\"The Farmacy ~ W. Hollywood\" by Thinking Couch

I spent a few days in Los Angeles this week, Santa Monica and Beverly Hills specifically. I was there for work and I know I don’t talk a lot about where I work and there are reasons for that. Luckily, I have a job where I get to go to very cool places and sometimes meet some very cool people although it’s not as glamarous as it sounds. There are people who get to go rub elbows with very powerful and famous people and then there’s the guy who gets to stand in the back of the room and take notes and have a bunch of shit they have to run and do and get back to the powerful peeps. That guy is me.

Anyway, it was the first time I had ever spent any time in Los Angeles and I had only two personal goals I wanted to accomplish:

  1. Find a Medical Marijuana clinic and take a picture of it for the blog

  2. Eat a meal at In-N-Out Burger

A buddy and I went cruising Beverly Hills and Hollywood at 6:30 AM on Tuesday morning. We left Santa Monica and there was a late Sun brewing over the city (three hours late to me being on Ohio time and all). We drove up Rodeo drive, snapped some pics of the Lotus dealer and the other landmarks that everyone knows and loves. We drove up into the hills and tried to get to the Hollywood sign and realized that we were a couple of fuckin’ tourists and if you actually get to the sign it must be a local secret. We found ourselves out hiking up Lee Mountain and ended up in some millionaire’s backyard while he was letting his dog out drinking his morning coffee.

Driving back to Santa Monica from Hollywood, we got caught up in rush hour traffic. There is traffic in LA that is the spawn of hell. It’s like Beelzebub opens the gates of hell when the sun hits the beaches of Southern California and the lesser demons file out into their Bentley’s, their pintos, their Prius’s and their fake tits, take to the streets and see how many ways they can ignore their common humanity while in the pressure cooker of a steadily warming street.

For some reason, the movie Falling Down kept popping into my mind.

So did i love LA? As beautiful as the city is, there is a great deal of sadness there. It hangs in the air like smoke from a bonfire, it pressurelessly presses the flesh and threatens to take you down with it. For every millionaire producer, director and actor, there is an army of lawyers out there suing the shit out of someone to move little pieces of it around. There are ten zillion Mexicans there building the pyramid for a handful of generally average people who have been put on a pedestal because of what side of the camera they ended up on.

It’s not my bag. That city would eat me alive in two years and I’ll leave Tony to his kingdom.

The Midwest nourishes me in a way that the Left Coast never could. I’d love to import some of their politics though.

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