Don’t tell my mom. She’ll just worry.

I like to take a morning walk from my loft building on 6th and Main to 1st Street, where Lulu can romp on the front lawn of City Hall (if we get a warning, I’ll refer them to Mayor Villaraigosa, who knows my dog from our countless walks past his house when we all resided on Mount Washington), we can take in the architectural splendor of the Caltrans Building (plaza of which Lulu and others of her canine ilk are sadly not welcome) and other surrounding Downtown LA edifices, and partake of a delightful morning beverage at the new New Otani Starbucks.

On weekdays and Saturdays, the streets are teeming with people walking or driving to work, overwriting the homeless crackheads who populate the streets of my ‘hood. Lulu and I engage in minimal circumnavigation on our way to and from our various morning destinations, and Lulu invariably receives an appreciative smile or comment from my fellow downtown citizens (one homeless guy recently marveled at Lulu's obviously conscious choice to deposit her solid waste off the curb, making me a very proud mama).

Today is Sunday. I didn't get more than 2 hours of sleep, owing to the luscious homemade sugar treats and caffeine I enjoyed at Hej & Doug’s Holiday Dessert Extravaganza, as well as the dozens of boisterous guests leaving my neighbor’s party between 2 and 3 this morning. I was looking forward to waking up during a refreshing dog walk before my 10am AA meeting in Silver Lake.

There are no mitigating commuters on Sunday morning in this particular stretch of the Historic Core > Old Bank District > Gallery Row. And today, not one member of the LAPD was in sight; nor were any of my loft neighbors out with their dogs. I was the only white girl giving her dog a chance to evacuate and exercise on the street this morning, passing one derelict after another, young boys and old men, all African-American, all with that dangerously vacant look in their eyes, a couple of them commenting on the “pretty woman with the pretty dog." When I walked past an old Beemer parked half a block down the street from my building and spotted the driver lighting a crack pipe in full view, I decided I’d had enough of the local color. Lulu and I made an abrupt about-face and ran across Main to the guarded entrance of my home. Safe in the fortress once again. But not unaffected by the exposure to real life in the big city.