When LA suffers a rare bout of clouds, the vistas become ominous. Cracks appear in the optimism, and the facades’ colors grow dull and clayey, as if the buildings had contracted leukemia. Nobody here is dressed for this weather, ever. Thin women in smart drapery shiver, buff men tense their muscles against what feels, to a Californian, like the frigid roar of Ulaanbaatar. Pelted with a brief rain, my memory adopts a different disposition. After sun, I would remember sun. After clouds, I remember sitting in traffic, nuzzling against the immense blanket of futility that settles daily along the highways near downtown.
I was going to write, yesterday, about media figures unnecessarily stoking fear about meltdowns in shelled nuclear plants in Ukraine. My hypothesis was that their blathering was a vain attempt at seizing some sort of personal agency in the face of uncontrollable atrocity. Innocents being shot, can’t do something, must do something anyway, might as well scare my subscribers. But I stopped when I realized that I, too, by writing this, was engaging in a vain attempt at seizing some sort of personal agency in the face of uncontrollable atrocity. It was the catharsis I’d selected over laying down and screaming. One great thing about social media is that it lets you recruit anyone as a coping mechanism.
When I came to this realization, I deleted what I had written, got up, and did a few laps of my hotel room. I looked out the window. It looked onto a wall opposite. There wasn’t a Keurig machine, but the waste bin was attractive. Apparently, this meager establishment was once home to Marilyn Monroe, Orson Welles, and others. Either it had been nicer then, befitting their station, or it was glamorously dirty, a place to beautifully relinquish their hygiene. But it was now a place for the tepid doing of modestly dark behavior, a den for those who scheme the inconvenience of their enemies.
I stayed in Hollywood even though I hate Hollywood, which is the kind of attitude it takes to make it in Hollywood, which I have no interest in doing anymore. I did for a year or two—when I first arrived here, I was scouted by someone at a ritzy talent agency who told me that I could be a star. He ghosted me after a few meetings, but the delusion remained. After writing about four screenplays, most of my writing output during those years, I had four stacks of paper I’d be ashamed to show a hamster. Nothing else happened, except that every year someone calls me and tells me that my book is about to become a TV show. But that’s just what they do to people with books here, it’s nothing personal, it’s part of the bundle of social services our taxes pay for.
I think I was 25 when I walked around Echo Park, and wrote my friend Steve, “all I want to do is move to LA, drive on the highways, and listen to Xtal by Aphex Twin on repeat.” This is precisely what I ended up doing, and I occasionally notice this, and wonder what I want to do now. There are a lot of options. But I think I just want today, again, and again, and again. I would like to order it, now, from a service that delivers it yesterday, in perpetuity. Although I woke with anxious biliousness, mentally reviewing what I imagined doing in case of approaching warhead, Scout picked me up and we smelled perfumes and spoke grandly of our destinies. I drove home under a transient monument to the color peach. Victoria was in the hot tub when I got back, and I felt my spirit decompress as we held each other in the safest water on earth. If I’d died right then I’d have died lucky.
But I haven’t died, leaving open the possibility of a less palatable demise. I’ve read some debate over how bad nuclear winter would be—people go back and forth on this. The original calculations were based on firestorms lifting city soot into the atmosphere, but our cities are less combustible now, so the models are all screwed up, and everyone’s fudging the numbers their own way, probably guided by their temperament more than anything. My conclusion is that I’d bet on the human race surviving this year, since if we don’t, you can’t take my money. My real conclusion is that the prospect of apocalypse, strangely, is more comprehensible than the mere fact of death. A lot of explosions before nothing is easier to grasp than just nothing.
It’s nice when you can ignore the fragility of the human project. It’s hard to right now. This is, I feel, what I was really talking about every time I spoke this weekend. I was pretending to speak other words, but I was actually just saying, hey, look, we’re alive, and, despite appearances to the contrary, we will never be more alive than this.
Very moved by this, thank you.