As a follow-up on some of my hospital thoughts, another part of my experience was actually leaving the place. I arrived around 10:00 pm on a Tuesday and left about 40 hours later. All things considered, that’s not an overly-long stay. However, as I left the parking lot and drove toward the 110—as merging on to a freeway is the most LA way to be reminded you’re back in the real world—I felt incredibly disoriented.

It’s not just that time seems to stand still, but because of the sterile and ubiquitous nature of hospital rooms, I could have been anywhere. Returning to Los Angeles felt like I’d warped into another world after spending nearly two days staring at the same off-white walls, watching repeats of Law and Order: SVU and listening to my roommate repeat the same Christian affirmations on his phone for hours on end.

There have certainly been two-day stretches where I haven’t left my apartment before, but I’m always reminded of where I am by the helicopters overhead, the cars honking from the intersection, the customers of the plumbing store loading materials into trucks in the parking lot outside my window. I can haul my laundry upstairs and have a pretty decent vantage point of Koreatown from the top. I could lie in bed for days on end and still know I’m in LA.

In the hospital, it’s different. All I hear are asynchronous beeps, all I can see out the window—if there is one—is a concrete parking garage. The news on TV reminds me that LA is out there, somewhere, having car chases and traffic jams, but from my vantage point it might as well be Mars. I didn’t realize it until I left, but I was slowly going crazy while I was stuck there.

It makes me think of everyone who has extended stays in these places, or the elderly living out their terms in the death-care equivalent. People who have no connection to the world outside of four, unchanging walls, stuck in the places the rest of us don’t have to be reminded they exist in. We have such a deformed view of what care entails in this country, and I doubt it’s going to get any better anytime soon.

Jackie-O Motherfucker live at Zebulon

I can’t tell if this is an I’m just getting old complaint, but last night at the JOMF show, three bands were set to play and doors opened at eight, with Jackie-O’s headlining set scheduled for 10:20 pm. To me that’s just wild, especially given the first band went on after a 20 minute delay. A Thursday night show with three bands taking as many hours to wrap up—two of which had 20-30 minute sets—is just way too long.

Again, though, maybe I’m just getting old, and it was nice to hear “Hey! Mr. Sky” live.

WU LYF at the Lodge Room

Fifteen years ago, WU LYF were all the hype and they had this lore about their live shows being a hefty dose of energy amidst a bland, guys-with-moustaches-and-banjos indie rock scene. After being broken up since 2012, they’re back with a solid new album and a tour to boot.

I can’t tell if I’m just getting older, or everybody is, or there’s a legitimate disconnect in live shows now against back then, but it’s just so strange to watch a crowd stay relatively still for pretty dance-worthy music. Maybe it’s just because I came up from the punk scene where any given show would have complete strangers falling over each other and helping one another up in a communal joy, but it’s weird to see a rock band have a fairly sterile response (at least considering the energy they provided).

Nevertheless, they were solid, but I spent a lot of time wondering about if the relatively dormant crowd was a sign of an increasingly broken society, or if we’re all just fifteen years older and our knees can’t take jumping around as much as they used to.