Sleep
New York is the city that never sleeps, but Los Angeles is not. In the cold sunrise of a Saturday morning, Los Angeles is getting her beauty sleep. She has cucumber slices over her eyes and is soaking her cuticles. Even most of the lawnboys seem to vanish during the weekend, having combed her palm trees and lotioned her terraces from Monday to Friday.
It has rained recently, which always washes the smog away for a few days, and the celebrity homes in the Hollywood Hills can be seen clearly in the morning light, sitting white and angular against the blue-tinted hillside. Blue skies always add a backdrop of comfortable cheer and wholesomeness to any scene. Even the black rocks of the Viper Room look tidy, and it sleeps off its hangover as the sun comes up. Whiskey a-Go-Go has gone night-night.
West Hollywood in particular has elements that would like to appear bohemian, or at least a touch jaded, like Freemason Abbey, but it’s hard to look jaded when all the furniture matches. It’s hard to look bohemian when the streets are so clean.
(I just got my first parking ticket this Friday for blocking the street-sweepers, so I’m a little bitter at the moment.)
The streets are nearly empty. The Writers’ Guild has put down their picket signs for now. The tourists who will crowd Hollywood Blvd in an hour or two are just getting up from their good night’s sleep, and checking that their digital camera batteries are charged. The little black-clad punk-rockers have left the Troubador and the Roxy, and returned to their suburbs.
Los Angeles is asleep. And if I didn’t have three galloping cats who wanted me up at
