Click images for desktop size: "Feathers" by Kirk Reinert The new server is up.
http://warchild13.com/
Things are still a bit of a mess so I'll try and post everything to both of them for a while.
The new server gives me 2.5 gig of storage and 50 gig of bandwidth.
As I am nearing the break off point on bandwidth on the original site this is pretty welcome.
What all this extra storage and bandwidth means is MORE PICTURES! Maybe some music and avi's too.
In two weeks there'll be a puppy here and then there will be a definite need for all of this internet stuff. My puppy will, no doubt, be the most beautiful puppy in the history of the world. At least to me. That means lots of boring pictures of a puppy being stupid that I will find totally charming and wonderful.
I'm setting up a separate Movable Type installation for the puppy. I figure she'll want to communicate and yak about things. Puppies are like that.
In between doing my laundry and fussing around with the new site and doing all that technical stuff that I barely understand I've been thinking a lot about LA.
LA is my home. I love it but I can't live there anymore. Too many tears. I used to love it when the streets were wet in the winter, when the black tar reflected neon and star light with the same tolerance.
I loved the way it changed even when I didn't love the changes. I liked the art and the nearness of the sun. I loved the mountians hidden by the smog, and the fact that places I rode my bike have become icons.
There's not an inch of LA, from the Pallisades to Altadena that I don't know, that I don't have a story about, that I don't have a memory of.
Now it just means that I start to cry.
I'm not so weak yet that crying bothers me. It only bothers me because it happens almost all the time. Then, I have to stop and compose myself so I can cry again.
I love the city.
Somebody wrote, probably Chandler, he loved LA too and saw it for what it was. Too bad he never surfed or skied, it would have changed some of the things he saw. Not much but some. At least he never would have doubted what he knew.
"A long time ago Hollywood was just a bunch of frame houses on the interurban line. Los Angeles was just a big dry sunny place with ugly homes and no style, but goodhearted and peaceful. People used to sleep on porches. Little groups who thought they were intellectual used to call it the Athens of America. It wasn't that, but it wasn't a neon lighted slum either."
"Now we got the big money, the sharp shooters, the percentage workers, the fast dollar boys. We've got the riff raff of a big hard boiled city with no more personality than a paper cup."
"Real cities have something else, some individual bony structure under the muck. Los Angeles has Hollywood - and hates it. It ought to consider itself lucky. Without Hollywood it would be just a mail order city. Everything in the catalog you can get better, someplace else."
I agree with all of that.
I still love the place. In the smog and the commerce of flesh and the prostitution of brains it's impossible not to be alive there. But it gives you too much life sometimes. When it takes that life away there's just the nothing behind you. the nothings that's the only thing left when you're just too damn stubborn to die.
I spent a half hour trying to get a contour sheet onto my bed.