I rent office space about three miles from our house. Two or three times a week, I walk instead of drive – I pack a sandwich, put on a baseball hat, plug in my headphones and set off for an hour’s commute.
The other day, though, something different. It was a little past seven. The sky was gray from the marine layer, the sidewalks were empty. We live in a part of Los Angeles that’s a mix of residential and business – little cottages, corner strip malls – and after ten minutes, I’d passed maybe seven people. All of them were wearing headphones. I was wearing headphones. Something felt wrong. I turned off the podcast, put my headphones in my pocket – and suddenly the walk started to pop. A tree of orange flowers intertwined with a bougainvillea, almost explosively pink, they must have grown together over decades. Then a beat-up minivan, rusty white, with a large Yves Saint Laurent logo in the rear window – someone had printed out the designer’s emblem on a piece of paper and taped it inside. There was a props shop advertising a full-body Sriracha Bottle costume. A long-faded sign for Mug root beer. A teenage boy climbing out of the hatchback where he’d been sleeping, wearing a purple and black letterman’s jacket that said on the back, Class of 2020.
The last time I walked to work was for my first real job. At the time, I rented a studio in Greenwich Village, with a little garden shared by the tenants. I worked as a copywriter at a design agency about twenty minutes north . Every morning, the commute was brisk, everyone rushing. In the evenings, though, it was leisurely – the sun setting behind west-side towers, chess players and drug dealers in Washington Square, smells from Cedar Tavern, Babbo, Murray’s Cheese Shop back when it was still just a closet on Cornelia Street. I’d buy two slices of pizza at Joe’s on Carmine and go eat them on the fire escape outside my desk.
Sometimes, headphones in, my eyes go dull. Sometimes, if I have my laptop open, the web nearby, I’ll struggle to remember a name or fact, but a few moments after I close the screen, it comes to me. My mind responds to friction. It likes glitches in the matrix. The imagination wants conflict to resolve. Wednesday morning, the commute became a parade of interest. I could’ve walked for another hour. Nearing the office, I stopped for a coffee and wrote this essay, thinking how, on other days, the walk to work often felt like a chore, but today was riveting.
In tomorrow’s Sunday supplement: A field report on a new device for going offline in the woods; celebrating a seminal album 50 years later; and a good podcast for health tips validated by scientific research.
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Meditations in an Emergency is a micro-essay published Saturdays by novelist Rosecrans Baldwin about things he finds beautiful, with a longer essay once a month for subscribers, sent from the woods.
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Rosecrans is the bestselling author of Everything Now: Lessons From the City-State of Los Angeles, available from Bookshop, Amazon, or (preferably) your local store. 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.
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