Warning to Those Who Dare Walk in LA

The first thing you do is leave your phone at home, because it’s about to die (because you were too lazy to grab the charger from the car last night), and anyway you’re just going down to the corner for coffee.

You have all that work to do when you get back, and you didn’t sleep well, so going out for coffee will be a nice treat and you need to walk the dog anyway. There’s no need to bring water, you’re not going far, and you lost your water bottle anyway.

So you go, and you can’t find the coffeeshop. Just the burger joint that’s closed for the holiday. So you go the other direction to where you remember there was another coffee spot, one you like. It’s a bit of a walk, maybe a mile, but you have a vague idea where it is, as long as you stay on Glendale. It’s only in the mid 60s so your dog, your 14-year old geratric but still quite spry dog can make it, right? Says your New York self.

So you walk, and it’s actually warmer than you think, and your dog is panting a little bit. You’re starting to worry about not bringing water. Mind you, no one else is walking, the only other people you see are Mexican gardeners and homeless people. Everyone else is driving. The smell and noise of traffic fill the air. The “sidewalk”, in their crumbling, glass and trash state, are just a ruse. This isn’t a walking city. The glass makes you worry for your dog and you stop to check his paws intermittently.

At least twenty minutes have passed and nothing looks familiar so you decide to call it quits and go back, but you want to avoid the glass (for your dog’s sake) and all the noisy smelly traffic (for your sake), and decide to take a side street through the foothills of Silverlake.

Except the streets get a little windy and they keep going uphill and you’re pretty positive this isn’t the way, but you dare not go back in the opposite direction, until you finally see someone else walking their dog and ask them which way to Glendale. And they tell you, up the road, and then just go down. Down the hill. (But not back the way you came, whew.)

So you go, and you feel like you’ve been walking forever and you never had that coffee, for crying out loud, and your poor old dog, will he even make it? You both just want to get home. Then you get down down down the hill, to the corner, and spy some nice outdoor seating which can only suggest A Place With Coffee. So you beeline it and confirm your suspicions. You will get coffee! And water for the dog, hooray!

Meanwhile, in line, you wonder what’s on the menu, and you’re like no way am I paying $13 for a a sandwich, I already had a bagel for breakfast, do not need more carbs or to spend money, but you’re standing in front of the register, and the walk and thirst has made you delusional, and it’s a fancy place where you don’t want to let them down, so you get an overpriced sandwich to go with your overpriced coffee, which you immediately regret, but also don’t care, because you’re tired and you want to sit, and no phone to occupy your empty hands, duh.

Okay, the sandwich is alright, and it came with fries, and dammit you love those crisp shoestring fries, so maybe this isn’t the worst decision of your life. At least now you and the dog are hydrated, rested, and energized for the walk back.

You ask a stranger to look at a map on their phone. You’re about the same distance from home as you were before you went over the foothills, but whatever, you can see where you need to go, just up Silverlake, no biggie. And it’s nice along the reservoir.

You pass the dog run, you thought your elderly dog was too tired, but he’s not, his tail says he wants to check it out. So you oblige, and immediately get annoyed by the porkroll who keeps trying to steamroll hump your elderly dog who’s doing all he can to stand upright as he is. OF COURSE the owner of humpy is some mindless zennial on his laptop who doesn’t have the sense to monitor his overweight beast even though I am pulling it off and telling it no.

So you leave, and continue along the reservoir. It’s nice and shady with the trees, and the pretty water.

You’ll see a familiar face and wonder if you should say hello, but they don’t make eye contact so you don’t. Which makes sense, because moments later you remember the context of that face is a show, not someone you know irl, and that person was Detective Duvall from Unbelievable and boy would you have felt silly, like that time you asked one of the Queer Eye guys if you knew them, and he said, I’m on Queer Eye. Oh.

Aha, there’s the Silverlake meadow where you know you need to cross over to Glendale. Several blocks later, you eventually round the corner to your (temporary) residence. The heavy-lidded sun about ready to pull the rooftops over its chin. And look, just ahead, there’s the coffee sign to the place where you meant to go all along. It was a door down from the burger place, after all this time. 🙄

Finally, you arrive back home nearly four hours later, and wonder how your dog can still bound up those stairs after that all-day walk but Mark Zuckerberg can’t do a damn thing about shutting down white nationalist garbage on Facebook. But you survive to walk another day.

The end.

P.S. The above is a photo of me and Arlo in 2009 (when we started the walk).

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