Like hidden volcanoes, towns founded one day cracked and exploded the next. Chunks of city dropped a hundred miles away, and then from that crater and over the century the development oozed and spread, filled in the empty spaces with pre-fab homes and 7-11s, nail parlors, donut shops, sushi joints. Friday night I counted twelve of the latter on Ventura Boulevard between Coldwater Canyon and Lankershim (I wasn't trying to count--they were just that obvious). That's more fad than socio-geological phenomenon; yet still urban, porous and bubbles of a magmatic growth.

This gradual spill escalates at times and in different places, and that is what we find now, where the United States, poor thing, is the only Western country losing "empty" space; Europe complains of immigration, but its overall population is dropping. Japan's also, as the East goes, is steadying, and they, too, find their citizenry changing faces. This appears horrendous and felonious and unfair to many of us; perhaps in legal terms it is wrong; but one thing money does is make people less fertile. Maybe this migration, this spread of cities outward into the most distant intemperate desert cracks--with everyone working and leading lives so prosperous they can afford to eat raw fish--will lead to the reduction of the world's overstock. That's what we can hope for, anyway, despite pension fears and other nonsensical whatnot. Too bad we'll all be dead when it happens.