I can’t count the number of times I’ve stood here, waiting for a bus to downtown LA, staring at that neon arrow.

On on side of the store is a couple exiting the brightly lit door, drinks in hand, smiling and laughing. Circling around each other and flirting. The other side has a door, too, dark and barred. Overflowing the dumpster, rotting and soggy cardboard forms a talus of trash. The two sides of this building aren’t even in the same universe. But that laughing couple will pass from one to other on the way to their car.

How many times have we all walked through this kind of parking lot to or from a bar, a club, a show? You see the dumpster and boxes and let them slide out of your mind. I can smell it, the mold, the spilled booze, the faint scene of urine, just looking at this picture. A thousand interstitial moments from a thousand late nights. We let those moments slide away. They’re not part of the pictures we’re making in our mind.