Los Angeles is an unreal city. Unreal as in “not real,” as opposed to “cool” or “rad” or “bitchin.” It’s a desert mirage, a metropolis built where no metropolis ought to live, and as such contains all the improbability of its geography: a sprawling, gridlocked playground of the absurdly rich and impossibly desperate, drenched in the near-constant haze of smog and sun. Los Angeleans are easy to spot because they carry with them—depending on their income bracket—either the trauma of riding a bicycle through six lanes of dense traffic, or the rarefied, otherworldly and profoundly unsettling glow of having lived their life among the stars.