LA: EVERYTHING YOU ALWAYS KNEW YOU ALWAYS WANTED BUT DIDN’T SAY

Words: Wendy Syfret
Illustration: Kaitlyn Linke

There are cities you always knew you would like. London, Paris, New York; they are written into your DNA as deeply as our assurance The Avalanches will make another album, and your parents gave up sex with their Beta player.

Others hold less cultural esteem. In fact, to mention your non ironic love for Vegas, Sydney (said the Melbournian in glasses) and anything hosting a quarter, half or full moon party is up there with mentioning how much of a bitch your year nine home room teacher is. So I guess I’m not blowing any minds when I include LA on that list. It seems there is nothing cooler than talking about how shit LA is.

I’ve lived in a few of the cities you are meant to love, one of them very recently. And it was cool, mind expanding, life changing and soul developing…blah, blah, blah. So when it was time to ship off to LA I packed my complaints in with my taste for bagels and got ready to sulk. I was not blown away by what I saw. No one is getting a Pulitzer for saying that LA is shit, it’s a tapestry of car parks and crazies loosely held together by a thin but constant layer of smog.

I don’t know why, but I loved it. No one was more surprised than me. At first I couldn’t put my finger on it. Was it the novelty? The lingering feeling of being in a Curb Your Enthusiasm Episode? Or the way it reminded me of my third world childhood? A few people pointed out it could be that everything was colorful and I got a lot of compliments for my various flat caps. The feeling of entering LA is not unlike walking in the morning after of an excellent party that you didn’t quite make it to the night before. Underneath the deluge and squalor there is an undeniable sense that something amazing happened there once, even as you are scraping used condoms off the bottom of your shoe with a chopstick. The city feels like that. It resonates with memories of the old days. It doesn’t take much to imagine the Rat Pack swanking around in the bars where the smell of pee hangs where cigar smoke used to. And sun bleached Laundromats hold a little more charm when you picture Norma Jean washing her smalls there. Sadly, those days are long gone, but still this unexpected appeal lingers. But then it hit me.

This city plays to everything that is bad about me that I don’t want to change. LA is a gross mess of a good party that you can’t be fucked cleaning up. It’s the houseplant that is so dead you leave it lying around because people think you’re being ironic.

In LA I’m not constantly plowing through the existential crisis that haunt First World young. I can be myself. I like money (but am lazy about making it). I am lazy (but mask it with “creative lethargy). I like the sun but not if it’s too hot (I can’t tan). I can drive but not park (what up valets?).

When all is said and done though, the city is boring. And all people do is sit around in nice restaurants and complain about the plight of the white man. It’s a place where it’s okay to hate challenges and straight talking. But where no one really wants to be 100% comfortable either. Because really, if you were happy what would you talk about over your three hour lunch break?

There is a school of thought that suggest the existence of God can be seen in mans flaws and not his virtues. Our tendency to compulsively destruct and rebuild assures a never-ending cycle of activity and excitement, which could surely entertain a deity for millennia. That heaven itself would be the ultimate torment where the lack of conflict would result in an overwhelming boredom we can’t imagine. LA is kind of a microcosm of that. But the destruct/rebuild impulse is more the cycle of sending a meal back 40 times until the pepper to salt ratio is right. The excitement is small talk about the struggles of finding a lunch place rather than what you’re doing with your life. And the deity is Larry David.

Of course, this hedonistic post 50s burnout fantasy is reserved for the people with enough cash and lack of a lust for life to back it up. But come on, you don’t come here searching for happiness. You come here because you have worked out the ultimate secret that our self-destructive faceless god has known all along.

Don’t look for happiness in beauty or perfection. In fact, don’t look for happiness at all. Move somewhere that you can fully embrace the fact that you will never really be happy. Where you will always be searching for a park and hoping you don’t get mugged. You will be so consumed by petty troubles soon you won’t have time for meaning of life quests. But you should have just enough hours in the day to complain and make some really good friends through the shared art of dissatisfaction.

Now if that’s not first world nihilist thinking then I don’t know what is. And I can’t be bothered with the personal growth it would take to find out. I mean come on, I have a lunch reservation and you just know this traffic is hell.

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