Beds of Sin (iii)

This almost hit me in the head at work the other day, so I picked it up after it came to rest and snapped an iPad picture for the blog:

I realize that the pine cone and the maple leaf have their fans, but seriously, isn't this soooo much cooler? There's just something about Los Angeles, from the architecture to the flora to the sunsets. It makes up for the quotidian inconveniences of modern American life in a way that fall colors, dendritic snowflakes, and the IDS Tower just never quite could. And though I've never been one to take overt cues for my music from environmental sources, I do think the aesthetic change of pace has had a charitable impact on me and my work. So sure, come on over everyone. We'll make room for you.

Beds of Sin (ii)

[Fickle Ears makes its first and probably last foray into the issue of human reproduction, posted today in honor of the author's thirty-first birthday]

The only time I've ever heard the notion of population control raised matter-of-factly in conversation was, not surprisingly, among a group of gay men. Even so, I don't think it's possible to come live in Los Angeles from somewhere smaller (even if that somewhere gets called a "big" city) and not have the thought at least cross your mind. And if it is possible not to think that way, then you're free to judge me for having slipped into it anyway, but you won't stop me from thinking it.

Los Angeles is a place where a lot of people would like to live, or think they would. Nature abhors a vacuum, and so it's undoubtedly foolish to think about population control while you're stuck in traffic. If people here had fewer kids, more pasty-faced midwesterners like me would surely flood in, guns and sunscreen bottles blazing, to clog up the freeways again and pursue our acting careers. All of that aside, though, I am constantly reminded here, as I was when I worked at the MSP airport, how lightly people seem to take the notion of having children and how ill-prepared they truly are to handle it. I'm even learning that to be 30 (make that 31) and childless in L.A. arouses a certain amount of...suspicion in working class circles. Now isn't that a tad bit over the top?

As far beyond the pale as, say, a two-child policy might be in the U.S., I'm willing to say that simply leaving sociology and biology to their own devices strikes me personally as no more or less crazy at this point, not when people I work with during the day are heading off to second full-time jobs at night instead of sleeping just to feed their kids; not when we have millions of intelligent people out of work along with millions of underserved children, yet we cannot collectively seem to figure out a way to play those two problems off against each other; and not when children (let's not forget pets in this one, either) are more or less seen as material possessions even by some we would otherwise consider to be among the economically, physically, and socially fittest parents around.

It would be nice to think that simply winning the fight for reproductive rights and affordable health care would solve the problem. It certainly couldn't hurt. I submit to you, however, with all the empathy of a rock that this is a cultural issue as well, one that all the condoms in the world won't fix. So, sorry to be one of those people, but the whole thing just makes me cringe, and more so with each passing year, another of which, I'm reminded today, has just passed before my very eyes thanks to my parents' own one-child policy.

Beds of Sin (i)

"People just keep coming here," a relative of mine once said indignantly, and as if she wasn't talking to one of the more recent emigres. Who wouldn't want to live in Los Angeles? I have feared straight through from the moment the first seed of temptation sprouted in my mind all the way through the present moment that the answer might be: "anyone with a conscience." I've hidden from no one the fact that the climate was always a consideration for me, but I have plenty of better reasons for coming to live here, and so far I'm content that they're all in evidence. And contrary to that peculiar form of midwestern conjecture one is bathed in upon declaring the intent to relocate, I've yet to feel the shadow of the entertainment industry stalking my every artistic move, and I remain unconvinced that people here are, as a group, any more or less superficial than they are back home.

It could not be more transparent, on the other hand, that the whole operation is enabled by a constellation of environmental and humanitarian atrocities the sum total of which I'm not sure many people I've met here know or care much about. Some of the blankest stares I've ever seen have followed what I thought were innocuous questions about water issues, made to people who have lived here their entire lives. Several co-workers of mine have the infuriating habit of taking their lunch breaks in their cars with engines idling and air conditioners blasting away for 30 minutes at a time. These are low-wage earners in the era of $4 per gallon gas; clearly there's no deterrent strong enough to combat animal instincts.

Naturally, my footprint is smaller, but I am an animal just like everyone else, a walking entropy machine complete with central nervous system and reproductive organs to assist in the task. I'm drawn to year-round outdoor basketball, musical communities that are large and informed enough to be self-policing, and double-digit personnel options on just about every instrument I'll ever need to form an ensemble to play my music. The extent of my impact on climate change, air quality, clogged freeways, depleted water supplies, and housing shortages remains to be seen, but this much is (and always was) clear: owing to geography and sociology alike, it will necessarily be larger here than it would have been in Minneapolis or virtually any other place I might have gone; it will be leveled against an environment which is under siege in a way that Minneapolis, despite its own notable sprawl and the alarming recent emergence of its own air quality issues, has never experienced and probably will not experience for a very long time; and it will be leveled at the expense of more desperate, aggrieved and oppressed people than the entire Twin Cities can claim in either number or degree. For all of that, I never had a perfectly clean conscience about coming here, and I never will.

No matter what sorts of high or trying times might await, my living here will always be "me time" through and through. It is a concession to the voice that says "do something for yourself for once" and in direct contravention of the one that says "you've had it pretty good to start with; leave something for everyone else." People just keep coming here, and I didn't have to be one of them, but here I am competing against all the other transplants and quite a few natives of myriad vintages for just about every known resource and privilege a human being might require. I'm crossing my fingers that we don't run out.