WEEK 7
This week in LA...
Everything is on fire. No, seriously.
There’s a massive ring of forest fires (possibly triggered by the sun-surge) that’s surrounding the metro area and slowly closing us off like that bad Escape from LA movie with Kurt Russell in an eye-patch.
In Minnesota I saw negative-60 degree temperatures and occasional tornadoes. In Chicago I saw torrential downpours every day of baseball season and lakeshore wind storms that could floor a hippo. When I got to LA I thought I’d see extreme heat and sporadic earthquakes. It’s been almost two months now and I’ve seen no earthquakes, felt no heat, and instead all I’ve seen is super-thick fog, massive fires and the resulting deadly ash-mist that’s been raining down on everything since they started, trying to infiltrate my lungs and make me a smoker.
It’s not so bad in Redondo Beach – the ash-mist is easily confused for ocean-mist, and since the ocean’s so polluted these days it’s probably about the same carbon content anyway. But my friend in Irvine says it’s much worse down there – the current climate conditions, she says, can only be described as “apocalyptic”. The LA sky is red and gray from morning ‘till night, as opposed to its usual brown and gray. Everyone’s car is covered in ash. I think I’m going to pull my stocks out of the flag business and invest in the carwash business.
I wonder what Disneyland is doing. It seems the characters might have trouble maintaining their aura of wonderment when there’s ashy gray death raining down on them all the time. Perhaps they’ve tried to make an event out of it, though I don’t think “Sooty Day in Hell” fits in with their monthly parade themes. I’m reminded of a movie parody idea a friend from college came up with called “Apocalypse Wow!” – a musical-comedy version of Francis Ford Coppola’s timeless classic. Perhaps the JoyLoveHugJoy singers of Disneyland could adapt it into their new revue.
In other news, Sam and JD broke the Ralph’s picket line this week in order to buy beer.
WEEK 8
I finally started a security job this week, on top of my health club job and the free-lance web design job and an office-moving job I’ve already got, successfully transitioning my schedule from its unusual “manageable” to its usual “maniacal”. To commemorate the occasion I worked overtime on all fronts over the weekend, logging an amazing 66 hours within four days. There was a grueling stint on Friday and Saturday where I worked for 43 of 48 hours. During the remaining 5 hours I slept. Hard.
Don’t want to go into the rigors of my daily work too much yet, for reasons of not wanting to get myself in trouble, except to say that it involves about 80% time for writing/napping, which actually represents a depressing 15% decrease from my Chicago security job. I actually have to do stuff to get paid. Yeah, I know, hard knock life. Plus it pays less, although the uniforms are nice and dapper. Perhaps I'll shed more light/dirt as I move out of “training” and into “working” (“quoties” here are used as sarcastically as possible).
WEEK 9
Job update – it seems as if I’ve been recruited into Kaplan’s training course to do standardized test tutoring, adding another job onto my already heaping schedule. This now makes 4 jobs not including the office-moving thing, rivaling a year ago when I was working as a news video editor, a bouncer, a web designer and a painter.
I’ve also officially adopted the “Leonardo DaVinci Sleep Schedule”, also known as the Moon Orbit Sleep Schedule. Rumor has it the master painter achieved his great success by sleeping only in 15 minute increments, and only half a dozen of these or so a day. I’m doing a little better than that, but it’s now been 4 days since I’ve slept for longer than 2 consecutive hours. My body’s given up being tired – at this point it just doesn’t even know what to do with me anymore. It might think we’re planning on hibernating for the winter. It’s going to be disappointed.
Fear not – this will only last a couple more days, as I’m paring down the health club thing in favor of more mentally challenging work/getting paid to sleep and write. But not before a weekend of malarkey as Jeremy and Mike, two old college buds, descended upon Redondo for two days of mayhem/spilling beer on our ping-pong table. Jeremy and Sam also did a quite successful dual music/comedy show at a local bar and a local coffee house, which has now inspired JD and I to put on a similar “Spoken Word” act, involving such JD/Paul hits as The Movie Trailer Mad Lib Game and “Web-Postings of a Suicidal 13-Year Old and His Friends”. Stay tuned for tour dates.
WEEK 10
Highlights from this week:
- Playing basketball with friend Elia this week at the old gym, Elia caught a nasty pass off the end of his pinky finger, and, well, this was the result. Four more hours in the emergency room at Torrance Hospital. Yes, it looks like a little kid tracing the outside of his hand with a marker. And the paper slipped on the last digit.
- Went to the beach on Thursday. Awesome that I live in a place where I can go swimming in November. Less awesome that it’s still balls-cold to do so.
- Went to Redondo High’s varsity football game with Gabe and Sam on Thursday. Awesome that we can still go to high school football games without the pressure of having a kid on the team. Less awesome that it’s still balls-cold to do so.
