Quarter Life Crisis: A Millennial’s Guide to Life and Los Angeles
Chapter 5: Sad Flower in the Sand
Los Angeles is the thing that gets the most flack in the Universe, even more than Facebook redesigns or yellow Starbursts. People hate it. It’s monstrously sprawling. It’s dirty. Concretey. Drivey.
Los Angeles is the worst. Except that it’s also amazing. And “Industry Millennials” (that’s “Film Industry” for you normals) are doing all kinds of amazing stuff here.
Los Angeles (henceforth referred to as “LA,” “The Big Sandy,” “DC For Attractive People” or “Los Santos”) is special. It has no soul. It’ll take your soul if you let it. It’s a distracting jumble of ugly neighborhoods. It’s a place to lose track of your dreams and then find them again, big time.
I moved to LA straight out of college hoping to make it as a screenwriter. What I didn’t know is that it’s impossible and that the same six immortals just keep recycling themselves over and over to comprise Hollywood’s population of screenwriters. Look it up. It’s true.
What I did instead was get a job at a giant to-remain-unnamed company that does filmy type things, and did a tedious job that had absolutely nothing to do with my desired career path. Trying to break into entertainment is hard in LA because 75% of the jobs are at least tangentiallyrelated to entertainment, but only 5% of those are actually “made it” kind of jobs. So while I’m sitting at a desk doing my daily mundanities, I’m reminded ceaselessly that there’s a whole entertainment industry out there I’m supposed to be making it in.
And that took two years out of my life. It seems to be the rule and not the exception that when you move to LA with a plan, that plan gets derailed almost immediately and surreptitiously. Only two years later do you realize you’re writing the Interpol messages that play ahead of instructional woodworking videos. “What, and leave Show Business??”
But like any great hero’s journey, I moved back in with my parents for eight months only to return to LA anew, her dry air and $5 coffee beckoning me back to give it a real go!
And that’s when I discovered how friggin’ great she is. Because LA has everything! The comedy here is amazing. Replace comedy with almost any word and that sentence still stands. Music. Art. Food. What else do people care about?
I didn’t really understand that the comedy here was amazing until I sought the shit out of it. But all my favorite people do things every night here, in cool weird little spaces like Nerdmelt and Largo and UCB and iO. And I go. A lot. And still not enough.
And that’s the thing about LA. It will expressly not show you its boobs on the first date. You have to buy it tons of dinners, and tell it all of your darkest secrets, and say I love you back, and then move away for eight months and come back determined to make it work in order to get a peek.
Here’s the common advice: when you first move to LA (and who are we kidding, most people in LA at some point first moved to LA), expect lots of parking tickets (there is an actual language entirely separate from English that you need to learn to read the parking signs), expect a lot of lonely “Netflix Nights,” expect to be tortured daily by your weird job (or complete lack of job), expect to be in your car from 4:30-6:30, expect to hate your neighborhood.
But then, understand that the great thing about LA is that she forces you to figure her out. You need to search desperately for a reason to like her. You need to find your neighborhood (seriously, just live here for two years, discover your favorite bar and your favorite coffee shop, hope they’re in the same general area, and move there — you will spend two years not knowing why the hell you chose to live in the Flower Rotting District).
You have to learn to conquer LA. Figure out how to bike everywhere. Or move to one of the few neighborhoods that are really truly amazingly walkable. Or move to Santa Monica and live inside of a mall (Booooooo! Hissssss! West side suuuuuuucks!).
“But Micah,” you may say, “How is this different from, say, New York?”
It’s different because LA has sun. And the Pacific Ocean, not the dumb Atlantic one. And New York is like the guy that wears a parrot everywhere. We get it, you’re the parrot guy, shut up.
It doesn’t count as an identity if you need to shout it out to the world at all times. That’s called insecurity, Parrot Guy (ahem, New York).
Los Angeles has such an identity issue that you can just make it whatever you want it to be. Sure, it’s occasionally depressing that in one 4-block radius you can see a row of beautiful Victorian houses, a giant motel-style affordable housing apartment complex built in the 1970s, an abandoned chicken restaurant, a shopping cart full of used car parts, a one-unit lot crammed with a brand new 12-unit Modern Industrial apartment building, a Mexican dive bar, and the band Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros. But ultimately, LA is a place where you can really find your scene.
And LA doesn’t have a parrot. She has a $6 million Craftsman home next to an empty lot filled with broken skateboards and a burlesque club. Just don’t park there between 9am-8am Tuesdays or when school’s out (or without a permit any other time except on Sundays…) ’cause you’ll get a ticket.
Originally posted on Honestblue.com
Micah Gordon has worked as the co-Executive Producer/Head Writer of the sketch comedy web series Watch Immediately, and Writer/Producer on Tiny Tiny Talk Show. Visit Micah’s portfolio here.
