Forever
A fictional story on living a normal life in LA
People are always asking me what I do for a living and I am not sure what to say. I find it unbelievable that people would ask such a question in LA. I have no answer, even though I feel that I do many things throughout the day: car, walk, farmer’s market, walk, office, car, office, Larchmont, car, Barnsdall, walk, car, farmer’s market, office, walk, car, home. I do not know why I go to these places, only that I feel as though I must and that if I do not, then something bad and altogether severe will happen to me.
Obsessively circling these places and neighborhoods is my own form of exercise, which in LA is mandatory in order to break up the near never-ending moments of non-activity that take up hours of the day.
Most of the time that I am in my car I feel OK. When I lived in New York I walked everywhere to the point that my toes became swollen with blood, which thankfully does not happen in my car even though I am certain that driving burns calories in a similar way to walking. In LA I drive my car for the same amount of time that I used to walk. When I am not inside of my car, I am forcing myself to eat potions that have indeterminate effects on my body. I am often imitating what it would be like in a city where I am able to actually exercise without having to segment my day around it.
I barely interact with anyone throughout the day. I have one friend who is mentally unwell, or at least has a penchant for saying outlandish things. Yesterday he said that this is going to be a good year because it is an even number, and last year was not because it was an odd number. He does not know how to dress himself. He is always wearing clothes that are too small or do not fit right one way or the other. About once a day I will look at him and realize that the entire bottom half of his torso is showing. He is not aware of this. His eyes are half closed. His hair is wet and slicked down over his forehead. He can not see in front of him. He is not aware of his own presence, he is like a child—only without the magic that children have.
In LA that is exactly what people are trying to maintain with their striving for youth and the immaturity that is a byproduct of such striving: magic. They think that if they look young and act young and think young, then they will be able to maintain some sort of wonder that they had when they were children. But the reality is that children are delayed, and therefore it is not possible to be able to maintain this childlike wonder, or rather that, if you did, you would actually be a handicapped adult, and that no amount of children’s aesthetics are able to maintain that sense of wonder. When a child looks at the world they see it like it is made of paper mâche or like a drawing that they did in crayon; a smear of colors. They are half blind in the sense that their vision has not yet been sanctioned into a formal and known arrangement of shapes and ideas.
I do have an office in the city, but I do not trust that the building has my best intentions at heart. The building is decades old and was abandoned for many of those years. The air quality is abhorrent. I have complained to management many times about this issue, but they have never done anything about it. The office is filled with a number of other people of indeterminate origin, film producers, etc. I do not trust them and although we may share the same office, I choose not to communicate with them.
I go to the office a number of times over the course of a given day, and ascend to my office upstairs, passing many of these so-called producers on the way, and yet, I am unable to bring myself to interact with them because I do not trust them and their thoughts because they have taken place within the building that was abandoned for years and years and all of the thoughts from the building’s previous tenants simply sat inside of this awful abandoned barn for a decade without even an open window to clear them out, and all of these sentiments and negative emotions that sat in the building are inside of the walls, haunting it. It is these thoughts that in part propel me to leave the office quickly onto my next place, which is often the farmer’s market down the street, where I do not purchase anything, but rather use the market as a sort of track that I can walk around repeatedly to fill my quota of activity for the day.
But really, there is no place. You are never in a place here. The heat and space put everything on a pedestal that is then only viewable while driving, causing a complete dissociation between time and place. All of these things, Erewhon, the farmer’s market, pilates, exist suspended in somewhere beyond time. They are phantoms of other ideas that exist temporarily in a place that is agreed upon to be Los Angeles. But it is nowhere really, a ghost of an idea. It is whatever object, person, idea you happen to have or be at any given time. Infinitely manipulatable and interchangeable. It is no place, no mind. Every person here knows this, I am sure of it.
Patrick McGraw is a writer based in LA, and editor of Heavy Traffic.