New moon in Aries, and the rain is pounding down on Los Ángeles. Patio furniture is tested throughout every neighborhood as parrots take shelter in the branches guarding us from high above. Love is a theme of this erotic moon phase–as well as the honking of car horns as the 110 South dangerously fills with standing water. Disjointed, disoriented, chaotic flow of the city that captures so many of our imaginations slowly molds you into its form: flexible jelly with a core of steel.
This is one of those days where it seems safer to just stay in bed. It sounds bad out there I think to myself as the beeswax candle cultivates a world of shadows on my bedroom walls. It’s 6:42am and the forecast is already set–scroll down and down, fall in and out of love with the bathroom mirror, cook dinner with your ex, play tug-of-war with your dog–do anything but open that front door.
But if you do have to leave, make sure to have water in your car in case you get sucked into a sinkhole on Sunset Boulevard and eat a healthy breakfast, but–no eight-hour fasting-whole-thirty kind of thing. Eat something hearty that gives your day a “leg up” or a “leg sideways” so that you can circumnavigate the loneliness of rain in Los Ángeles. The only certainty of today is that we will all have patio furniture that is going to be sixty-percent rot by summer and that our collective anxiety about the rain pounding that engineered Ikea wood will also hold us back from saving our four-legged friends from their fate. When it rains in Los Ángeles we live in denial–like when it’s 108 degrees Fahrenheit–we put a podcast on, throw some boy-brow gel on or whatever makeup makes you feel more ghastly and beautiful, and traverse through the city like it’s made for living.
To live in Los Ángeles is to be in love with the non-ending. Other cities might promise you solid conclusions–you know the neighborhoods well enough to predict the calm dinner out with the same friends, you know that people will complain about traffic and the influx of tech workers, you know that there will be no crowd spilling out of the neighborhood bar on a Tuesday night, you know that if you are lucky enough you will end well here in a way that will satisfy the order of things–a house, a career, a marriage, and even a golden retriever.
To live in Los Angeles is to be in love with the non-ending; a neighborhood bar is hard to locate because the highways keep beckoning you further and further into the tangled web of homes and palm trees and tiny restaurants bursting at their seams and linen-wearing humans picking herbs in Griffith and hidden farms in South Central twirling disco balls over colorful chickens and bowling alleys that sit along train tracks serving sukiyaki and cheese fries. This is a city of lonely transplants mixed impossibly with families who have lived here for generations and they clash in their cultures, but together, fall in love with the clean air after a steady rainfall.
On the highway is where I find my largest community–I used to think of myself as entering the herd, but now I see it as a convergence of “we’re all in this together” mentality and a “we are also very fucked” thought process. I love it. Does that make me abnormal? I’m not sure if Los Ángeles has a barometer for “normal” like smaller, more organized towns do. To be wacky, loud, disruptive, joyous, angry, and incredibly scared is to blend in here. If you’re not a little worried from time to time you’re not driving through the city enough.
Yet within the chaos are microcosms of sensual peace–Ethiopian jazz filtering through old speakers as lemon trees drip water onto terracotta tiles, smoke from chicken being barbecued in a grocery-store parking lot that captures your imagination, sunbeams melting over two-story level buildings in Koreatown, waves in Malibu tilting towards land boasting their dolphins, the clinking of glasses in old Hollywood steakhouses where the red velvet looks better in the dim light, spiraling labyrinths in Topanga Canyon where hikers hug the famous tree, mornings in your bedroom as you listen to the music of horns and rain and parrots and your neighbor chuckling to herself.
Miró Myung published articles in Tom Tom Magazine, a poem in Luna Collective Magazine, LA County Library’s “Love Letters in Light,” and co-published poetry book “Almanac of Tiny Clouds.” She does visuals for indie band Tangerine featured in NME, The Guardian, Rolling Stone India, Billboard with a BFA from UCLA.
THE CITY KEY 