So, I got into Los Angeles and the airport felt old and abused, yellow and green colors, not very appealing. I walked outside and the air wasn’t the usual air you find around an airport, it was heavy, smog filled, and smoky. We had to drive down to Long Beach to grab some things from Zac’s ex-girlfriend and the entire sky was off. The smoke is affecting the color of everything, its weird. You chew the air out here and I don’t think that the smoke makes it much different. As we drove back into Los Angeles I noted a few things about offensive smells, police everywhere, people homeless and otherwise littering the streets. Zac’s apartment building used to be a hotel and appears to house people who can barely afford to be alive, but not homeless. Crazy and incoherent they babble in the stairways. Zac pays over 700 for his apartment which has a tiny bathroom, barely any hot water, and a living room the size of my bathroom. No closets, no kitchen, one measly window. We walked outside to do some shopping and at street level Los Angeles is very dirty. The streets are riddled with garbage and the vendors sell their bootlegged merchandise to you for a great “deal” there are back alley shops and shady dealings going on everywhere. Any type of street drug is available in quantity by guys who look like they have taken way too much. The streets (depending on which ones) reek of human urine and excrement. Homeless lament and groan as you walk past, most begging for change. Disabled, disfigured, and clinically insane people roam the streets, forgotten but ever apparent to anyone passing them. It gets to wear on your heart as you see how they are making their lives. Shady dealings are constant, I saw a homeless man disassembling someone’s phone, freshly stolen he was likely hoping to get a few bucks so he could meet another shady street vendor for what he affectionately referred to me as “weight loss medication” — or methamphetamine.

The irony really hit me when I was looking at the USBank corp building standing tall and proud over the city. Just then a man in a wheel chair bathed in the smell of something horrible wheeled by me in a growl. There doesn’t seem to be any divide, you either got lots or got nothing, and it really shows.

That all being said, we are in the heart of the city and haven’t explored much else. Later we’re heading down past the missions, methadone clinics, and sad corners of the city to check out “the alley” a place where someone can get whatever they want at wholesale…it took a bit of research but Zac finally found out where it was, Olympic and sixth if I remember right.

Tomorrow, I’m buying a pass and running up to Hollywood to check out the other extreme. I’m almost disgusted to be where I’m at right now, not because of any status I may have achieved in my short life but because of the depressive human sadness that flows ever prevalent in this city of broken, and maybe shattered dreams. Although by the looks of some of these peoples dreams were never even started in the first place.