Los Angeles hurts.

It has always hurt, and all the things I love here do not seem to be quite enough to protect me from its teeth. Not now, when I am hurting so much already. Happiness carves its price into your flesh only as it goes. Los Angeles makes elections small, we had a historic day yesterday in the world of symbols, but symbols will change nothing. And I suppose if elected, Obama will carve his own price into the hopes of the nation. We saved rent control for another year, but in winning only defensive battles we are still pushed back. What are we doing? There were kids today on the train selling candy, perhaps they were 5 and 8? if that? I have seen them on the train before, and they are not the only ones. There are a few more kids, and a middle aged black man who has taped signs to his glasses saying 50 cents. He makes people laugh, and he makes people buy candy. We are being pushed deeper and deeper into a third-world economy, as the community crumbles around us.

I am writing. The words drip and smudge across the page, sometimes I think that if I were to dip a pen into my own veins it might be enough, the very ink itself my exorcism, because words alone fail. They cannot speak of pain enough, they cannot burn, they cannot taste of salt and hurt my eyes the way this does. The emptiness that night brings shudders along. I write and the words mock me, the powerlessness of them. I rage and it changes nothing. I imagine happy endings and know that in life they do not come true. I write but people remain broken, friends remain dead, battles remain lost, love remains bitter, the poor remain fucked. I smile at my own sweet exercise in futility.

If I could write the stars the way they should be seen, and can never be seen in Los Angeles, perhaps then…