I’ll come back

Cycling  in Irvine is like riding through a ghost town. The constant rush of engines rising from (the) 405 subsists into a mock-silence, and as the sole cyclist on the roads, I get the creeping, post-apocalyptic feeling that I’m the last of my kind. The threat of rain or radiation must have held people indoors today, I think. Really, though, this is how it always is down here. Everything you need is so close but so far. So people drive there, and drive with their windows rolled up. I’m alone for a while  until I cross paths with an old man on a rusty beach cruiser. I fancy him Orange County manifestation of the Mountain Man, lost in another time. Leatherskinned and oilhaired, the vacancy behind his sunglasses suggests no acknowledgment. He rides ahead slowly and his blue flip-flops curl limply over the cruiser’s thick plastic pedals.

A sign planted in the sagebrush landscape across the freeway reads: “Open Space Preserve (The Irvine Company).” The Irvine Company never lets you forget it’s there, or that today is today. I ride up what I think looks like a good hill—only to discover a gated community (None Shall Pass) before the summit. A small notice posted next to the sprinkler head smugly reminds: “Don’t Drink Reclaimed Water.” Frustration, frustration.

Just days ago we were (not, by any means) lost somewhere in the primordial ferns and Jurassic Park forests of Humboldt County. The North, with its wet fields and red houses send me spinning to another North—I didn’t know I could be so moved by the sight of herds of cattle grazing an open field by a rainy ocean. The trees, of course, are bigger. It’s not so simple to judge what is more of a wonder: the regenerative urgency of the thousands of clovers swelling on the forest floor or the behemoth hush of the redwoods having outlived, already, thousands of regenerations of clovers.

The North Coast is so dramatic it has a beach made of colorful glass pebbles. Really they’re just shards of beer bottles smoothed by the ocean, mostly. Some of them must have been Tiffany lamps, priceless vases, and church windows. I’d like to think that the bit of blue glass I found may be from a stained glass window destroyed in a Viking raid or during the sacking of Constantinople. But probably, it’s a blue beer bottle.

Seven hours shooting through the parched middle on the tail of the cerulean aqueduct in its wind through through brown hills and olive farms, and I’m back to The City of Angels, Fountain Valley, Santa Ana, Irvine, Desert, Mall, Ocean, Sky.

Experiencing the nearly the entire length of California (–coming home–) in a span of three days is quite a trip.

Later: The Vienna Philharmonic

To my left, there is a fat man in dress pants scribbling on his program. To my right, a woman who won’t stop questioning me about why I, a student at this University,  would be at the orchestra by myself amongst these hundreds of people on a Friday night.

“Oh, you write for the Daily Cal,” she says when I answer the question in terse tones (“I’m press,” I say). “So are you a student of Music, too, then? …. No? Oh, really? Physics? Wow. So how are you going to know what to write about, then? Why are you here?…No one else wanted to cover this concert? You were the only one? They where all too busy for this? Tsk. Is the Daily Cal still a radical liberal rag?”

Clearly, the Vienna Philharmonic is not something meant for common denizens like me.

But in the first few chords of “Tristan und Isolde” all pretense is lost. On your fifth listen to a Radiohead album, you might finally be able to convince yourself that it means something to you. Wagner, instead, grabs you by the shoulders with the first tone. Even as you hate yourself for seeping quietly into a broth of romantics in the concert hall seat, you can’t help but let in all visions, void of explanation, that the music brings. The order that jars are placed on the ledges of cellar windows, the way that fabric folds, the startling redness of the blood that goes through the tiny veins in human eyes—richness in small details, like the most subtle dissonance of tones, is always what overwhelms.

The Orchestra—the raw force of it—was meant, even if unintentionally, exactly for common denizens like me.

At the performance’s end, the lady behind me is yelling “Ja whol! Ja whol!” For a second, it’s 1800, and I’m in Austria. I think of the time I saw Mozart’s ghost, the Berlin Opera, and what the world must have been like before there was Hitler or the internet. A second later, it’s 2011 again, and the Woman to My Right is glaring again, waiting for me to move out of the way so she can exit the long aisle of seats, adjust her coat and wait sternly for her slower-moving husband to meet her smiling at the top of the theater.