LA Astronomy

This morning I went for a hike. I can officially call it a hike, not a walk; I had my hiking shoes on and I went up high. I saw quail (which toddle hilariously) and places where water used to be. I smelled sweet tangy pine brush and wild sage and the homey-to-me odor of horseshit. I heard those birds that sound like their batteries are running out and an unidentified whining machine that, although I hiked to get away from it, helped lead me home when I took the wrong path.

I'm reading a book that I kind of threw up my hands and decided to read. My stack for reviewing is really high, but I've been reading nothing but books for review for at least six weeks and I am tired of taking notes. So two days ago I picked up one that I've been wanting to read since last spring and knew would go fast: Excavation, by Wendy C. Ortiz. It's harrowing, because of its subject matter, but it's also wonderful.

One of the most interesting things for me about this book is that it takes place largely in the San Fernando Valley, which is where I live. I adore the valley, but I understand well why people don't set books there. It's kind of like setting a sci-fi book on Io instead of Jupiter. Jupiter looms, huge and fascinating and irresistible. Io is where people who like peace and quiet, people who don't like to be watched, would want to live, but Jupiter is where the exciting, worth-reading-about people live. Plus, the valley has changed so significantly in such a short time; the development from unpopulated orange groves to dense suburb has taken less than a generation. I think it'd be hard to set a book here unless you grew up here. You'd be constantly explaining what stage the valley was in at the time.

It was hazy this morning, which is a real weather condition here rather than a temporary description. I hiked higher than I ever have in this park, went further on the trail than I thought I could without breakfast, and took some panoramic pictures and sent them to Matt. Thankfully, I did not get Creed's "Higher" in my head. Until just now.

On the way back I saw Lassen Street, spearing out from the park into the sprawl. It shone under the early sun. Because of the haze, the street looked like it went on forever, the horizon faded to white like a matte painting. (Such comparisons are inevitable in the suburb orbiting stormy Jupiter.)

does not do justice to the scene, but at least offers an idea of what I'm talking about

I thought of Wendy's book, thought of her writing about Van Nuys, the 101, Woodman, Lankershim. "He sighed, turned left on Ventura, and we headed towards the west Valley, which always felt far from home." She is writing about 1987, when there still would have been orange groves here. I think. My apartment was built sometime in the 80s - I can tell by the tile counters in the kitchen - but I think this development would've been isolated, a new opportunity for daring investors.

Wendy still lives in LA, but she lives in Jupiter, not Io. I don't blame her. I'm happier here.

The Anatomy of an Essay

Last time we were together, I pointed you toward this essay I wrote, which the Los Angeles Review (online) saw fit to publish. I am so glad about this, because it's a very LA-steeped story, from the location to the pretentious people to the title being a riff on Joan Didion,* who's always prominent in picture collages of LA writers.

People who've read it have asked me how much of it is fictionalized. The answer is almost none. The parts where the sentences begin with "I imagine" are not true to life, and I changed a name due to circumstances too tangled to explain. But the rest I described as I saw it. You can go to the Standard Hotel, 550 S. Flower Street, Los Angeles, CA 90071, if you don't believe me, and see the well-dressed douchebags and vagina waterbed pods for yourself. I wrote it with a starkness, an aggressiveness, that is not my usual register, and I juxtaposed things kind of unnaturally to make a series of points, and I don't have, like, JAMA studies proving the thing about babies and yellow (though the internet has loads of information about that - I didn't just make it up). But everything I describe in the story happened the way I describe.

You can see the aforementioned pods in the left center of this photo. 

The backstory: two friends were staying at the Standard. They'd come to LA for AWP in March-April of 2016. We were joined in the restaurant by two additional friends, one in town for the same reason but staying elsewhere, the other a resident of Los Angeles; the LA friend stayed for the rooftop experience while the other friend left. That's why the numbers and names get a little jumbled. Trying to explain these circumstances artfully sounded less appealing than just letting it dangle.

