Ruminations on Escaping from L.A.

The City of Angels is a place like no other. Its momentum is manic with hints of frantic, but just enough soothing vibrational undertones to regenerate your spirit daily. A Sisyphean logic shaking you out of bed like the handful of earthquakes rattling visiting the city. From there, the contradictions only seem to expand. You escape to the beach and with the city to your back, all you can think about is the heat warming your spine. Run to the mountains, where the cold air and snow whisk you into a state of hot drinks, warm coats and snow to ride. The desert rounds out the nature trifecta with blasting, almost bombastic heat moving over your skin & hair. You sweat in the shade with your cold drink. Cradled by the mountains, the air is punctuated by deafening silence & stillness rising stratosphere bound. Even with the fires, earthquakes, mudslides and high cost to everything, it’s much easier to just chill and see what happens next. This was me in California. This was my Los Angeles. Home for so long.

Unlike Snake Plisskn, who had a mission, I moved to California for a job, but not the slightest of direction. Personally, the job felt like a shill, but I could pay my bills. I had really come West to make a better go at a new life. I had skeletons on the East Coast and bodies buried in the Midwest. I had run out of country so I took a hard left and ran West. I was looking for gold. The kind which beamed from my insides. A warm glow which would light up my life and all those around me. Fortune lay in those hills west of the Mississippi. I was like every other fool on a quest.

I first lived in San Diego. The home of my first weed card and birthplace of Marijuana Movie Night. I felt like I was whittling my days away watching films and blazing cannabis. The writing seems to be the single element tying things together for me creatively. Was this what I was suppose to be doing all along? It felt right, but I’d quit writing so many times it felt quixotic at best. Writing about weed. Writing about film. I watched more movies, took notes like some crazed, librarian monk shooting smoke out of my nose and mouth like some baked mythical dragon. I pondered the meaning of a move to L.A.

When it comes to your life and efforts circling the great drain of the grave, you either get scared, sentimental, regretful. Or you do something, anything. Snake Plissken saving the world by letting the prisoners out to change it. The logic and passion of the convicted and scorned. My rejections in life have set me free. Again and again. Success can be a jail just as failure can be a rebirth. The second, third, forth chance, ad nauseam. The snake shedding it’s skin over again.

I love L.A., but started to feel the wrath of overstaying our welcome. For many years, the city opened itself up to us in ways where we got everything we wanted. It was weird and sensational and seductive living in Los Angeles. After twelve years, I moved with my family to take up residence in the great state of Maine. The plates on the cars here read Vacationland. Celebrities and monied individuals are here, but unlike Los Angeles, they area lot more hidden and very sequestered. Covid has added to the ranks of urban dwellers who tossed in their commuter cards and whatnot for a state which is 90% trees and a good drive from a major city.

My biggest challenge will be the short, sharp, shock of normal life. I’m not in New York or London or Chicago or L.A. Not even close. It’s cold and near Canada and I can see the stars when I go smoke a joint in the inky blackness of the early evening. I plan to keep writing and this blog will go on until I stop or shuffle off this mortal coil. My California tears have dried and my freak flag might fly half-mast for a little while, but not forever. Welcome to Vacationland.