Last November, I went with a group of friends to see an art project at the Los Angeles River called What Water Wants. We all wore headphones and listened to Rosten Woo’s project about the LA basin’s watersheds.

Activists and artists and planners and researchers have been working for decades on a new plan to reclaim the river. In the ‘30s, the Army Corps of Engineers strait-jacketed it with concrete channels. But last year, my friends and I saw a heron pecking in the grasses at the foot of a tree. We watched water flow towards the ocean. The area across from us would soon be turned into a park. What Mike Davis once called “the redemption of Los Angeles’s riparian landscapes” seemed so close we could taste it.

I wanted to enter SOULHOUSE. But they were closed. So I snapped a picture and ended up, in an insomniac moment at 2am, distracting myself not with an appointment for inner crystals but with a rabbit hole of questions about this house of soul: Why does a music producer and “sound healer” by the beach have an Alzheimer’s nonprofit that he started with Dionne Warwick and an OnlyFans model?

Perhaps this doesn’t happen to you. 

Research about anonymous corporations and money laundering is a minor habit. It can be a useful lens through which I see the business world, or it can be like an inner hammer, where, when some part of me is longing for escape, everything I see in the world looks like a distracting nail. 

My theory is that the confusion on Alex Turner’s face was about me, and whether it was a good or a bad thing that I was a fan of his band. S. looked great in black pants and lipstick. But I had hurried out to the bar in an old sweater and a ponytail. My five year-old daughter had made me a necklace out of rubber bands on her Rainbow Loom. I was wearing it. And S. and I were so direct, so unfazed, so over caring what people thought of us. S. reassured them that “Mini Mansions” was also a very good name for a band. Were we flirting? Or being patronizing? I landed right on the cusp — cute girl in a bar? or soccer mom? Unclear…

Radical walking tours and a zine paying tribute to Mike Davis. Davis was mythically angry, but his work also made a shared history of solidarity visible. He saw cities—big, crowded, and dense, with all their flaws—as a source of hope. We want to bring alive his vision of being together, densely, so that we can both live well and protect green spaces outside the city walls. So we invited Los Angeles, the city that Mike raged against and loved, to party in his honor…

 I once read a parenting blog entry that made me so angry, I pretty much stopped reading parenting blogs. It was an interview with a woman who had a high-level position in finance. Yes, she was a banker, so, perhaps I’m biased. But when she was asked for tips about how to get your kids out in the morning, she said something about making organic oatmeal in large batches on Sunday night so that you could spend your precious minutes in the morning “eating together.”

Steffie Nelson, Stacie Stukin, Jori Finkel and I read from our essays about Joan Didion at the Santa Monica Library — Stukin is with me above.

Also, around this time, The Atlantic where a reporter visited some of the locations that I had discovered were connected with Didion, in my primary reporting on the Didion family’s holdings.

Said other reporter may have been encouraged, perhaps by someone in a fact-checking position, to cite my work directly—which she did.