I'm moving.  Not just from downtown to the upper east side.

But also from here to www.dailyangst.wordpress.com

After five years at this site...xanga has grown a little old and tired.  Familiar, yes, but also...everyone else has left and it's lonely.

More to come.  Trying to migrate the archive.

I've been spending a ton of time in California lately, probably more than I have in the last decade.

But I don't feel any more connected to it than I did when I lived there.  Sometimes, I just stare at people blankly, like, "Huh?"

I found myself, on Wednesday, sitting at LAX waiting for someone.  I had a few hours.  I was in Terminal Three, and there was no Fancy Lounge to which I could obtain access.  I was in the Alaska Airlines terminal.  Alaska Airlines kind of freaks me out.  Their logo has significance, I'm certain.  But it doesn't do it for me.  And I can't get into their lounge.  So it doubly irritates me.

I wound up in Gladstones instead.

The only things that Airport Gladstones serves at 10:38 am on a Wednesday are: fish, and booze.  They don't have a breakfast menu; they don't even have a lunch menu.  They just have a day-drinking menu.  The front half of the menu is the "you may or may not get sick by way of frozen and defrosted seafood" side.  The other half is the "you will definitely drink yourself sick" side.

Also, they serve calamari in a giant martini glass.  For some reason, I found this offensive.

There I was, overly tired, sitting in an Airport Gladstones, expecting brunch, instead faced with fish and booze.  Elton John's "Can You Feel the Love Tonight?" came on the stereo.  I burst into tears.  Meaningful sobs.  Me, blonde, petite, in a suit, glasses, hair in a chignon; briefcase, suitcase in tow; work splayed on the table...sobbing like a heartbroken teenager over "Can You Feel the Love Tonight?"

This is my life, people.  It may seem glamorous--airport codes; jets; exotic locations--maybe you even think that I think I'm better than you. 

Nope.  I spend my time sitting in a goddamn airport fish shack, crying in my calamari.

Anyway.  That happened.

I found my colleague; had my client meeting; made my way back to the airport.

It was weird, being ferried by towncar past the places that used to be somewhat familiar.  Wilshire, Westwood, Pico.  Past the Apple Pan; past Westside Pavillion.  Beverly Glen.  Past places I used to drive myself in my college car, with my college friends.  Past places where I used to ride on sorority buses and past places where I used to sing silly songs and drink cheap drinks and wear tube tops and fight with my boyfriend.

Where I used to be a girl, uncertain, trying things on for size, uncomfortable in my own skin, constantly questioning my decisions.  Trying to be a thing I was not.  Trying to be a thing I never felt I was.  Hiding behind compulsive behaviors and stuffing it all in.  Stuff, stuff, stuff.  Don't let it out.  Take it all in.

And now...

A woman, in a suit, in a black car.  Looking out over the alien landscape with foreign eyes...seeing it for the familiar/unfamilar thing it always was.  Admitting, finally, with a sigh of relief that maybe all that trying to be a California girl wasn't for "nothing" but that it's okay that it didn't work out.

Back to the airport, a different terminal this time.  And a prop plane, up the coast; then another towncar.

The driver, this time, was a retired television director; a man who had directed perhaps one of best-known talk shows in television history.  We chatted.  I always talk with people.  When I was first married, I didn't talk with people.  When I went through a lot of the hideous stuff of the last year, I was afraid to talk with people.  But at the heart of who I am...I can talk to a fence post.  Maybe it's part of being a writer.

We talked philosophy; French politics; age discrimination.

"You're not just a lawyer," he said finally, "You must write."

"Of course," I said.  I'm so transparent.

He dropped me off at my destination, which has started to feel more like home over the last six weeks than either of the places I ostensibly "live."  It's funny, the ways people make homes.

Home has not been much a part of the travelogue of my life the past few months.  I'm experimenting with alterna-home.  Trying to survive a world with minimal compulsion; trying to experience what it's like to live in the world of chaos with only my own routines--healthy-ish ones.

But I realized a few things.  Letting myself feel things--really actually feel them--is probably not going to kill me.  Even if that means breaking down crying over "Can You Feel the Love Tonight?" in an Airport Gladstones.  Whether it was because I was exhausted, or homesick, I don't know. 

Or maybe because it reminded me of when I was younger and had gone to the premiere party of "The Lion King" with Shay, and it was the summer right before we stopped being innocent and instead started going to parties, and were invited places, and my life became one endless stream of go; do; be...being served at dark cool restaurants on Melrose when I was way too young; a studio party at Chasen's before they made it into a Whole Foods (or was it a Bristol Farms? Whatever); nights in the hills, the canyons, on the beaches until the wee hours...

There was a lot that was idyllic, sure.  But there was perhaps more that was dangerous.

And so, "Can You Feel the Love Tonight?" played, and drunk girls ate their calamari out of cartoonishly giant martini glasses, and the world kept on turning, and I had a moment in the middle of LAX.

