This somewhat nomadic existence makes little sense to me, but I can't detach myself from it. I envy the people who have best friends they've known since elementary school, because I've known my closest friends for no more than five years or so. I wonder what the concept of a hometown means, because I don't have one. The home that my parents live in is strange to me and holds no nostalgia whatsoever, except that which my mother has attempted to infuse into it. I hold a passport for a country that I don't recognize, and cannot vote in the country that I live in.
But this actually is about a mix cd, and not about my desire for a home. Well, it is about both.
After a couple years of flirting with various parts of Los Angeles, I decided to just buck up and move away from the comfortable, rent-affordable, bohemian artsy charm of Long Beach into a brick walled, hardwood floored, parking devoid studio in West Hollywood.
When you move a lot, even if it's just 30 miles or so, you realize a lot of people in your life are necessarily temporal. The argument is always made that your true friends stick with you, regardless of distance, but I already know that. It's the passerbys, the friend-of-friends, the brief acquaintances, the temporary lovers - those disappear and fade away. They go from being quirky paragraphs in an autobiography, to sentences, to sentence fragments, until they are faceless fillers in group scenes, and you struggle to remember their names.
That's what's different about Los Angeles.
In Los Angeles, people do not fade. No one is worth forgetting, and maybe the nature of it is that they simply can't be forgotten. There's a strange, mystical quality about this town, where no one is truly old.
Perhaps here, you just want to believe the facade.
Here, people pass you by and you shrug and dismiss them as bit players and background actors and stand ready to file them away somewhere in the back of your file cabinet brain. But you can't. You find yourself standing in the frozen food section of a grocery store, or walking to a bar, or building paper clip chains, or making noodle soup for a cold day, and you are acutely aware that these ordinary, everyday experiences would be better with some passerby, or friend-of-friend, or brief acquaintance or temporary lover around.
In Los Angeles, people are really fucking awesome.
This city is a place for invention, and reinvention, and that is fascinating. It is gentle and painfully cruel to everyone. It is filled with mediocrity, and completely unfamiliar brilliance. It is shallow and vapid and meaningless, but it is colourful and I am fond of colours.
I am terrified of this city. I feel like I'm looking into the face of something that is telling me, "I will fuck you up" and holding my head up high and replying stubbornly with "So be it." It's a ride, and I know that the higher a roller coaster goes, the worse it falls.
But still.
So, this is a hesitant, scared, love song for a city. And I don't know if it loves me, and I don't know if it is capable of loving anyone, really. But to feel so hopelessly awkward and graceless and small in a big, crazy, indomitably ridiculous city - and still feel like I belong - well, that's new.
1. california, rufus wainwright
2. why you'd want to live here, death cab for cutie
3. home, imogen heap
4. uncomfortably numb, butch walker
5. shores of california, dresden dolls
6. one night stand, the pipettes
7. ladykillers, lush
8. thank god i'm pretty, emilie autumn
9. a sorta fairytale, tori amos
10. angeles, elliot smith
11. i feel it all, feist
12. los angeles i'm yours, the decemberists
13. call and answer, barenaked ladies
14. summer in the city, regina spektor
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