Pattern Recognition

Hearing oneself speak is not the inwardness of an inside that is closed in upon itself; it is the irreducible openness in the inside. . . . Phenomenological reduction is a scene, a theater stage. It is only with a certain precision that we can proceed with information and data analysis. On Wednesday, May 10 2011 I was walking the dog for her morning constitutional. We walked up Douglas, and she pissed on a thin strip of grass before rooting around the plywood planks that bailey bridge the broken sidewalk where a clutch of older Chinese women live in small squares. The dog likes to stop here because the women put out cereal and noodles for the birds, cats, or whatever may feed upon such ruined spills of grain.

We took a left up on Alison, and I thought about the ways in which this neighborhood, and indeed the east side as such, was cast as too dangerous to venture. Back when the barrio was clad in blood and darkness, or as the story goes in fifteen hundred word travel articles. With change, the character has changed says the chol-Ostalgie. Brunettes with college degrees don’t look one in the eye as they pass on the street. Protestant settlers who have eyes only for the housing stock have supplanted the good old days of the Catholic index; these new shepherds have come to live among us, unlike the Wilshire landlords who came only to stucco and bar the animals from re-stealing our rental electronics. Yet these hills, restored beyond the needs of children, stir some sense of their original investment. A house in the hills has always been something above the fray in this city. But origins are always impure, and access to anything, especially dusky jewels, is an expression of occluded negotiations: something auto-immune.

Walking down Alison, I paused as Bonnie shat, observing a stupid design ‘car,’ some funky subsidiary of Toyota or Korea, pull up and wait outside the rather large HUD building on the corner. The car running, the young man was using his hand-held device, presumably sending a text to someone inside. After picking up the dog shit, I looked up Alison and saw that it was clear to cross. There was a man on a bike coming down the hill, but we would likely be across the street by the time he reached our X-axis. The calculation was correct to a degree, as he made a shallow parabola into the negative space of the street. He was a darkly complexioned man with strong cheekbones wearing faded black jeans and several layers of equally grey tops. At the nadir of his swerve, he cupped his hand and yelled for someone at the HUD building. It was a deep and purposeful call, nearly perfect in its execution. The kind of call anyone would wish to make from a bike on the street. I scanned the building, my eyes traveling up the four stories of narrow balconies set in queasy yellow and purple stucco, but no screen parted before I turned back up Sunset. 

Two gentlemen calling on the same building nearly at once, and me there walking along as an interloper in their drama; I could say something more about the building, how it seems like a safe house for the witness protection program. How it occasionally releases these two young black dudes who walk over to the Leo market wearing several pairs of oversized pajamas, long mesh shorts, white socks and slippers. The combinations and layers of cozy plaid, heather grey, black, and blue are bewilderingly eccentric, yet imbued with a kind of teenage utility. This nothing that distinguishes the parallels, this nothing without which precisely no explication, that is, no language, could be freely developed in the service of truth without being deformed by some real contact, this nothing without which no transcendental (that is, philosophical) question could be opened, this nothing arises, so to speak, when the totality of the world is neutralized in its existence and is reduced to phenomenal being.