vernon ave.

A man whose mind is not unlike an
attention-hungry child speeds his low-hanging
yellow sports car 
down the Harbor Freeway; he’s either offensively
late for some banal appointment after work or
projecting his abyssal insecurity on the
thousands of folks just hoping to make their way
to their postwar sanctuaries, browning lawns,
fading swing sets, and significant others unscathed.
The legion of vehicles, blocked, swerving, and
ebbing, sardine-level tight southbound; if the city was
a living person then their artery risked infarction.
When the Federal Highway Administration designated the
nearly thirty-two mile concrete slab Interstate status, they surely
touted the efficiency, modernity, and individuality denizens
would experience—no need to share precious air rights with
the dirty man on the streetcar; little did they realize the stagnant
music festival it would become today—motorists peering
surreptitiously into the adjacent pods,
guilty like Peeping Toms, while bachata, conjunto norteño,
hyperpop, a sterilized shell called KROQ, and Real 92.3
pour out of half-cracked windows into an aural stew. What
the fuck did they do to Art Laboe and his Connection? So as
the unsettling image of white socks unassumingly on the
freeway under a baby blue sheet comes into everyone’s view,
their otherwise inane commute assumes a different
tune. Yellow sports car man revs to express his frustration,
Larry Elder’s talk radio program howling behind the glass,
and catches a glimpse of the socks, thinking at least he’s not stuck in traffic.




Liam is the editor-in-chief of Zora Zine and begins an MFA in Screenwriting at University of Southern California this Fall.