los angeles

Hello from sunny L.A., where it is currently 6:43 a.m. and warm and bright and I have been awake for two hours listening to some sort of fan mechanism throbbing underneath Bubba's apartment. I am staying on a black 3-click futon with a orange pitbull named Soda sleeping in an Ikea Poang chair next to it, in the office/second bedroom of a two-bedroom new condo unit downtown. My body is currently working two Newcastles and a pale ale out of itself, and my torrid, on-again, off-again relationship with sleep is at a low ebb...I only slept for four weak hours and now I'm trying to figure out if it will be imprudent to hike in the rattlesnake-infested hills when I am too disoriented to find the lightswitch, let alone avoid poisonous herps. I'm here for three days - well, only one more day now - just to hang out with old and newer friends, and at the moment I'm sad to have lost my companion in prudent summer recklessness Sonia to an early Monday flight back to SFO to start the working week.

For hours, Sonia and I showered Navneet with hopelessly naive questions about southern California, because unlike the Bay Area, it is very warm and nearly impossible to inhabit without a car. The question "What is this place really like?" was asked at least a dozen times, often in rapid succession, and I decided it was getting ridiculous when Sonia inquired, very earnestly, how one was to determine if one was eating the fruit and the yogurt in a medium Pinkberry in the appropriate proportions. Navneet was kind to navigate our curiousity. Sonia's sense, induced by Joan Didion, that California is a place of serene beauty and sudden, manic outbursts of violence made me worry as I munched my poorly-constructed vegetarian sub (a kilogram of sprouts and wheat bun with one frugal sliver of avocado and no salt) that one of the leathery iguanas cruise-biking on the Santa Monica street was going to spray us with a hail of gunfire. Driving around made me nervous also, not because poor Bubba has developed a bloodspot on her retina and is therefore partially blind in her right eye and left-turned into oncoming traffic, but because I am afraid to look at people in their cars because cars are treated like private spaces. So unlike New York, where you can glance briefly at other commuters to pass time or to si ves algo di algo, and then return to your music or chain maille-making or whatever else you want to do on the subway, in Los Angeles I'm concerned that I've invaded someone's privacy by glancing at the other cars around me and that the next guy I look at will level a pistol in my face. There is certainly a lot of car-to-car shouting of epithets.

There is also, however, a great deal of natural beauty and good weather, which makes it hard to do anything at all. I was perfectly content today to have hours of lazy conversation about vulvar pigmentation and ICE detention on the beach and at a cafe with Navneet, Sonia, and Jean, and couldn't be bothered at any point in the day to decide whether one thing or another was more preferable to do. Why decide when the weather is so nice and we have a parking spot? Sonia and I bobbed in the Santa Monica sewage for half an hour getting sunburnt and probably could have done it for hours, or days, or possibly months more. Last night, Sonia, Reena and I parked behind a Mervyn's in Burbank and had Hawaiian barbecue and sampled seven beers and then returned to Reena's sublet to watch Aishwarya Rai shake her ginomous bazooms in Bunty aur Babli. I grabbed all the prime sleeping real estate and got a long, comfy couch (albeit in the room with the gas leaking, which was alarming but not enough for me to not sleep in) and a fleece blanket while Sonia slept on the ground, on a gathering of oddly-shaped pillows and underneath a towel. But this is Sonia's summer of youthful recklessness, so I justified my greed by thinking of all the oceanic feelings of self-confidence that she would develop by surviving an uncomfortable night of floor-sleeping, which were put into good use hours later when we boldly set forth upon the carnicerias of Santa Monica Boulevard to find conchas and stale rolls for the breakfast spread. We spent the day eating and cruising, and my mermaid friend Bubba joined us with Soda in the afternoon.

If not for the feeling that something here is deeply, violently, unforgiveably awry - like that we've built over a potter's field and the ground is unsettled - it's been paradisical. I might just be too angry at the world to make my sense of disquiet go away. We talked at some length today about our most charming friends and I proposed that it would be great to flirt effortlessly, not libidinously but affably, to make people like you; i.e., I don't mean the "nice shoes, wannafuck?" kind of flirtation, but more like winky-smiley, at everyone, not just the people you already like. The very prospect of smiling at a stranger makes me unhappy. Watching an improv comedy troupe at the Upright Citizens' Brigade Theater tonight made me revise my earlier desire to be a flirt - I realized that it wasn't the charm skills that I wanted, but a less highly developed sense of justice, so that I wouldn't feel offended by 90% of things said to me and would feel more okay with suffering a few fools to win the war of persuasion - like I can't change hearts and minds unless I'm willing to talk to people, and I'm not willing to talk to people because their hearts and minds need to be changed first. It was just that the improv comedy troupe was so, so incredibly unfunny. Stern warned me that it would be offensive and cringe-inducing, and I knew better, but regardless I sat with my warm pale ale through jokes like "How long does a rape take to happen anyway? Five minutes? Forty-five minutes? Twenty!" and jokes about how funny it was to call people "faggots." I kid you not! Halfway through the faggot skit, which lasted a good long while, I was considering either storming out or booing or heckling loudly, but I was stupidly, womanly concerned with the mirth of other people, and sat on my hands while my slow brain balanced the harm done by the interruption of everyone else's good times and the harm done by the sexist, homophobic, mainstream-values-in-the-guise-of-curse-words set, and ended up doing nothing but fuming while everyone's wild applause signaled the end of the show.

Hence I came to the realization that what I want is not to flirt better with people, but that I wish that I was carefree enough to think that all these stupid, offensive, entitled, empowered, oppressive people might somehow connect with me as long as I smile and act nice. I don't wish that I was less easily offended, since I think I'm offended by the right things, but I wish that people would clean their acts up and stop giving me so much shit to be offended by. Which is really to say, fewer rape and faggot jokes, SVP.

Okay, I've gotten myself into yet another huff and now I'm exhausted and its eight a.m. and fully bright out in this stretch of Wilshire. I miss my cynical and brilliant and sensitive and phenotypically perfect girlfriend and am reading New York Times articles on couples counseling in order that our union be more conflict-free, so we can find better shelter in each other from all this oppression. I'm gonna have a shower and learn to stop worrying again, at least until the next lengthy entry on this blog.