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People in Los Angeles Say the Strangest Things

Everyone's so kooky here. Except me, I'm just aggressive.

I’ve come to LA because I used to live here and it’s been a couple of years now, so I wanted to see how people were getting on. This is how they’re getting on:

Someone says he has to go to a party tonight, but it’s thrown by some girls he can’t bear any more, because they act like a sorority. Every party they have, they put up posters round their shared house saying what the hashtag is if you want to put the party on Instagram. He says this time he’s making posters of his own to stick over the top of theirs, only the hashtag will be #peta. “So in the morning they’ll be on their phones going, 'Oh wow, a mink being made into a coat!!! Oh wow, a bear being maimed in China!! Oh wow, a kegstand!!'”

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Someone carries a James Franco doll in her bag at all times. She takes it to parties. It has its own Instagram account. When we have finished talking about the James Franco doll, she says that her mum keeps all the photos they take of you every year at school on her wall at home in Reno. “And they’re on a really prominent wall when you walk in my mum’s house. Only, one year, I didn’t have a photo taken, so for that year she just put up the boy who comes with the frame.”

Someone says “I don’t like it when people stay with me. I just don’t. But did you know that Costco sell coffins? I got one delivered to my house so guests could sleep in it, but I had the delivery guy put it in the garage and I got my friend to help me move it in in the middle of the night so my neighbours don’t think I’m a vampire. 'Cos I also have a skull that they can see just sitting in the corner of my living room. He’s called Herb.”

Someone replies, “I was in a low-budget horror film, and I played someone who died pretty early on so we filmed my scenes in a crematorium. So I’ve been in a used casket – it was actually pretty relaxing. Also, the woman who worked there showed me the oven.”

Someone says she has a Grindr account. She uses it to harrass men into telling her if her outfit looks good.

Someone has started telling the staff in Starbucks that his name is Biggie, and then when they call him with his order, he goes “Uhh.” He is going through all of his favourite rappers doing all of their trademark noises in all of the coffee shops.

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Someone was sleeping beside a bucket of ice water but she dropped her phone in it and now she says, “I think Mercury retrograde has taken on a human form, and that human is me.”

Someone says she reached a new level of embarrassment last night; “Really, a whole new grade of shame. I didn’t think that even I could do something that embarrassing.” I ask her what she did. “I smiled for someone’s selfie,” she replies. “I mean he held up his phone and pointed it at me – I didn’t know he had the camera facing the other way.”

Someone just bought a blanket at Goodwill, which is a chain of charity shops like Oxfam. The blanket is an enormous grey thing but also the sweetest, softest one she’s ever had. It’s so good that she wanted to see if she could get more, so she googled the brand name on the label. It turned out to be an international non-profit aid organisation who give out the blankets to victims of humanitarian disasters. My friend is gutted. She wanted to buy a full set. Someone asks why don’t I go and see Brian as he is living in a sweet little house in Silver Lake with a secret passageway now, or am I still feeling awkward about that time I came home from a bar and forgot he was asleep on the couch and sat on his head? Someone says she was in London the other week to do some recording with a producer. "And we would start in the studio with a cup of tea at about midday. At about half past twelve we would have another cup of tea, and so it went on all afternoon, more cups of tea. All of the cups of tea you drink in London! Until about 6 o’clock when we all went to the pub.” Someone sits at the table next to Lionel Richie, and all she can hear is him saying “something something Kanye West something something.” I also sit at her table for a bit. Lionel seems to be holding court to about six much younger men while eating a yellow pizza covered almost entirely in onions. I decide against reminding him about the time I Interviewed him for the Times, and asked him about his daughter Nicole who was wasting away at the time, and how he had gone a bit quiet then said, “You’re only as happy as your saddest child.” Someone says her favourite poetry book is called What Narcissism Means To Me. Someone says that he has just realised that his dog will never see Europe. He sounds sad. I tell someone that the flight to LA was so bad that I heard someone calling my child a little cunt, only to realise that the someone was me. Saying those actual words, out loud, to my daughter, on a plane full of people, and that it’s a wonder to me that she hasn’t been taken off me by the relevant authorities yet. And he says “Ah, but the way to diffuse that moment on the plane is to turn to everyone else and go, sorry – we’re performance artists. This is an awareness-raising piece.”

Follow Sophie on Twitter: @heawood

Previously – Oliver Bernard, Boris Johnson and the Nature of British Greatness