Is My City Gone?

Delighted to see all the photos of No Kings Day marches from my aunt to fellow artists. Wish I could have joined you all! WARNING: This is going to feel like a poor man’s version of the dispatches from Hollywood Ben Stein used to pen for The American Spectator. Who? What? Relax. Those obscure references were strictly for me. Don’t bother searching the names. Those were the hopes. We are now living the dream! I lost too much of my life figuring that out. You’re welcome.

Did my 2nd Task Rabbit yesterday. Delivered 2 gorgeously enhanced bagels worth $50, a birthday gift, to some guy staying in a luxury hotel in West Hollywood. Those bagels looked better than some of the vintage Chanel jewelry ads I list on ebay. Rare client okay with me using public transportation. An hour from bagel shop to destination. She tipped me $10 on top of $34 for 1.5 hours of work. 5 star rating.

I was grateful for the work, because gig app algorithms usually blackball me for not driving or taunting death on a scooter. Apparently I need to drastically lower my hourly rate if I want the next 8 gigs in days or weeks instead of years. After all, that’s why I was on the picket line all those weeks for writers and fellow actors.

Listed on ebay some vintage 90's print advertisements I got from a box of magazines left for me at the end of a mansion's driveway in the Valley by some dude on Nextdoor. Confused a spam text with him, so searched his name. Apparently he won an Emmy once.

Wasted gobs of time battling AI chatbots to get to humans to solve basic business and vendor issues. Is the future Sarah Connor battling terminators? Feels more like enshittification or a more colorful tech epitaph from Ed Zitron.

In spite of humans who can’t figure out earbuds or headphones to save their very important lives, on LA Metro buses and trains I managed to read another 25 pages of the Sam Tanenhaus tome on Bill Buckley. Yes, the same Tanenhaus who made me a paragraph in his Vanity Fair piece on Hillsdale College back in the day. Crazy how the print ads I now thirst for in such magazines have more value than that paragraph. Crazy how Buckley was a hero of mine once. What made me an agnostic liberal Democrat? Too much exposure to christians, conservatives and Republicans. But I digress.

No vacation plans. No social plans. Those things require money and life bandwidth. Maybe someday when I return to the bottom rungs of the middle class. But I got 17,059 steps in today!

That's a typical day for me lately.

Haven't been on set since November.
Haven't been paid to make a stranger laugh since December.
This is the most writing I've done in months.
Wonder if I'm still an artist anymore.
I desperately miss human connection.

And I'm one of the lucky ones. In so many ways.

Can you hear Chrissie Hynde sing?
"but my city was gone . . . a government that had no pride"
I sure can.

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