it's 2:21 am in LA, CA - is anyone else awake and not sleeping???

morning

Hello. It's 10pm in Sydney and the gay Mardi Gras is about to start. We came back from LA recently, we were there for the whole of January. Can't wait to com back.

Pay to com.

hi. its 12:45 am in honolulu. i'll be asleep soon.

Hi Moley - I have a bunch of straight friends who are in Sydney and I have a crew here in LA who have just participated int he gay pride mardi gras. One co-worker who is going to do the rife from SF to LA for AIDS... shall i shill here for him??? He's an accountant and I am quite fond of him and his partner and hope his $$$$ are bigtime for the cause...

What about LA did you like in particular? Maybe the idea that the place is so huge compared to many cities that are are very centralized...

Well there was certainly that. Every day was a bit of an adventure. I liked it all, big and small. The sense of insecurity is quite addictive. It felt on the edge and both doomed and exciting. It was inspiring, but hard to digest.

Moley??? insecurity?? what/how do you mean that? I am fascinated by how people perceive my homeland - (born in Santa Monica, CA , 40 years ago) I just came home from Tunisia and Algeria and as Americans it was rellay quite a difference in the perception by algerians... it was very cool and interesting....since I have been back there have been 2 significant terrorist bombings directed toward american tourists and I wonder what any other plain visitor takes from a visit here, good or bad.

Erm, this is all relative to your perception of your own homeland's safety, of course. It was a feeling which perhaps was a combination of concrete factors. These, for me, included the houses perched high up and flush to the edge on dodgy looking hills; the heat; the man at Venice Beach singing 'jingle bells, jingle bells, help me get drunk'', the lack of social security and risk of medical consequences of injury (for us), the ease with which David Lynch characters came into our lives every day, the presence of real life cowboys and Indians (a strong outlaw mentality prevails still), and of course the hair-raising freeways. With all this was a great deal of excitement and anticipation of adventures. We had quite a few adventures! As Australians we found we were welcome in a lot of strange places. People on the bus were asking us to listen to their remixes, etc. We felt very much at home, but slightly closer to violence than we would feel in Sydney.

We made occasional forays into Santa Monica but spent a fair amount of time shuttling between Venice Beach and Hollywood. Each district is its own little universe, or that was our impression. It was a huge place, we underestimated distance and made all those classic first-week errors.