Just Read it Off the Menu

It's never easy to grasp how huge Stiletto City is. Here we see downtown from a hill in Debs Park which is maybe ten miles away. The lighter-colored blur in the middle: a traffic jam on the Pasadena Freeway as it approaches and leaves downtown. In the background we see another hill -- that's where Dodger Stadium is -- and if we looked over that hill we'd see pretty much what we see here: lines and lines of houses, each with a tree. Stiletto City is miles of houses separated by the occasional hill, which is also built up with houses, except for at the very top where you can walk your dog, take a picture and look at the view.



Not that Debs Park isn't an oasis, because it is. The pond is beautiful and Mischief loves to splash in it.





When The Great PunkyDunky and The Great BZWZ were growing up, they had a hill and a park just like this one to play on, only larger, that one off in the distance in the first photo. Elysian Park is the second largest park in Stiletto City, and, much like McClaren Park in Saint Plotniko, 95% of it is wild and unused. Plot and Duck roamed those hills with their kids, and PD and 5H can do it now with Belly.



When Plotnik was growing up, the dry hilltops and wooded canyons were thick with undergrowth, rattlesnakes and poison oak. They probably still are.





Stiletto City can seem hugendously out-of-scale, off the charts for sheer enormity, but that size is also intoxicating. With a little effort you can find nature, and emptiness, and owls and hawks and coyotes, plus black pork ramen, empanadas or shishlik. Just read it off the menu.