To Live and Die in LA

Perhaps I connect emotionally too easily. I pity the discarded sweatshirt and the broken coffee mug. Perhaps I’ve always wanted a home. A place where I understood the rules and cared mildly for the sports teams, felt nostalgic for the cuisine. Maybe I just moved here at the right time. Whatever it is, I love my city, and it hurts my feelings when you complain about it pitilessly.

That’s not to say you shouldn’t complain, of course. I am a complaint advocate of the highest order; that’s how things become great (or better), when you reconstruct them after they’ve been demolished. And of course LA’s budget is in the toilet, it has become the toilet, we take decades to find serial killers and oh how you hate the traffic, nobody reads a book anymore, everyone has an agent — you use the word “soulless” maybe, or invoke Bret Easton Ellis, and man, you never even think of what Tupac would say to you.

KDAY, this afternoon, was feeling Tupac like nobody’s business. Nothing but Tupac would do. Tupac after Tupac after Tupac, and I didn’t change it as I sat in the traffic — God, you think, how awful to be in a car with your thoughts, unable to move away from them! Don’t you just hate when cars and immobility converge! Doesn’t it get your goat almost as much as murder does! — wondering why I should take it so personally that a day spent in Los Angeles without hearing someone wonder why God would make a place so inhospitable to humanity is a day spent in the house not reading the internet or speaking with anyone at all. Why should I care? I live here and it feels as though it’s my hometown. It isn’t my hometown, not technically, but it seemed so happy to receive me that it became somehow mine. New York never loved me back as hard as Los An...

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... North were the mountains, west was a freeway underpass with a guy passed out on some garbage, south was an American Apparel ad featuring a topless Asian toddler, and west was a goddamn rainbow the width of which implied that a pot of gold was chilling in Cypress Park. The fruit vendor guy was outside the Citibank, having recovered from being pinned between the bank’s sign and a mis-driven car a month ago, chatting with a kid who was buying a coconut. Miles away Molly Lambert, sometimes-New-York-Times-writer, was working on a Science Corner. In Pasadena, a kid taped a picture of the Empire State building to his wall. At home, six ripe lemons fell off the tree and were devoured by ants. In Westwood, an actor told his friend that he’d kill himself if he spent another three hours on the ten freeway. Through my radio, Tupac says, “Tupac cares, if don’t nobody else care.”