Month: July 2019

Eeny, Meeny, Miny, Mo

On the bus, two passengers said, the suspect would make people move out of his way when he moved about. At one point, they said, he pulled out a handgun and, unprovoked, shot another passenger.

“He was acting weird, he was trying to press on people,” said one of those passengers, Carlos Hurtado, 23. “He was trying to make people know he was a bad guy.”

Said the second of these passengers, Luis Rodriguez, 41: “It could have been anybody. I could have sat where (the victim) was sitting. It’s like he was going, ‘Eeny, meeny, miny, mo.’ ” *

Imagine you’re on the Orange Line on a weekday afternoon and you see this guy acting out. He’s not physically imposing, just oddly aggressive.  If you were a nice middle-class lady on your daily commute from work, you might be inclined to express your disapproval at his behavior in a non-threatening way.  What reason would you have to think he was carrying a gun? You’re in the Valley.  Why would you think he killed his parents that morning in Canoga Park, killed two others at a gas station in North Hollywood, and was now riding the bus, waiting out the helicopter search?  You wouldn’t.  Your good manners would be your undoing.  You would be victim number 5.

I picked up two guys in Fairfax the other night, but only one got in the Uber.  Is your friend coming? I asked.  That wasn’t my friend, the rider replied. That was a homeless guy, bumming a smoke. I attract them. Recognizing their humanity is my weakness. They can sense I’m a listener.  I’m an easy mark. I’d rather be living in a tent on the street myself if the alternative was never talking to anyone.

This tender particularity of character is what makes it possible for 5 million people to share a single city. It also opens the transom for the deranged, the conniving, and the evil to elide the limbic danger detection systems under which we operate. You can share a smoke with a stranger, rarely will you be smoked.  But it happens.

We live in this tension between prudence and brotherhood. The urban reforms of the 90s: broken windows policing, determinate sentencing laws, civil anti-gang injunctions, were so complete in their victory over random street crime people under the age of 35 have no living memory of it.  I’m old enough to have lived through the tail end of urban decay, and even I have let my guard down.  I say whaddup to everyone, including people I probably shouldn’t.   My name is Eeny.  Someone else is going to be Mo.   Someone on the evening news.

That’s another of the 23 Lies We Tell About LA: we can empty the jails, abandon quality of life enforcement, vilify the police and the crime rate will remain unchanged.  Because Lake Balboa is safe today, it will be safe tomorrow.

*Photo credit, Leo Kaufmann, LA Daily News

Only Hillbillies Throw Trash in Creeks

As we say in the creative arts, everything is material.  Cast a wide net. Freewrite.  Be bold in the face of prohibitions. Daring in your approach.  Refine your choices later.

Down here, in the Narrows, where no one will bother you.  Where you can extract $1.99 of trade goods from two shopping carts of scrog and leave the remainder to the storm drains.

Number 22 in the 23 Lies We Tell About LA™:  Only hillbillies throw trash in creeks.  Hillbillies are deplorable people who know nobody and nobody knows.   They live way out Elsewhere, in the pill eating, strip mining, under-achieving, low information Heritage America.   Not like Us. We have a Green New Deal,  with pie charts and bar graphs and 2035 targets. We have Environmental Justice. We are beyond self-recrimination.

105° in the Valley, 78° in Santa Barbara

Mercifully, dogs can’t distinguish between a one hour journey and three.  They have nose memory instead.   Sea belch evokes sand which evokes wind sprints and cool foam sluicing through their toes. In the deep circadian rhythm involving cars, something wonderful starts to happen around Carpenteria.  That the car isn’t actually moving, is literally parked on the freeway…well, that’s a people problem.

There’s an old joke. A bunch of stray dogs are hanging around in Tijuana. One of them is from suburban San Diego.  He comes down on the weekend and brags to the other dogs his owners feed him filet mignon scraps from the table.  He sleeps in bed with them on sheets of Egyptian cotton.

“If you have it so good up there,” they ask the La Jolla dog, “then what are you doing down here with us in Tijuana?”

“Oh, that’s easy. I come to Tijuana to bark.”

So why are Mrs. UpintheValley and I leaving 75 miles of Los Angeles beaches, adding to the collective agony of the 101…to bring the dogs to Montecito?

