Dodging Falling Palm Fronds

babe im gonna leave ya?

As the Santa Ana winds blew our eyes so dry we couldn’t cry, this annoying customer at my work said we live in paradise. This was yesterday when to blink in disbelief would have required WD-40. Los Angeles is paradise around its edges I thought, with an ugly city in its gut.

After almost 40 years in L.A. I’m tired of it. The collective derangement no longer coalesces into a seductive force. Not only do I understand the film/tv industry is not a vehicle for good but the public doesn’t even yearn for it now that other media has shown them closer to themselves.

I love its mountains and beaches though. The nature encircling it. The wide open horizon lining the blue mother Pacific Ocean. I take my dog Benito down to the sand so he can play a game of fetch he invented with the ebb and flow of the salty tide and a tennis ball. To get there, we walk through a tunnel under the highway and he drags me in excitement like a toy poodle racing in the Iditarod. I take him down to the beach because it’s his favorite thing to do, then once we get there I admit its also mine.

But for how much longer, I don’t know.

I have been here the entirety of a life and still discover new neighborhoods I can’t afford. How do so many people have so much money? Aerospace satellites to watch us closer, military industrial complex shit over by the airport and near Alta Dena, lawyers who sue those companies, lawyers who sue everyone, DUI lawyers who help you plead no contest which you could have done by yourself in hindsight and ten thousand dollars cheaper, trust fund kids whose parents helped hoover the well being out of the world so they can produce music in the Hollywood Hills to help anesthetize us, oil money, oily tech robot money, property developer scum, landlord parasites, stock market leeches, crypto gamblers, wellness guru frauds, criminals who never got caught, and Hollywood propagandizers. They live in homes you aren’t even invited to. The real titans have second mansions on beaches in Malibu that sit empty 50 weeks out of the year. The titans above them go door to door asking longtime owners to name their price and buy up entire stretches of houses on the highway, then hire security guards to deny public access to public beaches.

This state was colonized so recently we are in denial. The missionaries, the settlers, violent. This land was never made fair for all, it was named by those who bled the most victims then kept getting taken by worse men. And soon, so soon after we pretend it to be something enlightened, speak to the ideals laid out to brainwash our new country after the revolution. Tomorrow is the presidential election and to think a country started by violent colonialism, then ironed into capital corruption, can’t fall to fascism is denying the apocalypse the Natives endured when the savage European architects first arrived in their terrored kamikaze.

But this is not about the United States it’s about one life in its most alluring city. I used to cite the statistic of how only 1 of 100 people in L.A. even works in showbiz, and would joke that the other 99 are still trying to break in. Nowadays we are all making showbiz of ourselves and the cast and crew are reduced to one, the social media individual left to our own creative derangement to ensnare a brief flicker of fame to make a living off a lottery ticket whose numbers have bled off. People aren’t encouraged to gather creatively because to coordinate, would be a miracle when half our income is going to rent. When paying an entire team doesn’t maximize shareholder value. Musicians who didn’t come from Exxon stock, have to tour alone or perish. Filmmakers train their cameras front facing and ask their computerized assistants for help. Comedians do all right because they are urchins no matter the economy. Here in the mouthpiece for capital industry, pretend liberals with 10 million dollar homes and Harris/Walz signs, the streets are littered with electronic billboards. For bus stops to get shade they had to add sponsored television monitors or interactive pr exhibits (like below). Where do we go creatively if the only acceptable attempts at reconciling our art to the marketplace have to be creative expressions that align with its soulless dance? How do I ride the bus across town without being an unwilling participant in an ad for a movie along its side made by people who hate humanity?

So I start doing what you do when you’re ready to move on, I nitpick. I build a case for somewhere else. Maybe even somewhere more insufferable. San Francisco? Hotter? Tucson? One of those dilapidated stone houses in an aged Italian town they sell for a dollar if you can fix it up? No, you need to have money to buy a one dollar home. I’ve already looked it up, so too, have you.

I grew up here a failed child actor. My home is indecipherable from the vain dream laid out for me. That of trying to succeed in order to restore my family. But they survived without my success. I then survived by understanding the falsehoods of what this town and its media call success. To have your dreams come true is not to have a corporation say they will pay you to march in lockstep with their superhero/villain private money imperialism vision of the world. You don’t have to be a product to feel good about yourself. Your dreams come true the moment you dream them, share with a friend over coffee, jot their essence down in a notebook, read some shred of one at an open mic night, walk up into sage dusted hills or down into creek carved valleys, sit on the beach sand staring out at the ocean, in meditation with them, back turned to the city that no longer has your full attention.