Crappy apartments

My little corner of Los Angeles is a smattering of various convenience shops (7-11 up the street) and apartment buildings, many with names of foreign places that attempt to draw poor city dwellers away from the reality of our relatively ghetto neighborhood and into far-off places like "Cheviot Hills." A common theme seems to be Mediterranean names like "Palms" and "Capri."

After months of passing this apartment building, its name recently caught my attention:

Look closely.

Haaaa I love it. I almost got in an accident when I saw this. Sooooo many questions do I have for the owners of this place. Accident? Ignorance? Satire? Who's to say....

My apartment building, incidentally, is nameless.

Wonderland

Last week as I was walking down Santa Monica Boulevard on a mundane errand, I experienced a rather magical moment. A little old lady wearing a wide-brimmed hat was bent over peering into a storefront window. The store itself was sunken half a level below the street, and the entrance is on the side with steps up to the sidewalk. A woman inside the store was leaning out the door speaking up to the woman. She said, "Well it's lucky you've landed in the right spot..."

That's all I heard, but in that moment, what appears totally ordinary struck me as something from a fairy tale, as if the woman was a Mary Poppins figure who floated in on the brim of her large hat and landed right where she needed to be to carry out her magical mission. Like maybe the store was secretly a shop of tricks she needed for her next job...


The moment passed quickly but the image stuck in my mind in a goofy wonderland kind of way. I like when I can float off in my imagination like that. Reality is a little more fun when you're only halfway in it.