Tuesday, October 12, 2010

The Descent into LA

A girl I know because she used to work at a company I used to work at, but I worked there before she did and we never overlapped, only happened to meet through a friend (she calls him "Mark" and he truly is that incredible), wrote this beautiful piece in This Recording - "In Which There's Nothing Like Looking at a Picture of a Haircut." It's epic, grandiose, cryptic, abstract, beautiful, and brutally honest - this is a piece that captures the descent into the maelstrom that is Los Angeles better than anything else I've read of late.

Some brutal truths:
After a while you find yourself folded into the city, lulled into a kind of daze. You stop reading books and talk about box office grosses instead. There's no need for philosophy in a place where the weather is this nice. Still, voices from the outside reach you every once in a while, make it hard for you to sleep. The people you went to college with are editorial assistants, non-profit coordinators, teachers, medical students.

And at the root of my every existential-crisis is this:

Because though you have spent the past three years working actively against it, the only thing you ever wanted to do is write. Now you leave work every day with the truth heavy in your soul: no one deserves that kind of life. For every story about the acceptance that came after 100 rejections, there are millions about people who wrote for eighty years and died humiliated, poor, hungry and alone. You should have gone into banking, you should have been pre-med, you should have joined a cult.

Perhaps it is not too late to join a cult.

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