Tiny Dancer was playing from my earbuds, one of my favorite songs from Elton John’s album “Madman Across the Water,” I was excited because I knew, very soon my second favorite Elton John song, Levon, would soon smother me with reminiscent days gone by, when I felt giving anything one more try could and would actually make the difference. It was Friday, yesterday, December 28, 2018, actually 7 am in the morning and I was headed for a walk to see my doctor for my physical. The holiday season is still in full swing in LA, and the noise of the city, muffled of course by, Elton singing, “Jesus freaks out in the street Handing tickets out for God Turning back she just laughs The boulevard is not that bad”, helped hush any hubbub hanging around. It was one of those really windy Santa Ana winter wind conditions, leaving the sky bluer than the color blue had ever intended to be, but the wind also reminded any Angeleno out and about just how much gunk, and junk and wasteful items linger on the ground, until the heavens huff and puff and blow it all around. I left my house, and almost immediately witnessed a large cardboard box airborne hiding due north, almost with instinctive radar to smack me in my face. Someone must have purchased a 50 inch super deluxe extra special magic TV because, as this empty cardboard box was zooming in towards me I saw flashes of color advertising not only the content of the box but warning me to duck and cover. I luckily did and the cardboard box found a nesting place on the fence of yet another new McMansion being built on my street. Damn, that was close, I thought, but all this instant drama cause me to stop listening to Elton finish singing Tiny Dancer! But alas alack, to my rescue I heard the lyrics to Levon.
The wind continued, relentless in velocity, but with each gust, the sky seemed richer in color, and even with the clamor of the wind, it felt good to be alive, in LA. And then I hit Beverly Boulevard and was greeted with almost a half dozen cardboard boxes, this time, none of them flying objects of war, but all of them, products of a war on the poor, the mentally ill, and the injustice of just trying to exist. There is a small part of Beverly Boulevard, where old carpets, some torn tarp, stolen shopping carts, lots of plastic bags bulging at their seams, and human beings find shelter during the night, using cardboard boxes as either a make-believe roofer carpeted floor, or a wall to keep the rest of the world from their few moments of peace. “Levon, Levon likes his money. He makes a lot they say. Spends his days counting. In a garage by the motorway.”; those lyrics were crooning through my earbuds, as I encountered this row of cardboard box villas. Once again, albeit just in theory and not actual physical harm, I was hit in the head with the sight of cardboard boxes, on a very windy day in LA.
I am never certain how injustice begins, and I truly understand that many of us have both our own definition of injustice, and our own opinions as to the causes and the effects. When the album “Madman Across the Water first debuted in 1971, there was a war in Viet Nam, the words Black Power were scary to hear, if you smoked marijuana you were going to Hell, and hippies were the antichrist; poverty was still around, but there were bigger fish to fry and be afraid of. I made it to my doctor's office, and with the journey home, the wind had died, the sky began to glow a duller blue, and there was not a cardboard box in the sky or on the ground.
