wandering exurbia

There's been a few things weighing on me over the past few days, so I took a drive along Route 66 to clear my head out. I turned due east on Huntington Drive and made the city of Arcadia my first stop. Arcadia is best known as the home of Santa Anita Park. I've never had great luck at Santa Anita, but I don't care because it's where The Killing was shot, one of my favorite movies of all time. Sterling

Hayden was a very underrated actor in Hollywood, I feel. The very last line in the movie is the best. The cops have the airport surrounded, the girl tells Hayden's character to run, but there's no place for him to go. "Nah," he says to her, knowing the jig's up. "What's the difference?" It gives me goose bumps every time.

Something very disturbing happened to me last week. I was browsing Facebook in the morning before work when I got an IM from a friend of mine. The conversation started off normal enough. Hi. How are you? Long time no speak. How's your daughter? And so on and so forth. Then she told me that she was in trouble. I asked what kind of trouble. She told me she was vacationing in Wales and had all her money stolen from her at gunpoint. She asked me to lend her $700. She said I could send it to her Western Union, and she told me she'd pay me back right away.

I'd like to say that I'm a trusting person, but that's not quite true. I'm actually a pretty suspicious person, really. In weighing people's motives, even those of my friends, I tend to assume the worst. So it wasn't because I'm trusting that I agreed to wire her $700. Rather, it was because I do everything I possibly can to avoid conflict. If $700 is what it costs for me to not have conflict with someone, it's money well spent...

There are cool old apartment buildings scattered around the city of Arcadia. The one you see in the photo here is especially wacky. Is it a 60s Jet-Age Modern kind of thing, or is it an Art Deco building from the 20s or 30? It looks like a lot of the Art Deco buildings you see in Miami on Collins Drive...

Heading east on Huntington Drive through Arcadia, you get a real flavor for how Asian the San Gabriel Valley has become in the last 20 years. I saw so many signs in Chinese. I think they were in Chinese, anyway. There are enclaves in the SGV that are heavily Korean and Vietnamese as well. I wonder if and how China's ascent into the position of the dominant superpower of the world will affect the demographics of this region.

My next stop was the city of Monrovia, and as I approached it I popped the remastered version of Machine Head into the CD player. When I was a kid, I wanted to be Ian Gillan. Deep Purple Made in Japan was the first album I ever bought with my allowance at the Record Connection on east 86th street in New York, world's away from the San Gabe.

It's my fault for believing that the person at the other end of the IM on Facebook was really my friend. I know this. It was stupid on my part, especially since this friend has a husband whom she would presumably contact before she contacted me in an emergency. My aversion to conflict, and I suppose my overeagerness to be a good friend, prevented me from asking the right questions before I rushed off to Western Union and sent my money into a fucking black hole. But the loss of the money bothers me a lot less than the total non-responsiveness of my friend in the aftermath of all this. I have yet to hear anything from her or her husband, a guy I grew up with and was pretty tight with. Not a damn word from either of them after I informed them of the scam. I got some terse text telling me that she'd been hacked. That's it. I don't know what their problem is. Is it that they're just so self involved that they haven't even grasped that somebody used her Facebook account to steal 700 bucks from me? Is it that my gullibility in this case was so moronic that they don't even know what to say to me? Is it that they're worried that I'll expect them to pay me back? What's the deal here? If somebody hacked into my Facebook account and used it to fleece a friend of mine out of money, I would be very attentive to that friend afterwards. In this instance, I thought my "friend" was in dire straits in a foreign land with nobody else to turn to. I did everything I could to help her, even though it wasn't really her. And now they don't even have the decency to say thanks for being a good friend... I think the most damning thing you can say about a person is not that your expectations of them have always been low, but that over time, with what you've learned about them through your experiences with them, your expectations of them have gradually been lowered until you get to the point where you have no expectations of them at all... In some ways I feel that this whole episode might be a result of the way I live my life. There are very few people who really matter to me at all, so perhaps it should come as no surprise when I find that there are likewise very few people for whom I matter. Living a disconnected life is a two-way street.

From Monrovia I drove through the city of Duarte and into the city of Azusa. Azusa was once a predominantly white rural backwater, comprised mostly of bean fields, orange groves, and a quiet center of town with small shops. Over time, Azusa has become a largely Latino exurb. The apartment buildings I saw were all about 40-50 years old and badly dilapidated. I drove past the middle school just as the kids were getting out for the day. I took some very clumsy pictures of the kids. One of the teachers asked me if I was looking for someone in particular. I think she was afraid I was some kind of buggerer. I can respect her vigilance. If I saw a short 40-something bald guy walking around the premises of a middle school taking pictures, I would probably be alarmed as well...

