To Live And Die In La

“I wonder why I waste my time here, when we can run away to paradise, but I am held in some invisible vice, and I can’t get away/ To Live and Die in La” Ah, isn’t Wang Chung the best? I so regret not going on the Wang Chung cruise my ex boyfriend and I were debating in 2016. Our relationship was on its last leg, and we both knew it, but something about the Wang Chung cruise seemed like it could potentially turn it all around. Alas, the relationship dissolved and the “Stuck in the 80s” Cruise left without us, sparing us a bout of dysentery or gonorrhea, no doubt, from the fans of the 1980s we would have plowed together. I, of course, would have been thrown overboard once it became known I was born in 1990, but it would have been a fun death. I’d listen to the boat blast Human League’s “Keep Feeling Fascination”, as it floated away from my drowning ass, waving back to all the bald men with bellies and mesh tanks waving me  “good bye”

I love the song “To Live And Die In LA”, it makes me feel that familiar LA feeling that you would rather be anywhere and nowhere- the push, pull of feeling imprisonment and deep freedom. A place where often the only sense of agency you have is the  resentment you feel towards your city and the friendships you find yourselves in are predicated on the promise that you’ll both somehow free each other from whatever the projection of this place is at that moment. Regardless, I am finding I love LA right now even though that is a sign of psychosis.

There’s a repulsion here for so much of the unfeeling, superficiality, while also feeling the underbelly of something seductively liberating, meaningful, and very needed. Steeped in toxicity, and yet still enchanting and time bending. ( This place creates a lot of Peter Pans! A Peter Pan is a man who acts half his age and hasn’t accepted his mortality. I only gender this because it’s the only way I’ve experienced it.)

 It seems everyone I know wanted to leave and go bake bread in a small Scandinavian village at some point during quar,  yet leaving would somehow be saying goodbye to your dreams or minimizing them, making them just a hobby as you go back to a dream that felt small before, so you stay- you can’t give up. But what if staying was actually making your dreams smaller. What if LA is supposed to be where the dream dies so that a more aligned one is birthed (or shat out, if you don’t like picturing birth.)

My friend told me that Los Angeles is crazy because energy pools here because it’s in a desert basin so there’s nowhere for it to go, combine that with the delusions of Hollywood and fame and you’ve got a pressure cooker of a lot of confused people latching on to each other, stomping over each other, and projecting onto one another.  I just watched the movie THE BOOST with Sean Young and James Woods, which is a fun Los Angeles warning fable.  It’s about a couple moving to LA for a big new, shiney job that Woods got. Quickly, they get wealthy and are introduced to cocaine, which they both get addicted to. It ruins their lives and the movie ends with a shot of Woods in that nastiest t-shirt I’ve ever seen. Sean Young has left him, and he’s alone. Something about the t-shirt at the end of the movie, really drilled into my skull. It just looks filthy and is clinging onto him in a way where you can feel the hot moisture of his, I assume, very stinky arm pits. I’m sure the t-shirt wasn’t meant to steal the movie, but it did completely. Terribly gross shirt, look at it.

I found this old trope of city livin’ sucking people dry to be more real than ever. Though instead of coke zombies, people become different people here. They disassociate onto the switchboard of social media, the metrics for assigning your worth and there’s a video game feeling to social interaction. Everything is intertwined with work/ identity/ ego that I think relationships often get strained really fast unless there is an amount of trust that can somehow sneak past all the intensity. Again, I do really love LA.

The biggest lie about LA is that it’s shallow, that there isn’t a depth to the people here. It’s a place where the shyest people you know also show their assholes on instagram, a place where people do ayahuasca and then go to a baby shower in the same afternoon. Everyone’s a paradox and everyone has a right to be. And while most people here do have some sort of stunted adult thing going on (it may seem preposterous, but I have this), I don’t think that’s bad- it means there’s a richer relationship between that adult and their inner child, of course, this is is my projection. It could be the opposite. People come here unconsciously to neglect their inner child too, to torment them with their dreams. Not good enough! I will show you how right everyone was about you not being special! 

