read this

I've been meaning to link to Leaving Los Angeles since I found the site a couple of weeks ago. I was going to write something pithy about how I too want to get out, how this city is a kind of purgatory (Dan's phrase for it, years ago, coming back to haunt me) where lost souls drift, neither heaven nor quite hell. Welcome to the Hotel California; you can check in any time you like but you can never, no not ever leave. Except that she is leaving and I wish I too could slip out the back, leaving behind nothing but my shame.

But I mostly don't read this blog (more of a journal, really, a journal of the past) because I empathize with the sentiment. This is a damned good writer (no surprise there, she's a successful journalist) and the life she's led here makes mine look positively suburban and dull. I've met a few celebrities, had a few strange encounters, but the stories Nancy Rommelmann tells leave mine in the dust. It's a different Los Angeles, one I've caught glimpses of but only through a doorway left open by accident and then swiftly closed again.

I'm completely hooked. I hope she continues writing online after she leaves LA.