jeudi 5 mars 2026
12:22
I enjoy a clean house, me. Yes, Lord.
It was my intention to go for a morning hike or bike, or combination of the two the way I did the other day when I rode my electric bicycle to Culver City Stairs and spent an hour there. Mm, in those moments, I think about why I love living in Los Angeles.
Why do you pay rent here? L.A. is too expensive.
It’s the lifestyle for me.
Yes, the cost of living in Los Angeles is high as girafe pussy*, as my mother would so eloquently phrase any of the day-to-day or month-to-month expenses where I live. I understand the “you may as well live in another city, somewhere cheap, and visit L.A., you’re always somewhere else anyway” perspective that my best guy friend, Calvin, has been the most recent to share.
Yeah, I’ve tended to be on the move. On a few occasions over my years living in L.A., I’ve had different friends (that I’ve met here in L.A.) wonder if I’d moved away. I hadn’t. I was still paying rent right here in Los Angeles.
When Beverly Hills mandated closure of all non-essential businesses, ahead of its Los Angeles county neighbors, I only diddle-daddled around for a little bit, delivering Postmates on my manual pedal bicycle with my new found free time, before hopping on the next vessel smoking headed South. I spend ‘bout three months down home in Louisiana and Atlanta while those unemployment checks, courtesy of being furloughed from my full-time luxury retail job, were hitting my account. Oh, it was lovely! I wouldn’t mind COVID-19 striking again, if earning an income while maintaining autonomy (and health) would be as easy.
As much as I devoured delicious meals from eateries priced affordably, and basked in the rhythym and blues of the way my people move, and delighted in small talk with strangers, ‘cause that’s what we do, I eventually had to get back to my groove.
L.A. is my groove.
L.A. is my groove and somehow I knew it before I’d ever been.
My mother, though raised in Louisiana, was born in Los Angeles. Her mother, Granny Mable, had been shipped off, from a small hamlet in South Louisiana to California, during childhood. They say Granny was plucked from Vacherie and plopped into Los Angeles to help an auntie around the house and with the kids. She, herself, was only twelve. Some kind of way, by fifteen, Granny was pregnant with a grown man’s baby. (Note to self, try to find his gravestone or obituary to subtract her birth year from his.. Granny told me a man started taking advantage of her when she moved in with her auntie in California; now that I’m grown, I have all sorts of questions. How grown was he?? How did he have access to her??). I suppose the birth of her own child is what sent her back home to Louisiana. The kids that she helped raise are now aunties** to me here in Los Angeles and have nothing but positive things to say about Mable to this day.
From my mother’s birth certificate saying Los Angeles to her mother saying, telling the story whenver anyone would listen, how her mother gave her away to an aunt in California, from an early age, I had a loose familiarity with a place named L.A.
13:23
AROUNDwithTK is an online journal of sorts, transcriptions of words I’ve written by hand in one of many notebooks or journals. Other writers have readers, if you’re here, I consider you one of my riders. Thanks for coming along and I hope you’ll stick AROUND.
Glossary
* high as giraffe pussy = expensive. a way of classifying the cost of an item or experience as more than she wishes to ever pay, I’ve only ever heard used by my mother (or someone that’s familiar with my mother and mimicking her/me)
Where to next?
Read (related): A Brilliant Mess of a Being
Connect (Instagram): @aroundwithTK
Watch (vlog): Living in L.A.: Hollywood Hotspots, Hikes, Late Nights & Sunset Views