The (Long Awaited, Very Late) Bus

Hi everyone. If you actually are a person who likes my blog, or follows it, I do apologize for the extreme delay in this latest entry. But hey, this last book I read is "The Bus" by Steve Abee. And we all know public transportation in Los Angeles can be extremely unreliable, much like my frequency of blog posts! So, um, yeah. I actually finished this book quite a long time ago. I loved this book, and it was a pretty quick read. But since I am reading a lot to prepare for law school, and reading a lot of trashy gossip mags to avoid said preparation, I have just been so busy that I didn't yet post about this book!

"The Bus" is a stream-of-consciousness narrative about the author taking a bus in Los Angeles. No, silly, he's not carless in Los Angeles (gasp!) His car is being repaired in Santa Monica, and he has to take the bus from his house in Echo Park to go retrieve it. Along the way he writes about the sights, sounds, smells of the city bus and its surroundings. Often these serve as points of entry into his memories about family, friends, childhood, lovers. The book moves fast, the pace of the bus, popping, loud. The subtitle of this book is "Cosmic Ejaculations of the Daily Mind in Transit". You are pushed up against people, billboards, strip malls, and spaces of Abee's heart and brain that even he recoils from at times. I love that Abee can write like the rhythm of this city. I also love that this book is about a bus in Los Angeles, one of the major metropolitan cities known for its car culture and lack of effective public transportation. Abee brings you into a world where Angelenos have to touch eachother, sit next to eachother, and look eachother in the eyes. I know this world of the bus well, since I grew up in Los Angeles without a car. It can be an uncomfortable world, but also a very important one, a nexus of communication and point of contact that is so often missing from this city.

Los Angeles is haunted, and so are its inhabitants, including Abee. There is often no way to disentangle the physical space and historical presence of this city from the psyche of its residents. Just as an ex-lover's cologne haunts us when we think we smell it years later, so billboards and street corners, apartments and bus stops, attach themselves to points in our lives, linger and conjure specific memories, wanted or unwanted. I read somewhere recently that we are not only haunted by our own pasts, but also the pasts of our families, and our ancestors. I like this thought, and in this book, it is certainly true. Abee writes about how many of the old churches in Los Angeles were built by his grandfather, how his paretns met in this city and fell in love. He writes about his pre-birth, and ponders his post-birth. There is no escaping the past.

This book is also about the human gaze, and the simultaneous desire for and repulsion we have for human contact. Being on the bus puts Abee up close and personal with sad and tragic and beautiful and ecstatic people, who remind him of other people, and other times, and make him conjecture about people's lives other than his own. In Los Angeles we are often accused of being a snobby city, an unfriendly one, a fake city, full of self-absorbed people. But this book showcases another side to the city, one outside of the Hollywood hype, but not immune to it.

The human elements of this book could take place in any city, but it is very specifically Los Angeles. Each chapter has the name of a different main street that Abee rides the bus on his trek to Santa Monica, such as "Vermont" and "Fairfax" and "Alvarado" , and each area of this sprawling city is so different that the bus ride takes on a drastically different nature as it changes locales. I think I love this book so much for its familiarity to my experience, and my "insider" knowledge of the sights and sounds Abee refers to. I can breathe this book, it is palpable to me, it is the city that haunts me too, albeit in slightly different ways.

For some reason I could only read this book at night, maybe because only then could I feel the melancholy of this lonely city. And this book does have a melancholy air to it that I could not shake, for all its hopefulness and life. This book made me extremely sad at times, but it is also one of the first books I've read in a long time that actually inspired me to write.

