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the billboards of uptown
Saturday, October 17 1998
Kim was gone most of the day at a dreary series of "dialogueing" lectures, so I headed down to Hillcrest on my own to get some more clothes at the Baras Foundation Thrift Store on University Avenue. I also had it in my mind to pick up some lubricating oil for my squeaky bicycle.
On the way I made the mistake of stopping at an Adams Avenue bike shop in search of oil. I should have known better when I saw the space-age mountain bikes (suitable for riding up the side of the Olympus Mons) corralled out front. Inside, the only lubricating oil I could find was tiny containers of special "synthetic chain oil" for $4. I wonder what kind of people buy such overpriced hoo haw, especially when you consider that super high-grade car engine oil is only $4 per litre. Even low grade engine oil would have been fine with me, and in such small quantities it would have sold for only about five cents.
All the way to Hillcrest, I noticed that the billboards mostly advertised the price of lubricating oil at the various gas stations. I felt taunted. In Hillcrest itself, though, there was a billboard advertising Hotmail (who hasn't heard of Hotmail?) and another mocking the Marlboro man, showing two horsemen silhouetted in the sunset, one of them saying he wished he still had both his lungs. This last one was paid for by proceeds from the California cigarette tax, though it was inferior billboard space, facing University Avenue at a somewhat neck-twisting angle on the back of a billboard positioned far better.
After I bought a number of teeshirts at the thrift store, I went in search of lubricant and tea to be used in vodkatea. In an extremely crowded Hillcrest grocery store I found all kinds of big containers of automotive oil but none of those little containers I'd hoped to find.
Little things like this that are gradually revealing to me the obscene extent to which the automobile dominates southern Californian society. I heard once that during Brezhnev's visit to the United States, Nixon (or whatever president was running the show back then) took him on a tour to show off the wonders of American capitalism. One of the things in the tour was supposedly the freeway system of Los Angeles. According to the account I heard, this part of the tour didn't have the desired effect; Brezhnev was absolutely appalled.
I'm getting used to the gnawing intestinal rage I feel every time I hear California politicians griping about the inadequate expansion of the freeway system (without ever saying anything about public transportation). And I'm getting used to the stigma of being one of the few in this city with the civic sense to do the right thing. My co-workers clearly regard me as mildly crazy just because I bike two miles to work every day. And when I get to work, the only way to secure my bike is by locking it to an ornamental wooden fence in front of a country-western theme bar called In Cahoots. Yee haw, not many horses there.
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