It lasted 36 hours before the homeless threw it over the edge.

His wife put one there last week, along with some silk flowers. The homeless threw her votive into the street but not before using it to set fire to the silk flowers. The wireframe and ashes were still there until I cleaned 'em up.

LA Parks rousted the homeless yesterday.

I felt bad because they all shuffle around the bike path looking pensive as the stuff they haven't hauled off in their shopping carts gets swept into dump trucks as volunteers with stacks of biohazard-thick garbage bags hurl their accreted possessions into oblivion. There was a social worker there; she set up in one of the cleaned-out drainage tunnels that wash their shit out to the ocean whenever it rains but no one was talking to her.

But there wasn't any garbage once I was past the truck. And when I saw two people hanging out down by the water, I also saw their bicycles and their picnic basket. CITIZENS. And the three bicyclists in a row after that? All smiled and waved, which on the bike path, amongst LA bicyclists, is the equivalent of hurling your arms around someone and kissing them on the lips.

Last night, of course, the homeless were on the path, reasserting their possession of the territory. Hassling anyone who rode by. Shouting at me for having a headlight. You see, it's their river we just pass through.

From a libertarian standpoint, they're the stakeholders. Except of course this is not an economic argument: the actual stakeholders get merely symbolic involvement. And they aren't all homeless? But I'm developing a deep-seated hatred of the LA river homeless and I don't like it.

The difference between parks in LA and parks in Seattle is parks in LA are owned by who knows who, who never talk to each other, who create a balkanized patchwork where no one is really responsible. It's 2019 and they're just now thinking this is a bad idea because it's Los Angeles and without graft and corruption this place has no economy.

it was just a candle.