So they can run off-leash as God intended.  We bring them to bougie, white  Santa Barbara so they can bark.   Santa Barbara is a high-trust city. It can afford to be generous in leash laws. Los Angeles is not, therefore cannot.

There’s also ample free parking and that sweet walkable dog-friendly Funk Zone.

One of the 23 Lies We Tell About LA™: it’s a great beach town.

 

“I Cares About Your Bag”


So here’s a little dialogue from this weekend in the Uber:
Rider: I love your shirt. Are you going to the after-hours club when you finish driving?
Me: I’m going to be the guy picking people up from the club.
How is your bag? Are you making the fat bag?
My bag is not so fat anymore since they cut the rates, but thanks for caring.
Hey man, you picked us up. That makes you part of our evening. I cares about your bag.

Much of what I love about driving is packed into this exchange. Yet for how much longer will this sentiment, this brotherhood of the app, hold true?   To summon a car with a flick of your thumb at any hour day or night, in minutes, to whisk you in any condition to any location in the county, no matter how remote, was a small urban miracle.  Gratitude was the order of the day.  For some, it remains so. But people with no living memory of taxis now consider Uber and Lyft to be an extension of their phone.  

In March both Uber and Lyft, operating as a duopoly, cut the mileage and base rate for LA area drivers 30%m without warning.  In the middle of a booming economy.   Mayor Garcetti, a man given to proclaiming on all Liberal Issues Under the Sun, uttered nary a peep, though he did put in a celebratory appearance at a Lyft IPO event.

Let’s unpack this.  The largest employer in LA (it’s not even close) is rideshare.  Most are side hustlers like myself. Imagine if Ford and GM announced a 30% UAW pay cut amidst record car sales. Would politicians in Detroit say nothing?  At what point would silence be considered assent?

What if GM and Ford began running ads on the radio, buying billboards, soliciting new workers at the new low rates…and as an inducement, leased them the tools?  What if they targeted non-citizens for recruitment?

You might start making a list in your head as to who really cares about your bag.

A Whole Lotta Fa

Three questions. When in history have mobs wearing masks and hoods beating on defenseless people ever stood on the side of righteousness?   If one is against fascism, why are your team colors red and black?  If what you’re doing is legit, why the mask?

The level of physical aggression evinced by the Antifa brigades of Portland and elsewhere is remarkable only by its cowardice.   Cold-cocking people when their back is turned. Pepper-spraying from two feet away while the recipient is busy fending off other harassers. Tossing concrete milkshakes in peoples faces.  Tripping, spitting on, kicking people on the way down.  A tire iron upside the head, while the victim is bending over to assist a woman.

Always from the weak side.  Only from the safety of overwhelming numerical superiority.

Would any of these people behave this way mano a mano, or more tellingly, on neutral ground?  Would they try it in Texas?

Portland is now the mirror image of Birmingham, Alabama 1963, only creepier.  Lawless mobs execute political violence in the street in open view of police, who allow them to act with impunity, in accordance with directives from city officials. The targeted beating of journalist Andy Ngo this weekend for reporting fearlessly (and alone) on Antifa has revealed a will to power on the Left distinguished by joyful sadism: Everyone to the right of us is fascist.  We should punch fascists preemptively. They should have no freedom of assembly, nor of speech. Milkshake them all. 

Our very woke media is tacitly endorsing this notion that those who voted for Trump forfeit civil rights, including the right to enjoy a meal peaceably at a restaurant.  A nation in which vigilanteism is licensed for the anointed is not one which will hold together.

My Valley is brown. My Valley is gay. My Los Angeles is very liberal. Brown and gay are always welcome at my table. Twenty years as a citizen of Los Angeles has scourged me of my liberal impulses.  I am a man heterodox in his views.  Somehow I get through my day without the urge to beat on people, although I do talk at the TV from time to time, refining other people’s arguments, basking in the unimpeded glory of my own.

The Portland-ization of Los Angeles has remained south of Ventura Blvd, for now, and for this I am grateful, but it will not last.  Even Van Nuys will be made to choose.  The world may not like our answer.  We know Fa when we see it.

*photo credit Wall Street Journal, YouTube