Sometimes (i.e. tonight) your life just looks fucking weird to you. Things aren’t what you expected them to be or feel they probably ought to be, though you can’t quite put your finger on what to change or how to rethink things.

I’m in Los Angeles.

I had a large, insightful entry about Los Angeles all ready to go. It was sharp, witty, and sophisticated. Then my browser crashed. So nevermind. What I said was:

– Los Angeles is a whore
– It’s people are shallow and afraid
– Everyone here is being completely and utterly dominated by the reality they themselves create
– The worst thing in Los Angeles is a break in hipness/chicness/sexiness decorum…
– …because the sham that is their reality might snow through the cracks

Everyone here is fake. Everyone here is real somewhere underneath, but that reality so repressed that it takes on a mythological quality. Everyone here denies death and history. Death is in the air; death, cash, cynicism (in reality, fear masquerading as faux-cynicism), and sex (in reality, fear masquerading as faux-sex) are the overwhelming stenches everywhere in Los Angeles.

This place is easy to own; it’s just that nobody really, underneath it all, wants to own it. It’s no San Francisco or Chicago, or even Vancouver or Seattle. These people don’t know how to live.