power on self test

4:50 AM. My celfloam buzzed and started to play an orchestral remix of the music from Mission A.D.. I halfway woke up, pushed the volume button to make it shush, and dropped back onto the pillow, not quite awake, not really asleep any more either.

And then, behind my closed eyes, I saw a series of horizontal lines marching up my visual field from the bottom to the top, widening until there was no space between them. When they'd gone all the way up, I got a series of vertical ones moving from left to right.

Then I got overlapping circular moiré patterns.

I am not sure if I should be worried by this, or disappointed that it wasn't followed by text reading INITIAL TESTS INDICATE: ALL SYSTEMS OPERATIONAL.

oh, hello again you beautiful old whore

In conversation this morning I'd thought I was going through San Francisco on my way to Seattle. But I misremembered; I'm in Los Angeles as I write this.

LA. I haven't been in LA in, what, six years? seven? I'd have to go online to check and all the wireless here is pay. The last time I was here was, I think, when Sammi and I drove down from SF to see Bakshi speak and present his personal copies of Wizards and Coonskin.

I'm not sure changing planes in the airport counts as "being in" a city. Maybe I should go into the tiny little open courtyard and feel LA's sun beat down on me once more. My time here was complicated, difficult, and ultimately probably a failure - but sweet Kali is it a gorgeous city that was wonderful and sensuous to live in. Snuggled up between the mountains and the Pacific, sprawling endlessly - yet greener and more welcoming than Boston. I've been feeling nostalgia for LA for a while and it's so strange to be here quite by accident.

I wonder if I'll catch a glimpse of the Santa Monica Pier on my way out.

And as it so happens the book I pulled out at random for in-flight reading was set in... LA. Never read it before, didn't know this, thought I was going to SF anyway. But here I am squatting by a socket in LAX, recharging my laptop, reading a by-the-numbers piece of aging cyberpunk:

An acid rain, the sins of the fathers, blew down hard and cold, etching obscure messages into the faces of the graceless old buildings. A few blocks to the south, beyond the fifty-story torus housing Lockheed's business offices, carbon arcs burned a pure white nimbus of light into the fat, menacing clouds. Pemex-U.S. was out there somewhere, Jonny knew. Exxon; Krupp International. And Sony-- a flat black silicon sphere, almost invisible at night, like a hole punched in the sky. Wilshire Boulevard.

Hi, LA. It's been a while. Boston ain't got nothin' on you, babe. Even though you devour your children and shit where you sleep.