On Fancy Bags.

When I was properly college-aged I spent about zero time on college campuses. Later in life, having abandoned my adulthood to be a properly starving artist, I have spent a lot of time on college campuses.

I am always envious when I see the Art students moving purposefully across campus with their big black portfolio cases slung over their shoulders. Quite automatically an unreasonable thought always zings through my mind and makes me want to holler after them, “I want to do a thing that requires a big special bag!”  

Now I’m sure that those bags are a huge hassle and pain in the ass, especially if you have to take the bus or if there is a gust of wind, but still, they are kind of cool, right? I also like those long black (or sometimes ever dark leather) tubes that (in my mind at least) carry to transport blueprints and stuff.

At first I thought that maybe I have some secret desire to be a visual artist (like a painter), but now that I am being honest, I think that what I really want is just a really specific bag. I mean, I’m a writer. I always carry a good pen and a little notebook, but those don’t exactly scream, “LOOK AT HOW FANCY I AM!”

There is a great scene at the end of the movie Naked Lunch where Peter Weller (sort of playing William Burroughs) gets stopped at a quasi-Soviet border and the borderguard asks him what his business is. Weller says, “I am a writer” and the borderguard asks him to prove it and so he holds up a pen and says, “I have an implement of writing.”

I can’t just go around saying that to people. Or, at least, I shouldn’t.

Shortly after I moved to LA a million years ago I saw a guy in the Starbucks near Melrose and Fairfax wearing a black ballcap and that said in white letters: Writer. Man did I mock the crap out of that guy in my head while I waited in line and he pretended to work on his screenplay. Keep slinging that buddy, one day we will all believe you.

This why I need a fancy (but not ostentatious) bag to announce me!

(If you can’t tell yet, I am writing this post so that I can put off doing other work that I need to do.)

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Bloody.

The entryway of my apartment building has a glass security door and apparently one of the guys who lives in my complex is a photographer and he is taking Halloween pictures right now and that means that a college girl in a white dress - covered in “blood” -  is pressing herself zombie-style against that security door.  

I’m sure the pictures will be interesting, but it made it awkward for me to go check my mail.

I do love though being around all of that. LA has an artist commune called The Brewery (it is an old PBR brewery) and I have been there and as much as I was bothered by the sad quality of most of the “art” that I saw there, I still enjoy knowing that such a community exists.

This is a big part of why I am considering getting the hell out of LA in the next year or so. There is unequivocally culture in LA, but it is hard to find, hard to get to, and hard to be accepted into.

Perhaps it is like that everywhere, but I have to hope not. If a guy can shoot a horror show in my vestibule, does that mean that I’m living in the right place? Or that all that guy needed was a blood-covered model and a vestibule? Which he can find just about anywhere?

That may be the constant cosmic question of LA. Do I need to be here? or Do I only think I need to be here?

I have no answer for that.

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