The energy I felt before pandemic felt like “SAVE ME!” Save my reputation! Save my career! Save me from my feelings!” Like we’re all in some waterless pool parched for our own salves. Post pandemic, I have felt less of this psycho need for validation, in me and outside of me. With the shut down, there was a vacuum of the mindless doing, the productivity prodding, and evaluating people on their work. It has been a process of refinement in thinking for me because for some reason, its so easy to get swept up in the illusion. You start to convince yourself that all you’ve ever really wanted was to be on a sitcom about moving in with your kooky childhood best friend, CHARLIE SHEEN!, and remember all his shenanigans!? Who wouldn’t want to croak in a hospital bed to a show like that? The narrow view of what success looks like really begins to wear on you if you’re not clear with yourself about what it is that actually turns you on about following such an excruciatingly round about path- always leading  back to you and how much you really love yourself/ are honest with yourself. 

My ex-boyfriend and beloved good friend, invited me to the Twin Peaks premiere, a few years back, I was 26 at the time. While standing around a crowded bar at Clifton’s Cafeteria, my ex- Josh, started talking to a friend of his- the singer from Mulholland Drive, Rebekah Del Rio, who sings Roy Orbison’s Crying in Spanish in the movie. I was a little more tipsy than I should have been because I was on the Whole 30 diet and eating only Larabars and sweet potatoes. Rebekah and Josh must have touched on our history while talking because she grabbed my wrist forcefully and said in the scariest way possible: “Listen, you are not getting any younger. You should not have let Josh go. You are not as young as you think you are. You will be alone” Her words made me dizzy and gave me a sharp panic like I was witnessing some sort of ancient curse.  I sat down and lost consciousness. Sometimes when I really have a panic attack, I faint- my eye sight grows fuzzy and all sound morphs into a high pitched ring.  It does not happen often, but that lady has powers and it came on all at once.

 I had to claw Rebekah’s grip from my arm in order to sit down. “LISTEN TO ME! LISTEN TO ME! It’s the truth!” My friend got me some water and I rested my head on the railing for a few minutes. A stranger telling me with full authority that it was too late for me.  Why did Rio’s words affect me physically so much? Was something stirred in my subconscious by the lady in Mulholland Drive who’s performance affected me so much or did I suddenly feel like she might be right. I’m 26, I’m almost 30! in a town filled with insanely hot people. I need to lock down my ex no matter how over our romance is because he’s probably the only nice guy I know. My age had only been ridiculed once before by a nameless man I had a  tale, general meeting with at Soho House who told me at 25, that it was time to start lying about my age.  I have no idea who he was. I wish it had been Dr. Oz.

Anyways,  I spent the rest of the night feeling bewildered, and in a daze. Every time Rio made eye contact with me the scenery around her would melt like a dripping oil painting. She had stuck her hand into my core and she knew it. I think Lynch only hires psycho, psychic geniuses. He can spot people whose powers are too big for their bodies or something. 

 I think these moments in Los Angeles are part of what make it so hard to leave. We imbue all this symbolism onto moments we spend with people who’s art made us feel something and parts of us contracts into that age of influence. The Hollywood Dream’s paint is chipping and the wood is rotten and yet we still like to convince ourselves otherwise. Things are turning around! I saw Sean Penn walking his dog. Things are turning around! One of the kids from the Goonies matched with me! I feel like our child selves gets so easily duped by the nostalgia of what we felt it would feel like to be a star.

We can ride this wave for weeks, years, sometimes our whole lives until we are dead from pounding our foreheads against the vanity mirror one too many times. We hang on the compliments, the possibly sensuous glances from the people we perceive to be on a wrung higher than us. It’s a cult and we all know that, but then we forget. The movies and people we worshipped as children, that we deemed our idols, produce blind spots in us. Now we are finally ending pedestalizing celebrities as are awareness grows, but the subconscious fantasies of grandeur or getting saved by climbing this ladder still swirl within everyone here. It’s in the wind, I swear. There is something I love about it. Again, this is all my projection in a place filled with mostly projections.