Diary of Surrender, Week Six: War
Maybe we’re always at war and we just don’t know it.
I’m writing a diary about my year of giving up, although I may give up on this too. Who knows? You can read about why I’m giving up here, and the previous week of saying fuck it here. (The term “week” is used loosely).
On Wednesday I found myself sitting in the middle of Pershing Square, screaming and crying on a three-way call between a credit bureau and my father. I found myself in this predicament because the credit bureau refused to lift a freeze on my father’s account, and therefore no one could run his credit. They proclaimed that there was no way for us to verify his account over the phone, or online, and we would have to send hard copies of “documents” — they never specified what kind — to a P.O. Box in Texas. I snapped.
If you’re familiar with Pershing Square in downtown Los Angeles, you know that it’s already full of mentally ill people screaming into the abyss, so no one noticed my meltdown. And you would also know that Pershing Square is a visual blight on Los Angeles, a horrible mishmash of concrete and orange concrete and purple concrete, a result of someone who decided that concrete was somehow better than grass and trees. Rumor has it that Pershing Square was once beautiful, before it was assaulted by a group of developers or city…
