Los Angeles stinks. Not just of the usual things: sex, money, suntan oil, hipster food, surfer wax — odours that I like. There’s a new whiff in town, and it’s a bad one. Weed.
The smell of marijuana hangs over LA like an invisible menace. It’s an omnipresent fug. To walk from one end of a street to the other, whether it’s along the chaotic Hollywood Boulevard or the half-gentrified, half-terrifying Broadway in downtown LA, is to risk developing a skunk habit. I swear I almost got high popping out for a bottle of Dr Pepper.
It’s such an awful smell. It’s the smell of a Nietzsche-reading teenager’s bedroom, the smell of an old hippy’s laundry, the smell of teenage delinquency sprinkled with some foul thing from nature that should have been left in the earth.
It’s so bad that a savvy 62-year-old dope-user in Venice Beach has had the brainwave of selling odour-controlling purses.
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