Floating in Downtown

I do love the trappings of city life sometimes, the feeling of liberation of not being tethered to a car and just going where our whims take us. Of course in Los Angeles it doesn’t really work this way all the time, but there are times it gets close.

Madd and I wanted to go to St. Vincent Court after watching an episode of Tom Explores Los Angeles that explored this strange oasis of fake weirdness in the middle of the Jewelry District of Downtown LA. Rather than deal with the hassles of traffic from her Mid-City apartment to the parking woes of DTLA, we opted to take the train there which was perfect.

Sure the day pass is now $7, but it’s still better than paying for parking at all the places we ended up at. There was St. Vincent Court, the Central Library, cookies and coffee at Bottega Louie, tea and mochi ice cream in Little Tokyo. With the exception of St. Vincent Court, everything else was on a whim. “Where should we go now?” “What are you in the mood for?” “Oooh this looks good!” It’s an exhilarating freedom to be so whimsical, and I truly felt in the middle of the heart of the city as the buildings and skyscrapers loomed overhead.

The buoyancy of the day sent a bit of regret up my spine of how I lived during my Hulu years as my 20s became my 30s. Combine the stresses for working for a startup tech company with trying to get better at writing with blogging for LAist, it left me quite isolated. Actually, I isolated myself. I know it’s trendy to say that you have no regrets when asked if you have any, but if I’m being honest this is one my of regrets. Of not exploring, not seeing things and crawling into myself.

One of stupid things I did was at the library. For some reason, I thought it would be a great idea to borrow one volume of Anais Nin’s diaries and Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus. I was already carrying around the Bessoa book I’ve been reading, so for the latter half of the day I was schlepping a load. I guess I got a better workout than I had anticipated?

As much as I enjoyed being out and about, seeing all the homeless people really tempered the joy. Friday night while at Faultline with Daniel, there was a homeless man lying on the sidewalk sans shoes. As we were leaving, he was still lying there but someone had laid down a dirty dog with a drink right next to him. I thought that was awfully nice of whoever did that.