I’m preparing for another day at Neiman-Marcus.  Sales are way down what with taxes just due, the economy recessive or at least recalcitrant, and Armageddon imminent, so there’s piss all to do out on the floor.  Out of boredom I drink fresh coffee incontinently and cookie after sweet, buttery chocolate coated cookie imported from Switzerland.  I have on occasion eaten an entire loaf of hot sourdough then popped Godiva chocolates to such excess that by mid-afternoon I am hurtling down off the sugar with such a vengeance and am praying for a.) sleep and b.) absolution for my gluttony.

 

I feel particularly susceptible to the Seven Deadlies since moving down here.  Though last week I fasted for six days.  Drank only juice and tea and vegetable broth.  Put on four pounds which I can only attribute to water retention, an ugly thing.  I felt clearer headed, but marginally.  I seem to live on in a world unaffected by the vagaries of a susceptible metabolism although the facts of what has what effect upon the body having been brought so often to my attention in California I think I have convinced myself of a sensitivity I lacked hitherto.

 

I mean this only to be an update of facts and figures, nothing important, so don’t be disappointed at the end when all has not been said; it certainly hasn’t been done.  I’m living with Jim Shelton.  Which is not easy.  For either of us to be honest, but we’re learning accommodation and I feel a peculiar affection developing towards him when I reflect on what hard work we put in to understanding one another.

           

I visited San Francisco at Christmas but had no desire to live there any longer.  I intend to live in L.A. now indefinitely.  Especially since I am too broke to leave.  I have assets amounting to perhaps $1000 in my vintage Mustang but that’s it. 

           

I came to Los Angeles looking for myself and the search is continuing, slowly.  That’s what I mean by indefinitely.  Despite Jim’s good company I often feel very alone.  Perhaps necessarily; perhaps it was the solitude required in preparation of breaking through that plastic bubble you perceived I was in in San Francisco.  I had been laminating that baby up for a while before you arrived but wasn’t aware of it.  You with your typical, robust perception called a spade a spade.  I’m sorry if I was uncharacteristically adamant about how I was participating in the world.  This in itself should have been clue enough that I wasn’t seeing things clearly.  Any opinion held rigidly is dogma by definition and by definition a symptom of bad nay shitty faith.

 

I’ve come to L.A. to shake myself awake.  San Francisco became a stupor buffered by an easy income, temperate weather, genteel surroundings and sunny afternoons stoned on grass I grew myself.  I mean, we all have phases we go through.  I couldn’t stay there.  Los Angeles was the most accessible place to hand when I decided on this route, now I am here to stay.