Downtown L.A. is a mean, dirty, and ugly place at ground level. The streets are in poor condition, as are the broken humans who live in their cardboard sidewalk castles. At lunchtime, the suits and skirts come out and give the appearance of civilization to the city. Beautiful tall, shiny buildings and seventy-five-thousand-dollar cars mix in with relics of a beaten-down, decrepit past. Surrounding this is a semi-industrial landscape to the east, the very rich and totally poor west, a hill to the north that gives the impression of a disconnected, hollow, failing, and struggling residential life, and the violence and poverty of the south. However, in the first light of dawn, driving above this on the wonderful freeway, the rays of a new days sun glisten on concrete and glass, and all is quiet and all is calm. It is beautiful, it is perfect, and I am in love with this great and terrible city.