walking through los angeles when the crows are screaming and going through your garbage
I’m going full nomad lately; while I still have a place to sleep in Los Angeles, I should see more interesting sights than the same few chunks of Burbank I turned into a routine through complacency. I’ll just point the car somewhere, go to a new town, and walk. I walk a lot. There’s an immense therapeutic benefit to it. You’re taking in and processing new visual stimuli, you’re a stranger, and when you’re walking you’re not doing nothing. And doing nothing will kill you.
One consistent thing this time of year is that there are crows everywhere. I spend a lot of time thinking about crows. They have the most obnoxious vocalizations of maybe any animal, they’re aesthetically unpleasant and feel like a harbinger of death, and they know when they’re bothering you and they enjoy doing it. Drives me crazy how well they’ve adapted to LA. I saw one just this week going through a garbage can, methodically picking items out of it one by one and tossing them on the ground, looking for foodstuffs. It was making a horrible mess, a mess you’d normally associate with humans. They’re such a pest, and the worst part is you have to respect it. They’re fat and happy and they thrive. They’re annoying in a way that suggests profound intelligence. If they could get around to inventing money, they should get tickets for littering. Treated like equals. I have met crows that should be in jail. There’s one in my neighborhood that seems to have a problem with me personally. They’re my favorite bird.
The job search continues to be a source of constant despair, which is part of why I walk so much. There are so many dangerous lunatics in this town with full-blown jobs, and here I am walking around Whittier all damn day thinking about crows. The tough part is there’s so much more to life than this, and I used to have it, I have personal experience with it. I’ve had a taste. What an annoyance to have known.
Keeping my chin up though. Got my Associate’s from my community college in the woods, trying to get my Bachelor’s from my regular college over by Bob Dylan’s house. Apply for a million things a day. I’ve been filling out so many job applications I even get rejections sometimes. They’ve been funny lately. A tutoring service said “we are never going to need tutors in English or history.” A temp agency said I could never get a clerical job because I don’t have any clerical experience. A gin bar downtown said they thought I’d get a better opportunity too fast. Lady, listen to me closely: you are mistaken. You could not be more mistaken.
In negative moments, I think about getting an old shitbox Westfalia van and just living on the road. In positive moments I remember I wouldn’t know how to fix it if it broke and it’s way too hot in Arizona.
For some reason I keep running into dudes who want me to ghostwrite their autobiography. They always think they used to be cocaine gods, living lives of danger and intrigue. They’re always confessing to crimes that sound like episodes of half-remembered ‘80s cop shows. They’ve all had knives thrown at them, they’ve always been shot at by a captain of the Armenian mafia, they were all gun-runners in Beirut. I always listen to their stories because what else am I doing besides listening to some comedian on Maron talking about doing panel? It’s still a distraction and I still need it all the time and the internet doesn’t work for that anymore because it’s dead.
Just trying to hold out hope. Tomorrow I’m gonna get in my car again and go to I dunno Pacoima and I’ll probably see some kid in a park somewhere who has the confidence to think he’s gonna have a rap career and I’ll ask who his favorite rappers are and he’ll only be able to name like two and it’ll be fine and then I’ll see a hundred crows eating potato chips out of the gutter somehow acting like they own the place.