If you try hard enough, helicopters can remind you of the ocean. Especially when they’re circling over you. The humming of its proximity the low rumbling of the Pacific. It’s approach, waves crashing. And as it continues on, the fizzing retreat of the surge, from shore, pulled back into the sea. 

No matter how hard you try, helicopters remind you of home. They sound the way the ocean sounds made up the wind. Even from the street where I used to live. One, perfect little street. Buckeyes and Douglas firs; silhouettes of palms stalking you from afar, hiding in the forever blanket of Maritime overcast. And June, season of the white jasmine. The town perfume. Potholes, and. Old cars, small jobs, easy people with easy prospects, just trying to live. ‘Trying.’ With said ‘small’ ‘jobs.’ And you grow up, realize the crowdedness on the main drag, on the weekends, fancy people with fancy cars, when you’re younger you imagine the rich people in town are just hiding away until the weekend comes and now that it’s here, they’re ready for fun, but then, you get older and land a gig at a coffee slash reused, paperback feminist bookshop, and they all start flooding in asking for the vegan butterscotch – cookies – and you, you let them ask you questions about where you live and how you ‘like it out there,’ and then you begin to realize that maybe, these people aren’t even from your town at all, and that, maybe your town never had any rich people to begin with. 

And that’s when they talk about visiting from LA, you know, ‘just a little R and R,’ and sure, makes sense they’re city folk; they’ve all got Amexes and dressed like they’re – dress like a stereotypical houseless person would dress (although I’m not one to speculate, not really on the outside, at least). Everything’s distressed if they come from money, looking ugly and bored – even with themselves – unless they happened to find their riches in that city, for the first time in their entire families lineage. Then they dress in their polos and chinos, groomed hair and – carry – an utmost fascination with themselves for they worked towards the ability to not only find others and other things fascinating, but to go meet those things for themselves. Again, sure, you imagine that’s what comes out of this city, and, for the most part I think I’m right – although I couldn’t tell you what the world out there looks like, or dressed like South of the 10. I never fascinated myself with that part of town. I don’t think I can be hated for not wanting to. Tee shirts probably. Sunday best? Blue collar looking to go White. Black and Brown looking to go White, too. Maybe not looking to go anywhere at all, but. I think you always hope for different people to suddenly make up all the people you already know. But the folks who came from nothing, became something? With their pretty clothes? Their emblems of right choice? I thought I could be one of those people, too.

And so you sit with yourself. On the porch on your perfect street, of the perfect little home you and your brother began renting with your dead father’s money; no word from mom. And your brother’s beginning to get mixed up, but he’s found a woman who makes him happy, sort of, but in thinking he’s all you got, him and that house, you decide – FUCK reused, paperback feminist books AND their bookshops – FUCK – fascinating over fascinators looking at you, tapping on the glass at the zoo – FUCK – the white jasmine and the shore and the air that seeps through even polyester. You look at the moon and you sit on your porch and remind yourself or convince yourself that you are worth more than whatever she made you believe; or what your brother suggests at times, what we have been reduced to. And so? I moved to LA. And I got a job working for Alamo Car Rental. Close to the runways of Burbank, the thoughts of travel were a song. I would build a world and promise of myself, capable of returning to see my brother whenever he needed me. Or whenever I had decided I wanted to see him. I would – read, and write – something, join the forces for good, neighborhood council, the People’s council, ACLU, Democrats Now, the food shelter, the regular shelters, and the shelters that give out all those identical tents seemingly for the houseless and campus protestors? I would make – a name – for myself by doing good for others, offering aid and offering Camrys, speaking up for what was right and shouting down what I disagreed with. Soon? I would make it to the big leagues, something at the mayor’s office or some other office oversaw by a, preferably, brown or black person of color who climbed the ranks through the system and has never at all ever once done something corrupt. I would be, their knight – I know coffee and books, compelling ones – I know the lay of the land, the people, the people who gawk, the people who look at me – the same way they do a person on the streets! I would soar, high and above my street of fir and buckeye and white jasmine and my brother’s BITCH girlfriend Lily Rose, I would write an autobiography of my work serving the disenfranchised while also noting my own disenfranchisement, my OWN – BITCH mother – and then soon I would have a service clinic for all women and women-identifying convicts and would liberate ALL of us! 

The dreams get bigger the more the city holds you down, begs you to beg yourself not to go. My brother’s getting into deeper trouble and I could see a world for myself where I surrender the desire of fascination and retrieve whatever world of family I have left. At Alamo, you’re giving out better cars than the one you drive. And In Los Angeles, you’re always putting out for those who don’t need a single thing. This garden ledge, my porch back home. The strangers, the fascinators, all of whom I hope to get bored by, and inspired to, soon, one day go home. It’s better than this shit. Living off sloppy seconds, the second halves of your lunches out of Popeye’s, 7-11. Coming home to cheap wine, a dirty roommate, a neighbor ingratiated with himself, and a Moon seen better through a fog. In Los Angeles, you only get to leave once something about it spits you out. And if you try hard enough, maybe something finally will. I sort of hope it does. I sometimes think I’m not cut out for dreaming as a living.