Shillelagh of the Valley by Dan Johnson

“Add to the list of things I didn’t realize at the time: I was being sucked into the city’s underground. Los Angeles has this semi-sentient energy that sorts transplants on a binary. You’re either going to make it, kid, or you’re not. For people like me with few prospects, dwindling reserves of cash, rocky relationships, and nowhere else to go, the city’s vampiric quality begins to drag you over the shoals into the bone-yard of lost souls. You get an eye for it.
”The wasted and irretrievable walk the streets and hide in rent-controlled apartments. Constant heat and antiseptic sun have cracked and destroyed the ties that kept them functioning. Gone are the constraints of decency, propriety, and ambition. In their place lurks a new aspiration—the realization of madness, the velocity that comes with losing control, the endurance of the damned.
”This, I told myself, was worth writing about. This was something. This was the world as it was. The refuse of the American Dream, the discarded parts, the offal Upton Sinclair had written about, the transactional losers that haunted Mark Twain’s wit—they accumulated here, at bottom, where the American continent offered one last, wild, wet bacchanal before the rains washed the doomed out to sea.
”Pessimistic? Sure. Untruthful? Not by a long shot.
”I began to understand the city as I slipped beneath the water line of the great iceberg. A litany of shitty, thankless, psychically destructive jobs faded the cherished myths of cantilevered decks and the safety of security fences. I began to identify more and more with the wicked and demonized who lived beyond such things. Whose very presence was a perversion of those things. The downtrodden and disfigured. The great, unsung majority of Angelenos whose irrational despair at finally learning the score of the great rigged game made the cantilevered deck so essential with their envy, and the security fences and cameras so necessary with our capacity for rage.”

-Dan Johnson, 2021