I was walking down an empty street in Los Angeles sometime after midnight when I saw a rat run face-first and at full fucking speed into a pole, bounce off that pole, look around to see if anyone saw what just happened, and then scurry under a nearby car so it could die from the inevitable brain hemorrhage in the lonely comfort of darkness. It wasn’t even being chased by anything. And while I don’t want to step all over that dumbass rat’s moment its death was also a pretty big deal for me, because like Joan of Arc hearing the voice of God I knew that I was being called upon for something greater than myself.

Review of Southern California

I only spent a day and some change in Southern California, which should not qualify me to review Southern California, because Southern California is a region whose history extends back centuries as far as America is concerned, centuries more as far as the Spanish are concerned, millennia as far as the natives are concerned, and aeons as far as the history of the universe is concerned. But I pretty much got the drift while I was there and am going to do it anyway.

Southern California is basically a washed-up version of itself desperately auditioning for the role of “Southern California” in a biopic being produced by a financier who doesn’t even like movies but heard somewhere that funding them is a thing that rich people do. Like a paint-by-numbers completed to the best of his ability by a man not so good at counting everything is just kind of off in a way that has a frustrating mathematical consistency to it, one that constantly hints at meaning in places where there couldn’t possibly be any, like someone who creates a passably accurate portrait of the Virgin Mary every time they throw up against the side of a restaurant, but only certain restaurants. I started and ended that sentence with a simile because weird comparisons are the only way to construct a workable conception of Southern California for Southern California is an amalgamation of other things that themselves were constructed out of reverence for a time and a place that probably never existed in that weird fugue-washed bungalow of a beachfront community. This isn’t just Ouroboros, this is a YouTube Original Series starring someone from Tik Tok who only knows about Ouroboros from a joint U.S. – Chinese production of a comic book produced in Macau by someone who moved there to escape a copywrite lawsuit filed in Canada, and also everyone is on cocaine. There are so many degrees of separation between a human emotion and an actual, actionable event based off of that emotion that the chain connecting the two cannot be held entirely in the paltry chambers of the human mind. It’s like attempting interstellar travel in Dune without consuming spice first – causality just kind of breaks down, and then a sandworm eats you.

The Club Scene

I’ll try to avoid the esoteric commentaries and stick to reviewing things that I actually did during my twenty-four hours in an unlicensed street performance of Alice in Wonderland, which for legal reasons is probably advertised somewhere as Algar in Wündertown. One thing I did was go clubbing, because everyone should do at least one thing entirely out of character for themselves at least once in their life, and I’m still thirty years too young to attend a Young Republicans meeting.

There’s no deep, California-specific insight to be gleaned from saying “people at this club were on drugs,” because people at every club everywhere are on drugs, always. But it’s how those California motherfuckers were on drugs that sticks in my brain. Back home there’s a kind of blunt stateliness, a disappointed but unsurprised contempt, that characterizes drug use among East Coasters – we’re all, even during our first high, accepting of the fact that nothing too exciting is going to come from this bump, or that hit, and as a result consider the whole state of fucked-up-ness to be more like a caffeine buzz, or a conversation starter, a shared boredom with how uninspiring getting high turned out to be. These are my people, because everything we do is folded into the gray-cold inevitability of an Edith Wharton novel before the nerve endings have even started firing. Even buzz-bombing your brain with chemicals derived from Southern American plants is boring when you’re from Massachusetts, may God bless that fine state and the miserable pricks contained therein.

But everyone on drugs in California is doing, like, an impression of someone on drugs, like they think that if they pretend there’s some enlightenment quivering on the horizon of their latest poison then said enlightenment will actualize and breathe valuable life into their skulls! It’s artifice in search of retroactive meaning, and it’s weird! You know the first time people get drunk when they’re in high-school, or if they’re definitely not going anywhere in life, grade school? They’re less concerned with being drunk than reminding everyone that they’re drunk, right? California is like that, except forever.

Venice Beach

Venice Beach is Times Square in that both feel like exhibits in an alien museum attempting to replicate a famous location from Planet Earth based entirely on reports from other people who themselves never went there. Muscle Beach is actually a squat rack that someone left outside; the skatepark is behind a public bathroom; just walking up and down the beach in front of signs straining against their own fading and disappointing reality is like watching an aging vaudeville performer forced out on stage every night because they need the money, or that dream sequence in Space Jam where Jordan is forced to lose games on Moron Mountain for eternity. If Venice Beach were a dog I would shoot it.

Gold’s Gym at Venice Beach

Someone cooked these fuckers too long because everyone in the Gold’s Gym at Venice Beach is a Crisco-smeared monstrosity of biological engineering. The proportions are all wrong, the gaits have more radial motion than linear, and everything smells like boiled ham. The Nazis would have called off their eugenics program if they had lived to see the weird lumps of sentient hamburger their efforts would result in. Seeing these beefy bru-ha-ha’s in real life was like seeing the Goombas in the live-action Super Mario movie – even I’m not sure what I mean by that, and I don’t want to think about it anymore. Everything in the gym is damp and salty, because opening the doors and windows to the Venice Beach air is one of those romantically Southern California things that is materially stupid to do but is done anyway because nobody in Southern California has ever had a good idea before.

When I got changed out of my gym clothes I realized I didn’t have a second pair of boxers on me, which is probably symbolic of something.

Santa Monica

When you cross over from Venice Beach to Santa Monica the roads have newer pavement and the homeless people sleeping in the parking lots have been replaced with two things: incredibly, overwhelmingly gay men teaching groups of young girls how to twerk, and homeless people. I bought some new boxers at the mall, and asked if I could walk out wearing them. The changing room attendant told me that would be fine.

Homelessness

Nobody wants to read about homelessness in a silly article posted on a silly website, but I didn’t want someone on Venice Beach to follow me down the sidewalk just kind of making noises that sounded like a cross between a turtle and a deeply disturbed man who thinks he is a turtle, so we’re all out of our element here. Homelessness is no joke, and should be considered a point of regional shame everywhere it exists, which is everywhere, but the homeless in Southern California are so uniquely Californian in their homelessness that it deserves comment. Multiple unhoused people loudly announced their homelessness during my time on Venice Beach, which I’ve never seen before; the guy that followed me making noises was only one of, like, three people that did that, which brings the total number of times that has happened in my life to three. They didn’t even ask me for money! They just wanted to stress just how homeless they were, I guess, because everyone in California is maximally stressing everything about themselves, always.

The End

I’m grateful that I went to Southern California for the same reason that I’m grateful for all of my near-death experiences. Having passed so close to purgatory I return to life with renewed vigor, humbled and vaguely haunted by the specter of a world unloosed from physics and reason as we understand it. You know how porn stars look attractive from a distance but when you get closer they’re missing teeth and have, like, a quarter-inch wide scar from a knife-fight running down the side of their face? That’s Los Angeles. You know how when you meet Tom Cruise in real life it’s actually a Tom Cruise impersonator, and that Tom Cruise impersonator is actually Danny DeVito, but he’s in character as Frank Reynolds, and not wearing as much clothing as you would like, and significantly more body grease than seems practical? That’s Venice Beach. Everybody should go to Southern California and then return home and hug their friends and read the Bible.

Next time I’ll go to Glendale. I hear that’s nice.