I get it, how it must have seemed to that hippie in 1986 who said it was so different now then it was then and now it is so much later but it maybe hasn’t changed as much. That empty brick storefront on Commonwealth was the first place I ever tried sushi. It was 1986 and I went on to eat a lot of sushi.
But that hippie was thinking about 1968 in 1986 and now, well, more time has passed and as much as things change there still seems to be a few molecules of 1968 bouncing around Los Angeles and more from 1986, electrons too. What will be obliterated in the next few years I almost don’t care about any more. I got mine. Lots of sushi. Tom paid for that first order. I’d like to see him again and buy him dinner.
The streets and sidewalks, the curbs and the billboards don’t hold a candle to the people and you can walk down the streets three decades later and still not come close to the company you kept or the meals you had together. And the missing people create that wistfulness that caused that hippie to realize I saw his pony tail as an anachronism and not a statement against society. It was so different because his friends and enemies were gone, replaced by a different battle to which he was just a spectator and not an affected party, no skin in the game, no sushi on the plate.