Strange Days Indeed

I take the subway every day. I wait for a bus at MacArthur Park every day. I take a bus down Alvarado to school every day.

Strange things frequently happen. I sat next to a woman a few weeks ago who told me that she was on her way to jail for kicking her baby. I don't know if she was being serious or not, but when I asked her "why?" she said: "I don't know mommy. Sometimes I just get so angry. They've put me on pills because I'm crazy mommy." The she tried to sell me a half-empty bottle of perfume.

For some reason, I end up involved in conversations I could never foresee having. But, as strange as they often are, they are precious moments in a strange world. They are moments of connectedness in a land of segregation. They are insights of humanity in a city of superficiality.

But yesterday, it wasn't a conversation that knocked me sideways... it was an image.

Just when I was thinking "I don't know why everyone is so afraid of MacArthur Park", because it always seems so full of life and smells (not always bad ones either; at night, the street vendors waft the scent of tamales, tacos, corn-on-the-cob and hot dogs along Alvarado Street and it always makes me feel joyful), I crossed the street and was confronted by a strange image indeed:

A man wearing a blue jacket with a hood pulled up over his head, was being "shooed" from McDonalds by an employee who was "sweeping" at him with one of those dustpan-and-brush-in-one things that they always use to clean up in fast food restaurants. She was shouting at him, angrily, in Spanish. He was shouting "Shut up!". An ordinary argument for the streets of downtown LA? Not quite... the man was shuffling away with his pants around his ankles, and there was no underwear in sight.

Now, that's an unexpected eye-full at the end of a long day.

Perhaps if I could understand Spanish I would have been able to assess what the root of the problem was... but unfortunately, I was left to my own deductions and couldn't exactly investigate the matter. It will be a long time, however, before I stop wondering what had happened moments before I arrived at that quaint little McDonalds in Westlake.

Never a dull day in LA.



(Bonus Points for knowing where the title quote comes from)