Terminal Man
A beautiful quote from Michael Crichton, from The Terminal Man.
"The automobile was important to Los Angeles, a city more technology-dependent than any in the world. Los Angeles could not survive without the automobile, as it could not survive without water piped in from hundreds of miles away, and as it could not survive without certain building technologies. This was a fact of the city's existence, and had been true since early in the century.
But in recent years Ross had begun to recognize the subtle psychological effects of living your life inside an automobile. Los Angeles had no sidewalk cafés, because no one walked; the sidewalk café, where you could stare at passing people, was not stationary but mobile. It changed with each traffic light, where people stopped, stared briefly at each other, then drove on. But there was something inhuman about living inside a cocoon of tinted glass and stinless steel, air-conditioned, carpeted, sterepohonic tape-decked, power-optioned, isolated. It thwarted some deep human need to congregate, to be together, to see and be seen.
Local psychiatrists recognized an indigenous depersonalization syndrome. Los Angeles was a town of recent emigrants and therefore strangers; cars kept them strangers, and there were few institutions that served to bring them together. Practically no one went to church, and work groups were not entirely satisfactory. People became lonely; the complained of being cut off, without friends, far from families and old homes. Often they became suicidal--and a common method of suicide was the automobile. The police referred to it euphemistically as "single unit fatalities." You picked your overpass, and hit it at eighty or ninety, foot flat to the floor. Sometimes it took hours to cut the body out of the wreckage.
Moving at sixty-five miles an hour, she shifted across five lanes of traffic and pulled off the freeway at Sunset, heading up into the Hollywood Hills, through an area known locally as the Swish Alps because of the many homosexuals who lived there. People with problems seemed drawn to Los Angeles. The city offered freedom; its price was lack of supports."
The last sentence describes more of Kalifornia than you can know unless you've lived here. Most of the natives are oblivious to it because they never knew anything else. It's pretty sad.
"The automobile was important to Los Angeles, a city more technology-dependent than any in the world. Los Angeles could not survive without the automobile, as it could not survive without water piped in from hundreds of miles away, and as it could not survive without certain building technologies. This was a fact of the city's existence, and had been true since early in the century.
But in recent years Ross had begun to recognize the subtle psychological effects of living your life inside an automobile. Los Angeles had no sidewalk cafés, because no one walked; the sidewalk café, where you could stare at passing people, was not stationary but mobile. It changed with each traffic light, where people stopped, stared briefly at each other, then drove on. But there was something inhuman about living inside a cocoon of tinted glass and stinless steel, air-conditioned, carpeted, sterepohonic tape-decked, power-optioned, isolated. It thwarted some deep human need to congregate, to be together, to see and be seen.
Local psychiatrists recognized an indigenous depersonalization syndrome. Los Angeles was a town of recent emigrants and therefore strangers; cars kept them strangers, and there were few institutions that served to bring them together. Practically no one went to church, and work groups were not entirely satisfactory. People became lonely; the complained of being cut off, without friends, far from families and old homes. Often they became suicidal--and a common method of suicide was the automobile. The police referred to it euphemistically as "single unit fatalities." You picked your overpass, and hit it at eighty or ninety, foot flat to the floor. Sometimes it took hours to cut the body out of the wreckage.
Moving at sixty-five miles an hour, she shifted across five lanes of traffic and pulled off the freeway at Sunset, heading up into the Hollywood Hills, through an area known locally as the Swish Alps because of the many homosexuals who lived there. People with problems seemed drawn to Los Angeles. The city offered freedom; its price was lack of supports."
The last sentence describes more of Kalifornia than you can know unless you've lived here. Most of the natives are oblivious to it because they never knew anything else. It's pretty sad.
posted by ChemicalJesus at 4:06 AM
2 Comments:
I think it is harder to find support in urban areas, but just because you are in an urban area don't think that describes all of California. And for the record: we should transplant Disneyland to NorCal and blow up LA. LA is evil.
I'm pretty connected. I have a really wonderful group of friends, but I looked for them very deliberately and they are spread out all over the place. In California you don't get an automatic group of people to associate with based on where you live. You have to go out and find people who have things in common with you and create the bonds of friendship very deliberately. It is more difficult, but somehow I think it is more genuine. No one knows me just because they live down the street. People know me because we have interests and friends in common. It's good stuff too.
It is not more genuine. Sorry.
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