The building was located on Rossmore Avenue, at the northern edge of Hancock Park on a long, sweeping, busy block before it became Vine Street where it hit a crossroads at Melrose and the neighborhood took a hard turn away from the grimly lit tall apartment buildings and quickly shrank back to reveal drab strip malls, dirty sidewalks, and the general squalor of Hollywood. Turn around and go south on Rossmore and you’d see block upon block of voluminous mansions set back from the road, dark most of the time, shielded from the world behind tall hedges and fences. Southeast led to the Larchmont area. A long block of coffee, donut, and ice cream shops with overpriced clothing in between.

I preferred the Hollywood side. The freaks, the weirdos, the addicts, the shopping carts. People of all shapes, colors and sizes. The Peruvian restaurant on the corner, the Filipino place a little further on down the road, the world famous Wild Card boxing just up the street.

The two women in the office were nice and we didn’t have to really sign anything except a paper saying if they wanted us out it would take a month. On a second day, there was an hour of training and then we were released into the wild. I remember thinking to myself the whole process seemed all too easy.

And so a month later, my wife, my son, and I moved from the well worn, familiar streets of Santa Monica ten miles toward the interior of Los Angeles. Further toward the sprawl, the neverending streets. Los Angeles and all it’s satellite neighborhoods encompasses an enormous amount of concrete from the tip of Malibu nearly all the way to the border of Mexico, from Santa Clarita out to San Bernandino, from Riverside to Anaheim. Close to 19 million people are spread around out here all said and done, almost the entire population of Australia. It sounds impossible until you drive it or land in it at night from a place and see lights from horizon to horizon. Out here you’ll never see the stars at night, maybe one or two of the brightest, but you forget what the Milky Way Galaxy looks like. It’s possible that’s why people here seem so out of touch with reality and so in tune with themselves. You’re isolated here. To get from one place to the next you end up in the bubble of your car riding on the freeways and surface streets, areas so alien to the human brain it’s almost as if you don’t even register them. Lost in the endless glow of red taillights. All else is black, whirring death. Millions of cars, each one thousands of pounds of plastic and steel hurtling through time at 60, 70, 80, 90 miles per hour. And we’re reminded every so often when it fails. We slow and watch and see the shredded carapaces of the vehicles in which we sit.

Living in LA is like a weird, ongoing dream you never want to wake up from and at the same time gives you that funny feeling you are dreaming while it’s happening. None of it makes sense, but there’s no snow or ice.

For the entirety of my Los Angeles life, I have lived close to the ocean, at one point so close I could hear the roar of the surf as I put my head on the pillow at night. Now, inland, it didn’t feel as bad as I thought. I probably went to the beach a couple times a year anyway. It would always be there if I needed it.