A Few Things About LA
LA is a notion built on dualities.
It offers unexpected splendor and serves up drawbacks of equal proportion. You can be anonymous here. It’s easy to disappear for weeks, months, years. You can incubate, you can hide until the baby is born, until the job is done, until the grass grows back after dust dry summer.
Here, time skips under the seamless blue sky. Here, memories aren’t anchored by seasons. Everything that has ever happened to me floats freely in a nonlinear pasture. A decade passes and I could summarize it as spaces between a few big rains.
If you can gather people together under these circumstances, it’s nothing short of a miracle. Your guests owe you nothing. In fact, you owe them, because they braved streets filled with newly legalized jay walkers, professionally outfitted bikers and rogue scooters that persist in hostile territory. LA guests arrive with a fresh coat of lipstick to hide the shipwreck. But you can see it the way their eyes roam, searching for ghosts.
I’ve watched a dinner party turn on a dime when lukewarm food showed up in trays. Wine bottles emptied too fast, not everyone lived up to the BYOB portion of the invite. If you can get 10 people to meet in the middle, feed them well or you’ll have to fight off a mutiny.
It’s all what you make of it. I wanna soak up the life I’m given, spread myself thick not thin. Don’t drag through rush hour if your bad mood is in the passenger seat. Chances are, it will follow you inside and take up precious space.
You can escape to the bathroom and hold the sink. Gaze into your own eyes and wait for the LED bulb to waver. Wine blooms on your cheeks and you are reminded how much you love to be alone. Suddenly your little patch of solitude calls out. Time to go home. But first, I hope they serve dessert.
All of this to feel less lonely. If you’re not careful, the LA sprawl will swallow you. The same space that incubates can suffocate. It closes in, until you feel like the last person on earth. No one has heard your name. No one ever will.
In a land of names, this hurts. But only for the time that I occupy this earthly plane. I don’t care about immortality, it’s already in the bag. Every step we take plants seeds of consequence. An off-hand comment can ring for decades in the ears of another. It can shape their gait, influence their commerce, underscore their confidence.
Biodiversity flexes and falters under our thumb. We don’t even see the buttons that we press, because it’s all one, two, three steps removed. If we had to witness every light go out, there would be a greater capacity to know the weight of our movements.
It’s all so big now, these cities that have grown in our mind. We’re worrying over imagined skyscrapers, when the ground beneath them is swept with concrete and forgotten. Just as well. Nothing is fully sacred when it is visible. Why do you think the divine has never shown its face in totality? I’ll speak the name, but words are poor excuses for such transcendence. Only when sparks turn into an all consuming blaze will we know.
It feels like I empty out the rocks in my pockets every other day. I won’t pass them off to you, because extra cargo consumes more gas. I think of this whenever I open my boyfriend’s trunk and find a stack of firewood. I’ve been guilty of carrying similar excess.
It’s so easy to hold on, we forget how hard it is.
That’s all for today.
xx
James