They laugh when I say I like it here— like I’ve confused heat with holiness.
But there’s something about a place that doesn’t lie. The Valley never pretends. It just spreads itself— wide, cracked, sweating— beneath a sky that doesn’t give a damn.
It’s in the way the sun leaks down the liquor store wall at 6:42 p.m., in the power lines holding hands across boulevards.
Out here, no one chases dreams. They work beside them. The dreams drive for Instacart. They sell roofing. They play synth in a band still deciding what to call itself.
God lives in the hum of a laundromat on Tuesday afternoons. No one notices.
Keep your oceans. The Valley doesn’t need a view. It is one— burned and aching and alive. All blister and bloom.
The Hoatzin lineage is about 64 million years old, dating back to shortly after the dinosaurs went extinct. Fossils related to the Hoatzin have been found in Africa and Europe, suggesting its ancestors once roamed far beyond South America. The Hoatzin is the only surviving member of an ancient bird order called Opisthocomiformes. It’s like a living fossil. Baby Hoatzins are born with clawed wings, a trait birds lost over 100 million years ago — but the Hoatzin hung onto it. Scientists sometimes call the Hoatzin the “punk rock chicken” for its spiky crest and rebellious evolutionary path. The Hoatzin’s digestive system is more similar to a cow’s than to any other bird’s — it ferments leaves instead of digesting them normally. Hence its nickname, “The Stinkbird.”
