What Los Angeles means to me
"Obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day.”
***Note to readers: This is a post I originally wrote and published in March 2024 during my last trip to Los Angeles. I’m republishing it now without a paywall.***
Los Angeles is about overcast mornings giving way to overpriced afternoon patios and overly manicured sunscaped rooftops.
It’s about palm trees standing in for skyscrapers, dotting the city’s avenues that lead to evidence of both decadence and decline. And eventually, sand and salt water.
It’s about tolerating crawling at 10 miles an hour for 6 and a quarter miles on a 5-lane highway for 75 minutes in a leased Lamborghini.
Los Angeles is about what you’re wearing, not what you’re reading. It’s about advertising yourself as pescatarian at a vegan coffee shop — not playing parliamentarian inside a Twitter Spaces.
Which means it goes without saying that it’s about *not* knowing the news of the Senate Republican leadership transition-in-the-making — and being pretty enough not to have to.
I’ve long romanticized Los Angeles because it’s the exotic antithesis to Washington. Its sheer distance provides escapist allure. Matching its weather, the people and the pace are decidedly milder, if not always in manner, in mindset.
It’s a nice place to die slowly, as the wall art in Venice declares.
So of course, it was while I was mid-flight enroute to the City of Angels for four nights when news came raining down on my visit to a megalopolis that couldn’t care less.
Break: Mitch McConnell would relinquish his longtime role as Senate Republican leader following this year’s presidential election. The end of an era. The passing of a torch.
Tasked with the McConnell beat for my employer, the texts began landing on my screen before the airbus tires had hit the tarmac.
And immediately I felt a pang of guilt.
I should’ve been anchoring McClatchy’s coverage on the matter, but instead was on vacation.
Pay no mind, I had these days booked a month ago — with no way to forecast the timing of news carrying such significance. Yet somehow still my absence nagged at me.
I admittedly count myself among the brain-diseased who loses self-worth if a certain amount of hours pass without having *published.*
Mind you, this was only mere hours into my vacation. So I hadn’t fully been ensnared by California dreams.
Should I offer to log on? Text sources? Comb through reaction material?
“Busyness,” Tim Kreider wrote a dozen years ago in The New York Times, “serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day.”
“I can’t help but wonder whether all this histrionic exhaustion isn’t a way of covering up the fact that most of what we do doesn’t matter,” Kreider surmised.
Guilt over not working is a common DC infection, but thankfully it hasn’t proved chronic for me. Ten years ago the anxiety pang would’ve lingered much longer, potentially jeopardizing hours or days of the vacation. Aging forces you to quash foreboding because you’re cognizant you’re up against a clock that won’t wait.
After sending a few messages reminding colleagues of my whereabouts (there aren’t OutOfOffice texts?), I recentered and instructed myself to be focused not on the coverage taking place without my “requisite brilliance” — but my precious travel companion — my mother, who at a spry 78 was making her first trip ever to LA and tickled by the prospect of brushing past a movie Hulu star.
The McConnell story, while important for my organization, would be a blip in life. And just a piece of the constant carousel of our narrative politics.
“Do you have to work at all?,” my mother queried at one point as I steered the rental car.
“No. I took the days off,” I replied unnecessarily sternly, as if I was defending myself to a superior.
With the help of fresh sips of alcohol and slowly emerging afternoon sunlight, I was able to eventually settle into the true purpose of La La Land: To trade seriousness for serene scenery. To be unhurried and unbothered. The root of the word vacation, is to vacate, it occurred to me.
For the most part, I was able to push the news, alerts and email to the side, with the exception being when natural lulls in conversation permitted electronic grazing.
Scroll, scroll, scroll.
Point and click.
So have I learned how to fully… vacate?
Here I am on my flight back to DC, writing — actually typing on my Iphone — as part of my penance for taking three days off.
To publish is to attract validation is to cement relevance.
Los Angeles is about being shamelessly hot enough to lack a LinkedIn profile.
Washington is about posting on that insufferable site cringingly at least twice a week to avoid a lifetime wasted.