The three of us, the two friends staying at the Standard and I, made much of the insane patriarchal environment of the hotel while we were there. It wasn't something I noticed, alone, afterward, and decided to explore. All of us talked about it, laughed about it, yelled about it, and all of us wrote essays. The original plan was to see if someone would publish all three of them, three different takes on the same experience. That didn't work out, alas, but I still love the idea.

I wrote mine pretty quickly, and pretty soon after the event. Not much of my usual stewing & brewing. I wrote it in time to hand it in as a final project for one of my CSUN classes in late April or early May, and I read some aloud to the class. They laughed, and gasped, and asked me how much of it was true.

Then I sent it out - only, as it happens, to the Los Angeles Review. It seemed so intrinsically an LA story that I didn't know if any of my other goal publications would give a damn about it. My memory is that I waited a while to see if my friends wanted to send their essays out too, and once that possibility closed, I'd missed the open submissions period for the LAR and had to wait a few more months. I sent it in late November of 2016, six or seven months after I finished it, and I got a positive reply in mid-June of 2017, about seven months later, and it appeared in August of 2017, not quite a year and a half after the events in it.  On this occasion I wasn't deterred by revision time; the piece was hardly edited at all from how I initially set it down. (Sometimes that happens. Usually not.)

Above: the anatomy of an essay, from inspiration to publication. I'm explaining this because I rarely have such a strong, fact- and date-based memory of how a piece came to be, and such specific detail feels helpfully illustrative to me. This was an easy go, aside from the lag time between finishing & sending and between sending & hearing back.

It isn't always so. A fraught piece I have on my mind right now, about Woody Allen - I don't remember which of the news stories I read about him inspired it, and I don't remember when I drafted it, or whether I edited it with a strategy or not. I have information in my email about when I submitted it and when a publication asked for revisions, and I can tell you exactly why I've been putting off doing those revisions ( = they're too hard). But the beginnings are murkier, and that's the norm for me.

Sometimes I use this blog as a primary source for research on when I wrote things and how I worked on them. But in the last couple of years I have become unhelpfully vague, here, about the stuff I'm working on. Part of this is because my writing practice has changed, grown looser (lazier?), become more binge-y than bit-by-bit-y. I can't tell a serial story about any of it: the idea comes in one day and the essay whooshes out two days (or six months) later, in one big blurt, so there's nothing to say.

Another part is that Caitlin Moran thing when you stop talking to your friends about the guy. My writing process is much less interesting to me now than all the other stuff I've taken to writing about on this blog, and anyway it can't be that unique: I sit down and I write, or I stare at the page, or I read my own words and try to figure out how to replace them with better ones. Sometimes this takes place in longhand, and sometimes I type. Sometimes deadlines help me, but mostly they don't. I hit the same walls a lot: running out of enthusiasm for the idea I started with, feeling like I don't have enough time to do justice to an idea, finding I don't have enough load-bearing walls to build a room. If this isn't interesting to me, surely it isn't to you.

This blog still interests me, for the record. But I'm in the process of determining how to use it for anything other than a promotional tool. I was thinking of explaining a significant hour I spent on the road between I-10 and Mecca, California, but I might knead it into an essay instead. I wanted to talk about my experience at a writing workshop in Santa Fe, but I don't want to step on the toes of the people I met there. The more topics I come up with, the more I divert them away from this space, for one reason or another. It's a puzzle, but I'll solve it.


*After I announced this influence in my newsletter (are you subscribed to my newsletter?), a helpful person pointed out that Yeats originated the phrase "slouching towards Bethlehem," and Didion appropriated it. This is true. However, the appropriation is arguably more famous at this time than the origin, and there's more than a little Los Angeles in that.

In Which I Fail to Slay (But Do Get Home)

I don't know where else to put this.

Last night I went to see Beyoncé at Dodger Stadium. The night divides into two parts: the actual concert, and the complete disaster I encountered in trying to get home.

Concert:

From where I sat, Beyoncé was about three inches tall, but even at that distance, I could feel the force of her charisma. She is a queen. We all knew that, but it was still remarkable to feel her power unroll toward me. The concert was this odd, careful mix of giving herself to fun and strength and artistry on stage + a stage show crafted and calculated to give you goosebumps, predictably, every 90 seconds or so.

