Late Night Dining, Looting, and Pillaging
*This entry is a real time excerpt, penned on the side of the 101 freeway, by hand with an old Bic pen and a pad of yellow notebook paper, sometime between the hours of 9 PM and 2 AM on May 26, 2020, one day after George Floyd was killed and major American cities were rife with protest and riot.
I’m driving through Los Angeles tonight, on my way back from a quick, socially distanced business trip to San Diego.
It’s the second eve of nationwide protests after Floyd’s murder.
The City of Angels is buzzing with dystopian mood.
The northbound Interstate 5 overpasses are packed with Orange County police clad in black riot gear prepping to meet protestors in Anaheim. On the northbound 101, a fleet of police cars and National Guard armored transports are closing all the on ramps and off ramps around West Hollywood, where protests have sparked looting.
A blood red sunset casts an eerie glow under a dark sky.
With the parade of blue and red flashing lights illuminating the roads, the despairing increase in roadside tent encampments, the palpable tensions of Angelenos, and AM radio news broadcast updates of local events transpiring, it certainly feels like an apocalypse is in the making.
I’m sure that will sound overly dramatic from the future.
At the moment, it seems more real than I’ve imagined it might be someday, and I’m the kind of man who can imagine a lot and in great detail.
I’ve traveled through Los Angeles a number of times during the pandemic, either for essential business, philanthropic efforts, or socially distanced contemplation. During the initial lockdowns, the freeways were like nothing we’d ever seen. Deserted. Concrete stretches of formerly bumper to bumper asphalt were sparse, only occasionally marked with essential worker commutes, delivery services, and interstate trucking.
It’s desolate tonight on the freeways, apart from the SWAT brigades funneling into the inner city. I think Los Angeles has seen little like it since the Rodney King riots, reminiscent of every SoCal doomsday scenario seen on film or in print. Eerie is not a good enough word to describe it. It’s like the world is holding its breath before…something.
Not a pregnant pause, a hiccup of reality, tangible, not ephemeral, replete with a dearth of the usual urban sounds, other than siren after siren, overhead news choppers, and occasional fly-by roars of low-riding, tricked out Honda Civics and souped-up VW Golfs, street racing as they take advantage of this rare, traffic-less era, speeding across the barren expanses of the 110 and the 405.
On side streets, the few places still open for business have scattered patronage, mostly food pickup or laundromats or gas stations. Liquor stores and weed dispensaries operate not just at full tilt but at a surplus demand for obvious reasons, the latter usually emanating a now ubiquitous green glow from its medical cross neon. Essential businesses indeed. People are self medicating. Who can blame them?
The Los Angeles Times reports less than 50 percent of Angelenos are employed, as everyone quarantines, or is laid off, or furloughed, to stem the Covid tide.
Disneyland is shuttered for the first time in its existence and House of Mouse fans the world over, particularly season pass diehards, mourn like a loved one has died.
Authorities filled in Venice Beach’s skate park with sand.
Southern Californian institutions like Amoeba Records and the Troubadour nightclub, places I’ve patronized countless times, have launched Go-Fund campaigns to keep their doors open. Landmark businesses and tourist attractions are struggling to stay afloat.
Since so many people seem hell bent on transferring the focus of the current crises to the symptoms rather than the causes of the protests, I thought. here on the side of an eerily deserted freeway, I’d jot down a quick primer in history, splashed with a bit of elective civics. I’m happy to offer a brief summary, but please, please, ye future reader, do research yourself if you’re overwhelmed by the info overload at hand. Ideally you ought to proceed with actual books and accredited, legitimate news outlets unshaped by partisan preferences, not clickbait tabloid websites designed to drive traffic on the internet. Are there such resources still left in the internet age? There are, but you’ll have to work a little harder than scrolling through your phone to find them.
If citizens present at the heights of Pax Romana or Pax Britannia were around to tell us what’s what, before their respective falls from grace during those earlier eras of white supremacy, they’d probably point at the tail end of Pax Americana and say, “Looks familiar. We haven’t learned yet?”
Don’t kid yourself. You, me, all of us whiteboys, are only where we are on the resource spectrum thanks to colonialism and imperialism.