The Relatably Tragic and Tragically Relatable Life of a Total Loser: 2. (Two)
The postings will continue until behavior improves.
I was born in Los Angeles with the dream of moving as far away as possible without having to take a passport photo. Well, there is bravery in honesty, so truthfully, I was born in Los Angeles with an umbilical cord. But after I mostly mastered chewing and the occasional object permanence, the dream to flee (fleam) sans-passport kicked in. Sans-passport is key since those little turds somehow always manage to capture the ugliest parts of your soul no matter how much effort you put into your hair. Three hours of contouring videos on YouTube and a confusing conversation with the guy at Walgreens who keeps insisting your chin needs to be higher than could possibly be reasonable all for…tragedy.
After a short wait for the photos you put so much hope into, blammo: A single photo that distorts your face to such a degree that you seriously wonder if the guy at Walgreens A. is the next Picasso, but of photography, or B., has a personal vendetta against everyone. Which, if you’ve ever worked in a customer-oriented job, is a fairly common occurrence. I can think of at least twelve separate instances I sauntered up to the border of The Baseline Of What’s Expected and chose not to cross over it into Outstanding Service simply because the customer gave off a vibe like they expected me to pull out some grapes to individually feed them solely for existing. Get your own damn grapes. That’s my motto. No one understands it because I’ve never worked in a place that sells grapes, but that’s everyone else’s cross to bear.
Passport photos, I think, are intended to document who you are for security reasons, but they really work like how those small tribes believe cameras steal your soul. Of course, instead of stealing your soul (because the relief of being soulless would be too great a prize and also that’s such a ridiculous idea. Those goofy isolated tribes! Never even heard of MySpace! Think cameras steal your soul when really that’s all capitalism’s doing!)…instead of stealing your soul, a passport photo takes an aura-like snapshot of all your greatest flaws. Your stresses. Your chins. Your innate desire to just die. And the nature of the beast forces you to keep that snapshot for ten years. And to show it to strangers who have the authority to detain you in a room with those fluorescent lights — you know the ones that mess with your eyes so after awhile you feel kind of like you’re going blind? Does that happen to anyone else or just — detain you in a room with those fluorescent lights for hours because you give off a funny vibe or more simply are just not white. Or you get detained because your passport photo is so tremendously fucked up — why are your chins so high? That it can’t possibly be you. But it is, you tell the exhausted TSA agent. It is, and I really am capable of looking like that and I am sorry that this. is. my. face. Whoever invented passports was a genius. Of sadism. The spirit of Marquis de Sade (pronounced Sade) lives on in passport photos. Bless up.
But my reasoning for wanting to leave Los Angeles, the city of angels, the city of traffic and sunshine and perfect sunsets every night, is because Los Angeles is a place of pretense. Even criticising it comes off elitist, doesn’t it? Oh, check out Madam Big Shot here, you think. Ms. Has-Been-To-Los-Angeles-And-Has-Thoughts-About-It, esq.
Wait, one more. Dr. Was Born In A Place Where Summer Is Like, Every Day, And Everyone Is Gorgeous HOW Is That A Bad Thing??, D.D.S. What a fucking hack. You hate puppies and happiness too? What, you don’t like El-Eyyyy because you think it makes you edgy and unique? Go sit on a pinecone, ya chunky loser. Gimme a break. From all these goddamn italics.
Fair point, reader. But despite your continued protests, I will elaborate.
The mere essence of L.A., even saying El Ey, evokes such a feeling in me that I want to hurl. You know when your mouth sort of fills with hot saliva? That feeling. Yet Los Angeles evokes such a feeling in the whole world as to attract everyone to visit, and those who were very popular in their Midwestern high schools to move there. The ones who were always cast in their school’s spring musicals as the lead, of course. The ones whose hairs are just naturally liquid smooth and who were born with perfect teeth or had the money to get their busted up faces fixed. Those who have only ever walked on clouds and whose farts smell like freshly cut strawberries. Long, firm calves-havers. These people — there is a sort of magnet in their perfect tummies. And for them, Los Angeles has a gravitational pull unlike that of anything in our observable universe.
Naturally, this puts losers such as myself at a steep social and evolutionary disadvantage. Not only for success, but for generally not feeling out of place in like, the dairy section of a grocery store in Santa Monica. Have you ever been scared of taking too long to pick out a cheese? But on top of that it feels like everyone else is mad that an animated, schlubby dustbunny (dustschlubby) would have the audacity to even so much as exhale in the same refrigerated section as them? Or, for some terrible reason, you’re invited to a party and everyone is interesting except you. But also they’re not allowed to entertain you with how interesting they are because it would break the unspoken social hierarchy of this tanned, slim, sleek kingdom of fallen gods. In Los Angeles, it’s like every day is your first day of middle school but you showed up halfway through the year so everyone’s already friends and also one of the oversized, wingless Kotexes (Koti?) your grandmother gets at Costco because she naturally delivered her children and sneezes a lot during the spring just fell out of your gym shorts.
The cool, casual unaffectedness that is steeped in the sidewalks of Los Angeles demands all who live there master the same effortless popularity. The combination of such a place with a loser as moi could lazily be described as mixing oil and water, but is more aptly described as mixing Los Angeles with even a drop of rain: so unnatural to the arid grandeur, it’s a recipe for disaster. And also mixing oil and water isn’t a very apt description because if you stir them fast enough with the right kind of whisk you can make a vinaigrette in like, two minutes, and I lived in Los Angeles for decades and things never clicked and now I have carpal tunnel from all this fruitless whisking.
Hello, and I’m sorry. This is the second page of a long and ultimately worthless story. It’s going to keep on like this for awhile until enough folks demand it stop. Stay tuned out. Don’t watch this space. Etc and so forth. Avoid the first page. And yes, I know these aren’t pages, dickhole.
