If there is a moment of leisure that allows for a chance to take my eyes off the pandemonium of lane changes, flashing lights, sudden stops and starts and blind curves, then the view before me is magnificent. A garden of billboards, neon, blow up Santas, rivers of red break light lava flows and molten headlight gold streams rising up and falling down the sides of mountains far off into the valleys and canyons the five different freeways sweep through and loop around. Blinking points of light line the streets and climb the palm trees, ever twinkling through the blanket of smog rolling in to fill the recesses between mountain peaks. Orange roiling clouds of pollutants drift down from the sky and cascade over the foothills to give a ghostly presence to every shimmer and glitter twenty yards ahead. But the moments to take this in are few. When they come they disrupt the yuletide of cursing freely flowing from my mouth and through my head. The moments remind me that, yes, even though I live in a cess pool of human filth, garbage, debris and where art has met its penultimate corruption into expressions of dollar signs rather than will and though the air is hard to breath and the dusty ground is tough to appreciate and although this many humans were never meant to live in a desert and suck up the resources from the homes of others thereby destroying not just one ecosystem, the moment reminds me, despite all that, that there is a faint glimmer, a flash of beauty.
Of course that beauty is not enough to justify environmental destruction and artistic corruption, but it still is enough for me to reverse my condemnation and lift my wish for the ugly festering mass to shake, rattle, burn and roll into the sea. At least until I move back to the delightful home of McCarthy, Dahmer and Guien. Oh yeah, and Fonzie.