December, Los Angeles

Have I been here eight months already? It doesn't seem possible.

After thirty years, you get better in touch with the seasons than you know. That first cool breeze, that tint on the leaves, that means change, that time is passing, and you recognize it on levels you don't always recognize. Until you end up in Los Angeles bereft of your seasonal signposts, and next thing you know, you're waking up in mid-December, and the fall's gone before you knew it had ever even arrived. Christmas is right around the corner, but you're still thinking it's late July, and you've barely had a chance to pull on a sweater.

It was unseasonably cold two weeks ago, according to the weatherman, consisting of temperatures in the low 60's. This was followed by a week of unseasonably warm weather in the mid 70's, which leads you to wonder what the hell kind of place has a season that's apparently got a standard variable of around half a notch on a kitchen thermometer.

I was driving home from work the other night and noticed that some of the houses on the hillside were decorated with blinking multicolored lights, and I swear it took me a moment to figure out what they were for.

Tonight, the missus and I debated the merits of just going ahead and buying an artificial tree this year, something I normally find so unspeakable that it borders on sacrilegious. But December's snuck up on us this year, and we haven't the time to go on an outing to find one, and there's no Italian guys around the corner blaring holiday music to sell us one, no Brooklyn high school kid looking for a few extra bucks to lug it up to our third floor walkup. No time. An artificial tree's better than nothing, right? Even if it doesn't have that smell.

There are times when I like Los Angeles, when I'm standing in my backyard and looking up at the lights dotting the hillside at sunset, enjoying a beer and cooking a burger on the grill. Coming back from a fine meal along Mulholland Drive at dusk, when the city shimmers like pinpricks of light through gauze. And there's times when I hate it, when some Latino punk in an Infiniti cuts me off, roars to a stop at the light, then pulls out a switchblade and scratches the Audi next to him out of pure spite and reminds me that this is a place where bad things can lurk in shadows that aren't very far away.

L.A., man. L.A. can be hard. It's an ugly place that does its best to pretty itself up, at times, and at other times it just doesn't give a damn. And Christmas in Los Angeles is like the Santa in the mall: you take a look, shake your head, and just wonder what a guy like that's doing in a place like this.

Don't mind me, I'm a Nor'eastern boy at heart, and I'm just missing the snow. And I can't help but reminisce about a December spent walking Fifth Avenue, weaving through the crowds gaping at the shop windows, stopping in at Saint Patrick's decorated with ribbons and wreaths to light a candle, wandering past the tree at Rockefeller, meeting the missus for dinner at Gramercy Tavern, and beating back the winter wind with a nice whisky followed by a Guinness and good friends.

Of course, give me a couple years, and I'll be back east with the Guinness and the friends, stomping the slush off my boots, bitching about the cold and reminiscing about Los Angeles, where it's 85 and sunny, all year round.