Los Angeles
Los Angeles? really? well, yeah. I must, right? I've lived most of my life in Los Angeles, right? that's an appreciation of sorts. funny, or maybe just curious, since before this appreciation I've never really faced or admitted that I appreciated Los Angeles. I've always been here because I couldn't help it. c'mon! grow up! at least that much. let's look at my history with Los Angeles, do you mind? in 1965 I graduated from college, married, with a child, and took a job with The Boeing Company in Seattle. by the end of 1965, The Boeing Company had assigned me to a project - the Lunar Orbiter - and, as it turned out, had consigned me to spend half of the next two and a half years in Los Angeles. I think when that project completed, I had worked for The Boeing Company for three years, and spent a year and a half in Los Angeles, not consecutively, but for 8 weeks then for 10 weeks, and so on, with weeks in Seattle between those intervals. now let me admit too that I was very work-oriented in those intervals in Los Angeles and in Seattle. I might as well have been in Area 51. in Seattle, my wife had to almost literally take my blinders off to get me to enjoy the house we had bought, the neighbors we had, the night spots we could afford, the tourist spots around us. otherwise I might have had no experience of Seattle. in Los Angeles, my lead engineer first, and my wife later when she came down for a while, had to take my hands off the keyboard or make me put down my pen (we used fountain pens in those long ago days) and take me out to strip clubs, fancy bars, an Italian restaurant, a place in the mountains where we could ride horses, Disneyland, a wild animal park, Knott's Berry Farm, otherwise I might have had no experience of Los Angeles. and when the project finished, I went back to Seattle expecting to live there the rest of my life. well, duh, The Boeing Company sent me to Houston. it should have been exciting as hell, I got to work on the Apollo Project! but I got to work in a dirty little secret part of the Apollo Project that was analyzing what had been done up til the fire that burned three astronauts alive. it was horrible. I kept uncovering things that had been done that didn't cause the fire, but they were just bad engineering practices that, well, nobody wanted to hear about. so I went to graduate school and made me, The Boeing Company, and the Apollo Project all happier. five years later, I took a job with The Martin-Marietta Aerospace Division in Denver, where I worked on a sequence of projects and suddenly found myself on the way to Los Angeles again, to work on the Viking Project. I thought it would be a three-month job here, but it got extended by 15 weeks then by three months and so forth, and eventually I had been here over two years and the project was over. hunh! well, as I remember it, Martin-Marietta wanted me to come back to Denver for less pay and less authority. hunh. instead, JPL offered me a job at the same pay and a slight increase in authority. JPL won. I worked there for ten years or so, and had a helluva good time in a string of projects in the unmanned exploration of space. I worked my way into a dead end and left JPL, and spent ten years doing free-lance programming, but I wasn't very good at business. I went back to work as an employee and worked for fifteen years as a computer professional for an insurance company. so I've lived in Los Angeles (or if you'd rather, in Montrose and Glendale and Bell Gardens and North Hollywood and Canoga Park and Encino) for almost 42 years (out of 74 total). most of that has been by choice - meaning I'd've had to work at getting out of Los Angeles instead of just cruising along in Los Angeles. and the truth is, as I finally see tonight, that I've enjoyed and been amused by my work here, by the people I've met, by the diversity of the city, by the good feelings I've had here most of this time, by the awe I've sometimes felt, and lately, since January of 2010, by the poetry here and the fellowship I've found among Los Angeles' poets. yes, I appreciate Los Angeles.
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