I hate it here

So I woke up at six in the morning, in order to have time to do a little yoga before driving Mona to work at 8:30 (she neglected to inform me that she actually didn't have to leave till 9:30, but compared to the rest of the morning, that aggravation is really quite minor). In the predawn chill, I walked out to my secret spot overlooking Baloona Lagoon, rolled out my mat, and got down to yoga.

Didn't go so well. For some reason, I wasn't able to take my mind away from a series of unkind (but totally justified), thoughts about our de facto landlord, Scott, who I'm pretty sure ranks somewhere between slime molds and cockroaches on the moral evolutionary scale. Every time I would clear my mind and relax, it would be no more than a few seconds before I was once more dwelling upon an ill done unto me, or my concerns about leaving Mona alone in LA, where guys like him seem to be the rule, rather than the exception (Gabe and Russ, think about a particular guy I really hated at Hampshire, and imagine him six years from now. And then imagine a city full of the bastards. Scary, yes?). As the sun rose I gave up on yoga, realizing that I wouldn't get anything done till I'd at least addressed this problem to myself. So I sat down, cleared my mind, and tuned into my senses.

The first thing I noticed was not bird song. It was the white noise buzz of the pump station off to my right. The tide had gone out in the lagoon, a registered bird sanctuary, leaving a scattering of Styrofoam, cans, and random plastic lying on the beach. The water had an oily sheen. I could smell the fumes of the city and see the way they obscured the Hollywood hills (really not that far away). Cars honked in all directions.

It didn't hit me in a sudden flash of insight, but after ten, fifteen minutes of sitting quietly, I realized that it wasn't Scott who was upsetting me so much. This is not to say that he wasn't really a bastard, but normally I'm above letting the aggravations of people like him get at me. What was upsetting me so much was this place as a whole - my mind was just using one particular jerk to represent my accumulated disappointment with the city of Los Angeles.

For a while now, I've been toying with the idea that "God created Man in His image, but Man re-creates God's Earth in his own image." Seen in this light, the declarations by some members of the fringe environmental movement that humans are no more than a cancer that should be expunged from the planet make... a frightening amount of sense... Not that I ascribe to their belief, but live here long enough, pay enough attention, and you can understand how people might wind up thinking that way. After all, if what we do to the Earth is a reflection of ourselves (and I'm pretty sure it is), we are some ugly mother fuckers.

I know, I know, a lot of my friends are thinking, "Colin, you nut, you're just not a city person. You're missing the beauty of the architecture, the arts, civic life, the free flow of ideas, the amazing movie culture, the fun recreational opportunities, and the knowledgeable, sophisticated people who live in cities. After all, Colin, it's urban centers that voted blue in the last election. They were your best chance at avoiding another Bush presidency. Aren't you biting the hand that feeds you?"

Good point. I'm the first person to admit that cities do have a lot to offer. I don't think we should get rid of them. But have you ever noticed how much people in a city seem to live inside their heads? They're planning on the next meeting, the next party, the next paycheck, the next lay. Or they're bemoaning their poor fate, bitching about stress, other drivers, or reliving a particularly good movie. Or they're staring at a TV/computer screen, totally immersed in the world represented by the flickering lights. They're almost never RIGHT HERE RIGHT NOW. Why is that? I try to make a practice of engaging in awareness exercises on a regular basis, and I've noticed that since coming here, my enthusiasm for that has lessened. For some reason, yoga, deep breathing, and sensory awareness were much more attractive to me among the ponderosa pines of the central Oregon foothills than they are here. In LA, I'm just as happy to sit back and tune out reading a book, watching TV, or otherwise distracting my mind from the present moment - just like any other Los Angelan.

Now, my unscientific theory is this. People tend to tune out things they don't like. Like Helen Cresswell's "Grandpa Bagthorpe," who chose to turn off his hearing aid whenever his wife was talking to him, people become "selectively deaf." Instead of paying attention to everything around them, they put on metaphorical blinkers so that they can only see the things they want to see - the plays, the flashy restaurants, the past, the future. They choose not to walk down the dirty back alley, have the trash that washes up on shore cleaned away by cleaners each morning, and when the sun goes down in a blaze of crimson, they give only a passing thought to the air pollution that makes the sunset so red. In short, people living in a place with so much stimulation, both good and bad, choose to focus only on the pleasant things. If they saw everything, they would have a hard time justifying their continued lives in a place where breathing the air can shorten life by up to three years, lower lung capacity by 15 to 20 percent, and damage the lungs roughly equal to smoking half a pack of cigarettes a day (according to the University of Missouri). So they simply choose not to see it. They willingly erect up a barrier between themselves and reality.

And the last time I checked, that was the definition of insanity.

I'm living in a city of approximately ten million people who are, to one degree or another, madmen.

Frankly, I don't feel safe.