This Just In: L.A. is Full of Freaky People

It seems like ever since I moved back to L.A., I’m having this experience more and more.  Granted, it happens more in Santa Monica and Venice than anywhere else, but I do find it’s happening more than, say, when I lived in Manhattan.  The people there are freaky, but in an intentional way.  L.A. people are more like, freaky because of attrition, like they’re just TIRED of combing their hair, and they’re not going to do it anymore, ok man?

So, here’s my experience.  Maybe you can relate, if you live anywhere near the Los Angeles area, or perhaps another sort of place where you can see unusual people.  You’re standing in line in back of someone, or you pass by someone on the street, you stop to really look at them, and you just have a moment of…..really?  You own a mirror and don’t have any kind of mental defect, and THIS is what you came up with when it came to "how to present myself today"?  Seriously?   You picked out a Hawaiian shirt, slicked your stringy, male pattern balding hair back into a loooong ponytail, put on some too-short khaki shorts, looked in the mirror, and went "Done.  I look great!  This is how I’m going out in the world."   Sometimes I just want to tap people on the shoulder and go "Really?  This is what you’re going with?  You don’t have anything else that might make you look a little less crazy?  OK then…"

This is presumably how a cat like Phil Spector ends up with an eight inch high Afro with this look on his face like "What?".  There is just something about the total lack of irony that cracks me up.  This applies to the unkempt people as well as the cartoonish plastic surgery girls, or the lady at the gym who has old lady anorexia and is so tan she looks like beef jerky.  I’m thinking maybe the sun is baking away people’s common sense, giving them kind of a reverse Body Dysmorphic Disorder that makes them think they look good when they don’t.

When we first moved back to L.A., we lived upstairs from a British guy with a mullet who was a butcher…and a daytrader.  This guy owned two blue shirts, and when he wasn’t wearing his butcher outfit, he was either wearing one of them, or laying outside on the lawn in a Speedo, soaking up the sun.  He was another one where I was like…."wow, really?  You have enough money to live here and pay your bills, and you can’t buy a shirt that doesn’t have holes in it?  Interesting."   The last place we lived, our neighbor two doors down had one VERY LARGE DREADLOCK and dressed like a postman.  Oh, did I mention he was old and white, and not in the U.S. Postal Service?  These are the regular people in L.A.

I guess it’s all about where your priorities lie, but I personally find this aspect of Los Angeles culture very amusing. 

• Category: People Baffle Me Sometimes