Fictional Diversions

I've suddenly found time to read again. I haven't made a dent in the 300 or so magazines laying about the house. Why do I even have a subscription to Rolling Stone anyway? I blame James Ellroy for my GQs, but nothing explains all the other shit I get.

I've picked up books instead. Rodger Jacobs turned me on to Joan Didion's Play It As It Lays. I'm a sucker for LA-based fiction (hence the Ellroy obsession). Turns out one of the characters in the book has my same name! Which is weird because my entire life, I've only met about 5 people with whom I share that.

But the book was great. It's the story of a pathologically selfish 60s starlet decidely indifferent to the disaster she creates in the lives of those around her. It's painfully brilliant. I'll post the same excerpt he referenced, which just happened to be my favorite passage:

She walked back to the car and sat for a long while in the parking lot, idling the engine and watching a woman in a muumuu walk out of the Carolina Pines motel and cross the street to a supermarket. The woman walked in small mincing steps and kept raising her hand to shield her eyes from the vacant sunlight. As if in trance Maria watched the woman, for it seemed to her then that she was watching the dead still center of the world, the quintessential intersection of nothing.

Quintessential intersection of nothing. Bitter and poignant. And yet, the completely opposite experience I've had in this town that I love.

L'sigh. It's so good to be a native.

Though that is how I feel about Vegas. It's all about perception, isn't it?