el crispito

Our room at the Hollywood Standard overlooks the city that stretches out below, and standing on the balcony, one cannot help but wonder about all the things that are going on out there in that sprawling metropolis. If they are anything like the things that used to go on for me when I lived here, and I'm sure some of them are, it would not be polite to transcribe them for a mixed audience. Some are surely exciting, some are doubtless shocking and many are undeniably tedious. Yet there is an electricity in the air that permeates everything here, perhaps a static charge that is generated by the friction of the racial tension, political corruption, glamour and heartbreak constantly rubbing against each other in the heat. Even in the most boring of moments, one feels it here, raising the hair on the arms and tingling throughout the whole body. It is the potential that anything could happen here at any time.

Los Angeles has a great metaphor for this feeling in its vaunted "big one" - the hundred year earthquake that is expected to flatten huge sections of the city within seconds and overshadow whatever was the celebrity scandal of the moment for at least a week. Angelinos (why not angeles?) do not waste much time worrying about that potential energy waiting under the earth's crust to shake them into oblivion like an enormous British nanny. And why would they? Nothing can be done to prevent it; when the time comes, it will just happen.

And that is what I love about Los Angeles. Things happen here. Big things.

I recognize the value of a slower-paced life, and as a matter of fact, one of my favorite editors has brought me to understand its benefits and that it isn't just boring. But a life such as that requires a great deal of focus and drive. You have to concentrate all the time on where you are going and what you'll do next. In a place where anything can happen at any time, you always keep your eyes straight ahead for the next thing that's coming at you.

But here, far from being merely a tense struggle against the rat race, an element of sublime beauty imbues even the most mundane objects and breaks through to the surface at the most unusual times. In the depths of winter, you can smell jasmine throughout the city. The fog rolls in and chills the valleys late at night as you wander down a wide, sweeping street alone, with a eerily obscure song playing somewhere out of someone's window that you have not thought of in what seems like a few years but actually calculates to be half your life ago. You can be standing in line at a grocery store and someone says something that has nothing to do with you, rather, the fact that her daughter got a bad perm, and you actually feel your life shift beneath your feet. It's like that kind of Zen Buddhism where you can be instantly enlightened by being hit with a stick.

But in Los Angeles, the elements are beautiful. Beautiful weather. Beautiful people. Beautiful coastline. Beautiful mountains. Beautiful smog. Beautiful tragedy. Beautiful life.

That is why I have felt like Los Angeles is my home, even when I've not been located here: only when I am here does it feel like life is actually happening. Everywhere else, it's just like I'm taking a vacation from my normal life. I'm hemmed in by limitations on what there is to see and do. I'm not really able to be myself because I'm not in the right environment, where anything could happen at any time.

I hope that our new life in Mexico will be as exciting and exotic. I think that just our being strangers in a strange land will certainly increase those odds.