She used her hair like an aspect of her costume. She sang as beautifully as anyone ever has. She has the best smile since Marilyn Monroe.

But MAN. There were 50,000 people in that stadium, and almost all of them sang along with every word for two full hours. It couldn't drown her out, nothing could, but the audience was 80% of what I heard. The acoustics sucked, because it's a ballpark and not the Hollywood Bowl. And all the surrounding business of going to a show of this magnitude turned me off so badly that I don't think I'll ever go to another one.

She only sang about half the words of a given song, letting the audience sing the rest. Instead of feeling like a cheat, this felt to me like it was tied up with her performance persona: the whole show seemed like a continuous give and take of energy. She was giving us all she had, but she was getting all that back from us at the same time. We were each doing our half to make the show be spectacular. It was like kung fu: the transfer of energy to your opponent with least trouble and injury to yourself.

The materialism was outrageous. T-shirts were $45 apiece. I didn't plan (in terms of outfit) for the stadium to be as cold as it was, so I ended up buying a sweatshirt...for $85. Outrageous.

She also sang weirdly abbreviated versions of all the songs. I don't think she sang a single song all the way through; instead it was like verse-chorus-chorus-next song. Like a medley that moved through most of her A catalog. Breaks in between medleys for costume changes, like six or ten of them, an unnecessary number of costume changes.

Can you see actual-size Beyoncé? Her hair is a white blob, and she's kind of to the right of what look like three stairs.

Some of the numbers were stunning. She used a shallow stage full of water for "Freedom", and it was way beyond any concert I've ever seen in terms of innovation and impact. But on balance, going to a concert like this showed me that I don't really need to go to concerts like this, that I'll do better listening to records and watching official footage on YouTube.

Disaster:

I'm Not a Screenwriter, and I'm Okay with That

Last Thursday I went to a poetry reading on the CSUN campus. It was very interesting. The poet founded a small press in the 1990s that has since become quite successful (I'd heard of it long before now), and she seems to be pretty active in the Los Angeles writing community.

What there is of one. Something I keep hearing from various sources as I go to more events like this is that L.A. is not at all a literary city. That there just isn't much here for writers who are not screenwriters, and the city values books and literature much less than it does the biggest motor of this town: films.

We can't stop here. This is L.A. 

I am not a professional writer yet, and I don't go to more than a few literary events per year, but I feel a kind of mild disagreement with this attitude and assessment. No, L.A. is decidedly not New York, but the entire publishing industry is headquartered in New York. It's a bit like saying there isn't much of a film community in Washington, DC. No, there isn't, but that's not what DC is for.

I'm reminded a little of a woman I met in an online workshop who resided either in Texas or somewhere in the Midwest, I don't remember. She lived in a small and boring community, so she said, and she felt that she couldn't write interesting work unless she up and moved to New York. Things happen there, she said, and nothing happens in small towns.

I really, truly thought she was crazy. Some of the greatest books come out of pastoral settings; some of the most memorable literary situations come out of small-town living rooms. To Kill a Mockingbird, Madame Bovary. All of Jane Austen. In Cold Blood. Alice Munro! You can live a really boring life in New York and write meaningless fiction, or you can live a very colorful life in Nowhere, Nebraska and write remarkable fiction. (Is The Hudsucker Proxy better than Fargo?) Thinking that you need an infusion of New York to make your fiction worth reading seems to me like thinking you need a different mixing bowl to make a better cake. Making good cake is so not about the vessel you mix it in.

Of course, certain stories can't but be told in New York (or Miami, or Bangkok), and that may have been what this writer was trying to say: that she wanted to tell New York stories but didn't have any experience with life in that city. Which would be fine; if she just plain didn't want to write Munro-type stories, then she probably did need to move to New York. But that wasn't really what she said.

