Item: 1 bag of raw pecan halves

I think about Southern California sometimes in its role as the land of fruits and nuts (those being types of people).  Also sometimes referred to as that area toward which the US is tilted so that everything loose ends up here.  I wonder, do those types of people just gravitate here, or does living here create them?

I think that, really, living in Los Angeles is not a rational choice.  I think we are all, somehow, dimly aware of this.  Once you've made an irrational choice, it engenders a little bit more recklessness, a little bit more living for the minute, a little more who cares what people think, resulting in the prototypical free spirit.

We're also used to thinking about ourselves as the end point, the place where the land ends, making us the last resort for freaks.  It's kind of like being on the bottom rung as far as that goes.  LA can't not take you, because there's nowhere else to go.  Which is actually 1 of the things I find most endearing about LA:  it's the anti-snob.  We take anybody.