I can't wait to read the next book by Steve Abee. His writing is exciting and full of breath and vulnerability. Abee is currently working as an elementary teacher in Echo Park, where he lives with his family. He writes about all this stuff very openly in the book. Here's a few parts I love:

"Nothing, just people exploding silent volcanic bus ridden galactic. The hands of stars, the arms of deserts, the body of engines, bellies of fruit, the navels of spines, the lips of long skies, dark skies. Oh, the eyes of eyes. Eyes carrying rivers of eyes, eyes that have seen the world around three thousand times, eyes that look on tomorrow as the day they are going to die, eyes that wish to kill something, someone, but never will, eyes that cheat and eyes that wish they loved someone well enough that they would not have to lie, eyes afraid of being anything, so they stare into the cinder blocked wall of nothing and that is what they become, eyes of those who have laid awake all night for no reason besides the sound of the ocean coming through their walls.The eyes that have stared down on the face of love, leaving in the morning, off to work, now been gone the whole day, and now they are coming back. Those eyes of love, eyes that saw the baby's heart beat, eyes that put the child to sleep. The eyes that met the eyes of the web builder as it built the body that was the body that came into his eye. I look out the window, turn from imagining what everyone is thinking, thinking, man, that's just what you are thinking."

"Teaching English to 12 years olds in Silverlake, I cannot believe that I do this. What am I doing? What the hell am I doing here? I'll be standing in front of class, and I step out of my body, I sit down and watch myself, I sit there and I watch this guy give instructions, saying stuff like 'Get out your homework', something like 'sit down or I am going to call your home', crazy things, things that no sane person would say to people, to kids, no sane person would do this to kids, would do this to themselves...Kids should be running around outside, going crazy in the pastures and jumping up and down in the mud, they should be making naked lady pictures in the sky, they should be freaking out. There should be sex class, where the kids get to learn everything about sex and make all the stupid sex jokes and dick jokes and write down all the crazy dreams they have, make weird porn video projects using paly dough for the actors, they should have mindless violence class where the kids just get to beat the shit out of things and maybe even eachother..." THIS ENCAPSULATES HOW I FELT AS A TEACHER ALMOST EXACTLY!!!

There are so many more beautiful and funny parts. The whole book is pretty amazing. I love this way of looking at Los Angeles. Here is what I jot down as a stream-of-consciousness exercise after I was inspired by the book:
I am not of people these days. I curl up into a ball, flutter my eyes open and closed, ducking and hiding from the world. It's been a long time. I've lost my body. I'm only a head, detached from the universe and the lights, seeing a stranger in the shadows of arms and legs. I don't want to write things where people pity me anymore. I want to pity the world, a world of sadness and so much hope, a world I can never be part of. I am sad bones, this is how I was born. Sometimes I try to fake it. A smile. I love to laugh but my laughter is pitter patters of tears instead. This is my being, I can't get away from it. I know that sadness is my roots, and now I can say this as fact, not as something to be pitied for. It just is. I look at the girl who likes nature and finds awe in starfish. Yes, this is beautiful. She has a fucked up life, I think, but she is happy, can see wonder where I can no longer keep my eyes open. I do nothing. I have a lot. I work all night and watch strange spaces form, globs of night fuse with globs of morning. This is a strange place to occupy, my favorite place. The air is fresh and I can jaywalk at 6 am on a busy street. The air is quiet and I can get warm food if I want to. Last year I drank all night and smoked cigarettes with no addiction. I drank mornings and sometimes drank in this space. This holy glob that exists outside of definition. This fuse of darkness and light, like how can you really say when the last piece of sand has fallen from the hourglass, I mean the very last piece, it's kind of like that. Wonderful and weird. I'm reading a book about Los Angeles. This city haunts me, broken ghosts follow me, but i still choose to stay here. It's strange to read about places you know in one way, and hear how someone else knows them in another. Two balls of nothingess. If we ever could collide would an explosion occur, or just a dull fizzle? This book makes me so sad, because I am emotional lately, because even the word lonely makes me cry, because babies make me cry. And also because it is sad. But it also makes my heart beat with happiness and i get scared, the kind of scared thaat the world is so wild and you have so much to do and so much to give but here you are, curled up in a ball, done with people, probably for good, resting on sad bones, accepting this fact, but wanting.

Okay, so read this book. It will inspire you too. Next up I'm pretty sure is another book by Steve Abee called "King Planet", but I'm not completely sure. Will let you know soon! Sorry again, but posts might be slow. I've got a lot of law stuff coming up...but the project continues. Until next time--