Anyway, from my admittedly limited perspective, the L.A. writing community doesn't feel very small or neglected. Some truly great and unique writers have made this city their subject - Didion, Pynchon, Chandler. Writerly defensiveness about not fitting in to L.A., with its focus on film, seems a bit misplaced to me. For instance, I know that finding a workshop group or a space for your work or readings to go to is not hard. There aren't dozens of indie bookstores around, but those that exist have events all the time. A significant handful of MFA programs are spread across the city, and there are terrific foundations and rent-a-carrel places where you can connect with other writers. Saying that this town squeezes out fiction writers and poets seems to me a defeatist way to look at living here, when in fact opportunities are everywhere. And you get the chance to be a Didion instead of being one of a zillion just like you.

Mostly, I feel that if you want to be a New York writer, with all the benefits available from living in the city where most American books are born, maybe don't live in L.A. If you want to live in L.A., this is the lit community you have available to you. Why complain about it? It's your family, and your family kind of is what it is.

That Time I Tried to Go to an Author Event

Well, that was disappointing.

On Wednesday, miracle writer George Saunders came to the Los Angeles Public Library to give a talk with another writer, Bernard Cooper. Saunders has just published his fourth book of short stories, and I think you could call what he's on a book tour, although it seems to be sort of sparse. Wednesday was his only event in the L.A. area, and because he lives in Syracuse and doesn't write very many books, I thought this would be the only shot I was likely to get in the course of a few years to see him speak.

The LAPL where Saunders was speaking (with Bernard Cooper, I'm compelled to add; I'm sorry you're reduced to an also-ran in this post, Bernard, but I haven't read any of your books) was downtown, though, and I mean downtown, like the skyscraper part of Los Angeles that resembles Manhattan. The talk was at 7:15 and I wanted to get there well in time to get a seat, so I left home at 4:30. Traffic was middling, to my surprise, and I got to the library and found parking in enough time to wander around the smallish but amazing garden space that surrounds the library for a little while. If you're ever in downtown L.A., go to the central library. The architecture is remarkable. Very Andrew Ryan.

I went inside and discovered a line of people waiting outside the auditorium where the talk would take place. So I joined them. After 20 minutes or so we were shuffled to a different line behind a sign that read "Standby". Via eavesdropping on conversations a bit, I learned that this event was ticketed, and that those tickets were all totally gone, so the twenty-odd people waiting in line here were people who almost certainly were not going to get in unless the current ticket-holders decided to go to the ballet instead or something.

Here is the website about the event. Here is the website about the lecture series. Do you see any information about having to attain tickets ahead of time? (It was not "off-site" to my knowledge, as I was waiting IN THE LIBRARY.) No, I don't, either.

So, instead of waiting around another 45 minutes for an event for which I was extremely unlikely to get in (I was 13th in line), I just went home. I felt about how you'd expect me to feel. I admire Saunders enormously and would love to see him speak/read/dance one day, but apparently it's not in the cards this year. (Adding insult to injury, it took about 40 minutes to go three miles, getting out of downtown. But once I was on the 5, things were smooth.)

My consolation prize, getting to visit the library itself (a temple to books) and the really interesting surrounding half-city-block of pretty landscaping and fountains, was a decent one. That and getting to see downtown L.A., which I've never seen, and which was sort of an alien experience. It's stupid of me, but I don't think of Los Angeles as a skyscraper-y type of city. When we went into Hollywood to go to the sign and later to see Grauman's Chinese Theatre, that was the L.A. I always think of when I think of it (or just the broad boulevards and ranch houses that exist in the part of L.A. where I actually reside). Definitely citylike, but not glass and steel and all-business. But I am mistaken in my impression; there is a downtown L.A., and it's not much different from Manhattan or downtown Baltimore.

So. I hoped this post would be another love letter to the experience of hearing authors give talks, but instead it's me saying that I can't wait to go back to the central L.A. library. C'est la vie.

My Drive Through Coruscant

Yesterday I had a little mini-adventure: I drove to the La Jolla area of San Diego to visit the lovely bloggers kamper and twinklysparkles. They had ventured out of New England in order to enjoy a pleasant November climate - aaah, I'm just teasing.

The drive was interesting. I drove through L.A. basically from top to bottom, which for your reference I have illustrated badly in Paint:

Click to embiggen. I might have exaggerated about Los Angeles's boundary in the south; Santa Ana and Orange County probably aren't strictly L.A. But there was not one quarter-mile of pause in the sprawl during that entire red line. 

