Hire Me, I'm (Productively) Oblivious

How often do I leave the apartment?  Not very often.

When I first drove to California, I passed by the largest doors I'd ever seen.  Their scale defined my postmodern condition (in that Jamesonian way):

I lack the words to communicate the scale of this blimp hanger.  Skyscrapers may shoot into the sky, but they do so thinly, lightly, and seemingly without weight.  These hangers (as there are two) were hulking presences designed to remind all those who saw them of their place.  Adding to the intimidation was that they were located in the middle of nothing:

The giantic things casting shadows?  That would them.  So you can imagine my surprise when, yesterday afternoon, I drove down that way and found my view of these quiet monsters obstructed by a mall.  Since last I drove down this direction—a mere mile and a half from my apartment—someone built a mall: Best Buy, Ulta, Whole Foods, TJ Maxx, an AMC cineplex and dozens upon dozens of restaurants stood between me and my quotidian sublime.  How did that happen?  Easy:

I never leave the apartment.  I'm so devoted to my work they can erect a mall within earshot and I won't bat an eye.  I possess the attractive obliviousness you desire and you want to hire me.  Now.  You want to hire me.   Now.

Now what is it you want?

Comments

[Sisyphus]

ffft ---- that's nothing. You're in Southern California, remember? new subdivisions sprout up there like mushrooms after a rain --- I hate it when I drive in to the edge of a town and park, only to find when I come out from my errands that a new starbucks, jamba juice and la salsa combination now blocks what used to be the exit from the parking lot.

Now driving down the freeway extensions, hoping they'll finish a new exit for you in time to get off ahead of traffic never seems to work. Maybe they could use mall growth hormone on the off ramps instead.

[Luther Blissett]

What I'd do for a Whole Foods! When Columbus, Ohio, seems cosmopolitan, you know you're in post-industrial America.

[The Necromancer]

Weird, in a Douglas Coupland on acid kind of way.

[Gary]

Those hangers are my first memory of driving into Irvine, too. I remember negotiating my Ryder truck and vehicle tow trailer down Jamboree and wondering aloud what the hell those huge buildings were, at which point my brother impatiently informed me that they were blimp hangers as if I was tremendously stupid. They are fairly impressive structures, especially when you come from the south, where views of nearly everything are obscured by hills, trees, and rednecks. A Wikipedia entry on the development says the hangers are going to be demolished ultimately, which mildly saddens me for some weird reason.

[Gary]

I just realized that I misspelled "hangar" in that last post. Several times. I feel mildly sad about that, too.

[Rich Puchalsky]

I have to say that photography around L.A. beats photography in New England hands down in terms of variety of things to take pictures of. My favorite in terms of larger-than-human-scale built objects used to be the wind farms somewhere to the southeast.

[SEK]

Sisyphus, what's this blaspheming Jamba Juice? Anyway, they don't count, since no one actually builds them. Someone planted a Jamba bulb in Costa Mesa in 1966, now they just spring up everywhere.

No worries, Gary. I'll spell it "hanger" too, just so you feel better. I wonder how many people share our first glimpse of Irvine? Anyone coming from anyone east of Tustin, presumably, since Jamboree's the only decent way out of that bottleneck. Sad that they'll be demolished. They already emptied the place of the orange groves which contributed to the oddity of the effect. The hangers initially looked like small buildings behind the groves, then they just kept growing and growing and growing ...

Rich, those are on the way to the northwest, aren't they? I remember passing them on the way to Coachella one year.

[Rich Puchalsky]

I forget whether I'm thinking of the ones in Tehechapi or San Gorgonio. They'd be northeast of Irvine in either case, I think.

Hey, have you ever been to the Kelso Dunes? They're in the Mojave Natural Preserve, near Baker. Probably about three hours drive NW of Irvine. It's this weird, mysterious place -- here's a picture from somebody's site -- where the desert stops being normal US SW desert and becomes what you'd imagine as Middle Eastern desert. You can drive up to a place where you can hike up to a sand dune top; it's supposed to take a couple of hours. (I wouldn't know, since angled sand is a lot more difficult to hike in than it looks, so we made it so somewhere in the middle and declared that to be good enough.) Of course I don't know whether in your impoverished state you have enough gas money to get there, or even really whether you have a car.

Wait, I wonder whether I should really be recommending this to you. What strange catastrophe could you get into in this unusual environment? Burial under sand-slip? (To the knees or waist or something, enough not to do permanent harm but so that you'd have to be dug out.) Dehydration followed by mysterious memory loss of dissertation material only? Never mind.