian. I keep walking and think of my grandfather. He used to go to the theater, it was a place people went, a place of congregation for the generation before tv was common, beautiful places for human gathering. Up in an apartment someone is watching Netflix. The critique here- the difference between these two modes of entertainment, my aesthetic judgments, points about isolation-are to obvious to spare much thought for (on the walk and now). Common. Trite.

I walk south into a charming area with small nice homes and rented units. I hear music and take off my head phones- for much of this walk I’ve had music playing. (There is a contradiction here to my goal of being as unmediated as possible, listening to music alone in my head phones, but music changes the nature of a walk and only in my most open moments — when the thinking self has gone all but dormant — can I bear to do with out, otherwise my mind runs too loud.) As I get closer to the sound I realize it for some kind of intricate House track, the kind you can’t help but like. It brings up sense memories of other moments in my life, on foot and on mushrooms, festivals where the naked human body — literally naked and figuratively — are expected and appreciated. Festivals are ironic places. Festival grounds are the first place I’ve ever experienced the openness and comfort of being a body outside the demands of productivity, but these places only exists as enclaves set up and supported by capitalism. They’re not automatically transformative. There have been times inn my life when I thought they were.

I walk towards the sound and see that it’s coming from a house party, some people of about my age are in the front room and behind a gate in a courtyard the DJ must be spinning. They’ve got a really good setup for a small house party. It sounds really good. If I was with my least threatening and best looking friends I might hazard going in. Alone I’d feel too out of place. A group of strange men could be threatening if seen in the dark, but a man alone and unknown is threatening in the light. Who are you and what have you do to be alone? There’s an aspect of moral contagion in the man alone. You have to confront him in his entirety. A group you can confront as a group. It’s easier to stay afloat on the bigger surface area, easier to avoid weirdnesses when there’s multiple people to talk to.

I walk on thinking of some idyllic time when neighborhood culture was stronger in the city and walking into a house party might have been less strange. Maybe it’s not an idyllic time, maybe it’s a thing that still exists in neighborhoods that have a unity. In neighborhoods where people live, not just exist. Places with the aura of history and intricate connections, not places hollowed out by gentrification and general transience. An unwalkable city is a manifestation of this modern type of living. Those closest to your heart live in different parts of town. Your neighbors are strangers. There’s a freedom in this, sure. The bonds of familiarity can make it difficult to stretch and make different, some recognitions are no different that judgments. To be known has significant drawback, but for as long as I have lived in the city I have lived in it as an unknown. How would the geography change in a city with localized connections?

I’m nearing home now. I’m not yet tired but my legs are. I don’t know what I’ll do when I get back. I don’t plan to write any of this down until tomorrow and my fiancée is at work. I suppose after these few hours walking through a city as a thought moves through a brain, alone and thinking about what it means to be alone, I’ll go play video games or read. What else is there to do?

*A piece from ‘On Foot In The Unwalkable City*