I Love LA
This is not your home
You’re here likely to evade your problems
The problems of your youth.
The insecurities that plague your days
And the burden of the identify you have bore.
You’re here to form new groups and make new friends
To talk about the home you outgrew and the old ways of thinking that remain there
But you too, are still of the old mind and old patterns
You simply bring that baggage from there to here.
Under false claims of freedom and creativity
You too live falsely under different personas
How do I know this? I too lived a lie.
Pretending to be someone I knew nothing of
Pretending pretending pretending
A skill I developed before I knew my own name
To cool my Father’s pensive stares
The woo the neighborhood girls
To earn the city’s “respect”.
We all pretend.
Pretend to be happy when we are not
Pretend to be about a cause when we have no idea of it’s weight
Pretend to not know so that we are free from any consequences.
We have all pretended.
The truth is there is nothing on the other side of your rainbow.
There is no secret fortress
There is no community that will embrace, edify and restore you.
Because the problems that you left with
Are the same problems you bring here
Baggage in tow.
You cannot escape yourself.
It doesn’t matter the accolades
The fame
The power or wealth
No amount of it can fix the problems of the heart.
Regardless of where you are.
Your problems begin and end with you.
I am so grateful to Los Angeles
For what it has given me
For what I have used of it to explore aspects of myself
For the space it has given me
For the time I have spent walking within it
However, this place is not my home.
I am merely a visitor, who has returned to finish a job.
To finish what I had started.
I don’t know where life has for me
But this place was the destination to distill this understanding.
The game is the game.
What you bring to it is what you’ll receive of it.
It’s a time old tale, but true it is.
You can’t take anything with you, nor can you ask of it anything.
“So what is there to do with it?” You ask
Well, I reply, Why must there be something to do with it?
I came to Los Angeles lost and in search of validation.
And in leaving years back I recognized that I was the only one capable of answering my question.
And that no one could help me with a problem that I had unknowingly created
The need for acceptance
The need for respect
The need to be “Seen”
It begins there.
Cleverly etched in one’s mind as a deservedness.
And as it spawns, it creates great pain.
This album is a love letter to Los Angeles
Written with clarity it reflects much of the growth that I had come to experience while living here. Having the distance and time to examine that baggage that once interfere with my latent creativity.
It happened here.