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Roads

Wed, Nov 07, 2001 05:29PM -0600

Currently Listening to: Ben Folds Five - Don't Change Your Plans for Me

I was shocked to discover that US 41 runs all the way from Miami to Chicago up to Upper Peninsula Michigan. So technically, Calle Ocho is the same route as Lakeshore Drive.

The US Highways haven't been as important ever since the Interstate Highway system was completed, but as I waited at a red light at the old US 99/US 66 junction in L.A. (at N Broadway and Ave 20), I thought about how one road leads to Northern California where I went to college and the other road leads to Chicago where I'm going to medical school. Like many, I suppose I've been fascinated by US 66, and I marvel at how I've stood at both ends of it (though I haven't really traveled the road between)--one end near the Art Institute on Michigan Avenue, the other end at Ocean Ave just two blocks from the Third Street Promenade. Last Friday afternoon, me and my brother just gazed at the sunset and the Pacific Ocean, birds swooping hither and thither overhead, and then Friday night I was at a club on US 66 (Santa Monica Boulevard) in West Hollywood.

But I suppose there is no use regurgitating the past. Still, I wonder. On Friday after the club I went to Fred's on Vermont Ave in Los Feliz, and I was suddenly taken back to that May evening after the book reading at Skylight Books, and how at the time I had no inkling of my destiny (and yet I remember being hopeful about the future.) And after Fred's that May, we then went to the Formosa Cafe, another historical spot on US 66, in my mind, foreshadowing my abrupt journey to Illinois, and the pattern recognition machinery of the mind is a wondrous thing. I am forever trying to find meaning from sheer coincidences. (And yes, I suppose I was saved that May, and yet I can't help but wonder. Too late.)