One early morning I happened to see a dog named Snoop on Petfinder. I went to his shelter’s Instagram, and saw that they were holding their first in-person adoption event on the same morning. On a whim, half awake, we decided to amble out to the car and drive to Rowland Heights to see this dog in person. A couple of hours later we came home with a dog.
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Made It Home
My journey through living in Los Angeles proper has always been marked by inconvenient situations growing incrementally more convenient over time.
Read MoreRiding a Bike
I never learned how to ride a bike as a child. I’ve always carried this like a minor dark secret: a basic rite of passage for children across the world had eluded me. In my mind, I was a person that learned to crawl, walk, run, and then skipped straight to driving a car.
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Photo Credit: Matt Oswalt
The World in Flux
The coronavirus pandemic has made the unmooring of natural disasters available to all of us. The dread that I felt in mid-March was mostly informed by the realization that everything will be different now, but we can’t see what that means. We could only slowly live through it, second by second, until one day we look back and realize that something hasn’t returned.
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Today I went walking while things explode
Some sad independence
Better Oblivion
Rivers are an unfamiliar concept to those of us in the California metropolis. We have the ocean, but its cultural meaning is entirely different. Our beaches are places of relaxation, or vacation, or beauty. The Rio Grande is more somber than that. When I saw the occasional person on a park bench watching the river, they did not seem to be the type that was “taking in the rays.” The act of watching a river is inherently an act of sadness. If you were watching the river, something weighed on you that an ocean would not relieve.
Read MoreThe Center of the World
I was born and raised in the South Bay, a region just 15 miles south of Downtown Los Angeles. Culturally, it was across the country. The South Bay is its own world, with its own concerns and identity. LA lived in our minds as the distant big city, and while it loomed large, likening ourselves to Angelenos was as alien as likening ourselves to New Yorkers.
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