And I kept getting in traffic jam after traffic jam. It was not unexpected, but still ridiculous. I also saw a cop swerving back and forth across seven empty lanes of traffic for obscure reasons, I guess in order to slow us all down to 50 mph; I saw a sky that seriously looked like it was on fire, from orange streetlights + craaaaazy fog (that famous San Diego fog...?); and I saw a bunch of our nation's finest driving around in tanks on the vast stretch of land that surrounds Camp Pendleton (aka The Kill-Bot Factory).

Yes, I'm kidding. 100% of my parents were trained as kill-bots. 

I'm pretty sure I saw the boob-towers from The Naked Gun, too, although there was a weird structure in front of them that meant I couldn't get a good picture. One of the funny things about the drive was that it felt deeply weird to be driving south and have the ocean on my right. I'm used to the other coast.

And I saw harbor seals in La Jolla; I've never seen seals outside of a zoo before. That was cool. If you're ever in La Jolla, go to the Cave Store, pay $4, and hear the sea thundering inside a tunnel while you walk down 145 steps to a neat-o cave.

Most fun, I saw twinkly and kamper! I love meeting blog-friends, and this was as terrific as all the other meetings so far have been. They gave me some insight on gender in fiction that I plan to share in Friday's post.

I know there's something else going on in the country right now, but damned if I can think what it is.

Miraculous Birds

Finally some writing-esque news. Cheryl Strayed is apparently doing The Book Tour That Never Ends for Wild, and she's coming (back?) to Los Angeles in late July. I am SO going. If I said I had a special connection to her, that would be wrong, but to say that she's never helped me gain perspective on my own life, or that I don't admire her writing, would be even more wrong. So I'm really looking forward to seeing her in person. July is a banner month, in fact - Singin' in the Rain is coming to theaters for one night only, and I've already bought tickets for that.

And now back to Mi Vida, the continuing telenovela of my move to L.A.

This move has meant that Matt and I, previously spread out over a two-bedroom townhome, now live in a one-bedroom apartment. While not tiny by city standards, it's about a third of the space to which we were accustomed. Our TV/game center, both our computer setups, our living room, and our dining room now occupy a single room, rather than three. It's been an awful lot of work to make it uncrowded and homey, and I still don't love the way the tech is cheek by jowl with the comfy chair and sofa. However, we have no road noise whatsoever in our apartment, where previously we lived on a mainish road and couldn't really have the windows open and still retain peace; we have a slightly vaulted ceiling in the main room due to being on the third floor; and we have a small but pleasant balcony with a large sliding glass door, and before we couldn't use our patio at all due to its smallness and juxtaposition to the road. Even aside from these perks, I am kind of loving the effects of downsizing so far. I truly am creating a space where everything belongs somewhere, and the Raptitude guy was right, it has an incredibly positive effect on one's mental health.

I chose to set up my computer next to the glass door, and one morning while "working" (intermittently staring at the computer and out the window), I saw a wee brown bird buzzing up and down by the big fluffy tree/bush across the way. (I have no idea what most of the flora is out here, so, um, big fluffy tree/bush.) It was a few seconds before I realized I was looking at a hummingbird, because it hovered in midair the way no other domestic birds do that I'm aware of. It wasn't bright green and pink the way textbook hummingbirds are, it was brown and mottled, but it definitely had faster-than-light wings and a long thin beak.

Squeal! The only times I ever remember seeing hummingbirds were for fractions of a moment before they sped away, and I had to say "was that a hummingbird? Is that what they look like? Or was it just a really fast sparrow?" So seeing one was pretty cool for me.

I went right out and bought a hummingbird feeder, an antiquey red glass bottle screwed into a tray with flower-shaped holes, along with some packets of food that you mix into water. (Yeah, I know it's essentially sugar in a packet, but it wasn't expensive and I don't want to fuck up a homemade recipe and hurt the birds.) I hung it on the balcony and watched obsessively for about half a day. Nothing happened. I hung it a little further out, worried, thought about buying flowers to attract them...and then I saw a little brown thing come up to the balcony, look intently at the red bottle, and beeline away. "Looklooklook!" I shrieked at Matt (who was peaceably playing Heroes of Might & Magic), far too late for him to see anything.

