Fluoride blocks the Third Eye.

Inaugurating my second week at the Lakeshore co-op! I'm basically completely moved in and it's still such a novelty to have my own space again, to host friends and board game nights, or to have my decorations up instead of boxed. I was excited to have my massive desk back, the same one I hauled off the streets of Berkeley with Talia and then spent an hour wiping hobo poop off of.

I should block out weekends where I don't skip town, but until then, the wilderness beckons. This past weekend, we opted for the concrete jungle side of things, and the main quest was the grunion runs in SoCal.  Of course we incidentally picked the weekend that LA Pride occurs, as well as the end point of AIDS Lifecycle.

It's hard to believe that it's been a year since I was last here.

I expected to be in a weird headspace to be in LA, but I didn't even think of last year until now. It's been a lot of forgetting and accepting that I am indeed better off, not that it's been completely easy. Too bad no one else had seen 500 Days of Summer, or I could have totally gone back to the Bradbury. That was one sunny afternoon in 2012 where I felt like the pieces all fit and I was loved, and now it's just a small sweet nugget of memory, of me getting to know Los Angeles, laughing at the girl who wanted a picture at Angels Knoll with her stuffed T-Rex by her side.

The Aesop lesson is on a post-it I've had on my desktop for the past year: "Respect yourself enough to walk away from anything that no longer serves you, grows you, or makes you happy."

We flopped down on the camouflage blanket at the beach at 1 am. No fish fucking away. We wade into the water, watch the foam chase up our ankles, and then sneak into the house to go straight to bed. I wake up early and have a tour of the poisonous garden before rousing everyone else.

Cooking and then serving breakfast on a little pool-side terrace is shockingly not the worst thing ever. Surprise. We had a solid spread of breakfastibles, and I don't think I would have made it through the Getty without this early load of eggs and carbo-action. I want a little tub of honey almond cream cheese now.

Ema then led us on a tour of the Hollywood Sign and the Universal Studios backlots from above.

The meat troughs at Hae Jang Chon still run deep and fast, and as soon as we were seated, the banchan flew over. Like amateurs, we demolished the first wave and the meaty clouds didn't even descend until the second filling of the fish cake. Once the safe meats had been tackled, we opted for both stomachs and some miniature octopi. The abomasum (fourth and final stomach of Bessie) was my favorite of the not-so-awful offal (sorry, I had to), and it was a Pioppini mushroomy chew. I left room for the epic kimchi fried rice and sikye, but neither were forthcoming. Everyone else had surrendered at this point, so I wasn't going to one-man army it.

Of course, after throwing the ring into Mount Meat, it only made sense to flop down at Santa Monica beach like voluptuous whalepeople. The fish failed to show up again to get their rocks off, so we parted for WeHo to see if some action was to be had. The Gayborhood definitely had turned into a gay refugee camp for the weekend, and the Abbey had a line that went on and on and on. We all called dibs on various menfolk as they ebbed and flowed by us.

After being at SinBala for an hour, our Din Tai Fung reservation finally buzzed. In another crowd, we would totally have marched off for a second load of 小籠包. SinBala did indeed hit the spot though: oyster pancake, homemade sausage over rice, fried turnip cake, dumplings x 2, and then shaved ice to close it all up.

In n' Out wrapped up the weekend, though some of us subsisted on figs, Okinawan sugar, and pure light.