La La Land

I live on the left coast, in what some people call "La La Land", in other words, Los Angeles, California.  There is a lot of pretense here.  It was a natural nest for movie productions and fantasy theme parks to emerge.  Walking the streets of Hollywood has always been a hoot.  Maybe more dangerous today, but still one is able to find someone in a clown suit and a red bulbous nose.

It's a nasty place with sordid lowlife hardly hidden beneath the surface of society.  The San Fernando Valley section is known for a plethora of porn studios.

Did you know that there is no such city as "Hollywood"?  It's just a zone number of Los Angeles.  And yet it has an honorary mayor.  Tourists come by the drove to walk the pavement and see names and hand prints from stars past and present.  But there's just nothing exciting about it if we were to call it the "Los Angeles walk of fame."

Did you know that the San Diego freeway does not go to San Diego?  The San Diego freeway is numbered 405, but it ceases to exist just a few miles south of Los Angeles where it dumps traffic onto the Golden State freeway, US 5.  Then about 90 miles south of that you will find San Diego.  And yet you can find countless signs around town identifying the 405 as the "San Diego" freeway.  If truth is a little relative, oh well, this is the left coast.

There is a baseball team down in Anaheim, CA, who are called the "Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim."  I kid you not.  It's not that the owners love our city, but baseball is a huge business, and Los Angeles represents a lucrative market for fans left over from the Dodgers.  Oh yeah, the Dodgers were swiped from Brooklyn many years ago, but now they have been in LA longer than they were in Brooklyn, so it almost seems legitimate.

The sports joke around town is the fact that LA has no NFL team and hasn't had one since the Raiders picked our pockets several years ago.

For all it's foibles and fantasy, Los Angeles is still my city.  I was born in the Angeles Hospital in downtown Los Angeles.  Here is where I grew up, partly in south central LA and the other part in Eagle Rock (another zone number in Los Angeles).  This is the place my wife said she would never again live (that was before the Lord called me to serve our church in Carson where we lived for more than 20 years.  Oh, by the way, Carson is not a zone of LA.  It has its own city council and mayor.  But three of the past mayors went to jail.

Ah, yes, this is home.  Now we live in another city in the megalopolis of LA, and likely we will only move when chauffeured in a hearse.  My story is just a microcosm of each one of us living in a fallen world, waiting for the Savior to take us home to glory.  I pray, dear God, though I am in the world, please don't let me be part of the world.