Leave the bubble at home...

People in LA, including me, complain of "the bubble" - the disconnectedness and isolation you can experience in such a sprawling megacity. It used to make me crazy, but now I accept that there will be periods of complete aloneness, even though my friends or some interesting distraction may only be a mile or so away. I enjoy these quiet times and use them to feed off of whatever I've got in me. (You'd be surprised at what you can find lying around in your psyche!) Then, of course, there are the fast and action-packed, super-social times where life becomes very sensorially oriented and time moves in a different way. Very little conscious production goes on here, it's all impulse and instinct. Errors are made. Time and space move like waves and so one's job, by default, becomes surfer extraordinaire. The worst is when you bring your bubble to the wave machine. Either your bubble's gonna crack and spill you on to the street like an egg yolk, or the world is going to seem more out of reach than ever.

(photo by Melvin Sokolsky)