I was walking down Cota on my way downtown. I came to a street named Quarantina and decided to sit on the lawn by the Santa Barbara Junior High. I was listening to our newest Noble Laureate in Literature on my iPod which I had resurrected for a moment just such as this: The intersection of Desolation Row just off from the Gates of Eden. I saw a distraught woman with triplets trying to move her own circus from one place to another. She seemed more than equal to the task she had signed on for the rest of, at least, 18 or so years. She thought at least part of her plight was funny. She was cooing and coaxing the three little people in their complicated wheeled couch.
Teenagers, ear budded and intent, skateboarded, navigated the root eruptions and the street corners without wheel chair rampettes. Dogs barked behind hedges and all sorts of fences, walls, and barriers. There were signs pleading for any information about misplaced or escaped kittens and cats. A woman, tattooed, hung over, and tired, asks me for a dollar, and, in exchange, she tells me she “played the flute in middle school.” The homeless guys were packing up for a day on the move. Pot clouds wafted down toward Quarantina, and it was another beautiful spring day in November.
I went to CVS and walked the aisles of ointments, sutures, canes, tablets for sleep, and elixirs for awareness. It’s all about hope, commerce. We hope that the tablet will soothe or still the itch. Promises of lustrous hair, perfect nails, and conditioners murmur from within plastic dispensers, and we hope we can be restored or spared — if only for a while. I don’t know if there is anything in that place that anyone really needs.