Sixty minutes on a street corner
Sixty minutes on a street corner
More focus aerobics
Last week’s meditation about sitting in a coffeeshop for an hour proved so popular with readers—and fun for me—I’ve decided to make it into a series.
For how long? Who knows? Next week, an hour in a McDonald’s? For this week, Wednesday morning, eight a.m., I sat on a bench on Sunset Boulevard for an hour near an intersection. Here we go.
—Heavy morning traffic. Many cars, many delivery trucks, many delivery vans and city buses. Most vehicles are Hondas or Toyotas. A man cycles by, towing a small trailer, two kids inside in matching helmets.
—The sonic atmosphere is dense. There’s the racket of construction projects, a tolling of church bells. I close my eyes and notice how the pitch of sedans rolling along the pavement is higher than the guttural harrumphing of trucks, more like a drummer whisking brushes across a snare drum.
—I experience leaf blowers as alarms.
—A plane flies overheard. The sky is cloudless. In the west, the moon’s still out, waning gibbous, I think? I’m reminded there are a million things I don’t know how to describe properly.
—So many people pass by clutching coffees, or sipping from bottles, or eating food from small, waxy bags. Americans are always on the go. Do we fear running out of supplies? Is the so-called scarcity mindset our Yankee unconscious?
(Go Dodgers.)
I remember hearing Jamieson Webster comment on how our society’s even figured out how the very elderly can stay American, stay in motion—via RV culture! Or, more depressingly, by living out of vans.
—So many folks also openly clutch their phones. At least seventy-five percent of the women during the hour, and maybe a quarter of the men. Question: do you also find it silly to call our smartphones “phones” or “cell phones,” when that’s hardly their use anymore?
Maybe we need to invent a word for slot machine/anxiety-induction device. Or just call them drugs.
I’ll go with drugs.
Many of the women, especially the younger women, stare at their drugs while walking, seemingly watching something. Is it TikTok? Reels? YouTube for the walk?
—A leaf falls on my arm, crimped along its edges as though arthritic. My bench is beneath an olive tree. Los Angeles is not a shady place, especially in poorer neighborhoods, and I know I’m lucky to be sitting here, under an olive tree; this hour is a gift.
—College sweatshirts on view during the hour: Michigan. Michigan State. Brown. UCLA.
—There really is something about the tactility of touching pen to notebook paper! It binds me to a moment, similar to focusing on breathing during meditation. Perhaps my eye drifts, my mind spins out, but if I return to the paper, I’m back.
—A sticker on a nearby telephone pole: Now. Future. Same? Nope.
—A mobile car-washer sets up his operation on a side street. Is this only a Los Angeles phenomenon, hiring people to wash your car curbside?
—The stoplights at the intersection are timed to 30-second intervals. After fifteen minutes of heavy traffic, not a single car honks. It’s one of those things I love about L.A., as compared, say, to New York or Boston: how much less honking there is.
Of course, a minute after I note that, someone beeps. I’m watching as it happens: the light changed, the first car didn’t move—the driver was staring down at something in her lap, maybe her drugs? And the driver behind her gently tapped her horn.
—Some graffiti on the sidewalk near my feet: FUCK FREE.
—This being Los Angeles, I’m not surprised when a middle-aged man nearby, looking strung out and perhaps addled, roots through a garbage can behind me, removes several things and dumps on the ground. He studies them, kicks them around, then lurches out into the street. Cars slow to let him cross. He’s not wearing any underwear, he struggles to keep his shorts up. I watch him do a turn around the intersection, then return to the garbage on the ground, root through it again, then carry on.
—The car-washing operation shifts from wash to dry.
—The first time I hear loud music from a car is a beat-up Pontiac blasting Nate Dogg. I look at the driver. He almost instantly looks back at me, hard-faced as if confronted, and I look away.
It’s amazing to me how people are able to detect when other people are looking at them. From what I’ve read, “gaze detection” or “gaze perception” is both a remarkable feat of our brains, and also something our mind can suspect is happening (someone staring at you) when it’s not.
Sitting here, absorbing as much as I can, feeling almost as though I’m sunk in a trance, I’m almost thrilled by trying to calculate how much my brain is processing. But I’ll be more careful about staring directly.
—Two men walk by and one says to the other, “Let me rationalize what you just said.” Two women walk by and one says to the other, “Success isn’t the same thing as dominance.”
—Toward the end of the hour, a man comes down Sunset, pedaling a bike while also steering a loaded grocery cart with one hand. He weaves in and out of traffic as if on horseback, gallantly, then takes a turn too tight and the cart topples, and everything spills out.
Cars drive around him. I rise to go help him. A pair of people crossing the street offer their assistance and he barks them off. Five minutes later, everything is repacked and he’s rolling, plastic bags swinging off the sides of his cart like boat bumpers.
The car washer is done and drives away. The hour passed surprisingly fast. I check my drugs and then head back to my desk.
One final note: Not once did I see a person jaywalk. I mean, except for the guy with his pants around his knees. But no, Angelenos generally don’t cross streets until the walk sign appears, until they’re told it’s safe. This is a dangerous enough city as it is.
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“Meditations in an Emergency” is a weekly essay from writer Rosecrans Baldwin about something beautiful. Paying subscribers receive a Sunday supplement with three-plus things to love, plus the monthly “Humans Being Humans” ballyhoo.
Rosecrans is a correspondent for GQ, a contributing writer at Travel + Leisure, and the bestselling author of Everything Now, winner of the California Book Award. Other books include The Last Kid Left and Paris, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down. His debut novel, You Lost Me There, was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. For magazine articles, bio, contact info, try rosecransbaldwin.com.
What smells did you notice? I imagined diesel in the exhaust, maybe ozone, cooking smells from food carts, but I am on the East coast. Please makes these intervals a recurring feature.