- This week’s weather brought a socio-economically prejudiced rainstorm to Los Angeles. To explain: the USC neighborhood where I was at the time (** out of five stars on the affluence scale) received heavy rain and minor flooding. Watts/Compton (* out of five) received hail and a massive flooding – Gabe’s school had to close for two days because of the damage. Redondo Beach (***) received light rain. Beverly Hills (*****) received no rain. More ironically, The Ring of Fire (****, though arguably reduced now) around the city received sprinkles, not enough to put out the forest fires that still seem to be burning. The same city now has fires, floods, hail, and areas that don’t seem to be aware of any of these things. Where do I live again?
WEEK 11
A moment on the division of labor at 702 Paulina.
Maintaining a 4-bedroom residence is clearly a task that involves the cooperation and sharing of duties of all 4 members. But invariably there are some jobs that fall on one particular person – there’s no point in everyone keeping their own spreadsheet on house expenses, and some people just aren’t going to be as reliable when it comes to putting the recycling out on time.
So our house-duties have broken down in the following ways. Sam, with his technological background and stable financial situation has taken over the matters of money – that is, we all pay for things, but Sam gets the 10 cable/internet/electricity /phone bills a month, and manages the (quite impressive) house spreadsheet. It makes sense, he was the first one to move in.
JD, with his aversion to the idea that we have a “Garbage Room”*, has resigned himself to role of Trash-Caretaker, dutifully putting the rubbish into white then black bags and then out onto the curb every Wednesday for the garbage men. Plus he’s the only one who actually knows when they come.
For my own part, having a traditional Lutheran anxiety over seeing things wasted, coupled with my current pover-ific tax bracket, I’m an ideal candidate for Recycle-master. This means sorting the cardboard and newspapers out of the garbage room and putting them out for the other garbage guys who come on Wednesdays. It also means, every couple weeks or so, taking all of our beer cans and other aluminum, glass and plastic (OK just beer cans) down to the local recycling center and redeeming them for money. This is one cool thing about South Bay/Los Angeles - so far we’ve saved about 30 dollars by doing this, all of which then gets dumped back into buying more beer. It’s a vicious circle of awesomeness. The only problem is that each time I do this, the Spacemobile smells like a bar for about a day afterwards, even if I don't spill anything. It’s certainlynice to add “Garbage Truck” to the - list of roles the Spacemobile has played over the years, but between the smell, the cracked windshield, the muffler in the back seat, and the no-bumper, let’s just say that the Blue Beast isn’t exactly reeling in the chicks when I cruise Santa Monica Blvd these days.
Finally, Gabe, since we can’t get him to do anything else, has become the resident “Dirty-Work Man”, tending to our rare-but-important crisis-duties, such as cleaning blood out of the couch cushions and dealing with the Meatheads**.
**The Meatheads, to explain, are the quartet of El Camino Junior College students who live/party/park-their-trucks-in-our-driveway in the unit behind us.
*The Garbage Room, to explain… well… doesn’t really need any explanation.
My one disappointment with LA so far is that of the hundred or so people I know from college and other places who live out here, only three of them live within 45 minutes. And those would be my roommates. This is partly due to the city’s aforementioned colossal size – saying you live in Los Angeles is like saying you live in New England – it doesn’t really mean anything until you get a little more specific. This means it’s not as easy as I’d hoped to get together with old friends on a regular basis - as we’ve illustrated just because two people live in Los Angeles doesn’t mean they live anywhere near each other.
That being said, my friend Sarah in Irvine and I invented a technique this week to combat this drawback. The technique doesn’t have a name yet, but it basically involves two people getting in their cars at the same time, calling each other’s cell phones and then starting their conversation as they drive towards one another to meet in the middle. Though not during rush hour, of course. Maybe we’ll call it the “Meet-Halfway Technique”. Or maybe this is why it doesn’t have a name.
This works great for a few reasons. A), it halves the distance you have to travel to see somebody, and there’s no arguing over who makes the drive. You both do, and twenty minutes is a lot better than 40 minutes. B) Talking as you drive transforms even the transit time into valuable interaction, and gets some of the small-talk/catch-up out of the way so you can get right down to it once you see each other. And everybody in LA has a cell phone. And finally C), meeting halfway typically lands you in some obscure place you never would have gone to otherwise. Sarah and I wound up in Seal Beach, a quiet little ocean community where there aren’t any seals on the beach but there are lots of huge bulldozers moving sand around for no reason. We walked on the peer and ate at a little omelet shack with a surly waitress. If we ever go back perhaps we’ll go to one of the town’s happening night spots, such as the deftly-named Club Seals.
I also went to Phoenix this week for a two-day Thanksgiving vacation binge, but I’ll leave that account next week because I have some pictures I want to use that aren’t available yet. To tease: stay tuned for a ping-pong turned banquet table and a Nazi-Volkswagen jeep called “The Thing”.
