It is qualitatively different, that is for sure. The difference between being a molecule in a solid and a molecule in a gas perhaps.
The poverty is in your face, not criminalized and brushed aside as in the suburban areas. It is simply there; it has to be. There is nowhere else for it to go. Men stand outside of stores begging. It is agonizing. Doubly so as I am reprimanded for giving. That's right. Reprimanded for giving. This culture has really done a number to our value systems.
And the clouds billow in from the ocean, the strikingly endless ocean that stretches on beyond the bluffs. I spent my second time urinating in the Long Beach ocean last night after spending an uncomfortable hour in a club-like bar. Yes, these clubs are just like the rest of them everywhere else. Filled with hedonist instrumentalists, people flashing smiles and employing language and wit like tools, like crowbars to pry open the carnal riches of their sexual targets. I drank a few rum and cokes, painfully aware that I was surrounded by mercenaries, bobbing absently to mercenary techno music with deadpan female voices singing of, well, clubs and rolling, and so on into another hall of mirrors. Televisions glowed on the walls with surfing footage, maybe for people like me aching to rest their eyes on something distracting. Spinning red disco lights dappled the walls. All artifacts extracted from different eras, all thrown together into a single pulse of incoherence. What were we doing here? What were we accomplishing? I still failed to understand. I couldn't grasp the overall meaning of a place like this, and I don't think anyone else did either. It was about pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain, second by second, above all else. The walk back to the apartment after missing the bus was probably the highlight of the night. Moonlit, seaside, lonely, with scattered stragglers finding their way back.
I do like it here though. It is the diversity. The difference of peoples. It is difference that transforms everyone involved. It spreads tolerance. Lowers xenophobia. Near the end of my time in the suburbs I'd ride down a bike path that weaved back behind some houses in Placentia and Yorba Linda and I'd pass all these suburbanites. I tried very hard to say hello to most of them, and to their credit many of them were friendly. But many still had faces of stone. Or fear in their faces as they caught sight of someone who looked somewhat different. The time was usually around sundown, and I saw these crewcut men and slit-mouthed women and it made me think of Rome and declining empire: just people clustered in their mini-tribes, terrified of anything with even a slightly divergent appearance. A nation of civilian police and soldiers, people militant and terrified and guarded inside, terrified of the setting sun, of the coming dark. Scurrying to the safety of their homes.
I too fear the dark, but only as much as it excites me. Within the dark you are free to produce light; you are hidden from judgement. You are the judgement. You are the value-creator that others will later judge by.
