Written earlier today but posted now as I fly home back to NYC...
Good morning from sunny California. It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood and I’m on a smooth production out here so all is well. I love a well-oiled machine, don’t you?
So LA. I’m so conflicted by my feelings for thee.
On the one hand, I’m madly in love with your sunshine, coconut infusions, and watermelon radish salads. I like your style, your custom laced Vans, your sun kissed visage. I dig hard on your healthful ways, your natural good looks, and your casual coolness.
I love your celebrities on every corner, your windy canyon roads at dusk, and the way your lights unfold like blankets on clear evenings.
I love your Malibu life, your Los Feliz life, and your Topanga life. And those palm trees don't suck nor do those badass ranch houses or your subversive weirdness bred in hazy counterculture.
But here’s what I don’t like- your fake empathy and passive/aggressive attempts at compassion.
Because when you repeatedly ask, as you grab my arm with your toned, tawny limbs, how on Earth did you survive the great winter of 2015, it makes me not like you. And as your best squint eyed composure tries to relate to my East Coast pallor as the sun beats down on your tan and healthy face and dapples your burnout tee , I begin to hate on you. Truly, madly, deeply.
It must be so hard, you say. I can’t imagine how bad it is, you say. You must love being in California, you say, as you sip your vanilla almond milk chai and rock a perfect, gender neutral top knot.
Let’s be honest- you care not that we were cold and buried in the Northeast. You don't give a real shit because there's gnarly waves and skinny jeans and perfectly crunched hair to distract you from our pain. You give not a single fuck that as we ruin every pair of shoes we have in the snow and our dogs flee from us when we pull out those rubber balloon booties, because you get to look pretty and be perfect and lack the cynicism necessary to survive in the Northeast. You’re not going to get any sympathy from me for your weather, so I don’t need any from you. And that’s that.
It’s not like we survived a war, an outbreak of plague, or anything nearly that catastrophic. We were simply too cold, too tired, and too stressed to wonder if you out here were thinking of all of us back East, and that, my friends is that. And though I will always partake in your goodness and admire your hot surfery looks, I will not admire your fakery, your attempt to really care about our frozen tundra of a winter. Because you don’t really care, so why pretend? At least in New York, we don’t engage in pretend, particularly because it’s harder to masquerade when you’re super pale and pasty and worn out. We just can’t right now. LA I do enjoy you but your vacant compassion is a freak show.
And that’s what’s up this #blessed #anotherperfectday #livingthedream kind of Thursday in Hellay. I’m going to grab some buffalo cauliflower for lunch and call it a day. Yours, in pit stops to Fred Segal on the way to the airport. That’s the thing about LA- so much good stuff on the surface, but what really lies beneath, and further, does it matter? Yours, in real deals. XO