Today, I walked to the Starbucks near my grandma’s house for the first time! Super exciting right? Stoke-inducing? Mind-exploding? Eh… no, not really. Basically the same menu board, green aprons, long line, and password-protected bathrooms you would see at any other location. I just wanted to build up the hype with that line of questions because it was sadly pretty high on the list of fun things I did this past month.

One part of this “adventure” was actually pretty interesting though. Before I left the house, my grandma mentioned that the Starbucks off Crenshaw used to be a Japanese-owned coffee shop, and the Walgreens next to it was a relatively well-known bowling alley called Holiday Bowl. Wikipedia even has an article about it! They were both integral parts of the Japanese-American community back in the day, and now they have been subsumed by coffee and drug store conglomerates.

Without access to that understanding of history, I would have thought nothing of the experience beyond my initial evaluation. With that knowledge in mind, however, a tiny set of gems in the establishment stood out in recognition of its mostly forgotten past. The elliptical paper lantern fixtures on the lights stood out as a unique continuity into the present, and a nod to the Japanese-Americans who passed in and out of those doors for decades prior.

It gave me a weird feeling about the fleeting nature of history. Times change, and even though the present appears to be so comfortably concrete it’s impossible to fully predict what will happen, and what will be left behind. I wrote a review of a book that mentioned thinking about the present as if it were the past, but what about thinking about the present as if it were the future? An infinite number of different events could have precipitated from decades ago to lead in an equally infinite number of unthinkable directions. Instead of those other realities, we are currently living within a specific trajectory that is simultaneously leading into an unknown future. Personally, I think the many-worlds interpretation is dumb, so we are left with this one crazy continuity that just keeps going!

I guess that’s both the advantage and disadvantage of living in a city that is literally a fat-ass baby in comparison to those in other countries with elaborate histories. We don’t have much of a unifying culture embedded within the infrastructure, but that also leaves it relatively open to a wealth of potential developments that might eventually shape it. For better or worse, changes now will probably not erase centuries of history, but it could lay the foundation for centuries to come. That is, if we don’t end up underwater… Fingers crossed!