So I’ve eaten my cake, had my song, and now the next day it’s time to reflect, right? My own personal New Year. I’m supposed to start paddling to Sweden. So to speak.

For this one I’m taking a raincheck. This year, aging is a constant process with no milestones. One cannot celebrate the incremental. One can only enjoy it.

Like most people that aren’t angling for a dictatorship or corner office (or both, as I suppose the former would provide the latter), my first reaction to learning a person’s age is to compare my position in life to theirs. Thus, when I discover that White Teeth was published when Zadie Smith when she was 25, brief existential panic ensues, but when I find out that Ira Glass was born in 1959 I calm back down. I sometimes think that I chose my profession because early fame is nearly nonexistent; architects are like novelists, “young” until 40. Actually, I prefer to think of architects as more like ninjas– plenty of young hotshots, but nobody can beat the sensei (at least not without a long backstory and a longer showdown). And, many of us are bald, and we wear lots of black.

My new book on infrastructure tells an easy way to discern between AC and DC high power lines:

“DC transmission lines sound quite different from AC ones. They click and crackle rather than buzz; the DC line sounds just like a Geiger counter. And when you walk under the conductors, the pace of the clicking accelerates, as if you were radioactive.”

Forget cancer, or sterility, or even the pervasive hum. Our grid is watching us.

So, if old novels and movies are to be trusted, in the time of our greatest generation people only drank two things: whisky and black coffee. I unfortunately can’t remember back to a time when my psyche hadn’t been aquafina’d— after fuzzy mornings, sore throats and headaches, and more than a few hangovers that combined all three, any ailment that strikes must first be treated through an immediate water infusion. It’s the modern equivalent of swinging a dead cat or butchering a goat over the local shrine. Beer and coffee are bad primarily for their water-depletion effects, not for any kind of liver damage or addictive qualities they might contain. I don’t even drink any more. I hydrate. I have special containers that are not cups for storing water to drink, at work.

I feel that I am not alone in this. But if our grandparents got such a great collective nickname only drinking things that were brown and damaging, what are we achieving through a proper ion balance? Better skin?

There isn’t really a good way of ending this post without an apology (of course water is good for you) or an absurdity (going on a diet that consists solely of hydrogenated oils thickened with refined sugar.) So I’m just going to fade out, imbibing equal quantities of my liquid trifecta: coffee, whiskey, and water. With any luck I’ll look just like Walter Cronkite in a few years.

Our house, like many in Southern California, features a gas floor heater. It’s a metal box of flame that heats and draws air in from beneath the house. At full blast it creates a small, hot, dry wind in the hallway outside of our bedroom.

Unlike a forced-air system, there is no return. Our heater is gently pressurizing our home, pushing warm gusts out the cracks around our windows and doors and making the water boil a tiny bit faster. A microclimate, complete with artificial light and sound, as our house hurtles through the cold silent dark.

I’d be willing to bet that the development of Disneyland and Los Angeles is roughly parallel. 1950’s: both coming into existence with seas of parking surrounding points of attraction, obsession with automobiles, futurism, and eclecticism. Fifteen years later, a belated (and somewhat failed) attempt to add mass rail transportation in a spasm of progressive action, followed by a 10-year slow leak of belief in founding principles. 1990’s, expansion through densification, as well as an increasingly self-aware critique of the California condition in general, but at the loss of any belief in futurity or progress. In recent years a partnership with other massive corporations and conglomerates to produce thrilling, controlled simulacra of urbanity, as well as a “rediscovery” and celebration of the mid-century roots.

The question is, which one is mirroring the other?

1. They’re cold.

2. They rarely have any odor, so the flavor comes to you all at once, without a preview.

3. You eat them with spoons, but they are not liquid. The spoon is there more as a digging tool than a reservoir.

4. There is a point, however, where they liquefy in your mouth, usually between the palate and tongue, like the ice is letting go and preparing to be swallowed.

5. They take on the shape of whatever they’re scooped or extruded with, but then slowly degrade through heat, gravity, and spoon attacks into a tiny bubbly swirly delicious animal.

This post-a-day thing is worrying me. It’s a lot easier to apologise for spastic activity than to face up to the fact that you don’t think of something thrilling to say every day (or really, ever).

So today, apologia:

My earlier post about the tentative nature of current music was all over the place. It didn’t make a lot of sense to rail against appropriation and critical usage and then harp on the constructed nature of reality.

I guess my real problem is the same reason I wince, just slightly, when talking about Rural Studio: they do fantastic things for needy people, but I still can’t quite get it out of my head that the work is partially condescending, finding the sublime in the savage or base. Like that Iron+Wine video where he stands in front of Super-8 footage of truck stops. There’s an anthropological bent to it that seems a little too detachedto respect the subject. Once again, I don’t want to suggest that RS is carpetbagging. Their work is commendable for the quality of design as well as the attention it draws to the forgotten. But I feel the question still needs to be asked: why experiment on these projects? What exactly is being communicated when using discarded car parts for homes for the irretrievably poor?

Okay, now I feel really guilty. I’m going to go drown some puppies to finish off this post.

Katy and I had dinner on the beach tonight, spur of the moment. Grapes and cheese and crackers on the sand. We talked about how we should try more often to make days different than the usual. “We should go to the beach more often,” Katy said, “after all, this is Southern California. It’s what we paid for.”

Now, there are probably a lot of people that would exclaim against that statement, either in a reactionary/contrarian LA way or with some kind of honest rebuttal. “I’m not here for the ocean. I’m here for the art/money/glamour/vibe/food/energy/jobs/drugs/etc.” And this might be partially true. But Katy never said anything about why we were here. Listen again. Hollywood studios, 16 million dollar homes, palm trees and international cusine and yes, the drugs– they all come, in some way or another, from the coast. You see the allusions refracted deep into Pasadena, in the colors and street names and footwear.

All of which makes Los Angeles’ denial of the ocean even more spectacular. At its formation it was an agricultural community, divorced from the beachfront resort towns at the perimiter by a few miles of scrub. But the growth came from the water, and now they are all one big mess, a mess in which topography and city planning has denied the very existence of a coastline from the Palisades to Manhattan Beach.

People in this city love to speak of the Valley as some sort of poor retarded younger sibling, one which always exceeds expectations (in its sushi, music, etc), if only because those expectations were rock bottom to begin with. But isn’t greater Los Angeles just another valley, hot and dry, no water in sight? This is the kind of city defined by a lack of boundaries– LA is never more LA than when the hills are shrouded by smog and the ocean a distant memory. In it’s own dreams, Los Angeles seams together Jefferson and Sunset, Sepulveda and Atlantic, no edges and no reality save itself.

Just watched The Apartment with Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine. Movie date night is improved by half-century old romantic comedies. Usually. Here is a list of things that shocked me (other than how long it was. 2:20 is lengthy for 1960!)

1. Apparently every executive in Manhattan had a mistress fifty years ago.

2. They didn’t print your name on perscriptions back then.

3. They had TV dinners, but no microwaves.

4. Jack Lemmon made 1/5 of my salary, but he paid 1/20 of my rent.

5. In Lemmon’s office there was a 30ft section of wall devoted to overcoats and hats.

6. Rolodexes are faster than Outlook contacts.

7. Nobody who was somebody drank beer.

8. Office Christmas parties have been all but decimated in the last 20 years.

9. #8 probably has something to do with all of the mistresses. And the martinis.

10. In 1960, even though elevators had buttons, there were still women in white gloves to press those buttons.