Beneath The Green-Light Remedy

People in LA run from the rain. They live in such a tormented bubble-world that is so cut off from the reality of nature's control over our lives that they literally RUN from it! LA is built in such a way that people are inside 24 hours a day. You wake up inside your overpriced apartment, get inside your gas-guzzling car, drive through a concrete jungle of buildings only to drive inside a parking structure, get inside an elevator that takes you to your 10th floor office...inside! You spend 9 hours inside only to turn around and do it all over again to get home. Even now, looking out my window to my patio (which has walls around it to give me "privacy" from the outside), all I see is buildings...homes, apartments, restaurants, shops, cars. My poor birds, who sit right in front of my patio window, stick their little heads through the blinds, desperately trying to find some connection to the outside world, and all they get to see (through the lattice walls of my patio) are buildings and cars driving by. They don't even react anymore when a firetruck drives down the street, 10 feet from my front door, blaring it's siren. It's truly sad.
It's raining today, so I decided to take a walk. Rainy days are the best days to take a walk in LA because there's absolutely no one outside. It's barren, and it's one of the few times you can actually notice the sparse remanents of nature around you. My street has an unusually large amount of greenery & trees on it, but you never notice them until you walk out into the rain and are free of the usual distractions that keep you from looking up: people walking by on their cell phones, horns honking as two cars fight for the only remaining parking spot, people pulling in and out of their driveways. And then all of a sudden you feel a rather large drop of water fall on your head, and you look up to see that it came from a surprisingly beautiful tree that you never noticed, even though it's 10 steps out of your front door.
LA is a city that never stops. People living what I like to call "the green-light remedy," filling their lives with a constant flow of activity in order to avoid dealing with life in the moment. But on a rainy day in LA, if you know the right backstreets, you can find yourself living in one of those real moments...not the pretentious kind that you hear about in songs or low-budget indie films...but the real kind where you find yourself, for a brief moment, existing in the REAL world...the kind that was here before the buildings and the pop culture we've created over it...the kind where you can feel the tangible proof of the natural world spitting and blowing against your face, and for that brief moment you feel alive in way that even a night on the Boulevard could never compare to.