Tagged: Los Angeles

Summertime – and the living is grumpy.

Summer has always meant two things.

Summer is when the travel-bug hits me the hardest. Summer is when, as a born-and-raised bone-fide Californian, I need sand and salt-water. I need a large body of water and a coastal breeze.

I always lived within an hour of the sea. As a child, I never learned to ride a bike, wasn’t a fan of the great outdoors, and could rarely be bothered to get my nose out of a book – but damn, could I swim. Every year I’d celebrate my (June) birthday at the beach. Most summers we got in the car and headed south, rented a house (when we could afford it, otherwise we camped) on the beach in Baja. Teenagers in California take to the beach every summer, all summer Continue reading

Give the Pacific my love.

What’s it like, being from Los Angeles? It isn’t. You’ve always wanted to go? Of course you have.

Los Angeles exists only as rivers of head-lights and veins of brake-lights. Not a proper city, no center at all, nothing but a sprawl of strip-mall liquor stores and beach-front property twisted around freeway interchanges, highway overpasses, and motorway numerals. LA is movement, jerky traffic. Los Angeles is inhabited by cars driven by an enternally late, under-caffeinated, “Nearly-out-of-gas, lost-the-phone-number, forgot-the-directions, can-I-call-you-back?” simulacrum of a being that has been consumed by his or her vehicle’s need to be in constant motion. Snail-paced motion.

Sure – they’ve designed a stretch of Sunset and put aside a bit of Hollywood, for the tourists’ sake. You can see the sign. Look at the closed gates of the back-lots… Continue reading