Ours isn't a perfect world. It's downtown--a gilded toilet where people defecate in the streets, where untreated crazies run amok, where Business Improvement District dispatchers get stabbed in the back, where residents gleefully attend midnight arson, where cars pin people to walls, where tourists disintegrate in water tanks, where old men get beaten to death outside their apartments.

Los Angeles, you've got to be more than the sum of your hats.

Los Angeles was built as a machine of transformation. it mirrors industrialism and the triumph of progress over recalcitrance. But progress is a mixed bill. It has easily brought as much sorrow as joy. We must try to remember that its greatest success is the tilling of raw materials into a dubious finished product.

You can imagine my horror when my mom parked the car on Grand and opened the door. We were dead. I already imagined the Merlot soaked claws of a thousand bums tearing me limb from limb then tobagganing down Second Street on what remained of my torso.