2 things that I don’t miss about LA living are random gunfire at all hours of the night and the inevitable ghetto bird* 20 feet above your roof at 3:30 a.m. for a good hour or so while you sit there fuming and ready to go buy yourself an RPG just to shut him up. Those two things I don’t miss at all. And with like all things you have to give a little to get a little. The one thing I wasn’t really prepared for when I moved into the neighborhood was that it pretty much smells like a giant pot field on fire 24 hours a day. It just wreaks of the ganja. Also the damn dirty hippies. I figured (desperately hoped) most of them had died off or gotten real jobs by now but there are still quite a few of them. The damn dirty hippies have been joined by the suburban gutter-punk wanna-be squad. I’m regularly accosted by 150 dollar shoe wearing, cellphone talking “homeless” looking for change. It takes all I got not to toss them under a bus but we were all young once. So I’m learning to love the quirks of my new home town. Slowly but surely… I’ve been here two months though and still haven’t been to a proper protest.

*ghetto bird is what the kids call the police helicopter in the slang of the day.