Today’s soundtrack: can’t help myself
Today at 11:02am: merging


I’m a freelancer, I live alone and work alone. My bio in nine words.

The disadvantage of being a freelancer is, work comes in sporadically. The advantage is, work comes in sporadically. You can do things like leave for six days. So I got on a plane to California.

You could say a guy with debt like mine ought not to be buying plane tickets on credit. Mastercard loves me; my accountant speaks to me slowly.

I am staying at someplace called Orange County. Out here they name the counties after fruit, not royalty.

L.A. freeways are all they’re cracked up to be. The overpasses are impressive, the traffic, expansive. You rarely see more than one person in a car. Sealed in glass and metal boxes, cell phones pressed to their faces, motorists yammer away in silence.

Been tooling around in a borrowed whip. The towns all sound exotic: Laguna Beach, Costa Mesa, Newport Beach. Okay the last one sounds like cigarettes but whatever, they look exotic. Lots of palm trees and weird spiky plants and apparently they have people here who clean the garbage off the streets. Am thinking of kidnapping one and bringing him back to New York as an experiment.

It’s insane the way they drive over here. I don’t mean the manner in which they drive, I mean that if you want to go to the store next door, twenty feet away, you get in your car and drive over, it’s fucking crazy. Even worse, I found myself doing it too. The sidewalks just don’t feel hospitable enough to walk on; they don’t even have any garbage on them.

I have witnessed a weird form of beauty. At a four-way intersection with no signal, I watched four cars (I was one of ‘em) each approach within seconds of each other. Magically, everyone staggered it perfectly, stopping for a second, then driving straight through with no traffic static. I guess it’s like walking through midtown in a hurry, if you know what you’re doing you won’t slam into anybody’s shoulders.

Went to see a play called “Play Without Words.” It was next to the Disney Concert Hall (the building that looks like the construction model for it melted in a horrible fire but then they built it exactly like the model anyway) and it was pretty cool. Set in 1960s London.

Five minutes of the play went by before I realized the actors really weren’t going to talk at all. But it had this great jazz soundtrack, and cool clothes, and multiple actors for each character to draw your eye all over the place. Despite the fact that they expressed themselves solely through dance, I dug it, and I’m not a modern dance/performing arts kinda guy.

I’m doing something wrong with the cashiers out here. ‘Cause they start off real friendly, “Hi, how are you?” but seem disappointed by the end of the transaction. Perhaps because I don’t make eye contact (it’s a habit, get off my back) or maybe my “Howya dune” isn’t the appropriate response to their earnest greetings.

The quest for coffee is different in California, which I have to get used to. Back home if I want coffee I go to a deli or diner. Coffee to me is a staple, something regular places just have. But here, as in most of America, they have places that were constructed purely to serve coffee. Starbucks, The Coffee Bean, Diedrich’s.

Apparently my view of the beverage is out-of-step with the rest of the nation’s. I drink coffee in transit; it’s a supplement, not an activity. Everywhere else, coffee seems to be a destination in itself. These people go to places purely to have coffee. Which is weird to me because I view it as fuel. Imagine going to a gas station, sitting your ass in a couch, flipping through magazines and listening to one of the Gilbertos for an hour while your car tanks up.

Forgot that everything takes forever out here. Unable to find a deli I stopped off at a Krispy Kreme to get a cup of coffee and like, forget about it. There was only one person in front of me and it took like ten minutes. I could’ve picked a pot’s worth of beans, ground ‘em and brewed ‘em myself in that time.

I keep reminding myself that I am in a different place where I must respect their rules. Service-wise the emphasis here is on friendliness, not brevity or efficiency. If I want fast coffee I can wait ‘til I get back to the city.

Relax.

You are somewhere else.

Embrace L.A.

Learn patience.

The service is kind of funny though, funny in a good way. Like at this one place the waitress came by to see if everything was okay. I said it was.
“Awesome!” she said. I had to smile at that. Awesome!

“How’s your pasta?”

“Pasta’s good.”

“Awesome!”

Haha.

“Hi! Please stop jawboning with the customer in front of me and get me a coffee! Milk no sugar! Right away!”

“Okay!”

“Awesome!”