He asked me what I liked so much about hummingbirds, anyway. Nothing, I told him, I had just rarely seen them. Later I realized that was mostly the reason, but there's something else, too. Something that has to do with me not being able to grow any sort of plants to save my life, and having such pale skin that I burn like a forest fire even under SPF, and being seriously allergic to bugs, but desperately wanting to be out-of-doors as much as possible, anyway. Something appealing beyond words about the idea that I could hang up a feeder and tiny, miraculous birds really would show up and hang out on my balcony.

And they have. Yesterday I worked most of the day, looking to the left 847 times to see if there were any birds at the feeder, and I had customers on and off all day long. They drank my sugar water. A couple times they even sat on the edge of the feeder and folded their wings while they sipped. I haven't tried to get pictures of any of them, because they mostly drink from the flower-hole that's farthest from me and I can only see their edges around the bottle. But it's still so damn cool.

Feeder, hummingbird-free at the moment, unfortunately

I could connect this to how awesome Los Angeles is, how much I'm enjoying it here, but there are hummingbirds in many, many places in this country. What it really connects to is the joys of this particular apartment - finding happiness in things like this balcony, which is small and directly faces my neighbors' balcony across the way, which theoretically means they can watch me at my desk all day long, but which has brought me so many little mental rainbows with its morning sunshine and afternoon hummingbirds. The surprising amount of storage space here, presently full of disorganized life-stuff which I will eventually put to order. The teeny-tiny kitchen, which is kind of like adventuring in a houseboat. The seriously cool space-saving dining room table and chairs I bought at Ikea, despite the moving guy's well-intentioned comments amounting to the conclusion that our stuff is cheap and shitty. And my new address stamp, which has a swirly bird on it.

Life is good.

PS: I am falling far behind on correspondence, including thank-you notes and e-mails. Please forgive me if you're waiting for something from me.

Irrevocably Attached

Still no writing news. Heck, I haven't even read anything other than the internet and work material in the last week. The place is starting to come together, with the help of cheap plastic crap from China organizational devices from Bed Bath & Beyond and Target. We're unearthing a lot and throwing away a lot, both of which feel great.

Having a small space to work with has been more of an inspiration than I thought it would be. Part of the reason is that I read this a few months ago, have been rereading it ever since, and have sworn to myself that this move marks a new start for the stuff-fest that has been my life for the past 30 years. I told my mom this morning that there were only two things I could think of offhand to which I'm irrevocably attached, things that I would really be upset if I lost - barring things like my laptop and my birth certificate and such life-necessitating things that are tough to replace. One of them went with me on the plane (small plastic Tom Servo), and the other one I unpacked yesterday (framed poster of map of Narnia).

I totally fail to understand why I'm so attached to lil' Tom Servo. I feel like an idiot about it. He's definitely my favorite commentator on MST3K, but that doesn't really explain it. He's just a little plastic desk gewgaw, and there's no reason in the world why he should stir such affection in my heart when I see him sitting there. But he does. I put him in my carry-on baggage for the trip to L.A. Part of the reason for this was that he was a special one-off figure for an MST box set, and although I haven't researched it, I don't know that I could replace him easily.* That still doesn't really answer why I just have to have him around in order to be [more] happy. I truly have no idea.

Took this at BWI before departure. Me & Tom, seeing the world. 

Anyway, there's also the Narnia poster. Which we couldn't find at first when unpacking our picture boxes yesterday. We found every single other thing we'd hung on the walls of our old house, including a lot of stuff that we don't plan to put up at all in the new place, but no Narnia.

