New Year in Los Angeles

Kinda weird for a Soviet immigrant like me to realize that you fled one failing society only to end up in a society that was also entering an accelerated phase of decline and degradation.

Evgenia and I were back in LA earlier this month.

When we left our cheap rent controlled apartment in Santa Monica in 2015 and moved to New York, it was the very end of the Obama Era. Hyper-gentrification had majorly kicked in, tech companies were moving in, the real estate bubble had been reinflated, and everyone pretended like the biggest financial cr…