It's just a shot away

Today is Mick Jagger's birthday. Mother pretends like it doesn't matter but drinks an extra glass of wine when I'm not watching.

When my father first left New York and came to Los Angeles he brought his Rollings Stones albums and the clothes on his back. Nothing more. He found a city with the shiniest of surfaces where everything seemed so perfectly polished that there couldn't possibly be any room for sadness or grief.

He already knew that nothing ever is what it initially looks like, but it was still going to take some time before he realized that with LA it wasn't just a few scratches in the armor. The whole city was rotten down to its very foundation, and true ugliness can never be completely covered.