Horror Conveyed

“Every now and again you could see a coyote on a regular street. Sometimes the ground would shake and the phones would get jammed and you couldn’t ascertain if everyone you knew was okay because not everyone updated Facebook to say FELT IT. They told us we’d be drinking our own piss within the year thanks to drought conditions and I’d awake from dreams where I had become so dehydrated that I needed a water dropper applied to me to reduce the spongy cardboardness that my flesh had taken on as a result of rampant lack of drinking water.”
 — There’s other stuff here about some road in New Jersey or whatever but the best part of this piece from the ubiquitous Taffy Brodesser-Akner is this paragraph about how fucking frightening and terrible and generally garbagey Los Angeles is. One of the ways you can tell she’s a great writer is she doesn’t even have to get into its unparalleled status as a vapid and soulless and cynical city lacking in charm or taste or basic human grace; she is able to convey the essence of the horrible nightmare shithole that all right-minded people pity and despise in just three sentences about environmental circumstances.