Tuesday October 28th, 2003
Why I live in LA
A lot of readers have asked me why I live in Los Angeles. I have gotten a lot of e-mail from people in other parts of the world telling me that Los Angeles is a shit mill of lies run on the slave labor of walking broken dreams. I'm told it may be easier to get a girl if I was in Boston or some part of Virginia rather than going to bars with soulless ego's competing for silicone ghosts. The funny thing is that people from Los Angeles have said far worse.
After graduating from college I wanted to move some place exciting and completely different from everything I knew. The film capital of the world seemed to be the obvious choice. Since I had never been west of the Mississippi I flew out to visit for a week, at the end of which, I never wanted to go back. Looking back I now know why. Los Angeles is the greatest city in the world... for exactly seven days.
Fast-forward several years and I'm still here. Why you ask? Since I moved out here my best friend and my brother both have moved out here as well. Not to mention I wouldn't know where to go. After a couple years in LA something tells me I wouldn't be too happy moving back home to give larger versions of girls who ignored me in high school a second chance to reject me. I've become much too accustomed to the random insanity that is Los Angeles.
I remember my first earthquake; I paid Pac Bell a small fortune to tell my friends and family how my can of soda spilled on the carpet. Now I don't even pause my video game for anything less than a 4.0. The first time I saw an actor I recognized I was in a California Pizza Kitchen. At the table across from me was the guy who plays the sadistic nazi leader Schilinger on the HBO prison drama "Oz," feeding his daughter. This was a man that not four hours earlier ordered his cellmate's daughter kidnapped, cut off her hand, and sent it to him as a present. Now I get pissed when the waitress at "The Well" won't get me another Tom Collins because she's too busy flirting with Vince Vaughn. Today I worked late so one of my fellow employees could go home early and pack up their house because one of the forest fires is moving toward Valencia. When I went on my lunch break I happened to notice a lot of people standing out front of their office buildings looking in the opposite direction I was driving. At a red light I turned around to see what everyone was looking at and I saw the sun was purple. It looked like the sun usually does in most horror movies right before the Warlock undoes creation or a cosmic event turns all of humanity into zombies except for a teenage couple that fell asleep in a lead lined tool shed. Apparently the standard Marlboro lite pollution in Los Angeles mingled with the 500,000 acre forest fire to produce an evil purple sun.
The truth is I like Los Angeles a lot. I didn't really have better luck with women on the East Coast and even if I don't have any luck here at least life is interesting. Sure I go to sleep to the sound of police helicopters and wake up to my neighbor's Mariachi music, but at least life is interesting. Besides there are 15 million women in Los Angeles and only a few thousand back home. I might have to go through a few million before I find that one special girl with the perfect combination of low self esteem and bad eye sight, but I still think I have a better chance of finding her here than anywhere else.Related articles:
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