Process/Product
My hair is like sex: even when it's bad, it's good.
Archive for February 3rd, 2009
Tuesday, February the 3rd, 2009
034 - The Metropole, Part: I
“Hey baby, are you hungry?” I asked.
“Yeah, I could eat a little,” she said.
My mind spun through possibilities like a Rolodex, landing on the card for ye olde standby, Talay Thai.
“How about some Thai food?” I asked.
“Sure,” she said.
Of course, things weren’t always so easy.
When I left San Francisco about a year and a half ago, I felt like I had a pretty good handle on how the city is laid out. Firm was my grasp on where the various neighborhoods lie in relation to one another, which bars and night clubs were the coolest (and which ones were lame), and of course, the best late night cuisine in any given area. My mental map of eateries in San Francisco included the smells and tastes as well, and in fact, whenever I smell that warm scent of tamales on the street or hear the sizzle of bacon fat and hot dogs, I often have a flashback of being back in front of Casanova.
Coming to Los Angeles, I had to start over fresh. Streets had strange names, like “Stoner” and “Sepulveda.” Nothing was rectangular like my familiar Sunset district. And of course, there were the turnabouts, the one way streets, the endlessly snaking highways…
It was a lot to take in.
Nothing was so far removed from my San Franciscan experience that I couldn’t find an analog, a way to relate to it. But even with my vast foreknowledge of city life in general, great volumes of Angelenian specific information presented themselves to me, each waving, gently, like the branchiae of the majestic feather duster worm.
Damn. That came out of nowhere.
More importantly, I didn’t have a feel for LA yet; I wasn’t sure how everything fit.
And so, I forced myself to go out. With no GPS in my car, Yelp, Google maps, and little scraps of paper served as my guides. I became intimately familiar with the 405, the 10, the 405 connector to the 10, and with each passing mile I started to perform a sort of mental cartography, cutting up the city into large sections, and connecting them together with the magical pipelines of streets and highways.
New synapses formed in my brain while others were pruned, and I grew to memorize where my favorite spots were. I absorbed their correlations to the cardinal directions, as well as their general flavors. There is still much to learn, but I have at least a basic idea of what each neighborhood is good for.
I still keep a list of late night restaurants in my glove compartment.