I found it on eBay, this poster; it's a laminated version of Pauline Baynes' map of Narnia and surrounding countries, and was created probably in the 80's for a classroom. It has a terrible green and white border and information about Scholastic press on it, all of which was hidden behind a mat by the framers. I am glad of every single penny (of many) I spent on the framing job, because I love it and it's beautiful and it makes me happy just to look at it. It's growing harder to find these posters, though, and I was pretty worried about replacing it if it was lost. (Maps of Narnia other than Baynes', which are all generally easier to find, have various problems that make them unappealing to me.)

But we did find it, inside a box with another stupidly heavy framed item that was a lovely gift which we don't want at all. I'd mistaken the box as only holding the big heavy not-want thing, but the Narnia poster was wrapped up with it. And now it's here, sitting next to me, only slightly the worse for wear.

There's a crease down the middle that was created when
the poster was laminated; not much to do about that.
Open in a new tab to embiggen; the detail
on this poster is one of the best parts about it. 

I really have a hard relationship with stuff. I tend to be owned by it. This move is continuing to teach me lessons about that. I've had a hard time keeping to my work schedule in the last few days, because all I want to do is unpack and organize and turn this into home. And GET RID OF THINGS. That's actually more exciting to me than the idea of having all my stuff back, out of boxes, between my hands or within sight. I have a vision of a home where there's a place for everything and everything is in its place. Because this seems even harder to accomplish when the home is so much smaller than the space we used to occupy, I'm even more determined to do it.

*Although if I have a few hundred dollars to completely blow, I can buy a full-size working replica. Don't think I haven't considered it. One day, when I'm wildly rich and successful, I'll probably buy him; I'll put him in the back of my electric DeLorean. 

Dream My Troubles All Away

For to listen while you read: 

I have no writing news to share. For the last two weeks, I've been wrapped up completely with the move, and for the last two days, I've been wrapped up completely with trying to get back to work. A couple of weeks of unpaid vacation will get you in the mood to work but quick.

Do I like it in Los Angeles? Yes, I do. Yes, yes, yes. I could rhapsodize for thousands of words about it: the weather, the mood, the exotic-to-me architecture and flora, the way our apartment (which is not tiny by most standards, but which is miles smaller than our Maryland house) has inspired me to winnow out our possessions, the interesting people, the food (OH THE FOOD, cheap street food of numerous nationalities that is awesome and all within walking distance), etc etc etc. But if I end up hating it within a month, I'm going to look very silly, so instead I'll just tell you one detail and one amusing story and then I'll GBTW. 

On the (looooong) drive from LAX to the San Fernando Valley, where we now live, it seemed like every flower in Los Angeles was blooming at the same time. And there are these enormous purple trees everywhere, big tall actual trees that appear to have purple leaves. I still don't know what they are, but their flowers are my most favorite shade of purple, a lavender that's slightly bolder than a pastel, and the ground beneath these trees is generally just painted with the petals. It's hard for me to understand how seasons work in this climate, so I don't know if the blooms I'm seeing are May flowers or all-the-time flowers or what, but it felt like a welcome, that everywhere I looked I saw bright, fresh, beautiful color. 

I was leaving our apartment a couple of days ago and waiting to turn left, and on the sidewalk was a man walking a little pug dog. He was dressed normally, in a polo shirt and khaki shorts, and he was speaking and gesturing very emphatically, his fingers squinched together in that way that usually means a) someone has fucked up and you're having to get across to them just how stupid they are or b) the speaker is Italian. It was pretty early in the morning and I didn't see any devices in or near his ear, and it looked for all the world as if he was trying to communicate some essential point to his dog. If he was a homeless guy, he was the cleanest and best-dressed homeless guy I've ever seen. I giggled at him and turned left and went to Lowe's. 

Not that people here are naturally going to be more eccentric than they are on the East Coast, but I'm actually in a city now, and it's kind of nice to think that I'll have my share of eccentric on the street every day. Free entertainment. So far (a week in, okay) I love living in the valley; we're in a blue-collar-ish neighborhood, and that's 100% okay with me, because it means the prices are lower and the traffic is mild and the people are friendly but aloof. Matt's work is 5 miles from our apartment. Anything sophisticated we need is not at all far away. I'm trying not to be too enthused, because then the other shoe will drop and I'll hate it, but at the moment I'm happy fit to bust.