The Facebook scam got me thinking about friendship more generally. I don't have a lot of friends, and it hurts when the ones I do have show me that they don't really give a shit if I crap or go blind. The older I get, the more alone I feel. It's not all bad, but there are certainly times when the implications of being a loner are presented to me in stark terms. It's not even that I won't be friends with these people anymore. But I know now that they are not people I can count on, which means that they're not really friends in anything more than the most superficial sense. I have quite a few superficial friendships. The real friendships are the ones I can count on one hand.

Huntington Drive turns into Foothill

Blvd in the City of Glendora. Of all the towns along Route 66, Glendora is the nicest. It's a real throwback to the small town Americana of the pre-1960s era. Yes this means that it's very white and probably very conservative, but you can't help but get swept up into a bit of nostalgia as you walk past the old shops on Grand Avenue, the town's main drag. There's a barber shop, a pharmacy with a lunch counter where you can buy a float or a banana split, a hardware store, a small diner... Who knows what kind of David Lynchesque psychotic nightmare lurks beneath

this placid, timeless setting? As you move further north and higher up into the hills above the center of town, the houses get bigger and more expensive. I like the more modest homes in the flats best.

The next town over is San Dimas. There's not a lot going on in San Dimas. The road becomes one lane in each direction for a small stretch. Things get dustier and more horsey. It's very Jack Straw, very Me and My Uncle, very Clint Eastwood as directed by Sergio Leone. I suppose I could flatter myself by telling myself that my isolated existence is an expression of the rugged individualism that makes America great. Yeah, that's it. I don't need anybody. I'm a fucking cowboy on the frontier... But all kidding aside, I really don't feel comfortable depending on other people. Is that so bad? I was very self sufficient as a kid, and it's carried over into adulthood. I wasn't exactly a latch key kid, but I spent a lot of time alone in my room, listening to records and reading comics and box scores. So why do people look at me funny when I tell them that I'm ok by myself? Why is my father so obsessed with me finding someone to live with? He brings it up every time I speak to him. I tell him what I'm doing and he says, "Well, hopefully you have someone to do that with." I don't think I can get him to understand the way I'm hard wired, which is weird because he's my dad. He wants the best for me, and I know he doesn't say these things in a mean spirited way. Getting him to understand may be out of the question, but how about acceptance? Is it possible to accept something you don't understand? I have to think about that one for awhile...

When I arrived in Pomona, I had a beer at a nondescript bar in the center of town. The place had Miller High Life on tap. There were a few old drunks sitting at the bar, but otherwise the place was empty. I realized after a few minutes that there might not be a lot of customers because the a/c wasn't working very well. It gets smokin' hot in Pomona...

About ten years ago, I interviewed for a tenure-track job at Cal State San Bernardino. It probably would have been an awful job, but at the time I had no other prospects, so I was disappointed when they didn't select me. I told myself that if I got the job I'd live in Pomona. But driving through Pomona today made me appreciate how lucky I was not to get that job. What a shit hole Pomona is! The streets are all badly pot holed, and everything there just looks beaten down and forsaken. I started to feel myself getting depressed as I wandered down south of the railroad tracks and the San Bernardino freeway. All this reflection on isolation and solitude started to get to me...

Driving back from Pomona, I took Mission Boulevard to the city Diamond Bar. From my perspective as nothing more than a drive-through tourist, Diamond Bar appears to be a collection of gated communities, not much more. I transitioned over to Temple Avenue and zipped into the city of Walnut. Nice enough town. There are lovely streets lined with palms, and the roads are open and quiet, for the most part. I didn't see any residential architecture from before the 1950s in Walnut, so I'm assuming that it's largely a post-war suburb... Temple becomes Amar Road as you drop down into the city of West Covina and then drive through the city of La Puente. This has got to be one of the ugliest, most waste-landiest stretches of road in Southern California. It's nothing but dust, abandoned store fronts, and large, overhead powerlines. I turned north on Puente Avenue and drove under the 10 freeway in Baldwin Park. Then I turned west again on Ramona. I started out the journey wanting to clarify my thinking about the way I live. That's probably a bit too sweeping of a task for one trip. I understand the way I live, and I think I understand why I live that way, but I don't know if it makes me happy. I don't even know if happiness is an attainable goal. What would happiness look and feel like? Would I be happier, more content, if I were married and had two kids? I can barely stand to be with someone for more than a few days, let alone a whole lifetime. I live appropriately for someone with my predisposition, but I have a lot of questions about things. Will I wake up one day 10 or 20 years down the road and wonder why I didn't try to build a more meaningful life with someone else?

I was feeling pretty confused by the time I turned onto Valley Boulevard for the home stretch. I passed through the city of El Monte, the city of Rosemead, and the city of San Gabriel before crossing through the city limits back into Alhambra. I didn't come up with any definitive answers today, just a lot of questions and a lot of ambiguity...