Short Stories

The Landing

I'm not sure what it was. Maybe I was sick of reading and dozing off every couple of pages. My neck sure hurt like a sonofabitch. I exhausted all the eye-fucking I was gonna do on this flight because the seat belt light had been illuminated for 10 minutes now as we began our descent. We were told to keep our fans on and shades drawn during the flight so as to keep the cabin cool. The older-yet-distinguished-looking man next to me was definitely encroaching into my arm space. You let that kind of thing slide when you got the window seat. Whatever the reason, I decided to pull the shade up to get a gander at what was below.

Normally, when flying into LAX, you get a pretty lousy view of South Central, Torrance, Inglewood, and other insignificant neighborhoods of Los Angeles. There's always the horse racing track, Hollywood Park, just below all the fuel droppings of every arriving flight into this airport. The racetrack also housed one of the lousiest casinos in the greater Los Angeles area. Nothing but degenerate gamblers whom were either on welfare or trust fund. The lazy, shiftless population of the selfish and unmotivated.

Hollywood Park: I sell my time here for an hourly wage.

Today, however, I was flying into Burbank, California, just north of Los Angeles. I pulled the shade up just in time to see Catalina in the distance and downtown LA just below. I scanned the grid with my eyes, following Sunset westward towards my home just passed the Silverlake reservoir. That fucker was bigger than the property that Dodger Stadium sat upon; parking lot and all.

Why the hell do I keep coming back here? My social life is an empty shell of who I was or what I was doing, or whatever the fuck people wanted to label other people by. You ain't shit unless you're doing something. I've become what I feared. A local burnout. We're everywhere. Still. People are nice enough to say hello whenever they run into us and always ask, "So what are you up to now?" I can't even fake it anymore. "Jack and shit," I tell them. And I usually never bother to ask what they've been into as of late.