LA Lift

A cloudy day is creeping in as I crack away on the keys in a city that I used to know so well.

Like the lover you leave and come back home to, I stare out the window and part of me sees what I’ve always wanted to see….

But the other part of me does not. The other part sees the landscape as it is. As perhaps it always has been.

Dirty and gritty and filled with contempt.

Sunsent Boulevard wasn’t a movie but a movement. And film noir isn’t dead, it’s right here. Down the street and across the block.

Drink in hand, I stand there for hours, watching stray shards of blue light spread across the cream and white striped wallpaper walls as echos of voices I used to know holler out for attention.

But its the stripes that grab my eyes. It’s the stripes that call out louder. Stripes that remind you of farm houses and east coast oceanic get-aways and Nantucket in the fall… Whose virtue plies its trade in utterly non-offensive ways.

Sitting in this comfy Martha Stewart-esque room, that’s been romantically dubbed a ‘suite’, inside yet one more swanky Los Angeles establishment, I find myself thinking about the city that’s sitting outside the window. Again and again.

The way the sounds of trash trucks rise up above the sidewalk, the energy that’s hustling down the street, the neon glow in the middle of the day, the way that sunset shines down the boulevards and crests over the hills.

Suddenly all those years of sitting here doing battle seem like an eternity ago — and I find myself asking, was I ever really here?

Did I actually do this?

Live here? Go to school down South?

Honestly, did I call this my home?

Because amazingly I feel this welled up sense of contempt that’s boiling over — This amendment of past deeds that strikes me as brazen if not trite and yet so real and vivid and strong in my veins. I can’t help it. I feel this echo of what once was and yet I know that no longer exists here. Did I savor everything there was to enjoy about the LA experience and get my fill and then move on? Did I leave to early? To late? With too much sorrow in my soul? Is it the girl at the beach calling me back or the image of her that makes me glad I left? Is the Black AMG downstairs utterly cool or a complete status symbol? The bleached blonde hair – hot or way over-exposed? Has everything here become a facsimile of what it was? Do I actually still feel anything for this place? For this city? For what I used to call ‘home’?

So hard to imagine & yet harder to recall. It all seems so distant today. So totally foreign. As if it never really happened.

How sad to lose one’s memory already…

What a shame to feel lost in a land you once knew so well. And yet…

And yet…

It wasn’t always this way.

There was a time where LA held all the possibility I could ever ask for — There was a time when from Mullhulland to the Beach and back again to Downtown was the most remarkable vantage point from which to see the stars shine at night. There was a plethora of culture to be had, beaches to explore, hills to peruse at ones leisure. When did the fake over take the real? Because dreams were born here, and hands were bleed on here, and thoughts ached their way toward freedom and bore the brunt of being manufactured in a city of emotion, right here.

And yet, I’m not even sure I believe that anymore…

This was the land from which endless potential prospered. An oil well of inspiration. A sundeck full of emotional prostitution. An opportunity around every turn.

And yet, I stare out at the vista before me and I wonder was any of that actually real? Did this city, this place, this manufactured oasis, really create that?

Or did I just want to believe that it was real?

Driving on the freeway, I shuttle between lanes, fight my way towards the off-ramps, and creep to a stop in the middle of the day… The veins of the city’s arteries are pumping out automobiles at an awesome rate. Suddenly cars seem everywhere and concrete goes on forever. The way the walls of traffic ebb and flow and creep into your car’s personal space. So much noise. So many people. So much movement. At its best breakneck speed the entire drive feels overwhelmingly congested.

It’s half-past ten, I realize that I’m gripping the wheel with every ounce of energy and sitting up in the seat taller than ever and that I’m feeling tense.

Terribly Tense.

As if I’ve never done this before — And yet I have, a million times or more… What the hell is going on here?

Is it possible that I’ve begun to see the world through Small-Town America eyes?