27 Aug 2024 – We packed up on December 17th, said goodbye to our POD and then spent three-nights with friends in an awkward-goodbye few days with LA. The sensation washes over me again as I think to how of the finality of those final moments; a final sunset looking West past downtown, and beyond to the port of Long Beach.
I locked in my bicycle on the newly-installed hitch, and we pulled away at 4:27 a.m. (PST) pausing only not to bottom out w/ the low clearance of the loaded down wagon. A small scrape was the final kiss; a final touch to the ground of Los Angeles that had been my home, and my formative ground since 2011. Now with two children, a partner/spouse, and a faint bit of melancholy in my heart we drove down the snaking streets of Monterey Park, to the 10 freeway headed East.
So many emotions spring from the decision to leave Los Angeles. A mix of romanticism I felt in what drove me to move in those early days of the 2010s, to the pondering what was it all for(?) to the what could have happened if we stayed(?) gives way to the need for affirmative necessity in that we are no longer there, but some place else.
For the past few months I have been struggling, and in new ways from the struggle with which i became familiar. I could leave the struggle, strap my cleats into pedals just before daybreak and smell the dusty walls of canyons in the foothills above Pasadena; Los Angeles offers a constant ability to escape; in celluloid, temperate weather even when the rest of the Northern hemisphere is enduring ‘winter’, to the nature of people and their own constant quests for meaning. The ambiguity of the place allows for moment-to-moment escape and in many ways that became my foundational reality.
There is no escape here; people work or they don’t, enduring hard realities, poverty, violence, or intense longing. The stakes are higher here, and starving is a real possibility.
What was it about Los Angeles that we felt as if we could fall back into its cradling arms yet while it remained so seemingly indifferent to all things while yielding to passions that could be satisfied in ways not possible any place else?
It’s not the people i miss. It’s the impersonal things; the air, the freeway exits of the 110 in Highland/Glassell Park, the late-night illumination of the basin, the faint smell that only we know. Bread with an understanding of a midwestern work ethic, Los Angeles is a place where anything is possible if you are persistent and in some ways it gave me all I aspired to have. And now I miss it and what would have been a next chapter of passioned-indifference. +N
26 August 2024 – Dummy text generators may contain seasonal words instead of scrambled Latin for your web page designs. Picture the Christmas favorite, "All I Want for Christmas Is You," translated into Latin and scrambled before you pepper it into the spaces on your favorite web page design theme. Then, print those Latin lyrics onto card stock to create business cards, gift tags, and paper ornaments. Think of it as sampling, the way rap artists use the hooks that repeat throughout their work.
Imagine that you translate Lizzo's "Good as Hell" into Latin. Then, print the lyrics, chop them into single words, toss them in the air, and use them in the order they landed on the floor to create placeholder text for your single people's Valentine's Day blog. You just completed your first randomized lorem ipsum copy. Any Lizzo fans who also know ancient languages will appreciate the nod to their favorite artist. Of course, printing the lyrics to toss them in the air would be ridiculous. Precisely for this reason, randomized text generators exist.
29 January 2025-
I'm increasingly anxious that places I love most;
the ones I have visited multiple times
I may never return to in my life.
Is it the acknowledgement of middle-age or that I will someday die?