Nobody's Going Anywhere

Picture, if you will, the immense bedsheet of the universe. Give yourself a bird’s eye view and see it stretching out in all directions of horizon. In your mind’s eye, it’s a dark expanse dotted with erratic clusters of light. All is still and unmoving, for you have the cosmic view outside of space and time.

Now, pick one of those clusters of light and stare at it for a moment. Come in closer and see that it is a spiral galaxy whose arms throw out stardust as it wheels through the black like a glow-in-the-dark Frisbee. It is rotating and blinking and bouncing along.

Zero in on one of the arms. Get right inside it. All sorts of activity now looms into view: asteroids trundle gravely along on gravity belts; meteors whip past. Stars cough and throb, while planets glide around pools of starlight with their duckling moons dodging and circling in their wakes.

One of those planets is Earth, and I now invite you to gaze on the old girl as she turns and tilts on her habitual rounds. She’s got the spins, so you’ve got to get in closer to slow her down. Oh Earth! The fat Asian continent spreads over the top half, and there she has two legs, Africa thicker through the hip and South America dwindling to a dainty ankle. At the western Atlantic, hurricanes plow into the coast. The Gulf Stream is a plume. The polar caps grate with cold.

Come around to America. Cloud covers the east, but the west it is clear. Look to the dangling Baja peninsula and then north: you might see a faint haze of smoke where California’s been burning. Los Angeles is down there.

So come down through the haze. You pop out into a bowl formed by mountains to the east and south, and the Pacific on the west. LA is crammed in there with its neighbours, Santa Monica and Pasadena and Anaheim and all, sprawling and creeping out over the edges. The famous Hollywood sign hems a piece in, and if you zoom in to the south-south-west, there’s downtown Los Angeles, a predictable stand of bank buildings looking like a concrete and glass edition of those magic rocks you order from a comic book to grow in a clear plastic “garden”.

Throughout Los Angeles, there are arteries clogged with traffic. A hundred thousand people are plodding north on the Pasadena Freeway, and a hundred thousand more are plodding south. A hundred thousand go east to Pomona, and a hundred thousand are going west to the beaches. Bouncing for a moment off the freeway, you’ll see it’s no better on the city streets. La Cienaga, and Sunset, and Wilshire, and every last street is packed with cars and vans and trucks and motorcycles roaring around, changing lanes, entering and exiting and making u-turns.

There’s a sort of triangle where the 5 and the 10 and the 110 cross, just a hair northeast of the downtown stand, by Dodger Stadium. If you run your eyes down there, you’ll see it’s Chinatown. You can’t miss the standard-issue carved red and gold gates, and all those crumbling pagoda roofs. The traffic is somewhat diminished here, except for the fish delivery trucks and pickups full of Mexicans coming up from the Pueblo district with their flatbeds stacked with office chairs and wrought iron fencing. Zoom right in on North Hill Street, where a few Asian people are clipping along with their shopping bags. There is an ancient fellow with a cane, and two grouchy old Chinese ladies dragging their screaming grandchildren by the sleeves.

Right on the corner of North Hill and Alpine, there is me. (I’m wearing an orange shirt. Oh, and I have the only blond hair for blocks.) Cars and trucks are to-ing and fro-ing, and some of them are honking at each other and maybe at me as I stand on the corner deciding whether to go up or down. I left the hotel a moment ago and have been tacking from one side to the other. Eventually, I go around in a loop.

We’re striving, the universe, the galaxy, the planet, Los Angeles and I, to get somewhere. I’m trying to find a liquor store. Los Angeles is trying to get there (or back), the planet is reaching for a new season, the galaxy wants to break apart, and the universe is, at every moment of every moment, carving itself out of nothing. All this requires an enormous amount of energy. Each centimeter of space claimed from the void stretches the universe a little thinner, and it’s likely that the galaxy will eventually meet a chunk of gravity big enough to knock it off its pinwheel axis. (Then where will it go? Apart!)

The Earth dogs on, around and around the sun, minute after minute and eon after eon. Los Angeles is on its way home. I finally find a grocer who sells bourbon, and that’s me turning for the hotel where I intend, for a short time anyway, to take myself clean out of orbit.