Downtown Santa Monica now feels like a cross between a war-damaged ghetto with brave restaurant goers, an asylum that ran out of meds and orderlies, and a poorly maintained graveyard.
Over 90% of the stores are still closed, many of them still boarded up and covered with graffiti or please-don’t-hurt-me capitulation and begging for mercy messages from future mobs.
After dark, the few people walking around keep their eyes down and talk in whispers. If you said ‘boo’ many would shriek and run.
The skateboarders and bikers seem brain damaged, coming so close that they don’t seem to consider pedestrians as worthy of having a buffer zone.
Most of the restaurants that used to be open after dark no longer are. An area with 200+ restaurants now has maybe a dozen.
Thanks looters.
The few restaurants open, like Water Grill, Meat on Ocean, and 212 on the Promenade, have made huge land grabs for space, with greedy Water Grill taking about 300 square meters of public sidewalk for their tight packed noisy customers to spew fishy SARS virus spittle into the air in a dense COVID cloud without masks, deluding themselves that tiny plastic sheets will protect them even though they sit tightly packed back to back to back inches from each other.
Walking past them we are forced to smell their stinky breath and pass within a foot of their mouths, or step in the bus lane. The ultimate humiliation would be to be hit by an empty 200 passenger bus trying to social distance on a 12 foot wide sidewalk reduced to two feet in width because both rules and reasonableness are tossed away like litter in the gutter.
Three roach coaches with the ugliest food pictures I’ve seen in California cluster together bumper to bumper just outside the rumored primary source of venereal disease in the area, Makai bar, running their generators and selling food most locals would not dream of serving to their dogs.
Homeless act as if pedestrians don’t exist and now sprawl across the sidewalk requiring stepping over them, getting a face full of stench of urine and feces smellable even through a thick mask sting enough to start a gag reflex, or the walker to step out into the street and give a wide berth.
Though I walk about six miles a day through this formerly beautiful, now depressing, environment, I have not seen a police officer out of a car since that day looters damaged 350 buildings and arsonists burned nine building over a month ago.
The police seem to have disappeared, as if this is Minneapolis or Seattle.
The police chief in our pathetic socialist paradise by the sea formerly with 80,000 inhabitants makes $480,000 a year and inspired over 70,000 people who know she’s a fake to sign a petition for her removal. Police make over $300,000, apparently just to hide in their cars and homes.
One good thing is that the people blowing off fireworks seem to have blown their wad as the explosions are no longer all the time from 8pm to 2am. Their political puppeteers have moved on to their next phase of collapsing America.
The other good thing is that most of the people downtown seem to have moved. It’s much quieter, as no one seems to want to attract the attention of the ghosts, demons, and monsters that people seem to be afraid of on these streets mostly empty and devoid of life.