Clear Night

Class was good tonight; lots of laughter, a good workout, the genuine happiness of people being together, doing something they love. Maybe that’s what primed me for the magic of the drive home.

It’s one of those clean, clear nights in Los Angeles. The air is perfect — its temperature, its clarity, even its smell. As I started down Reseda, I kept catching my breath at the beauty all around me.

If you know Reseda Boulevard, you know it’s lined with fast food joints and pawn shops and restaurants and shops that sell bikes, pipes, clothes, dreams. It’s not a pretty place even on a good day. But tonight, it just glittered. All that neon, all those headlights. They cut through the unusually black sky with painful clarity.

When you live in a city, the idea of landscape stops being the ebb and flow of shapes on the horizon, and becomes more about shadows and streetlamps, a row of taillights trailing off into the distance and the winking of TVs from windows and cellphones from other cars. There’s density to a city landscape, and a calming sense of order found only in so much energy and chaos.

I drove, cognizant of myself in a way I don’t frequently experience. The darkness helped, and being in my car, and the way the power of music is amplified if those first two conditions are met.

And then I thought, “I should blog this,” and the mood was broken. But for a while there, it was magic.