In the summer of 2004 I was feeling like a castoff; not homeless, but without a home. Without realizing the connection, I began photographing furniture sitting curbside. Unwanted. At the end of the summer it felt like enough, though I continued to notice these fellow travelers for months as I drove through Los Angeles.

A friend told me she finds these images strangely alluring. I think it is the clear evidence in each image of a story; a narrative you or I will never know. A mystery unsolved.

This is not the Long Beach of my youth. Not that I spent much time in Long Beach as a kid, but the impression I was left with was a gritty, industrial Pacific coast town.

The location today has many faces. There is still the port, still the endlessly bobbing oil rigs. Now downtown is a tourist destination with the Aquarium of the Pacific. The Queen Mary still sits across the water. Signal Hill is no longer just for radio towers and oil rigs; it is filling up with new houses.

These photographs are taken from many of these locations, but you might never know it. The scenes themselves were not so interesting to me as the small artifacts of the old life and the new life of the city.

Traveling carnivals that spring up at the neighborhood park always strike an odd chord in me. These are tacitly places of fun, but look closer and you\'ll see drunk ride attendants, poorly maintained equipment, and the look of down-market nomadic discontent on the faces of our hosts.

Slow days leave more room for these observations, and the whole place can seem a little sad. Instruments of fun left idle have a lonely look.

This particular day started slow, then picked up. I kept shooting when the people came, but the place still came up feeling disconnected. Maybe then it was just I who was alone in the crowd.

On a trip to my hometown, I drove past one of the landmarks of my youth: the Sunnyside Drive-In, now in ruins.

You’d think this was the site of my first first kiss, first back-seat romp, first something. For me, the Sunnyside Drive-In is where I saw the second movie I remember. It was 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

I had become obsessed with the movie, getting my Mom to buy the record, with full dialog and music. I must have driven her crazy with repeated spins of Whale of a Tale. At home it sounded much better than on the tiny, torn speakers hanging for dear life from the car window at the Sunnyside.

Standing there in modern times, I only heard the wild rabbits scampering through the half-brush, half-asphalt of the decaying landmark.