On this morning, I am confronted with the unsettling fact that I cannot afford Los Angeles. It is madness how much rent I pay to be here—rent, mind you, on a place that offends my senses on a daily—nay, hourly!—basis. Mostly my nose and my eyes are offended, but often my ears are too. It is a place that is more like a tomb than a home, and I pay very dearly for this privilege, it is the privilege of knowing death in life, but I do not need to pay so high a price for that, for I am always knowing that, I have known it since I slipped into this world through the thin skin of All Hallows Eve, death is always with me, I do not need to live in an expensive tomb! I consider it profoundly lamentable, the changes that have happened to Los Angeles over the past 15 years, I would put that offhand number to the years it's been since L.A. began its earnest stride toward being as expensive as New York, as expensive and, therefore, as soulless, a city devised by the calculating greedy mind of the developer and hostile to the person without money and/or property. Of course, we will never have her back, the city who was all haphazard beauty, all rough heart, she was not yet spun by the bloodless Rumpelstiltskins who think net worth is the only game worth winning.