When it happened, I texted a friend, to make sure I wasn't crazy.  He called back immediately.

"Just so you know," he responded, "You're a fucking loon.  Get some sleep.  Take a valium.  Have a drink.  Whatever it takes.  But if you send me another message about giant martini glasses and Elton John songs, I'm going to have you locked away."

I was in Las Vegas the other day.

I should back up.  I am always "somewhere" the "other day."  Seriously.

Last week I was in New York, San Francisco, on the Monterey Peninsula, Los Angeles, Las Vegas.  I should have been in DC on Sunday night, but that would have meant eight (different) airports in a week, and that was too much, even for me. 

But before I got to Las Vegas, I was in Los Angeles.

I hate Los Angeles.  I love-hate Los Angeles.  Los Angeles is...triggery...for me.  I say it in my way of a woman who took a year off of life and traveled the world, and wrote, and went to therapy like it was a full-time job.  All the cities I frequent are full of ghosts, but Los Angeles is where I came of age in a body that I long ago sloughed off like a cocoon.

So the canyons and the sunsets sometimes take on a homey-sinister cast--much like they do for anyone else, but they somehow feel uniquely strange to me...a non-native daughter.  A woman constantly in and out of her own skin.

Regardless, I was in Los Angeles for a day, coming from the San Francisco area, en route to Las Vegas.  So there was a night in Los Angeles, then the next morning I was on a hideous Friday morning Southwest Airlines flight to Las Vegas.  Those are the flights where they serve beer for breakfast, and even the flight attendants would be decked out in Ed Hardy if they were allowed.

But it wasn't until I was leaving Las Vegas that things got interesting--wandering around the airport with the friend with whom I was traveling.  We were looking for a bar.  It was when we were leaving the California Pizza Kitchen in search of a nightcap less toxic than the Center Seat's Little Helper (i.e., vodka tonic served in a giant tumbler--my nickname, not theirs) that we discovered McCarran airport has an abundance of slots and shops...but a dearth of watering holes.

We wandered.

One other thing that is important to note about McCarran International Airport is that it is a hellhole.  No offense to you denizens of Las Vegas.  But your airport is terrible.  I can't tell whether it is a casino or a hotel or an airport or what.  Maybe that is the point.

My flight was in the new(er?) portion of the airport.  My flight was a red-eye.  And I have been working a lot lately, which means I am not getting a lot of sleep, regardless.

The waiting for the flight became an existential slog from one end of the terminal to the other--playing slots and searching for a bar that did not exist ("Are we going to get a drink at Gordon Biersch?" "Do you want to get a drink there?" "Yeah, I think I want another drink before the flight, do you want one?" "Where is it--the Gordon Biersch?" "The terminal is not that big!" "I know but I can't find this place" "It's like the Brigadoon of airport bars...")

The conversation chattered on and on as we trudged aimlessly from one end of the airport to the other, pumping bills into machines, on the off-chance that the machines would spit paper back out.

Las Vegas has removed the enjoyment from playing slots.

One must understand this.  The machines still make the clanging noise of distributing coins upon a win.  The machines still have handles, levers to pull to spin the wheels with the "Bar" and "7" and the little cherries printed on them--whatever they mean.  But the machines neither churn out coins, nor do they permit the game-player (on most machines) to pull the lever.

What is the point?

There is no point.  This is a game of put your money in and hope that money comes out.  This is like feeding money into a soda machine with an "out of order" placard on it, pushing the coin return button, and sticking your hand in the change cup, hoping for a quarter.

You get nothing, no matter what.  But maybe you get lucky, once.

Back and forth, back and forth...bank of slots after bank of slots.

I turned to my friend.

"You know, when I was in law school, I had a layover in Vegas.  I put like, $0.75 in a machine as I ran through the airport, and I won hundreds of dollars."

It was the wrong thing to say.  She wanted more, so we continued to play.  Dollar after dollar.  All in search of a drink that was not forthcoming; waiting for a flight that did not appear to be getting any closer at a time that was not nearing.

Finally, a directory.

The bar was in the one lobe of the terminal we had left unexplored; a tiny wing.  The map had been printed upside-down.

Chi-ching!  Ping.

To the bar.  To Gordon Biersch.

But the wing was gated off.  Closed.  There was no such wing.  We'd trudged through the airport for two solid hours; lost $45 into the vast depths of the machine known as slots, and NO GORDON BIERSCH?

What the hell?!

By that point, our flight was finally being called, and the several glasses of wine we'd managed to imbibe during the trek had taken the edge off the week, the day, the hours.

I woke up in New York at 6am with a spectacular headache, forgetting that Las Vegas is almost two hours closer to Manhattan than is San Francisco; the memory of an all-evening walk through McCarran still imprinted on my feet.

As we climbed out of our coach seats, my friend's shoe snapped, as if to protest the long, ridiculous night we'd had of making laps around the airport and playing slots; bitching about a place we could not locate; reminiscing about the Vegas of times gone by...

Like retirees lapping a shopping mall.